Story MJOTZY: Mom's Journal of the Zombie Years

[Kathy in FL]

Day 205 or 205 - 3

Out walked six black-clad figures with their hands clasped above their head. From the sidelines I could just see a seventh figure, also in black, on the ground beside a … well, at the time it looked to me like a black humvee with a camper type of thing on the back. I’ve since found out it is the NRSC version of a humvee communication vehicle.

I hoped they were roasting in those black uniforms. I know it was rather ungallant of me but I couldn’t help but snicker a bit at the large sweat stains they all had under their arms and across their backs. It’s not that I hold a personal grudge against individual members of the NRSC but it’s awful hard to forget how they treated us back in August and how they basically cut Florida off from the rest of the country. My rational side says that had I been in their shoes I may very well have done the same thing but I keep imagining I would have found some way to lighten the burden of the people who were left behind. Supply drops, civilian evacuation points, something.

After the four men and two women were searched, their vehicle was searched and then driven into the compound so that the gate could be re-secured. Samuel ran by and straight to the clinic; within moments Waleski had come out with his kit. He looked pale which I at first attributed to helping Terra and dealing with Laura. He shut the clinic door but instead of heading straight for the NRSC folks he looked around and then came over to me. His mouth was set in a tight line and it took clearing his throat twice before he could get anything out.

He asked if I would lend him a hand with the NRSC. He’d set the girls and Rilla some tasks in the clinic so they could be close at hand for Terra and Tina who was watching a very groggy Laura. I said I’d do what I could, of course. What he said next puzzled me, “It’s like some damn sappy movie.”

Well, it puzzled me until I got close enough to really make out the faces of our new “guests.” Holy crap!

Talk about a blast from the past. Junie. Now I understand Waleski’s reference to sappy movies. Lover leaves, probably never to be heard from again under less than desirable conditions. Lover left behind eventually gets their life back together, gets over their heartbreak, falls in love again, and starts new life. Right after some commitment or other big deal, old lover returns. Talk about cliché.

But the look on Junie’s face didn’t leave me the feeling that she was happy to see us. As a matter of fact as I helped Waleski treat the relatively minor injuries that every member of that patrol had suffered, I listened to Matlock and Dix question her and the rest of that group. Junie’s answers left me in no doubt that returning to Sanctuary was the last thing she wanted to do and in fact only did so due to the extreme threat to her own life. You know, I’m not fond of swearing but particular word springs to mind … Bitch!

And you, dear reader, can have no way of understanding … not in your future and hopefully secure lives … understand how we felt upon hearing what was going on. We were on the inside, doing our best to survive day to day. They were observing from the outside, like scientists studying a particularly virulent bug.

First, the NRSC basically runs everything these days. Well, I suspect not everything or they wouldn’t have to bring to brook so much rough stuff. Free people, free to choose, will generally prove to abide by law and order that is just and reasonably fair. People who feel unjustly constrained will act out with greater and greater force. That’s the state that our country currently exists in; strict martial law enacted by an appointed rather than elected body, supported by a quasi-governmental agency from whom the supposedly “fairly appointed” new leaders came from. A snake eating its tail.

The NRSC controls the government now rather than the other way around. The NRSC troops provide protection for government officials and lead the “national planning” exercises. The regular US military and the remaining National Guard troops are the cannon fodder.

There are breakaway factions of the government as well as the US Military but our NRSC group didn’t seem to take them very seriously. As a matter of fact they were quite scornful of them, calling them no better than some of the “survivor groups” mucking around in the quarantine zones.

While talking to these blowhards I frequently got the sensation of biting on tinfoil or fingernails across a blackboard. Their indoctrination to their employer was complete. I hated how easy it was to compare them in my mind to the SS of World War II. Another cliché perhaps, but this one all too real for us. And the black uniforms certainly didn’t help.

I asked Junie how her shoulder was and she got a closed look on her face. She finally responded that she had been cut from the military personnel rosters. Then added, out of self-defense or perhaps spite, that she went into communications with the NRSC because she’d had no choice but that their doctor’s told her despite the “poor care” she received after the initial injury they would be able to fix most of the damage after she had earned enough credits to qualify for the procedure.

Apparently “earning credits” is what had her back in Florida. You got extra points for serving in the quarantine zones; sort of a hazardous duty bonus. Her prior experience in Florida earned her a higher rank in the communication patrol she was in.

But enough of this personal touchy-feely stuff, what I want to write about is how the fire, the horde, and these nuckleheads are all connected.

See it all started out innocently enough. The NRSC … or at least its personnel … isn’t all bad. I may not like their tactics but I’m sure most of them, at least at the lower rungs of their organization, really believe they are working towards the greater good against a monstrous enemy of the human species. Supposedly they were trying to find ways to knock the number of infected corpses down to a more manageable level until a “cure” or preventative could be found.

The only known, 100% positive “cure” is destruction of the infected brain. Enter middle-management thinking. Individual destruction of each corpse would be a very labor and resource intensive program. It would not be “cost effective.” Insurance costs would be hell as well so go back to the drawing board and find us a better plan.

Next came the realization by the NRSC’s research branch that individual infected corpses were easy to dispose of. While they were dangerous in a confrontation they were still easy to sanitize for a prepared opponent. Problems begin to arise when you get a higher infected population. It’s like fighting a battle on too many fronts. It’s not that the individual infecteds are any more dangerous, it’s that they can quickly overrun existing defenses.

But then to their horror … and this has apparently been kept from the general public … at some point when enough infected get together you get a “school of fish” effect. There doesn’t appear to be any true intelligence to it nor does the behavior appear to be linked to any mutation of the original NRS virus. The point … as yet unquantifiable using current research data … has more to do with group make up than number of zombies. It takes quite a few plain ‘ol zombies to create a “school” of zombies; what we would call shambler groups. However, if you add in a runner, climber, or other “non-standard” zombie you lower the number of infecteds needed to get the “school” effect.

Even worse was the discovery that if you get a large enough “school” of zombies they appear to develop a “hive mentality.” Again, there is no true intelligence, no change in the NRS virus itself but somehow the way the zombies interact within the group and with the environment they are in changes. What the NRSC calls a “hive” we call a large horde. The smaller hordes correspond to what they call “schools of infected.”

Having that information is good but some Einstein thought they could use it to bring the zombies together to make it more “cost effective” and give them a more constructive opportunity to destroy large numbers of infected corpses with a single mission or program. Their test case was the island that Newport, RI sits on. Using simple techniques they “herded” the zombies to one end of the island where they were sanitized en mass.

Their next two experiments involved the island of the Dominican Republic/Haiti and on Cuba. In the DR/Haiti case they ran into problems with the mountains that separate the two countries that share the same small island. In Cuba they gained more experience in turning large groups of zombies, guiding them in the direction they wanted them to go. That mission involved herding a hive of infecteds from one end of the island to the other and then back again; doing this several times to gain more data on hive movement. They were marginally successful on both of these missions and learned that rather than wasting bombs and ammunition that they could just use … you guessed it, fire.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 205 or 206 - 4

Florida is their first attempt at herding truly large numbers of zombies to a central sanitization area. It sticks out into the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic water ways setting it apart from the rest of the USA. The NRSC found that submersion in water increases the rate of decay to near normal of NRS infected corpses. This is significant because once the soft tissues decay water will quickly enter the skull and destroy the NRS receptors, incapacitating the infected long enough for decay to destroy the brain. Florida is surrounded by water on three sides so there is no worry that a zombie will swim (or walk) across the sediment floor to come out on another shore and start attacking there. The state line where Florida is attached received a huge build up of troops to keep any infecteds from escaping that way.

They started by herding small numbers of zombies out of the Miami area. The one factor that the planners of this fiasco failed to take into account was the drought this state has been suffering through off and on for several years now and that they decided to start this mission during one of the driest times of year. And, unlike in their other three test programs, Florida has a large area given over to development. The small fires in Miami quickly got out of control; from reports it did not even take a single day before they had raging, wind-driven infernos using all of the decaying flotsam of the cities in its path to fuel itself into a monster every bit as deadly as the hive the NRSC had created by artificially pushing large numbers of zombies together.

Once started, no one wanted to stop. It was all or nothing. They won big or they failed miserably; there was no “start over and come back another day” because some much was riding on the results of this mission. The NRSC needed this win to prove to the people of the Central Zone that they knew what they were doing and were capable of returning them to their former lives.

The idea was to bring the zombies to the Tampa Bay area and destroy them all here, by bombing and by driving them into the Bay. Foot soldiers would pick off the stragglers that got away.

The problem is that the fire became so smoky that it prevented the NRSC reconnaissance from being able to fully monitor the hive’s progress. The hive overshot the planned turning point designated by the NRSC and the fire prevented the NRSC from adjusting their plans quickly enough. Junie’s patrol group was cut off from their pick up point by the fire. Then they ran into the forerunners of the hive and then into survivors who were less than happy to see the NRSC; feeling abandoned those that were supposed to have protected them.

They got separated from the other vehicle in their patrol. They were down one man and another began showing signs of infection … whether by NRS or something else they didn’t determine for sure until they reached Sanctuary.

Dix wanted to know if she had revealed Sanctuary’s location and when. Junie rolled her eyes in complete disrespect to her former commanding officer and told him that Sanctuary’s location had been known all along. Drone planes have been used to map survivor compounds and encampments. The NRSC has also been monitoring all radio frequencies. That was a bit of a blow to some people but really, what did we expect?

We’ve corralled the NRSC people into one of the vacant houses, not that there are all that many that are habitable. It’s not real comfy but it should keep them safe for the time being … the question is safe from whom? The zombies or survivors that are feeling a tad on the vindictive side?

I don’t know how to feel about them. They are little more than hamsters in a wheel, firmly caged, looking busy for their organization … but they aren’t really going anywhere. They are just keeping busy; not producing anything. They are survivors in a way as well. Luck of the draw that they weren’t in a quarantine zone when things went crazy. Why should I hold it against them just because they landed in a free zone and I landed in a quarantined zone? How would I feel if our positions were reversed?

On the other hand they are supporting what appears to be a corrupt and dictatorial regime operating under the guise of martial law for the safety of all. They are just following orders, but they know the potential consequences of those orders. Who knows how many the fire has already killed? Who knows how many have been killed by this artificially created super hive that would have otherwise survived under “normal” zombie conditions?

I haven’t really had too much time to ruminate on those points. About thirty minutes have we had locked them in the building and made sure they didn’t have anything capable of removing the cast iron security bars from the windows and doors, the smoke began to get significantly heavier.

Reports being forwarded to OSAG and broadcast for general consumption of the public said the fire was still several miles east of I75. A survivor caravan passing the intersection of Knights Griffin Rd and SR39 reported being able to see a glow to the north east but hoped that they’d be able to outrun it going straight north.

Scott’s concern was that the “glow” was NE and not just east; that could mean that the fire was turning westward. That’s not to be unexpected because there is a windy corridor that runs along SR54; the same east – west travel way that can be followed all the way out to the west coast of Florida. That’s where our crew first encountered some of the pirates that later made the Raid on Sanctuary. That seems so long ago but it was only about seven weeks. So much has happened since then that it is hard to believe.

One of the equipment pieces that we’d been collecting as we found them was N100 respirators and other things that help take the edge off of dealing with sanitized corpses. We handed them out to all of the Wall guards as well as to any other adults that had to be outside. Those that didn’t have to be outside were instructed to remain indoors and to prepare as best they could for several different scenarios.

Of most immediate concern is a large “hive” or super horde. That requires a bug-in and basically we will be under siege for the duration of such an event. The next major event would be a fire. If its like the Big Fire we will get through it with just a little crispiness around the edges. We’ll have to have crews at stand by to avoid spot fires from drifting hot ash or exploding debris being dropped inside the compound. If the fire overtakes our compound we may be looking at an emergency bug out but I’m not sure, given the size of our group, how we would accomplish that without running into further problems. Or worse, we could wind up having to deal with a combination of disasters … hive and fire … at the same time. All we can do right now is remain flexible and at maximum readiness.

Charlene, bless her, has given me the freedom to do what I can to help. She has taken on the responsibility of watching the younger children, the same position that Rose once held. But Rose and Melody are at the clinic preparing as much of our medical gear to go as we can afford to take in a bug out.

The smoke became so noxious by what would have been dinner time that cooking simply wasn’t an option. When I came home to try and figure out what to feed my family, I found Charlene already had things well in hand.

James, David, and Scott lay on the floor completely soot streaked from head to toe except for a clean spot that encompassed their nose and mouth. They were only slightly less dirty around there eyes where they had been wearing goggles. The younger kids were fanning them, trying to give them fresh air … relatively fresh air. Charlene had laid dampened cloths everywhere she could think of and even hung a dampened curtain across the carport door to try and minimize the amount of smoke that came in when someone entered the house.

I was filthy myself but I still gave her a hug and gratefully accepted the mug of tea she handed me. My eyes flew open in pleasure when I realized she had gone to the trouble of brewing tea rather than using instant. The strong, sweet, lemony liquid was perfect in my parched mouth. A few swallows and I was able to clear the gunk from my throat as well.

Not only was there tea to drink she’d made tuna fish sandwiches and hardboiled eggs using some of the things I had shown her I kept the kitchen stocked with. She said that she would have cooked a full meal but that she was trying to go easy on the wood box that sat out on the lanai which was only half full.

I could have kicked myself. Johnnie and Bubby were normally in charge of filling the wood box. If they hadn’t been allowed outside how were they supposed to have done the job? After asking Charlene when the men were due back on duty and finding they had about two more hours I told her to let them sleep and that I would fetch the wood. I wanted it brought in but asked that she find an out of the way place for it so no one would trip over it in the dark. The house might get full again.

I told Bekah and my Sarah to keep all of the rechargeables wound up and to take turns riding the pedal powered recharger until all of our car batteries out in the lean to were fully charged. I was gratified to find out that they had already done this. One less thing for me to keep track of.

As I walked out to the wood pile I tried really hard not to notice how fetid the smoke smelled. That wasn’t just wood and greenery burning. The few individual smells I could pick out included tar, rubber and vinyl, the dark oily smell you get when you burn cars, and some kind of poisonous smell like burning oleander bushes or lead-based paint. What worried me was that if I could smell it that my mask might not be doing the job I hoped it was doing.

After the wood box was filled and moved inside I went back to the food storehouse and checked to make sure that the dampened cloths that I had put in the window cracks and at the base of the doorways were working. We definitely do not need noxious and potentially poisonous smoke getting into our food stores.

When I got there I was disturbed to find the door had been left ajar. I walked in and got clunked on the back by someone who had been aiming at my head, but missed.

My opponent was not the first person to have underestimated me in the last six or seven months. Rather than doing the smart thing and immediately correcting their aim and following through with another attack they assumed that my going down meant that I was disabled and disarmed.

Nope. I’ve played this game before.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 205 or 206 - 5

Once Scott had started to carry a mallet and spike around with him for sanitizing disabled infecteds many of us began to follow suit, including me. It’s a rather messy but effective tool. Scott had even adjusted a leather tool belt to hold my gadgets and gizmos that I used most frequently. It had stopped me from laying them down and then forgetting where I put them. Especially my pistol … but it wasn’t my pistol that I grabbed for. It was dark in the storehouse with all the windows covered and not being able to aim appropriately I didn’t want to take out any of our food stuffs.

As I went down the metal-headed mallet easily lifted from its cradle hook and fitted into my hand. Once I was into a crouch I kicked off and added my strength to increase the velocity of the heavy weight that was acting as an extension of my arm. It didn’t matter what I hit, it was going to do some damage.

But as luck would have it – mine and not my assailant’s – the head of the mallet struck the outside of her left knee. The sound of mallet hitting flesh and the resulting crack and pop has proven to be nauseatingly memorable. For both of us.

Junie went down in so much pain she wasn’t even able to scream. Before I had time to regret it, I kicked her in the head and knocked her out. I was then grabbed from behind across my upper arms. Moving my face out of the potential splatter I got a good grip on the end of the mallet handle and bending my elbows swung it up with all the power I could. I was unceremoniously released.

I turned, ready for the next opponent and came face to face with a soot-streaked angle of death, “Dammit darlin’ ... how the hell do you keep finding this kind of trouble!”

As I tried to explain to Scott while my nose was firmly smashed up against his chest, it wasn’t my fault. I just had this karmic bulls-eye painted on me and there simply wasn’t anything to do about it. I tried to tell him I had come back over to check behind myself and thought someone else had left the door open. And besides, I thought the NRSC crowd had been firmly locked up. He wasn’t in the mood to be placated and would probably kicked Junie himself if he had been any less of what I had always defined as “a real man.”

It turns out that NRSC personnel that operate within the quarantine zones are actually trained on escaping from locked buildings … or gaining entrance to locked buildings. I guess your perspective depends on which side of the door you are on.

The six were now down to three. Once they had escaped they had broken down into three teams. Junie and her partner had been sent to gather food supplies. Two of them had headed up to the guard tower to acquire weapons and the last two were searching for a vehicle to steal. They were desperate to escape and it wasn’t because they feared us.

Well, Junie is incapacitated but not dead. The same couldn’t be said of her partner. My mallet gave the man a lethal lobotomy. I’ll live with it. The two that had been searching the vehicles had met three of our resident weapons … Angus, Glenn, and Mayhem. Matlock was barely in time to stop Jim and some of the other men from tossing the two that had tried to get weapons out of the guard station and over the Wall. It’s not that he was giving them clemency; he wanted them for further interrogation.

One of the remaining NRSC was a real hard case; totally devoted to his cause, willing to die for it, and absolutely refused to talk. Junie was useless as she was in too much pain to be coherent and Dix and Matlock were refusing to allow Waleski to give her anything for the pain. The last man … kid … was barely eighteen. If I had to guess he wasn’t even that but had lied to join up for the three square meals a day and other perks that the recruiters had promised.

All three were separated from one another. I don’t know why the men were so fixated on the grumpy sergeant. They obviously had some sort of grudge and were determined to break him. I thought, “Good luck with that.” Junie would have been nearly as bad. So … what’s a harmless, motherly type to do? I focused on breaking the kid, that’s what.

I know I should be at least a little bit ashamed at manipulating the kid like I did … but I’m not. I didn’t hit him. I didn’t strike or touch him in any way. In fact, all it took was understanding and a little emotional nudging by asking him about home and family and asking how he got mixed up with these “ruffians” when he seemed so nice and reasonable. In the end he broke like a Faberge egg dropped on concrete and thanked me the entire time.

After getting his story and rewarding him with food and some clean cloths to wash his face with, I went over to building where the men were “talking” to the NRSC sergeant. I was irritated enough with what I saw that I was a little more self-righteous than I meant to be. “If y’all are done playing Rambo, maybe you’d like to see the map I drew and find out what we’ve got coming at us.” Then I stalked off to the radio shack, not really certain that anyone was going to follow me.

Scott was … well, not happy kind of describes his particular response to me talking to the little NRSC boy. As soon as he wound down a bit I apologized … easier to do than listening to another lecture … and asked if they wanted to hear the information I got out of the kid or not.

Basically the way it goes is this: Once the original planned turning point was missed the NRSC strategists turned to their meteorological staff to try and estimate what path the fire was most likely to take based on wind speed and direction. The answer was that the fire would curve to the west at some point around Zephyrhills and follow the land corridor between SR54 and SR52 and head west with a dead on course for New Port Richey.

The size of the fire was larger than they had predicted and the smoke extended to both coasts of the state making tracking the fire by air very difficult. That’s what Junie’s patrol was really doing. They were tracking the hive and the fire and relaying the information to ships accord off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico.

The next part is what is badly worrisome for us. The NRSC plans to use the fire to cut off the exit for the hive. As soon as the NRSC command is sure that the hive is contained with legs of the “L” made by the fire they are going to choose tactics that will heard the hive towards the coast and into the Gulf. They’ve have set up buoys and underwater nets that will prevent the corpses from going too far beyond a certain depth and location. After a week they will begin dragging those nets and gathering up the now decayed and naturally sanitized corpses.

I can actually see some logic to driving the infecteds to a watery sanitation. Less danger to uninfected humans using far fewer resources that are apparently in very short supply in the free zones. Even the NRSC has to buy much of their ammo and supplies on the black market. But, we don’t know for sure how they are going to drive the zombies to the coast. We’ve already seen how poorly their fire method works. The boy … “just call me Jamie” … said they had jets on carriers loaded with bombs that could be dropped to “guide” the hive. They could use sound machines to “lure” the hive to the coast. There is even the possibility of heavily armored land craft being used to literally push the back of the hive to the water’s edge. We just don’t know. Junie’s patrol lost communication before the final plans were announced.

So now we wait. The Wall guards are reporting ever increasing numbers of shamblers moving through the area, not stopping but making a beeline to the northwest. No ragers or other non-standard zombies among them yet but we expect by the time daylight arrives to have seen at least a few. OSAG is still receiving and transmitting reports but for how long I don’t know. They’ve barricaded themselves as best they can and moved most of their gear and personnel to the upper floors of their location; I just hope it is enough.

This reminds me that I need to write down what Jamie told me about what the research has revealed about how the different types of zombies are formed but I’ll do it on my next break. Right now I need to catch a little shut eye before I go on duty.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 206 (Thursday) – February 22 - 1

I’m really, really tired. The smoke is horrible. But in a way it … it makes it easier too. The haze hides the worst of the nightmares. This day has been pretty bad.

The sun never really came up. We knew it was up there but it only lessened the gloom; didn’t or couldn’t really penetrate the dense smoke that now constantly wafts across the landscape. Everything just became a lighter shade of gray in an already washed out color scheme. We haven’t had much ash, the actual flames are still far off, at least I hope so.

Just because our house is centrally located Dix begged a favor. He asked if we could set up our carport as a station that people could come and go from for food and drink. We had closed it in so long ago that it was more like a box than a carport, now used more as an extension of our living space than as a house for a vehicle . To deal with the open end I attached old shower curtains that had been taped together with that silver tape Scott used to use on AC duct work onto the outside of the carport opening. On the inside side of the opening I hung several layers of sheets that I tried to keep somewhat damp. I couldn’t make them too wet or they would get so heavy they would pull the wire down that I had strung to hold them. Damp though they seemed to catch most of the smoke that was let in by people going in and out.

Scott was busy so that David had to lend me a hand by cutting a hole in a piece of scrap plywood that would then inside the single outside. I used it to feed out the exhaust pipe of the wood stove that I moved into the space. For light I installed some of those little LED tap lights in a pattern across the ceiling. I kept the kids busy making sure all of our rechargeable batteries were ready if and when necessary. It wasn’t a perfect solution, even with the tap lights and smoke barriers it was dim and a big rank, but it was a thousand percent better than trying to keep something going at the communal kitchen or at the dining hall.

With the first pot of coffee and tea that I served came the report of the first Rager sighting. And then another. And then yet another. The guards also started seeing the other non-standard zombie types in with the groups of Shamblers. So far there wasn’t any significant interest in Sanctuary. One Rager turned abruptly and attacked one of the wooden telephone poles that is the skin of the Wall, but after a moment lost interest. Using a pair of binoculars, the guard reported that he left some teeth behind in the wood. We’ll have to be careful of contamination for a while.

And to go along with the bad news outside came bad news from inside. Our animals started having trouble breathing. Everyone that could be spared helped to round them up out of the large pasture and put them in the two large equipment sheds that we use as barns. The larger animals went into one shed in the make shift stalls and the smaller animals went into the smaller building. Both buildings have concrete slabs for floors but no drains so clean up is going to be a bi … uh … problem.

Samuel and my Sarah – without getting permission might I say – have put several cages of very stinky rabbits and chickens on our lanai. They did get points for lining the screens with more plastic sheeting preventing the smoke from getting in back there; but it’s also preventing the smell of the mini livestock from getting out. I told them in no uncertain terms that they better keep those cages clean or they were going to be carting those things over to Jack’s house real quick. They got the message … Patricia is not fond of chickens. I think they are one of the few things on this planet that she is really scared of. To be honest I think she’d rather face a zombie than a rooster.

Austin and Mr. Morris think they have the animal situation under control for now but don’t know for how long. That’s a lot of animals for that size of space. And some of them are cranky. The larger goats are just not happy; they had gotten used to their free range freedom. And if one gets sick with something that is catching? It will run like wildfire through the entire population. I guess we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. For now, because the barns are all dark the animals are pretty much treating it like it is night time and extending their rest cycles.

The domesticated animals aren’t the only ones in trouble. We’ve found several bird carcasses on the ground. We’ve also seen some squirrels falling out of the trees. Samuel and Sarah found a couple of marsh rabbits that had built a new burrow in our hay bales. We left them alone. It may come down that we need them for meat if this “siege” lasts a long time. Thanks to the hunt after Noah’s parade we are doing pretty well meat wise but never look a gift horse in the mouth. A little providential provision may be what helps us get through in the end.

About midmorning Rose came over and told me that Waleski asked if he could move Terra and baby Kai over here. Laura woke up and in apparent panic and proceeded to try and escape her room, breaking a window in the process. The baby was in distress from all the smoke despite the fact that the window had been covered. I said of course. I didn’t even have to bother asking Scott, I know he would want to do what we could.

I went inside and when I told Charlene she said she’d give up her bed. Instead I asked her to clean out the little girls’ room and move their bedding into the boys’ room temporarily until we could figure something else out. I had just finished pushing two of the twin beds together and getting sheets on them when Nick and Waleski carried Terra and Kai in through the carport. Terra had tried to walk part of the way here but the stress of everything was just a bit much so she finally accepted the wheelchair Ski had all but been begging her to sit in.

I had to get back to preparing lunch so Charlene and Rose helped to settle Terra and Kai in. Nick and Waleski, both grim faced, were on their way back to deal with the mess Laura had made. Ski asked me if I would send Scott over when he had time. Ski was afraid that Laura had bent the window frame and the whole thing would have to be replaced and not just the glass. Ski had dosed Laura with more sedatives, just enough to let her go back into her fantasy world.

Saen dropped by and we made a really nice curry, this one milder than she would normally have made. We didn’t have enough room to make multiple dishes up so we compromised on the mild side rather than fixing a pot of mild and hot and letting people take their choice. She also made a batch of something that looked like coconut rice pudding. People filed in and out eating as they could and the younger kids all helped with the dishes in the clean up station I had put together in our kitchen. It was crowded but better than the alternative. And there was surprisingly few complaints. Everyone was too tired more likely.

It was right after lunch that the chaos set in. Melody ran over to get Rose who had just finished eating. Laura had started to bleed quite heavily. She was miscarrying, probably brought on by her own explosively violent panic. I went to go help when Melody told me that Ski didn’t want any more people than he could help over at the clinic in case he was forced to sanitize Laura or the baby. Waleski didn’t think the fetus was developed enough to have to fear but he was acting on the safe side. He had already restrained Laura whom he had sedated even further.

Junie, on a cot in one of the other rooms at the clinic was screaming to be let out. She wasn’t going to stay where some freaky kid could go reanimated, yada, yada, yada. The way I heard it later it was her own fault what eventually happened.

The miscarriage took a couple of hours. Tina and Dante’ were in shock. They knew the dangers of such a young girl being pregnant, miscarriage is one of them. Add in her mental instability and the fact that we simply didn’t have access to a lot of modern health care resources and you have a lot of potential for disaster. Still, no matter people’s personal feelings on the matter, the miscarriage was an emotional blow to our already depressed population.

In the end Laura started to hemorrhage. It would have been a very difficult situation in a modern hospital setting with a lower percentage of survival. She probably would have had to have a hysterectomy and at 13 that would have been devastating. It didn’t take her long to bleed out. Dante’ and Tina, already prepared by Waleski for the possibility, started to argue about how they wanted her sanitized. Waleski, ignoring them, went to get the undertaker’s tool but was stopped by Junie who had managed to get up from her cot and crawl over the doorway and grabbed hold of him.

Sometimes corpses take a while to reanimate … and sometimes they don’t.

While Junie was fussing at Waleski and threatening to sanitize “the girl” herself, the change had already begun within Laura’s corpse. Dante’ was the one to notice it first. It finally snapped him out of the stupor he had been in the last few days. He pushed Tina, Rose and Melody out of the room right as Laura’s corpse snapped the restraints holding her. Rilla standing in the waiting room area … the old living room of the converted house … screamed.

The fact that she … no … the fact that it hadn’t gone through the initial weak phase and went straight into the strong stage was not a good thing. Dante’ yelled for Waleski right as what used to be Laura exited the room where she had just died. This happened so quickly that Junie was startled, pivoted on her injured knee, and lost her balance slamming both herself and Waleski into the hallway wall. Laura … I’m still having trouble not designating the infected corpse by the name it had in life … sprang at the two of them. Waleski jumped out of the way just in time. Junie didn’t make it.

It was seconds. Junie didn’t even have time to scream. Not that she could have, it tore her throat out and arterial blood sprayed everywhere for a moment. The floor was so slick that Waleski and Dante’ were sliding as they dogpiled the corpse and sanitized it. Junie wasn’t even cold before she started to turn and threw Laura’s corpse off as well as Dante’ and Ski.

Rose had taken her Daddy’s admonishments seriously. Lord knows he’s made the kids practice enough so he was confident they wouldn’t freeze or panic. She picked up the long-handled sledge hammer that was kept in the pharmacy area and Rilla said she used it like a croquet mallet; a loud pop and then Junie’s corpse lay still beside the already sanitized corpse of Laura.

