A PROJECT ZOMBOID CAMPAIGN — KNOX CO., KY

The Long Road

Seven acts. One household. Forty‑three doors.
A hundred and thirty‑one years of rats in the walls.

ACTS 07
DOORS 43
HOUSEHOLD 08
ENDINGS 03
[ ENTER THE REGISTER ]
READ FIRST Sister Mae

The Bargain

The Knox Event was not what it appeared. Before the dead climbed and the country fell, there was already a thing below Knox County — a warp, an old door, a hunger. The rats had been feeding it for generations.

They lived in the gnawed spaces between walls and beneath floorboards, in the rafters of churches and the crawlspaces of houses that had been good Christian homes for a hundred and thirty-one years. Two sizes. The small ones are the size of cats and run in shoals along baseboards. The big ones have been heard but rarely seen — they take large men under floorboards without a struggle. And above the big ones, in the lore Mae will not say inside a building, there is one larger still. The Big One. The warp’s mouth in the world.

The rats serve it. They count. They keep books. They drag the fallen down through floorboards they have spent years preparing. They have human servants — robed, hunched, long-fingered, with snouts where snouts should not be — who work the rendering vats and sign the cordwood manifests. The cult and the rats are not separate things. They are layers of the same warren.

Every kill the players make also feeds it. The cult and the survivors are at war, but the warp does not pick a side. It eats what falls. That is where survivor power comes from. That is the bargain. The wards know your hands after the recognition ritual. The third kill is when you feel it. Sister Mae will explain. She has waited a long time to.

“

We’re a household now. You, me, the rats in the rectory wall, and the thing they answer to.

— Sister Mae Calloway, the morning after the first night

The Register, in Seven Acts

Entered by hand. Counted twice. Some pages bear water damage; others, blood; others, the chew of small teeth at the corners.

I
SANCTUARY Rosewood Christian Church

The night the rafters came down

Pastor Eli Vance has been the priest at the Rosewood Christian Church for thirty-one years. He has heard the small claws on hardwood under his pulpit since the spring he turned forty. He kept two notebooks — one full of names, the other gnawed through the spine. He tried to seal the door beneath the altar with prayer. He failed. Prayer is what the warp eats fastest. The rats opened rings of pinprick teeth-marks up his forearm like a bracelet someone bit on.

The players find him pinned, breathing, his right hand curled around a wet wad of grey fur he will not let go of. The wall behind him makes a sound like teeth on bone — scrabble, scrabble, click — and goes silent the moment the players step closer. He gives them two things: clear the church, and a name — Sister Mae Calloway. Don’t startle her. She keeps a dish by the cellar door that you shouldn’t kick over.

Eli dies partway through. The wad of fur is gone from his hand. A few pale hairs are still caught in the crease of his palm. Mae comes out the moment he stops breathing. She has been waiting. Her cardigan sleeves cover the same scratch-rings he wore.

Across the next six quests she teaches the players to live with the rats: twelve-knot sheet-rope wards (not eleven, not thirteen, because the rats count, and they will gnaw through anything they can count past); silver from the choir-loft locker, carried in pockets against the skin; the cellar-door dish refreshed nightly; and the sundown watch, where you do not look up.

The next morning Mae asks for three hot meals, four bandages, eight planks — made, not scavenged. Show me what you made. Don’t show me what you found. When the players bring it back she does not eat. She names them. The third kill, walking out the church gate, feels different. They cannot say how. They feel it anyway.

+ JOINS THE HOUSEHOLD Sister Mae Calloway Gatekeeper · Keeps the cheese dish
II
THE TOWN Rosewood · the warren above-ground

Three layers, all counted, all counting back

Mae has counted forty-three doors in Rosewood for years, alone. At dawn she takes the players to the second floor of the church — the first time she has spoken her catalog aloud — and points each one out from the window above the altar. You think of it as a town. It is also a warren.

Three layers, she says, all counted, all counting back: the cult in the houses, the rats in the walls of the houses, the warp below the rats. The rats in the wainscoting of the second floor chitter while she speaks. They do not go silent. They are agreeing.

