Sunday, September 26, 2010

Big Pictures

Today is a very important day, for several reasons.

The harvest has started. The major one, anyway. We are gathering all of the food we can, preserving much of it for the coming winter. We have had to slow down work on the annex walls to accomplish this. The good news there is that the work on the annexes is coming along quickly, and the two adjoining neighborhoods should be safe enough to move into in a few weeks. The heat wave that we have been under seems to have finally broken this morning, and it's pretty damn cold out. That was what brought on the harvesting operations...

In an unrelated note, my brother Dave and I are planning some stuff for the spring. We have so many projects that we want to get done, like our power stations, but with limited people to make them work, we have to pick and choose. It is our hope that we will find more survivors to bring here, and if we can, then we plan on annexing further and further from the compound, building on to it until it lies at the center of a much larger safe zone for what we hope will be thousands of residents. Planning for it, just in case...

The sudden cold seems to have driven the zombies into hiding. The few that the patrols have seen while ferrying supplies back and forth have seemed slower than normal, almost tired. Maybe they are running out of energy and finally starving. That would be great. But even if it's just the cold slowing them down, at least that might give us a good long respite from fighting and killing them. One can hope.

Probably the biggest news today is from Jack's compound up north. A small group of Smarties attacked in the night, probing the defenses. They were cut down, of course, but this means that their timetable for dealing with the threat has moved up immensely. We had a long meeting in council about it yesterday and again after getting the news last night, and some decisions were made.

We will be sending a group to Michigan to aid Jack and his people in setting up defenses and running kill patrols against the smarties. They are already out hunting, trying to keep the numbers of converted zombies to a minimum. If they can prevent the spread of the strain of the zombie plague that enables them to become more intelligent for long enough to improve their defenses, they should be alright. We're sending forty people who have all had direct contact with smarties and know what they can do, led by Courtney, Steve, and Will Price.

There were some people who thought that we shouldn't send Will, those folks who think that he isn't fully trustworthy. Treesong and some others made the point that he is tactically and strategically knowledgeable, more so than any of the rest of us. Tree pointed out that he's proven his loyalty to the satisfaction of most of us, gave the obvious examples. The good news is that the number of people that are still eying him with undue suspicion are dwindling. The bad news is that Courtney is still one of them. Not in a spiteful way or anything, just that her inquiring and critical nature makes her harder to convince in the short term than most people. It's one of the qualities I love most about her, and I think this experience will do a lot to either help her trust Will, or find some evidence that he isn't trustworthy. I'm just glad he's able to move about on his own now. His leg and arm still hurt him quite a lot, but he can at least use them now.

They are leaving tomorrow. Not a lot of time to prepare, but there you have it. We are prepping several vehicles to move out, this time some hybrid cars we have managed to gather over the last few weeks. It's taken a while to get enough of them together, but it will help us save what we can of our limited supply of gas, which is becoming increasingly hard to find. We might have to start sending groups out looking for tankers and siphoning out whole parking lots of cars....

Sort of rambling now, sorry. So much going on, so much to do. If we can go the day without being pelted by hungry zombies, we will have had time to make some headway on our efforts. With that in mind, I should go. Every hand helps.

1 comment:

  1. You would think winter would at least slow them down...the cold making it harder for them to move, and all. I wonder if it will speed up decomposition.

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