Today was a pretty uneventful day. I spent the majority of it cleaning up the radio station. I got everything dusted, threw out the trash, got a few broken windows boarded up and repaired as much equipment as I could. I got the computer on, but the transformer is another problem altogether. Without that going, I won't be able to broadcast at all. Thaddeus said he'd get me a guy to take a look at it tomorrow.
Speaking of Thaddeus, I had a talk with him about leaving Rhinelander to go pick up our friends back in Terre Haute, and I was a little surprised to see him so hesitant to say anything at first. It seemed like he wasn't exactly sure how he wanted to respond to my question, making up excuses as to why I shouldn't go, why they couldn't spare a car, etc. I don't quite understand. If I wanted to leave, shouldn't I be allowed to just leave? He just kept saying it was too risky, that even though I was cured, I'd only get sick again if I got exposed to zombies. That's a red flag. They appear to be dealing with zombies on a daily basis, and I don't see the guards or anyone else undergoing the purification process again.
Anyway, he gave me the passkey for the Internet, but he explained that it would do little good. Just about every major website was offline, including Google, and whatever net was still running was basic sites designed for communication and information. I said that would be perfect. I had no interest in browsing Amazon or Reddit or Buzzfeed. He gave me the URL for Rhinelander, and it was about as basic as basic HTML can get. It literally was just a directory of people living in the town and reports of daily happenings. The one thing I did see were links to other settlement websites. One of them that caught my intereset belonged to Mariposa, CA, a small mining town that was located in the Sierra Nevada mountains. My heart actually skipped a beat, and I scanned their list of residents, but I didn't see my parents among them. That didn't mean anything, though. They could still be living off somewhere away from civilization. I also read some disturbing news, though. Apparently, there was a forest fire last month that burned about 25,000 acres. This made me think of the nightmare I had, and about Augustina telling me it was a premonition. Did I really dream about a forest fire that actually happened? I don't believe it. I'm just going to chalk it up to coincidence. Still, hearing the news and not seeing my parents' names in the directory was disheartening.
Kat started working at Bright Eyes today and managed to do just fine. She got to look after a group of 10 kids aging from 2-5. She said it was an uncomfortable feeling at first, being with not just a child that young, but several children that young. There was a time where back before she met me, she thought that all the children left in the world would have been eaten by now. She impressed Margaret, though, with how quickly she adapted to the position. She played games with them, read them books and fed them snacks. The kids seemed to be warming up to Kat as well.
I talked to her about the mysteriousness of Thaddeus not wanting us to leave. She agreed that it didn't make much sense, but maybe he's just worried about us being two people who just arrived to his town wanting to go back out in the dangerous world. I tried to tell her that even though it was a risk, it meant possibly adding three more people to his community. He could also have been reluctant to let such an important resource like an electric car out of his possession. Still, if we just wanted to up and leave, we should have the freedom to do so.
So yeah, it was overall a pretty boring day. I even started reading my library book Rise of the Fallen King by Gerry Gentleheart, which unfortunately didn't ease the boredom. I read the first 150 pages of this 700 page book and so far, all that's happened was a young boy being given the task of finding a hermit out in the woods who used to be a king. This king was needed to once again restore order to the lands, but at 150 pages, he should have found the king by now. The boy still hasn't even left his village. It kills me when books have such tremendously slow pacing. To be honest, it felt rather nice to have a boring day for once. I'd much rather have a day where nothing happens than a day where I'm fighting for my life.
Until tomorrow.
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