Gunfire, like a rapid-fire snare drum in the distance, brought Dinah to a standstill for a moment before she reached the main street.  But she regained her composure-- it sounded like how she imagined wars she'd never seen, but now it wasn't shock, but memory... the small towns she'd coursed to get here, the occasional holdouts she'd encountered only to find the remnants of a family.  Sometimes they were bitten, dead and half-eaten.  Sometimes, with a self-inflicted red halo on the wall behind them.  The worst, of course, dead, half-eaten, and still moving.<br/><br/>In the silence that follows, Dinah reaches the corner of the bank's lot and creeps around the hedges-- not wanting to draw the fire of some crazed survivalist who was thriving in the zombie wastes, or whoever it was.  She peers at the road-- shopfronts littered with broken pallets in an attempt to forge barricades, spools of barbed wire fluttering with decaying flesh, and bodies-- a couple mid-street, dead for real this time.<br/><br/>"Shit," she whispered to herself-- someone was out there.  How to make contact..?  She was trotting back around the bank, mind whirring with possibilities, to fetch her pack.  "A signal.  Call out, yell for help-- show them I'm not infected?"  A casual observer from a less desperate era would have thought her completely insane from her shock-wide eyes, her mutterings to herself, her longcoat too warm for the weather and the dust-mask banging around her upper chest.  "Just got to find them."  She'd caught her breath already.  She was used to running, but her shoulders screamed at the return of that weight to her back when she'd recovered her pack.  "Watch them.  Make sure they're safe."  She latched the strap under her breasts where a bruise was starting to form.  "Make sure."  She checked the action on the shotgun, checked the barrel-- safety set, she slung the weapon over her shoulder again and set off at a trot for the main drag toward the fallen dead.