Rilla’s scream was pretty audible in the unnatural quiet that had overtaken Sanctuary. Too off-duty guards walking in front of the clinic sent up the alarm. It was a moment before Waleski could convince Matlock and Dix that things were already under control. Dante’ was holding onto Tina repeating, “She was already gone baby. She was already gone.”

Meanwhile Rose was sandwiched between Scott and David and Melody was being squeezed to pieces by Cease. I couldn’t leave the carport and was very agitated about it if you want to know the truth. Matlock had just brought Jamie over so he could get something to eat before he was locked back up in one of the vacant houses. As much as I suspected Jamie was harmless there was no way I was going to test that theory by leaving him alone with my kids so close at hand.

This day … Lord have mercy … this day ….

No sooner had Dix left than Jamie started pouring his guts out to me again. He kept telling me that we had to be careful of McGruder … that was the tough guy sergeant’s name. Apparently McGruder was the real deal. Rumor had it that he was a former corporate spy and new sixty-eleven dozen different ways to get what he wanted. Jamie claimed to have seen McGruder do some pretty disgusting things both to the living and the dead. I won’t repeat them in this journal, likely Dix has put them in his event reports that he keeps. Suffice it to say if even half of what Jamie said about the man was true we had a sociopath on our hands. Jamie said every patrol group had someone like McGruder with them although McGruder was one of the worst. They were like informers or enforcers for the NRSC Executive Board.

It was McGruder that was the mastermind behind the attempted escape even though he wasn’t the officer in charge. He was the one that had apparently been working on Junie for weeks, turning her into his “eyes and ears.” I can see how it happened. Junie had left looking for something; not even she probably knew what in the beginning. That’s how cults get people. The depressed, the vulnerable, the lonely, the outcast … they are all fodder for a good recruiter.

I had been listening to Jamie with half an ear while trying to listen for Scott’s return with our daughter. And then the boogey man showed up at the door.

God, that poor kid. He never stood a chance. His is a death I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for. I was the one that opened him up like a emotional can opener, used his needs against him, caused him to spill his guts. He was just a weak kid, not especially likeable but desperately needing to be liked, or at least think someone cared about him. If I hadn’t let him use me as an outlet for his neediness McGruder would never have thought him a traitor. What I did was necessary … I know that, or I’m pretty sure I know that most of the time … but necessary doesn’t mean crap when you’ve got blood on your hands.

McGruder just reached in and grabbed him and then poof, the kid was gone. McGruder shoved some kind of pointy thing into his temple. I saw it afterwards; it looks like some kind of four-sided ice pick kind of blade.

Then he came at me. A big boom rang out, then another though I didn’t hear that one quite as well.

Charlene. She stood there looking at where McGruders face used to be and said, “Poppa Scott says you forget your gun more often than he likes to know about. You really shouldn’t do that. I better go get him, he’s bound to have heard the noise.”

I was still standing there with my mouth hanging open trying to figure out a comeback when Scott nearly yanked all the curtains down running in.

Jack has a pretty mean knife wound but it is more painful than near fatal. Matlock and Dix are kicking themselves for not putting two guards on McGruder but he had been firmly tied up and in full view of everyone. When the commotion at the clinic started, McGruder made his move. We still haven’t figured out where the knife or spike or whatever that thing was called got secreted. All he had on was pants … not even his shoes. I’m not really sure I want to know at this point.

Junie and McGruder’s corpses were tossed over the Wall. Dante’ and Tina buried Laura out in the little graveyard in the orange grove before it got dark. They were going to throw Jamie’s body over the Wall as well but I got a little hysterical and David said he’d bury him on the other side of our little cemetery. If and when things ever return to normal I want to tell Jamie’s family … his sisters and parents that he told me about … that he at least died with a clean conscience. That he tried to be helpful and that he loved them very much. That’s the least I can do.

I suppose that I should write down the other information that Jamie gave me. I’m not certain what good this does for us out here in the quarantine zones but its information worth having nonetheless. It’s about how the various zombies come to be.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 206 - 2

Basically two factors come into play. The first one is what variety of zombie passes the infection along. The second factor is blood type.

The most common zombie is the common shambler. Its not surprising then all shamblers started out with O+ blood type. Here in the USA – I checked with Waleski to make sure – blood types from most common to most rare is O+, A+, B+, O-, A-, AB+, B-, and then most rare is the AB-.

As I said, shamblers are the most common and all shamblers started out with O+ blood type. In contrast the first Ragers started out as O- blood type. Most of the Climbers start out as A- blood type.

Now here’s the thing that makes it so complicated. Shamblers can only beget shamblers. That’s all that their particular variant of the NRS virus can transmit. Climbers are rare relatively speaking. And, their variant of NRS generally only awakens other A- blood types. If a climber transmits the NRS virus to an O+ blood type the virus reverts to the Shambler variant.

On the other hand the Rager variant of the virus tends to override all other variants. That means that if a shambler passes their virus along to an individual that is O- they will become a Rager automatically. However, if a Rager passes their variant along to O+, A+, B+ or A- blood type those individuals will without exception become Ragers.

Blood types A+ and B+ also tend to be shamblers unless there receive a viral load from some other type of zombie. Because of the number of O, A, and B positive individuals being the most prevalent in the USA … and in the world for the most part … that is the explanation for why Shamblers are generally the most common kind of zombie.

Jamie told me of a type of zombie that we have not knowingly encountered yet that the NRSC calls a “Hunter.” It’s a loner, will not follow a hive or horde of any size. This zombie appears to exhibit some intelligence. That zombie starts out with a B- blood type. It is very rare. In the USA 0.6% of the population has B- blood. Another reason why the Hunters are so rare is because they cannot transmit their variant at all except to another B- person. If a B- person is bitten by a Rager they will become a Rager. A person that is B- that is bitten by a shambler becomes a Hunter most of the time. Again though I’ve learned of one exception to the rule about corpses that reanimate. For some reason, people with B- blood do not always reanimate. James said the NRSC scientists have found that at least 50% of the time a B- person simply doesn’t reanimate at all. They haven’t figured out why yet.

The mutant zombies – the ones that prey on other zombies – only started showing up about two or three months ago. Apparently it took time for all the possible variants of the NRS virus to mix into a weird enough cocktail the first time. Mutants result from already reanimated zombies cross infecting each other. No one is quite sure of the combination but apparently a certain cross contamination has to occur and then the contaminated zombie has to deteriorate passed a certain point before the mutant abnormality is triggered. Mutants follow and are created by the bigger hordes and the hives. That’s why we haven’t seen them since the Big Horde. If a mutant is not able to feed on other zombies it quickly is taken over by the tumors and decays at a near normal rate.

There are other zombies that are nearly as rare as the Hunters are but it’s getting late and I still don’t understand everything that Jamie was trying to explain. Those zombies are a result of various blood or lymphatic disorders as well as blood types and what kinds of zombies transmit the virus. I wouldn’t say there are an infinite number of variations on the types of zombies that we could see, but it is certainly possible to see types beyond what we already have experience with.

I’m tired but I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight. The later in the day it became the more desperate some of the calls into OSAG’s radio station became. The later in the day it became the more we became desperate. The zombie hive arrived.

Zombies don’t make independent vocal sounds. Most of that soft tissue is too destroyed to even work. However, there is a sound that thousands upon thousands of zombies make when they are together in one place. It the sound of cockroaches rustling in the leaves on the ground. It’s the sound of rats chewing in an attic. It’s the sound of a snake makes as its passing through the grass. The sound of leathery bat wings as they fly through the air.

I don’t know exactly what the sound is from. Maybe old air being forced out of useless lungs over ruined windpipes. Maybe blood stiffened clothes and skin constantly rubbing against each other. It’s a sound difficult to describe and impossible to ever forget.

And that sound was all around us, for as far as the eye could see, even amplified by binoculars.

For a while there the smell of the hive was so overpowering it was like the very oxygen we breathed was being stolen from us. More than one person unashamedly found a discreet place to puke. Eventually we were forced to learn to ignore it. I hung up bundles of dried herbs and flowers and dabbed essential oils every where I could but it hasn’t really helped.

This whole maggoty situation weighs on us like a headstone across our chests. We are all dragging. Its like a miasma stealing all hope. And we aren’t the only ones being affected by this. OSAG has had to go off the air. The thickness of the smoke was beginning to affect their generators. They also needed to pull back as far as they could for safety’s sake.

I hope that when this is over … not if but when, I have to keep believing that. When this is over, Steve and his crew will be back on the air. Unfortunately it looks like it is not just the zombies that they – and we – need to be concerned about. Steve, bless him, sounds a little on the ragged edge. I doubt he has had much sleep in the last few days. I hope now that he has shut the broadcast down Shorty will be able to get some food in him and get him to catch a few desperately needed hours of rest. That’s where I’m going just as soon as I get his last broadcast transcribed.

-------------------

Well, listeners, this is Steve’s Midnight Music and Talk Radio Show brought to you by the Association for A Free Florida. Now while the AAFF doesn’t really exist as of yet as a cohesive organization, I believe that it might exist in the hearts and minds of people within the sound of my voice.

If you are getting a slight warble in my transmission, you can thank the people we did not elect for that little transmission difficulty. I’m not going to claim the knowledge of how it ****ing works, but apparently when you want to defeat someone from what we used to call “jamming” your transmission, you simple start to transmit on various frequencies all at once, at different power bands. That’s what Scott tells me. I am simply the humble DJ.

The music you just heard was Bob Dylan “Chimes of Freedom”. Yes, friends, you are going to get a shitload of protest songs tonight.

Tonight, I want to update everyone on the situation we have before us—that is the mother****ing situation that our government that we did not elect have put us in. The fires, it turns out, was set by those bastards in an effort to control the NRS infected. We have it on good authority that members of the forward group of the NRSC have taken the opportunity to strike first at our outposts here in Florida and have failed. They have been beaten back by the good people and are now incarcerated—our present government might call them hostages, but I like to think of them as being prisoners of war.

Yeah, I might be talking shit here, but what else am I going to call them? They attacked members of the community and expect to nor be dealt with harshly?

Now, we here at Steve’s Free Florida Show have gotten a broadcast from people who represent the officials of the government that we did not elect. Guess what they wanted from your humble DJ--? That’s it, it was a cease and desist from taking an active interest in the happenings around me and simply be more “Broadcast friendly” or the FCC was going to come in and shut me down. They even gave me what ****ing news that they wanted me to broadcast.

Guess what I told them? You got it, friends, I told them to **** themselves. I told their sycophant to get off his fat ass and come down here to Florida and make me stop broadcasting.

Now here at Steve’s Midnight Music and Talk Show we have a caveat for our community in general: always go armed. So once again to that ****headed governmental lackey; **** you and your ****ing orders. Come down here and make me, bitch.

Here’s the Indigo Girls with “Rise Up” from the album “All That We Let In”.

And that was Shooter Jennings with “Manifesto No. 1” from “Put the O back into Country”… the operative line in that song if you couldn’t figure it out was “If that’s the way you say hello, you can kiss my ass goodbye.”

Now let’s talk a little about freedom, shall we? What few people know about me is that I used to teach and one of the things I taught was something called Search and Seizure. Now you might ask yourself, “Steve, what the **** does Search and Seizure have to do with our situation?” Well, folks, let me tell you how all that shit works.

There’s this document called the Bill of Rights, and in the Bill of Rights, we have the Amendments to that document. In order for our system of government to work, you have to look at the document in its entirety. I know, I know, that was not the most popular way to look at those pieces of paper in recent years, many of us liked to pick and choose those things we thought only applied to us and our situation, and let the others fall by the way side.

But I’m here to tell you that they don’t ****ing work that way. The Amendments that you see there on that piece of paper are written the way they are because without the first three, the fourth one is worthless. With out Free Speech, we can not fight for our Right to Keep and Bear Arms. With out the Second Amendment we can not protect that right of Free Speech, nor can we be safe in our homes from Unlawful Search and Seizure. While we might not think that it applies to use today, with out the Third Amendment, we would not be free from the pressure of the government to house soldiers.
Let me read that one to you folks, I think that here in the near future it might apply to all of us here in Free Florida. I happen to have a copy of the Bill of Rights right here; as a matter of fact I keep a copy of it in several places, with all my firearms, in my BOB and in my safe at home. Amendment Three reads as follows;


No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Now we’re all law abiding citizens, and I’ve had this conversation with some folks in one of the enclaves known as Sanctuary. They’ve been more than helpful to people in the past, they’ve been more than willing to allow for our government to house people in their compound in the past, but with consent and with the understanding that it was THEIR HOUSE. I chided them at doing this out of kindness and now, it has come full circle. NRSC goons paid a visit to some folks and tried to take advantage of their compassion. Thankfully, our good people overcame those worthless bastards and we now have at least a little information as to the plan they were endeavoring to undertake. OF course it backfired on them. More on that later.

Let’s talk about our elected officials who have unleashed NRSC on is, shall we? I know that one might argue that the NRSC workers are just doing their jobs, and studies have shown that there is such a thing as group-think, that is, people acting as a group will do what they are told even if the order goes against their held morals. We saw this in Germany, we saw this in Russia, we saw this in so many fascist and socialist governments that it is hard to discard the evidence. The problem with NRSC lies with the people at the top and because of this, we are going to pay the price unless we stand up to it now. This government was not elected by us, Florida, and is illegal.

There are four different Amendments pertaining to voting. How many of them have been denied to us here in Free Florida? All of them, people. As soon as the ballot box was closed to us due to the NRS outbreak and they HELD ELECTIONS WITHOUT US, they violated that sacred trust we supposedly have in our government. So to you idiots who belong to the illegal government of Colorado who are listening to me, here’s a song for you.

Bob Dylan again, “The Time’s They are a Changin’.”

I know I’ve been rambling here, I really just don’t know where to start. I’ve kept you up to date about who to trade with, what can be done about chiggers, keeping clean in an unclean environment and their desire to nuke parts of this great nation, I’ve kept you up to date about their attempts to control this outbreak and how they’ve been using us here in Florida to experiment with the eradication of the NRS plague.

I really don’t know where to go from here, Scott tells me that due to the smoke, we need to shut down for a while since the generators are over heating. So I’ll leave you with this one thought from Samuel Adams:

“The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.”

I’m going to leave with a song that is not a protest song. It’s a song by a Adam Hood, called “Play Something We Know”. It’s from a really cool album called “6th Street”. I guess that I just need to stop my tirade here and get to something a little less, inflammatory.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 207 (Friday) – February 23

Today should have been cleaning day. What a laugh. The smoke is everywhere. It’s not the smoke you get from a campfire either. It’s like the smell of a burning landfill; sweet and rotten.

The only relief we got today was a brief rain shower. The zombies started moving haphazardly again but it didn’t last long. So far they are just standing like silent sentries around Sanctuary. We can make out, when the haze lifts slightly, that the outer bands of the hive continue to move to the west.

We make as little noise as we can but it’s inevitable that some noise gets made. The kids are nervous wrecks. I’ve tried to instill the need for absolute quiet but they are just little kids. I had to get onto them so many times late yesterday and early today that now they watch me with silent eyes, too worried that they’ll misstep and maybe it won’t just be my words punishing them. But their safety and ours depends on their obedience. I feel like a heel … worse than that. Finally I had Scott help me to take their beds apart and we’ve done our best to line the room where they are staying with the mattresses and then added several layers of blankets on top of that. It helps keep the smoke out too. Too late I think. The kids are somber and scared. I’ve tried to make things better but …

Charlene says they aren’t really upset at me … they are just upset period. Nice girl, trying to make me feel better. I hope I can fix this … this … whatever I’ve done sooner rather than later. Tomorrow, if its feasible, we are going to bring all of the kids over here so they can play together. We’ll hang heavy quilts over all the openings and hopefully that will help dampen the sound some.

Rose was over at the clinic most of the day cleaning and disinfecting everything. But Terra and Kai won’t be moving back over there. Scott said the window frame would have to be replaced and it would make too much noise to do that right now.

Tina and Dante’ are understandably grief stricken right now. I’ve seen them both. I’ve tried to say the right things. But if I were in their shoes I know it wouldn’t be enough. It’s something you have to live through and it will stay with you the rest of your life. Maybe it is wrong of me but I’m relieved that it wasn’t me. I had feared that somehow some way I would be part of Laura’s fate, whatever it was. I’m glad I don’t have to live with that. The rest of the things that I’ve had to do are going to be hard enough.

James is getting sick. He spends most of his time on guard duty and this smoke is just not good for him. Dix finally noticed and has ordered him to get a full night’s sleep. He’ll ruin his lungs and his eyes trying to peer through this haze to keep an eye out for threats.

Scott and David are hacking a lot as well. Pulling out my herbals all I could find for smoke inhalation was ginseng tea, eating oatmeal, and loquat syrup. Also you were supposed to stay away from spicy foods. The goal was to get your body to retain moisture to help lungs and eyes. I’ve given the loquat syrup a try with the kids and they loved it. We’ll be having oatmeal for breakfast everyday for a while because it is what is easiest to fix under the circumstances. I’ve enjoyed the ginseng tea but not everyone has.

There hasn’t been much in the way of radio communication since we found out that OSAG was threatened. Thanks to the radio equipment in the vehicle that the NRSC were in we are able to listen in to what they are saying amongst themselves but its taking Dix a while to decipher their codes. Bekah actually figured out a sequence all by herself much to all the adults’ amazement. That helped Dix figure out some other phrases but he is missing some vital info to make it all fall into place.

The animals are in greater distress today. I think they sense the infected corpses. Some of them do nothing but stand with stiffened legs and shake and shiver. We lost two rabbits during the night, no apparent reason. Austin says it may have been fear. Chickens are off laying their eggs but that was to be expected with us keeping them in the dark as much as possible.

I’m not going to have any choice, tomorrow I’m going to have to do some more baking. We’ve run through almost all of what we fixed a couple of days ago.

I’m going to close with both the worst and the best thing I saw today. I’ll start with the best. Lucky is back. That’s right, that crazy cat has been around just not to be seen. Sarah and Samuel found her. She must have come in at some point over the last day or two. Dix had stacked some boxes on his front porch and they’ve been there for a couple of weeks now. Samuel had asked if Sarah could help him move them to the burn pile, but when he looked over in them he got a surprise. There was lucky in the middle of giving birth. She has four teeny tiny kittens. She would have had five but one didn’t make it. The four that did are all black as night; three of them are slick and one of them is long haired and about as fluffy as you could ever imagine. Three have green eyes but the fluffy one has ice blue eyes. Lucky is rather puffed up with her consequence and is enjoying being fed and watered … just don’t get too near the kittens or she’ll take a whack at you.

I wish I could stop there. Maybe I should but I think I need to write it down to get it out of my head. When I was on guard duty Angus told me not to look down too much and not to think too hard about it when I did. Of course, that is a bit like telling Pandora not to peek inside the box.

I looked down and oh how I wished I hadn’t. It was the zombies, but yet not. It wasn’t what they smelled like or looked like exactly. It wasn’t how many of them there were although yeah that was part of it too. It was that … they were pushing. You know, we’ve set the rail cars and trailers so that they aren’t going anywhere. We’ve strapped them together and bolted them in place. It would take a tsunami … or a head on collision from something huge … to move the Wall.

When the first zombies piled up against the Wall it was just … I keep imagining a crowded rock concert. The people on the front row of a standing room only show … I do I put this into words so that someone can understand it. They were crushing each other against the Wall. The first row of zombies were long gone. Probably the third, forth, and fifth row of zombies as well. They just kept pushing.

And then the hive would move as a whole and they would smear … From the height of a man down to the ground the Wall and Gatehouses were smeared with … It wasn’t just red. There was stuff sticking to … I give up. Whoever you are reading this sometime long from now maybe someone else was able to describe that horrific sight but its beyond my powers. The zombies crushed their own kind and the resulting biological debris layered the Wall like jelly on toasted bread. It caught in all the nooks and crannies, all the crevices, every surface space. If we could see the ground I’m sure it would be like a pool of jello.

I just won’t think about it. There is nothing I can do. It’s just there. Maybe pray for rain to wash it away … but it’ll just be back as soon as the zombies start moving again.

If I’m going to pray, I better pray that doesn’t happen to any of us. We’re safe inside our Wall. For now. I hope I can still say that tomorrow.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 209 (Sunday) – February 25

Some day of rest this has been. Yesterday I was too tired and too depressed to write. Today … I’m not sure there are words to describe this day.

Yesterday was a whole lot of the same as the day before. I cooked. I cleaned the best I could. I took care of the kids and Scott. I did my time on the Wall. It was just … it was awful. I was dragging and I was depressed and I just couldn’t climb out of the funk I was in. The only bright spot was the kids. It was like old times. Every kid in Sanctuary was over here and they played. I mean they really played. Toys, cars, board games, card games, I fixed them snacks … popcorn, juice, they pulled taffy … for them I could be better. But whenever I went back outside, back to the haze, the smoke, the dank smell, the weird and unnatural sounds … then the façade would tumble down, I would be how I really was and not how I wanted to be.

The radio was silent except for the occasional crackle of life when the NRSC were relaying their coded messages to one another. Dix was so frustrated.

We used up most of the lamps so that the kids could have light to play by during the day. We left the mattresses and blankets against the windows to deaden the sound so the zombies couldn’t hear the kids. The whole house was a dark as a cave. I found every solar lamp and light and rechargeable that we had so that the kids could play. But that didn’t leave me any to waste to write by. It didn’t matter, I just didn’t really feel like it anyway.

But something happened overnight. Dix, unable to sleep, worked in the Radio Shack. And then, it must have been about 3 AM, he finally figured out their location codes. With that he was able to make more sense of some of the other transmissions. As he went back he finally broke their whole code.

And damn good thing he did it when he did. At five in the morning they gave a signal that they would be “planting the flowers in the field at the north end of aviator’s highway.” Scott had told Dix that Dale Mabry Hwy was actually named after a WWI aviator. “Planting the flowers” Dix was able to discern from other transmissions was dropping some type of package that was used to lure the infected corpses. They were going to do that at 6 AM.

We were all up and moving when we got the news. I’m not fond of the NRSC. I don’t like their tactics. I recognize the need to have a central government for some things but I don’t like how they seem to be operating outside of the US Constitution and US Bill of Rights. I know in an emergency some of those “rights” may get suspended but there had to be a line of demarcation that should never be crossed. I also didn’t like that they were doing this operation with no warning to the survivors in the area. Like we were expendable … or bait … and were being use to further their goals.

We gathered that the fire had made the full turn and was now running from east to west along the corridor we expected it to take. We were blessed that the wind had died down and now the fire only traveled because it was taking the path with the most fuel to consume. The Big Fire of so many months ago now turned out to be a good thing. Most of what could fuel a fire was gone. I hope all of the small peddler groups and survivor compounds could avoid this disaster.

The smoke was very bad for us. We were inside the “L” and catching the smoke from both pathways. But that would mean that it should leave us sooner rather than later. But we wouldn’t know for sure until the zombies were gone and we could reconnoiter the area.

Six AM came and went and then we started to hear it. My Lord. Imagine all of the happy sounds of normal everyday life you can think of; children laughing and talking, a baby’s cry, the clink of dishes, dinner table conversation, the sound of a city bus, music from a carousel, the clack of a rollercoaster, a hot dog vendor selling his wares, birds in a park, a football game, a stadium full of fans. The sounds played over and over and over. The sounds that real live humans make going about their normal lives. Only these were amplified so they must have carried for miles.

They had to have dropped some kind of transmitter right into the leading edge of the hive. And it did … nothing. Not a single thing. Eventually they batteries wore out.

They called for a second drop about 9 AM. The same result. Again at noon. The same result. The zombies didn’t move, didn’t leave. They just shuffled in place, uninterested in the sounds of humanity. Why should they be interested in sounds … they were fixated on the real thing. Us … and OSAG … and a couple of other small groups that had gotten caught in the area trying to escape the fire.

Then another version of our nightmare started. The order went out for the “eagles to soar.” Turned out more like vultures dropping a stinking load. We heard the jets but never saw them. We didn’t know what they were doing until it was too late.

We just barely had time to identify the sounds of the planes when there was a whistling noise. You know, anyone that has ever watched a war movie or documentary knows that sound. It didn’t take any special wisdom. But before we could do much more than hitch our breath there were loud thumping explosions in the smoke to our east.

Well, crap. What are you going to do when you are close to being bombed? Its not like we’ve got any basements or subways that we can crawl into. Scott and I looked at each other and we ran for our kids. Scott split off from me and headed to the clinic to get Rose and Melody. Waleski was already hustling them out laden with a lot of medical supplies.

Cease also came running and the men hustled them into the house. Dix came running up at the same time and looked at Scott. Scott asked, “What are you waiting for?! Bring ‘em on!”

Our home has been designated as the fallback position almost since the very beginning of Sanctuary but not since the Raid have we utilized this system. They came in dribs and drabs carry mattresses, blankets, food, and other stuff we would need. It felt like everyone was in slow motion but actually we were all moving very quickly. Shutters were closed, mattresses were leaned against windows and walls. Food stored in the kitchen.

I kept looking around for James and David. They weren’t anywhere. I finally grabbed Scott but before I could ask he shook his head and said, “They’re on the Wall.” Then he hugged me and I realized he hated just as much as I did but knew that it was necessary while I still battled with believing that.

“Down!” bellowed Dix.

This time the explosions were closer. Reports came from our guards that the zombies were more agitated but weren’t really moving, at least not those within visual distance.

Everyone was in. We put the children in the den where there would be enough room for them all and Terra with Kai, Patricia, and Rhonda in one of the bedrooms. Rose and Melody floated between the two helping with whatever needed doing. Waleski stowed his stuff in the dining room and we covered the table with a tarp. You don’t want to think of that sort of thing but what choice did we have.

Again, another bombing run, this one close enough to make a deep base rumble in our ear drums. And then the next one was close enough that we could feel it through the ground.

They were getting closer. And the zombies were getting more agitated. We beginning to move. But, not appreciably in any particular direction. In point of fact they were losing the cohesion that they had as a hive. We couldn’t decide if this was a good thing or not.

Then Dix popped out of the radio shack and sent the word out. The NRSC may be in charge overall but it was the US military that was running the bombing runs. I appeared they were using “smart bombs” and doing their best to avoid known civilian locations.

The bombing was more like the “shock and awe” tactics of recent history or the blitzkrieg maneuvers of WW2. It picked up in consistency and went on until five o’clock at which time they just seemed to either give up … or someone with a calculator finally called a halt after tallying up the cost.

About an hour into the bombing, Waleski gave Rhonda and Patricia a very low dose of phenothiazine. It was the only sedative we had that was occasionally used with pregnant women. He had scoured all the medical books he had but that’s the only one he could come up with that we had in stock. I know he didn’t feel like he had much choice, especially with Patricia that was beginning to show extreme signs of distress. They were never sedated enough to go to sleep but they were lethargic and relaxed … honestly pretty zoned, but not so bad that we couldn’t have stuffed them into an escape vehicle had we needed to.

And speaking of, my nerves were pretty frayed as well. Scott, James, and David spent much of the time getting the bus, Juicer, and a few other vehicles ready in case we had a Wall breach and needed to bug out. The plan was to throw ourselves on the mercy of OSAG if we could go that way or even get to Aldea and make do with what had been stored with the storage containers.

We did have one emergency from the bombing. The percussion from the bombs finally knocked down a huge live oak and wouldn’t you know it, it fell on the Wall. While it crushed some zombies it also created a bridge up the Wall.

Imagine reader, if you can, being out in the middle of a battle. Bombs falling all around. The sound deafening. The stress and fear pushing your heart up your throat. That’s where we were. Why you ask? Well, because we were cutting the tree back as quickly as we could. I took James’ place as look out and he helped his father and the other men with saws and axes trying to cut it away so we could lever the massive trunk down off the Wall.

We were fine until a couple of climbers showed up. And when they got agitated the other zombies finally started to notice us as well. The climbers would start up and then we would shoot them down or throw a limb down and in their way. Other zombies kept trying to get to us but they were an uncoordinated lot. And then the three ragers showed up. What was scary was those three seemed to be working in concert. They were ripping and tearing at the lower limbs and trunk. What was left of the shredded bark shown red with blood where the ragers didn’t care whether they ripped off skin or whole fingers as they tried to utilize the tree to get to us.

It took five or six shots, but I finally calmed myself down enough that I could make reasonably descent headshots. I missed a couple of times and simply blew off jaws or other body parts, but for the most part I began to find the rhythm I needed to do my part. One thing on our side was that the zombies, as clumsy as the majority of them were, could never get a purchase to climb the Wall itself … not even the Climbers. And the zombie … umm … debris I guess you’d call it … would have been comedic if we weren’t so scared. Some of the shamblers could do nothing but slip and slide, only remaining upright because there were so many of them packed into the area.

It took an hour with all hands available hacking and sawing to clear enough of the tree off so that we could do what needed to be done. I went through way too much ammo to be comfortable.

