Chill of Night

The cold has claimed its first victim.

One of the people in the annex was on guard over there last night, and apparently fell asleep from exhaustion. I'm not clear on how a patrol missed him when they went by, or why no one realized he hadn't checked in, but when the shift changed out his replacement found him dead from exposure.

I don't even know his name. I read it in the report, but it escapes me at the moment. Don't know that I had ever set eyes on the guy. Now I never will.

We try to do everything we can to deal with the elements. We've made sure that everyone who has to be outside for extended periods of time has layers of clothes to wear along with winter coats and gloves. We've altered the schedules to try to make sure that things like this can't happen.

It's just frustrating and depressing to lose someone from something so preventable. Talking about it isn't helping...

So maybe I will head out and look into this. I helped make those rotation schedules. There should be no reason that a man died last night. Someone should have seen him, woken him up, within half an hour. That's the longest gap of any walking patrol anywhere on this wall.

There aren't a lot of possibilities here. Either someone saw him asleep and let him go on about it, or someone (or several someones, more likely) didn't actually do their walk around, and missed him. Or, they walked and missed him but didn't double check to make sure he was on duty.

OK, I need to get off this subject or I'm going to get really angry.

Other than that, not much is going on around here that you don't already know about. Courtney has made big strides toward getting a convoy set up to bring some struggling survivors here. There's a group down in Louisiana that has fuel for us to use, some people in Alabama with a bunch of converted buses. If we can manage to get everything together in one place, it should be pretty simple for us to manage.

Oh, and Will has gotten a little better with his mania in the last few days. Most of the big defense upgrades are done, and now he's organizing the production and distribution of a lot of melee weapons. He's seeding them all over the place so that no one can be caught off guard too far away from something that can either cut a head off a zombie or bash it in.

Guess that goes for live folks as well, but I don't like to think about that too long.

It says a lot about the people around here that we can leave weapons in easy reach and not worry about something going horribly awry. Even the smaller kids know better than to grab one unless they need it, which is pretty surprising but also very comforting.

No, talking about other things is definitely not helping. I'm going out to look into this thing at the annex, and I'm going to get some damn answers...