WE KNEW we were approaching the edge of the forest by the fifth of May. Ellie had proudly made all of her space nerd jokes based on an old movie series called Star Wars the entirety of the day before, blurting out "May the fourth be with you," every time there was silence, which stopped fast when I kicked her in the knee.
"Hey, it's not my fault I'm a cool, cultured space girl and you're stuck on earth, Crumpets," she said, nursing her knee back to normal. It wasn't her knee she was worried about, anyways. She had insisted we spend one more day in the forest, just to get my leg where it needed to be. But, frankly, I was feeling fairly restless, and I needed to move forward.
We were especially on our guard now. The beautiful forest was thinning out, and more and more signs of mankind were appearing. Abandoned cars seemed to be the main culprit, and though we searched them for supplies, we were always waiting for runners. I hadn't looked at one since Ellie squashed the last's head with her shoe, and I was a little more nervous about rencountering them than I'd like to admit. Ellie had her weapon of choice was a bow, but I knew she kept a pistol and a couple of Molotovs in her backpack. About a week before, she had decided to make me a weapon that might have a little more range and power than a switch knife, at least enough to help keep a distance between me and the monsters.
She was fashioning a wooden bat with my knife, finding a moderately large branch that had fallen down recently enough that the wood hadn't started rotting yet. So when I was resting my leg, and she wanted a break, she would sit there and whittle away at that branch until it formed into a very jagged bat. I appreciated it nonetheless. She presented it to me proudly, hours and hours of handiwork that she seemed to want me to appreciate.
"What're you gonna name it?" she asked. I snorted but, upon seeing that she was dead serious, started to hum with thought.
"Bertha."
Ellie raised a quizzical brow at me. "Bertha? Really?" I could hear the judgment in her tone clear as day, but I was steadfast in defending Bertha.
"Yeah, really."
She put up both her hands to signal her surrender, and drifted on forwards as I played about with my new weapon between my hands.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
ᵇᵉʳᵗʰᵃ, ᶜᶦʳᶜᵃ '³⁸
So now, carrying Bertha and making our way West, we were finally approaching Seattle. Seattle, or the prospect of it, sobered me up a little as we walked. I felt more and more determined, every time I saw an abandoned car or a stray house, to finish what I had started. To find Abby, and to kill her.
Our runs into houses were scary. Any enclosed space like that was enough for any type of infected to confront us now, though the likelihood of that being a bloater or shambler was lower than the others. We could definitely come across come stalkers though, and clickers... and all this new stuff scared me.
