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

73. Material

"You ready up there!"

"Yeah!" yelled Clementine as she looked down at Patty from her perch up on the small catwalk surrounding the billboard.

"All right, hang tight!" Clem actually did clutch the railing tightly as she watched Patty head through an opening in the fence surrounding a dusty lot. A free-standing square of red roofing in front of a small building suggested this was once a gas station. But the various trailers, bundles of long pipes and massive spools of wire made it clear it had become something else by the time of the outbreak. It hardly mattered what though as all Clem and Patty were concerned with was the yellow piece of construction equipment with a mechanical arm attached to a giant metal shovel parked in the back.

"All right," crackled Patty's voice over the radio. "Keep an eye out, this thing is loud and slow, so I can't exactly drive out of here in it if something comes running, assuming it even works at all."

"Got it." Clem briefly looked down as Patty climbed into the backhoe's cab then fixed her eyes on the horizon. A loud mechanical churning filled the air as Clem carefully scanned for threats. She slowly turned her head past the road, carefully eyed the door of an old building across the street, watched an open warehouse for signs of movement, and kept turning in place until she found herself staring out an empty field peppered by short, blooming trees.

The engine suddenly got much louder and Clem turned back to the lot in time to watch the backhoe slowly roll forward a few feet. It stopped, then the mechanical arm on the front began to extend, producing a series of loud whirs with every inch it pivoted. The large metal scoop moved down to the ground, then back up, then down, then left, and so forth until Patty finally seemed to figure out the controls. The scoop sliced into the ground and, after a lot more awkward short movements, eventually pulled out a pile of dirt.

Clem headed for the ladder as she heard the engine shut off. Climbing down in a hurry and racing over to Patty as she emerged from the backhoe, she saw a big smile on the woman's face that matched her own.

"It works?" asked an excited Clem as she looked down at the big hole.

"It works!" cheered Patty as she looked at the vehicle. "Surprised all it needed was a little routine maintenance. When Sin asked us to find one of these things I didn't think we'd actually find one, let alone on the first day."

"So now what?" asked Clem. "Should we drive it back?"

"It would take hours with how slow it moves and use up tons of diesel we don't have on hand," said Patty as she walked over to a long flat trailer. "But, we unhook one of our semis, drive it back, hitch it to this thing, drive the backhoe onto it, then when can haul it back to the farm."

"That sounds... complicated," said Clem.

"Not really, it's just going to be a time-consuming hassle," said Patty as she looked at the trailer's hitch. "Seeing as it's past noon and backhoes probably aren't high up on the apocalyptic wish list, we could come back tomorrow and figure it out. For now I'd rather just get back to the farm, in case something did hear us just now and is on its way."

"Sounds good to me."

The pair radioed Devlin and Jet with an update before grabbing their bikes. Clem pedaled down the road a bit, then stopped to look over her shoulder at the billboard she had used as a lookout. Faded orange letters spelling 'Osage' was all that remained of whatever was originally posted on it. They were barely visible through the crude red ones that spelled out their message: DEAD DON'T EAT DEAD, SMELL LIKE THE DEAD. Satisfied they had done enough for today, the pair took off down the interstate and started pedaling north.