safe in your skin | the walking dead

chapter one | searching the blue

They start to starve, truly, when the cicadas begin their humming song and the roads outside the camp stay radio-silent.

Not only does it rain– in thick swathes that swell the riverbank and send their encampment scurrying two blocks inwards– but it pours, to quote her mother. One shitstorm after the other, quick succession, rapidfire killshots like a calloused index clamped down tight on a trigger.

Like most things nowadays, all thirty-seven inhabitants of what used to be Harper's Ferry, West Virginia look to Beth Greene for the solutions to all their problems.

And Beth, well, she stopped looking to God what feels like a lifetime ago. Three-odd years, to be specific. She looks to the woods instead, tonight just barely lit by a sickle moon and the outpost's kerosene lanterns, familiar as the veins on the back of her hands, as the sun-freckles spattered across the kids' noses. Thick moss clustered on the grove of hemlocks, thickets of weeds and wildflowers conglomerated on an overgrown forest floor, hiding within a bedtime choir of katydids and crickets and spring peepers, their final solo a scream, strident and mechanized, from the belted kingfisher nested above the engorged riverbed.

The sign at the entrance of their camp faces the woods, large and smeared with debris, illuminated only by that pale moonlight, and yet it stands at attention. Monolithic, monumental, noticeable. Much-needed.

THERE IS NOTHING IN THIS HOLLER WORTH DYING FOR

STAY OUT OR BE CARRIED OUT

Funnily enough, it'd been from before, at least according to Old Jemmy. Found near the beginning, nailed to some doomsday prepper's fence up deep in the Blue Ridge. A corner, now scrubbed clean, had been splashed with brain matter and blood presumably from the owner, his carcass subsequently consumed, either by walkers or coyotes or nature herself, until it was nothing but a pile of rot in front of a meaningless warning. The man's cache had fortified the larder, been the bones of the armory. His sign, carted out onto Main Street, the first indication that they were in this predicament for good.

The undead couldn't read, so the warning didn't matter much in that regard. It meant nothing when Beth herself had arrived, wounds physical and mental still smarting like nettle scrapes, taking her chances with Ginny out of pure necessity. It sure as hell didn't deter a single soul when the Saviors strode through their gates, the first new faces they'd seen in the valley for half a year.

But it was notice as any, that they owned something, and that they would protect it by all means necessary.

Not that Beth felt like she was doing a stand-up job of protecting lately, what with the hunger and concern gnawing holes of acid rot through her stomach.

First there was Josiah, bitten in what was supposed to have been a straightforward run to the Antietam Creek campground for lumber. Then half their hunting grounds were scorched in a low-burning fire, Brody having preferred his supposedly scintillating game of solitaire over keeping an eye on the smokehouse like he was supposed to. A springtime cold incapacitated most of their at-risk, and therefore half of their workforce. The remaining ablebodied were now pulling double shifts in the courtyard gardens, forgoing any runs outside in favor of the possibility of any harvest at all to come fall. The group had all managed to live off crawdads and grilled trout perfectly fine, but then the springtime storms had started and Maude nearly drowned in a swell of the Potomac, forcing them more inland.

Perhaps most damningly of all, the Saviors had ceased their bimonthly visits with no notice, almost a year ago to the day. Their sparse stacks of tithings– barrels of greased guns and ammo, a meager bushel of radishes and pea shoots– had rotted and rusted in their neat piles at the mouth of the gate, their ham radio nothing but static. The Wilson Freeway beyond was isolated once more. Their presence wasn't necessarily missed— but their trade most certainly was.