Don't Let Your Reanimates Grow Up to be Cowboys

As the saying goes, Mr. Gadnsk was born in the wrong century. He had a love of frontier folklore and vast knowledge railroads, horses, mining towns. He is the one who owned the dude ranch we all worked on, in South Dakota. Is was a great place for scouts and families - you could ride horses, rope livestock, even fire some old black-powder revolvers and rifles. At night, he would share famous films about cowboys and go go long into the night talking about the "man with no name" and Sergio Leone. He'd gladly take a loss in profits or even pay out of pocket to let disadvantaged children attend.

When The Event hit, we made it through OK, better than OK really. The some chickens remained, a few of the Buffalo, and pretty much all the vegetables survived, though the cattle disappeared in a pretty gruesome fashion. Firearms were plentiful - not just ours, but the whole army of those for guests, as was camping supplies - we had just stocked up for the season but not had any scouts or families come through. Considering the two dozen staff compared to three hundred people - well, that probably left us with two or three years of supplies without the farm.

So yeah, we were probably some of the luckiest moterherf----s in the United States.

Except for Mr. Gadnsk. He, well, just broke. I don't know if it was family lost, or if he really was that invested in seeing scouts again, or what, but - he broke. He just kind of threw himself into his movies, and retreated into his own little world for a while, and when he came out, he just wasn't quite right. He now seems convinced we're in the 1870s. He calls us by names of characters in his old cowboy films, and will say rustlers or coyotes, but never "Reanimate".

Its sad to see such a nice man suffering from dementia. I wish we could ride into a town and find someone to help him. But frankly, its hard enough keeping this big place running, and we're a bit afraid of what would happen if people started flocking to our little sanctuary. Infinite supplies for twenty-five people may very well be only a few months sufficient supplies for fifty, or a few weeks for a hundred. Its a dude ranch, not an industrial farm.

We can hear the 104.3 broadcasts, we have some idea of what is going on in the zone, just no idea about what to do about it. A dozen people with reproduction 1873 Peacemaker revolvers aren't going to clean up the who country, but if not us, who?