Resurgence

Bad news this morning. We were going to send out our hundred new arrivals with our teams of people that will be working with them on a practice run this morning. You know, shake down the moves, learn how each group thinks, figure out the best way to integrate forces.

That's on hold for a day or two, because we had a fairly large setback. Ten of the new arrivals woke up sick with the new plague, along with five of our own people. Since Kincaid's brilliant idea to overheat the sickness using a sauna, the plague has become more of a nuisance, a sort of background problem, rather than the main attraction it was even a few weeks ago.

People who come down with the sickness can be cured now but that doesn't mean everyone is at full strength right away. Even folks that haven't been under the influence of the new plague for very long need at least a day to recover. North Jackson has been extremely careful about the illness (though that didn't stop them from suffering some casualties, albeit a smaller percentage than most places) and we didn't really consider the fact that the new arrivals may not have even been exposed.

Then there's the high possibility that the new plague itself evolves. We've seen ample evidence that the zombie plague takes many forms and mutates at a rate to make evolution theorists faint. Could be that whatever strain these people may have been exposed to is so different than ours that they've got no defenses against it. Doesn't really matter, I guess. The old hot box does the trick.

Honestly, I'm kind of glad it happened this way. I don't want anyone sick, and I certainly wouldn't say this if anyone had died, but it's good to have reminders now and then that many things are out of our control. We're on the precipice of a huge change. We're at a point where caution is second nature, so it's not that I'm afraid that we'll suddenly forget how dangerous the world is. We just have too much at stake to plan this expansion without leaving some breathing room in there for what we don't expect.

I'll keep an eye on the situation, as all of us are, and we'll move forward from there. I'd love to write a longer post, but frankly there just isn't time today. Need to make sure no one else is coming down ill. Mainly because the thought just occurred to me that if our new plague is a different strain, maybe the newcomers brought a strain of their own. That's a chilling thought.

Maybe I'll check a couple times. Can't let the plague catch us off guard again, not when we have means to fight it.