From the journal of Nathan Sanchez, May 17

May 17, 2017

Well, we figured out who the people are that we were finding evidence and catching glimpses of. They are a band of students who were on a field trip from their college headed to some kind of music festival down south of here. There were 50 of them in the beginning, along with two drivers and two teachers. They got attacked when they were sent to one of the emergency shelters that had already been overrun.
My group was doing a training exercise at a ranch house ten miles from home. We had just set up a perimeter and were getting all our teams into place when Fernando heard someone call out from behind a fence. It was a woman named Sheila who was the clarinet player in the band.

It was a really tense situation for about ten minutes, then we gathered everyone and spent time talking to Sheila and the four others with her. She explained to us that they had been funneled to one of the near small cities that had an emergency shelter. When they got there, they got off the buses and started walking to the welcome tent. That's when the undead started streaming from the buildings, tents and surrounding dirt roads. There were at least a hundred of them and their teacher, Chester Smith, yelled at everyone to get back to the buses. They ran to the buses and the one Sheila was on was able to get the door closed and the bus moving. The people on the other bus were no so lucky.The undead were able to push the door open and swarm onto the bus.
Sandy, a flute player, said that 31 people had made it onto their bus, including Chester and the other teacher, Miranda. They watched the people on the other bus being eaten and torn apart. The sound of their screams still make some of the survivors start awake at night.
Of the 31 people who survived, only 17 are still alive. Some of them died getting to Elwood. They hadn't planned on stopping here, but two weeks ago, the bus broke down on the main street and they have been stuck here ever since. They have been sending out scouting parties to look for supplies and one of those parties stumbled onto us at the building supply company. Since then, they have been keeping watch for people from our group to watch us and see if we are good people or have given in to the evil, like some people they ran into.
One of those groups stopped them on the road and tried to take the women and kill the men. They had blocked the road with a semi and trailer, then surrounded the bus and made them all get off. Then the bad group made them all get to their knees. One of the guys in the band noticed that most of those holding them only had knives and whispered this to others. Everyone decided to resist and they were able to over power the group and get the bus around the semi. Turned out, the guns were more than likely empty, since they never fired, just tried to climb through the windows to get in the bus.
We talked to band members for a couple hours, then talked among ourselves about what we should do. We couldn't just take them back to the ranch. We needed to prepare our people before we did that. We left it that Shiela would tell her group about us while they stayed where they already were. We would go back to the ranch and tell our people about them and then we would come back and set up a meeting between us. Some of our people are really timid, so it might have to be somewhere other than the ranch.  Hopefully, it will all work out and we can get them to be part of our group. They would add the fresh blood we need and we can supply the place to survive and restart civilization.

As a writer and artist, I appreciate any readers and their comments. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog. Please, come read the other blog I write for our artisan collective, Raven's Castle Creations, on our website at www.ravencastlecreations.com. It includes posts on art, the mythology of symbols we use in our art, history and more! Also, come see the art we produce in our Etsy store at etsy.com/shop/RavenCastleCreations. Follow us on Twitter at @ravencastleart and on Facebook at @ravencastlecreations.