I am happy to report that the snow
has stopped falling. It is not a tremendous amount and the sun is starting to
shine. Going out without sunglasses is particularly painful but that sunlight
and radiation beating down on the parking lot will probably have this thing
cleared in no time.
I spent some time up on the roof to
have a look around, considering that I didn’t have anywhere to go. It is that
Christmas Card Winter Wonderland. No sign of movement (living or undead). The
world is very quiet. Life actually seems nice. But being up there gave me a
little perspective.
Since Day One of this waking nightmare,
we have a very simple strategy to avoid the zombies. It was simple: Keep the
store locked down and make like a hole in the world. The goal was to stay off
the radar by minimalizing our signature: sight, sound, and smell. This goes
back to our using tin foil to seal off the windows so we could run the lights
at night and shutting off the parking lot lights.
For a minute, try to think like a
zombie. As long as they cannot see us because of the tin foil, if they cannot
hear us, or smell us, what real reason do they have to try to get into a
grocery store? There is no bait. There is no reason for them to get inside.
This is the enemy we have been
fighting and the strategy has been working. However…
If you remember, back when this
thing first started, we hung American flags from the rooftop and hung them
upside down as a signal for distress. And now, we have lines of buses and cars
forming a perimeter around our parking lot. There are the Bob-Zoms along the
ditch or our western line. And there are all the bodies of zoms in the various
parking lots and along the highway that we have not ventured out to gather and
burn.
We have had extremely limited contact
with people that have fully functioning cortexes but they have to be out there.
The giant sign out front that says “Reason’s Foods” makes us a target on its
own.
Now, with all the improvements that we
have made, a person coming by would obviously assume that this is a location
that is being held. Buses don’t get perimeter stacked like they did. Obviously,
this was part of a bigger plan. Any outside observer could see that. And the
next step in that deductive reasoning?
“If that place is so barricaded, it
must be because they have something valuable in there that I want. They have food,
water, medicine, supplies…”
And where does that reasoning take
people? “We should go take their stuff!”
To people that are desperate, we might
seem like a prime target and ripe for the picking. Now, we do have our “Us vs.
Them” mentality regarding zombies. But I cannot guarantee that everyone out
there has that mentality. For all we know, a cavalcade of anti-whimsy could be
rolling down the highway right now, looking like extras from BEYOND
THUNDERDOME. And seeing all the barricades and the “Food” signs may make them
decide they are going to roll in heavy.
So this is the question. Are we advertising ourselves
and if so, do we need to be slightly more vigilant, especially at night? I do
want to maintain our “Us vs. Them” mentality but if we come across someone that
does not share this attitude… I am afraid of what might happen.
