If I remember correctly and I probably don't. The only part of this tweet that made it into the book was the last line. "Ah,a king's feast." I know I had thought about what one would do if you did not have a microwave to un-thaw frozen food and naturally the only answer is you let it thaw on it's own. Which means, depending on how cold or hard it was frozen it could be a few hours that you go hungry. They were living on top of the Safeway almost full time by now with the base house as a place they could go to when needed but still on the roof.
The Roof Idea. I have to explain how that came about. In a nutshell Masada. I had seen again a documentary on the Israeli mesa fortress and how they held off the roman army for over a year. Shortly after that I saw a documentary on the Anasazi Indians of Mesa Verdi and how they easily defended it from attackers so the high ground was on my mind.
Little Rock dose not have a skyline like New York or Chicago there are a few high buildings and the rest is basically a very small city or a very large town depending on how you look at it. It is still growing out instead of up. So how do you find the high ground? A mesa in the city? If they were to use a tall office building the struggle would be in getting up there and off of there. It would become a big hassle for our hero's to deal with especially with the plans they had. A low roofed building made since. Little Rock doesn't have a Safeway so I chose that as the store they were going to use.
Unlike the library where I could walk around and explore within reason the building I had chosen to be the model for the Safeway I couldn't just walk around on their roof. Enter Google Maps. This became my friend for most of the story. I used it to explore many of the places I talk about in the book.
The problem is in the story I had set the boarder of the kingdom to go right down the center of main and the "Safeway was outside that boarder in stead of right in the middle where a fortress should be. I suppose that's what makes it a flawed plan, but that flawed plan is what made our hero's who they were and I decided to just go with it. I think in the book they moved the kingdom boarder over a block to run right behind the grocery store.
The idea of growing food on the roof was just part of my never ending quest to find out about green energy, renewable energy and ways to grow sustainable food in a small amount of space. I have been looking into urban farming for some time and that was the seed (pun intended) behind this rooftop garden. I had read somewhere that a family of four could live for a year off a minimum of one acre of land then the rooftop of the store could offer two people what they needed. If our hero's were up on the roof and had raised bed gardens up there away from the edges where others couldn't see them then they in theory could live up their unnoticed for years. At least in story Little Rock. In Real Little Rock their are building, homes, nearby that are taller than the "Safeway" and anyone could easily look out a window and see them up there. I had considered making that a danger for them but chose not to because it risked too much in taking the story in too many directions.
The real problem was where do you get the wood for a raised bed? I wasn't even going to address the water problem because it was winter. I was sitting in my back yard smoking a cigar thinking about this problem and staring at the six foot privacy fence that surrounds my yard trying to come up with a solution when I thought of decking. Not the easily removable fencing but decking. Decking was a more logical choice. Why? Fencing was a barrier for the zombies. I wanted to keep them out, put as many obstacles between them and me. Yes I thought about this as if my life depended on it. There is privacy fencing everywhere downtown and it would have been easy to use but there is also a lot of decking and I know if it were me I would want the barriers and deal with the smaller boards of the decking to build raised beds. if running from a zombie I could climb a fence, put two or three of them between me and a zombie and I'm safe. I may be wrong let's hope we never have to find out.
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