After things were silent again we walked the perimeter. We couldn’t see that they had appreciably moved the zombies at all. In fact, many of the more noticeable ones were still around. There was the zombie in a bride’s dress now more gore splattered than white who was missing the lower half of her right arm. There was a zombie still wearing a fireman’s jacket and breathing apparatus, though the face mask had fallen away long ago. There were the child zombies, some of the hardest for me to take. There was a zombie dressed in a clown outfit guaranteed to give me more than a few dreams at some point in the future. The ones that Angus said gave him the willies were the three zombies in bikinis or what was left of the bikinis … and what was left of what was supposed to have been covered up by the bikinis. All three of them had horrific wounds on their chests.

Matlock and some of the other guys got busy manufacturing their homemade bombs. The stuff they were using was basically the same materials that were used to bring the OKC building down. I’m glad they were doing it on the other side of the compound in a storage container they had sandbagged all around to make a sort of bunker for their bombs to live in.

Dix had headed over to the radio shack to see if he could figure out what was next. After checking to make sure that all the people in our house were fed and watered I headed over to see if he had heard anything new.

Oh brother, had he. I hope Steve and his group are able to pick the signals up but even if they could I don’t know if anyone has deciphered them yet. Dix is worried about breaking radio silence and alerting them to the fact that we can understand them. We’d send a runner out but that would be suicide.

Tomorrow the next wave starts … not … we aren’t for sure that we have decoded it properly. It sounds outrageous. Crazy. Suicidal. And dangerous as hell.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 210 (Monday) – February 26

Sometimes I wonder how far into the future this journal is going to be read. Will I just be a little old lady basking in the act of surviving when so many didn’t? Will my journals be taken out by my children after I’ve gone and they are searching for a connection? Will my grandchildren or great grandchildren be rummaging through a box or chest and wonder what all this scrabbling was about as they sit and read? Maybe it’s more generations from now than I can contemplate, when all that I hold dear now has left the earth.

The reason I sometimes wonder about that issue is that I have a tendency to associate two dissimilar objects or events, trying to come to some understanding about what I’ve seen, heard, or experienced.

Take today for instance. We all had a feeling today was going to be worse than yesterday. Yesterday was bad, but today was like we had stepped into a ripped off script from Starship Troopers. I know my kids know what Starship Troopers is but maybe my future readers do not. Fine. Let me explain as best I can.

Starship Troopers was a movie … actually it was a trilogy those the second two movies didn’t have the cult following of the first one. It started out being about a bunch of kids who “signed up” to become citizens by joining a military regime that fought bugs. I’m sure I’ve already lost some of you. But it wasn’t just about fighting bugs, it was how the kids were indoctrinated into this service and how they changed over time; some for the good, some for the worse. By the end of the trilogy the metaphors were getting a little heavy and obvious but in some ways apply more today than they did back when it was made. This was all very sci-fi and their uniforms and tools for fighting the bugs were quite interesting.

Well, today I watched people … many of them little more than kids … fighting “bugs” same as in the movie. Only the “bugs” were actually zombies; or more properly they were Necrotizing Reanimating Syndrome infected corpses. NRS. Our real life “bug.” Our real life plague.

I had spent much of the night, in between cat naps, doing more cooking. All the women were busy helping load magazines and clips, divide up ammo, cook and bake food and breads that would last a day or two without refrigeration, fill water containers, and prepare drinks like Koolaid for the kids and Gatorade for those that would need electrolyte replacement from sweating or from battle.

From the overheard transmissions we knew that the NRSC planned on starting their crazy battle plan at 6 AM. A Radio Free Florida broadcast – not from OSAG but someone claiming the same name – came out late last night telling how equipment had parachuted from the sky and helicopters had landed with lots of men dressed all in black and they were setting up on the far side of the new burn zone between US 98 and US 301 not too far from Zephyrhills. They had just started a more detailed description of the equipment when the broadcast was abruptly broken off. We all had an opinion on what that meant.

So we waited. And waited. And waited.

After the RFF broadcast someone had wised up and gone to radio silence. Obviously they didn’t want survivors to know what was coming. They certainly couldn’t have expected the zombies would give a rats behind what was on the radio. I don’t care about the old scare stories about zombies getting “smart” somehow. The whole point to a zombie is the fact that it is dead … dead things decay starting with the soft tissues. The brain is a soft tissue organ. It may be one of the last things to go, but go it will and that means that the more decay the dumber the zombie. We’ve seen that time and again with shamblers and the like.

My main concern at the time was just how dumb were the NRSC going to be. Their plan had so many holes in it that it let everything through but failure. The failure latched on to the lunatics that dreamed this nightmare up.

By about 8:30 AM their line was already faltering. What we’ve been able to paste together was that a massive line of tanks and personnel lined up along a two mile stretch just on the other side of US301. The tanks were painted black with the NRSC insignia on them like some kind of voodoo good luck charm. The men were armored in what looks like Kevlar and some hard polymer plating; from head to toe … or at least from head to the top of their boots which came just below their knees. Their helmet was some type of polymer as well with an attached face mask and neck guard. Sorry for the movie comparisons but Scott, being weird as he is on occasion, did his Darth Vader imitation saying, “James, I am your father.” I thought it was asinine, but James and David laughed which I think might have been Scott’s aim to begin with. We were all so tense; I just didn’t see how they could joke at a time like that.

As you can guess around about noon came the first reports of heat exhaustion. What worked in New England in the late autumn and winter was not going to work in Florida at any time of the year. The gear had a built in camel pack but the rehydration went quickly.

At 6 AM on the nose the line started forward. The burn zone was fairly free of zombies … except for a few that had gotten fried crispy but hadn’t completely destroyed the brain. These were easily put down. Then they began to run into the hive’s exterior coating. These were nothing but shamblers unfit to do anything but face forward and move. They never even turned and the NRSC troopers mowed them down quickly. I think this set up a problem with over confidence.

Despite their apparent early successes, it was slow going. There were just so many corpses to slice through. About 8 AM they met their first real resistance and their main armored vehicle went to work. It looked like a small tank … maybe holding two or three personnel … with what looked like a street sweeper attached to the front on arms. Only instead of heavy duty brush bristles this think had chains and blades that would sling around.

I saw on in action. Oh my Lord. This thing chopped up everything … ground, trees, fences … but most particularly it chopped up zombies. And I think, had we had a normal horde it could have worked. But the head honchos in the Midwest tried to do too much at one time. They bit off more than they could chew. This wasn’t a horde; it was a hive … and a huge one that was miles in diameter and full of more than just shamblers.

Their other armored vehicle looked like a modified personnel carrier that had a …. I can’t remember the name of these things but I’ve seen pictures of them on the front of steam engine trains that were cutting through avalanches laying over tracks and on those ships called “ice breakers.” It was kind of like a pointy steam shovel that was used to push the hive along. The vehicle itself was huge, like one of those really big dump trucks you used to see on Modern Marvels, a television series about all the good things that man had built. Only these things weren’t good. They were like … like … no, I’m not crazy, not really. But what those machines … the drivers of those machines … did was awful, mean, irresponsible, sociopathic, and sadistic. If you thought my description of what the little tanks could do was pretty bad these things were even worse. They rolled over everything. They just went through stuff like a hot knife through butter. They could even slice through buildings without stopping as long as they had enough speed going into the obstruction.

But the problem was, from what OSAG was finally able to relay to us from their hidden vantage point at the top of one of their secured buildings, they tried to move their line too quickly. They cut into the hive, and quite effectively, but their line wasn’t long enough or the hive was too thick or something. As the NRSC pushed into the hive, the center of the line starting forming a point. The line to either side of the point started falling back creating an inverted “V”. Like birds flying south for the winter. This formation is great for punching into something but sucks when you want to keep what you are punching into cohesive.

The hive started splitting and bleeding around either end of the NRSC line. Because of radio silence or battle fever or inexperience, the center didn’t get the message that they needed to slow down; or maybe they didn’t know, the smoke was still very heavy. The inverted “V” kept getting more and more narrow.

Suddenly the NRSC line was fighting a battle on two fronts; the main hive in front of them and now the pieces of the hive that were flowing around and coming up behind them.

I’ll give it to the NRSC boys and girls, they didn’t lack for heart. They continued to maintain their forward motion and chew through the hive. We noticed some minor disturbances in the hive surrounding Sanctuary around 9 AM; by 10 AM the hive was undulating and moving back and forth like waves, mostly westward but for three feet forward they would slide back two. By 11 AM it had changed to move westward three feet and only slide back one.

At 11:30 AM though we noticed the start of what we’ve called a feeding frenzy. There were a lot of tumored, mutant zombies around now. And a lot of Ragers … bad combination. We figured it was the noise that was agitating them. We had begun to hear the roar and crunch of the forward NRSC line.

Brian and a couple of the other guys that had been lying on top of the tallest parts of the Wall scrambled down quickly and put the word out that the NRSC line was within visual distance, though still nearly a mile off. Debris could be seen falling and being kicked up through gaps in the thinning smoke. But, the line was pretty ragged. The foot soldiers were taking the worst of it. I’m not sure how many they had started with but they had to have lost quite a few considering how many we watched go down.

I was getting really nervous. They weren’t turning or deviating from their path. I kept thinking of all those fruit trees that had just started coming back from the damage they had experienced during the Big Horde. Pictures of all of our storage pools came into my mind as well and all that we had hoped to salvage from the buildings. WE were going to be the ones to bring the buildings down in an efficient manner when we were ready. Now I could just make out all the damage and destruction that those vehicles had to be perpetrating. The Wall was strong but it wasn’t indestructible.

Suddenly out of the smog and sound came a huge explosion. I’ll be totally honest, I came close to wetting myself it startled me just that bad.

James, who was beside me at my position at the Wall went, “Whooooooaaaaaa! The must’ve found one.”

“Found … one … what … James,” I ground out after I put my heart back in my chest.

“Oh. Um. Well. Hey, here comes Dix and Matt. They can tell you,” and the boy scrambled away pretty quick.

He was on the ladder going down when there was another explosion that nearly knocked me off my feet. What the heck?! I screamed inside my head.

Matt and Dixon had their piranha smiles on. “Oh,” I thought to myself, “they did so not do what I think they did.”

But they had. It seems when they had heard that the hive was on its way they had taken all of the explosives that had been made up to that point and seeded various areas. They did it secretly just to be safe. However, the stuff was apparently a little bit stronger than they had expected.

Scott came up at that point and asked me to get off the Wall. I was more than willing to go at that point, chauvinism or no chauvinism. I hate loud noises. I mean they rattle me very badly. I like loud music, but sudden loud noises does something to me. It’s one of the reasons that I was so resistant to using guns in the beginning; not because I was scared of the guns but because I literally hate the noise they make. I’ve become desensitized to the noise somewhat now, but no one could possibly get use to the kind of deafening noise that those packages of explosives were making.

I guess some of the guys – the ones that were in on this – had rigged up some explosives in the houses that still stood. It was like a trip wire or something or some were like pressure switches. Anyone within our group would recognize the skull and crossbones insignia we put on the doors of a “bad” house … whether it was full of poison to kill an infestation, full of biological debris of some type, or maybe it was black mold … if it had that insignia no one was to go inside it. The houses were secure enough to keep the zombies out but when the armored vehicles tried to bust in or knocked one of them it was enough to set off the trigger.

I looked over to the “bunker” the men had set up and sure enough Austin, Brian, Chris and a few of the others were gathering up more of their “toys.”

Anne saw me and came running wanting to know what was going on. When I told her … and Saen, Becky, Sarah, and Tina who had also come out to the carport … what was going on their faces must have mirrored my own. But it was Anne that pretty much summed it up for the rest of us. Seems Anne can be very, very creative when it comes to potential revenge for not giving us any warning of what they were going to do. I hope Lee knows what he’s doing when he comes home tonight. Saen is not too happy with Glenn at the moment either. Several of the men might find out they are in for a skinning.

About that time three near simultaneous explosions went off. I later found out that was something that Scott and James … my pyromaniacs that tie unseemly numbers of fireworks together on the 4th of July to make the biggest explosion possible for the longest time possible … had rigged up. That one took out one of those big armored vehicles … basically disintegrated it, sending dirt, debris, and metal parts raining down all over the place, including inside Sanctuary.

The men became much more cautious because things had started to get very crazy. My descriptions aren’t doing the facts justice. It has just all been so unbelievable. So over the top that many of us have been near overload for days now.

The feeding frenzy that had been threatening became a reality. You don’t ever want to see thousands of zombies go crazy at the same time. Just like sharks they were biting and snapping at everything animate or otherwise. David said he watched them take huge chunks of flesh out of each other and then spit them out. I heard Lee telling Anne about watching some of the mutants eat other zombies by ripping a chunk out of one and stuffing it in its mouth and then ripping the arm off of another and eating it like a drumstick before reaching into the stomach cavity of yet another and pull intestines out to eat them like thick spaghetti.

And if the zombies were doing that to each other you can just imagine the havoc they wreaked on the hapless NRSC recruits? I myself witnessed them up end one of the small tanks trying to get to the warm bodies inside. There were so many zombies that they clogged up the shredder and it became useless as a weapon of destruction. The foot soldiers took the worst hits. I watched them get dogpiled by dozens of zombies at a time. The only thing their body armor gave them was a few more minutes of pain and terror.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 211 (Tuesday) – February 27 - 1

I can’t believe I dozed off in the middle of my journal entry last night. I’m not the only one who sat down for a second only to wake up an hour or two later, but I’m still a bit embarrassed.

By my best count the booby trap explosives took out no less than three of those big armored vehicles and two of those little tanks. That didn’t stop things though. It came down to the .50 caliber and our other homemade bombs.

We were surprised that none of the NRSC vehicles had mounted guns. We found out today … I’ll right now in a bit … that the lack of mounted guns was a “cost control decision” and a case of underestimation of the opposition they would run into. The NRSC does have mounted guns but for patrols of the central zone and around the new capital … not for zombie combat. That really blew us away, figuratively speaking, because even many raider groups and the pirates had mounted guns and were finding ammo from some place.

The foot soldiers were too busy to target Sanctuary; they were no longer soldiers strictly speaking, but were survivors fighting against overwhelming odds the same as us. The little tanks would never have made it through our gatehouse or Wall and were frankly too busy dealing with the number of zombies they were encountering. The big armored vehicles were a different story however. We later found out that those vehicles were assigned as “rewards” to hard core NRSC “patriots.” They were thought to be nearly indestructible. They were wrong.

We had several try a direct attack on us. Two of them fell to the mounted .50 caliber. Two others tired to attack the Wall from out of range of the gun. Brian got one and Austin the other using our homemade explosives. The explosives and guns didn’t really stop the vehicles themselves but the drivers inside them, giving the zombies time to completely overwhelm all of those inside.

The fifth, and last, to try and take out our Wall nearly made it. Thankfully they were unable to get up enough speed to do anymore than crack the wooden skin on the Wall. The driver was quickly ripped out of the broken window and torn apart. But four of the troopers in the back of the vehicle were able to climb on top of the cab.

It was automatic. We are human. There is an instinct to save our own kind in the face of so many infecteds. We threw down a rope ladder. Three of them made it up, the fourth who was covering for his buddies was pulled off and fell to into the grasping arms of two ragers. There was nothing left for his comrades-in-arm to sanitize.

They didn’t hesitate and threw their lot in with ours. They realized immediately that if they wanted to survive they needed to help defend Sanctuary. It wasn’t until sunset that things had died down enough for Dix and Matt – who had set Angus and Jim to watch the new arrivals during the battle – had the time to demand that helmets and masks be removed.

My Lord, they were just kids. Two boys and one girl. The girl was the oldest at 21, the boys were 16 and 17 respectively. The 16 year old didn’t even look like he had to shave yet, in fact looked younger than James did.

By the time the gloom of sunset had passed into full night the NRSC’s line had moved to the west beyond our sight. They took with them about three quarters of the zombies but that still left a significant number.

We fed and watered and rested as best we could. I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the NRSC kids; apparently they were concerned after my interaction with Jamie. In the end it was James and young Eric who were the most rabid at distrusting the new people. I suppose Dix was right but I did demand that we at least treat them under the Geneva Convention and made sure they had food and water as well before they were locked up for the night. There was some grumbling at that but I reminded them that they had defended the Wall without needing to be coerced into it.

As soon as I could pull Dix aside surreptitiously, I reminded him that if they were kids it might be that they were malleable. Seeing as we don’t know how things are going to work out in the long run, a few less enemies in the world might come in handy at some point. Dix looked at me like maybe I wasn’t quite the fuzzy sheep he expected. I don’t know why folks keep underestimating me like that. I can’t help if I look like someone’s momma … that’s what I am … but I’m also a student of history, interested in current events, and rather more cynical that I guess folks understand.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 211 - 2

After leaving Dix I sat down to write in my journal. I simply meant to lean by head back for a moment to rest my eyes from all the smoke and writing by dim light. I woke up at 4 AM the next morning with the buzzing of a mosquito in my ear and Scott’s head on my lap. I eased up and away, just managing not to wake him.

On the way to my morning ablutions, I overheard James, Samuel, and Eric discussing the NRSC kids. They were quite rabid and without mercy. I could understand Eric, he’d suffered terribly at the hands of the pirates but my own son’s vehemence worried me.

I couldn’t help it. Upon returning from a trip to the latrine, and finding they were still discussing the subject I joined in and reminded them of a few things.

It’s not the “government” that is bad. It is the PEOPLE who currently control the government that are bad. Government in and of itself is merely a means to an end, a system without emotion or life. At the individual level we govern ourselves, our actions, so as to make our lives as easy and pleasurable to us as possible. At the family level, parents govern their children in order to raise them in such a way as to become productive members of the society in which they participate. At the local level, such as here within Sanctuary, we have come together and created a society that puts a high value on being self-sufficient and self-governing. The reason we can do that is because the members of our society, barring a few examples here and there, are responsible and strive to be agreeable and interact in constructive ways so that not only do we thrive as individuals but as a whole community.

When the USA was original envisioned great men, though flawed and imperfect its true, came together to create a government that did not limit the individual but gave the individual scope to become better, where they could strive to improve their lot in life. That vision included certain guaranteed freedoms … what we came to call The Bill of Rights … as well as a reasonably sized federal government that was there to shepherd rather that usurp individual and state rights.

At some point down the road those that managed our system of government, those that we elected, began to reinterpret individual rights and freedoms and those that elected them forgot that freedom did not come free; they lost the understanding of the concept of personal responsibility and self-sufficiency, buried as it become under the concept of entitlement. They also lost the understanding of community responsibility. No longer were orphans and widows supported by individuals who knew them and cared for them, suddenly that responsibility was seeded to the state and federal governments who were ill equipped to do the job right. Generations suffered from this. And the injustices inherent in the reinterpreted vision were perpetuated again and again.

Then an apocalyptic even occurred. Civilization began to crumble and our government that had gone from lower case “g” to uppercase “G” was in danger; and so too was the livelihood of all those that had become dependent on the Government for their cradle to grave existence. Large numbers of both good and bad people who had been part of the perpetuation of “the system” died. And into this vacuum came the NRSC.

It’s not always a bad thing when change must occur. But in the case of the NRSC and their apparent takeover of the Federal system, it was. The people at the top were self-serving and megalomaniacal. To have called them sociopaths or psychopaths would not really be true. They were simply human, had found a system in which they thrived and were prosperous, and were going to defend and perpetuate that system so that they were even more powerful and prosperous. It’s their methods that suck.

I asked the boys to consider just a few things before I left them. I asked them where would they stand if they hadn’t experienced life here in the quarantine zone? I asked them to consider the possibility that if they really didn’t know what was going on out here, if they were being given false or distorted information, would they be any more or less likely to wear the black uniform? Lastly I asked them, and Eric particularly felt this, if they had lost all they held dear and someone offered them a chance at revenge against what or who was supposed to have taken their dear ones from them, would they jump at the chance to do so, even if that meant putting on a uniform of a group you weren’t in total agreement of?

As the boys left, irritated at my unwillingness to march in their parade of self-righteousness, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had helped or harmed things. I turned around and nearly jumped out of my skin.

Dammit, I hate it when I squeak like that. Scott and Dix were standing there listening to what I had said to the boys. I knew they both probably had some response to make. What they said was what really surprised me however.

Dix wanted me to talk to the NRSC kids and see if I could find out anything useful. I was one of the few in the compound willing to be open minded enough to not scare the heck out of them apparently. However, I had rules I had to follow. I wasn’t to promise them anything. I wasn’t to interact with them except superficially. I would be the one to take their breakfast to them but I would have two guards. I was to get no more than three feet away from Curtis or Chris at any given time. If I couldn’t agree to abide by those rules they would figure something else out.

Not wanting Angus or Glenn to be the “something else” I quickly said of course. Dix left to go make arrangements and Scott just sighed while looking at me.

I was right; he did have something specific to say. He was worried that I was being too kindhearted and empathetic; that I would be too soft in my handling of the new people. On the other hand he hadn’t been around when I dealt with Jamie. He doesn’t really know how far I’m willing to go if it is for the sake of my family … of those I now consider family. How much of a manipulator I am capable of being. How dangerous I am capable of being.

I think there are some illusions that need to be maintained in order for spouses to coexist for long periods of time. I know my dad protected mom from some of the things he had done in the military and I know that Scott has tried to protect me from some of the things that they’ve had to do around Sanctuary. For my part I believe it best that Scott doesn’t need to know that often I am only weak when I know that his strength is sufficient to carry me. He doesn’t need to know that I would be walking in there with two of my dad’s knives secreted up my shirt sleeves. He also doesn’t need to know that there are places that I know I can go within myself that would scare the bejeebers out of most of the people who know me … or think they do. I will always do what I need to do. It may be hard to live with, but living with my choices will always be easier for me than living without my family would be.

I wanted our prisoner to be willing to share information. I wanted a constructive interaction with them. I did plan on giving those kids a chance to show they weren’t a lost cause. In the end I thought to myself, “Well, two out of three isn’t bad.”

"Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility." I forget where I read that, but it has stuck in my mind for years.

Breakfast for our prisoners was grits and scrambled eggs with a flour tortilla to scoop it up with served on paper plates and fresh water in paper cups. I didn’t want to give them anything that could be misused. I saw too many of those “inside prison walls” documentaries not to realize that even the most innocuous item can be turned into a weapon. And our experience with the last NRSC group we came into contact with reinforced that out with extreme prejudice.

The kids wolfed down the food, amazed that everything was fresh and reasonably plentiful. They also couldn’t believe we had good water. The girl, her name was Bobbi Berkshire, revealed that food and water was a problem back in the Central Zone, and an even worse problem along the NRSC supply lines. Bobbi fit her name to a tee. Tall and willowy with hair that curled in an unfortunate way that she had cut mercilessly short in an attempt to control it … and deal with the fleas and lice that had run rampant through the squads three months ago when she had been assigned to a Recovery Crew in Baja.

The 16-year-old gave off the aura of someone who is surprised that not all of the survivors out in the quarantine zones weren’t sicko mutants that wallowed in our own filth. He wanted to know where we kept our “pet” zombies. I thought Chris was going to start laughing outright at the poor kid. I don’t know where Daniel (that was the kid’s name but he hadn’t grown into it yet) had been for the last seven months but he sure hadn’t had much credulity knocked into him … he was as green as a fresh cut willow branch.

Landes … yeah, that really was his name and he was excessively proud of it … was the 17-year-old and a right good size pain in the butt in more ways than one. The boy was arrogant and snide; two characteristics that twist my guts. He kept talking about how we should seriously consider just surrendering as it would go easier for us that way. He felt “some responsibility” since we had “assisted” their escape … I wish there was some way for me to get across just how wonked this kid sounded. Here he was, a prisoner in a compound that had withstood zombies, raiders, pirates, and everything the NRSC had thrown at us up to that point and he still made it sound like he was the one doing us a favor.

Daniel looked a little bit too much like a hero-worshipping puppy when he looked at Landes. Bobbi on the other hand wouldn’t look at Landes at all; in point of fact she looked like she was having a hard time not delivering a hearty dope slap to the back of his head.

I asked Bobbi in a sotto voice if she needed a little … uh hmmm … privacy. Her response was immediate and in the affirmative. I sent for and got permission from Dix to escort Bobbi to one of the vacant houses so she could wash up without having to have adolescent males watching.

Anne came with us and Chris and Curtis stood outside the front door. Anne looked at me, wondering where I was going with this or if I was going anywhere at all. I looked at her with big, innocent eyes and she got the message. But, so had Bobbi. Smart girl. Nice to know that not every female left outside the quarantine zones were air heads or butch bitches.

“You want to know what’s up,” she said.

“Of course we do,” I admitted. “But feel free to clean up. That offer was genuine.”

“Thanks. Danny is OK but Landes is a nasty little jerk off.”

While Bobbi took advantage of some space and privacy … or at least as much as Anne and I were willing to give her … she explained a few things.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 211 - 3

She was a junior at the University of Denver studying psychology and social work when the first NRS outbreak in the states had been reported. She admitted there was a lot of deterioration in the social fabric until the NRSC showed up and organized things. They stopped the panic, organized food and water distribution, helped to keep the utilities own by taking over the management of the natural gas and coal reserves, and started creating a defense force that were initially only assigned to protecting the remnants of the federal government that had relocated into the area and give support to local militias.

“Everyone should have realized something wasn’t right when they started convincing the local militia members to disarm and let the NRSC handle things. It was supposed to be so the average citizen could go back to work and to taking care of their family like normal … none of us understood at the time that normal was never coming back.”

It had gone downhill from that point onward in terms of personal freedoms. By the beginning of October a mandate for giving the NRSC so many hours of the week in service had been put into place ostensibly for gathering up supplies and preventing hording. By the end of the month there was an actual draft. A lot of the early draftees simply disappeared, likely victims of the early and poor planned attempts at zombie control. Things got so bad after Thanksgiving that they lowered the draft age to 16.

“That’s how they got Danny. He was living with his grandparents who had a real houseful from taking in so many relatives. He was actually grateful for the chance to leave. Families of draftees are supposed to get a one-time bonus payment in food and fuel but I’ve heard rumors it takes forever to collect on that.”

The NRSC no longer even bothers trying to make their actions seem benign. It’s total allegiance to the NRSC or you are considered an enemy combatant and have your home and supplies taken away as fines, the adults are sent to outposts and the kids are funneled into the NRSC’s education programs; sounds more like re-education and indoctrination.

The NRSC controls the media so the people in the Central Zones really aren’t aware of how things truly are out in the Quarantine Zones. Apparently its like reporting on natural disasters. The only people to make it to the television are the stereotypes. A large, muumuu covered woman with Dolly Parton-sized assets says of the tornado, “You shoulda just heard it. It sounded like a freight train. And there was ghost lights. My granny always told me if you saw ghost lights then someone was gonna die. I just knew right there someone I loved was gonna tie and shore ‘nuff my doll baby died!” At which point she breaks down in hysterical tears. Only, “doll baby” turns out to be her ancient and overfed Chihuahua that didn’t die until after the storm when he choked on the twelfth doggie treat of the day.

Bobbi said that the NRSC really made the survivors in the quarantine zones sound like fruitcakes one minute and thundering hordes the next intent on taking everything away from the people in the central zone out of jealousy. And they made themselves out to be defenders of all that was good and right in the central zone and messiahs who would rescue the “deserving” from out of the quarantine zones.

“I’ve seen the pictures though. They weren’t doctored. There are some whack jobs out here in the quarantine zones. And I’ve found in more than a few raider battles. What makes you people different?”

I tried to explain she was getting a skewed view. Life in the quarantine zones was hard, not mistake. Your average softy wasn’t going to make it. You needed to be self-sufficient and willing to be ruthless if necessary. We did have groups like the “filthies” and pirates and raiders but personally I believed they were fewer than the survivor groups who were just trying to make their own way and better their lives. And some of those groups … particularly the filthies … likely wouldn’t survive more than another year or two simply because how they lived was so dangerous.

“If you are talking about that group of low-hygiene targets south west of here the hive got them already. We dropped a beacon into their camp and they set it off early by trying to dismantle it. I guess they thought there was something valuable inside the box.”

I didn’t like how unconcerned she sounded but I suppose it was nothing but a fact or statistic to her. As much as the filthies had disgusted me, I still saw them as people.

“Look, you won’t have any trouble with me. I’d like to shed the NRSC. It wasn’t my idea to join up, I’m a draftee and we aren’t anything but cannon fodder. And if you can get Danny away from Landes he’ll clean up real quick. He’s nothing but a puppy and can be retrained. Landes though, he’s hardcore. That little bastard has dreams of becoming a member of the NRSC Council if not the damn Chairman of the Board. He’s real ambitious. He’s a good fighter, but it’s all about where his reputation can take him and not really the cause he is fighting for. You get it?”

Yeah, I got it all right. And it was just about like I suspected in the first place. We have a cynic, a puppy, and a wannabe … and it looks like they could all be a pain in the butt.

Then I asked her about the feds and the US military. Both still exist but the federal government officials are basically figureheads. They don’t have any real power. Pre-NRS the Congress had gotten so heavily infiltrated by NRSC supporters and those that owed them favors that they had were nearly a moot point as soon as New York occurred. And the Prez … well, rumor had it that he had thought he was the one controlling the NRSC when it turned out that the tail was wagging the dog. After the plane crash and the “appointment” of replacements, the NRSC came out of the closet.

