A
few weeks ago, I made a comment about The Carbone Initiative and our plan to go
through and completely clear out Langley when the winter freezes hit. It is a
good plan and with the weather on our side, it is possible… or so I thought.
Then that shambling horde came staggering through last Wednesday.
Langley
is the very definition of a small town. If you looked around, pre-Apocalypse,
we featured two major fast food chains. We had a Sonic and a Subway. We had a
few sit-down restaurants, a few greasy spoons, the local donut shop, and both
convenience stores featured in house pizza places (a Mazzio’s and a Simple
Simon’s). We had a liquor store (catering to lake people), a cellular phone
place, a hardware store, a lumber yard, the Dollar General , a pawn shop, too
many antique shops and flea markets, the flower store, a Laundromat, more than
a few local places to get your car fixed. Langley had one drive-in motel and
the resort place that we looted for mattresses and linens back in our first
sortie mission. We had all the basic business that you come to expect in a
small town. And then there was the population.
But here is the
kicker. All these businesses are all stand-alone joints. They are set up in
their own structures. There are very few confined areas with buildings all
stacked alongside one another. Langley actually features a lot of trees and
large swaths of wooded areas. This is not like Manhattan where there are no
alleyways because every inch of real estate is fought for. Hell, if you look
the north and east of our store, you can throw a rock and it will land where
cattle could graze. This is not a city by any stretch of the imagination.
What this means is
that when the outbreak hit, the immediate population of Langley only numbered
around 800. Now, granted, in the surrounding areas, you have Ketchum, Disney,
Pensacola, and then if you keep spiraling outward you can add in Adair,
Spavinaw (birthplace of Mickey Mantle woo!), Eucha (pronounced Oo-chee)… So we
have an intense surrounding population but even all these cities cannot compare
to dropping our group in the middle of downtown Tulsa or Oklahoma City.
But here is the
problem, with all of these open spaces, it is impossible for us to wall off
Langley. Sure, we could barricade the highways with abandoned vehicles but all
that does is stop living people who might need our help. A few cars with
flattened tires and pulled out batteries aren’t going to stop a zombie from
just shambling into the ditch. There are too many woods and open plains around
us that would be too easy to navigate through.
And Eric and his
crew? Riding on that shredded tire? Coming across a barricade would have
sentenced them all to death.
So despite all our
best efforts to secure Langley, we are completely at the mercy of any shambling
horde that might come staggering through. Even if we kill every zom in Langley,
a horde of 200 or 2,000 could come through and all our work is undone. We have
barricades. We have cars blocking the entrance to the doors. Sheer physics
should state that there is not enough surface area and enough coordination for
the zoms to break through. We should be safe… but what if there is a threat we
have not seen that we have not anticipated?
