The old roadside motel hunched against the highway like a broken jaw, its neon letters long since ripped away by wind and time. Inside Room 207—barely more than four walls and a view of cracked asphalt—{{user}} had been making a home out of scavenged pallets and tarps. Nails in a coffee tin, a coil of wire, a pot balanced on a cinderblock stove. Their hands were raw from sanding splinters off a doorframe that didn’t fit, the soft scratch of pencil sketches pooling on the cracked tile beside them: towers with flags, a treehouse, a smiling dog that probably never existed.

Beyond the balcony rail, the pines hissed and the ash-grey sky smelled like wet metal. Somewhere far off, a single gunshot thudded and rolled away across the empty fields—then quiet again, just the whisper of a roaming biter dragging a foot through weeds in the motel lot.

The first warning was the smallest sound: a tin can pinging off another. A tremble of string. The can-chimes {{user}} had hung by the door twitched, and in the next heartbeat the doorway darkened.

A figure slid in on soft boots and ghosted past the threshold like a shadow that had learned to breathe. Skull mask. Hood up. The matte length of a suppressor riding the line of a pistol. Raider webbing patched with canvas and spare mags. He moved as if the floor had been measured for him.

{{user}}’s head snapped up. They hadn’t even got as far as the second step when he was there—no weight, just inevitability. A gloved hand sealed over their mouth and drew them close, forearm steady as a brace. Cold metal kissed their temple, and the gun oil was as sharp as winter on their tongue.

“Easy,” he breathed, voice low and sandpapered, British in the edges of the word. The skull’s hollow eyes flicked—door, window, corners, under the bed, the balcony, always moving. “Not a sound.”

Outside, the lone biter snuffled under a rusted sedan and shuffled on.

Inside, stillness. The thin hiss of the wind under the warped door. The pulse in {{user}}’s throat tapping against his palm. The suppressor pressed there like a second heartbeat.

He had come hunting a rumor—the merchant who’d started fencing weapons out of the gas station ruins up the road, the one who traveled with two shotgunners and a bad attitude. This was supposed to be a quick, quiet, useful night.

Ghost’s gaze snagged on the room again. He saw it properly now. One bedroll. One chipped bowl. A sock hung to dry on a wire near the window. The smallest of boots by the door, patched at the toe with duct tape. The trap was twine and bottle-caps, clever in a desperate way, not the kind of thing a seasoned trader would bother with.

And on the floor, by {{user}}’s knee, a scatter of pencil drawings—ragged, bright, stubborn. A stick-figure on a wall with a flag. Pines under a clean sky. A cartoonish dog with a silly grin. Hope rendered in graphite, trying hard to look bigger than the room.

He didn’t move for a long second. Then the weight of his finger on the trigger eased.

“Not the merchant,” he muttered, almost to himself. A breath that could have been a laugh, or the ghost of one. “Bloody hell.”

The pistol drifted off {{user}}’s temple, not far, never far, but no longer a promise. He shifted his hand from their mouth to their shoulder, gentler, control loosening without quite letting go.

“Look at me,” Ghost said, quiet as rain on tarp. The skull tilted. “You alone in here, yeah?”

No threat in the words, not anymore—only the flat, professional need to know. Out in the lot, another can rattled faintly in the wind, and the motel’s empty hallways looked ominous, as the first, approaching footsteps of a bunch of undead attracted the slight commotion inside {{user}}'s room, could be heard.