Survival Journal Entry 4

Over the last couple days things have been kind of quiet. Very busy but quiet, which is good. We went up to Big Bear and good news, I held it together. We finally got a trade deal figured out after a couple hours of negotiating. For every 2 pounds of produce, we will get 1 pound of venison. It has been a long time since meat was not a delicacy for us so I am really excited to introduce a new diet into the community.

We are going to roll out tomorrow to go to San Bernardino. We have a meeting in a parking lot for an old strip mall. We are going to have our snipers about 700 yards back on a billboard overlooking the parking lot. If everything goes as planned, we are going to get all of our food back and hopefully come out with an agreement that we won't bother each other and stay out of the respective territories. Although, I hear that their leader, Hector, is a both a very reasonable and unreasonable man at he same time. He will almost never just talk and figure things out diplomatically, but he will fight you to decide who gets their way. It looks like I am going to have to end up in the cage with him so lets see how that goes.

Some really good news is that nothing has gone wrong recently. The tractor got fixed and everything has run smoothly since. We had a small group of roamers come by but they were dispatched with ease within a matter of minutes. We had a big group bon fire last night and it was amazing. On our last scavenging run, we found a guitar and it turns out that Liz, one of the teenage girls that works in our special missions unit, can play the guitar and sing. She sang a lot of campfire songs and boosted moral.

Liz is a very strong girl, especially for her age. She has lost every member of her family, her last remaining family member (her sister) being killed when the wall fell. After the bon fire, I saw her sitting at her sister's grave playing Hurt. Seeing her broken and crying at the foot of her sister's grave was one of the most powerful sites I have seen. When I went up to her she told me some stories she had of her and her sister playing together before everything happened and now I know why she fought so hard and is so protective of everyone around her. I wish that I was half a strong as her. Maybe then I could be a great leader.

Ever since I talked with Liz, I have a new outlook on our community. This community is my new family and I need to protect it at all costs. When we go to San Bernadino I need to make sure that they will never bother us again. If we cannot reach that by diplomatic measures, then I hope that they are prepared for what will come next. I have already sent out Carl to do some scouting and find out exactly where they are located and see if he can find any weak points in the guard rotation.

We invited Naya (the Big Bear leader) and her main crew to come back down to us in Redlands and show them around our community. Being in a school and not having a super large community right now, we are only utilizing about 30% of the space available. We are using the classrooms as basically apartments. It is 3 to 4 people per room and we only have 60 people in our community so we only use about 20 of the classrooms, which isn't even one full wing (there are 3 wings). They are getting a bit big for where they are set up so they might send a couple of people down here to live with us. The more the merrier!