Monday, July 25, 2011

Cornering the Market

It's been a long and trying weekend. No major battles or anything, just the humdrum activities of daily life: the oppressive heat, ceaseless hunting trips. and helping the people from Tennessee prepare to leave.

As it turns out, they aren't going far. The departing group have decided to go to Shelbyville. They're going to use the facilities left behind by the poor souls who lost their lives to disease there. There is ample hunting available, and I'm sure patches of crops we haven't found yet. I'm glad to know they'll be close, especially considering a few of the women going are very pregnant. We may not have much in the way of food, but we've still got two doctors on staff and a good amount of medical supplies.

As a matter of fact, Gabby and Phil have had an idea that seems too good to pass up.

You may remember that during our exile, Evans and Gabrielle met Phil while they were running a traveling clinic. Most of our homeless medical personnel managed to survive by trading their services and supplies for food and other vital goods. Gabrielle, as it turns out, has not been idle lately.

She's had her nose buried in my copy of the Ark, the huge collection of information furnished to us by the people out at Google. I'm sure she's been indulging her endless curiosity to some extent, but mostly she's been learning how to do some very important things from scratch. Like making gauze and bandages among many other useful things. The most important?

Antibiotics.

She's even gotten started. Didn't want to get anyone's hopes up until she had some kind of results, so it came as a surprise to all of us. Granted, they're simple and probably not as effective as the pills we've all gotten used to, but she has done it. As far as I know, Gabrielle is the first person to manufacture new medicine since The Fall. She claims that with enough materials and time, she can make literally tons of the stuff. She's going to be focusing on this right now, because she's been in touch with a few other groups of survivors.

Funny how people swear they don't have any food to give you when you're begging for help, but when you have access to a commodity that will save lives suddenly there are hundreds of pounds of the stuff just lying around for trade.

You might be able to tell, but just to be clear--I'm smiling right now.

Just when things seemed darkest, there is this spark of hope. If Gabby can produce medical supplies in sufficient quantity for us to trade, there is a good chance we'll be able to make it. I have many people with free time on their hands that would love nothing more than to help her. I'm not counting on this working, but I'll be damned if I keep a cynical outlook on it. Have to be positive sometime, right?

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