The Fire Station’s locker latches have been worked by teeth too small to crack them and then large enough to crack them. The convoy’s child-seat straps are gnawed through from the inside. Sandra Cortman’s letters to her brother Daniel are typed, because by June she had stopped writing in her own handwriting.

The set-piece is the Prison Run. In cell block A: small rats in shoals on the floor and the first visible cultist of the campaign — robed, hunched, long-fingered, a snout where a snout should not be — crouched over Caldwell’s cell. He runs on all fours when he hears the players coming. He drops a list as he flees. Caldwell picks it up before the players reach the bars. He has his own list of twenty-three county officials he believed were already turned. He has not spoken since. His fists are clenched on both lists.

The act ends at the crossroads. The players plant a marker with twelve notches per face, the spoon-curve at the corners that the cult uses in reverse. The rats at the treeline go quiet when the marker takes. That is how the players know.

+ JOINS THE HOUSEHOLD Deputy Caldwell Silent witness · Holds the lists
III
THE WOODS McCoy Logging Co. · what the trees count

The green, and what it makes glow

McCoy Logging Co. has been receiving shipments since at least 1987, signed for by men who do not exist in any other county record. Erasmus Holsey signed for one hundred and twelve loads of cordwood between 1987 and 1994. The cordwood was never cordwood.

The players find Buck by following his woodsmoke. He has lived in his cabin since 1972, quit the mill in 1989 after looking inside a boiler. Trees keep count, daughter. You’ll learn what they’re counting before you’re done.

The boilers have not been running on diesel for at least a year. They have been rendering the touched into bone fat — a thick yellow render that smells faintly wrong, faintly familiar. You smell it? Buck asks. The other smell. Under the bone smell. That’s the green.

The green is what the cult mixes into the rendered fat. It makes the fat glow — only at night, only in a dark room, only if you aren’t looking right at it. Buck has a jar of it on his cabin’s mantel. He shaved a half-pound out of the bottom of the rendering vat every Friday for six months and buried each one. He never threw any away. Don’t touch it. Don’t even stand close. The rats know when it’s near. They get organized.

The Sawmill Standoff burns the render back the other way through a reversed chimney draw — the largest single ward Mae will teach. The smoke is the color the green turns when it dies. Afterward, Buck walks into Rosewood territory for the first time in thirty-six years. He carries the jar from the mantel in a wrapped bundle in his pack. The first thing he does in camp is walk to the church’s choir loft — the one the players cleared in Act I — and points to fresh gnaw marks in the rafters that were not there a week ago. You closed the door under the altar. They came up through the roof joists instead. They always do.

+ JOINS THE HOUSEHOLD Buck Witness · Carries the jar of green
IV
THE CITY Muldraugh · the ledger writes itself

Our names, in someone else’s hand

Muldraugh is the largest urban region the players have seen. The cult is not hiding in this town. The cult runs the basements. The rats run the storm drains, the sewer lines, the gaps between buildings. They are visible at the corners of streets at dusk. They do not flee from the players the way Rosewood’s rats did. They watch.

At Cortman Medical, Dr. Daniel Marsh — Sandra Cortman’s brother — has been treating the touched in a back room for three months. He had been waiting for someone to bring her letters when she stopped. He reads them with his hands flat on the table. He turns over the last typed one and finds, in pencil, in handwriting that is Sandra’s: Daniel — they’ve gotten into the wallpaper paste. Don’t let your patients lick the walls. — S. He laughs. Then he stops laughing.

In a back office of the senator’s estate the players find the cult’s master ledger — leather-bound, the corners worried by small teeth. Inside, every name. The Davidsons of Rosewood. The Henstridge sisters of March Ridge. The McCoy mill manager. Eli’s predecessor as pastor, four generations back. Mae’s name. Buck’s name, with a strike-through and a date — 1989. Their names. The household reads its own names being written as they read. A pen on a small wooden lectern in the corner — held by no one — is finishing the entry with a flourish.

Buck breaks the silence: Well. We’re in it now. It is the only laugh anyone has in Act IV.

The set-piece is the Warehouse Heist. The vats at Mass-Genfac are guarded by Renderers — heavy, slow, robed, reinforced aprons, hand-rendered cleavers whose handles bear teeth-marks in the same ring pattern as Eli’s forearm. Two members of the household are wounded. One of them is wounded in a way the players will not learn the meaning of until Act VI.

