I guess maybe you might be surprised that we were so nervous, perhaps even paranoid about putting ourselves in the hands of another group. There are reasons behind it but they get a bit complex so I’ll try to explain a little and see if that helps. After the Big Blast knocked civilization into the grinder it all got a bit tense for a while. The survivors couldn’t quite get their heads around the idea that life had changed, and changed big time. You couldn’t just pop out to the shops anymore. If you got into trouble you couldn’t just call the cops. You had to fight for whatever you could find, and if you weren’t strong enough to fight you were in trouble. In some areas there were small groups of survivors who had come through it together and it pretty soon became clear that the old saying “There’s strength in numbers” had a ring of truth to it. It’s easier to keep yourself safe I guess if there is someone watching your back, someone with a vested interest in keeping you alive if for no other reason than so you can watch theirs.
These small groups started to act like late 21st Century gangs, preying on the isolated, the loners, the weak, and I guess it’s part of human nature that some people like power. So leaders started to rise to the top, and you’ve got to bear in mind that it ain’t only the cream that floats to the top. In some of those groups the leader could be pretty nasty, pretty vicious and that made the group powerful. Smaller groups were taken over, dominated and forced to yield or die, and in that way over time factions started to develop. Now a fair few people could see that this was just going to drive us down the same road that had got us into this mess in the first place. These people took to the hills I guess, long time before my time but the stories still get told round the camp fire. Anyhow, I’m getting off track a little. So, these groups got pretty hardcore about protecting what they had and getting whatever they wanted off everyone else. They got organised and gave themselves names, usually related to wherever they were based.
The only ways to defend against these groups was to have a group of your own that was big enough to defend itself or to hide and scratch an existence on the margins of habitable land. Neither was ideal, but I guess of the two, banding together made more sense. The trick was to find a leader who wasn’t completely insane. Our little band had been forced together by one of these groups. A nasty bunch called the Red Maw. They took their name from the desert area around us, the red sand coloured by the vast amounts of iron oxide rusted from the building frames of the skyscrapers that had dominated the area before the end. It was a tough environment, but it was fairly resource rich if you knew where to look. The Red Maw had small camps through the area but their base was hidden away in a vast plateau area in the centre of the desert. When we first started to come together as a group we each had some knowledge of the Red Maw set up, and between us we were able to get a pretty clear idea of how they operated.
We knew that if we just looked after ourselves eventually we would be over-run so the only option was to strike first. We started out with scouting parties, pairs and small groups heading out across the sands to find the smaller Red Maw camps. We had to move fast, if we were spotted or worse, followed, we would have been in serious trouble. Our mission was not to engage these camps but just to scout them out, map them out, work out their strengths and vulnerabilities and report back to develop a plan to hit as many of them as we could and take out the communication lines to stop them alerting the larger bases deeper into Red Maw territory. Having gathered the information over a period of weeks we were in a position to organise a coordinated strike taking out a ring of small bases around the perimeter of the area. It was a tough ask. I met one of the old timers who had formed part of the assault group when I was a kid and he told a mean story of close quarter combat, hand to hand when the ammo ran out, but it was worth it. Each of those camps, it turned out, had work parties made up of enslaved survivors who had not had our group advantages but were more than happy to get a bit of payback once they realized that we had the upper hand. From what I understand it was the liberation of these slaves and prisoners that turned the tide in our favour and left us in a position to regroup and plan for the assault on the Red Maw heartland deep in the desert.
Of course we didn’t have it all our own way, but it showed us that we could progress, that we could look after ourselves, that we could make things different, even if we had to fight to make things happen. There is a name that comes back to us from that time, and although we don’t really do leaders anymore, if we did, this name would resonate with leadership through the ages. So much so that the name still survives in our current guide and mentor. Our very own Sirius can tell you a pretty good story about his Grandfather and the way he organised us and led us and how it was his strategy and understanding of tactics that was our saving grace. Maybe the old stories of powerful families had some validity. Who knows. All I know is that we owe a debt to Siruis’ forefathers, and we make sure that we look after him and keep him going. So, apart from getting distracted again, that gives you an idea of why we were nervous about joining up with this obviously stronger group. We had been looking after ourselves for a while now, and we had got pretty good at it, but maybe it was time to look to a brighter future. Who knew what was still out there to be found…..
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