The meeting started after dinner.
When the plates were cleared, every chair was taken.
The couch sagged under the weight of bodies leaning forward, elbows on knees.
Light flickered imperceptibly above, throwing long shadows across the walls while the last of dinner's warmth lingered in the air—cooked vegetables, canned meat, something close to normal.
I stood near the fireplace, arms loosely crossed, feeling every set of eyes settle on me.
"Let's start the meeting, shall we?" I said, meeting everyone's gazes, nodding once as I was met with nods from across the room.
"I headed east," I began, voice even.
"Augusta."
A few heads lifted at that.
I continued, "Thought it would be a quick job. In and out, grab whatever I could find and bolt. Turned out it wasn't so simple."
I let that hang for a bit.
"The city was clogged," I continued. "Not empty like I thought. Too much infrastructure—hospitals, supply depots. When things fell apart, it didn't clear out clean. It stacked."
Glenn leaned forward slightly. "You made it in?"
"Yeah," I said. "Not as clean as I had hoped, but I got in. Highway access was practically blocked—abandoned vehicles, some burnouts, but manageable on foot. The problem wasn't getting in."
I paused just long enough. "It was moving across the city."
Rick leaned forward slightly. "How bad?"
I met his eyes. "Bad enough you couldn't move half a dozen feet without having walkers lock in on you."
Silence settled.
"That's why it took me so long to loot and get back. I had to take shelter in one of the buildings after I cleared it, just to wait for the horde to thin out or leave."
Shifting on my feet slightly, I continued, "Lucky for me, I didn't have to wait long, because the next day that horde was nowhere to be seen."
I let my eyes move across the room, making sure they were following.
"Hit the medical district first. Clinics, smaller facilities. That's where most of the medical supplies came from. Antibiotics, trauma kits, surgical stock. A lot of it was recent, still sealed, still usable."
Hershel exhaled quietly, almost as if to himself.
"Augusta's a healthcare hub," I added. "Always has been. That worked in my favor."
Shane shifted. "And the ammo?"
"Checkpoints," I said. "National Guard set up along the main routes. When things went bad, they didn't get the chance to pull everything out."
Morgan nodded faintly. "Or didn't make it out."
I didn't respond to that.
Didn't need to.
"Food stuff was from the industrial area and distribution centers," I said.
"The place was crawling with walkers so i had to be careful which took more time" Rick nodded.
"Most of the second day was spent on looting."
I shrugged slightly. "Third day was finding a clean way out. Took longer than getting in as I had to navigate through pockets of walkers and abandoned vehicles."
No embellishment.
No over-explaining.
Just enough.
Dale nodded slowly. "That explains the time."
"Yeah," I said.
And that was that.
No one pushed further because it made sense—because it sounded like the kind of run anyone could imagine going wrong.
I let the silence settle for a second, then shifted.
"Glenn?"
He straightened immediately, pulling the map closer.
"Right," he said, spreading it out across the table. "So, I went to Atlanta. Didn't go too deep, just enough to get eyes on a couple places."
He tapped one point: Norfolk Southern Inman Yard.
Then another: CSX Fairburn Terminal.
He leaned back slightly. "There's also the Georgia Railroad Freight Depot, but I elected to leave it out as it is in downtown Atlanta."
He paused slightly before he continued. "Getting in and out is too risky."
"Right," I said, nodding.
"Inman Yard is huge," Glenn continued.
"Containers, rail lines, maintenance buildings. It's basically a maze. But it's also in Atlanta. Not as deep as Georgia Railroad Freight Depot, but it's inside the city grid."
Shane frowned. "That's also not a good thing."
"No," Glenn admitted.
"It's not. But seeing that it's a fair bit of distance from downtown, I added it to the list. But it's an inspection site, meaning there's a huge chance of finding sealed containers waiting for inspection for weeks or even months."
That made the group perk up a little.
Glenn tapped the second location.
"Fairburn's not much different. It's also like Inman Yard, twenty miles southwest of downtown Atlanta. It's the region's primary intermodal hub, where double-stack container trains are unloaded."
Glenn paused a little before continuing.
"It's a potential massive goldmine of sealed supplies, because it's designed to hold thousands of containers and it's far enough from the densest part of the city that it might have remained untouched."
"So they're basically the same," I said after a while of thinking.
Glenn hesitated a little. "…Yes. You could say that."
The room went quiet again.
Shane crossed his arms. "I don't like going into Atlanta. Too many ways for it to go bad."
"Same," Morgan said.
A few murmurs of agreement followed.
I stepped closer to the table, looking down at the map. "Inman Yard isn't just storage."
Glenn glanced at me before nodding. "No… it's not."
"It's processing," I continued.
"Cargo gets sorted there, held for inspection before being redirected." I tapped the map lightly. "That means overlap. Containers sitting longer than they should."
Hershel frowned. "So… more supplies?"
"Better odds," I said.
I straightened slightly. "Fairburn is a risky bet. We might go there and find nothing, and we can't afford that. Inman Yard, on the other hand, due to it being an inspection site, might be the safer bet for us right now, though it is going to be harder to strip."
I let that hang for a second.
Morgan's expression shifted, thoughtful.
"Risky," he said.
"Yeah," I agreed. "But we can make it a controlled risk."
Shane looked at me. "How do you control that?"
"Perimeter first," I said.
"We don't dive in head-first. We scout, map movement, find elevated positions, then clear it in sections—not all at once."
Rick nodded from his seat. "That's doable."
"No rushing," I added. "No deep pushes until we know the layout."
Silence stretched—not uncomfortable, but focused.
Dale looked around the room before he locked eyes with Hershel.
No one liked it, but no one had a better option.
"Alright," I said. "Inman Yard it is."
And with that, the meeting came to an end.
(To be continued...)