+ JOINS THE HOUSEHOLD Dr. Daniel Marsh Medic · Read his sister’s last line
V
THE RIVER West Point, Ohio R. · the green in the water

A chewed femur in a fishing net

West Point is on the Ohio River. Rosa works the marina — she had pulled a chewed femur up in her fishing net the morning before the household arrived. She had been waiting for someone to ask about it. Mae asks. Rosa joins.

The river itself is wrong here. At certain bends, at low water, only if you are not looking right at it, there is a faint green tint. Buck recognizes it loudest. They’ve been dumping render upriver. For years. The whole damn Ohio’s got green in it now. The household considers this. The household says nothing.

The bridge marker on the East Bridge has a note pinned to it, in cult handwriting, demanding a toll: three teeth. The players can pay or destroy. Mae will not advise. Buck advises destroy. Marsh advises pay. Caldwell taps the note three times. The players cannot tell if he means three teeth, pay or three taps for refuse. They have to choose.

Janet arrives from March Ridge. She did not bring much. She did not bring Doyle. Doyle is still gone, will always be gone. She brings a list of survivors with crosses through the names of those the cult took after she left. We are counting the same numbers from different sides, Mae says.

The Gigamart set-piece: the freight elevator goes down four floors. The players cannot hold past three. They burn green by the cupful for the first time, ladling it from Buck’s jar onto the rendering vats. The smoke that comes back up the shaft is the color the green turns when it dies. The fourth floor was always going to be Louisville’s problem.

+ JOIN THE HOUSEHOLD Rosa · Janet Marina keeper · Grief carrier
VI
THE PLANT Riverside Power Plant · coordinated rats

The Big One is awake

The Riverside Power Plant’s sub-basement is one of the deepest doors south of Louisville. Maintaining lights in Knox County has been, for decades, an act of complicity — the grid was being fed by the same render the McCoy boilers fed. The cult’s logistics is the infrastructure.

When the players arrive, the rats here are coordinated. They run in formation along the river bank. They have a sentry system — one rat per intersection, watching, motionless, dropping back when a player turns its way. Buck: They’re being told. The big one is awake. Whatever Mae and I have been doing for thirty years, we did it less in the last week than they did in the last day.

This act is where the household loses someone.

The reveal is Mae’s. One of us has been touched. I have known for a while. I am sorry I did not say. I needed it to wait.

The touched one does not protest. Mae has cooked the broth tonight and they eat it. Buck plays a chord on a guitar he carried out of McCoy. Janet says one of her husband’s names by accident and does not correct herself. Caldwell writes a sentence on the back of his list and gives it to them. The sentence is: You were never alone in this. They read it. They smile. They reach under their coat — where the small rats have been listening for two weeks — and pull out a clump of grey fur. Their clump. The one they have been holding in their pocket since Act IV without knowing they had it. They set the fur on the table. The household understands.

They walk out at first light and do not come back. The household burns the body the next day. The players are not granted the mercy of seeing it. The smoke is enough. Closing the plant cuts power across Knox County for the first time since the Event. The rats in the woods around the camp do not chitter. They do not move. They watch.

In the morning, Mae says one thing. Louisville is the last one.

− ONE OF US [ name redacted ] Touched · Pulled grey fur from their coat
VII
THE CAPITOL Louisville · the original wound

The Big One, in the rafters of the meeting-house

The city has fallen.

A pastor named Bishop had been running a haven out of the Capitol crypts for the first three weeks of the Event. The haven failed on day twenty-two when the cult opened a door inside the Capitol that no one had known was there. His looped broadcast still plays from the radio tower in north Louisville. He is, when the players reach him, either alive or already touched and going through the motions. Mae cannot tell. Caldwell taps the broadcast box twice. The players have to decide.

