Three Orphan Pilgrimage (The Alternative to TWDG's Final Season) [Walking Dead]

41. Pit Stops & Past Recollections

"Someone's coming!" called Clementine as she saw a figure moving in the distance through the lens of her telescope.

"Where?" called Patty.

"South, moving towards us on the road," answered Clem.

"How far?" asked a frightened Sarah.

"Pretty far, they're..." Clem watched closely as the figure drew nearer. "It's a walker." The girl breathed a sigh of relief as she recognized the familiar stagger and rotten skin of one of the dead. Looking down from her perch on top of the gas station, Clem saw a look of relief on Sarah's face through her glasses and respirator.

"He's probably following the noise we're making," concluded Patty as she slung her sawed-off shotgun onto her back.

"How much more do we need?" called Clementine over the electric hum in the air as Sarah placed a hose into a fuel can.

"We've already got all the gas we need for Patty's motorcycle and our generator," said Sarah as she screwed a cap back onto a jerry can. "I've just got to get a couple more cans of diesel for the Brave now."

"I'll go take care of the dead guy in the mean time." Patty grabbed an aluminum bat leaned up against the trailer hitched to her motorcycle, then started walking down the road. Seeing the woman's gore-smeared raincoat flutter in the wind as she jogged after her target, Clem felt confident Patty could handle a lone walker by herself and resumed her role as lookout.

Looking through the telescope, Clem saw an abundance of trees in almost every direction that surrounded this rural gas station. There appeared to be fewer palm trees in this part of Florida, but otherwise it looked no different from any number of forgotten small towns Clem had visited, except maybe for the meager stream running by the road. Clementine briefly pulled off her stuffy respirator to get a breath of cool air before resuming her lookout.

Seeing nothing of interest, Clem looked past the trees bordering the road and gazed out upon the ocean. After snaking their way across central Florida for over a week, they had finally arrived on the state's western coast. The young girl struggled to remember the last time she had seen the ocean. It was probably when she went on vacation to Savannah, long before people rose from the dead. Even when she was there last year, she never had a chance to venture close enough to see the ocean again.

It was spellbinding to behold; the steady rhythm of the waves as they slapped against the land, the dark blue color of the water, the faint smell of saltwater in the air, and its massive size causing it to span the entire western horizon. Clem almost felt foolish for ever mistaking a river for the ocean as seeing the real thing made it clear there was no comparison. The only thing missing was a beach, the land bordering the water here being much closer to swamplands than sand.

"You see anything else?" Clem looked up from the telescope to see Patty walking back towards the gas station, her bat now stained with blood. Looking through the telescope, Clem found the now motionless corpse lying in the road behind Patty, and a quick check of the surrounding areas revealed nothing new of interest.

"I don't see anyone," reported Clem as Patty moved off the road and headed back towards where Sarah was set up near the station's buried fuel tanks.

"Patty, can you stop the generator?" asked Sarah. "I'm pretty much done."

"I swear, this RV is getting better milage than my bike," said Patty as she walked around the RV and headed for the generator sitting on the ground. "This is the first time you two have needed diesel since we left Valkaria."

"It helps the Brave holds a lot of fuel," said Sarah.

"Yeah, but a small motorcycle with an even smaller trailer like mine shouldn't be burning gas as fast as it should," said Patty as she knelt down by the generator. "Especially compared to your Brave; a heavy ass house on wheels should be a bigger gas guzzler than my bike."