Cross Stich pattern by Alicia Watkins. (Link to her etsy page is provided below. )

Dearest Readers,

Last Thursday I promised you all an explanation for why we’ve been out of touch. Here is how it happened. Do you remember Mr. Young Jr.? He was my romantic interest last November before getting kicked out by Mr. K in January due to his inability to, well… contribute.

We hoped we had heard the last of him. Unfortunately, we had not.

It seems that after Mr. Young Jr. left our colony, he joined up with a roving cannibal gang. As I’ve mentioned before, cannibals are the worst sort of crowd to consort with – even viler than Miss Peterson. While it is not surprising that he would try to join that kind of disreputable group, cannibals are not usually amenable to taking on new members. I can only imagine that telling these hungry people-eaters that there were a couple dozen delicious individuals at a nearby location ingratiated him to the pack. (After all, I’ve always thought of myself as a tasty little dish!) Perhaps this was the cannibal lair we came across several weeks ago when searching for a new home.

On Wednesday last week, Mrs. K and I were on the front porch taking a break from packing when we saw a disheveled, ragged Mr. Young Jr. limping towards us. He looked different; not only was he unkempt (per usual) but he kept shaking furiously and laughing manically.

Immediately, we knew these were tell-tale symptoms of cannibalism, so we called for help. At the moment, the cannibal gang burst through the weak parts of our fences and began their attack. They must have been studying our defenses for a few days since they seemed to know all of the points of entry. There were perhaps 15 of them – they didn’t outnumber us but they had the advantage of surprise.

We had run drills for attacks (from both alive and undead aggressors), of course, but the patterns of the living are always less predictable than the zombies. Between the surprise attack and the distraction of packing, we were slow to respond. The cannibals were armed with shotguns and starting firing first. All the gunfire seemed to attract every undead being in the neighborhood! Within a half hour, in addition to the cannibals, our defenses were completely overrun by zeds.
The firefight lasted under a half an hour but we had lost four, Mr. Lehman, Mr. Wright and two junior survivors, Little Amanda Rose and Little Maddie. For those of you who are good at math, that brings our survival group down to 19.

A few of the cannibals escaped but I’m glad to say that most died grisly deaths at the hands of a group of girl scout zambini. Happily, I had the pleasure of watching Mr. Young Jr. being devoured by a zambino. I didn’t want the zombie to have all of the fun, so I shot him straight between the eyes (that’ll teach him to reject my advances!).

Between the undead hordes and the knowledge that the cannibals would quickly regroup and try again, we needed to move out quickly. Lucky for us, we had already been planning a move, so the 19 of us that remained were able to jump into our half-packed, armored school bus and hit the road.

We have started west. We do not have a destination in mind and progress is slow, but I have started working on a new cross stitch to hang wherever we next call home.

Your ever gracious,
Miss E

(Like the cross stich pattern featured? Check out Alicia Watkin’s etsy shop for more: http://www.etsy.com/shop/aliciawatkins?ref=seller_info)