The Messengers of Sanctuary

2 - Chicory

These days, Chicory only spent enough time at Sanctuary to update the records and familiarize herself with important news. It wasn’t that she was avoiding the place she called home. She wasn’t even avoiding Gabe. He was bringing up very good points. 

It’s just that Chicory had a project. 

She was back in the mountains after just a week of travel—somewhat concerning since it had taken her three weeks initially—But she had been able to use the same path as last time since all the moisture in the air had frozen and it wouldn’t be snowing again until things warmed up several degrees. And besides, everyone traveled faster on familiar ground.

The fired young adult jogged at a smooth speed down her beaten trail. She was going faster for much longer than any regular human could manage without years of training. In a way, Chicory did have years of training, but as anyone with heartfire could attest, she didn’t really have any other option.

Chicory spotted familiar landmarks and grinned as she hit the end of her path. After that she began a quick survey of the area. 

Most strongholds and settlements couldn’t survive a winter on their own, so in the early days of this new world, most smaller ones had ended up combining if only for resources. Plus, if a safe zone wasn’t in a good spot, it wouldn’t last long.

After thirteen years of living in a world infested with zombies, practically every stronghold either had a good source of trade materials—usually ferried around by the Sanctuary traders—or they were in exactly the right kind of spot to be entirely self-sufficient.

All of that complicated placement stuff was completely void if there wasn’t a reliable and clean source of water nearby. Humans sort of needed the stuff to keep living. 

So, Chicory looked for streams and rivers, running alongside them for a ways and then continuing onward. As she’d noticed last time she’d come this way, the area was almost entirely devoid of human life. There hadn’t been many towns around pre-fall, so it made sense, Chicory still looked anyway, she would never forgive herself if she completely passed over a group just because they were a bit out of the way.

As the hours wore on, Chicory slowly made her way westward. She only stopped every so often to eat something or to inspect strange patterns in the cliffs that began to tower above her. She didn’t stop as the sun began to set, the heat in her blood rising up and giving everything a blue-ish cast as her eyes began to glow. She could negate the effect if she wanted, but this far from humanity, there was no sense in compromising her night vision. 

Chicory continued on for most of the night, only stopping to hang a hammock high in the trees and surrender herself to sleep. 

She was up early the next morning and continued the process. 

Considering how Chicory tended to go about it, it was unlikely that she would miss any settlements unless they were hidden so well that even the zombies couldn’t locate them. 

It was like that that the weeks passed. At one point she’d tried her radio out to spice things up and see if they were using any of her songs, but even though she was still relatively close to Sanctuary—only like a two week journey if there weren’t huge mountains and snow covering things up!—The terrain was messing with the signal, so she only got a faint buzz accentuated by occasional notes that she vaguely recognized as a catchy pop song that had been popular just before the outbreak. 

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Chicory paused in surprise as she rounded a bend in the road she’d recently discovered and saw a settlement. Sparks, that was almost too easy. Only a month of wandering. 

She took out her map and examined the settlement, trying to gauge where exactly the location translated to on a map. 

Chicory paused, looking at the fort below her for a long moment as she noticed the obvious signs of problems. If it weren’t for heartfire, it would probably have taken her longer to notice, but as it was, it was only moments before Chicory noticed the eerie silence and felt the unnatural calm.

She looked harder and was easily able to spot a place on the fence where something had climbed over it. It was even more simple to notice the faint stench of rot on the wind. 

If the place hadn’t been in the middle of nowhere, one of the few places where zombies tended to never appear, the fence would be swarming with the things. But as it was, there was only a single lone zombie that ambled about, searching for the source of the rotting smell, yet unable to get over the palisade to find it. 

A deep sense of sadness infiltrated Chicory’s thoughts as she observed the fallen place. It seemed from here that a Swift had somehow gotten over the fence and killed everyone. If anyone had later turned they would still be inside. 

Which also made Chicory wonder, the damage looked recent, were there any survivors?

---

Chicory scaled the fence, wishing she’d managed to simply open the gate, however, due to how it was locked she couldn’t manage the feat. 

The palisade was clearly designed to be difficult to climb over. It was only twice her height, and still it took nearly every trick she could think of to get over the thing. Hopefully the return trip would be much easier. 

As Chicory had assumed, the inside was crawling with zombies. Even though there were only a dozen maximum, it still rattled her to be close enough to the things that she could smell some of their breath.

Chicory had thought about her options before entering, she could be cautious if she had to, even though most of her plan revolved pretty much solely around winging it. 

She lured all the visible zombies into nearby houses, closing the doors behind them and sorely hoping that if there was a survivor around that they weren’t in any of those homes. 

After locking up all the zombies she could see, Chicory stood near the fence, and shouted. Half to let anyone who could understand her know that she was there and half to lure in the remaining zombies. It worked like a charm and three stragglers wandered toward her, walking fast enough that they weren’t completely ignorable, though she could easily evade them, and she did so as she led them into empty rooms. 

After that, Chicory wandered about the fallen place, shouting for anyone who was alive to respond. 

Chicory got no response, so after an hour she called it quits, marking the map with a red X and moving onward.

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Every vote gives Chicory more interesting things to do with her time!