From the journal of Marie Costa, May 29

May 29, 2017

Well, we decided to send some of our people out in teams to check all the nearest houses and cabins. Most of them were empty, but three of them had undead in them and one had a group of bodies. The completely dead group had died in a suicide pact and they left a note about how they couldn't live in this kind of world.
I was on the team that searched one of the cabins with undead inside. When we stepped onto the porch, one of the boards groaned and we heard the zombie start moaning inside the cabin. Well, at least we knew there was at least one inside.
We spent a couple of minutes walking around the outside and looking in the windows. All we could see was the one in the living room and it was in a chair, struggling to and almost tipping itself over. We met back at the front door and we went in, quietly and slowly. I walked around the edge of the room and came face to face with an undead female in really bad shape.

She had been tied to the chair and savagely beaten and raped, probably more than once and by more than one man. She was covered in her own blood and her throat was a  gaping slash that puffed out with every moan. I know I gagged and had to turn away and that's when I saw the message smeared on the wall in what I thought was probably her blood..
"She was the best hostess and made us all feel right at home."
How sick were the guys who did this? We found out when we went into one of the back bedrooms. Inside, we found the bodies of three kids, an old woman and old man, and someone who was maybe the female zombies husband. All of them had been tortured and the kids looked like they had been raped before being killed. If I could have found the ones who had done this right then, I would have killed them myself.
We went through all the rooms and found a few cans of food, some clothes and undead a loose floorboard, a box of shotgun shells. It's sad how little was left in the cabin with the bodies of its former owners.
We are going to have to keep our eyes out so the people who did this don't sneak up on us. That means more patrols, more lookouts and tighter security around our place. We're going to have to push out our perimeter to give us more warning if someone enters our protected zone. This is going to take some planning and team work.
The others found about the same amount of supplies that we did in each place. Not much for the trouble we went through, but now we know that no one is living in any of these close homes. So, if we see someone or something around these places, we know we need to investigate. We are going to have to send occasional patrols out to these places to make sure nothing had changed and no one has moved in.

We came back together in our yard and had a meeting about what we found and saw. We discussed the changes in the patrols and about adding more lookout places around our new, father out perimeter, and agreed to think about it tonight and meet again tomorrow to go over any ideas and plan our moves. We have really come together as a group and have gelled into our rolls. Hopefully, this will keep happening and we don't run into any really bad people.

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.