With the confirmation of the group
trapped across the way in ACE Hardware store, I can see their future plans
coming from a mile away. They are going to want to get that group over here to
us. I have no problem with that and there is also a pretty good chance that we
could encounter survivors that are going to want to have sanctuary with us. And
given my nature and the nature of many people that are in here, I do not see us
turning people away. I mean if you look back at my first post, we invited
people to come to us if they needed sanctuary.
But we have to keep the infected out.
At all costs.
Naturally, I have a theory and I
worked this out with Fred. The conversation took all of about two minutes for
him to be on board. We are planning on breaking the plan to the group tomorrow.
With a lot of the produce going out, that cooler is getting empty. I think the
only real choice is to convert the Produce Department’s Prep Area into a QZ – a
Quarantine Zone. With all of our people and shopping carts and pallet jacks, we
could empty out the Produce Prep of all useable equipment in an hour. Assigning
10+ people towards a task, it can get done pretty quickly. Many hands make
light work.
So here is my justification for this
plan. The produce cooler is a lot like the meat department cooler in that there
are drains and we have a hose in the department. The two doors that lead out of
the produce cooler are pretty old and all we have to do is remove the exit pins
from them and the doors cannot be opened from the inside. (Yeah, if there are
any fire marshals out there, come give us a ticket!) That leaves only one
entrance from Produce to the rest of the store. And we can easily close that
area off with a stack of pallets.
Now, the Produce “Back Room” has a
lot. There is a prep sink, drains, and we have buckets from bakery that we
could fill with cat litter from the pet food aisle. (Crude, I know but it will
work for what we have planned.) We have this little TV with a DVD player that
the store used for product demos. We have magazines and a small assortment of
books from that section of the store. Produce does have its own computer which
does feature Solitare, Hearts, Spider, and Mindsweeper. And we can set up
pallet stacks along with some of our full length pool rafts for sleeping.
The produce prep room is equipped with
a security camera so we can monitor them from the Store Director’s Office to
make sure everything is okay. We have an intercom system so we can talk on the
internal phone lines.
If Brad and his crew want to come into
our area, we have to quarantine them. What if one of them is bit? And who knows?
What if other survivors show up down the road? We need to be prepared for them
as well.
So we let them come in the store and
they have to hang out for two days to make sure they are not showing any
symptoms. It is going to be harsh but I think we need it for the safety of our
collective group.
I need to sleep on it and figure out
the best way to sell this to the crew but with Fred agreeing with me and on
board I don’t think it will be a hard sell.
