Free The Aftermath: Parts I and II by Megan E Pearson Page B

heard about our trophies.  There were the dead, dead trophies.  Heads on stakes, all that Ivan the Terrible scare your opposition kind of thing.  Though we used it to scare our population.  Some though, some became our more famous trophies.  We killed them but allowed them to come back, kept them on leashes around our perimeter.  Tied up enough that we knew they wouldn't be a threat, but not so much that they didn't serve their purpose.  It doesn't do much for morale to see your ex-neighbors snarling and snapping at you.  It does a hell of a lot to keep people in line though.  They also served as pseudo guard dogs.  I mean we've all seen what a fuss they make when they see others, living or dead.
    I guess that was really a cruel punishment.  I mean you could argue that the human soul or whatever the fuck we got that gives us cognitive reasoning would disappear.  That you wouldn't be you, so there's no way you'd know what happened to you.  That being said, we all know that becoming one of those things is the last thing we want to happen to us.
    It was effective though.  At one point we actually had to start going out to find our trophies because simply put, no one wanted to be our next trophy.  As far as keeping the population in line we seemed to have cracked the code.
    Our community was pretty good too.  We had the original five that started it.  People like myself managed to gain the honors of being leaders because we had proven ourselves.  We were close enough to a major city that we could get in and scout for supplies, but not so close that we had to deal with the meat sacks that had once lived there on a regular basis.  We had a good place to grow our own food, and good places to store all we got.  We rationed regardless of how much we had, and were smart about it.  Training and working were part of everyone's daily lives, as well as brushing up on survival skills.  After awhile we took a group of people with one or two skills and made a whole community of people with a large set of skills.
    Survival was something we knew we had down to an art form.  It also didn't hurt that our population growth was controlled in such a way that we weren't at risk for losing that.
    But like I said, it always ends the same way.
    The problem with our plan was it left us a lot of room to feel safe.  Now when the end of the world is a reality feeling safe is just not a good thing.  It was something that all people had striven for in the world before, but the last thing you want in this new world.
    Now you have a bit of the old world you left, so you don't understand why feeling safe is a problem.  Neither did we.  See the problem with feeling safe is you honestly start to believe you are safe.  But we aren't.  We could be in the most fortified place in the world with unlimited resources and we still aren't safe.  But since old world us exists we forget that.  Believing you are safe wouldn't be such a problem either, except we no longer stick to the things that made us feel that way in the first place.  We relax.
    Our leaders relaxed first.  See, each section of the community was closed off from the rest.  Now I don't mean we controlled where the population was or was not allowed to go, there were just gates you had to go through.  One of the rules was locking those gates when you left or entered a section.  But when the leaders stopped being so careful about that, the community as a whole did.  It became a rule we simply could not enforce anymore.  When safety was a major concern it wasn't hard to explain it.  Once the leaders felt safe enough to stop doing it though, I guess it just fell away.
    Population also became a major issue.  I mean they didn't start breaking rules left and right, but they did start to question them.  More importantly though they started to question our common goal.  Why were we keeping so many people out?  Why weren't we trying to help rebuild the world?  If we had found a