In Louisville, the rats are the citizens and the survivors are the trespassers. They line the gutters of buildings the players have not yet entered, watching the players pass. The hierarchy the household has been glimpsing for six acts is, here, fully present: Counters in the libraries, Renderers in the hospital wings, Listeners in the walls of every building. And the Big One, only described, never seen, until…

Beneath the Louisville Capitol is an old meeting-house from before the town was founded. Beneath the meeting-house is the original wound — the door from which every other door in Knox County descended. It is wider than the players can see. It is making a sound that the silver crucifix the man on Route 31W died carrying does not silence so much as answer. Above the door, crouched in the rafters of the meeting-house, finally visible: the Big One. Cat-sized rats have been the size of cats. This is the size of a dray horse. Its forepaws are holding the master ledger. It has been waiting.

  1. i. Every regional door the players have closed reduces the strength of the wound. Mae has been keeping count this whole time.
  2. ii. Every gram of green the players have accumulated must be burned in a circle around the door. Buck’s jar goes first. He insists. The household lets him.
  3. iii. Confession. The wound will not close if the household pretends. Every kill is named, aloud, on the road. The Big One counts. The ledger is the lock. The confession is the key.

And one of the household will be carried into the wound when the seal goes — because the warp is owed a body, and the gatekeeper of a bargain is the one who pays when the bargain closes. The players will not be told this until the moment. The players will not choose. Mae will already have chosen. The household will know it by the way she packed the cheese dish that morning.

They carry all of it into the Capitol. They put it down before the wound.
The wound does not look at the papers. The wound looks at the household.
The Big One looks at the cheese dish.

The household looks back.

The Household

Roster as of the morning Mae packed the cheese dish for Louisville.

Sister Mae Calloway

Gatekeeper · Rosewood

Wears her cardigan sleeves long, even in the heat. Counts the doors. Refreshes the cheese dish. Carries the bargain. Pays for it at the end.

BITN DISH DOORS×43

Deputy Caldwell

Silent witness · KY State Prison

Holds two lists — his own twenty-three names, and the cult’s, dropped by a four-legged robed thing fleeing his cell block. Speaks twice in the whole campaign.

MUTE ARMED LISTS×2

Buck

Witness · McCoy

Cabin since 1972. Quit the mill in 1989 after looking inside a boiler. Carries the jar of green in a wrapped bundle. His own name is in the master ledger with a 1989 strike-through.

KNEE TREES JAR

Dr. Daniel Marsh

Medic · Cortman Medical

Sandra’s brother. Found her last line in pencil on the back of the last typed letter — they’ve gotten into the wallpaper paste. Laughed once. Stopped laughing.

MEDIC CALM KIT×3

Rosa

Marina keeper · West Point

Pulled a chewed femur up in her fishing net. Had been waiting for someone to ask about it. Stays at the marina, after.

BOAT FED NETS

Janet

Grief carrier · March Ridge

Walked north to find them. Did not bring Doyle. Doyle is always gone. Carries a green binder of crossed-out households. Walks back south at the end.

GRIEF WALKS BINDER

[ redacted ]

Touched · Walked out at dawn

Ate Mae’s broth one last time. Read the sentence Caldwell wrote. Pulled the clump of grey fur from their own coat — the one they had been holding since Act IV without knowing.

GONE FUR

Bishop

Voice on the radio · Louisville

Ran the haven out of the Capitol crypts for the first three weeks. Alive, touched, or already dead — the players cannot tell. Caldwell taps the broadcast box twice.

?? SIG LOOP

The Warren

What lives in the walls. What walks among them on two legs and on four. What waits in the rafters of the meeting-house.

I

The Small Rats

Cat-sized · run in shoals

Live along baseboards. Listen at the wainscoting. Count, and gnaw through anything they can count past. Some have learned to listen at our doors instead. Those are the ones the cheese dish is for.

SHOAL COUNTS
II

The Big Rats

Heard but rarely seen

Take large men under floorboards without a struggle. Will not go where silver is — carry it in a pocket against the skin and they will hesitate for a second. A second is sometimes enough.

DRAG SILVER−
III

The Big One

The warp’s mouth in the world

The size of a dray horse. Crouched in the rafters of the meeting-house beneath the Louisville Capitol. Forepaws around the master ledger. Eyes intelligent in a way that hurts to look at. It has been waiting.

LEDGER WAITS
R

Renderers

Vat-keepers · Muldraugh / Louisville

Heavy, slow, robed cultists with snouts and reinforced aprons. Carry hand-rendered cleavers. The handles bear teeth-marks in the same ring pattern as Eli’s forearm.

