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Nearly two weeks pass in your travels away from the Cathedral. You cross the forest in the first few days, living off the fresh food you brought along with foraged fruits and berries and the occasional vermin spotted running about. Water is easy to find, and you clean it with a water filtration system taken from the helicopter. The living dead are few and far between, and those you do find are languid as if hibernating, easy to avoid or kill. Pines fade away and the forest brims with spruce and oak the further you walk. Eventually the forest disappears for rough plains, overgrown with grass and weeds, long stretches of country road, and acres of untended dirt and soil where farms would be thriving only months ago. These give way to small towns with boarded-up businesses and broken-down homes, dismal wood-and-brick skeletons picked clean by looters and the remnants of humankind. You search through many you pass, seldom finding anything of use. When fresh food is used up, you live off the food paste, and although the taste lacks any resemblance of something edible, starvation flavors the brown substance, tricking your mind into hallucinations of chicken pot pie, your aunt's pot roast, and ice cream sundaes.

The lack of undead is just as unsettling as hordes of them. The long, empty stretches of field or city create a sense of impending doom, that any corner you turn may run you smack in the middle of a horde of hungry undead. Your companions are your saving grace, maintaining your body and mind, reminding you to take breaks through the seemingly never-ending walks, scavenging houses, or when hunting along the path. They keep you sane during the most desperate, lonely times when all you do is stare at the blinking light and watch the display change to new numbers. Everyone fills a role. Mindy reminds you of your will to survive, having faced so many hardships since the dawn of the Apocalypse. Heather reminds the group of what is it like to be alive: to laugh, to cry, to complain, to be comforted, and to be relied on for another person's survival. Emma sticks to the periphery and guards the flank or scouts ahead.