As far as the military goes, that’s the wild card. See there are a lot of service men and women at all levels that take their oath to protect the US Constitution extremely seriously. When the NRSC made its grab for power and for all intents and purposes nulled the Constitution many upper level military officers broke away. The Navy and the Coast Guard continue to patrol the coasts and watch for foreign incursions on US soil. They also have taken it as their solemn duty to control, if not eradicate as many violent pirate groups as possible and will work in conjunction with any coastal community that will allow them to port and trade for food and water to support their troops.

The marines are all over the place in pockets, and rumor has it that some have even taken to making incursions into the central zones to liberate some of the “camps” the NRSC has set up. The same for the Army although they are primarily vested in a few of the western and eastern quarantine zones, trying to hold some of the last military bases. The USAF partners with the Army and the Navy providing air and radar support where possible.

On occasion the US military branches will cooperate with the NRSC when they feel they have no other option as was the case here in Florida. The NRSC said either cooperate or that they would use nukes to eradicate the zombie nests. The USAF and the US Navy agreed to run tactical and surgical air strikes to encourage the zombies to head toward the coast. As irritated as I am by the bombing runs, it explained the difference in the bombing runs and the land based maneuvers; the military had striven for little to no collateral damage while the NRSC just didn’t give a rat’s behind who got in their way.

We had stalled for as long as we could and it was time for Bobbi to rejoin the boys. To blow a little smoke screen Anne and I carried a couple of buckets of water for Danny and Landes to wash up with. Sure enough they were disgruntled that Bobbi had been gone so long. They were only slightly mollified when they saw the water and soap we had brought for them. Of course Landes had to be a jackass.

“You gonna watch?” he said in what he thought was some kind of manly leer I guess.

Anne, in quick retort, “Watch what little boy?”

Bobbi cracked up laughing and I couldn’t help but smile as well at the look on Landes’ face. But then he charged catching me off guard.

I’ve seen Curtis move quickly more than once but he always surprises me when he does it. Landes was on his butt and on the other side of the “prison container” before I had the chance to pull one of my knives. Both Bobbi and Danny were shocked at how fast the situation deteriorated. Landes is a big boy and apparently pretty handy with his fists. Curtis is short and slight; it’s easy to forget that he is a master at hand-to-hand defense and accidentally underestimate him.

But Curtis wasn’t the only one that went into motion. One of my knives was out of its sheath on my exhale. Chris had Landes covered with his weapon and Damion and young Eric that had been outside of the door on guard duty stepped in and had Bobbi and Danny covered. And Anne … she wasn’t that much of a hand with a gun, but she had her own version of scary … had a taser out (probably something that Lee had built for her) and directed at a particularly tender portion of young Landes’ anatomy.

From the look on Landes’ face I don’t think he’ll do that a second time. I also have a feeling that Bobbi will enjoy putting the needle to Landes for a bit after she finished kicking the boy’s butt around the container a couple of times for causing the ruckus in the first place. I hope she can defend herself. She proved useful and while I’m not sure I like her I don’t exactly dislike her either. She’s a still beautiful young woman without a protector and I don’t think that works any better in the Central Zone than it does out here in the Quarantine Zones. Her eyes have dead spots in them where it looks like she’s seen her own share of problems.

We didn’t let Landes off with a scare because we were being nice. Had our weapons gone off inside that steel container we could have had some serious ricochet going on. And we weren’t sure that those three were at the end of their usefulness either. At least not at the time. Had Bobbi or Danny backed Landes up however it probably would have been a blood bath. The only other thing besides trying not to get into the line of fire, that stopped me from gutting Landes was the fact that he wet his pants … from the smell of things probably something else as well. Obviously Landy-boy isn’t the big bad he likes to think he is. The shame of having to clean himself up after he siting in it for a while cooled his ardor for being a bully, for a little while any way.

By that time it was lunch and the prisoners weren’t my priority any longer. I made sure my family got something to eat out of the huge cauldron of soup that Becky and Tina had been cooking and then I went to see what kind of damage had been done to my gardens.

There were lots of wilted plants but a short burst with the drip hose system perked most of them back up. The lack of real sunlight was causing problems too, but there was nothing I could do about that. I pulled about a bushel of turnips that were ready and cut the first tender leaves of turnip greens. I would roast the turnips in wine, honey, and butter for dinner after cubing them and would cook the greens with some bacon grease. Betty and Reba were making a roast from the haunch of one of the Kudu that had been picked off during Noah’s parade.

I hope those animals made it to someplace safe. We’ve had to take so many I don’t know if we cut their numbers down too far for successful breeding to occur. Not to mention the hunting around here will probably be very thin for a while; at least until the animals feel safe enough to return to their old territory, if they ever do. We are going to be very dependent on our domestic animals and what we’ve already hunted and smoked for maybe an entire season or more.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 211 - 4

James and Scott found me out pulling weeds and wanted to hear my version of what had occurred. They were both extremely angry. Not really at me though with everyone being on short sleep it kind of came off that way. I was too tired to fight and told them so. Dix and Matt walked up and said they’d heard Anne’s side now wanted to hear mine. I said fine and went over everything we had learned from Bobbi, reminding them that it was what she said and not necessarily the whole truth, as well as what happened in the prison container.

After going over the story a couple of more times and clarifying some things I left discussing how to correct the problem of the ricochet danger. James followed me back to the house demanding to know what I hadn’t just used my machete on Landes.

I tried to explain myself but wasn’t doing much good. James was just too angry; not just at Landes but at anything from the Central Zone generally and anyone in a black uniform particularly. I know I need to handle this right. After World War II it was over a generation before Japanese Americans could live in relative peace without having to pay the price for what Japanese nationals had done at Pearl Harbor and in the Pacific. It’s taken nearly as long for Americans of German decent to shed the shadow of the Nazi regime. Pre-NRS many Middle Easterners were painted with the same broad brushstrokes that were used to characterize terrorists that claimed to be Muslim extremists … even the ones that were Christian for generations. All that mattered was skin color or ethnicity.

That way lays continued destruction. I don’t want that for my kids. For one thing it is too easy. You don’t really have to think about a person, or justify your actions, when all you see is a color or language or whatever it is that makes them different from you. I didn’t expect everyone to live in harmony and happiness with rainbows and candy canes. I did expect personal responsibility and accountability. I did expect people to prove their worth and value and to earn respect rather than feel like they were entitled to it. Not everyone is going to get along all the time. There may even be groups that don’t get along most of the time. So be it, but let it be for valid reasons and not just how someone was born or the family they were born into.

“James, honey, I wish I had the words to make everything that has happened right and back the way they used to be. Even if I could though I don’t know if I would want to erase all the growing and maturing you’ve done … that I’ve done. You have a right to be angry. But put your anger to constructive use. Don’t blast it widely and indiscriminately. Hold each individual responsible for their own actions. Yes, Landes has turned out to be a real punk. You were right that time. But Bobbi and Danny still have the potential to become informed and then to choose a different path. Landes too for that matter though I think he will probably get his fool self killed before he changes his ways.”

“God mom, we aren’t in church and I don’t need a sermon.”

“And I’m not giving you one so don’t be a smart aleck. I’m just telling you that you need to be thoughtful about things … not to think ‘em to death but so that when you do take action it has the greatest impact for good and the greatest level of constructiveness that you can attain at that point.”

“Is that why you went after Samson and all those other crazy things that you’ve done?”

“I thought I asked you nicely not to talk to me like that? Look, I’m not telling you that I’m the perfect example. What I’m trying to do is share with you the fact that I’m aware that I make mistakes and they are mistakes I don’t want you to make. You’ll make your own. I’m bad about acting hot-headed. I’ve got a temper. It’s put me in situations that could have had a serious impact on your dad, you and the other kids not to mention on Sanctuary in general. Things have generally turned out well, but they could just as easily have gone the other direction. All I’m asking you is to put more thought into the prejudices you are choosing to have. Make them logical and directed towards the ones that are truly accountable.”

“You mean just left all those troopers off without any kind of penalty for following bad leaders.”

“No, but make the punishment fit the crime.”

“And how am I supposed to do that?!”

“Honey, if I had the answer to that … Look, for whatever reason it seems the NRSC has been able to horn swaggle a lot of people in the Central Zone. Not everyone, but quite a goodly number. But from what I heard it sounds like the tide is turning. People that make the choice to change direction on their own will likely stay the new course much better than those that are coerced or forced into making a change.”

“Yeah, well, it doesn’t sound like they are changing fast enough.”

“How do you know? For one, we don’t even know with 100% surety that what we learned from Bobbi is the whole truth or even a half truth.”

“Why do you do this?”

“Do what?” I asked confused at the sudden change in subject.

“This … this … I don’t know what to call it. You always make things hard.”

“What? Because I’m asking you to think?”

“Yeah,” he answered more quietly. “It’s easier just to be mad. I don’t want to think about them being real people. They are just the enemy.”

“Well, to me that sounds too close to what the NRSC is doing. They are forgetting … or don’t care … that there are people left out here in the Quarantine Zones. I don’t intend or being just as bad as they are. Whatever we wind up building, I want it to be better than it was before.”

“Let me guess … umm … nirvana? Paradise?”

“There’s that smart mouth again. And no, that’s not what I mean. Frankly I think we humans will always need something to battle or we’ll grow soft and start battling each other over stupid stuff. The sharpest swords are created from the flames. I’d rather keep battling zombies the rest of my life than to go back to the mess our country had been heading towards before. But if we have a chance to change and be something better I don’t see what I shouldn’t keep pushing for that to happen.”

“Whatever. I’ve got to go on duty.”



It’s as we always suspected but never wanted to really give up hope of something different … we’re on our own.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 211- 5

Lord I felt old at that moment. I’m not really idealistic but I do believe in having ideals. I believe there are things worth striving for even if we know they are 99.9% unattainable in this life. This life we were leading has changed my children in ways I never expected it to. For good or bad I was going to have to learn to live with that.

I went back to my bedroom to wash my face and to try and freshen up a bit. Scott came in while I was changing shirts and grabbed me around the waist and in a cuddle hug and told me, “I’ve been informed by suddenly enlightened 16 year old son that God made women solely to give men a hard time.”

“Oh? And how did he come to this state of enlightenment?”

Scott just laughed and nuzzled my neck. “Don’t worry about it. One of these days he’ll learn to appreciate it.”

“You don’t think I’m making more of this than I should?”

“I’m thinking you just want your kids to have a good life and this is your way of trying to ensure it.”

“That’s not an answer of yes or no.”

“Well sugar, that’s the only answer you’re gonna get. Just ease off a bit. You’ve given him something to think about, now give him some space to do the thinking. Belaboring the point every time he turns around isn’t going to work.”

“And you know this because you’re a guy.”

“I know this because I love you and know you want to fix things right away when sometimes it would be better if you would just give things time to fix themselves … and because I’m a guy.”

I mumbled and groaned a little bit in complaint but admitted to myself, if not him, that I knew he was right. Beating a dead horse wasn’t going to make it get up and walk any sooner.

Scott and I were necking a little when Johnnie and Bubby come crashing in, stopped short and went, “Ewwwww!”

Scott said, “I forgot to lock the door.” I said, “You forgot to lock the door.” And then we both couldn’t do anything but laugh.

Rose called from the other room, “Um, Dad … Mom … you need to come out here right away! They need you outside!!”

Rose is normally so self-contained. Scott and I knew right away it had to be something extraordinary for her to get this obviously excited.

As soon as we stepped out the front door we heard it. That distinctive “chop-chop-chop” of large fan blades. It was a helicopter … a big one, not one of the news or traffic helicopters that I was used to seeing around town so many months ago. Not even an emergency medical helicopter. It was even bigger than that helicopter out of that move Black Hawk Down, at least I think so but what do I know. All I know is that it was big sucker with a huge down draft. No one has slowed down long enough since so I could ask.

Oh, and it wasn’t black … it was kind of a grayish color; definitely military, possibly Navy since it came from a carrier out in the Gulf but it could be one of the Marines’ aircraft since that was what was on board. Either or. I was excited and scared at the same time. There is just something about the sight of the US military that always makes me think of Daddy and growing up a military brat.

We have guests.

I haven’t been formally introduced yet. The troops they had on board are camped off to one side of the helicopter and the guys in charge are holed up with Dix, Matt, and several others. The troops are eating rations they brought with them but we managed to have enough veggies and roast to feed the officers on board.

Scott was able to relay me a little info so that I wouldn’t get too wound up and worried. They definitely were US Military. They were trying to transport out any recoverable equipment … not to the NRSC but for their own use. The NRSC line has been decimated with only about ten percent of their original force making it to the rendezvous point for extraction. The NRSC troops are not very happy with their commanders at the moment.

And nor is the citizenry in the Central Zone who got to see some of the fiasco beamed right into their homes; at least until the NRSC was able to retake the local broadcasting stations. An active civil war erupted in an attempt to oust the NRSC from the Central Zone. It’s turning into a blood bath for both sides. They expect that the civil war will last throughout the next several months, possibly only coming to a complete halt when winter sets in again.

The US Military has been as devastated by NRS as the rest of us civilians; in some ways even more so. Trained personnel for some of the equipment are few and far between because of all of the specialization required. And spare parts are also a problem. Much of the equipment that was scavenged from military bases was confiscated by the NRSC. The military is slowly retaking this equipment but there are still serious shortages.

For the moment there are as many anti-military people in the Central Zone as there are anti-NRSC. Because of this the military will remain observers of the main battles. Their main goal is to retake the strategic bases within the Central Zone and remove the nuclear threat.

That’s about all I know at the moment. Oh, and that they’ve agreed to take our three prisoners off our hands. Bobbi is more than willing to go. Danny is scared that he is in some kind of trouble but has also become enthralled by the medic that had been aboard the helicopter.

Well, I guess I do know something else. Sickness is becoming a huge problem and the mortality rates that existed prior to the wide-availability of antibiotics and life-extending health care are returning. The military are now very careful about taking prisoners or civilians in without first giving each one as thorough a field exam as possible.

The medic was pretty amazed that we’ve managed as well as we have without any major problems. He was purely blown away at how healthy the kids were, and was extremely interested in how well the kids that had been abused by the pirates had come back.

That’s when I got pulled into the conversation. Ski embarrassed the heck out of me. I tried to explain that I wasn’t doing anything other than what I had done before what they are calling “The Fall.” We try and plan three decent, nutritionally balanced meals per day. I’ll feed the kids vitamins every day until they finally run out. It’s just part of our routine, even for the teens and young adults. We are careful with our water and Ski doesn’t tolerate anyone not reporting injuries, even if they are “minor” ones.

But then he got into the herbals and natural remedies. I’m no homeopath, I just try and use some commonsense. I just try and use more traditional methods in cases where medications might not be available or where it might not be the best use of the medication. For instance, when I have a headache I’ll drink a cup of betony tea … not the tastiest tea available but better than using our Tylenol or Exedrin that could be better put to some other use. I use a cold thyme tea for a child’s fever. I have a cayenne pepper mix that is the bomb for warding off the flu or helping to keep it mild if you do catch it. And for a bit of energy I’ll mix a tablespoon of honey into a tablespoon of cider vinegar and then add that to a glass of cold water. It actually tastes pretty pleasant, like a cider lemonade.

I explained that my philosophy was moderation in all things. I’m not totally hung up on natural remedies nor am I totally against the benefits of modern medicine; I’m just trying to marry the two of them into a commonsense approach so that we get the biggest bang for our buck out of the supplies we have.

Rose and Melody said that they helped one of the young injured female soldiers. She got a little roughed up during a brawl with a couple of NRSC troopers a couple of days back and one of the scrapes on her back is trying to get infected. She is only one of two females on the helicopter … now that I’m thinking about it I think she called it a Stallion although that might just have been a joke … the other female is an officer and was talking with the men.

I’m very tired. It seems like forever since I got a decent night’s sleep. I don’t want to go to bed but I don’t think I have much choice at this point; it’s either go to bed or fall asleep on my feet and fall flat on my face. James, who is nearly as wary of the military as he is the NRSC, is still on guard duty. Angus said he slept for a few hours in one of the guard houses but I could tell at dinner that he is getting that drawn look he gets when he gets too tired and then tries to get sick. I’ll get Scott to talk to him tomorrow; I doubt he’d take anything I said with any pleasure right now. David isn’t much better but he tends to be wary of everyone even after he’s known them for a while. Scott is up and wired which worries me as much as James being overly tired.

I put the littles to bed when the medic from the helicopter was through giving them a looksee. The medic said very young children are rare outside of the Central Zone, the life it too hard and there are too many dangers. That makes me very sad. It sounds like we may have lost nearly an entire generation out in the Quarantine Zones. Pregnancies that make it to full term without complications are just as rare apparently … in all the zones.

I want Scott to come to bed soon. The helicopter brought some hope and excitement but that’s beginning to wear off as reality … the wider reality we are facing … sets in. There are still many thousands of zombies outside the Wall. And now we know for certain that no place has been spared. There isn’t a Calvary that is waiting in the wings for the right moment to ride in and help us. The troubles that we could have left behind by combining efforts of dissimilar philosophies continue to hamper recovery efforts in our country. And I’m not sure I even want to know what is going on in the rest of the world.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 212 (Wednesday) – February 28

Full day today. Not bad, not good, just … I don’t know … just kind of anticlimactic I guess. We are still stuck and I was hoping for some type of resolution. I guess in this life you don’t always get what you want when you want it.

We fed breakfast to the military as well as the three NRSC personnel this morning. Landes had a snotty attitude but was kept in check. Danny was very subdued though he continued to watch that medic like a hawk. I know that Landes was giving some heck over it; guess he didn’t like losing his sycophant. Found out after breakfast, from Bobbi, that Danny’s father was an EMT and his grandfather a volunteer firefighter which might explain the fascination.

So that made 15 extra for breakfast and I just decided to do up pancakes. I threw a big griddle on the outdoor grill that we had built to go with the wood cook stove, so with both work stations up and running we were just able to keep up with the crowd. Betty and Reba browned sound ground sausage and mixed in onions and peppers for those that wanted a little protein with their cakes. Regular pancake syrup is getting to be a luxury and will likely stay that way until the sugar cane makes. If it doesn’t I can only hope that the beehives that Mr. Morris is tending do well. The bees certainly haven’t like the smoke we are suffering with.

Not long after breakfast was completed the helicopter prepared to leave. Landes must have run his mouth. He left in those plastic ties (as opposed to handcuffs) but Bobbi and Danny did not. I don’t expect to see those three again but I hope wherever they do wind up they put their youth and enthusiasm to good use.

The helicopter’s departure left a hole. They weren’t even here for 24 hours yet the presence was pretty significant. Of course we still have the zombies for company. According to word received today, there has been a complete pull back of NRSC troops out of the Quarantine Zones. I guess they are trying to secure their position in the Central Zone. We’ll have to wait on info from that. But that means that we get to deal with and clean up the mess they left behind.

The only relief in regard to the zombies is they appear to be reforming a horde and moving ever so slightly moving in a westwardly directly. I’m not going to count on it, but it does at least seem that way. I just hope it’s not wishful thinking on our parts.

I spent the remainder of the day helping to go over the inside of the Wall. Things have held together incredibly well all things considered. The outside of the Wall needs some repair but the wooden skin served its purpose and we don’t have any breeches in the still containers that comprise most of the Wall’s structure. There hasn’t been any undermining of the foundation either which is good news as well.

While checking on various stretches of the Wall I also checked on the gardens. We desperately need rain. I gave everything another spurt with the soaker hoses and did some spot watering where it was particularly bad but that left our garden cisterns half empty. Tomorrow, if we are still corralled inside Sanctuary, Scott says he will see if he can start digging ag wells out by each garden and set up some solar power for them. The motor wouldn’t have to be a big one if the well isn’t deep and all I want to do is run soaker hoses so the pressure wouldn’t have to be that great either. We probably have all the parts he needs in the storage containers, it will just be a matter of actually hitting water and running the lines.

Lunch was an impossible chicken pot pie that I helped to make using canned chicken, canned veggies, some creamed soups, and some Bisquick that was nearing the end of its life. It didn’t appeal to everyone but at least every fourth meal or so I’m trying to use up ingredients from our storage that are just about to go off. I’d rather have a less than stellar meal right not than have no meal at all later because we used up all of our favorite food first and the less desirable stuff was left to spoil on the shelves.

Dinner was a bit better than lunch though I think no one was much in the mood to eat except that it filled up the time. We made a pork stew from one of the warthogs that we took a while back and added turnips that came from the garden to go with some of the dried veggies that we used. We made huge pans of cornbread rather than biscuits because we are starting to ration the flour we have.

From reports from the military the fire is still very bad but it has moved closer to the coast. I know there are – were – a lot of small survivor groups along the coast. I hope they are able to move out of the way. The map of the fire’s path of destruction is pretty bad. That’s one of the things that Matt and Dix were able to find out from the military officers. Every step forward seems to be four or five steps back for the Quarantine Zones. If I wasn’t so certain that there was no such thing as fairness in this life I’d complain about it.

I suppose the one positive thing that we can say about the fire is that it was so hot with no mitigation that where it burned it was alike cauterizing a wound, burning off the chaff, or any other simile that you might think of. With a little bit of rain, by this coming winter those areas will return to the wild so quickly they’ll be unrecognizable; by next year you won’t even be able to tell that people ever lived in some of those areas. Hopefully that will take care of some of the rodent and roach problems Florida was having and which likely would have gotten worse.

Thinking about pest animals reminds me of something strange I saw today. Lucky has gotten where she will leave her kittens for longer stretches. We try and save some scraps for her to eat so she can nurse but between her and the dogs and puppies there just isn’t all that much. I’ve been worried that our dogs and cats will go after our domestic livestock if they get too hungry but so far we are doing OK. But to be on the safe side I’ve started mixing grains into their food portions hoping to push that problem away.

Well, I went to take Lucky some food after lunch and she wasn’t there. Everyone knows not to mess with the kittens so I just was listen to them in the box but hadn’t gone over there yet. I could hear them mewing and scuttling about but then I heard one of them let out a little squeak with a lot more rustling. I wanted to make sure nothing had crawled over in there.

When I looked over in the box, there was a little raccoon kit in there grooming the kittens. Then here comes Lucky, she hops in the box and then starts momma grooming all of the kittens … including the raccoon kit. Looks like she adopted an orphan. I had this surreal moment of kinship watching Lucky. I don’t know what will come of the Cat/Raccoon adoption but it should be interesting.

Scott just came in from guard duty and he said that it looks like the zombies are really starting to move to the west. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to witness this migration. Hopefully we’ll begin hearing how other survivor groups tomorrow. Dix thinks everyone is being cautious because of the NRSC and because of the zombies. At least we hope that is the problem; we don’t want it to be because they’ve been wiped out by the fire, or worse by the infecteds.

That’s about as far into the future as we can plan at the moment. Until these zombies move on we are pretty much stuck bugging in here at Sanctuary and I can already tell that some folks are starting to get a little cranky at the restriction.

 

[Griz3752]

Prodigious output Ms Kathy

It may take me a day or two to catch up

OK; could be three. .....

 

[Lake Lili]

Wow... what a read! 2:40am and I can now go to bed having caught up... lol
Thanks Kathy!
Lili

 

[Lone_Hawk]

I hope you didn't lose as much sleep as I did reading this story, there has to be MOAR!!

 

[wilecoyote]

Please ma’am can we have some MOAR?!!

 

[Griz3752]

In no way shape or form is this a complaint, OK?

Remember the 3 days I alluded to?

I'm caught up now . . . .

 

[sssarawolf]

Well, I have to say thank you for sure I am ready for more anytime you have the time and energy to post more.

 

[Kathy in FL]

March: Lions and Lambs



Days 213 – 243




Day 213 (Thursday) – March 1

Another milestone, the turning of another month. March, if it comes in like a lion it is supposed to go out like a lamb. Raspberries on that. We need rain and we need it badly. Bring on some lions already.

According to the records we are keeping we are already down two inches in rain for the year. Doesn’t sound like much but that is a lot considering this is already our dry season. I know the gardens are already suffering and we need whatever we can bring in. We’ve got the animals to feed and ourselves. I had the kids walking down all the rows of corn and hand watering the plants. I know that seems really stupid, but I don’t know what else to do. We’ve got to have that corn crop and not just for the men’s stupid corn liquor. If I hear one more word about that still, I swear I’ll take an ax to it more thoroughly than an old-time revenuer.

“We’ll trade for it.” That’s the only answer anyone seems to have when I tell them that I’m worried the gardens aren’t going to make. “We’ll trade for it.” From who?! With what? For what?!! I tell you what, if they try and use one kernel of that corn for making mash before I’ve got enough canned and dried for the next couple of seasons and I swear I will make a Rager look like Barney the Purple Dinosaur.

And if we can’t trade for it they think we’ll just keep scavenging for it. It was bad enough after the Big Horde. Trees and bushes down all outside the Wall and they were just really getting to where I thought we’d be able to get another season out of them. Now we’ve had a Hive come through … and those idiots with their armored vehicles tearing up everything every which way from Sunday. And the destruction runs for freaking miles in all directions. What the Hive and the NRSC hasn’t destroyed it looks like the fire may have.

There’s been a little bit of noise on the radio; not much, and none of it good. We still haven’t heard from OSAG. I hope Steve and his clan are all right. The NRSC had a hard on against them. Steve told them in a way that no one could misunderstand that they could go screw themselves. I hope to high heavens that they came through OK. If we can just get these stupid zombies to finish going away, or at least thinning out, then Scott, Angus, and Jim said that they would run over there and check things out. Matlock and Glenn are eager to see if Aldea survived and in what shape.

I had the kids on bucket brigade most of the day. They’d take turns pumping water from the hand pump and then running buckets of water to refill barrels and cisterns. That left the kids exhausted and many nearly fell asleep during dinner. Do I feel badly? Yes. Did I do it anyway? Yes. It’s necessary.

I’m so tired I can barely think straight myself, but my back is hurting so bad and my left arm has the shakes so I’m up waiting to see if some herbal tea helps before I go begging for something from Waleski.

It all started this morning. It was still dark, about 4 AM I guess. I was on guard duty on that piece of the Wall that surrounds the pasture area. Right beneath my position something suddenly hits the Wall hard enough to create a vibration in the metal all the way up. My first thought was that the NRSC vehicle right below had somehow been started up again and was trying to make its way inside our perimeter.

There was no moon so it’s not like I could see what was going on exactly. And then came another hit and then another but these felt like they were hitting higher than the first one had. I didn’t see as I had a choice despite it giving our position away. I heard the boots of the other guards coming in my direction. I hit the spotlight to see what the noise was.

By all that is Holy!

I have seriously, not in the seven long months since this all started, seen anything like this … this … this thing. Or zombie. Or … it was an NRS infected. It had on one of the black uniforms that designated it as one of the NRSC troopers … or that it used to be one … what was left of one.

I didn’t have time to think. It was staring right up into my face though there is no way that it could have seen me with what was left of its face.

I brought the shotgun down that Scott had insisted I keep with me when I was on guard duty at night. He said I wouldn’t have to have perfect aim, just the general direction of anything that got close enough to warrant its use in the first place. But I was so badly startled that I forgot where I was. On the Wall. On a smooth metal surface.

I’m terrible with the shotgun. I’m too short … OK, not too short but I just never have gotten the hang of centering my body correctly. And I don’t get enough practice with the shotgun either. We have to watch ammo so gratuitous target practice is now out. So when I brought the shotgun up and around and aimed for the general direction of its head I didn’t take the time to balance myself properly.

I pulled the trigger and just managed to take the very top of the things head off. In the process however I fell backwards, lost my balance and hit the chain that we were using hard enough to snap it. I cartwheeled backwards and came down on the catwalk we had attached to the second level of the Wall.

Apparently, I hit the sturdier guard rail on the catwalk and was bounced back onto the steel mesh floor where I stayed put because I had knocked myself out cold at some point on the way down.

I woke when they were moving me onto a gurney to take me to the clinic. There is almost nothing worse than having those small hairs at the very base of your hairline get stuck on something and yanked on. My hair had come loose from my braid and a few hairs had wrapped around a screw or bolt and when they moved me … youch! I don’t know who was more startled, me coming awake like that or David and James who were carrying the backboard with me on it.

It took some convincing, but they finally put me down and let me catch my breath. I have a goose egg sized bump on the side of my head, and I’ve already started to bruise a nice bright purple but otherwise I think I was more shook up than actually injured. Scott was upset too but I think it was the sight of that ghastly thing that helped everyone get over the fright of my fall.

It had definitely been an NRSC trooper in its human life. Part of the banging I heard was the body armor hitting the Wall every time it jumped. Yeah. It was a climber … well, sort of.

I thought back to the things that we’ve learned up to this point about the zombies. The mutations are dependent on blood type and what type of infected then infects the human. However, there are also variations that can be caused by some blood and neuro disorders or some recessive genetic traits. This boy … or girl, I couldn’t tell and haven’t wanted to ask … must have started out A- blood type. That gave it the “climber” variant of NRS; but it must have had something else going on. Jamie hadn’t learned all of the “typing procedures” before he died and if the military had known that data they hadn’t shared it with us.

The body’s feet and hands were gone. The only thing left were sharp, broken bones where they had been gnawed off by the zombies that brought it down when it was still human. A lot of the soft tissue on its face was also missing. But, what remained of its skin had started to grow … tumors I guess you’d call them. But not tumors like the zombie-eating zombie mutants. These tumors … well … these tumors moved. It reminded me of a sea anemone only anemones are pretty. These things were just plain nasty looking and a pale, sickly white like it had never seen sunlight.

