She looked so much like her father that it hurt. The thin pull of her lip, her pert little nose that was upturned ever so slightly, the roundness of her face, the hooded shape of her eyes; the cowlick that kept the left side of her part a bit higher than the right, the slight curve of line that traced soft cheekbones. In the dark recesses of Cassie’s mind, buried deep to try to maintain what arguable sanity she had left, the vestige of a man was etched. She tried to forget, fought tooth and nail to forget, but seeing her daughter had the image dragging itself back to the surface of her mind. It always did. The young girl’s prominent features fit so perfectly over the face of her father floating in Cassie’s memory that it was startling. For a moment all the woman could do was stare stupefied as her only child stood shyly behind the legs of her caretaker in their family’s doorway.
 
Nobody would have guessed that Brianna was Cassie’s daughter, they looked nothing alike, but then the woman shook herself out of her transfixion and smiled. And that little girl’s shy smile dragged out into the same lopsided, mischievous smirk, her eyes crinkling at the corners, which Cassie wore so often. It left no doubt of their shared blood and it was the thing that often anchored the child to her heart. Bri may have looked in so many ways like her father, but her expressions were all her mother’s. And her stormy gray eyes, slight dimple, hair so light it bordered on white, and fluttering eyelashes were unique to her alone; Cassie’s daughter.
 
“Squish!” Cassie called, casting off her insecurities and opening her arms wide to receive the squealing little girl rushing towards her seat by the fire. The two toppled over onto the rug and Cassie planted a solid kiss on her daughter’s forehead as she squeezed her in as tight of an embrace as she dared. “I missed you so much,” she crooned and inhaled the scent of Bri’s wispy blonde curls, “look how big you’ve gotten!” Cass never considered herself a good mom, far from it, but she couldn’t seem to resist doing overtly mom-like things.
 
“I’m almost four!” Brianna pulled out of her mother’s grasp enough to hold up the correct number with fingers still chubby with baby fat.
 
“Four?!? There’s no way, Squish. You look at least six!” The little girl giggled and clutched Cassie around the neck in another hug as her mother pushed them both off the floor to stand. In that motion she caught the knowing look from her own mom, which had her quirking an eyebrow. Another lecture about her current traveling lifestyle would be coming Cassie’s way; that was for certain. But for now she’d hold off the inevitable by hiding behind a human shield or two and moved over to the petite woman who still stood at the entrance of the home. “Laily!”
 
“I am happy to see you are safe, Cassandra-jaan,” the younger woman said as they embraced, her words carefully forced through her heavily laden Persian accent. Her English had improved greatly since the time the Shannahan clan had taken her in at the beginning of apocalypse, but she sometimes still found herself having a hard time finding the right words to express herself properly, and her speech would occasionally lapse as she attempted to translate her thoughts from her native Dari to English. Despite this language barrier, Cassie always thought that Laily’s soft eyes often communicated her feelings better than most peoples’ words.

“Not through lack of trying, Khua-harum,” Cass laughed as they parted, using the Dari word for sister; her normal way to refer to the Afghan woman. On top of it being one of the few Afghan words she could actually ever remember, it was also considered a term of endearment in Laily’s culture and represented how much she meant to Cassie. The little wisp of a mousy thing may have been almost a decade younger than Cass, but she most definitely played the part of the older, wiser sibling in their relationship.

Her mother caught her attention again as the two girls separated from their embrace, Laily adjusting the traditional head scarf she still liked to wear back in its proper place and Cass setting her daughter back on her feet; Bri still clutched to her mother’s leg, however. “I [i]am[/i] glad your back home, Cassie,” Samantha started, “but why did you come back so close to Horde Season? It’s so dangerous on the mainland this time of year.”

Cassie cringed. “I need to speak to the council. It’s ahhh… kinda really important.” Her mother’s look prompted her to elaborate, “I may have, by complete and total accident mind you, gave Mackinac’s location to a hostile paramilitary group.” 

Samantha blinked. “Oh, Cassie,” She exhaled deeply. There were so many implications and undertones packed into those two little words that it had enough potency to make even one such as her eccentrically optimistic daughter dip her head.

“…Yeah...”

~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~

There was something about Mackinac that set it apart from the rest of the Havens Cass had been. It was an island, sure, but that wasn’t what made it stand out so much in her mind. The people here were different; Less soft, less delusional somehow. The main street bustled with hurried people as they went along and performed their daily chores. Vendors bellowed out into the crowd from their stalls to attract patrons to their wares. Men and women alike shuffled through the throng of human and horse traffic on their way to and from work. In that, it was very much like something you’d find in Chico, Bismarck, or even Reno, but it was still different.

