State of Decay✔️

Chapter 17: Plain, Hard Work

Three days passed.

Once Maya got started, she really didn't stop. Marcus was impressed. In approximately seventy two hours, she managed to whip the church into shape.

On the first day, she organized a schedule for the watchtower. Everyone was on the schedule...except for Marcus and Maya. Alan didn't like that one, and immediately had started arguing about it. Maya explained that she and Marcus were exempt from the schedule because they were the designated explorers. It would be their job to head into town, pretty much every day pretty soon, and explore the abandoned structures for supplies. Considering the danger and exertion the job entailed, they deserved it.

No one argued after that, even Alan backed off.

On top of that, Maya made sure everyone had radios, (there were just enough of the little, black handhelds), and that everyone had a map, (there were more than enough of those). She then began working with Lily to commit everything about Trumbull Valley in general and Spencer's Mill in particular to memory. While she did that, Sam, Jacob and Ed began to inventory everything while Marcus set to work scrubbing down the basement and getting it ready to be an infirmary. When that was done, she set him to work preforming inventory on everything outside of the church but still within the protective perimeter wall.

It wasn't a very fun task.

Despite how motivated everyone was, they didn't get as much done on the first day as they'd hoped for. Everyone was still getting used to this level of work, and Ed and Jacob were still recovering. Still, Marcus went to bed that night exhausted and satisfied.

On the second day, work resumed with enthusiasm. Marcus was surprised at how much everyone threw themselves into the tasks Maya assigned them. They finished inventorying everything in the church and set to work making improvements to the watchtower. That and actually cleaning and organizing everything in the church took up the rest of the second day. By the time the sun was setting, the place was practically spotless.

Sam, Ed and Jacob had argued on that one, saying there were better things they could be doing. Maya stuck to her maxim that an organized environment led to an organized mind. Marcus had to give her that one. Nothing got him pumped and cleared his head quite in the same way cleaning his apartment did. So, they got to it, used up a good portion of the bleach and Windex. While they did that, Maya set to work coming up with a way to figure out how to divvy up the food and water they had per person per day.

The third, and final, day of this renewal, or, as Pastor Will liked to refer to it, revival, saw the most activity. Marcus, Jacob and Maya set up the room-sized tent, broke down the bunk-bed in the main room and rebuilt it in the tent. They also moved in a dresser, an end table and a pair of folding chairs, as well as the two beds from the gazebo, which Maya decided was going to be repurposed as an outdoors eating area.

She moved a large, breakdownable picnic table they'd discovered in the basement into the gazebo and moved Will's desk into the main room, not far from Lily's radio workstation. They scavenged a handful of chairs from the basement junk as well, and declared it done. The final portion of the day was spent sorting through everything from the basement. They managed to salvage some furniture that they broke down to beef up the watchtower, some kitchen utensils, about a boxful of books, (most of the paperbacks were too warped, eaten up or torn apart to be legible) and a ton of spare blankets, pillows and clothing articles.

They ended up moving anything left that could be used to burn when winter came back into the basement, shoving it all in a far corner. They also moved a large metal locker, a desk and a small, squat dresser downstairs to hold their minimal medical supplies. Maya wanted to move beds down there when they found more, for obvious reasons.