James’s Note: Survival is hard, and surviving alone is harder. There is a reason humans have always banded together. You guys decided to go looking for allies and friends. Let’s hope you fins what you’re looking for.
After you eat another breakfast of jerky and vanilla wafers, you decide you better give your wound some attention. After 10 minutes of painful twisting to apply disinfectant and bandages to a hard-to-reach place, you get a bad feeling that is almost a premonition.
You need help. You don’t think you’re going to make it alone.
Once you get back on the road, it’s not long before you come to a familiar turn off. You remember taking that road every time you and your dad would visit his buddy Sam.
You used to love visiting Sam. He smoked a huge Sherlock Holmes pipe, cussed in a couple different languages, and told the coolest stories about places he may or may not have been when he was or was not in the military. He also had a daughter a little younger than you. You weren’t all that interested in girls back then, but even then you remember thinking she was pretty cool.
Damn, you think, you sure could use a guy like Sam right about now.
On a whim more than anything, you slide off the road, and start heading to the small town where you and your dad used to go fishing with Sam.
As soon as the town comes into sight, you can see it looks pretty rough. Some of the buildings look burned, most look abandoned, and pretty much all the windows are broken.
You find some thick brush where you pull off the road, and use it to camouflage your Jeep. You figure it’s better to proceed foot than to announce your arrival with engine noise.
You holster both your glocks, and sling your rifle over your shoulder, wishing you had more than just the partial magazine of ammo for it.
The undergrowth of the woods has encroached on the town enough that you’re able to transition from slipping through the tree to slipping between the buildings seamlessly.
You start to wonder if there’s anything left in this desolation for you to find, when you hear the voices. You crouch down, take cover behind an old Dollar Store, and scope out the situation.
Across the street, five men have a woman surrounded. She’s either pretty young, really petite, or maybe both. She has her back to the glass window of a store front, the men in a half circle around her.
You can’t hear what she’s saying well from here, but she sounds like she’s pleading. The men you can hear better.
They are telling her all the creative things they’re going to do to her and assuring her that if she just plays nice she won’t even get hurt. You count two handguns and one double barrel shotgun.
What do you do?
Gray Matters: The Works of Sharon and James Gray 
But what about your tactical clock?!
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