Even after I’d blown the top of the brain off and for all intents and purposes stopped the NRS zombie, those tumors continued to move for another two hours before the whole corpse finally went into advanced decay. In fact we had never seen a zombie decay so quickly before. It must have had something to do with either the disease the human had suffered from or the tumors were continuing to feed off of the corpse even after I had stopped the NRS part of it.

I hope to never see anything like that zombie again. The Mutant zombies with their black tumors are bad enough, this thing was in a whole ‘nother category of horrific. It sunk its bone stumps so far into the wood that it was impossible to detach as a whole piece. We had just about decided to cut it off and dig the bones out of the wood later when the decay process started. There are still some remnants of it attached to the Wall but most of what remained of the flesh and skeletal structure has fallen down to the ground.

I didn’t really get sore from the fall until late in the day. I kept myself pretty busy, mostly to prove to everyone (and myself) that I was OK. I worked in the garden and started the next cycle of crops that need to be planted: bush beans, pole beans, lima beans, cantaloupe, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, okra, blackeyed peas, peppers, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, summer squash, winter squash, tomatoes, watermelon, turnips, beets, carrots, collard greens, kohlrabi, lettuce, mustard greens, peanuts, radishes, and Swiss chard. Some of these I planted at the beginning of last month but I’m trying to keep everything from being ready for harvest all at the same time. I was hesitant to plant more corn because of the drought but I just don’t feel I have any choice. I have to try.

I’m going have to give up. I’ve really pinched something in my back I think. As soon as Scott comes in from the dining hall pow-wow that started even before everyone had finished eating, I’ll wander over to the Clinic and see if anyone is there.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 214 (Friday) – March 2

On the good side of the equation … the zombies are definitely moving westward. Well, staggering westward. OK, some of them are crawling westward. Oh alright … some of them remind me of the scene at the end of that crazy movie Flight of the Living Dead; or any of the other awful zombie movies that Scott and I watched over the years. I mean, things that shouldn’t be possible are. Things that only weird and disturbed individuals should imagine are now part of our daily reality.

I wouldn’t say that life sucks. No. I definitely wouldn’t say that. Life isn’t easy. You can’t just coast through life these days like you could before. There is no entitlement to life these days. You have to work to retain your life and the lives of your children. But in a sense that is what makes it more valuable. You only value those things you have to put effort into attaining and keeping.

People stopped valuing life when it became too cheap. This is the way it used to be: What’s a little murder when there are way too many people in the world anyway? What’s being a bad parent when you can just make another one just like them to replace them if they get taken away or they die? Why not be a portly couch potato when there are lots of doctors and medications and operations that can take care of that later? Why not screw up your family life because you can always get married and divorced until you find your “perfect” mate and you don’t need any kids to muck up your retirement years anyway? After all, it’s all about being the center of the universe and doing what feels right and good at any given moment. No absolutes should be enforced because that would limit a person’s “rights.”

Now it’s not like that anymore. Mother/infant mortality has skyrocketed. Children outside of family groups are an apparent rarity. Family group members (whether biological or sociological) work together for a common goal of survival. Communities work together because together the members can accomplish more than they can separately. People put more thought into their choice of mate because of how important that other person could become to their survival.

But there is still a factor that there are a lot fewer humans populating the world than there used to be. Sometimes regardless of what type of person your first instinct is to save them before you judge them. That explains why we rescued the NRSC troopers when during a regular battle or war we would likely not have. It wasn’t human vs. human like in a raid it was human vs. zombie and the instinct of one human to help another over road everything else.

We here in Sanctuary likely model all of those issues to one extent or the other. Even our singles who have no current interest in any kind of “hook up” with the opposite sex are careful about the relationships they do build. Everyone tries to be more discerning; both in their own choices and in understanding the choices of others.

Now for the bad side of the equation today … the ag wells for the gardens are much more difficult to dig than the one where we were able to water drill it. Scott has an auger but it’s not anywhere near long enough. We either need a longer auger or we need some other type of tool. Scott thinks he could devise something using a compressor but that would mean hooking up one of the generators. That would also mean possibly distracting the zombies from their westward migration.

Caught between a rock and a hard place is what we are. We must have the zombies move out of the area but we must also have water. Without water our crops are going to die. Without water our animals will die. Without water we will die. But if the zombies don’t leave then we are stuck inside this Wall and the same thing will ultimately happen to us anyway.

We have access to our hand pump and the well that is hooked up to solar near our house but hauling that water is very physically intense. We can get by for now so it was decided that we would wait another day, two at most, to see if the zombies are truly going to continue to move out and then we will see whether we can afford to wait on the ag wells.

I spent a good chunk of the day watering in the gardens by hand again … and again with the children’s help. We were all exhausted by the end of the day but it is necessary, especially with the new seeds that I put into the ground yesterday.

Scott organized some of the men to finish pulling down some of the buildings within Sanctuary that have been too damaged to be used as housing. He wants to get it done as soon as possible as he really feels that as soon as possible a significant number of our community members will likely occupy Aldea if it is still possible. Matlock and Glenn seem to be extremely keen on this and spend a good deal of time with some of the others making plans.

I can also tell that Angus and Jim are getting antsy and wanting to simply get out and see how things stand. Those two get itchy feet more than anyone else in Sanctuary. Scott used to be like that but I think he has curbed much of his wanderlust because he knows that something could happen and then I’d be left to raise the kids by myself.

I want to mention that Dix is pretty sick. He opened a package of jerky – none that we made but some that we had collected – and I guess he didn’t notice that it had some mold down in the farthest corner of the package. The poor man puked almost nonstop for a while no matter what we did and he was running a low-grade fever as well. We finally figured out it was food poisoning and where it came from but it’s just going to have to run its course. There isn’t a whole lot that we can do for something like that now that he has already puked everything up. We all must be more careful. If that had been one of the kids it could have been much worse. Or it could have gone into a meal and the whole compound could have come down with food poisoning.

As for my own injuries I’ve been hobbling all day. I’ve got a lump that is a hematoma on the back of my left shoulder and my bra has been absolutely killing me. I’ve switched to a sports bra but that hasn’t helped much because I still have a good dent between my shoulders where the bra clasp dug in. I’m pretty much sore all over for that matter. I’ll live but I’m going to be pretty shades of color for a bit longer than I expected. It could have been worse so I feel I need to be grateful, but I would have been even more grateful not to have fallen at all or not to have run into that freaky zombie.

The zombie has been discussed off and on today by everyone. Josephine and Brandon have started a catalog of zombies and the observations and research data that go along with each will be kept in the library. I’m not sure that it will be of any immediate usefulness but at least it will available for posterity and for us to refer to if we should need it.

As for the bottom line, we are probably better off than we have any right to expect. Yes, we have some very serious challenges facing us but for now they are not insurmountable challenges. What tomorrow will bring is anyone’s guess.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 215 (Saturday) – March 3

Man oh man, when they say it’s the second day after an accident when you are the most sore they weren’t kidding. My mind knows that I’m 42 but my body is telling me it’s closer to 102. Scott and the kids were so sweet I just busted out crying and freaked them all out.

By the dinner time I was so whooped that I didn’t even feel like eating. Rose took Kitty and Sissy while the rest of the kids went with Scott. I was just going to lay down but couldn’t manage to do much more than sprawl across the bed. After dinner was bath time for everyone so I knew I was going to have to get up shortly anyway. I must have dozed ‘cause the next thing I knew a freshly washed and combed Scott said he’d already taken care of the kids and that my bath was ready.

Well, I didn’t think much of it except to kiss him in gratitude for taking care of the kids for me. We’ve been using the term bath and shower interchangeably but really all there were available was showers. I gather up my towel and scrub brush and go to the lanai to cut around to the outdoor shower space we have set up. But as soon as I stepped out onto the lanai I noticed that someone had brought the big wash tub in. And it was full of water. It was full of warm water.

I was still half asleep but still managed to jump pretty good when Scott came out with the decorative screen from out bedroom.

“Sorry, no bubble bath since we’ll have to use this water tomorrow for watering the garden. Go ahead and climb in while it is still warm.”

I must have stayed in the tub for nearly an hour. I’m embarrassed to say that it felt like I was soaking an inch deep layer of grime off my whole body, but it felt soooooo gooooooood. I haven’t felt this clean since I don’t know when. It’s like a sandy beach in the bottom of the tub but I don’t care.

I had a hard time climbing out so Scott had to help and then I took three Tylenol. I’m still sore, but it’s a distant sore rather than a sharp and in your face kind of sore. I just put on a robe and have been sitting here on the lanai writing and enjoying probably some of the last nice weather before the really warm stuff starts setting in. It’s already getting up into the 80s during the day. At this rate we’ll see 90-degree weather before the month is out.

The rotten sour smell from the smoke and zombies wasn’t even too bad. Well, either that or I’m just getting used to it.

Angus and Jim took Juicer and cleared the outside of the Wall. That was a mess and a half. Glenn wants to try and salvage the armored vehicle that tried to take on Sanctuary head on. The plow thing on the front is hung up in the wooden skin and is going to require cutting it out so it will just have to sit there until the zombie population is brought back under control.

Rather than just mashing everything together Angus managed to just kind of pile everything off to the side. I gag thinking about it, but we are going to have to figure out some way to go through all of the corpses for ammo and anything salvageable like those pieces of Kevlar and that plastic looking armor the NRSC troopers were using.

And I know there has to be something interesting that we can use the tracks off of the small tanks and those sling blades for, my imagination just doesn’t want to spit it out right now. The only thing I can come up with would be to reinforce the main road here in Sanctuary … the asphalt and concrete is completely gone in areas now leaving only stretches of eroding limerock. Or possibly to prevent erosion along the edges of the canals.

Speaking of being innovative ... It’s going to take a major amount of work, but David thinks he has come up with a way to ensure a steady supply of renewable food here in Sanctuary requiring very little long-term work on our part. At the bottom of one of the canals that were included into Sanctuary on the last Wall expansion is a spring. The spring doesn’t have much volume but even during the hottest and driest summer there is a section that always has standing water that is about five feet deep.

David thinks that while the water is as low as it is right now would be a good time to dredge out the canal a little better and then shore the embankment with broken concrete, etc. The dredged out dirt will go to fill in the huge raised garden that I started. Then once we get more rain and the newly deepened canal fills up, we can catch fish from water sources outside of Sanctuary and start our own “fish farm” as it were.

David thinks that we can definitely have a healthy catfish population but he’s suggesting we try and put fish in all of the ponds and canals. No gators should be able to enter Sanctuary … we managed to find and close the underwater gap in that one canal; it was an old storm drain that became exposed as the canal has dried up. If we can really make this work we can have bass, gar, bowfin, sunfish, bluegill, and crappie.

We’ll have a year up on Aldea … everyone talks like it is still there so I guess that’s what we’ll assume unless we find out otherwise … for the garden and we have our own citrus grove and wild fruit grove. But Aldea will have access to the river for power and transportation. I can see how the two communities could work hand-in-hand. Sanctuary would grow the majority of the crops and fruit and Aldea would be a strategic and trading center. There would be some things that would remain a specialty of Sanctuary and some things that would become a specialty of Aldea.

Initially everything for Aldea would need to come from Sanctuary. It’s going to take time and a lot of effort for them to arrange the “living quarters” the way Matlock and Glenn are talking about. But eventually Aldea will be ready to be more self-sufficient and will also have something to trade back to Sanctuary. And keeping our eggs from being all in one basket makes good strategic sense as well.

Glenn and Saen said that it would be easier to have rice paddies over at Aldea as the area was situated better for that sort of thing. The two areas we were talking about putting the rice paddies just aren’t going to work. Maybe eventually we can engineer something but not right now. And they are going to have mosquito issues over there anyway so I guess a rice paddy isn’t going to make that much of a difference in that respect. And, the Hillsborough River, even when it gets low, still continues to flow in that area and you need water for rice paddies. And they need to get it in the ground this month or they’ve missed the season.

Ummmm … one food subject leads off into another. Pulled my first Ruby Queen beets. They aren’t as big as I had hoped for but they were good. I know not everyone likes beets but man are they great energy food. Well, I cooked the small batch and turned them into pickled beets to go with our lunch of rice and beans. Betty was so nice, she volunteered to can the rest of the beets that were ready for harvest. She’s teaching anyone that wants to learn out to pressure can. All the women and girls were there and a couple of the guys did it as well. I think they were just bored and looking for something new to try.

The other things that I managed to harvest today are some of the blood oranges, some of the Valencia oranges, some calamondin, and some key limes. The calamondin is a small orange but it is really high in acid. You don’t eat it fresh unless you want your face to fall in. I expected Saen to come up with some outrageously good recipe to use the calamondin in … they get used a lot is Asian cooking apparently … but she wasn’t feeling very well and Glenn got all fussy and put her to bed early. As feisty as Saen is it is easy to forget just how small a woman she really is.

Tomorrow – for fun mind you since it is supposed to be a rest day – I’m going to make a couple of calamondin pies. I’ll save the leftover scraps (peel and pulp) and add it to a batch of calamondin marmalade that I want to make also.

We also need to start preserving more of the loquats. This is the last month for them and they are starting to get so ripe they are falling from the trees. I’m saving all the seeds and I’ve got a bunch going already so hopefully they will propagate. I’m thinking that at some point it might be a good trade idea to have fruit tree and bush seedlings on hand. People are going to want to grow their own food sooner rather than later and a tree or bush that they don’t have to propagate year in and year out would be a labor-saving item.

And when I was weeding around the perimeter of the gardens I found some Florida betony. The betony is a type of wild radish and went really well with some other wild greens that I found. James said the fresh “salad” at dinner looked kind of like what he used to dump out of the lawn mower bag. It was mostly made up of all wild stuff … betony, dandelion, rose petals, parsley, chives, tarragon leaves, mint leaves, some basil, fennel, and a little bit of arugula out of the greenhouse. The salad dressing was pretty Spartan as well … white wine vinegar, honey, mustard, salt and pepper, and olive oil.

I’d given a lot to have seen everyone’s face when they saw what was on the menu but I was too tired. Scott did bring me a tray with some dinner on it and the salad actually tasted pretty good even if it was a little more “peppery” than I normally eat it. The dressing could have done with more honey and less vinegar as well but then I like my dressings on the sweet side.

Well, I think my soak is wearing off and the sore is coming back. I’m going to take another Tylenol and crawl in bed. I saw some lightning off to the north but I think it is only heat lightning. I pray we get some rain soon. Maybe tomorrow the zombie population will be down far enough that some of the men can go out and start collecting ammo and stuff that is lying around. I don’t think they will find as much as they hope but anything will be more than what we have right now.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 216 (Sunday) – March 4

There are still a lot of zombies in the area but they are mostly shamblers; the real dregs of the hive. The ones that are left are still dangerous but many of them are on the tail end of decomposition and don’t seem to have enough together to pick up whatever signal that is driving their group dynamics. These zombies are definitely just moving west because they are sort of being pulled that way, like a leaf floating on top of a current. The leaf is being taken by the current; the leaf doesn’t take advantage of the current.

Well, that’s about as good an explanation as I can come up with anyway. We are still very careful however and a good thing too. The guys ran into one today that acted almost feral. It looked pretty fresh, especially compared to the shamblers in the area; however, it wasn’t an NRSC trooper. It may have been from some survivor group. Who knows?

After a lot of discussion we don’t think it was one of the Hunters that Jamie told us about. This thing wasn’t single minded enough. And I don’t really think it was cognizant but it sure did mimic that pretty well.

Charlene said she had seen some similar to this back near the beginning of the outbreak. She said that people that were bitten outright turned pretty quickly; however, some people that caught NRS from some other way like through a hang nail or small scratch turned very slowly. One guy she remembered turned so slowly they almost didn’t realize what was happening until after he’d stopped eating rations doled out by the Red Cross and had taken to eating animals out in the palmetto stands where no one could see what he was doing. He mimicked humanity until the day he stopped talking and lured a child out to the palmetto stand instead of an animal.

That gave us a lot to think about and even more reason to be careful as we started scavenging through what we could find.

I never puked as I was going through the corpses pockets but it was close a time or two. I kept remember that scene from The Stand and told myself over and over that they were only cord wood. We have a lot of guns – mostly AR-15s and according to Matlock some variations on the Mossberg 500 and the Remington 870 – but not nearly as much ammo as the guys had hoped. Many of the guns are jammed or gunked up and will mostly have to be cannibalized for parts. In the back of a couple of the armored vehicles we did find some flame throwers believe it or not but only a quarter of them actually had any fuel. I guess they were part of their regular equipment but they didn’t want them using them on this mission … or fuel is getting scarce and they never got resupplied.

Glenn is sure he can definitely fix the armored vehicle that tried to ram Sanctuary’s Wall. There really wasn’t anything wrong with it besides that it was stuck. He is also fairly certain that he can rebuild at least one, possibly two, of the other armored vehicles if we can find enough spare parts from the ones that we blew up. They may not be pretty, but they’ll move.

The little tanks are all a washout. I wasn’t the only one thinking of using the tracks as erosion preventers. Matlock wants to reinforce some of the steeper embankments along the river side of Aldea. Scott is getting a bit irritable that Matlock seems to think about how all of the stuff will benefit Aldea and doesn’t seem to realize that it would be more equitable to split things between the two compounds. I know Matt is excited about Aldea’s potential … but its potential still rests in what Sanctuary can provide as far as food and provisions for the first few months anyway. We might be taking it wrong – his way of saying things – I haven’t decided yet. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt until he proves me wrong. I don’t even think it is intentional … more like an over excited kid who wants, wants, wants without realizing how that sounds or the consequences. ‘Course Matlock is no kid and it would probably hack him off if he read this … but in my mind the principle appears the same. I want Aldea to be a success, just not at the expense of Sanctuary. We are going to have to learn to meet somewhere near the middle on this issue before it becomes a problem.

Dix is feeling better today but you can tell he is still pretty rung out. Samuel pretty much stuck close to his dad all day long but would also run back to his mom … who isn’t feeling all that great either … and my Sarah told me that he is really upset and keeps thinking that he might lose one or both of his parents. Then she looked at me with her huge brown eyes and I knew she was asking for some reassurance about Scott and I. I gave it to her. How could I have done otherwise? But she is getting old enough that she is seeing that reality is a far cry from the way it used to be. All we can do is plan and work for tomorrow but live in today and just do the best we can.

You know I can’t remember now when the last time I mentioned baby Kai or the other pregnant ladies. Kai is just the cutest little thing. He’s ten days old and boy you should hear the little piggy go to town when he is nursing. And he has a burp that rattles windows. I always understood that to be a good thing as babies that can really burp are less likely to be colicky. Kitty had this dainty little burp that I thought was cute at first until I realized the consequences of her not getting rid of all the air in her belly. Terra and Nick moved back to their place but poor Nick looks like he isn’t getting much sleep. Kai definitely has his own schedule and it doesn’t have anything to do with his parents’ schedule.

Rhonda is eight months pregnant. Pregnancy seems to suit her. She is just really blooming and watching her the last couple of months have made me miss pregnancy a little … a little … a very little. She’s due the middle of April and unless something changes between now and then she should be fine although she has admitted to being scared about going through the labor itself. I told her I went through labor five times. Painkillers or no painkillers it hurts but when you are finished … it’s like the real memory of the pain goes away. You can remember that it hurt but not the actual feeling of pain itself.

Becky is now just out of the first trimester at 13 weeks. She still upchucks in the mornings … but not every morning and not as badly. She too is the picture of health though I think she is stressing about moving to Aldea. She’s keeping it to herself for the most part though she and Tina talk a lot. Just a side note that Tina and Dante’ are opting to move to Aldea now. I think they are trying to escape Laura’s memory. I’m not in their shoes so I won’t judge them but in my own opinion you don’t deal with grief by leaving it behind; it’s going to follow you no matter where you go. But on the other hand, maybe a fresh start and a lot of hard work will be the best way for them to deal with things.

Patricia is the one that I’m really getting worried about. She’s 27 weeks pregnant. According to the pregnancy books we’ve been able to find that qualifies her for her third trimester which is really wonderful considering how rough things have been for her. If the baby was born now it’s supposed to have an 85% chance of survival. The closer to 40 weeks she gets the better. Rose told me that Ski would be happy if she made it to 36 or 38 weeks. We’ve given Patricia all the supplemental nutritional shakes that we can find. Ski also has her on pre-natal vitamins but she is still pale and anemic looking. Her blood pressure also is erratic and she may have gestational diabetes, we aren’t sure. Ski worried about the baby being too big for a natural birth, we simply are not set up for a C-Section operation. All we can do is what we are doing now and that includes praying. Dix tries not to interfere in Patricia and Jack’s relationship but I can tell he is worried too.

Next to that my injury seems petty. I’m still sore but I limbered up about mid-morning and the twinges only came when I over-stretched my back reaching for something or bending down. That stupid knot is still in the way of my bra strap and Waleski said it could take up to two weeks for it to go down. And sweat rolling down my back stings like crazy but even with all that I’m still grateful it’s not any worse.

I took an early morning shift on the “reclamation” crew. That’s when we went out and started picking up all the fallen NRSC gear. While I was out I also made note of all the plant destruction in the area. Scott took his turn with me and we worked as a team. He’s pretty upset that he didn’t put more effort into dismantling the houses outside of Sanctuary sooner. What the Big Horde didn’t destroy the combination of the Hive and the NRSC armored vehicles did.

All the destruction has also stirred up the varmints that had taken refuge in those buildings. Samuel who had asked if he could be on our team was kept pretty busy with his slingshot and spear killing rats and mice. We also saw a few gnawed places on the Wall where it looks like some rodents have been trying get inside for protection. I guess tomorrow I will have the kids go through the steel storage containers to see if we have any more unwelcome visitors. We already set traps and poison but that only manages the population, it doesn’t get rid of them all together.

Angus came over and he and Scott broke off to talk about things. I was right. Angus will float between Aldea and Sanctuary and his firehouse. He also wants to do some more traveling. Jim will likely go with him. But the main thing they talked about what how to deal with all of this destruction. We need to get rid of this stuff or it really will become a breeding ground for troublesome pests.

The houses that were primarily frame will be fairly easy to dispose of. They’ll use a grapple rake and put the debris in our dump truck and then haul it down to the body dump area. When the rainy season comes back – assuming it does – a controlled burn will take care of the debris and the decomposing bodies up there. The only hitch is if this latest fire has already burned that area over. There is a good chance that it has.

The alternative will be to dig a pit; not easy here in this area with our high water table. Or, perhaps find a handy dandy sink hole. We could dump a little bit of stuff in there at a time and do a controlled burn that way. A concrete block building however is going to require more work. Some of the blocks may be able to be salvaged and set aside for later construction project. Any bricks … and there won’t be many of those around here as most are fake stucco work that just look like bricks … will be salvaged as well. Some of the broken blocks can be used on the banks of the canals to prevent erosion once the dredging takes place. I have a feeling though this is going to be a huge, ongoing process of going through the debris.

Angus and Scott figure that we can drag a bunch of those construction dumpsters and line them up nearby. All the burnables will go into one. All the glass and broken porcelain into another. Shingles and roofing material into another. Metal into another. Fiberglass into yet another. Etc. Etc. Etc. Anything that was actually salvageable would be put in a completely different location so that it wasn’t confused with the useless debris.

The Big Fire, the Big Horde, the Raid on Sanctuary, the Hive, the NRSC vehicles, the new Big Fire started by the NRCS, and not to mention our own construction projects have all changed the map of this area. Now I know what people must have felt like during wars when they tried to find them home but only saw rubble no matter where they looked. Nothing looks as you remember it. Points of reference are gone. In just seven short months US41 has been obliterated in places and the railroad tracks that have lain in the same location for nearly a century are just gone. The drought has taken its own toll and many ponds and lakes are merely shadows of their former glory.

Trees are dying. Yards are overgrown and becoming a tropical tangle. Florida is returning to its natural state. Without some cattle to graze them over, palmettos will inherit the earth … or at least our part of the state.

And we are running low on fuel to run all the heavy equipment needed to get this work done. I’m worried we are going to be down to oxen and horses before too much longer. That will really limit the distance we’ll be able to travel on any given day.

But it’s not my responsibility to come up with a solution for that particular problem and I decided after lunch to get on to the canning and such that I had promised myself that I would do.

First I made the calamondin pies. I had several cans of sweetened condensed milk that looked like they wouldn’t last much longer so I used the, along with half a cup of calamondin juice per can and then added some dream whip that I had mixed up … sort of like a poor man’s Cool Whip. I dumped the filling into some simple pat-in-the-pan pie crusts and then moved them into the Cooler until dinner time.

I didn’t feel like a big meal for lunch so I just ate some of the ever-present fruit salad and a muffin. Everyone else had a serving of the vegetable soup that Reba and Betty had been simmering most of the morning.

After lunch I started making the Calamondin Marmalade. I say “start” because it has to set in the Cooler overnight to bring out the natural pectin. Basically I washed and de-seeded … then thinly sliced … about 40 or 50 calamondin fruit. For every cup of sliced fruit (I used my handy dandy mandolin slicer to spare my hands and save a lot of time) I added three-quarter cups of water. Tomorrow, after everything has soaked for the night I’ll drain the fruit and then measure the stock. For every cup of liquid stock I’ll add a cup of sugar. I’ll bring it all to the soft crack candy stage (220 F) and then put it into jars and seal it.

I really hope that our honey harvest and the sugar cane make. I moved all the sugar I ran across into five gallon buckets a long time ago and we’ve been pretty good about watching how much is used. We also use brown sugar and other non-white granulated sugars when at all possible for sweetening. I still have about fifteen five-gallon buckets of white sugar left but that won’t last forever; especially not as we begin preserving more of the harvests that hopefully will come in. I found that about fifty pounds of sugar will fit in a five gallon bucket but that really isn’t much sugar for the number of people we have and all the preserving that we need to do in the coming months. I wonder if they’ll get any sugar production going down South? And if so, what will they trade it for? I wonder what people in other locations are using for sweetening?

Well, tomorrow is laundry day, so I need to make an early night of it. I might have some more harvesting to do as well. The broccoli looks like it is just about ready. Yum. I dreamed of broccoli and cheese the other night. Hope everyone’s dreams are as pleasant on this night.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 217 (Monday) – March 5

Ha! Really good news for a change. We’ve had some bad news as well but at least more good than bad this time around.

Johnnie and Bubby described it best when they said that “Uncle Angus, Mr. Jim and Mr. Glenn were gonna get in trouble if they don’t stop being so bouncy!”

The three men woke in what I would call an almost claustrophobic mood. They were bound and determined to go check on OSAG and Aldea. They could have had a convoy except everyone knew it made more sense for a small party to go check things out first before we split our forces. It’s still possible that there are some NRSC troopers in the area or that raiders are going to move into the area to try and take advantage of the mess the Hive and the NRSC left in their wake. It’s also possible that the folks representing the regular military were lying for strategic reasons. Caution is a much more common commodity than trust is these days.

They took Juicer and left the armored vehicles here because they still need to place some basic parts that were ripped up by the zombies when they went into a feeding frenzy. It’s a good thing they did take Juicer actually. When they got over to OSAG’s compound at the university they found a highly armed bunch of men (and women) who were waiting for the NRSC to show up and make good on their threat. Seems OSAG had lost some of their connections and such … Lord knows I haven’t got a clue exactly what the damage was but the damage was enough to prevent them from both reception and broadcast for a bit. Repairs are underway and they’ll be back on the air ASAP now that they’ve received the intel we had to share with them. Hopefully with Steve’s big set up and connections we’ll get a better idea of how things stand around the state; and maybe even further afield.

OSAG weathered the Hive’s appearance fairly well but not without some damage. Like us they are hurt but not incapacitated. I hope to get a full report later but for now it was great just to know that their group is still amongst the land of the living.

Aldea … it’s there. There has been some significant damage in the front parts of the park but that was probably inevitable as Matlock and that group started moving stuff in and out. Actually the main part of the park still is in good repair because of the way it is situated. I guess the NRSC didn’t want to worry about bogging down or getting cornered on a peninsula. The bridge over the Hillsborough River near there is pretty beat up. All of the NRSC would have had to travel across that bridge as they headed west. They found a couple of explosives on the bridge but were able to disarm them without mishap. They left the C4 at Aldea in one of the steel storage containers that sits outside of their main compound area just to be on the safe side for a bit.

Glenn thinks the bridge is still in reasonably decent shape. He said he drove over worse in the Middle East during worse conditions but they are still talking about how they can reinforce it without the river compromising any of their efforts. That may be a long term problem for that location and for all east/west traveling through that area.

The men came back in the early afternoon. After a little bit of grumping by all concerned it was decided that before they begin to work on Aldea, Sanctuary’s outside perimeter will be cleaned up, any houses that remain within 100 yards of Sanctuary’s exterior will be pulled down, and the infected corpses within 200 yards of Sanctuary’s exterior will be dealt with. Some estimate that all of that can be accomplished in a week … that doesn’t include dealing with the rubble in my opinion … and that after that all those that will be building Aldea will shift while those of us who will remain in Sanctuary will continue to focus on the continuity of this compound.

