Wargaming Episode
Training Day
Ron takes the kid on training mission
and learns a lesson himself.
It’s been two days of listening to Doc and Jan plan which repairs and improvements to undertake and in what order. Lots of imperfect decisions are being debated without enough information, but with dire consequences for everyone if we pick the wrong option.
I thought it would be simple. We want to start making our own food. I know my way around a kitchen and offered to take care of it, but Doc pointed out that cooking was the tip of the iceberg: we need to set snares, butcher game, fillet fish, can vegetables, and cure, smoke, and dry meat for storage. None of us have experience with that, so we need to find people who do. However, we don’t have a place for them to sleep, so maybe our first project should be to build bunks in our bedrooms.
Of course, those people will need a functioning prep area and kitchen to be productive. Until now, we drank pop and bottled water that we scavenged from abandoned stores and homes, and we cooked over fires built with chopped firewood or bags of charcoal briquettes liberated from those same places. Staying in one place for a while means we need a source of potable water and electricity to run the stove and oven. Therefore, maybe our first project should be to repair the utilities. But none of us knows how to do that, either, so we need to find people with those skills, too. And they need a place to sleep.
Or we could work on saving what’s left of the garden. We can’t can the vegetables, but eating everything as it ripens will be that much less we need to scavenge. Of course, being able to run a sprinkler would help, and that brings us back to repairing the utilities…
When the discussion continued into a second day, I announced that I would take the kid out for some training and we’d be back in a few days. I packed our backpacks, grabbed our gear, found the kid, and we started walking down the road. Doc’s mention of canning reminded me of a couple of houses I’d seen in the next town with gardens and old-fashioned exterior cellar doors. I hoped to find some examples of traditionally canned vegetables so that we could figure it out. Finding some vegetable seeds would be a nice bonus. And food.
I spent the half day’s walk to the houses showing the kid how to move around dormant Z and what an active Z will likely do when it gets close. The kid’s Z-killer is a metal baseball bat. He’s got a good swing, but needs to work on pushing and parrying with it. We did some slow-motion fighting so he could practice fending off a Zed head instead of swinging for the fences all the time. Then I let him practice with a single Z we encountered shambling down the road. His performance was acceptable. By the time we got to the intersection with the houses, I felt he was ready for some real action — which was good because there were a surprising number of Z.
Another training opportunity: scouting! We spent several hours identifying the likely spots for food, fuel, and hardware. The kid noted that the woods in the northwest corner had some camping gear scattered around. He could grab-n-go without waking any Z. While he stalked through the woods, I approached the house in the opposite corner of the intersection from the back. This trip would be a good score; I could feel it!
I got to the cellar doors about the same time the kid got to the camping equipment nearest him. I heard a Z grunt by the gas station. It was waking up — our clock had started ticking. I was in luck: there was no padlock on the cellar doors. I dashed in, started grabbing cans and jars off of shelves and shoving them in my backpack. I heard two more Z wails and guessed they came from the same direction as the first. They were waking up faster than I anticipated. Three Z make a horde. I hoped the kid understood the danger and would back off rather than try any heroics. Oh yeah, that thought would drip with irony in a few minutes.
I finished stuffing the backpack and slung it across my shoulders as I dashed out of the cellar. Peaking through the house’s windows, I saw the kid had cleared out. Good judgment. He has potential. I wondered what he might have grabbed. Probably hardware or materials. Maybe fuel. That meant I was carrying all the food for the team. It wasn’t enough.
I moved around the far side of the house, away from the horde, and peaked around the corner. Where did that horde go? Uh oh. The horde had moved to the middle of the intersection and woken up most of the Z there. This was the largest horde that I’d seen in a long time. How did this go so badly so quickly? I could still do this. There were a couple of spots to check in front of the house. We needed that food. I could do this. It would set a horrible example for the kid, though. Maybe he was far enough away that he wouldn’t see what I was about to do.
But he wasn’t, and he must have gone through the same thought process that I’d had because I saw a baseball come arcing in and hit a tree. A huge flock of birds took off from that tree and those surrounding it. The horde immediately turned toward the forest and started shambling away from me. Way to go, kid!
I shot the dormant Z standing next to the garbage bags I wanted to look through. Don’t judge! Garbage bags don’t mean that what’s in them is necessarily garbage. During the Panic, people tossed anything they thought they needed into anything that could be carried as they tried to flee. There’s usually good stuff in garbage bags. And even if they are filled with garbage, well, the apocalypse has a way of making that okay, too.
The horde was still moving toward the trees the birds took off from. I got to the bags and noticed dormant Z lying in the bushes. Looting the garbage bags would wake it, so I nocked another arrow and killed it.
The horde was moving back in my direction, veering a little to pick up more dormant Z. I eyeballed the beeline to safety. It would be close. I could make it. Probably. Maybe. But we needed more food. If it sounds like I have a thing about ensuring I have enough food to eat, that’s because I do. It was called the Panic, not the Picnic. It left me with some issues.
I stayed and opened the first garbage bag. It was filled with ramen noodle cups! The moans from the horde were getting closer. My hands started to shake. Getting swarmed under by a horde is a terrible way to go. Just pieces of you left. I lifted the bag and looked around.
It was good that my back was to the horde because otherwise, I wouldn’t have seen the Zed head running right at me from the opposite direction. That’s what I get for focusing all my attention on the horde.
I dropped the bag and nocked an arrow. Hands shaking, horde breathing down my neck, I loosed the arrow and it flew true. That’s the payoff from thousands of hours of practice. But I looked at my feet, and the ramen cups had spilled everywhere.
I heard a wail from the horde right behind me, and my heart stopped. I stood frozen, waiting for the inevitable. This is it. At least my end will provide the kid an object lesson in the consequences of stupid decisions. A moment passed, then another. My heart started pumping again, thudding in my ears for all it was worth. I gasped a breath and slowly looked behind me. One of the newly awakened Z had started shambling toward the other house. Did it live there? Does it remember something? Hordes move together; that’s a rule, so the whole group turned and followed that stupid Z, bless its black dead heart.
The momentary reprieve was almost wasted as my hands shook worse than ever. I had difficulty scooping the ramen cups back into the garbage bag, and when I lifted it, it nearly fell out of my hands again. I ended up dragging it. The noise drew another Z toward me, and I shot it with an arrow.
I dragged the bag away and met up with the kid a few miles outside town. I had gotten my body under control by then, but I knew I’d have a new nightmare for the rest of my life.
The kid was ecstatic about what I’d done. “That was amazing!” and “How did you know the horde would move away like that?” And “You were cool and calm the whole time — I want to be like that one day.” Whoa, that’s a thought I needed to discourage.
“Sure, kid,” I said, “but it takes lots of practice. Don’t ever let me catch you slacking from weapon training. Thousands of hours of practice is what kept me alive out there today.” And too much luck.
“Oh, of course. I’ll work so hard you’ll be really proud of me. That was so amazing. Just wait until I tell Doc and Jan!” Oh no.
I tried to calm him down, play it off like something so pedestrian that Doc and Jan wouldn’t even be interested. Didn’t work. As soon as we were inside the gate, the kid started blabbing about how I stared down a zombie horde and didn’t let anything stand in my way.
When the kid finally winds down from telling the story, Doc and Jan look at me. Jan had an arched eyebrow.
“It was alright,” I said, “We played it safe the whole time,” I said. “It was alright,” I repeated. “I was there.”