Ruin and paladin playing a tabletop battletech game. Ruin is losing, on the run, paladin chasing him off the board.
C. and I drive around The City, its freeways, out in the countryside to the East, looking for a house to buy in the countryside. We have like $20,000 in cash with us.
Gaming with the guys in a new house on a piece of property much like Willits. It's raining outside in the night. I realize I left some stuff we need up in the upper house on the property, the old house that is empty and unused. I trundle up there in the rain. The house is dark and leaking all over the place. It's two stories... there's a little bathroom in the middle of the central staircase column. The door is locked; I opened it and there's a guy in there, in the dark, a stranger. He jumped out at me, grabbed the door, pulled it back shut, and locked himself back inside the leaking, pitch black bathroom.
I thought it was strange but didn't tell anyone else about it. Just took the stuff back down to the other house. Then we realized that somehow there had been a war or something, or a zombie holocaust, and there were roving packs of displaced people in the area. That was probably what the guy in the bathroom was hiding from. I needed a pistol and some ammo, and I knew there was some in another house on the property. I headed way out there, got the .45 and two boxes of ammo, loaded the gun, and wrapped the ammo up in a wool blanket.
I knew that I would encounter at least one of these packs before I got back to the house where the other guys were.