Some of those that have volunteered to help set up Aldea haven’t decided whether to stay there permanently but everyone seems to agree that a second secured and viable location is a good idea strategically. Lettuce Lake Park … now known as Aldea … has 240 acres within its boundaries. That’s a lot of territory to patrol and protect. They’ll probably have to pull back and decide precisely how much they think they can manage at first and work from there; similar to how we started here in Sanctuary. One of the pieces of bad news is that there are a lot of loose shamblers all through the woods near Aldea. There’s going to be some serious work and many cautious days until they get that area completely cleared.

Scott was busy today marking items that he wanted to salvage on houses both inside and outside Sanctuary. There really isn’t that much worth salvaging outside Sanctuary. I don’t know which was more destructive the Hive or the NRSC. One of the few items that we can count on salvaging from nearly every house was a bathtub or two. Scott intends to – temporarily maybe – line these tubs up to placed where the houses within Sanctuary are pulled down to create a whole section of sturdy plant containers. They already have nice drains in them so all we’ll need to do is to fill them with compost and sand and we’ll probably have a good container for tomatoes or potatoes or even a place I can start some small fruit trees.

I went with him for a bit outside the Wall. I didn’t feel safe like I used to. There were shamblers … and unsanitized but immobile zombies … all over the place. Most of the mobile shamblers were relatively harmless but we didn’t take any unnecessary chances. Any that came too near or got too curious were dispatched by arrow, slingshot, ax, machete, spear, pike, or some other “silent” weapon. In one case I used the sharp edge of my shovel to decapitate a zombie and Scott sanitized it with his spike and mallet.

If you are wondering why I was out there with a shovel it is because I was trying to save as many useful plants and trees as I could. I honestly didn’t find much except for some banana rhizomes that I’m really hoping survive the transplantation process. I found more ornamentals than I did food plants. Scott got a little irritated with that after a bit, but I just don’t know when I’ll have a similar chance to get these plants. The dozer is going to tear up stuff quite a bit, and probably finish off what the Hive and those big armored vehicles started.

When I wasn’t with Scott I was working in our gardens and there was more ready for picking than I expected. All the produce is going to catch me off guard and I’m not going to be able to keep up. Today I brought in the first of the broccoli, “baby” carrots, the bok choy, and some more turnips. We made a nice stir fry for dinner and used some of the chopped broccoli and bok choy to make it even more filling.

All the plants are smaller than I had anticipated. I don’t know for sure whether it is the variety, the drought, or something I’m doing. I hope that I’ve planted enough. It’s not like I can run to the corner market if we run out of something.

Mr. Morris says he plans on harvesting the first batch of honey from our hives tomorrow. That should be exciting. As many hives as we have – a dozen of those bee hotels or whatever you call them – Mr. Morris thinks we should easily get a dozen pounds of honey from the first harvest. After that we should get quite a bit more as they love all the blooming going on in the gardens and the left over blooms from the citrus trees. I’ve heard more talk of mead and a “liquid gold trade item” than I care to think about right now. They’d best make sure that we have enough for our own use for the year before they start using it for anything else.

There were a few spits of rain tonight, but you could have driven Juicer between the drops. Lots of heat lightning but I don’t think anything will come of it. When oh when are we going to get some rain?

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 218 (Tuesday) – March 6

Barring the occasional sanitation job we are nearly back to normal. Normal … what is that anyway? It’s not the “normal” of pre-NRS days. “Normal” for us is quite a bit different since the world came crashing down. Everyone has their own definition of normal I guess. All I know is that no one died, no one is sick, food was plentiful, and constructive work got accomplished … and we are slowly returning to a regular schedule.

The cows and goats and other animals were allowed to return the pasture yesterday and by this evening we could already tell that at least some of them were happy about it because the milk production for both the cows and goats has gone up. It’s not where it was pre-Hive but that will come in time hopefully. As soon as it does Reba wants to start making hard cheeses. We’ve only been making soft cheeses that get used up the same day but now with the Cooler she thinks she’s figured out a way to make cheddar, and maybe parmesan/romano and a few others that I’ve heard mentioned before. She said we’ll have to make sure and keep scavenging for paraffin and unscented wax so that we can wax the cheese blocks and wheels as the cheeses get made.

Reba has this pretty well laid out and I can’t wait for her to start. It’s been so long since I’ve tasted fresh cheddar. Powdered cheese or the soft cheeses we have been making like queso blanco or queso fresco are useful and even taste good; but there is nothing quite as grand as a sliced of well-aged cheddar. I think it is very important that all of the girls take the time to learn this task. Specialization may have proved more efficient pre-NRS but it isn’t any longer. We all need to know how to do as much as possible so in case we lose someone we don’t lose the art or craft in question.

Today’s excitement came from bees. That’s right. Honey producing bees to be more precise … like mini cattle they are worth herding and produce a great deal of value that returns the work and effort you put into them at least tenfold.

First thing this morning as some of the men had started to pull down one of the houses outside of Sanctuary they ran into a large feral hive living between the siding and the interior frame of one of the buildings. Kevin was out there and immediately called his father to come see. Apparently they had both been hoping for this … finding more bees … and having it occur so close to Sanctuary was a plus.

They had prepared by building something called a beevac … basically a kind of contraption that vacuums up the feral bees before you began to dismantle the hive and locate the queen and thus saving some rather painful interaction with their species. After you’ve vacuumed up the bees you can transfer them to regular housing for captured and domesticated bees thus increasing the number of bees you have and the amount of honey you can collect.

Well, a lot of the wax in this feral hive was quite dark. Usually, according to Mr. Morris anyway, this means that the honeycombs are old. Kevin added that you can also get dark wax because bees are storing dark honey in the cells. I’ll leave all the really technical stuff to them or to those that want to read all of their notes in the library. It’s actually cool, I just don’t have that much experience with it yet.

What I do know is that after vacuuming the bees – which required extra guards because the little vac motor attracted some zombies that subsequently had to be sanitized – they collected four five-gallon buckets of the wax. Since the comb wasn’t in frames they had to use the crush and strain method and so far – out of those four buckets – they’ve gotten over a hundred pounds of honey, but it’s pretty dark stuff. The leftover wax will be washed and then put in a solar beeswax melter and then solidified into blocks for later use.

To test the bee hives that we had scavenged from over in the Keystone area, Mr. Morris decided to harvest the three frames that were fully capped and put them in the frame extractor. Basically that is a contraption that you set the frames down into that you have opened the “caps” (then ends of the honey cells) and then you manually spin the honey out of the frames. It uses plain old centrifugal force to get the honey from the frames. Out of three frames he was able to get just over twelve pounds. Not too shabby considering we have twelve bee hives.

Each of those twelve hives are made up of a bottom piece called a hive stand. Next comes a board that is used for ventilation. Then comes a box that is like a nursery. Mr. Morris called this a brood box which is where the queen bee lives. Then there is another board called a “queen excluder” that keeps the queen from going any place else but the brood box. On top of that “supers” that hold the frames. Each super will hold ten frames. The frame is what you collect honey from. There are three supers for each of our hives although Mr. Morris says you can put more if the hive is large and/or produces a lot of extra honey. The captured feral hive will give us a thirteenth hive (and possibly fourteenth if they swarm).

If nothing goes wrong and the bees don’t starve … which I don’t expect they will as they’ve got our organic gardens and the orchard and other fruit trees to get their food from … I think we will get a significant amount of honey. Let’s see, if four frames gave us 12 pounds of honey means that each frame should give us three pounds of honey at least once. We have twelve domesticated hives with three supers with ten frames each … three times ten equals thirty frames times for each of twelve hives which means 360 frames total. If each frame yields three pounds of honey then that’s 1080 pounds of honey. That’s absolutely incredible.

I don’t think I’ll be quite so crabby about the whole mead experiment thing if we really can get that much honey. And if we get more than one harvest per frame we’ll be swimming in the stuff. Of course, if we don’t get any rain … or we get too much … or any number of other things we could go way down on honey production. I think I like gardening better.

The mead guys are all in hog heaven. Tomorrow they are going to make their first batch of mead. I got the puppy dog eyes from Scott and Angus and even Dix … the big goofball … played along asked what I’d take in trade for “procuring” the stuff they need from my magical storehouse. Yeah, like I wasn’t actually going to take them up on that. Heck lot they know. So tomorrow they are going to cut back some hanging branches from an oak tree that is beginning to shade one end of the big garden and I’ll “procure” their stuff for them.

They’ll get eighteen pounds of honey from Mr. Morris and I’ll get everything else that includes: two cups of maple syrup; 32 ounces of lemon or lime juice; 12 lemons and 8 limes; and then dried citrus peel of orange, lemon, and tangerine; and then they need 2 oz. of coriander seeds. I sure hope their experiment is worth it because they are taking up quite a bit of the last of my fresh lemons and limes. And I hope they have some other mead recipes because we might not have as much citrus fruit next year if we don’t get some rain.

I’ve had the kids to start bringing buckets of water for the trees from the canals and ponds but as low as they are that won’t last forever either. I’ve already noted two orange trees and one grapefruit tree that needs to come down and be replaced with seedlings. I don’t think it’s that they’ve outlived their usefulness; orange trees can live up to 100 years. I think the stress of the drought is getting to them. If we don’t have some decent and consistent rain soon we’ll start losing more trees, probably some of the oaks as well and that will be really bad. What we don’t need are weak trees once the hurricane season starts. Ugh.

The only thing that we’ve been washing lately are our under things. Everything else we’ve just been shaking out and hanging to air out. Some of the younger guys have been hanging their t-shirts on the clothes line before they go to bed and then they take them off after they’ve dried from the morning’s dew. I’d use canal water but it is really muddy right now because it is so low and has lots of algae in it.

Collecting material left behind by the NRSC continues but our spotters saw that we aren’t the only ones doing it. We saw that peddler group that Tasha joined … or at least they were using one of the RVs from that group because the methane collector on top is pretty distinctive … to the north along what used to be US41. I don’t know what you would call it now, but it sure doesn’t qualify as a highway any more. Dix took a contingent of armed men to meet them and see what was up.

They were actually on their way to see us. The head of the clan … Mr. something or other, I never was allowed close enough to confirm whether it was Fred to Ted … had a grandson who had been burned pretty badly on his back by a piece of floating debris as they were escaping north from the fire. The fact that they were all the way over in Tarpon Springs when this occurred was too reminiscent of when Scott was gone back months ago and brought my parents’ stuff to me. It also brought back the suspicion that the peddlers were connected to the raiders.

Dix must have thought the same thing but the Clan Leader said that there weren’t too many people over that way anymore what with all the fuel running out and the military sitting off the coast in their big fleet. There wasn’t anything left of it at all now that the fire had run clear all the way to the Gulf. They had run all the way north to Hernando Beach before the flames stopped following them. They had risked a lot to come back this way because Tasha told them with proper incentive Waleski would probably treat the boy’s burns.

I heard from Rose that apparently Tasha has moved up quite a bit in the hierarchy. She’s made them clean up their living quarters and while it still isn’t what you would call immaculate it’s a lot better than what it was. She told me Tasha looks a lot harder than when she was with us but I’m not sure how to measure what she was saying; Rose, for all she has experienced the last several months is still a bit idealistic and inexperienced.

The boy’s burn had begun to heal but there were a couple of quarter size and silver dollar size places that must have been second or third degree. He was passed the worst pain stage so Waleski said ibuprofen was adequate for that except for Vicodin he gave the boy for when he was cleaning the burns. After the places were completely cleaned he covered them with silvadene which is a type of topical antibiotic for severe burns. He also gave the boy a tetanus shot since the grandfather didn’t know when he had last had one. He also prescribed Vitamin C, Vitamin E, and Omega-3 tablets all of which the peddlers have in their wares.

I was interested to hear that he also fussed at them a bit about not feeding the boy enough, reminding them that his body was working harder to mend itself so he needed extra calories, not fewer. He also told them no caffeine but fruit juices or plain water only and several times a day, not just at meal times. Dehydration is a big problems with burns, but I hadn’t realized how much of a problem until Waleski pointed it out. The prognosis for the boy is pretty good since he survived this long so long as they can keep infection from setting in.

Nothing else was even as mildly exciting as the bees or the peddlers. The peddlers are on their way but not before turning over a few of crates of ammo they had collected from the NRSC dead. Their head man refused to leave owing us anything though we would have treated his grandson for good will. I guess that might be a good thing in the long run. I don’t think they are any less trustworthy that some of the folks we’ve met, but they are shifty. And it’s also set a precedent. Hopefully people won’t line up outside of Sanctuary looking for free handouts as far as medical treatment go, but the word should also get out that we do everything within our skills to do a good job.

I think our greens are going to start coming in hand over fist pretty soon. I was able to cut the first new leaves on the mustard greens and tomorrow I’ll be able to harvest the first of the loose leaf lettuce varieties. Pretty soon the eggplants should start coming in as well. By the end of the month we’ll also have fresh tomatoes and fresh carrots.

At dinner I whipped up some cinnamon honey butter for folks to spread on their biscuits. And tomorrow I think I’ll take some of the dark honey from the feral hive and make a chocolate honey cake and then cover it with chocolate honey frosting. Later in the week if I have time I’ll also make honey cheese cake. My mouth is watering just thinking about all the stuff I can do now that I won’t have to ration the sweetening quite as much as I have recently.

Wish we could fix the wheat flour shortage as easily. I’ve got some bags of seeds that I’ve found while scavenging that I’ve set aside to try and address this issue but I don’t know with what kind of success. Some of what I will do is stretch out supply of wheat flour out by adding in some bean flour. We’ve got enough dried beans to choke a horse with; amazing how many people kept bags of them around but never seemed to actually use them. The ones that are too old to soak and cook will get ground up into a fine powder and added to my bread mixes.

Corn I’ve probably written about ad nauseum. I’ll take some of the oats and from the feed store and try and plant some oats towards the middle of September. I may not get much the first year. If the crop isn’t worth anything I figure I can still give it to the animals as forage. I threw some millet in a quarter-acre area and its coming up but is suffering from the drought and might dry out before it makes any heads of grain.

Next week rice will go in at Aldea. They’ve already got the area marked off. Rice for so many things including rice flour. Next month I’ll plant another quarter to half acre of sorghum, depends on whether we get any rain or not. Beginning of May is when I’ll put the soybeans in the ground. Middle of November I’ll do my best to grow my own wheat and lastly the beginning of December I’ll try my hand at rye. I wish I had known I could plant wheat and rye earlier; now I’m a whole year behind. Now I’m beginning to worry that we may have to eat our seeds before we can put them in the ground.

I just have to keep remembering that we have a plan, we are moving forward, and no matter how hard I push my foot down on the imaginary accelerator on the passenger side I’m not going to get time to move any faster.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 219 (Wednesday) – March 7

Talk about a depressing Water Day. Still no rain. I’m really getting worried about the gardens. You can tell … wait …

OK, rather than erase all of that or waste the paper I’ll just start over with a new paragraph. It’s raining. Great big dry weather drops and they are making a heck of a lot of noise on the lanai roof and the skylight in the kitchen. We all stopped what we were doing and ran outside to set up the rain barrels and to make sure the other run off pipes and flashing are directed into the holding tanks. The pounding is so loud I can barely hear myself think but I haven’t heard anything so pretty in a long, long time.

I had started out saying that this was a depressing Water Day because we didn’t have any water to process. Many of the in-ground pools still inside Sanctuary are 90% empty. The pools outside are still full of debris or putrefied corpses. The ones outside the Wall also have a few gators in them as well. Tell me that don’t make trying to clean things up interesting.

Breakfast was a little strange. I took the remainder of all of our packaged muffin mixes and turned them into pancakes. The mixes we have left over from pre-NRS commercial products are beginning to get pretty old. Not too bad but the first couple of pancakes I tried to make wouldn’t rise so I had to stop and mix in some of the friendship bread starter that I always keep going. They did pretty well after that but the only thing was that no two of them really tasted the same. They were all jumbled up. The ones the kids really seemed to like was when I mixed the strawberry muffin mix with the chocolate chip muffin mix. It was so rich it made me want to gag but the kids couldn’t inhale them fast enough. Several of the adults like the banana nut muffin mix with the chocolate chip muffin mix; again pretty rich, but with fresh whipped cream courtesy of Reba not too shabby if I do say so myself. I like how the spice muffin mix and the blackberry muffin mix went together. All the other combinations just tasted like some kind of wild razzleberry to me.

After breakfast I went and harvested a bunch of looseleaf lettuce and for my part of lunch I made a pretty killer mandarin orange salad. I used some canned mandarin oranges and they weren’t half bad even though a couple of them tasted like they might have sat in the can a tad longer than their “best by” date said they should have.

David had taken some of the boys and gone to check out the ponds that we had been fishing from. Some had dried up and you could see the carcasses of a few fish though most had undoubtedly been eaten by the local wildlife. The main lake however still had a decent amount of water in it though it was quite low. It was pretty easy to run a net and bring in more than we could eat at lunch. The best looking of the extra fish were carefully put into a cooler of water and brought back to Sanctuary and released into the deepest water we still had in one of the ponds.

After lunch David started dredging out the long canal that is now a central ecological and geographical feature within Sanctuary. Parts of the canal were so dry that he could use the bobcat with no fear of bogging down. That certainly won’t be true tomorrow if it continues to rain but at least he got one section done and the embankment stabilized with broken concrete blocks before this rain.

David’s project wasn’t the only one going. Everyone was working fast and furiously to clear the exterior perimeter of the Wall. Angus used Juicer to haul away the corpses that had been stripped of everything useful and Glenn used the finally-repaired armored steam shovel type vehicle to push over the buildings after they had been stripped of everything usable. There were only a couple of buildings that were still too solid for him to collapse and McElroy took care of those with the dozer. Made a great bunch of noise too so we needed plenty of guards to take care of the infecteds when they decided to get a little too close or frisky.

Infecteds weren’t the only thing that the noise attracted. We had another brief visit from the military guys. It was a small patrol group doing a little mop up. I don’t know the specifics but Dix confirmed they weren’t AWOL or impersonators. Seems a bunch of their meals were bad after opening. They only wanted to trade for enough to get them to their extraction point which was a day and a half away. They traded the intel that they had stashed another NRSC armored vehicle about a mile away with some NRSC gear and ammo still inside. They also traded a radio part that Dix had needed to unscramble some of the NRSC broadcasts he could hear from the Central Zone.

For that we traded them rice, cornmeal, fresh water, some honey, and some jerky. We also gave them about a dozen real eggs. You’d thought we’d handed them Solomon’s gold. After that it was short work to get enough intel to update our maps – both local and national. They didn’t give us anything that we couldn’t have eventually figured out but it was a lot faster than having to wait to decode everything we hear on the radio.

Seems that Sanctuary and OSAG aren’t the only fortified compounds here in Florida. Sanctuary seems to be several months ahead of most of them and has a more balanced set up. Some of the compounds are strictly agrarian with 90% of their effort put into food production and/or harvest, including some of the coastal communities trying to make a living from the ocean or Gulf. Some of the compounds focus 90% of their effort on security and rely heavily on scavenging or trade to acquire their food.

Many of the compounds, no matter what their focus is, are still very closed off; kind of a “if you don’t already belong don’t even bother knocking on the door” mentality. A few are open to communication but on a strictly limited basis, only on their terms, and only if you come to them first. Even those compounds that are concentrated in certain areas tend to be hostile to too much interaction with other compounds even when it would make more sense to share the workload.

For now I think we better hold off on the idea of building a loose confederation of communities. I think the effort would be better put into first solidifying Sanctuary, Aldea, and OSAG (if they are interested) into points of a triangle of area that at least has some semblance of peace and stability to it. Or at least into a good trading partnership that also lends a hand to each other in case of security needs. Similar to the forts in the pioneering era of the US; one community’s trouble is offset by the help received by the other two communities. It would also make us more formidable an opponent individually because any enemy would find themselves our common enemy. They would have to deal, not just with the one community, but with three well-armed and well-trained communities. That should make any raiders think twice.

It’s not that the loose confederation of communities isn’t a good idea because it is. I think the primary problem right now is that only seven months have passed since the fall and people are still finding their way. There is still a lot of suspicion and shock out there. As cruel as it may sound I think the chaff is still being winnowed from the wheat. We’ll need to be flexible and adapt but we also need to guide the re-establishment of things so that the general framework we all agree on doesn’t become compromised.

We also still have a lot of macro problems to face. They’ve retreated but there is no way that we will be able to permanently escape all the political claptrap that is going on in the Central Zone. Nor will we be able to escape potential fallout from other Quarantine Zones dumping their issues onto us.

Speaking of dumping … one of the most shocking things that I’ve heard to date was that some of the Quarantine Zones are starting to dump their infecteds into the neighboring quarantine zones. There are still some half-brains out there that seem to think that if you move the problem someplace else then it is no longer a problem. In essence, if you can’t see it and can’t hear it then it must no longer exist. Those ninnies need a dope slap upside the back of their heads. Zombies have no concept of political lines. A state line is a human concept. What? Do they expect a zombie dumped from Alabama into Georgia, or vice versa, to suddenly think, “Ooops, can’t go back that way anymore. We can’t cross the state line.”

That might explain why we are still seeing so many zombies after such a long period of time. I know that the decomposition rate radically slows down in an NRS infected corpse but I would have thought that a lot of zombies would have perished over the harsh winter up north. Maybe they don’t decompose during the winter but go into some type of suspended animation or hibernation or something. Wouldn’t that be crazy to find out that zombies hibernate in the cold rather than die the second death?

With no rain, the weeds aren’t growing very quickly. Good mulch and careful group planting has also helped keep this problem to a minimum. That doesn’t leave me with as much to do in the garden as I would have if the rain had been coming regularly. This rain … that continues to fall by the bucketful … will change that. It’ll also be like working in a sauna but I’ll grow used to it. I do every year. If the humidity picks up however we’ll need to watch everyone’s electrolytes. I need to remember to see how much Gatorade and PowerAde we still have. I know I’ve got a recipe around here some place that uses unsweetened Koolaid to make ORS (oral rehydration solution) which is a kinda sorta homemade sports drink. Need to keep some ginger drink or lemonade handy as well. The kids are going to dry out fast in the heat that is coming.

Wowwee! We are starting to get some pretty good winds in this stuff and quite a bit of thunder and lightning as well. I’m going to have to sign off here and go help make sure everything is tied down really tight. If we can’t handle a thunderstorm we are going to be in trouble come June when the hurricane season starts up.

 

[sssarawolf]

Wow, big thank you. As my generation used to say, Right on.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 220 (Thursday) – March 8

I’ve had a really bad headache all day long. I think the rain last night must have stirred up as much dust as it settled. The intermittent sprinkling that it’s done off and on the entire day didn’t do much for me either. It was too wet to get much work done in comfort outside and too muggy inside to really get comfortable there either.

I finally used one of the extra batteries that we keep charged and hooked it up to an oscillating floor fan just to keep the air stirred up. This must be a cold front coming through but it’s hard to tell without the weatherman to tell us what they see on the radar. All I know is that the rain is cold but once it hits the ground all we do is get a smelly sauna steaming up.

The gardens have perked up but the trees and water retention areas still need a considerable amount to make them truly healthy again. I measured about an inch from the overnight rain and then about half that in all the rain we had during the day. An inch and a half of rain won’t go far if things continue to warm up like they have been doing.

One of Mischief’s pups died. Austin says it looks like it got snake bit. Scott took a look at it and he and Angus finally found the fang marks but they were really small. Scott thinks it was a pigmy rattler. I’ve noticed the kids were starting to go barefoot in the warm weather and I need to impress on them how bad an idea that is. The snakes will be getting active again soon and so will all the other creepy crawlies that bite and pinch. Parasitic worms will also become a problem if we aren’t careful.

My Sarah and Samuel buried the puppy in the far corner of the pasture; deep enough that none of our animals would think about digging it up. I feel bad but … and this is probably just horrible … but I can’t help but think about it being one less mouth to feed as well.

The dogs are a real consideration for me. They are working dogs. They serve a real purpose within our community. But on the other hand we haven’t been able to let them out to hunt for themselves and we are having to feed them from our own rations. I’ve been mixing leftovers with rice and whey to try and keep them fed and out of our domestic animal stock. Squirrels are actually getting scarce ‘cause the dogs or cats grab them as soon as they show up. I don’t know for how much longer we’ll be able to keep that up though.

The hogs get acorns, slop the dogs won’t eat, and mash from the still. The cattle, poultry, and goats are just about as free range though we are able to supplement their diet better with feed we’ve found here and there. The llamas are all free range as are the ostrich and a few of our other wilder critters. The only animals that are primarily fed using commercial feed are the horses, mules, and burros. This just proves even more that our corn crop is going to be a make-or-break project for us. If we can’t get a decent corn crop in I don’t know what we are going to do as far as the animals go.

I’ve taken a chance and continued planting blocks of corn in succession so I really hope everything makes. So far so good with everything else up to this point. I’ve lost some stuff sure, but less than I expected. What I haven’t liked is that everything is so much smaller on the vine than I expected and the plants are producing fewer fruits than I expected. My mom’s garden was always so great and the fruits and veggies so pretty; they could (and did) win prizes at the local fair. I’m not sure if being forced to go organic has made that much of a difference or if the lack of rain is the cause. I don’t know, maybe a combination of those two factors and others that I haven’t thought of yet.

The kids were just about to drive me buggy today. Between being cooped up to keep them from getting sick in this cold rain and my own headache I nearly lost my temper over small, stupid stuff more than once. Charlene was really trying to help but I could tell she wasn’t feeling much better than I was. Sarah and Rose were a little on the cranky side too. I’m thinking that having so many females living in close confines like we do our cycles are beginning to occur at the same time.

I had mentioned something about that to Scott the other day and he got this horrified look on his face. It made me laugh but I’m still not sure if he was funning with me or not. I finally just broke down and fixed everyone a surprise Orange “Slush.” Basically for every two cups of orange juice you mix in a half cup of powdered milk. To that you mix in about a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract. I snagged a bunch of ice cubes that are stacking up in the Cooler and used an old, manual ice shaver from one of the girls’ toys to crunch the ice up enough to mix into the OJ/milk mixture. Wow, was it good. Almost as good as a cold soda would have been … almost.

Today was a food prep day anyway. I spent a few hours in the food store house. The first thing I noticed was that the rat traps needed to be changed. We haven’t lost anything as we’ve been packaging things in metal and glass containers when at all possible but it still grosses me out thinking about rats and mice slinking all over the shelves. Ick. I’m hoping one of Lucky’s kittens may be a little more domesticated and also turns out to be a good hunter; I’ll try and fix it so that it will live in the food storehouse and turn into a mouser.

Rodents aren’t the only problem over there. The food organization has fallen apart. I haven’t got a clue if there is an up-to-date inventory. I asked Brandon to see if he could build me an inventory spreadsheet on Excel on a reliable laptop or tower computer or tablet … or even on an Ipod I-touch or something like that … so that I can inventory as I go. There are a lot of things on the shelves that looks like it is either at or just past the “do not use past” date. Looks like I’m going to be putting together more odd meals to get this stuff used up in some semblance of order.

Tonight for dinner, much to the initial distrust of some of the guys, I made Lentil-Walnut Patties. I know that sounds kind of weird but I needed to have a good protein with the meal and with all the rain it would have been too much of a pain to try and good a good roast or other type of big meat dish. Plus, I had these canned nuts that needed to be used before they went rancid.

First you purée some cooked lentils and then place them in a medium-size bowl. Spread your walnuts and some crumbs in a shallow pan and toast them lightly in a hot oven (400 degrees F) for about 10 minutes. Take them out of the oven and stir into lentils and then add eggs, onion, catsup, cloves, salt and pepper. My mixture turned out to be too dry so I added a little sour cream. Once you get the right consistency you shape the mess into patties (1/2 cup each) and sauté in oil and butter until nicely browned, about 5 minutes per side.

To go with the patties I made a rice pilaf and we had some nice grilled eggplant with goat milk cheese using the white eggplants that I harvested today. There was also a nice mesclun greens salad for anyone that wanted it.

If you are wondering why I’m cooking again it’s because I think we’ve got a little bug running around or something. Saen wasn’t feeling good again. I dropped by and took her some ginger tea and asked her if she had spoken with Waleski yet. I guess I was trying to figure out if she was going to be the next victim of the fertile fairy but I could tell just as soon as she opened her mouth that it was just a bad head cold. It’s bound to happen to someone else sooner or later; probably sooner rather than later. Anne and I got a giggle out of it try to guess who would be next. When the guys would look at us funny we would get this really innocent look on our faces and then they would get suspicious and all but run for the hills. Scott and Lee stopped by later in the afternoon and we let them in on the joke.

Of course they didn’t see it quite the same way we did. They actually wanted to know who we thought would catch it next. If I had to guess I would say probably Melody. She and Cease are pretty young and liable to be less careful until after they get caught the first time. Rilla might be next on my list. Ty is a couple of years old already and I know she wants a little brother or sister for him. After that I would have to guess maybe Austin and his Sarah. I know they’ve been together for a while but they are both still pretty young. Saen and Glenn will have a baby when they get good and ready to. I’m thinking that may be one of the reasons that Glenn is so all fired up and in a hurry to get Aldea set up. They are both old enough and experienced enough they aren’t liable to get caught until they are good and ready to get caught.

The only other one that I think might be a candidate in the near future is Tina. She’s not that old, certainly still fertile. Another baby might be just what they need to help them through their grief; or not, it’s not my place to say I suppose.

