He’d been following the group for two days now.
Bosco, who’d run off now (something which only mildly concerning Eli since Bosco had a way of showing up whenever he was trying to eat) had almost given him away a few times, but somehow Eli had managed to stay off the radar. Honestly that surprised him more than anything else. The group was… big. Biggest he’d seen, actually. There had to be more than thirty, easy. There were kids, from what he could see, too, which meant they felt like they could move families. He assumed that was an indicator that they had more than enough firepower to fend off the raiders and thieves who prowled across the country now.
…Technically, Eli was one of those prowlers. He preferred to identify as a GHOST, though. It was what he did, ghost. He could walk with the dead, blend in with their ranks like he was actually a shuffling corpse and not a very much alive twenty-something. Stealing from them would be stupid. Incredibly, incalculably stupid.
It was also his only choice. He was down to just bottles of blood and clothes in his bag– reducing him to a hungry, ghostly vampire. Something right out of a modern, Southern Gothic novel. It was a nice, poetic thought– but it wasn’t putting food in his stomach. So, he was stuck with stealing. He hadn’t managed it yet, but tonight felt like the night he could at least attempt to pull a bag or a few cans out of one of the tents in the back.
Just on the edge of the makeshift camp they’d made, he crept through the shadows, low to the ground so he could pull a possum if he needed to. He was jittery, ready to run, but also determined not to go another day without eating. The few lookouts that regularly patrolled had just wandered (more than likely to check up on another area), and Eli took his chances and inched closer.
She couldn’t seem to drift off to sleep. Siena lied on her back, trying to get some kind of rest to gather the needed strength to go on another day. “To live another day” to gamble with her life —after all to survive was not something more than mere luck now. You could be strong, brave and smart all at once yet it wouldn’t any kind of an assurance that you wouldn't end up six feet under from a .9mm piece of steel: like Blaize did, the man Siena had thought would outlive everyone else left. &In truth, it should have been him.
Her eyelids grew heavy and fell, it was the closest she had been to sinking into a proper sleep since they had head out. She jumped at the loud echo of a gun being shot. A red image flashed in her mind for a split second. Siena instinctively found herself reaching under the sleeping bag for her knife, hastily pulling it out of its case, she examined inside the tent, and the shadows changing shapes outside. As she expected, it was just her mind replaying the memory for there was no sound expect for some crickets chirping. She couldn’t sleep a wink. A mixture of grief & paranoia hunted her at night, also at day. But days were easier, she’d get distracted easily from the rush and the exhaustion.
For two days now she had been on tenterhooks because she was almost certain that the group was being followed by someone. She could almost feel someone else’s eyes on the makeshift camp, the disturbing presence of an intruder. The worst-case-scenario, Tyler’s people had spotted them, maybe one of them or more were waiting for the right moment to act. And it seemed like the most feasible one to Siena, being exhausted but not being able to fall asleep because her heart was beating just a bit too loud had the hold of her paranoid side.
She watched the indistinct shadows of the two lookouts back to back, one of them was sharing the tent with Siena but left nearly two hours ago for the guard duty. They suddenly split up heading opposite directions. Something wasn’t right. She tightened her grip on the knife, her ears were alert for the slightest sound she could pick up.
Holding her breath and bracing herself for possible scenarios, she felt a movement towards her tent, not harsh sounding steps but a lighter noise. It grew closer by second then started to sound a bit more distant. Siena stuck her head out of the tent, listened closer. Without further hesitation she came out of the tent crawling on all fours. She could make out the intruder at that point. She could feel her stomach churning but still, a part of her felt relief that she wasn’t delusional or hearing non-existent noises. She lowered herself closer to the ground, and was moving on her elbows now, still holding the knife with one hand. She was careful not to get too close, waiting for the right moment. She decided to strike when he finally made it (Siena presumed the intruder was a young man as far as she could make out) to the tent at the very back, which seemed like his target. That would be when he would feel like he was in the clear, but actually wasn’t.
