Stemming the Tide

In the last day, I've sent out emails, made calls, done anything I can to halt or even slow the number of captives being killed by marauders around the country. I find myself in the odd position of giving the marauders the comfort of knowing no one is hunting them. There's no freelance vengeance squad after them. Even now, in the aftermath of the zombie plague, rumor still has a curious power to move faster than the speed of light. 

I don't know if it's working or not, but hopefully time will tell. My efforts may end up coming to nothing, but I can't sit idly by and let innocent people be murdered because of my actions. 

I also can't afford to let this situation take over my life. As much as it pains me, I have to get back to doing the job I'm out here for. My team and I have barely seen each other since we came to Carlyle, who as a community have been gracious enough to welcome us in. Here, at least, the people seem to understand our urge to protect the innocents captured by the marauders. They applaud our decision to release them, even knowing the eventual repercussions. I wonder if they'd feel we were so blameless if the flames were licking at their own doors. 

That being said, I really do need to move on. I've got a pretty awesome bit of news that needs to be put out there for ALL survivors. 

A few days ago I got an email from home. Some of our scouts have been ranging to secluded areas not that far from New Haven, no more than a hundred miles. When you think of that radius, it seems a pretty small one to search over more than eighteen months. It isn't. And it's really hard to search all that space carefully. It's equally easy to miss the ridiculously obvious. We've been so hard up for food at times, hovering on the edge of starvation for weeks at a time. 

It's frustrating to know we were driving past dozens of acres of food without even realizing it. The problem lies in the fact that our scouts aren't farmers, and the fields in question are pretty far away. They're full of white clover. Which is edible and pretty nutritious. It has to be boiled for humans to more easily digest it, but that's not especially hard. We boil our water anyway. 

Literally tons of the stuff. And when the scouts mentioned it to some others, it started a frenzy. The thing about white clover is, it's invasive as hell. Once it starts growing in a place, it spreads and kills off other plants. Bad if you're trying to cultivate other food, good if you have thousands of acres of empty land and a huge supply of seeds. 

My folks have started looking for seeds, and it has been easy to find. They've got hundreds of pounds. There's an old abandoned store downtown that had ten huge bags sitting right out back. There's bound to be more. 

Soon, all the land we can manage to sow will be growing clover. Not this year, but early next. And every year it will spread. We're passing this on to as many others as possible. Eat it if you find it, use it to make the rest of your food supplies stretch. Mason and some others are putting together a list of other common edible plants. 

In what seems like an endless stretch of bad news, it's a bright spot. Maybe it will help ease the food problems all of us might face this winter. I hope so.