One of the rabbit does added another little batch of baby rabbits to the ones we’ve already got … or kits or whatever you call baby rabbits. In the not too distant future we’ll probably need to start culling some of them. We already have more hutches than I expected to have at any one time. I like the rabbits, but on the other hand I don’t want to just continue to raise them gratuitously no matter how cute some of them are. Some of those things may be cute but they also bite. Think Bugs Bunny after being on steroids too long … very, very cranky and unpredictable.

And for more unpredictability in life I’m going to make pizza for breakfast. I’ll partially bake the pizza shells first and while they are baking I’ll scramble some eggs with onion and bell pepper. Before the pizza shells are completely finished I’ll pull them out and put some of the cooked egg mixture and then I’ll put other toppings – one will be sausage, another one bacon, a third ham, a veggie omelet one with mushrooms, etc. – so that everyone can grab exactly what they want. I’ll also fix a couple of fruit topped pizzas that will be similar to a sweet roll. Hopefully this will minimize clean up for me and hold people until lunch time.

Before I forget, Matlock took a party out and they re-claimed that armored vehicle and its contents from the exact spot the patrol we traded with yesterday said it would be. Nice to know they were on the up and up. I hope they made it to the extraction point on time. Dix told them to come back our way if for some reason their plan blew up.

I suppose that could make it seem like we are choosing sides and I guess to a certain extent we are; our own. The NRSC that was in this area proved they weren’t the most trustworthy bunch. On the other hand Matlock and his crew originally worked with the NRSC even though they were National Guardsmen. You have to be careful of the paintbrush you wield when say who the bad guy is and who he is not. We’ll need to tread real careful so that we don’t get drawn into something that could destroy us. We have enough of that going on already.

And with that I am finished for the evening. Rain sounds like it is kicking up again. Looks like another soggy day tomorrow and if I’m going to be in charge of all the cooking again I’m going to need my rest.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 221 (Friday) – March 9 – Cleaning Day

I didn’t get much cleaning done in our house but I did make a start on the food storehouse. There wasn’t much else that I could really do in the gardens because it rained. And rained. And rained, rained, rained, rained. I’m glad for it but I’m also fighting being ungrateful … if it isn’t one type of mess it’s another.

To get the kids out of the house I brought them over to the food storehouse with me. Of course I put them to work which wasn’t exactly what they had been expecting. I’ve warned all the kids that they shouldn’t ever say the dreaded phrase, “I’m bored, I don’t have anything to do.” I’m really, really good at finding stuff for bored kids to do. (Cue evil scientist laugh.)

Actually I wound up having to ask for some help from some of the older boys … guys … young men … whatever they preferred to be called. I had them rearrange some of the shelves upstairs and I’ve moved all of the #10 cans of foods upstairs on those shelves. I also moved all of the commercially canned herbs and spices upstairs in labeled tubs. Basically I put upstairs anything that was sealed for long term storage or that we don’t use very much. We had already gutted the plumbing and everything from the house so in what used to be the upstairs bathroom I put all condiments. Another one of the upstairs rooms is where I’ve put all the chutneys and pickled stuff. One of the walk in closets upstairs is kept locked and that’s where all of the candy (non-chocolate) and snack foods are kept.

Downstairs I put all of the bulk grains in what was the master bedroom. Then each of the remaining rooms downstairs was allocated to a specific season or type of item. One of the smallest rooms was full of tomato products. Another room held all of the canned meats and jerky. Yet another room I’ve designated to hold all of the beans whether they are dried, commercially canned, or home canned. And of course there is a room that is full of nothing but fruit and fruit products like jams, jellies, dried fruit, and canned fruits. One of the downstairs rooms has also been set aside for sweetenings and fats so that room is where you’ll find all of the sugars and the cooking oils.

It isn’t a perfect solution and I keep finding areas where I need to arrange and then rearrange things and I still might change my mind as we go along but it certainly looks better than it did before. Of course, we’ve used quite a bit of stuff as well so that’s made more room. We moved the cleaning products to a couple of the steel storage containers in the Wall and most of the fresh meat now gets put into the smokehouse. First aid stuff is being stored in the clinic.

The food storehouse pretty much took up our whole day. I did indeed fix pizzas for breakfast and while I got a few raised eyebrows most everyone was a good sport about it. Food is fuel after all and we need all the fuel we can get.

The other two meals were other people’s responsibilities. I know I ate something … or at least Rose put something in front of me that made it from a plate to my mouth … but it really didn’t make that much of an impression. I do that sometimes – get so busy and focused that I eat out of necessity and not necessarily out of desire and then pretty much forget what it was that I had to eat. Lunch was soft and dinner was hot and that’s about all my senses registered.

I’m very tired tonight. Tomorrow we are supposed to do some baking but if the rain doesn’t let up we are going to be looking at have to bake bread on a day-by-day basis this coming week. I don’t like doing it like that because we always use more flour. It’s harder to ration out.

If I can’t bake tomorrow then I’ll probably do some canning. There are quite a few tropical apricots, loquats, and mysore raspberries that I can do something with. If not that then I should probably go through the kids clothes and shoes and see what needs to be repaired, replaced, let down, hemmed up, etc. There is always something that needs doing.

Scott got soaked today as did James and David. All the guys did for that matter. I didn’t realize how wet though until I stepped on the wet clothes he left on the bathroom floor. Talk about a rude surprise. I didn’t know what I had stepped on at first. Scott got chilled which isn’t good. He’s been working so hard and we aren’t getting any younger. I know 40s isn’t “old” but on the other hand it isn’t “young” either. I worry about him. His family had a history of early heart problems and diabetes. Scott avoided the diabetes and with only a brief scare concerning a problem that turned out to not be a problem after all I thought we had years before we needed to worry about that sort of thing. I don’t know. He’s wearing himself out and I worry what toll this will eventually take on his health.

The men were dismantling buildings all day long. Sarah and Samuel and some of the other early teens and tweens did a huge favor for me and are gathering all the intact stepping stones and pavers that can be salvaged. When the concrete mix runs out we are going to have to change to some other way of putting a floor or patio down.

The trash was getting to be a bit much to happen so McElroy dug a long trench out in the big burn zone and the guys managed to get a slow fire going. The rain keeps it completely under control but we are able to burn things like drywall, old paneling, insulation, and other crappy pieces of stuff that just isn’t worth trying to save or salvage.

James is out on the Wall but should be back in any minute from his turn. I’ll go out then. Scott is off duty tonight but David has early shift. I wouldn’t mind so much except that it is raining Oh, and there he is now. I need to close up and get going. I hope someone has the teapot going in the guard station; I have a feeling I’m going to need it.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 222 (Saturday) – March 10 - Saturday

And another one bites the dust … or another three or four should I say. I was so tired when I got off of guard duty last night I basically just kind of fell across the bed and forgot to take off my wet socks and other dampish underthings. Of course that was just bloody brilliant and I woke up with a sore throat and stuffy sinuses.

Scott isn’t feeling great either but more from the threatening cold than actually having a full-blown one. Charlene also isn’t feeling all that great. And James seems to be trying to come down with this crap as well. Rose and David are fine. The two of them are Teflon coated and they rarely seem to get ill. So far none of the younger kids have it though I made sure that my Sarah and Bekah were well-covered when they went out into the weather to do their chores.

Scott was depressed that he couldn’t “save” the girls from having to do their chores. I mean I wasn’t happy about it but I guess I felt OK with it whereas he went into Daddy-mode. But we don’t have much time before our group splits its focus and Scott needs to take advantage as much as possible of the extra labor before they head to Aldea. This morning there were still three dozen buildings tagged for immediate dismantling and they only have two days to do it. None of the buildings got pulled down but most of them were pretty much gutted today. Tomorrow the guys have agreed to forego their Rest Day … assuming the weather cooperates better than it did today … and they pull down what buildings they can and the rest will just have to be done slower.

Weather cooperation isn’t what I would call at a high level right now. The front must be stalled right over the top of us. Not that we don’t need the rain but we’ve had several days running of the stuff. No flooding that lasted too long despite some pretty torrential downpours during the day but we do have standing water at the end of a lot of driveways.

It’s a good thing that David did that one section of the canal. The canal has already filled back up right to that point. So far the artificial embankment built from the broken concrete blocks is holding. When David wasn’t helping dismantle the rubble houses outside of the Wall he was getting filthy climbing around in the canal trying to get the next section of embankment going. The only thing I asked him to be careful of was not to destroy any more of the elderberry bushes than he had to. In August and September I hope to harvest them and show Waleski how I make elderberry extract which is an immune booster for treating both influenza A and B; or at least it is supposed to be, I prefer my cayenne pepper remedy to tell you the truth.

Rose was over at the clinic with Melody, Rilla, and Ski most of the day. They were doing a new inventory and preparing the supplies that would go with Aldea. Rose admitted at dinner around our own table … it was a huge cauldron of soup that was divided up amongst the families/groups to eat where ever they could get out of the rain … that it was disconcerting to see the chunk of supplies just suddenly go like that. They still have quite a bit but what was taken out was noticeable.

Aldea’s medical situation is going to be better than a lot of people are dealing with right now but not as good as we have it in Sanctuary. Austin is going to head up the med stuff there. He’s practically a vet anyway and he’ll just carry over that training into human treatment. There is less difference in some stuff than people realize. He’s already proven to be cool in an emergency as evidence when that he and Dix and a couple of the others were attacked while hunting at Lowry Park Zoo.

It’s going to be a while before they stay overnight at Aldea. The group will leave in the morning, work all day setting up their perimeter and getting the storage containers stacked into their own Wall/apartments, and then at night they’ll come back to Sanctuary. Glenn says that if the weather lets up he thinks they can get the basic set up done in a week and make it secure enough that they can start moving families in.

While they are still “going and coming” we’ll go through and start dividing up the food. We’ll have to start them out with a bunch of the canned and dried foods which will cut into Sanctuary’s reserves but we have all the gardens going. One of the first things they have to do is set up the rice fields and get their regular garden plotted and dug out. The plan is for them to plant the rice asap and start planting a vegetable garden on the first of April. They are only going to have about two weeks to get set up before they have to start this.

Matlock and Dix thinks that at first we’ll have twice a week supply exchanges. Once Aldea becomes more self-sufficient that may go down to once a week or even bi-weekly. We’ll still cooperate on issues of security and hunts that take us out of the immediate area or trading parties that go out of the immediate area.

If I had to find historical references for the differences between Aldea and Sanctuary I would say that Sanctuary is similar to a small medieval walled town though we don’t have the same type of population. Aldea is going to be more kin to the forts on the frontier, particularly those of the backcountry era when the young US first began to expand past the Smoky Mountains. Sanctuary is big enough that we live inside the Wall most of the time. Aldea is going to be smaller and more compact so while they’ll sleep and eat inside their compound, most of their working and living time will likely be spent outside their wall but still within a patrolled perimeter. I’m not sure but I think Matlock mentioned that they were going to scavenge chain link fencing and then install it along a strategic line inside the park. That’s not going to happen however until they build their primary compound and get their gardens up and running.

Some folks are also making some noise about another extended run either to the north or south of the state. Angus and Jim have mentioned that they’d like to see the east coast of Florida and may even dip down towards the south just to see what is up. Scott hasn’t said so explicitly but I think he might be interested in another run to the north, maybe along the panhandle this time. I thought they ran into enough trouble last time they tried that. Angus and Jim I can kinda see, they’ve got built in wanderlust. But Scott has responsibilities here at home. I’m not at all thrilled by the prospect of him going anywhere much less taking James which is what I overheard.

Lots of changes coming rapidly but I guess that is no different than what has happened for months now. I have just gotten comfortable with the way things are now. The way things are right now is what feels like security. I know dividing our population is a bit inevitable … too many alphas in a confined space does not make for easy living. On the other hand it is hard for me to justify it when I know for a fact how relatively well off we are right now at this given point in time. Scott tries to comfort me by saying things like, “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” I guess what he is trying to say when he gets all Confucius-y is that extended our sphere of influence over a larger area by seeding places with our own people we become stronger than the individual settlements would at first appear. We aren’t just individual settlements in the wilderness but like-minded colonies working towards a common goal which gives us greater influence over the final construct that we build.

We’ve spent so much time surviving the immediate here and now that I’m having trouble readjusting my thinking to anything beyond the immediate future. Scott and I used to talk about our retirement years and the things we wanted to do when we got there. We made long term financial plans including for the kids’ futures. Now all I seem to be able to plan for is from one meal to the next.

The gardens are helping me put things back into a longer view perspective. I think one of the reasons that David is so very interested in building up the canal with fish and such is that it is working to a future and long-lasting result. Rose continues to be adamant that the medical field is where she wants to be and she certainly is going towards that with gusto. She studies every evening after all her daily work is complete.

James seems to be free-floating. He hadn’t really settled on what he wanted to do when he grew up and almost any plan he would have had has been pretty well kyboshed at this point. He has really grown up but I want something more for his future than just a gun in his hands sitting on the Wall waiting for an enemy that may never appear. Yes, some of that needs to be done by dedicated individuals but there needs to be something more to fall back on as well. It’s like those students with the football scholarships that have dreams of making it to the professionals and that is all they ever focus on. When they aren’t drafted by a professional franchise or even if they do but get cut after a season or two they have nothing to fall back on.

Scott and I have talked about this a few times. We had so much to choose from when it came to our future. We didn’t have unlimited choices, no one does really, but we certainly had a whole lot to choose from. Our kids … its almost as if NRS has robbed them of some of their potential. But at the same time that isn’t what I mean because it sounds like I’ll be disappointed if Rose never earns her doctorate or James never goes to college or my Sarah never actually becomes a certified Vet. NRS has robbed them of choices I guess is a better way of saying it.

It sounds petty when put beside the fact that NRS robbed so many of life altogether. I guess every parent’s dream is for their kids to have more and better options than they themselves did. I know I still want better for the kids than what we have right now. It’s not that I don’t appreciate what we have right now but sometimes I worry that the kids will look back and have regrets. Scott says we need to keep in mind that the kids access to choices may only be temporarily delayed and not necessarily taken away completely. I hope that is all that it is.

Oh, I don’t expect things to go back to the way they used to be very quickly if at all but it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that it may be our grandkids or great grandkids before the same types of choices are available to children.

Well obviously you can tell I’m not feeling my best. I always get morose when I’m sick. I ran a fever off and on and I can actually feel it coming back as I’m sitting here writing. Charlene is already asleep as are most of the kids. Only James is up and acting twitchy and bored; usually he and Charlene play a game of chess at night before he goes on guard duty or just sit and talk. He hasn’t complained but I can tell he isn’t feeling one hundred percent. Sarah made him a thermos of Russian Tea to take on duty tonight and startled him with her unexpected thoughtfulness. Of all the kids those two go at it more than any of the others. I suppose it is that they are four years apart and the opposite sex. There are days when I want to throw something at both of them; they like to irritate each other so much.

Scott had guard duty during supper. He should be home shortly and then James will go and stop looking so gloomy. I don’t know who is took my place today. Scott had Ski come over first thing this morning when I woke up with a fever. I’ve slept off and on today but not as much as I wanted to if you want the truth.

I did some schoolwork with the kids despite it being Saturday. That Monday through Friday school schedule is kind of useless these days. We get our schooling when and where we can. After everyone leaves for Aldea however I am determined to put an honest to goodness school schedule into effect for the kids who remain here. Today’s school work mostly entailed using math, science, and research skills to plan the garden patches that will go into the ground the beginning of April. After that I had them go through all of their clothes and pull out the stuff that needs repair or is too small and separate it into piles; this included all of their underclothing and accessories. They also had to clean their shoes and hats. Sarah (and Samuel who was over at our house as usual) were very good at keeping this activity organized while I took another short nap.

When I woke up I found the mending pile smaller than I expected it to be. We’ve done really well about keeping things sewn up and in good repair. I wasn’t happy to see that nearly all of the kids need new shoes of some type. I asked Samuel how he was doing and he blushed and said that he could use some new shoes too but Dix was sewing most of his clothes back together for him. I told him not to be embarrassed. It wasn’t Patricia’s fault that she was confined to bed, it just happened to be that way right now.

That seemed to bring him out of his shyness and he took off his shoe and showed me where Dix had “darned” his socks. I’ll give Dix and A+ for effort but putting patches of duct tape was unlike any sewing project that I’ve ever seen. I had to cough into my hand so I would laugh out loud. After Samuel left and we were cleaning up from our last meal of the day Sarah came to me and said, “Gosh Mom. Do you think it would be all right if I fixed his socks? I don’t want to make Mrs. Patricia mad, or Mr. Dix either, but even I know you don’t fix holes in clothes by putting tape on them.”

I told her I’d talk to Patricia when I got over my cold and we’d probably look into pulling him some clothes out of storage. Shoes though he needs right away and I have made a note to mention it to Dix. Samuel’s feet though are pretty big. I think the last size we got for him were size sixteen. If he has already grown out of those it might just be better to make him some moccasins. And I’ve just remembered where I put that pattern for turning car tires into sandals so we’ll probably make some of those as the daylight hangs around longer and we have more time.

Oh, I’m getting to fell not so good again. ‘Night. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. Bless this rain. Curse this cold.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 223 (Sunday) – March 11
Day 224 (Monday) – March 12

Just found a great big giant hole in my plans. Why is that we always consider ourselves indestructible? I mean that is just totally stupid.

Saturday night I got really sick. My fever would go up and down but I just couldn’t kick it all the way. I was pretty out of it most of yesterday and didn’t start really feeling human again until late yesterday afternoon. But I was weak as a day old kitten. I haven’t done much better today. No fever, thank goodness, but still really zapped of any strength. I tried to get up several times today and just …. well, I’m embarrassed to say that I was so tired I cried like a baby.

I’m glad no one but this journal will ever know that I did. I just plain broke down. My “to do” list is just so long now and I can’t afford to lay around like I have for the last two days. The reason though that I say I have a giant hole in my plans is because I realized I’ve been making the same mistakes that I swore I wouldn’t make. I just let the kids gravitate to doing the things they like best and picked up the slack in the other stuff.

Rose is almost 100% in the clinic these days. She helps with cooking some and does help with the kids when she is off duty and not studying. She also helps with chores around the house. I thought that would be OK … she really doesn’t like gardening and I figured her time was better spent doing other things. My Sarah is an animal person and she is very good at helping with all of those chores. She even does the more disgusting chores like mucking the stables without a single complaint. And she helps some around the house. James used to be who I could count on most for all of the outdoor work but he is now much more interested in guard duty and being with the men and because when he isn’t doing that he is helping Scott I just didn’t think much of it. Bekah wants to learn everything she can about communications in general and the radio specifically … and it’s needed that some of the younger folk are there to help.

But what about the gardening? The littles help me but I have to guide nearly their every step. Scott wouldn’t know a squash from a cucumber from a gourd if it picked the hoe up and hit him in the head. He sure can’t tell the difference between any of the root crops until they’ve been pulled up. And he can look at something and without measuring tell you how much wood or cement will be needed but he hasn’t a clue how to plant a garden.

Now Reba and Betty sure do know how to take care of a garden but after talking to them today they realized the same thing I have. Their kids have no idea how to plan, plant, and manage a garden of any size. We’ve just been doing it because it was easiest and we seemed to get things done faster.

The only other ones that know anything about gardening are going to Aldea … Saen and Becky primarily. Anne is going to tend the little flock of chickens they are going to install over there since she used to keep a small flock pre-NRS.

Charlene and my Sarah both tried to help today but it was a mess. Like a dope I never labeled the rows of what I planted where. I just didn’t think about it. They couldn’t tell the difference between the squash, cucumbers, and melons that I’ve planted.

Only half the washing that needed to get done got done today as well. All of the bedding needed to be washed but the girls were barely able to get the jeans and all the under things washed, rinsed, and hung to dry. It was dinner time before they finished the last load of towels and they didn’t have time to dry before night fell. They are going to have to stay on the line overnight and finish drying tomorrow. I hope the birds don’t get on them or they’ll have to be rewashed. As it is they are going to be hard and coarse as sandpaper.

Tomorrow all I’m going to be able to do is hang the linens out and air them out the best we can. I’m so glad that I keep the mattresses in protectors or they’d be disgusting by now. The pillows too for that matter. That’s something else I need to think about. What happens when the mattresses and pillows begin to fall apart? One of the first things Scott and I scavenged were new mattresses and pillows for all the beds in the house and we have some still in one of the steel storage containers but even those will go sooner or later. What are we going to replace the mattresses with? They used to use hay but I’d really hate to go back to that. Dang it, something else to manufacture. Maybe we should start saving feathers like they did in the old days to make pillows and down comforters with.

Scott slept in his easy chair last night trying to not get whatever I have/had. He said he is going to sleep there tonight too just to be on the safe side. Hopefully tomorrow night he’ll be able to sleep in his own bed again. That’s another reason why I want to air everything out tomorrow to try and get rid of the germs.

I couldn’t have picked a worst time to get sick. Things are really starting to take off in the garden. Betty came over with a basket of what they had picked today. There was more broccoli and looseleaf lettuces but they picked the first of the carrots and cabbage. I nearly cried that I hadn’t been there to pull the first ones but I guess I should be grateful that things are making.

So far the way I planted it turned out to be great. There is yet to be more fresh produce come ripe than we can use in a single day. That day is fast approaching and that’s when we’ll need to start preserving things for when the garden gives out.

And speaking of giving out, that’s where I am right now. I’m all give out. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to be up and about but I had to try. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 225 (Tuesday) – March 13
Day 226 (Wednesday) – March 14
Day 227 (Thursday) – March 15

Two missed days of journaling but I suppose it would be too much to expect to be able to do exactly what I want every day.

Day before yesterday I was still dragging but I’m feeling better today than I have been in a while. Not what I would call one hundred percent but certainly better. Scott heated me up another tub of water Tuesday night and I soaked the germs and general malaise from my body. Wednesday I was still getting better but feeling like I was trying to relapse a bit but today was all good … at least health-wise.

The intermediate reality of our new living situation is slowly sinking in. The crew that is going to be living in Aldea started going there on Tuesday. I spent much of yesterday and today inventorying items and splitting stuff by percentage. As soon as they get their primary compound set up they’ll take 20% of the food storage and dry goods. After they are firmly established and have their storage capacity and system worked out they’ll get another 20% of the food storage. We’ll provide them with fresh foods and a share of the corn crop until they can get their garden going. In exchange they’ll provide us with a share of rice.

Fuel won’t be split as Glenn and some of the others found a partially filled tanker left behind by the NRSC at a refueling point. The fuel that is at Sanctuary will remain here to run the tractor and to be pieced out while we increase our biofuel capacity; primarily with methane and cellulose and “white lightning.”

Some of the plans for Aldea have changed. The recent rain we got, while not nearly enough to call off the drought, has definitely pointed out some of the problems with building Aldea. First, the main compound location has been changed. It will be in the main park area that has been built up and leveled off. It’s really the only good place in the park stable enough year-round for a good foundation. That location change will also mean that fewer trees will have to be taken down. The peninsula where they were originally going to build was nothing but lowland and cypress. However, they are going to build a emergency bug out location on the original peninsula up on stilts and maintain it to a fallback position.

The new location for Aldea does offer one benefit. There is an inlet of sorts that can be turned into a protected harbor. There is already an existing boardwalk right along that side of the river and that can be used to help with the water mill idea that has been spoken of. They’ll also be closer to the “lake” portion of the Hillsborough River which should help them with fishing and trading as well. And the observation tower will get them a really great view of the surrounding area if they can get it fortified.

Well, it is what it is. There are things about Aldea that I like and things that I don’t. I’ll admit to partiality to Sanctuary but I understand that it isn’t perfect either. One of the things about Sanctuary that was always on the problematic side was the fact that it was right on a main highway. US41 offered both good and bad things but it’s a little on the moot side now as it has been so torn up, blown up, washed out, burnt, and just about anything else you can think of including having a major train derailment wreck the heck out of a couple of sections several months back. As badly damaged as the road is it won’t be long before grass and weeds add to the deterioration and US41 will return to the mud track it was a hundred years ago.

On the other hand, if we can get a trade route set up, Sanctuary is in a perfect position to take major advantage of any traffic in that regard. Aldea could be a trade center by water and Sanctuary could be a trade center by land. We’d be sister communities that could lock in and become major players in any rebuilding that goes on. The only better position for something of that nature would be something immediately along the coast and then you have issues with the annual hurricane season.

As for trading, we have our first real trade as far as I’m concerned. It wasn’t a huge trade as things go but I think a significant one and something that I had Brandon note in the history of Sanctuary that he is keeping. A woman came to the front gate today and had heard from the peddlers that we might be interested in trade. She had homemade soap to trade and was looking for some garden starts. I traded a tray of garden seedlings and a few packets of seed for five gallons of laundry detergent and a half dozen bars of bath soap.

Why I think this is significant is because neither product was something we could have scavenged. I grew the plants and she – her name was Dora – made the soap from scratch. This was a total cottage industry type deal.

I guess I better confess something. I don’t think that even Scott would understand if I told him. I just couldn’t stand to see how hungry the two kids where that the woman had with her. They called her “aunt” so I’m assuming that they were her niece and nephew but it could have just been a polite title for a woman that had taken them in. I don’t know, I didn’t ask though I wondered. Anyway, it hurt to see them. The woman didn’t ask for charity and seemed rather proud that she had found a way to make a good trade for what she needed without asking for a handout. I just couldn’t stand it so in the basket of seedlings and seeds I put in a hunk of the Pony Express Bread I had made yesterday and a jelly jar of honey.

I know, I know … but it just felt like the right thing to do. Had it been a bunch of adults I wouldn’t have done it. If it had felt like she was using the kids to get sympathy I wouldn’t have done it. But it didn’t feel that way at all. I just hope that if the need ever arrives that “what goes around comes around” will be the pay off.

We are having better and better luck with the garden production. The rain has had an amazing effect on everything. In addition to the carrots that are coming in we have broccoli and the looseleaf lettuce. The first couple of heads of cabbage were cut and the radishes are coming in again. I have a whole row of Chiogga beets that I’m going to harvest and preserve tomorrow and the English peas are beginning to come in so fast that I’m having to pick the ones ready for harvest and put them in the Cooler until I have enough to can a batch in the pressure canner.

And today I harvested the first head of iceberg lettuce and shredded it up. We had a wonderful dinner tonight. I mixed 1:1:1 some taco flavored TVP, ground venison, and canned ground beef and then seasoned it up really well. We had a few boxes of corn tortillas that needed to be used so I pulled those out of the inventory and freshened them up and of course we made a ton of flour tortillas. Reba made some sour cream and Betty brought some cheese she has been aging and I made some queso blanco from some powdered milk past its best used by date. I added some homemade salsa that I had made last year and then baked some of the flour tortillas and turned them into chips. My girls helped by making up a big batch of refried beans. I wish I had fresh tomatoes to add to it but the tomatoes aren’t due to be ripe until next week at the earliest.

Tomorrow is another cleaning day but I’m going to be inventorying and reorganizing in the food storehouse for the most part except for a little bit of gardening and then working on getting the beets preserved. Betty actually told me if I wanted to help get the jars all set up she would be happy to watch the canner for me. She is teaching another lesson on canning to the girls.

We are doing this really cool stuff. For every “lesson” we are making a scrapbook page. OK, I know most guys would probably find this kind of corny but this is a really good way to put stuff definitely in memory. We can’t really take pictures but we can draw and we have a ton of scrapbooking stuff that we’ve gathered and it can be as fancy or as plain as you want it.

Over the summer when it is too hot to do anything else I plan on teaching them embroidery and crochet and maybe even quilting if it doesn’t make me too sad. Mom taught Sarah some quilting since Rose just never was interested. Sarah still has her first quilt block and has it framed and hanging in her room. I miss Momma.

I gotta stop writing for tonight. I’m getting to sad all of a sudden and it just won’t do for Scott to come in from guard duty and find me crying.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 228 (Friday) – March 16

It has been a fairly productive day. Up early and dawn was clear and bright. Breakfast was cornmeal cakes; some liked them sweet and some liked them savory, I didn’t care just as long as they cleaned their plates.

After breakfast most of the Aldea folks left for the day, including the women and children. They were going to start cooking their mid-day meal on-site instead of taking stuff from here. That means that we don’t have near as many to cook for and those that remain are the ones that tend to be used to the way I normally cooked. I prefer to fix a hearty breakfast; not big, hearty. Lunch is the main meal of the day. I have a “teatime” around 4 o’clock and then a lighter supper is served about 7 o’clock at night.

I guess I picked up my inlaws’ habits after Scott and I got married; but it works most of the time for us. If the youngest kids are too tired to stay up late enough for dinner they won’t go to bed hungry because they’ve had “teatime.” There’s been a few times when some of the adults aren’t hungry enough to eat supper and teatime is enough for them as well. The teatime also helps with our guard duty rotations.

Dix is working out a new schedule for guard duty here at Sanctuary. It’s going to be challenging to manage but we did it before our population became so large. We did it before, we’ll do it again. I’ll be back on the rotation pretty regular but mostly during the day probably … hopefully. What I’m really hoping is that this isn’t too hard on the men, but we don’t have much choice.

