“We pushed hard for the river, coming up through Freeport. We managed to use all of the cargo containers from the depot.” Nate said.

That raised my eyebrows. “Really? There had to be a thousand of them.”

Nate laughed. “One thousand, three hundred, and forty-six. We spread out not only west but east. There was a lot of farmland to the southeast.”

I nodded. It was sound move. “If ever we decide to tackle the city, there’s another storage depot near Chicago.”

Nate shuddered. “No thanks. I’ll do that when I’m bored with life.”

I smiled, wondering when that might ever happen.

“We managed to free up an additional seventy-eight people in our push west and would you believe it? Twenty of them are young guys, between nineteen and twenty-five years old who had banded together to save each other when the crap went down.”

I whistled. That was a good force to send against the Z’s if they were trained right. Who was I kidding? They had Nate. Of course they were trained. I motioned for him to continue.

“We have quite a few families, lots of kids, and we are in a good position for food and supplies right now. We will need to forage until the first crops come in, and we will have to start some animal raising, but I imagine we have the land for that.”

I nodded. “The forest preserves we went through to get here have a lot of clearings surrounded by heavy woods. Once upon a time these were farms, so they can be farms once again. There are enough homes nearby for people to manage the herds and protect them as needed. We can trench them for defense and also to keep the animals from straying.”

Nate seemed impressed. “Always looking ahead, hey?”

I shrugged. “Looking back these days puts some strain on your soul, you know what I mean?”