Marcus raised an eyebrow at the woman's response. As if she was angry that he was here. Unfortunately, Marcus was all to familiar with the response. He never had any luck with girls, and any time he tried to talk to them, they always ignored him. Marcus sighed and absently spun his axe and adjusted his backpack. "Your making this much more awkward that it needs to be." He mumbled to himself.

Marcus snapped to attention when the lady and her...daughter maybe, began to leave. Marcus used a rock to hold to front door open, that way they had an easy escape just in case. Marcus followed her into the dark building. The floors were speckled with dark red shoe marks and the walls filled with bloody hand prints. Marcus felt a bit nervous, the hall and rooms was unusually quiet. He took that as a bad sign, he took everything as a bad sign now. "Let's hope we won't be over run." He mumbled to himself as he raked his hand through his hair.

Marcus did not pay much attention to the interactions between the woman and her daughter, out of respect for there privacy. He was raised as a gentleman, so he as going to show that. Marcus sighed and nodded when the woman offered to take on side. He was a bit worried about being alone, but he was more worried about the the woman being alone. Don't try and play hero. Marcus want rigid for a second before calming down, he had watched enough movies to realize the hero's died first. Marcus nodded, "I'll take the right side then." He said as he griped his axe. Marcus took a deep breath and walked over to the first door on the right side. He peered through the small glass window on the it and saw nothing. He grabbed to handle and rapidly blinked his eyes. "Here goes nothing." He said before he opened the door.

Sergeant Maiko's eyes dug into this Dr Ng's eyes in silence, scraping out whatever information she could out of her soul. For the time being, she decided that this Abby was no threat. "This is what Captain Ishida wants. But we need nothing from you. There is no payment required. We are the UN and the JSDF, not Sony or Mitsubishi. If you remain with us, we would prefer that you do nothing but live and breathe; food, water, security, all essentials are provided."

With that, she turned and started walking back to the School of Education, "I will show you where you may deposit your things." Walking around her men, who were carrying more corpses out, she continued, "We do not need a nutritionist. In case you and your American friends did not notice the red cross on our arms, Captain Ishida is a medical officer by vocation and I am a medic."

She took Abby to the third floor, the same floor where they had set up most of their makeshift headquarters. The command room, bunks and armoury were all on the same floor. There were rows upon rows of lockers outside the staff offices and classrooms, "You may have one of these. You just have to clear out whatever rubbish is inside your locker. As I've discovered, American students tend to be rather messy and unsanitary. Pray that the locker of your choosing is unoccupied. If you suspect yourself of contracting a form of skin disease or another after that, approach Captain Ishida for treatment when he comes back."

Inside the teaching staff's office hall, the main room of the HQ was set up. There, Sergeant Maiko opened a metal box mounted on the wall containing all locker keys; "There is a science lab on the other end of this floor. We plan to use it for research, but you could share it with us for whatever you wish to do."

Marcus nodded, "I'll take the right side then." He said as he griped his axe. Marcus took a deep breath and walked over to the first door on the right side. He peered through the small glass window on the it and saw nothing. He grabbed to handle and rapidly blinked his eyes. "Here goes nothing." He said before he opened the door.

He was greeted by an empty classroom, lit only by the sunlight streaming in through the smallish windows. The decor was perhaps a little spartan, but there was nothing more dangerous in here than a thin layer of dust gathering on the surface of the desks and uncomfortably warm air. A similar sight greeted Sam on the other side of the hall. The small noise didn't seem to attract any attention from elsewhere in the Bass Building.

Two rooms down.

Taking the main road leading into town, Captain Ishida Hisashi was making a beeline for the closest infantry icon on his computer. There was still a distance to go, so he decided to do a radio test. Pressing the transmit button on his digital walkie talkie, he spoke into the mic on his headset, "This is Captain Ishida Hisashi of 2nd Kyonshikirapeitai 3rd Company, UN US Mission, to Roy of... Civilian Group 1-Alpha, second radio check, over." He released the transmit button and waited. If there was a time when he did well in the local language, it was in radio discipline. The utilitarian sparsity of the language ensured that what he spoke sounded like good English.

"This is 1-Alpha, receiving you loud and clear. Best of luck down there." Roy had a passing familiarity with radio protocol- back in the Nineties, when he was still working a corner, he had had the bright idea of getting himself a police scanner and headphones. He just looked like another young man with a Walkman, but in reality he was listening intently to see if any KCPD cars were en route to his position to make a few arrests. It hadn't always worked, of course, but more than once he had managed to quietly shuffle off before any black and whites had arrived. Back in the day.

"Alright, fellas, let's get moving," Roy said as he jumped into the truck's driver seat and turned the keys. Enough wasted time, they had best head into town.

The roads were pitted, not very well maintained- Nathanson was a poor town in a poor county. They passed by Rutland Park, green and forested, standing out among the blonde of summer wheat and dead grass stretching far to the horizon all around, and then the four men were in the town of Nathanson.

In what was surely a godsend to students at the college, the Wal-Mart was scarcely a mile and a half away, just right on the other side of Rutland Park. Roy slowly pulled the pickup to a halt on the access road, taking a careful look at the massive structure. It stood in the middle of a huge parking lot. There seeming to be fifteen or so shambling figures milling around the parking lot, all widely spread out. Roy turned back to look at his passengers. "What do you gentlemen think? Go for the front doors?"

