Reading about shelters was an eye opening experience to Dave. Many shelters were made of logs gathered from trees. And Dave knew nothing about how to harvest logs from trees. Dave eyed his recently acquired axe and tried to imagine himself cutting down a tree and could only imagine that ending up in a disaster. Learning exposes ignorance.
When you are an outsider to a field it's very easy to have an overly simplistic way of thinking about it. He thought that making something like a shelter would only require tying a few pieces of easily found wood together. But even those few steps of his overly-simplistic view hid thousands of unstated skills that Dave was only just starting to become aware even existed. Dave felt domesticated to the point of being helpless.
It was getting late. The sun was going down and soon there would soon be no light to do anything.
Dave scanned the floor where he had spread out the contents of his backpack and picked up a can of soup, a bottle of water and a spoon. He took these out on the balcony and placed them on the top of the balcony wall. He picked up the soup can and pulled the pop top off and tossed the removed part onto the garden below. There was no one around to see his littering.
Picking up a spoon, Dave began to eat the soup straight from the can. Dave grimaced. Eating this way would become discouraging as hell over time. While eating, Dave looked over the various backyards. He couldn't see any signs of life anywhere. Or at least no human or human-like life. Dave did see some pigeons pecking for seeds in one of the lawns. Other than that the world felt empty.
So it was a bit odd that Dave didn't feel any sense of loneliness. Having lived shoulder to shoulder in a busy city Dave felt no sadness at the disappearance of all the people. It was a rather startling self-revelation. Dave never pegged himself as a loner. Then he thought about how few deep emotional connections he had made through his life and realised that their loss didn't add up to anything worth mourning about. You can't experience a sense of loss for anything that doesn't exist.
Finishing the soup, Dave dropped the empty can into the garden. He jumped slightly at the noise and looked about with a startled expression. He listened carefully but heard no sign that anything had noticed. This was odd. Last night at about this time, Dave had noticed a bunch of walkers limping on the streets. Here he saw none.
Dave walked to the edge of the balcony nearest the fence that ran between the apartment and the house next door. Slowly Dave leaned out and tried to look around to the street at the front of the apartment. He didn't need to lean far to see that there were a few walkers out on the street.
That made Dave think. So that was the second time that Dave had seen the walkers come out at night. Was there something that the walkers didn't like about the day? pondered Dave. What's more, the walkers were only on the roads and not in the backyards that he could see into. Were they unable to do complex tasks like open doors or gates?
It was an odd thought to have. When the infection first broke out it happened during the day and there were walkers then. Did the infection just spread when it could and when the area was fully infected then the dead would hide away. And what was the destination that they walked to? These dead didn't come across as particularly intelligent.
Dave stopped leaning out from the balcony and walked back into the lounge room. There was no running water in the apartment, meaning that there was no means to clean up, so he put the spoon down next to his other eating utensils before picking up his notepad and pen. He'd keep the spoon and just clean it latter when the chance came.
He wasn't too sure about his observations but he wanted to write them down anyway. Sometimes the best way to organise one's thoughts were to just write them down in their current messy state. Holding everything in one's head often used up valuable mental resources. Once you write something down you can then look at those thoughts that are on paper and generate new thoughts with the freed up braincells.
There is a limitation to brainstorming - information, and in Dave's case he lacked data. Good hard data about the circumstances that he was in. What was going on? How did it begin? What could be done about it? Dave just had too many questions. Dave felt that he was missing some sort of fundamental knowledge. Maybe if he knew more he'd know which abstractions were the best way to frame his thinking. He wished that the electricity was still on throughout the city so that he could watch TV.
Dave's only job that he had all his working career had been as a systems analyst. This meant that he could take a system that he was unfamiliar with, break it down, generate abstraction and figure out how to describe it. This was never an easy task and one that required a lot of trial and error. Sometimes the failures can be so continuous as to be completely disheartening. But Dave had done this for a long time. He just believed in his own stubbornness and that if he didn't back down then he would somehow push through to success. Those past successes now just seemed like a dim and impossible dream, leaving Dave with a sense of waste.
Dave finished taking
