Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Pirates

Since my post yesterday morning, six more people have come up ill. The disease is spreading. Strange thing is, a few of the newly infected don't have symptoms as sever as the others. I'm trying not to get my hopes up that this is a good sign, but I'll take any good news even if it's just not-as-bad-as-I-thought news.

A few people around New Haven have asked what we'll do to quarantine people once the clinic runs out of space. The simple answer is: nothing. Based on the disparity between all the infected so far it's safe to say that the illness has spread to every corner of our home. People seem to develop symptoms at different rates, but no evidence thus far indicates a snowball's chance we could slow it down if we tried. Not that we're encouraging people to spend time with sick people or anything.

Our meeting yesterday was, given the circumstances, pretty chaotic. The number of people trying to fight off the new strain of the zombie plague grows, making it harder to get things done. So far we're not in dire trouble from lack of manpower, but a lot of our focus right now is on trying to keep those folks as healthy as possible. Many ideas have been floated around, some of them...extreme.

Will wants Evans to work on finding some kind of treatment. Given our near total lack of facilities and technology, that's a tall order. Evans doesn't like being given impossible jobs. They make him swear a lot and mumble about how things were in the jungle back in the day. Crusty old man might give us a hard time but his heart is in the right place. He's as worried about the infected as anyone.

Aside from keeping our people alive and as healthy as we can make them, we're working on contingency plans for the possibility that too many of us fall ill to properly defend New Haven. For obvious reasons I can't explain what those plans are. We're on the job, let's leave it at that.

One of those obvious reasons is the project the Exiles are working on. Our watchers finally managed a look inside the fallback point yesterday, though one of them nearly fell off the sheer face of Devil's Hollow to manage it. No one is quite sure why, but the Exiles are building a boat. Pretty big, too. My first thought was that they were going to go pirate and start hitting communities downriver, but that would break the truce. Maybe they're hoping no one would hear about it or be able to prove they did it. It's also possible they're going to use it for fishing or something, but my spidey-sense is tingling. I'm paranoid as hell, I know. I also lean heavily against the idea that the Exiles are ever up to anything innocent.

No idea what the boat is for, but I don't think it's anything good. Until and unless we see them actually do something bad with it, though, we can't do much but wonder. There's always the possibility they're going to use it to attack us. Pleasant thoughts, I know.

If they do go pirate, we'll have to do something about it. We know it, they know it. We've made too many blunt statements about what behavior is acceptable from them, and to allow any leeway there is to invite disaster. Our numbers would have to take a severe hit for us to lose the will to punish the enemy for breaking the rules.

That's what scares me. At the rate we're going that could be a few weeks from now.

No comments:

Post a Comment