- A temporary base. Comfortable enough to sleep in, discreet enough not to be found, hard enough for both humans and zombies to break in, and big enough to store loot.

  - Make sure you have more than 2 safe houses.

  - Make sure they're hidden with ingenuity.

  - Like an Easter egg room.

  ---

  We suffered from success. Real, honest-to-God suffering.

  The bandits were still being the city’s loudest idiots for days, which meant we were raking in loot faster than we could carry. I had duct tape in my pockets, wires hanging from my belt, and Alex had so many canned goods crammed in her backpack she jingled like a walking pantry.

  “Elliot,” she said breathlessly, adjusting her bag for the third time. “We have a hoarding problem.”

  “Not a problem,” I grunted, shouldering a crowbar and a garden hose. “A storage issue. Totally different.”

  Problem was, we couldn’t just keep piling loot in one place. Too risky. One wrong zombie herd, one curious bandit, one raccoon with a grudge, and it’s all gone.

  “Time for real estate,” I muttered.

  ---

  Safehouse #1: The Overhole

  We found it by accident. Old gas station on the outskirts, garage half-collapsed, reeked of burnt rubber and broken dreams. But under a pile of oily tires, I kicked something solid. Metal.

  Trapdoor. Rusty. Hidden by filth. My kind of place.

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  Underneath? Jackpot. Some kind of service basement. Huge. Dry. Reinforced walls. Smelled like diesel and mold, but Alex lit up like Christmas.

  “This,” she said, arms wide, “is the Overhole.”

  I stared.

  “It’s a hole,” she explained. “For us. To overhaul our gear. Overhole.”

  I wanted to argue. But it was good. Quiet. Concealed. Spacious enough for all our loot and an arm wrestling match. Overhole became our main base.

  And yes, she drew a little doodle of it on her map with sparkles and labeled it “Home, Sweet Hole."

  ---

  Safehouse #2: Sewer Rat’s Dream

  The second one, I found while trying to shortcut through a wrecked street. Whole avenue was jammed with crashed cars, but one bus had fallen on its side, perfectly hiding a broken shop window. The window led into a deli. The deli led to a storeroom. And the storeroom had a busted floorboard revealing a manhole.

  I climbed down. Found a dry, half-collapsed sewer corridor with no smell, no rats, and no zombies. Quiet. Undisturbed. And the manhole itself? Hidden unless you were looking for it real hard.

  “Sewer Rat’s Dream,” I called it. Alex hated the name.

  “That makes it sound like it smells like armpits and pizza grease,” she said.

  “It does,” I shrugged. “But it’s my armpit.”

  It became my backup safehouse. Quiet, tight, good acoustics for paranoid muttering.

  ---

  Safehouse #3: The Gym Locker Womb

  Alex found it while poking around a ruined fitness center looking for yoga mats or kettlebells or some nonsense. The whole place had collapsed, but one back hallway was half-buried in debris. I wouldn’t have fit through the crack, but Alex squeezed in like a worm on a mission.

  She found a locker room—miraculously intact. The kind of room where you could barricade a door and feel safe enough to fall asleep in your underwear.

  I asked her what she was going to name it. She didn’t even hesitate.

  “The Gym Locker Womb,” she said proudly.

  I blinked.

  “You’re naming a hideout after a uterus?”

  “It’s warm. Tight. Comforting. Also, echo-proof.”

  Couldn’t argue with that logic. It became her personal fallback spot. I carved a small arrow on the sidewalk near the debris, just in case she needed help and I needed to find it in a hurry.

  ---

  That night, we split up for a test run.

  “If we get separated,” I told her, adjusting the strap on my backpack, “meet at the Overhole. No matter what. Two-day limit.”

  She nodded, more serious than usual. “Copy. I’ll be womb-ing it up tonight.”

  “Ew.”

  She laughed and punched my arm.

  We parted ways—her to the gym ruins, me to the sewer rat dream. For the first time in a long while, I felt prepared. We had bases. Options. Hidden holes like apocalyptic squirrels.

  And for the first time since Cleveland, I slept soundly. Surrounded by loot, weapons, and the comforting knowledge that if things went to hell tomorrow, I’d have at least two places to run to.

  Now all we needed was to not get found by the bandit who's still screaming through the city like Mad Max meets Duck Dynasty.