CLEAVER SLOW
C

Counters

Bookkeepers · Louisville libraries

Fast, fragile. Fight with quills and inkpots. Update the master ledger as the cult’s accounting demands. The pen on the senator’s lectern that finished the household’s entry was held by no one. There is also that.

QUILL FAST
L

Listeners

Touched, not yet turned

Sit motionless in crawlspaces and report. They do not fight. They are not even seen, most of the time. They are the reason the cult always seems to know where the household is.

MUTE PATIENT

What the Campaign Counts

01

The Bargain is Mutual

The cult feeds the warp. The survivors feed the warp. The warp does not pick sides — it eats what falls. By Act III the players are noticing the third kill. By Act V, every kill. By Act VII they confess them aloud.

02

The Rats Are the Truth

Not the metaphor. Literal small-toothed creatures in the walls, their robed servants, and a Big One in the rafters of the meeting-house. By Act V players are leaving their own cheese rinds at Mae’s saucer when they have one.

03

Generational Evil

The rats have been here a hundred and thirty-one years; the church a hundred and thirty, built directly over the meeting-house they had already gnawed through. Eli inherited a fight. Mae inherited it from Eli. Whoever survives Act VII inherits it from the players.

04

Bookkeeping

Eli’s notebook, Mae’s tally, Caldwell’s lists, Janet’s binder, Buck’s tree-counting, Sandra’s letters, the senator’s master ledger writing itself. The world ends as a register. The Capitol seal is a closing of accounts.

05

Recognition

Show me what you made. Mae in Act I, Buck in Act III, Marsh in Act IV. Each recognition is a household forming. Each is also the cult’s accounting — the master ledger writes the household’s names as they earn them.

06

The Cost of Going On

The cheese dish keeps the small rats fed. The small rats keep the big rats off the church. The church holds. The household goes on. That is the whole thing. The going on is the meaning.

What They Carried Into the Capitol

They put it down before the wound. The wound does not look at the papers.

NEli’s notebookThe county map · Act I
CMarvin’s codexHistorical record · Side
❖The communion silverPockets against the skin · Act I
†The silver crucifixWrapped in a First Communion dress · Act III
ΩBuck’s jar of greenThe cult’s warpstone · Act III
LCaldwell’s listsTwenty-three names, plus the correction
BJanet’s green binderThe grief count · March Ridge
DThe Davidson ledgerSurveillance, reversed · Side
☩The master ledgerThe cult’s full bookkeeping. The household’s names are in it.
43Mae’s door tallyThe score
☉Mae’s cheese dishThe bargain’s daily expression. Refreshed weekly.

The Big One looks at the cheese dish.

Three Endings

There is no clean ending. There are three.

SEAL HELD

The Closing

The seal holds. Mae walks into the wound carrying her cheese dish, which she sets down on the threshold. The rats from the Rosewood rectory wall — somehow, impossibly, having followed her all the way to Louisville — gather around it in absolute silence to feed from it for the last time. The Big One bows its head. The wound shuts.

Caldwell speaks for the first time since the prison.
He says, thank you.

Forty-three doors in Rosewood. The players count them on the way south. Some are still closed. Some are not. They walk. The walking is the meaning.

SEAL PARTIAL

The Holding

The wound is not closed but it is wounded. The cult is broken in Knox County but other counties will see other doors open. The players must stay in Louisville to maintain the wards on the Capitol.

They start keeping a cheese dish at the Capitol’s threshold.
The dish gets refreshed weekly.

They have figured out who refreshes it. They have not yet decided whether they are willing to be that person forever.

SEAL FAILED

The Failure

The seal fails. The wound widens. The players retreat south toward Rosewood, losing people on the road. The Christian Church holds, because Mae’s wards still hold. Her cheese dish — which Buck insisted on retrieving from the Capitol’s threshold on their way out — is back at the cellar door of the rectory where it began.

The household becomes a remnant.
They go on. It is what households do.

The next pastor they raise teaches the wards to whoever next walks through the church’s doors. The rats in the rectory wall are patient. They have been patient before.