Believe it or not the wife and I were talking over dinner about starting a garden in the spring and that's how this thought came about. I got to thinking about the time line of this story in my mind. I thought that at some time in October the zombie attack would have hit Little Rock after it had spread exponentially across the country. In my mind the spread would have taken about a week to reach national epidemic levels just out of the shear stupidity of people not listening to or paying attention to the world around them. I thought that people would care too much about loved ones to really take precautions.
So, October disaster strikes and our heroes have been on the move since then and the story starts in December. I condensed the time they spent at the park to just a few important moments to give you a since of what the camp was like before they got overrun.
December leaves us with no gardens, but keep in mind this is Arkansas, that plays into it later in my thinking. Fresh food is now three months old so it's no good, at least for fresh food. canned food would be more valuable than gold by now and frozen is like silver not as valuable because you can't eat it immediately but it has a high value after it's thawed. But being Arkansas with compared to northern states a warm winter (I've seen Christmas with no snow) because of the warm winters there seemed to be a possibility to have at least root veggies available.
I wanted to explore more the possibility of living off the land like a Prepper or Survivalist but as the story developed I never got the chance to really go into it. There is some amazing stuff you can do to live off the land, I was surprised.
Two months of people scavenging before the story starts and I thought there wouldn't be much food left. That's why our hero hates finding things like cans of Artichoke Hearts. Things have been picked over pretty well by the city's hidden population.
A quick word about the population. I struggled with the idea of having more adults in the story but it seemed to make it too complicated. Adding more groups of people would have cluttered the telling far more than it needed to be. There were adults, families hidden around the city. Barricaded in their homes and mostly just not trusting others just like Grandpa didn't when we first meet him later in the story.
But the kids, the kids would not be trusting but need or even crave adult guidance and here were these two fools out in the world just like them and they seemed to be doing something interesting so why not approach them. Besides they might have food.
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