Twenty minutes. That's how long we'd been moving since we found that corpse, picking through the terrain, trying to piece together where they'd gone.
The blood trail bought us maybe five minutes of direction, a dark, irregular smear cutting through the dirt that gave us something to follow. Then it just stopped. Dried up, soaked in, gone. Like whoever left it had simply ceased to exist.
After that we had to improvise. The freshly killed Infected were our new breadcrumbs. Someone had been cutting through them recently, bodies still wet, still warm in that wrong way. We found them scattered across a wide stretch, not clustered, not cornered in one spot. Spread out.
That kind of spread meant numbers. A group, not a lone straggler. A significant one at that.
Not exactly the kind of thing that put your mind at ease.
But what unsettled me more wasn't the size of the group. It was the why. Why were they out here? Why this far?
