Chapter Text
She'd been careless, walking down a random street in yet another nameless town she would no doubt forget the name of before she had even left. Her thoughts wandering off to happier times. The sound of shuffling feet had become part of the background ambience of her trip down memory lane as she scanned the houses she passed, hoping for a convenience store, a hunting goods store, or anything that might have canned food, sealed water bottles, medication, or any of the hundreds of other things the world had suddenly become in short supply of.
A sudden crash made her jump in place before spinning around and landing in a fighting stance with a kukri in each hand. Three meters back was a herd of the walking dead, all of them stuffing their way straight to her. Even further back, the half-rotten corpse of a woman had apparently walked straight into a trash can, overbalanced, and both the woman and the trash were now strewn over a small area. As Buffy stared at the strangely normal incident, aside from the walking dead part of it, several more of the undead stumbled and fell.
Snapping her attention back to the problem, the still advancing herd, she quickly side-stepped the ones in the front, but stabbed two of the ones on the side on her way past. Her changed view made her reevaluate her estimate of how large the herd really was. At first glance, she had guessed maybe eight or 10, but now she upped it to closer to twenty.
Ten minutes later, and the walking dead had been turned into the actual dead. Buffy herself had brain matter and other things on her clothes and in her hair that she really, really didn't want to think too closely about. She wrinkled her nose. Water was in short supply, which meant she would need to find new clothes somewhere, which meant entering one or more houses.
"What the hell?"
Buffy spun around again, and this time she was faced with two women, somewhere in their thirties, and looking shocked at her skillset. Well, the blonde one was staring a little wide-eyed at her while the dread-locked woman at her side was giving Buffy a narrowed, suspicious eye contact. The second woman was also holding a wicked-looking sword that had Buffy drooling a little at the sight.
Being the social butterfly she had always been, Buffy smiled in return. Most of the people she had come across had been male, and the few women she had met had been too cautious to want anything to do with her. "Hi! I don't suppose you know somewhere with a working shower?"
Because a shower would be of the good right now, and they looked clean. Well, a lot cleaner than she was at any rate. On second thought, that had been a stupid question; no one had working showers anymore.
Except that the blonde gave her an unexpected response. "I stayed on a farm a while back, and they had a working shower. The entire farm burned down over a month ago, though, and I haven't had a shower since."
"Oh," she almost whispered. How was she supposed to reply to that?
An awkward silence followed before the other woman asked, "Do you have a group?"
"No," was all Buffy replied. They were far enough into the apocalypse that her one-word response didn't need an explanation. They had all been there. "Do you?"
"I did, but we were all scattered after the fire and the huge herd that descended on the farm.
Some more awkward small-talk followed before the other woman decided they needed to leave. Buffy didn't object and left in the opposite direction.