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From St. Louis Missouri down the Mississippi River to Cairo, Illinois and up the Ohio River to Louisville, Kentucky, a community of survivors lives on 36 deck barges pushed up and down the river by a large tugboat, taking small boats and jet skis to shore to raid for supplies. What began as a makeshift tent city laid out on the barges has grown since the outbreak to where now people live in stolen cars and transit buses brought onto the barges.
People come and go, but the core of the group, that call themselves the Ferrymen, are both saviors and terrors, as they are not above raiding survivors on land and taking what they need and retreating back to the formidable defenses of the river, often filled with writhing, squirming walkers and at many points too far to swim. For example, the Ohio River at Louisville, Kentucky is over a mile wide.
****please note that this storyline is intended to propel my character Franklin Daniels as a villain / foil for a future encounter with another group in either Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, or Indiana... so, if you would like to join this group, the upside is it's a base of operations that moves! The downside is, well, the group is / should be unsavory, immoral bad guy types. Villains gotta vill... Get your villain on! Lackeys and henchmen welcome****
more to come
Last Edit: Sept 23, 2015 1:49:00 GMT -5 by Deleted
The shore party had come back with a good report. The fuel depot at St. Louis was still seemingly unmolested or at least no one had taken more kerosene diesel than they needed since the last time the tug refueled. Franklin hated leaving the depot unmanned and unguarded but the trip to Cairo, Illinois had paid off. The group had picked up some new survivors that were willing to earn their keep with laundry, fishing, and the occasional manning of pump firehoses to spray off the occasional floundering restless corpse that might have the strength to pull itself out of the water and onto one of the outer barges in this 6 barge by 6 barge tow.
The dead rose and roamed the land, devouring the living like wild packs of starving coyotes. Their only real opposition was terrain. With bridges over major rivers either blocked or blown, when a herd of the rotters encountered a major waterway a great many of them wound up in the water only to wash ashore miles away downstream. With several major cities up the Mississippi from St. Louis it was a natural argument for Franklin that if several of the dead pulled from the Chain of Rocks lock were found to have Iowa driver's licenses then it was reasonable to assume that the waterways north of that point would likely be infested with hissing corpses from Minneapolis. People around the camp jokingly called Franklin's idea the "Minnesota Mud Monkey Theory" but most were convinced of it even if it never really mattered to them on the level Franklin held it. There's a ghoul trying to eat you. Who the flip cares where the ghoul used to live?
But it was that point Franklin was trying to make, and, everyone gathered around to hear Franklin speak.
"if we knew where the dead came from, we know where the living aren't. By that I mean the eaters have done ate everyone they could and have moved on. We all know none of those geeks just give up -'oh I'm sorry you were trying to have a moment we'll come back,'" Franklin changed his voice in cartoon mockery, for laughs. "Seriously people, we all know those things will kill you and they never stop coming. But knowing that, if we know where they came from, we know where the ghost towns are. Yes, I know there's a lot of variables that make that uncertain in a scientific sense, but going where the walkers are leaving from has gotten myself and a lot of us many things those trying to tough it out on land gathered up for us before the geeks got them..." Frank snickers, disturbingly. "The fact of the matter is, we fight the rotters smarter, not harder. And our recent trip to Cairo, Illinois yielded some good news and bad."
"First, the good news. The bridges over the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers at Cairo are intact. Looks like the military never got around to defending us from convenient travel there. The bad news is Cairo is swarming with walkers, probably still there for the FEMA bait trap, I mean, camp. But, there's armored vehicles there, and a tank. Probably a shit ton of food supplies. We raided a lot of it but there's more and we can secure it. But the really interesting thing is this..."
Franklin held up a handful of driver's licenses of various dead people, lifted from walkers in the river at Cairo.
"Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania. Who knows what that means?"
The group seemed perplexed. A heckler piped in "it means the rotters died with wallets in their pockets."
Franklin shared a laugh with the group, though he was inwardly angered at the mockery. "Yes, it does mean that. But it also means the locks on the Ohio River are open, and with enough supplies raided from Cairo, we can be reasonably safe in the middle of the Ohio at Louisville, KY where we'll have over a half-mile of water on either side of us, and islands to camp on. We can possibly put together a network of strongholds."
[note: This thread is open to starting characters on the barge... Their back story of life on the barge would only go back up to a year (depending on how deep in Franklin's inner circle they are... PM me) and they may know some of the non-player characters that are ***spoiler*** camped at the Gateway Arch, most of whom are physically disabled or wheelchair bound. And about to die... I also want to pitch the river-ferry network idea to moderators / admins as a way to move player characters around with their origins. Say they spent some time with some crazy people on a boat... It'd be nice to mention walkers with orange spray-painted faces washing ashore in your stories ... Franklin has been catching and releasing fuglies for a while
Last Edit: Sept 21, 2015 1:51:19 GMT -5 by Deleted
As the Charon's Ferry was being refueled Franklin was informed that Dutch and others had gone on an expedition deep into St. Louis to scavenge for supplies, look for survivors, and had not returned. In the weeks that had passed since Franklin and others went down river, St. Louis had been hit with severe thunderstorms which brought flash flooding along the Missouri River, which in turn swept a lot of dead roamers out of Central Missouri and deposited them in St. Charles and northern St. Louis County. The outpost at Earth City was overrun and later the Lumier Place Casino Hotel was rendered uninhabitable by the sickening mix of trip wire explosives and a walker horde. Dutch and others had rigged the Eads Bridge walkway with claymore mines.
The refugees picked up from Ft. Leonard Wood were a pitiful lot. Cancer patients, amputees, even a guy with a stoma in his side with no ostomy bags to shit in. Executing them outright had crossed Franklin's mind, as a matter of convenience, but these people had lived two years after this doomsday started, because of these barges, and they were the last remnant of the barge community Franklin had joined that had promised to care for them. They left them in the Gateway Arch museum with supplies to keep them safe from the horrors outside, and promised to return.
But that was a promise made by dead men before Franklin and like-minded others turned the barge sanctuary into a pirate ship.
Franklin heard gunfire pop across the river and with his binoculars he saw walkers heading towards the Arch. He untied a Coast Guard speedboat from the dock and crossed the river...
Shauna Kelly: That helped, thank you
Oct 4, 2021 14:40:44 GMT -5
Ayita Hunt: dang, January was my last post.. Jeez it's been a hot minute. o7 guys, sorry for the complete disappearance, life got.. a little interesting this year.
Oct 18, 2021 22:34:19 GMT -5