Calvin was along for the short ride as Roy had been the driver of their supply run to Wal-Mart. The ride wasn't as long as he hoped for since he was so used to traveling that it felt a little bit unusual for him to be stationary for as long as he had been. The plus side was that if they ever needed to come back and make another trip in the future that it wasn't that far away. While they were pulling into the parking lot he wondered if this trip would be truly productive to them since a large box store like Wal-Mart would typically be the first places that people would go for emergency apocalypse supplies. When they were planning the trip out it seemed like a fairly good idea. The group was there now and the longer that they stuck around outside of the camp was a greater chance of having an incident happen.

They pulled up to the front of the building where they had been a little bit over a dozen of zombies that were hanging around the front of the building. That was when the driver Roy asked what they should do. Calvin took a second to think about it. "It is tough to say because what if there are people waiting to ambush us at the doors when we walk through those doors. However there is no guarantee that any other route into the store would be available or unguarded. Whatever we do we should hurry, don't want wandering eyes to catch us."

Of course he wasn't really referring to zombies, with their numbers they could easily take care of the immediate threat of zombies that they had near them. It was what they couldn't see that could see them. He was really referring to other humans, looters to be particular. Humans would be quite a bit harder to deal with than a zombie and Calvin wasn't really equipped to fight a human at the moment.

"I also think the first place we should go is the hunting section grab as much weapons and ammo as we can. No point grabbing food if we can't keep out intruders, human or zombie. The next would be to grab food and medical supplies if there is any left."

Sam turned the doorknob slowly and shifted into the room almost on her toes. She shot quick glances to all four corners of the rooms and in the most obvious nooks before she let her niece into the room. The kid waltzed in without a damn to give about the noise she made. She huffed all the way from the door to the window, peered out, then spun back around. With a scowl, Sam left the door an inch or so open and began to search the room for useful items.

"This is a waste of time," Darcy made sure to note as soon as possible. She added a whine to her tone, just to give it that extra shrillness. In truth she wanted to leave, and not just this building but the entire campus, and put it behind them. She didn't like so many strangers and guns. "They already checked all the buildings."

Sam ignored her, she tried explaining the situation before the meeting, but she was beginning to think Darcy understood and fancied making trouble just to put her aunt off helping out. Sam started pulling out all the drawers and opening cabinets. The longer she searched, the more evident it became nothing of note would be found in the room. It was merely a music classroom, after all. Though she expected as much, disappointment still etched its way onto her features; she needed to find something more threatening than a tire iron, and the desperation was getting stronger.

"Aunt Sam," Darcy groaned. "We're going to be here all day." She made her way over to a bookcase and ran her fingertip across the bindings.

"Not if you shut up and help." Sam signalled for her niece to follow and marched back into the hallway. If she kept this pace, she could see them clearing the first floor in no time at all. Maybe she'd set up camp on the top floor, provided the place could be secured easy enough. Tightening her grip on the tire iron, until the pads of her hand grew sore, she twisted the knob on the next door down.

"I'm not a nurtitionist," Abby said, eyeing the men moving bodies out of the building, She was going to need to find out where they were taking those. She had some questions about the rate of decomposition - not to mention that she needed to collect more specimins.

"I think I said that wrong. What I meant was I've spent most of my life in the bush, and I've made a point of knowing that I can eat. I can find edible plants, mushrooms, shellfish, all kinds of nutritious and delicious things. So when the IMPs and canned baby corn or whatever the Walmart run comes up with are running out, I'll be happy to be teaching anyone who wants to learn to forage to do so."

She checked a few of the open lockers until she found a clean one - number forty-three. She placed her backpack inside, careful of the contents. It felt wonderful to have even the limited security of four thin metal walls again. Not for the first time, she wished she had a car instead of arriving on foot.

"Thank you for letting me share your laboratory. I'm not a medical doctor, but I have some questions that need answering about this whole "zombie" plague and I figure a scientist is ascientist, right?"

She locked her locker and turned to face the Japanese sergeant. "But I think you have some misapprehensions about how this apocalypse thing is going to play out. As of two weeks ago, we're back in the dark ages. We've got no electricity - even if we find enough gas to run the generator, it'll have gone stale in a year or two and be no use to us. We've got no infrastructure for mass production of food, either. At least three quarters of everyone is dead. Even if the rabids were gone tomorrow, we're going to have a monumentally hard time just keeping basic life running. There's never been a disaster like this.

"So, what I'm saying is, everyone's going to have to pull their weight. Your soldiers are great at what they do, and they're a far sight better than some civillian with a hammer, I agree." She patted the hammer at her side. "But we're going to have a lot of other things that need doing. We're going to need people bringing in water from that lake; we're going to need people watching the children; before long we're going to have to start farming if we want to stay alive. And we're going to need craftspeople, construction workers fortifying our settlement, we're going to need to find out of there are other survivors out there we can trade with. There isn't going to be any room for just being alive and happy, Sergeant."

*Mistake*