Chapter 35

Settler Wave Two Arrives

Now that this had been taken care of I go and have a quick dinner and follow my own advice. I use the final two hours of daylight making sure every vehicle is offloaded from the ferry and parked in a reasonably defensive area. It seems that the majority if not all of the people took my speech to heart and also pitch in. I hope that this is a sign of good times to come. Now for the most important part of the day.

I head to the cockpit of the tender and pick up the satellite phone. I punch in the code and soon enough I have Gerald on the other end.

“Gerald what is the situation with your group?”

“24 ships, a little over 200 people including children and elderly, we should arrive around noon tomorrow, and your momma is seasick.”

I focused on the most important point he gave me.

“How seasick?”

“Enough that everyone around her will be glad when we reach land as much as she will be.”

“So basically she is going to arrive in a brand new place, after not seeing me for a while, and be sick and grumpy?”

“Yep, boy are you in trouble.”

“Hmm, you may be right. I guess I could go on patrol until she feels better.”

In the background I could hear Benji.

“Don’t even think about escaping brother. If you are not there to meet the boats, I shudder to think at the punishment momma will bring down on you.”

Well either Gerald has me on speakerphone or my brother knows how my mind works.

“All right Gerald, I will be at the docks tomorrow at noon to wait for you guys. Remember to sail around the island until you see a large car ferry and the military base. That is where we are setting up shop.”

“Ten-Four Mark. We will see you soon enough. I will talk to you and the others tomorrow.”

With that exchange I have finished my obligations for the night and I head down to my bunk a little more tired than I thought I would be. Either the responsibility is starting to get to me or my age is finally catching up with me. It is probably a combination of both of those things. I cannot slow down though. There is still so much to do. I start listing the things I need the group to accomplish in the morning tomorrow and soon enough darkness envelopes me and I sleep.

Morning comes bright and early and I stumble around and take care of all of my morning duties. Showered and now more coherent I make my way to the galley for breakfast. With so much to do for today I settle for a large bowl of grits which is quick and easy to make. Hmm, I do love grits. Most of my settlers are southern. I should probably secure a way of getting southern comfort food including grits for the little colony we are setting up. I know we have to have some in supplies, but probably not enough.

After breakfast I head to the dock and see several people already waiting. Should I give another speech? No too much speaking is just as bad as not enough.

“I need security sweeps, barriers built at the entrances, and people to start setting up our power grid. Divide yourselves up into the appropriate group.”

I motion to my regular henchmen Michael and Olivia. Wait Oliva is a girl so would it be henchpeople? Do people that have henchmen even care about being politically correct? I am not going to call them henchmen out loud any way as that would probably have a negative effect. So since it is only in my head I am going to stick with henchmen.

“Let’s go pick up Billy and figure out where the emergency generators are for the base. We need to see if there is space around them that we can set up our solar and wind farm or if we need to move the generators.”

“Why would we move them?”

“Convenience mostly. If all our power generating stuff is together it makes guarding it and maintain it much simpler. It is also easier to run electrical wires to only one place.”

“Oh, that makes sense.”

We troop over and knock on Billy’s door and explain what we want to do this morning. It turns out that he has no idea where the generators are, but he does know where the administrative offices are and they should have maps of the base. That will help us tremendously and definitely speed things up.

Thirty minutes later finds us searching through desks and files in a two story office type building near the main entrance to the base. This is where everyone who came onto the base had to check in and where the CO of the base had his office. Somewhere in this mess has to be maps and information that we can use. The problem is finding it. Whoever was in charge of this place used their own unique set of filing criteria or just did not know how to do their job. It is a mess and seems like it might almost be impossible to find what we need. I decide to give it another half hour of searching before we just start searching buildings or tracing power lines. Tracing power lines would probably be faster, but some of them are probably buried to protect them.

Luckily fifteen minutes later Olivia lets out a cry of victory. “I found them! There are a ton of maps in this file cabinet. It seems like they were filed under B for buildings instead of M for maps.”

Well that makes no sense to me, but I guess it didn’t need to. As long as the person who filed it knew where they were it was probably just fine. However, it does mean that finding information about this base just became a lot harder.

