Rosita spent the following hour going over the SeaArk from bow to stern, one hand tracing bolts and fittings while the other flipped through a waterlogged maintenance manual she'd found tucked under the console.
"How's she looking?" Michael asked, coming up beside the dock.
"Better than I expected. Whoever used this thing before actually knew how to take care of a boat." She tapped the hull with her knuckle, listening for something only she seemed able to hear. "Hull's solid. No soft spots, no delamination that I can find. Engines are old but well-maintained. If we're smart about fuel and don't push her too hard, she'll get us where we're going."
"That's a lot of ifs."
"Everything's an if out here." Rosita didn't look up from the fuel line she was inspecting. "You want a guarantee, go build a time machine and ask somebody from before all this."
Michael huffed something close to a laugh. "Fair enough. We're going into town to look for extra supplies. Do you need anything?"
"Time, mostly. I want to run the engines again after this. I need to check for leaks once they've had a chance to warm up properly. And I want extra oil if you can find one, this thing's due for a change, and I'd rather not find out the hard way what happens when we skip it a hundred miles offshore."
"Noted." Michael looked over at Michonne, who was leaning against a piling with her rifle across her knees, eyes on the tree line. "Are you good staying here with her?"
"I'm good anywhere," Michonne said, which wasn't quite an answer, but Michael took it as one anyway.
"Jack and I are heading into town. Gas, blankets, whatever else we can carry. Should be in an hour or two. Will that be enough time for you?."
"Yeah. Watch yourselves out there." Rosita said, still half-buried in the engine compartment. "I just hope whoever left this boat here does not come back while you two are gone. I'd rather not be the one explaining where you two wandered off to."
"We'll be quick."
The town wasn't unfamiliar to Michael. He saw the familiar storefronts that were either boarded or broken open long ago when he and Andrea first got here. The two arrived at the town and slowly drove through the streets while being wary of their surroundings.
They stopped before a grocery and got down from the vehicle.
"I still can't get used to the feeling of seeing desolate places like this. It gives me the creeps every time." Jack said, eyeing a shattered pharmacy window across the street. "It's like a horror movie coming into life."
"Yeah. Exactly that, and we're experiencing it first hand." Michael crouched by the entrance to a small grocery, studying the frame. The door had been forced and inside, shelves stood mostly bare, a few crushed cans scattered across the floor like nobody had bothered picking through them a second time.
Though it was not surprising since grocery stores are always the first ones to be looted in times of chaos. Even Michael and Andrea broke into a couple of stores here when they first came to this town.
"What do you think? Was this place already like this when you first came here?" Jack said, stepping past him into the store.
"Yeah, but not like this where there's barely anything here." Michael straightened up, scanning the shelves anyway out of habit. "So it's good for us to assume that those people who came on that boat are still in the area. Probably even watching us right now."
"Hmm..should we make a proper sweep this time then?"
"Nah" Michael moved deeper into the store, careful with his steps while constantly tapping the shelves to lure whatever walker was still inside with the noise. "If they wanted to confront us, they would have already done so. So it's best if we maintain this delicate situation until we leave this place."
They didn't find anything noteworthy inside except for some tampons, napkins and condoms they found at the cashier desk. Michael took them all just in case. They weren't really worried about food since they brought enough for the trip South and the people from the camp also prepared them with enough dried goods to last the trip twice over, and whatever they scavenged here was extra, not necessary.
"Should we check the Hardware store ahead?" Jack said, checking the street sign against a torn page of the road atlas he'd pulled from his jacket. "That is if it hadn't been looted clean."
"Let's go. I think we'll need some extra cans for fuel.
The hardware store's shelves had taken the same treatment as the grocery, thinned out, but not stripped bare, the kind of looting done by people grabbing what they needed in a hurry rather than a slow, thorough sweep.
Before either of them stepped past the front counter, Michael had already rapped his knuckles twice against the nearest metal shelf, waited, and listened.
He did that multiple times but nothing came up except for silence and the settling creak of the building itself.
The two proceed inside, and Michael worked one side of the store while Jack took the other.
Usually, Michael would have disagreed with them splitting up since it increases the risk of danger for them, but since the store is not that big and the two can still see each other from across the floor. He didn't say anything.
"Unfortunately, there's no gun shops in the area." Michael was mumbling to himself while moving around.
There was still a lot of stuff lying around. In fact, the place was barely touched at all.
"It seems like people have not come around here at all." Jack said the moment the two of them regrouped back at the counter.
"Well, this is a country full of guns. So I doubt their first course of action would be to come here to get weapons when almost everybody possesses guns in their homes." Michael replied.
"Of course. People will eventually turn to these kinds of places when they start running out of bullets to use." He added.
Roaming around, Michael found a plastic toolkit, the briefcase one. Aside from that, he did not find anything else worth taking. Jack on the other hand, managed to find what they mostly came here for. Gas cans, and three of them, one was even half full. There was also a small case of motor oil, it was dusty but sealed.
Leaving the store with the things in hand, Jack turned to Michael. "Stay put. I'll go get the car."
The car wasn't far from where they left it and Jack came back a minute later.
Michael placed the things at the back of the car. The two of them did not immediately go back and instead roamed the area looking for more things.
Jack and Michael eventually drove back to the docks an hour later. They had more things with them, like blankets, the thick wool ones that had survived untouched in their plastic wrapping, along with a stack of flashlights and a bin of batteries that still tested good when Jack tried them earlier.
The following items are also among the pile; waterproof matches, two magnesium fire starters, several ready to eat canned goods and a couple sets of personal necessities women use.
By the time they reached the dock, Rosita was already waiting for them, wiping grease off her hands with a rag, with Michonne standing a couple of feet behind her.
"Well?" Rosita asked, eyeing the duffel bags. "Tell me you some found oil."
"We did," Michael said as he alighted from the car. "We found a lot of things actually. Though I think we need to leave this place soon"
Rosita's eyebrows lifted. "That bad?"
"Not that bad, but I still stand on my hunch from earlier that whoever used that boat did not go far from here." Michael looked out at the water, specifically the sheriff's boat.
"I think so too." Jack also backed him up." Most of the places we went to are looted with almost nothing left. You already know that my friends and I had lived a nomadic life for a while, and from experience, you don't bring things you can't carry if you're planning to be constantly on the move. Not only is it wasteful, it's tiring and slows you down."
"So I'm guessing there's a camp here somewhere. I just don't know how far we are from it and how many people they have."
"Probably not a lot since they would have attacked us when we split up." Rosita replied.
"Hmm, I guess."