Freeman

I'm exhausted. I've only had a few hours of sleep in the last few days. Between coordinating trades and trying to keep abreast of the situation going on with the marauders across many states, I haven't had much time for rest. I ate something, though. That's good, right? I think it was yesterday morning.

Mason is making me lay down. He's pulling rank, as it were, by pointing out how weak and tired I am and how fresh and strong he is. He told me he'd put me in bed forcibly if I refused. I asked to write a blog first.

For the record, that big fucker is way more scary when he's talking to you calmly than when he's out murdering the hell out of zombies. Just putting that out there.

The reason I was so insistent is because the number of bodies being found has dropped to nothing. In fact, one group of marauders did something...unprecedented. They let their captives go. Alive.

I'm not hopeful this will become a trend, and frankly it confuses me. It's not in keeping with what I've observed about the kind of people marauders typically are. Their psychology is surely a lot more complex than I can imagine. Some people, a very small fraction of a percentage, probably had the perfect storm of mental problems or just plain evil waiting inside them for a trigger. Seeing the rule of law disintegrate overnight might have done it. Maybe watching loved ones die was the cause.

Some of them might be caught up in group hysteria. There are a lot of possible causes for men and women to do the things they do. What I have to wonder now is whether or not the recent actions of the captives we freed have made a few marauders reconsider their lives. The things they do.

Was this a single act of goodness, or a desperate gamble for self-preservation? The results for that group are the same as if they'd killed their captives instead of making them free men. They'll be able to blend in if they choose. Pretend to be normal people, the kind that don't rape and murder innocents. Why leave witnesses alive? Why take that risk if they were so afraid of the consequences of being caught?

It's something I'll have to sleep on, and that's not a turn of phrase. Mason is flipping one of those extendable batons in his hand. It's as close to subtle as I've seen him get.