Razors

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 40-footer. 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.

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.

RAZORS

At 7 a.m. Two of the vampires start getting calls from their clinics. Of the two-dozen vampires, only these two are on the Tu-Th-Sa at 6 a.m. shift. They are from different clinics, so finding a replacement should not be a problem or particularly noticed. But the nurses say the vampires should come at the last (2 p.m.) shift, and they will bump the other vampires to earlier slots.

Sports Seller opens at 10 a.m., but none of the employees appear to care that we are blocking part of the parking lot. On a Saturday morning very few people are rushing to get equipment. All of our containers are simply white with the Firehorse logo on them, a QR code, and a web link to ‘hemodiealysis.com’. Anyone following that link will get some information about housing the homeless. The simplicity and consistency of the containers may make us look like a construction crew.

Around 11 a.m., two more vampires get called by their (different) clinics. Again, they are told to show up at 2 p.m.. In this case, one of the 2 p.m. vampires is called and asked to come in early, which she says she can’t do. There was no arguing, so there must have been an alternate.

During all this time we finished setting up our camp: housing is assembled, water and food stations are set up, refrigerators and freezers are running in a few containers, waste management is prepared, and twenty scheduled patients and the four scheduled vampires have all done dialysis. Our ratio is a bit off because we believe we needed a lot of redundancy among vampires. But if we do it more often and mostly with compatible blood types, there should not be a blood-thirst problem.

There are also ladders to the top of the containers and jerry-rigged metal shields. We don’t expect things to get to the assault level given the value of our aces — our aces are our vampires, ever notice how an ‘A’ is mostly just a ‘V’ upside-down? — but we don’t want to be easily swarmed. Since our arrival, the containers are manned as watch towers with at least a dozen people and vampires up there. We use chicken wire backed by razor wire to fill the gaps between containers, where the chickens are used to mask the razors.

At 2:30 p.m. we get the next wave of calls to vampires. We have four that committed hooky and don’t answer the phone call. And we have two more that say they can’t come in. I believe the clinics may start calling doctors, but I doubt any doctors will answer on July 4th weekend. That supposes there is not a ‘renegade vampires ’ alerting system, or at least this wouldn’t trigger it.