The Second Convoy

With the tents in place — very little of the ground is visible from the air… unless someone crawls onto the twenty-foot high tents or hovers a drone near the gaps. The tents are white & tall, and enough light comes through the spacing that it is not at all claustrophobic.

Probably the least “homey” aspect was the freeway noise. The 101 was very close and there isn’t even a sound wall in this section blocking its noise. Only the containers, tiny house insulation, and any ear-plugs made sleeping similar to a more normal house. But many of the patients were used to much worse.

The tanker trucks — are under the driveway canopy because they represent how long a siege we are ready to handle. We have much more water and fuel in jerry cans, but the image of 50K-liter triple-axel tankers would make ‘the man’ think in terms of months instead of days. We would rather ‘the man’ not learn that potential timeline with just a cursory view of our compound.

Pico Pico Houses are rectangular cubes — normally 40 inches by 80 inches by 52 inches high. These dimensions come from standard pallet sizes: a 48x40 and 32x40 are combined side-by-side. The houses come unassembled (floor, sides, ceiling, all stacked on top of each other), and are less than two feet high in that form. In an eight-foot high container or box truck, you could potentially get two per 40x48 floor space, or ten in a 20-footer, or twenty in a 40footer. We have less than 160 people, so need eight 40-foot containers dedicated to this, or have them dispersed in the box trucks. We spread all supplies around fairly evenly in case any trucks were attacked or crippled somehow. But they all arrived safely.

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With the perimeter setup, the solar awnings deployed, and the containers all verified, about half of the group starts assembling houses while the other half rests or patrols. Although we use power wrenches to assemble the Pico houses, there is enough freeway noise combined with a large distance to any slumbering households to make us as quiet as a bat.

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CONTACT LISTS » MARK

One of the goals of the exodus — is to take some significant percentage of patients along with the vampires leaving California. We do not need to bring all the patients (ten per vampire) but bringing two or three would be great. This is both to protect the patients from the hemodialysis reduction ramifications and to make it clear we are doing our best to avoid harm to others. If this ever hits the press, our counter might be "We are providing dialysis for free to thousands of patients, what are the clinics charging?"

The problem is figuring out who to contact and how to contact them. The subset of patients we want to talk with are not on an email list we can buy from marketers. And I have no idea how to write the email to those people.

In theory, the vampires could contact their own patients, but even if influence could help with that interaction, it would look very suspicious to have vampires contacting all their patients. Plus vampires are a pretty general cross-section of humanity, and many of them are actually pretty anti-social. Nothing about dialysis encourages social interaction, so a vampire has to personally drive this patient contact and have the personality or influence to succeed at that. We want this to be as simple and successful as possible.

To lead to this success, I need a targeted contact list of patient and their non-dialysis addresses. Phones are unfortunately useless for most vampires, and patients are unlikely to have an easy way to video chat… some won't even have email addresses. So an old fashioned door-to-door salesman marketing list is the way to go. With the list being filtered by current dialysis patients, and possibly organized by income level.

I hope Jo-Anne, my dialysis social worker, can help.

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