She had passed the outer enclosure they called the second ringfort and taken leave of little Jasmine, who had looked pale and worried again, close to tears. With no idea how to cheer her up, Franka had merely tousled her hair and winked, making it as short a goodbye as possible. One of the men at the gate had been old Willi, a master story teller in his own way, he would take care of Jasmine, she knew. Franka watched the giant metal door swing close behind her. They had found a clever trick to make the brambles and ivy creep up all over it. Once it was securely shut, there was no telling what lay behind it, it looked like just another thicket, crawling over stones and bushes.<br/><br/>She bent down to pull the boat from under a bush, turned it and pushed it into the water. The lake lay calm before her, its deep water undisturbed. A perfect protection, the lake, the infected couldn't swim. It was an artificial lake, sort of, an ingenious idea brought up by Rolf, the gaunt engineer who once had constructed bridges. There had been a lake before, long ago, so, with tremendous effort, digging and building a damn further up, they had guided the river back into its former bed. Which had created the lake. Now, the settlement was one of the safest places imaginable, hidden and protected on one side by the mountain, on the other by the water.<br/><br/>She fastened the rope to the boat, made sure the other end was securely tied to a tree, and began to row towards the opposite shore. All was still peaceful, animals following their usual routines, not a sound out of place, not a scent in the air was wrong. One could smell most infected from miles away since the corpses strewn everywhere after the gas attack had been picked bare of their rotting flesh. Now, the air was clean, unpolluted, too, and the dirt, blood and rotting tissue infected usually had sputtered all over them gave them away even when they were hibernating or standing stock still, staring into nothingness, as sometimes they would.<br/><br/>Nonetheless, before she reached the shore, Franka fastened her tank top to her pants and slipped into the leather jacket, closing the zipper all the way up. She pulled over the rucksack, made sure she could easily reach and draw the machete. The slingshot was little use in the woods, but once in the open, if she saw them early enough, she could noiselessly remove an infected before it could start screaming. It had taken excruciatingly long to learn how to use the slingshot, she had almost given up, but now, she was fast, sure, precise. It was small, light, efficient, easy to replace and find ammunition for. She pulled out her binoculars and scanned the tree-lines, then paddled towards the shore. She left the boat, placed the paddles inside and pushed it back out into the lake. The others would draw it back later. From now on, she was on her own.<br/><br/>Three hours later, she had almost reached the valley. No incident, nothing alarming to see or hear even in the distance. But her tension rose with every moment. She would be in the open soon, with no place to hide, easy to spot. She must cross the former farmland, meadows and fields of oat, wheat and rye, some canola. You could still what had been where, despite the fact it all had turned into a sea of hay now, wild flowers and herbs everywhere, and clouds of butterflies dangling from poppies, lady's smocks, yarrow, clover, chamomile and thistles. It looked like an idyllic scenery, and it was, in a way. Until you noticed the skeletons of cows and sheep that had died here, screaming in anguish with their udders infected and nearly bursting, then fallen upon by infected, or wild dogs.<br/><br/>Still, cows had survived, most of them living in herds, roaming about. A few had been caught or never been neglected, were milk cows still, but most ran wild these days and where hunted for meat. Horses had made it, too, had become shy, almost wild, but the older ones still remembered humans had taken care of them. The people up across the valley had taken to riding again, to plough fields with horses, make them pull carts. But where she was heading, a horse without horseshoes couldn't go, while with them, it would be too noisy and still prone to injure its legs. Or to whinny and run off in just the wrong moment, if, and that wasn't likely, horses could be persuaded to go anywhere near a city.<br/><br/>After scanning the valley, Franka stepped into the sun's glare. A wall of heat hit her. That would only get worse the further down she descended. And it wasn't midday yet. She moved on at a steady pace, stayed in the fields, the swaying ocean of grass and flowers the wind rippled. She looked at the cracked country lanes winding through the valley, rusty cars, a tractor, toppled, bits of clothes flapping in the breeze. It was when she crossed the fifth field and could see around the hill to her right that she spotted something down there, far away in the distance, something that hadn't been there before, looked entirely wrong and yet had a familiar shape. She pulled out her binoculars and inspected it. An airplane. She squinted, focussed, zoomed and zoomed, then read. U.S. Air Force. Unbelievable! Where had that come from? Why?