The kids are really going to have to kick it up a notch and help with the work around Sanctuary. They are already helping quite a bit but until we can get into a new routine they are going to have to help pick up the slack. The cows are giving between five and eight gallons of milk per day and that’s a lot of work, but the Cooler helps. We are now also processing cheeses which everyone is really excited about.

Today however was primarily cleaning and processing beets. And we had a bunch more beets to harvest than I expected. For the succession planting I did I think I needed more than a day or two between the rows. We have the most of three rows ready to pick so that means we had a lot to process.

We were able to make quite a few beet items: beet jelly, pickled beets, beet relish, and plain beets. We’ve still got quite a few beets in the Cooler and I’m afraid people are going to get sick of them eventually. At lunch we had a beet casserole as a side dish and then Betty and I laughed and giggled the entire time we were making brownies that had beets hidden in them. We had them during tea time. Here is the recipe. We’ll give it a couple of day before we confess what was in them.

Chocolate Beet Brownies

1/2 cup butter (or 1/4 cup butter and 1/4 cup applesauce)
4 oz. unsweetened chocolate
4 eggs
1 cup brown sugar (packed)
1 cup applesauce
1 tsp. vanilla
1-1/2 cup unbleached white flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. baking powder
1 cup cooked beets or 15 oz. can beets packed in water, drained and mashed;
1/2 cup finely chopped almonds
1/2 cup wheat germ

Melt butter and chocolate over low heat. Set aside to cool. In a separate bowl, beat eggs until light in color and foamy. Add sugar and vanilla and continue beating until well creamed. Stir in chocolate mixture, followed by applesauce and beets. Sift together flour, salt, spices and baking powder and stir into creamed mixture. Fold in wheat germ and almonds. Turn into greased 9x13-inch pan and bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 40 minutes. Cool before cutting into squares.

Betty and I were giggling so much we had to leave the kitchen area because people kept asking us what was so funny. You know, I’m glad Scott and I didn’t try and do this whole “survival” thing on our own. I love Scott. I love the kids. But there are certainly issues of weakness in a small family group that you can compensate with by being part of a larger group with similar goals.

Not too big though. I remember the problems that the Ehren Cutoff group had and I think some of the issues were a direct result of their size and how they were trying to govern themselves. It will be interesting to see now that we are cutting our “leadership” in half how well things will run. I used to not be real thrilled with Dix and there are still issues with him that I’m not totally in line with; however, if I had to choose which man had grown the most as a leader between Matlock and Dix I have to admit that it would be Dix.

Matlock continues to be Matlock. He has always had the better rapport with people and been more flexible. When he and Becky hooked up and moved to their own place some of the relationship I had with him changed but that was to be expected. I don’t think I resented that but on the other hand I did catch myself comparing him to the men in my family. I was probably getting a little too close and involved. No one is going to replace my brother and I just need to learn to deal with that.

Dix on the other hand has certainly learned to be more flexible and to work within the group better. He was such a solo act I used to worry about how he would work out as a person in leadership. In some weird way it’s like he has become more comfortable in his own skin and being comfortable with himself helps him to be comfortable with others. He always seemed so arrogant and that just irritated me beyond reason, but he isn’t that way now. He still intimidates some people but not to the extreme he used to. He can’t help he is one of those big guys that looks like GI Joe on steroids. I think it also helps people see him as a father to Samuel and how much effort he is willing to put into being a good one.

I think we’ve all changed to some degree. We are still ourselves but stretched and grown in ways we could never have envisioned.

I have most of the first 20% of the food divided out for the Aldea folks to take. They’ll take most of that on Monday. Saen and Anne are heading that part up. Becky is miserable with nerves and morning sickness that has come back on her. The mosquitoes and no-seeums are pretty bad over there as well. They’ve taken quite a bit of screening with them but they can’t spend all of their time inside their storage container homes, they aren’t designed for that.

Bugs are getting bad here as well now that the cool weather is gone for good and the recent rains have left enough moisture for the mosquitoes to breed in. They don’t need standing water but it doesn’t hurt. The fish in the ponds and canals will actually help with this as they will eat most of the mosquito larvae laid in that water.

Scott has finished covering all of the cisterns but we aren’t sure what to do with the open, in-ground pools that aren’t screened. We may have to empty those and fill them in somehow. Now that we are picking up regular radio broadcasts again we’ve been hearing that some insect borne diseases are making a comeback around the coasts and inland water sources. Waleski is running around like a nut trying to locate info and figure how ways to prevent and/or treat cases of stuff like cholera, yellow fever and a lot of other stuff we haven’t had to deal with on a regular basis since early last century.

What was really scary was a report out of the Texas quarantine zone – an area where most people prefer to call themselves citizens of the Republic of Texas – of a typhoid epidemic. Early on when we were scavenging the health facilities around University Hospital Waleski grabbed all of the routine vaccines and gave everyone, adults included, boosters of the vaccines that didn’t require refrigeration. And then when we were scavenging downtown, they went through the County Health Clinic there on Kennedy Blvd. and he grabbed most everything else he could find.

The County Health Clinic over that way is where a lot of folks from this area used to get their traveling vaccines; the ones that are required to enter certain countries. Rose and James had gotten some of them already because they went on some mission trips to places that required them. They had the typhoid vaccine as well as the one for meningitis. Scott got those two plus the one for yellow fever when he went to South America on business a couple of years ago. Our whole family has both the HepA and HepB vaccines as well as the MMR and boosters where necessary because of the clientele we rent to.

Our family was the exception to the rule however and except for the military and national guard personnel that had served over seas most everyone else received an extensive list of shots. Waleski gave everyone as many of the updated vaccines as he could but vaccines are never 100% effective and don’t replace precautions. Vaccines also do not offer lifetime protection. I think the longest that a vaccine will cover you is the lifetime coverage of the polio vaccine followed probably by the up to 10 years offered by the Tetanus vaccine (Tdap). But the flu vaccine only lasts a year at most and even the typhoid vaccine will only last two years. Hopefully every vaccine will give us a buffer of protection to get us through the next couple of years and after that massive epidemics will go down or disappear … I hope.

The food storehouse is looking pretty good. I figured out a way to get more storage shelving in each room. The really heavy stuff sits on shelves that have been screwed into the studs around the edges of the walls but rather than wasting all that floor space I added long, sturdy shelves on wheels. Scott has helped modify and/or build a bunch of shelves like this so that when the shelves are being rolled the stuff doesn’t fall off the shelf or fall over on the shelf and make a mess.

Let me see if I can explain it. Say you have a 12 x 12-foot room. On three sides of the room you have 24-inch-wide shelves from floor to ceiling. That means that you have a 10 x 10-foot space that is pretty useless smack dab in the middle; space that would be really useful. You really only need about three feet wide walkways to be able to work in. That means that I could still have another 7-foot-long strip of space. That means I can put four more 18-inch-wide shelves in that space if I pushed them right up onto each other. But that would make it difficult to access everything and keep it rotated properly. But with the shelving on wheels they can be moved back and forth one at a time and you could continue to have at least a three-foot-wide walking path.

OK, it’s not a perfect solution and accidents are bound to happen but if the national archives can do it for their paper files I don’t see why I can utilize a variation of it for our food supplies. I tell you it’s really let me organize things a lot better and I haven’t had to utilize quite so many of those plastic tubs that sometimes collapse under the weight of anything stacked on them. In bigger rooms where this system doesn’t make a lot of sense I had the guys install shelving that we scavenged from Keel Library and that has worked really well too.

I’m really getting into the swing of things and this is something the littles can help me with. Get enough little rugrats going and you can move an amazing amount of cans in no time. Nothing broke and only a couple of cans were dented. That’s a good day. I would like to finish it up tomorrow but I don’t think that will happen. For one I promised the kids that I’d do some special cooking for St. Patrick’s Day. For another it is Baking Day and we really do need to do that tomorrow. I have a couple of bread recipes that I want to try out to stretch out the wheat flour we have remaining.

We are also going to go through a lot of the “dry goods” (non-food items) that we stored in the steel containers and pull out stuff that Aldea might need. And all of that is going on while the Aldea folks begin to pack up their households so that everything can be hauled over to their new home.

I did mention something to Scott and I hope he mentions it to Glenn and Matlock. People that aren’t used to living in apartments may have an adjustment reaction to living in those steel storage containers. I know they will be remodeling them as time goes along but I worry they are going to be a little dark and cramped. While I was working in the food storehouse – which can be dark and stifling as well – I thought it might be nice if they go to the New Orleans or Charleston way of doing things. You have what amounts to a shotgun type house and then you have these really wonderful porches and patios where most of the living is actually done. In New Orleans there are some beautiful (were some?) cast iron balconies on the second and third floors of buildings that let people take advantage of any breeze that happened to come through. In Charleston they have the same type thing only under roof and they are called piazzas and they were as large as a veranda and serve basically the same purpose. Just seems like a way to have the best of both worlds to me. And if they want to screen in the piazzas that would be even better.

Well, James just got in from guard duty and Scott is ready to head off so I need to see him out the door. I hope tomorrow is as fine a day as today was. I need more of those.

 

[AlaskaSue]

This is such a great tale…I still love reading it! You are very, very talented! <3

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 229 (Saturday) – March 17 – St. Patrick’s Day

Happy St. Paddy’s Day! And as you can see for the occasion I’ve pulled out a green gel pen for the occasion. Yeah, I know, more than a little on the silly side but I feel the need for a little silliness.

One of the last breakfasts we will all have together and the kids are already bitterly complaining about being separated. Many of them had become quite close. Everyone will survive but I think it will be at least as hard on the kids as it will be on the adults. And because I’m a big marshmallow I let the kids talk me into celebrating St. Patrick’s Day will some special cooking.

Breakfast was green eggs and ham and pastel green gumdrop quick bread. For drinks there was green milk and green juice. I even managed to make green butter and I colored just a little bit of pineapple preserves green as well. The kids loved it, even the older ones laughed. Some of the adults on the other hand had to close their eyes in order to eat.

Matlock looked a little green around the gills as he was trying to swallow. Scott and James who have both had to put up with my weird fits and starts over the years had warned David ahead of time and all three wolfed down their breakfast. All Angus said was that I had better not have messed with the coffee. Hmmm … not that I wouldn’t have but I couldn’t figure out how to make something so dark into a green color.

I didn’t stop there either. At lunch we had green tinged Deviled Eggs, pickles, green tortillas that they stuffed with lettuce and a few other things I had set out. The kids had green Limeade to drink that I added some neon green food coloring to. At tea time I had green shamrock shaped cookies and “green tea” and for dinner there was cabbage, green beans, and green tinted mashed potatoes to go with a large pork roast from one of the culled hogs. To top it off I made green Jell-O parfaits with green tinted Dream Whip and a green maraschino cherry on top.

I have to admit by the end of the day even I was getting a little sick of the color green. And Angus finally changed into a green kilt because all the kids kept trying to give him a pinch. I did happen to notice however that a bottle of Bailey’s was missing out of the store house and so was a bottle of green food coloring that somehow found its way into a batch of hooch. Guess I wasn’t the only one getting silly today. I hope their heads don’t ache too badly in the morning. If they toss their cookies from the hangover and see all that green you can bet they’ll just get all that much sicker.

Aside from the silliness we did get quite a bit of constructive work accomplished. Scott has managed to get the last house that was in complete disrepair taken down here inside the Wall. He’s also marked off where he wants to add another gate into the Wall. It’s on the north side and makes sense. It will be a minor gate to start with; mostly for human traffic or small vehicles. If it turns out that we start using the gate quite a bit he’s made the plans flexible enough so that the gate can grow into one about the size of the front gatehouse with the same security features.

We did a lot of baking today and I have to say that the new recipes I tried out were really fantastic. First I found a lot of dried beans in our storage that were way, way, way passed their “best used by” dates. I had tried a few of each bean to see if they would rehydrate well but had very poor results. Rather than toss the beans or feed them to the animals I decided to make bean flour with them.

To save us a lot of work I hooked up an electric grinder to one of the battery powered sources and ground the beans as fine as bread flour. It took a while even with the electric grinder so I’m really glad I wasn’t doing it by hand. Once I had a good supply of bean flour I substituted 30% of the wheat flour for bean flour in my regular bread recipe. Of the different bean flours that I tried the garbanzo bean flour turned out with the best flavor in my opinion.

I also ground some rice up this way and made rice flour. I could substitute 30% of the wheat flour this way as well. I had several boxes of barley that we needed to do something with so I made barley flour as well and I could substitute up to 50% of the wheat flour that way. I’ve got some other books I needed to go through and I’m hoping to find some whole grain bread recipes to use so I don’t have to grind anything down.

While the bread was baking Betty, Reba, and I sat around making plans. The kids don’t know it yet but come April Fool’s Day they are going to start back with an organized school schedule. I don’t know what they have planned for the kids going to Aldea but the kids staying here are going to get a traditional education whether they want one or not. I’m sure I’m going to have problems with James and Betty and Reba think they’ll have problems with some of the older Morris kids as well but we are all determined to do this. Tomorrow we are going to get together again and I’ll bring a list of resources that I have and we’ll try and piece out a lesson plan and some goals.

As soon as the Aldea folks are firmly settled Angus and Jim said they are going to go for a little ride. I think they mean to go nosing around south of here and see what kind of trouble they can get into. The NRS infecteds have finally dropped back down to what they were before the Hive came along but all that says is that it is still going to be dangerous as all get. They are equipping Juicer with better communication devices so hopefully it won’t be like they enter a black hole and we don’t hear from them again until they come banging on the gate.

Scott keeps talking around it, but I know he wants to go on another run to the north; maybe even passed the state line and over into Georgia. As you can guess I’m not terribly thrilled by the idea but it’s a bit inevitable. I’m sure there are going to be things that we need to trade for. Apples for one but that won’t be until August or September. Before that, maybe in July, we are going to need to see about trading for some wheat. That’s assuming any was planted this year by people willing to bargain for it and that we have what they are interested in.

I guess I should just go ahead and put this in but I’m afraid whoever reads this down the road is going to think I’m being judgmental. I don’t mean to be but I’m just having a problem reconciling this with my admittedly conservative take on things. Seems it wasn’t the adult women that I should have been wondering about in terms of who was going to get caught pregnant next.

I knew Brandon and Josephine were an “item.” I knew they were close and I knew that they were likely treading a very fine line when it came to how they were conducting themselves in private. Jim and I had found that little lover’s nest and I had considered the possibility it was their trysting place even then. But I hadn’t really considered it any of my business. They weren’t within my sphere of discipline; or at least that was how I rationalized not getting involved.

I also tried to tell myself that having Maddie around all the time had to be cramping their style. Apparently not. Josephine is six to eight weeks pregnant and she’s only sixteen years old. For some odd reason Rose is angry about this. When I try and talk to her about it she shuts me out. I’ll give her the night to cool off and then I’ll try again tomorrow. It’s just such an unusual reaction that I’d like to know what is causing it. I mean I’m not happy about it and I think they could have used more restraint and commonsense but I’m not seething or anything. Rose is really PO’d and that’s not like her at all.

Now we have four pregnant females. Rhonda is about eight and a half months pregnant. Patricia is 29 weeks along and continues to weaken though she is doing her best to hang in there. I went over and helped Jack do a few things around the house and Patricia slept nearly the entire time. She is all baby, her arms and legs are too thin and the other women and I are trying to come up with something that will put some extra calories into her diet. Becky is fifteen weeks along but she is going to Aldea so I won’t see her as much. Terra will be the midwife over there and she and Ski have been coordinating a few things just in case of emergencies. And now Josephine. I am so glad that I no longer have to worry about getting pregnant. I just can’t get it out of my head that Rose is so bent out of shape. I’m definitely going to have to figure out what that is all about. My imagination is running a little wild at the moment and skittering over possibilities that I don’t even want to contemplate.


Tomorrow is Rest Day but it promises to be a busy one so I’m going to toddle on off to bed. I don’t have guard duty tonight and neither does Scott. It is rare that we are both off on the same night so we plan on making the most of it.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Day 230 (Sunday) – March 18 – Rest Day

Think I may have found a way to help Patricia to eat more and put more carbs and protein into her diet as well. As I lay in bed last night trying to sleep – Scott was snoring again – I kept thinking about all the beans we’ve got in the storehouse both canned and dried and how I needed to start putting them into our menu more often. And that led me back to the bean bread that we had baked today. And then that thought led me to remember the extra oomph that was in the bread because of the bean flour. And then for some reason my mind jumped to the fact that Patricia really likes muffins. If she can’t keep anything else down she’ll eat a muffin so we’ve been keeping some on hand just for her.

Bingo! A mental jackpot; and I was finally able to go off to sleep. See, one of the things that I used to do as a hobby was collect recipes. I’ve got cookbooks galore but I also copied them out of library books and off the internet. I even created a several special cookbooks just for our prep foods. One of these is a Bean Book. I knew just where it was too because I had just finished looking through it for the directions for making bean flour. I remember skimming over a recipe for making Blueberry Bean Muffins but I didn’t take much notice of it at the time. Well, as soon as I got up this morning I scrambled through the binder and found the recipe again and that’s what I made for breakfast. Oh, we made chorizo grits and scrambled eggs as well but I was anxious to see if the muffins turned out.

Oh boy they were good. And I actually saw Patricia eat three of them with fresh butter and on one of them she even put jelly. This is such a good thing. Waleski wanted to know what I had put in the muffins because he was getting pretty desperate. He had tried to get her to drink all different kinds of nutritional shakes that he could come up with but she couldn’t keep them down. They really didn’t taste all that great in my opinion and they smelled terrible so I’m not surprised she had problems gagging them down.

Here’s the recipe in case anyone wants it. Instead of the fresh or frozen blueberries I used dried blueberries that I rehydrated. I also left the pecans out of half the batches because we have some folks that aren’t partial to nuts. Not having an electric food processor in our kitchen area I used a potato masher on the beans until I got a thick paste and then I added the milk to smooth it out even more.

Blueberry Bean Muffins

2 cans (15 ounces each) Red Kidney beans or 3 cups cooked Red Kidney beans, drained, rinsed
1/3 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter or margarine, softened
3 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon, ground
1/2 teaspoon each of ground allspice and ground cloves
1 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen
3/4 cup pecans, chopped

Process beans and milk in food processor or blender until smooth. Mix sugar and butter in large bowl; beat in eggs and vanilla. Add bean mixture, mixing until well blended. Mix in combined flours, baking soda, salt and spices. Gently mix in blueberries. Spoon mixture into 12 greased or paper-lined muffin cups; sprinkle with pecans. Bake muffins in preheated 375-degree oven until toothpicks inserted in centers come out clean, 20 to 25 minutes. Cool in pans on wire racks 5 minutes; remove from pans and cool. Yield: 1 dozen

Betty says that we need to make a Sanctuary Cookbook for posterity and in case something happens to any one of us our recipes will still be around for others to use. I think that makes sense. We have just about a gazillion of those plastic page protectors that we’ve gathered from various offices and office supply places that will even help keep the recipes neat when in use.

Another nice thing happened today. While out on a bicycle ride with Scott today we found that not all of the fruit trees outside the Wall were destroyed by the Hive or by the NRSC troopers. We crossed the highway to take stock of how many houses we were going to eventually have to demolish on that side. Hidden at a weird angle between a house and a small lake – the same one where we had for a time considered planting the rice – we found three Ponderosa Lemon trees, two large tangerine trees, and some grapefruit trees.

At first I thought the Ponderosa Lemons were grapefruit as they don’t look much different. But I cut one open to see if they had started to dry out and sure enough we had a small gold mine on our hands. Scott called back to Sanctuary for the boys and James and Samuel came and helped us pick every tree clean. On his way back from the fish ponds David stopped and picked up the bushels of fruit so we wouldn’t have to haul everything over by hand. Tomorrow I’ll start juicing the fruit and get them canned up.

David was out with the truck – Jim decided to go with him to keep him out of trouble – getting more fish for the large canal. David has been spending every spare minute dredging the canal and using all the broken cement blocks to reinforce the embankments. He’s doing a fine job of it too. The canal is slowly filling up with water again I think in part because David cleaned out the spring area and in part because of the rains we’ve had. Scott told me that they are thinking of taking a pumper truck and hitting up some of the local ponds for water just to go ahead and get the canal three-quarters full. Whatever floats their boat I guess.

And speaking of boats, in the garage of one of the houses by the lake are two of these little … thingies, I don’t know what they are called. You put them on the water and then you can putter around the lake by pedaling just like on a bike. We are going to haul those over for the kids to have for their free time. Not that there is going to be much of that in the near future.

Except for the few odds and ends we’ve pretty much scavenged our area dry. Aldea will have fresh pickings over their way but Sanctuary is now primarily focused on self-sufficiency and getting ourselves set up for trading. I’m sure we’ll continue finding odds and ends for who knows how long but all the good stuff is just gone already. That means that we’ll have fewer big Gathering Runs unless we do some with Aldea and OSAG.

And what that means is that we can put in some schooling with the kids because there WILL be time. We talked to Dix today and he is all for it. I think he sees it as a little military school but they already get a lot of that. We want to make sure the kids can read and write not just point and shoot.

Early on the kids really enjoyed the literature units that I pulled together around The Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe. Our first book in April will be Alas, Babylon for the older kids and we’ll start a nine-month study of the Little House on the Prairie series for the younger kids. The LHOTP series I already have a prepackaged curriculum for called The Prairie Primer and I’ve used it twice already but I think it will be pretty good with the younger ones. We’ll have to pull our own lessons together for Alas, Babylon which means more work for me in the evenings. Glory I miss the Internet. At least I won’t be doing this by myself. Betty and Reba have both promised to help.

We set up files and a general calendar and Dix knows that we want two solid hours mid morning to work with the kids. That will take a chunk out of my gardening time but I think it’s very important that we are consistent. There will be interruptions no doubt; the trick will be to keep those interruptions to a minimum.

Took my turn on guard duty late in the afternoon so I missed tea time but James brought me something to drink when he was just wandering around with nothing in particular to do. I still hadn’t been able to pin Rose down on why she was so bent out of shape over Josephine being pregnant so I asked James if he knew what was going on.

James groused at me, “God Mom, do you have to over analyze everything?”

“Hey, watch your mouth. And I’m not over analyzing this.”

After an exaggerated sigh and nose flare I finally got, “Look, it’s just … come on, you know she and David are kind of on again off again. When things get too personal Rose just has to back up.”

Still confused I asked, “What do you mean ‘too personal’?”

“You know. David is a guy. Rose is a girl. There are things guys and girls like to do together. Only Rose and David aren’t married so they try and avoid temptation.”

Yeah, I was finally getting the picture. “So you mean that she is bent out of shape because Brandon and Josephine aren’t making the same sacrifice as she and David are.”

“Yeah, I guess you could put it that way. But geez … why don’t you ask her?” James replied more than a little embarrassed.

I wanted to tell him that I’d been trying but it was like talking to a brick wall; an angry brick wall. Instead, after my shift was over I grabbed some sun tea and found David working away in the canal, muddy from the chest down.

“OK, I’ve tried Rose. I’ve tried James. Now I’ll see if you can explain it to me.”

David caught me off guard by asking, “You mean why Rose is so angry?”

“Yes, and how did you know what I was asking about?”

“You are a Mom,” he laughed. “And Scott warned me you were bothered by it.”

I’m definitely going to have to discuss this with Scott. He’s giving away my secrets. “Well, what is your conclusion?”

I knew David would give it to me straight with no dressing up. He wasn’t raised in a home where you did that kind of stuff. I’m sure some of our old friends would have considered him a little unrefined and maybe a little crude but that has never bothered me. Scott’s a bit like that too. Neither one of them has a lot of patience for people that won’t just accept them as they are. That in itself has a certain charm to it and I can see why Rose would find David fascinating if nothing else.

“Look. I love Rose. I really love her. I’m pretty sure she feels the same about me but it’s a little freaky that if the world hadn’t blown up in our faces over the last six or seven months we might never have even met. And I ain’t ready for kids. And Rose isn’t ready for marriage. You and Scott would probably ask us to wait even if we thought we were ready. Neither one of us wants to compromise on that part of it. So we hang out and when things get … too serious … we try and take a break and just act like friends for a while. We think it is a sacrifice worth making and we hope that when we are both ready for marriage we’ll also be ready for kids and all the other stuff that goes along with marriage.”

I was still missing something in the translation. “Honey, that’s all well and good and frankly I’m glad you both have the sense to back off rather than take unnecessary chances. What I don’t get is why Rose is angry.”

He shrugged and said, “Probably for the same reason I’m a little bent out of shape about it. We’ve got enough problems right now. It’s not fair that Brandon and Josie went all selfish and now we may all have to pay for it. What’s a sixteen-year-old girl really know about being a mom? What’s a seventeen-year-old punk really know about being a dad? So everyone else now has to deal with their drama when we have enough of our own. Hell, it ain’t easy waiting but I’m doing it, why couldn’t skinny boy Brandon? And they aren’t even getting dragged across the carpet for having sex and getting knocked up. That’s what’s pissing me off the most.”

Oh hoooooo … so now I understood. Maturity is a great thing but it’s not an easy thing to have to commit to being. David and Rose had set self-limits based on a wise decision making process. But that doesn’t stop them from being a little jealous of those that have been less wise. And then for them to think there have been no consequences, or will be no consequences, from our group probably just put salt in the wound.

“Look David, I feel your pain. Scott and I … well, there was a reason why we lived with our parents and dated for four years before we finally got married. Some of it was money but some of it was that we weren’t ready for the risk of starting a family before we had college and other stuff out of the way. There were times we were like static electricity … helplessly attracted and then a huge pop as the power built up to be too much and something set it off.”

David blushed a little at that and just kept working. I continued, “There are going to be consequences that I don’t think any of us realizes yet. Certainly I don’t think Brandon and Josephine have a clue as to what they’ve gotten themselves into yet. Rose has a better idea than Josie does because she watched me be pregnant four times plus the two we lost and a couple of those pregnancies were through some really rough times and circumstances. You saw in your own family how easily things can and do go wrong. I’m really proud of you and Rose. But don’t think that Brandon and Josephine won’t be suffering consequences within our group. I’m sure that Ski has ripped them up one side and down the other. I know for a fact that Dix took Brandon aside and gave him one heck of a lecture. Betty has probably scared Josie out of a year’s growth with the list of items that she needs to start gathering so that she can take care of herself and the baby. But the fact is that there is a baby and we don’t want anything bad to happen to Josie or Brandon so we’ll probably have to pick up some of the slack. But if the baby is born and lives, and Josephine survives with no lasting complications, they can pretty much count their childhood totally over and done with.”

“Hey I didn’t mean that Rose and I were still kids … “

“I know, and I’m sorry it came out like that. I just mean that when you become a parent you have to give up a lot of freedoms that you have when you don’t have kids. Your ability to have an egocentric life is just gone. Even bad parents lose that whether they always acknowledge it or not. Burden or blessing, a child changes your life in ways that you can never change back. Even if the child doesn’t survive or you give it up for adoption, the memory of the child changes you. That is going to be a lifelong consequence for Brandon and Josephine that there will be no escaping from.”

I left a liter of tea for him in the shade of a bush and headed home. On my way I found Rose standing looking at our little graveyard. She jumped as I put my arm around her.

“Don’t say it mom, I know life changes fast and I know it’s stupid to complain about life not being fair.”

“Darlin’ I wasn’t going to say either of those things. I just wanted you to know how proud I am of you.”

She deflated like a fuzzed-up cat that gets doused by a bucket of water. We talked a little bit and she pretty much confirmed what David had said but she was angrier at Josephine for not telling Brandon “No.” Rose says that Josephine was either too weak to say no, too selfish to say no, or was being too manipulative to say no. I’m not sure that reflects very well on her opinion of Brandon but on the other hand I see her point. I guess we are all going to take a while to get used to the idea.

After stopping by the house to see if Charlene needed a break from watching the littles and finding that Scott and James had already taken them off her hands I asked if she wanted to go to the gardens with me. She is a good girl and I really like her. Her life hasn’t been an easy one and it has left its mark on her but you can tell she really wants to take advantage of this new chance that has come her way. She’s so eager for a female role model that it half scares me to death. I only hope that we can live up to what she needs. Rose is helping her with her hair … which has also strangely enough drawn Sarah and Bekah in … and girly stuff like that. I guess my role is to help her gain “womanly survival skills” like gardening and cooking and stuff like that. That girl is a hoot, I’ll say that. Some of the things that come out of her mouth just tickle me to pieces.

The gardens are looking really great since the rain. We’ll have to continue to be careful and water regularly with the soaker hoses into next month but with weed control we should be doing grand before the spring growing season is over with. Got some Kale and Swiss Chard today that I stuck into the cooler for tomorrow’s lunch. I was tempted to pull a couple of tomatoes but another day on the vine will make them better. I should definitely be able to start pulling tomatoes tomorrow as well as some bush beans and wax beans. Now is when things start getting interesting. We’ll have to decide what to use fresh and what to preserve on a daily basis most likely.

Well, I’m all wrote out. Can’t believe I sat here and forgot to drink my warm milk to help me sleep. I’ll have to give it to the pups if I can’t bring myself to drink it now. I hate waste and that was stupid to forget it was sitting right there beside me.

 

[sssarawolf]

Big, enormous thank you

 

[Lake Lili]

WoW! Thanks! That was a whole lot of read. Appreciated.
Lili

 

[Siskiyoumom]

Power posting! Thank you so much for all the chapters.