Many wore animal pelts against the cold northern air, true, but not even that denoted anything out of the ordinary to the veteran salvager and wanderer Cassie considered herself. The islanders [i]knew[/i], she decided. They not only knew they were living through the apocalypse, they accepted it. She’d seen so many people try to forget that the undead were walking the earth and live like they had before the collapse of society that seeing such mass acceptance was odd to her; it was like being among thousands of salvagers. 

The very nature of the haven itself demanded it, she supposed. Mackinac island was too small to sustain even a few hundred people by itself, even with the little farming colony recently started up on the neighboring island of Bois Blanc, let alone the six or seven thousand that actually called the place home. There wasn’t enough food, plain and simple. That meant the people were forced to abandon the safety of the island to scavenge and hunt; they were forced to confront the walkers, the apocalypse. They fought the hordes almost every winter. The haveners of Mackinac didn’t have the luxury of forgetting nor did they have the ability to plead ignorance.

They were harsh, but they were strong, Cass thought as she climbed the steps of the hotel the ruling council of Mackinac had declared their base of operations. It was traced in the hard lines each face she passed by. If any haven could withstand the brute force of the 1007th, it was the Haven of Hunters. At least she hoped. 

Cassandra Shannahan was well known to the thirteen members of the council. There were very few people left in Apocalyptica they had found with her particular skill set, and none of which that compared in either the eccentric woman’s vast knowledge base or her uncanny ability to give the lot of them migraines. She had been paramount in developing most of the communications the haven claimed, including a working dish that connected them to a small satellite network, so when their daily meeting had been interrupted by a secretary announcing her need to meet with them there was little they could do to deny her an audience. 

She strode straight into the Victorian-era grandeur of their meeting hall with little pretense. The woman looked haggard, probably just back from one of her months long trips into the expanses of the apocalypse, but still she shook her head at the proffered chair a guard had brought before the long hardwood table in which the council sat. Instead she met the eyes of each of the nine men and four women seated in turn. “We have a problem.” Eloquent as ever.

A man with a closely trimmed salt-and-peppered beard was the first to humor her. “And what is that, Miss Shannahan?”

“I think the hundred and seventh knows where the haven is.” Despite Mackinac’s relative seclusion from the rest of the world they still maintained a small number of scouts and other information gatherers to maintain a general understanding of the state of things outside their small sphere of existence. So they knew of the group, but not enough to understand the urgency of this meeting.

“The military group?” Another man asked, a war veteran himself, “The ones who are supposed to be helping people with condemned and the undead?” He failed to see the problem.

The young woman before them snorted indignantly. “Only if by ‘helping’ you mean forcefully taking over their havens, enacting fucking martial law, and keeping the havenfolks’ necks pressed firmly beneath their shiny boots… Then yeah, helping. They’ve already taken over Evergreen Haven on the west coast.”

All thirteen of the haven’s leaders raised their voices’ in dissonance; this was news to them and the fall of what had been a very stable haven certainly called for their further attention. Questions, accusations, concerns, and opinions spewed into the cavernous room, echoing off the arched ceilings and nearly bare walls. Cassie had trouble picking out one voice from another, let alone making out an entire sentence, and so she crossed her arms lightly over her chest to wait out the bombardment of noise impatiently. 

What felt like hours, but in reality was only mere minutes, later their voices lowered until they eventually returned back to the organized silence they had maintained at the beginning of the meeting. Thirteen sets of eyes swung back in her direction.

“You’re sure? How? How did Evergreen fall and how do they figure out where we are?” They seemed to have consolidated their questions to the most pressing few.

“I was there,” Cassie said flatly, “I saw it. They came riding in like a fucking white knight promising to help the haven against a condemned threat, only to overtake them when they were weakened from the fight. Bullied their leaders into compliance and subdued anyone they thought would rebel. They were trying to press anyone into their ranks that they thought could be useful with bribery or threats when I escape—“

The large doors to the meeting room burst open, a kid not older than sixteen or seventeen rushing into the space in their wake. The blue band of fabric tied around his left arm marked him as a member of the volunteer force, his heavy panting and stooped over stance indicated his sprint to the chambers. “Councilmen,” he said in between taking in large gulps of air, “We’ve just received a report that a helicopter crashed not far inland… It was shooting at one of our hunting parties, with machine guns. They think they know where it landed and are going to investigate.”

Cassie turned back to the council grimly. For once in her life, she wished she hadn’t been right.