Survival Journal Entry 1

Today, the walls fell. There was a horde of zombies that drifted in from the East. We have never had anything come from that direction, but I guess they have been forced to migrate further for food. We lost 12 people but it could have been much, much worse. We are still not spread too thin, but so many people are mourning, I have no idea how long it will take to bounce back but it better be fast. The wall repairs will take a week on their own so we need to get started asap.

The food supply has been below where I feel comfortable with it being. Our scavenging crew got held up at the location and is going to take a while to wait for the highway to clear of multiple hordes. We are going to have to ration better until they get back. The farms are doing very well but we are going to have to pull most of the farmhands off in order to assemble a crew for the wall, so we are going to need to get ahead on farm work before wall construction starts.

Suggestions:

• Find more useful additions to the library

There is a library about three miles north that we might be able to raid, but the threat level must be non-existent because this is not at all necessary right now.

• Build small blacksmith station

I'm going to have to find someone with a bit of prior experience to help set up the furnace. We might have a couple of sets of instructions on how to make a furnace, so we will have to find those.

Problems:

• Recently found out that there is some trouble in paradise. Jim had to be locked up because he laid out Bill for hitting on his wife. He should be released tomorrow, so I will have to try to keep Bill away from Jane until then to diffuse the situation.
• The water tower is dripping. It could be nothing or it could get much much worse, so it looks like we are going to have to go up and check it out. Make sure to grab some sheet metal just in case.
• Jack has started to say that he wants to call for an emergency election to get me out of my position. He has said this before and never pulled the trigger so I guess we will see what happens. Even if he does end up running, I don't think that he will be able to pull it off and win.
• If we don't hear from our scavenging party soon, we are going to have to send a scout troupe to go see what happened. I hope they are still alive. We can't afford to lose anyone else.

With the recent deaths, I have been feeling very down. Usually death doesn't get me, but seeing so many people dying at once and so many people stricken with grief is really getting to me. Could I have stopped this? How long till it happens again? If this happens again, I don't know how to handle it. Some people are going to want to just double down on defenses which will spread us very thin and others will want to just move further away from where the hordes are coming from but that would mean giving up everything that we have built and worked so hard for. I don't have an answer for what our next move is, but I hope this will never happen again. The worst thing is that death is so common nowadays, the smell of burning flesh is common now. There is a burning almost every week—either burning dead zombies or fallen friends. I hope things get better soon.