“We need to hurry. I only have two more hours until I need to get back to the docks to meet momma and the other new arrivals.”

“I thought they weren’t supposed to get here until after lunch.”

“It is better safe than sorry. I just know that if I am not down by the docks by 11:00 a.m. some special current or wind will have pushed the boats here faster and I will miss them arriving. I am already in enough trouble for leaving momma the way I did. I definitely do not want anymore.”

Everyone started to laugh at me. They can laugh all they want. They were not raised by that woman, she scares me. With the mocking laughter of my little group surrounding me, okay to be truthful it is a few snorts and a giggle that I hope came from Olivia as it sounded very high pitched and feminine, we set out to the generator shed. A few minutes walk leads us to a building about the size of a pretty large house. Say twenty meters by twenty meters. We enter inside and I see six of the largest diesel generators that I have ever seen.

My group pokes around and explores and tries to figure things out for the next few minutes. After we gather back together at the entrance I ask the most important question I have.

“Does anyone know how to turn them on?”

Everybody shook their heads.

“It looks like they still have fuel and are ready to go. My guess is that they were never switched on as things broke down too quickly. I think that this is going to be a job for a specialist. Time to head back and see if anyone knows anything about generators or diesel engines.”

I hate leaving a job half finished, and that is exactly what this situation feels like. I was hoping to get the power on so the arriving group of people would have access to the modern conveniences at least for their initial stay. Now it looks like my plans will have to be altered and the inconvenience of no power will continue on land for at least a little while longer. We trudge back towards the docks and I decide that the rest of the morning should just be spent getting ready to receive our new guests and settlers. I think that it will be the most efficient use of my time.

“I am going to stick around the docks and make sure everything is ready for when the rest of the people get here. You all can stay with me or go help out around the base building barriers or cleaning buildings.”

Olivia decides to stay with me at the docks and Michael and Billy join a group heading to the east entrance to set up a barrier against wandering zombies. The rest of the morning passes rather quickly. The groups who are out among the base start wandering back in for a lunch break and those of us at the docks stop moving supplies around and help out with the cooking and distribution of the food. I really enjoy this. It seems that surviving the zombie apocalypse has brought out the best in people. Sure people may still grumble and complain a little, but that is human nature.

After they are done grumbling everyone pitches in and just gets things done. They may not like, or even be very good at it, but it does get done. Once again I get the impression that those that can do things or at least are willing to try are the majority of those that survived. This makes sense as it takes a certain mindset to deal with the horrors that are wandering around and actually not just survive but strive to make things better.

There are definitely people that have survived that deal with the situation differently. They usually become the bandits or the pirates of the world. They survive and even thrive sometimes. However, without them building an infrastructure or trying to improve the world and situation they are doomed to failure and obscurity eventually. The world only has so many resources you can plunder before you have to replace them. If they over use or over raid an area than eventually they will starve.

If they limit their raiding, at some point their targets are going to get stronger and rebel. At that point they will either succeed and kill of the bad guys or fail and die thus also preventing the bad guys from getting supplies. My guess is that bandits and pirates will only be viable in small groups for two to three years. Then I suppose they will join together and make larger groups that can last another three or five years. Eight to ten years down the road I think that the survivors will be able to suppress any raiding group that show up.

I am hoping that with our preparations that we can skip this cycle and hold our own against anything that comes at us. In fact, I think we might actually be able to help others and speed up the demise of any raiding groups near us.

Horns, blow in the distance. I look up from my mental ruminating and see several ships approaching in the distance. My family had arrived. It takes almost an hour for all of the ships to dock and unload their passengers. We have barely enough room to tie up all the ships. Even then we had to unload them one at a time. Momma was the first one off the ships and Gerald helped her down the gangplank. Is he holding her hand that long to help her or is something going on. Momma it has only been a few weeks since pops passed, we are going to have to have a talk.

I gave mom a big hug and my daughter Brittany who was right after her.

“Don’t walk off like that again son. We can always talk about things.”

“Yeah dad, it has been hard these last few days not knowing what was happening with you.”

“Alright I know when I am outnumbered. Just remember though that in the future I am going to have to leave to help out with a variety of different jobs.”

“We understand that, we just want them to be good partings and not bad ones.”