Marcus felt the shadow of Jake close across him as he squinted through the binoculars and panned them across the shattered town; but as Jake commented that what ever was out there was long gone; Marcus pulled his gaze away from the open door and retreated a little way back into the store again where he sat against the edge of the checkout desk; his shotgun placed rested across it as he listened to Jake speak; his expression taking with a resigned despondency as he expressed just how dire their situation was becoming.  He had heard mention of those rumours too; of some enclave deep in the mountains, he had caught snatches of conversation that had been picked up on his headphones whilst he was airborne, but at the time they had seemed nothing more than flights of fancy and desperate hope …though maybe there was some grounding to them.<br/><br/>When Jake extolled the virtues of HomeDepot, Marcus sighed a little;<em>Yeah; free of both the stiffs …and a stiff drink …</em>Marcus mused in resignation; for him, the food run across to Walmart couldn’t come soon enough and even given his natural instinct for wanting to avoid any unnecessary encounters with the dead heads, he was determined to volunteer for that one when the time came.<br/><br/>As Dinah’s gaze passed across him the best Marcus could raise was a smile; he had pretty much guessed, he thought, what had been going through her mind at that point because something similar had passed through his; but he hadn’t found a satisfactory response either.  As she asked about shoring the place up he glanced across to Jake who had already mentioned about securing the building earlier to him; about the wealth of timber and constructing a barrier, and, with a glance across to where the marine had been busying away; some sort of first warning alarm system involving …explosives.  The thought made him wince, despite Jake’s reassurance that the place was free of the dead, Marcus was apprehensive about their walling themselves in here, perhaps it was the yearnings of the open spaces that a pilot craved or maybe the fact that as the sun dipped and the day turned to night, their could see an intensity to their numbers drawn by the explosion.  “Does anyone know if we have access to the roof?”