Friday, October 29, 2010

Rationalization

We're home. We got very lucky, switched drivers and drove all night. We pulled in a few hours ago, and as tired as I am from the pressure of this trip, I had to go out and see the damage for myself.

Both to the wall and to our friends.

My brother has done an admirable job getting the giant hole patched up. Though you can tell that it's different there, the repair work makes that section look just as strong and durable as any other stretch. I wish the same could be said about our people.

Roger isn't doing well. His wounds are serious and Evans is doing everything he can to try and stave off infection. But the hard truth is that our resources, while plentiful, are still limited. There is only so much we can do here, and Evans says that limit has been reached. We can only watch and hope from here on out.

I've gone around asking some of the people here who are from Richmond about the place, trying to gather some clue about what the layout of the army base there looks like. What I'm being told is fucking scary.

I mean, I knew the place was a munitions depot. I knew from conversations with Will that there are somewhere around a hundred people living there, off the grid from the rest of the town. But I had no idea exactly what is kept there, until Will and some others got very detailed this morning. It's basically a WMD storage facility, along with many hundreds of giant repositories for pretty much every sort of ammunition you can think of, everything from bullets to rockets filled with chemical weapons.

I guess this never seemed vitally important to me until now. After all, society has been ripped to shreds and left to die by the zombie plague, so who in their right mind would consider using any of that on the tattered remains of the human species? Right?

No, apparently not. Though nobody from Richmond had any idea that there were even soldiers left on the base until Will's helicopter was discovered, certainly none of them would have guessed that they would attack anyone. But sadly, that's what we're dealing with. I have to imagine that there are other people in Richmond that are still unaware of the men huddled heavily armed within that 15,000 acre deathtrap for any unwary traveler.

I want very much to believe that all we've worked for here is not at risk. Right now it's barely forty degrees outside, all the zombies elsewhere catatonic from the cold. The fury inside me at the idea that a new threat is on the horizon just when we have started to get a break from all the old ones is so strong that I can't even think straight. My passion is straining against my reason, pushing me to advocate the incredibly stupid idea that we should try and attack these fuckers, wipe them from the face of the earth.

I can give you a lot of reasons why this is just as suicidal as Will suggests it is, and i trust his judgement given that he used to be one of those hundred soldiers. They're equipped with weapons that we can't match, armor we can't match, and an almost comical amount of ammo to throw at us. They are better trained and more experienced in combat, and the blunt truth is that had Will not set up hidden gun platforms and traps at our critical locations around the compound, those ten would probably have taken us.

They are trained killers educated in how to disrupt, destroy, or capture larger forces. Every one of those men could probably take out ten of us, and the fact that they have been able to move like ghosts completely unobserved pretty much wherever they want to leads me to the inevitable conclusion that fighting them would kill us at best.

Trying to live up to the spirit of an eye for an eye in this case just isn't in the list of options. Will is going around explaining to people, talking some of the more hotheaded ones down (myself included). It's hard for him, because he wants very badly to do something about this attack as well and everyone knows it. I think he will channel that energy into the defenses as he has done so often of late, and that will serve us well should his former friends choose to come calling again.

Right now, I wish it were a little warmer. I want to kill something.

2 comments:

  1. Yes, a retaliatory strike simply isn't an option. They surely know this, which may be part of why they attacked. Risking ten lives may seem cheap to them if they know that a hundred back home can continue to plot raids with impunity.

    Richmond soldiers, you should also know that those machine guns aren't the only things we're hiding here. People who come in peace will be accepted in peace; but people who come with conquest in mind will be sorely disappointed. We would rather die than be enslaved, and rather destroy this Compound than let you have it.

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