From the journal of Nathan Sanchez, June 18

June 18, 2017

     Life has been interesting lately. I haven't written in a couple weeks since we've been getting everyone settled. There have been a few bumps along the way. Some of the band kids had a hard time with taking orders from the elders here on the Ranch, but that was only for the first week or so. They had only had Chester and, Miranda, their former band teachers, to be in charge. But shortly after the group lost the other bus, Shiela became the leader with the teachers being her backup. Shiela says she has no idea how it happened, but everyone else says she was always the unspoken leader for the band and since she had been taught survival skills by her father while she was growing up, it was natural for her to take over.

Mark

John

     The worst problem we've had so far was a set of brothers, John and Mark, who decided they wanted to leave after the first week with us. They don't have a lot of skills that are useful to us here, so they were assigned to help with the farming and gardening. This was just too much for them and they yelled about how insulting it was for them to be made to scratch around in the dirt all day. They were in law school and would have been lawyers if the world hadn't fallen apart. How dare we not give them the respect they deserved for their knowledge. They wouldn't even acknowledge that the information they know is now totally useless and they need to learn a useful skill.

     I offered to let them learn something else, like animal husbandry while working with the livestock. Or they could join one of the scout teams and learn to work with our groups to scavenge for supplies. We offered to let them join and learn with any of the teams we have, even in the kitchen, which is mostly the women of our families domain. But none of it was good enough. I swear, even being made the leaders of our group wouldn't have been good enough.

     The rest of the band tried to convince them that it was a mistake to want to leave. Where would they go? How would they feed themselves? Protect themselves? They didn't know anything about living out there. They didn't even take part in the scouting missions when the band was still on it's own. They'd never really had to deal with the undead on their own before, Shiela and her group took care of all that stuff.

     We had a meeting that night and Fernando suggested we take them out and make them think we left them on their own but a small group of us would follow them. If they got themselves into too much trouble, we could swoop in and save them. Yet, they would get to experience being on their own and maybe they would come to appreciate what they get here at the Ranch. Shiela agreed to this and we let them know to pack their stuff, Shiela, Darren, Fernando and I would be taking them out and setting them free the next day.

     We left early in the morning and “left” them in a town fifteen miles from the Ranch. We pulled away and once out of sight, we pulled over and hid our vehicle before going back on foot to watch them. John and Mark still stood in the yard where we'd left them, not sure what to do next. They went inside the house after about a half hour and we settled in to wait for them to make up their minds on what to do and where to go. It took several hours, but they finally came out and walked down the street towards the down town area. We followed, sneaking from house to house to stay out of sight.

     They wandered around down town for a few hours, looking in stores and getting new clothes. When they got hungry, they hit up a quicky-mart and ate snack food. After a few hours, they headed for the movie house, not thinking about the loss of electricity. There wouldn't have been a way for them to watch the movies anyway. But that's where it happened. When they went into the theater, it was only two minutes or so when they ran back out, followed by at least thirty undead movie-goers. They would've been in real trouble if we had really left them.

     We left John and Mark run past us and then we jumped out and started taking out the undead, all without firing a shot. It took us about ten minutes to take them all out and John and Mark just cowered behind us the whole time, not even trying to help us out. Once we were done, Shiela asked them if they wanted to come back with us to the Ranch, which they jumped at right away. That was eight days ago. They've been really good workers in the garden and have even started showing an interest in really learning how to grow the crops we need.

     I knew it wouldn't be completely smooth sailing for our groups to learn to be one group, but I think we are still heading in the right direction and are making progress. I just hope it keeps going well for us.

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.