Today we went muling. That’s what we call it when we leave the Fort for a supply run. Because you end up carrying stuff on your back like a mule. The way it works is this: you go to a supply building and you talk to one of the quartermasters about something you want. If you have enough credit, and they have the item, they give it to you. If they don’t have the item, you can put in a request for it. The requests from our Fort and all of the other enclaves are uploaded into a big database, and most everybody has teams that go out muling to fulfill those requests. It can take a while. There’s still stuff that was requested during the first month here that is marked as “in transit” but hasn’t shown up here yet. It’s like a really slow version of UPS without any package tracking. You just have to hope that it’s on its way somehow.
We usually cover a particular street or a row of houses in a neighborhood. This is often some nasty business. When people die as quickly as they did, you run out of living people to take care of the dead. The federal disaster organizations gave up trying, leaving it to the locals, who gave up trying themselves in the later days. So it’s not uncommon to find dead bodies in various states, depending on how well-sealed their house was and which animals were able to get inside. Animals are always a concern, whether it’s rabid packs of dogs or rodent infestations, the two major sources of fun from the animal kingdom these days. And the houses *always* smell. It doesn’t matter if the windows have been left open since long before the relocation. There’s always something rotting, or something left behind.
Today was different, though, because we hit up a strip mall. Strip malls are mostly empty, because most people got too sick to die at work. The quote-unquote good stuff was looted long ago by people who didn’t know better and took things like watches and jewelry and left behind the stuff that would be useful.
This place was called the Watertower Plaza, but I didn’t see any water towers anywhere nearby. It was anchored, if you can consider a mini-mall to have anchor stores, by an office supply store, a supermarket, and a bookstore. We split into four person teams and took our assignments. My team got the slightly-upscale dollar store (everything was five dollars or less). It yielded nothing of significant value – some pocket flashlights, cheap toolsets, decks of cards, things like that. I did convince our team leader to grab all of the pool noodles and an entire bin of sports balls. Most of the other teams came up empty as well, taking a general inventory of what was available if a return trip was required. The supermarket yielded several thousand cans of food (and stunk to high heaven, from reports). The bookstore had suffered some sort of flood and books on the bottom two shelves were completely ruined, but all of the reference shelves were taken along with the fiction classics. The office supply store had cases and cases of useful stuff, but the big surprise was an indie pool supply store that had leased out a pretty small space between Lane Bryant and the salon. Aside from some solid chemicals, hoses, and water testing equipment, this guy had a ton of stuff squirreled away in the back that didn’t have anything to do with his business – rifles, a shortwave radio, cases of bottled water. Looks like he was expecting to survive the plague and that’s where he was storing his loot. He either lasted to the end or no one bothered to try looting the pool supply store, because there it all was, just sitting there. A lot of this stuff is useless – what are we going to use a shortwave radio for? – but a lot of it will come in handy.
The pet store was a complete disaster – dead birds, dead fish, dead reptiles, rotted food, shit everywhere. Ellen threw up and had to leave the place. It was marked as an important spot to return to, given the current state of the kennel, but no one was willing to help load stuff after what they saw in there.