A Toast and a Plan

     We mourned the dead the next night, over cheap beer. It was almost more depressing than just reading the list, that the only way we could show our support was to sit in a dim old bank sipping canned piss, and plastic bottle tequila. We decided that night, not to linger on the dead, but to protect the ones who were still alive. We didn't understand what was happening to these people, or why, but we knew that if we could find one family still alive, they might be able to help us understand, and stop whatever was happening.
     A few of the hackers volunteered to help us find the people on the list who were still alive, and to arrange a route between their homes. The cheap beer and tequila must have loosened me up, because I agreed to go without much hesitation. The rest of the guys were up for hours after I fell asleep, formulating plans. When I woke up on Friday morning, they had already found the nearest family. Silas seemed ready to go, but I was so hungover that I couldn't get focused enough to go. Silas didn't like it, but he waited for me anyway.
     Silas spent the rest of the day working with some of the hackers on various ideas to get things together. He suggested creating a "Spider" to search repeatedly for all of the names on the list, and let us all know if anything changed. I don't really understand it, but they seemed to like the idea. They jumped on it, and one of the younger kids jumped right on it. I spent the day with Liza, preparing for Saturday, packing up my gear again, and grabbing food supplies, since we weren't expecting to come back to the collective. The idea was that we'd move from one home to the next, learning what we could, and offering whatever protection we could, before moving to the next home. We weren't prepared for what was going to happen.