This is Part 2. Part 1 of this story is here:
The warehouse I’m sitting in was once home to dozens of survivors. Time took some from me. The world took others. Our resources were limited, so we established a process by which small contingents, volunteers at first, ventured into town or into the fields beyond the industrial park to loot or forage, depending on which direction they walked.
At first, we sent only one group at a time, 3 or 4 people. Volunteers were either noble or desperate. It’s a matter of perspective. Some, I suspect, were deluded about their roles in the greater group. Walter Grindholm was one of those people. I disliked him, a perspective I now feel guilty about, as after 5 relatively successful expeditions, his sixth never returned. There were 4 people in his group, total, though to observe them was to conclude he considered the other 3 to be expendable.
That’s my perspective. It’s the only perspective left, so I suppose it must be correct. When other people existed, they might have disagreed with me. But there are no other people, so my opinion stands. Still, I am open to the possibility that I was wrong, that his demeanor was a product of his efficiency, strategy, or some kind of brilliance I didn’t perceive.
It doesn’t matter. He didn’t come back and there is no one to argue with about it. So history shall reflect that Walter Grindholm was an asshole. It doesn’t mean he deserved whatever happened to him on that sixth expedition into the city.
Reader-Who-Doesn’t-Exist, I’m mentioning this just so you know I am aware that I am inadequate. I am sometimes inadequately understanding of people like Walter Grindholm. I am inadequate to the task of history.
But my view is all that matters now, so we need to put that on the table and move on. A planet of 1 is not a democracy.
Walter Grindholm’s sixth expedition was just over a year ago. I should start setting timelines and terms, contexts and conditions.
I know it was over a year ago that I last saw Walter because we started keeping track of sunrises. When our little warehouse community started cohering a bit, Evelyn Forrester began marking each sunrise by scratching a line on an interior wall. It became our imperfect but clarifying version of a calendar. Imperfect because we did not know the date when Evelyn took the broken concrete block and etched her first line in the wall. Clarifying because it allowed us to restart the counting of history.
Evelyn’s first etching simply became “1.” Evelyn died 32 etchings ago. I know because I scratched a new line the day after I buried her, and I’ve scratched a new sunrise every day since.
Even with everything that has happened, I still know how many days are in a year, and Walter’s group has been gone for 387 etchings.
I hate that I hated him. Evelyn I loved.
The expeditions were crucial to our community, which we never named. People who arrived at the warehouse often had some supplies with them, food, weapons, tools, but were often hesitant to share. That resistance was certainly understandable, so we needed communal resources. A few people were capable hunters, some had medical knowledge, a handful had mechanical skills, but our confines were, well, confining. We had to venture forth to gather what we could.
The warehouse seemed protected, though that was probably always a foolish assumption. What it did provide, though, was borders. A defined community. A shared location in which to re-establish something that might approximate a society.
It worked for a while. Societies are temporary, though. I don’t think I ever even considered that while the society into which I was born existed. I thought about it a lot as we constructed a new one.
Our new society had both Walters and Evelyns.