[quote]Then the tall girl's tone changed. Aviel looked up to find the new arrival - a man? Without thinking Aviel dropped the pot she was holding and quickly pulled out her pistol, [i][b]aiming it at the stranger[/b][/i]. It was only then that she noticed the knife in his hand. A scowl crossed her face; what the hell was he doing? Where did he come from? And did he really think he was a match for them?[/quote]

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFEAzP1Zm-A]Elijah was holding the knife down by his side,[/url] trying to appear as harmless as possible. It wasn't until the impulsive one of the group leveled a pistol at him that he had to restrain the rage. It was a mental self-defense mechanism that all US military personnel were instilled with: if someone points a weapon at you, you eliminate the threat immediately. Nobody probably immediately noticed the Army dogtags that hung around his neck (though they were lined with rubber to prevent them from clanging and being heard). But Elijah had to forgive her, because she obviously hadn't known many military people. The rule of firearms was simple: you only point a gun at someone you want to kill. Never use it to threaten someone. Instead, he took a deep breath and turned his face away slightly, so that he was not looking directly at the woman or her gun. He knew that with his Krav Maga training, he could probably disarm her before she got a fatally accurate shot off, but he didn't want to hurt, or be hurt by, anyone else in the room. 

So with his face turned aside, head lowered slightly, he kept everyone in his peripheral, but tried to look both nervous and submissive; he was actually neither. 

[quote]She took a single step closer and steadied her aim...[/quote]

This time he stepped back while raising his unarmed hand, nearly falling through the threshold of the entrance he'd just walked through. He tried to get a glimpse of the handgun for any vulnerabilities and noticed that it was not of a caliber that had an abundance of ammunition lying around, like his own. 9mm bullets were the most commonly manufactured and used round before the apocalypse, so the same was true after. And since one of the last survivors he'd met was a gunsmith who'd been pretty adept at reloading bullets, Elijah had no shortage of the 9mm caliber bullets, at least compared to most people. 

Both his sight and hearing were not that good, so even though he was closer to the real threat down the sewer passageway, he did not perceive it until the latina did. Thankfully she was quiet about warning the others, and as soon as she did, Elijah stepped backwards through the door and turned to the right, making it evident to the woman with the gun that she was not the reason why he was now raising his knife.

"Close-quarters only," he whispered to them, just in case one of them wanted to be less than stealthy while taking on this relatively mild threat. "And shut the door."

Without waiting for the others, except for possibly the latina, who was the first of the ladies to hear it, Elijah dropped his bag of one canned item at the door and moved swiftly but quietly down the corridor toward the oncoming creatures. He'd encountered them before, many times. The two things that saved his skin before was his martial arts training, and not being where the zombie-things thought he was/would be. So Elijah closed on them before they could get closer to the shelter. Even if he was lost, the shelter would be safe.