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steadiest of hands were given a textbook. But we had infections.
    We lost twenty percent of our population that first year due to illness.
    Then came year two.
    Over three hundred people and only thirty-seven were women.
    Thirty-seven women.
    It wasn’t until the end of the first year when we had our first rape. Then our second … despite how we tried to protect our women, they were victimized. None of them wanted to live under lock and guard, but it seemed to be the only way to protect them.
    Even then, we had rapes.
    Rape and thievery were immediate grounds for execution.
    That was no secret either. Yet, the men did it. Soon, when a rape was committed, the culprit fled. We never saw him again.
    Our inner citizens weren’t our only threat. Within two years savagery started. There were people who banned together like us, but didn’t start a civilization. They roamed. Like locusts, they took what they could and moved on.
    The fights, violence and injuries, cost us even more.
    What had this world come to?
    Doing our best wasn’t good enough. We lived under constant threats.
    Being a designer and electrical engineer, I was called upon to try to come up with a solution. An alarm system.
    I was able to make a tracking system. Because of our locale, an encompassing one was difficult, so I designed handheld ones made from old game units.
    We had four men perched as lookouts. North, south, east and west.
    Each had a tracking device when they were on duty.
    The tracker picked up everything over fifty pounds, animals included, which was annoying at times, but a necessary safeguard.
    We were alerted of anything that moved within a hundred feet.
    That prepared us for attacks.
    A pilgrimage to another location was discussed, but a community vote determined we’d stay put.
    Where else would we go? Wouldn’t it be the same everywhere and we’d just have to start over?
    “What about Utopia?”
    I remember the day a newer guy said that.
    Utopia. This was about the tenth time we’d heard of it.
    Utopia had become an urban legend.
    This great place, somewhere hidden, where they had secure living, medical attention, plenty of food and society had started all over again.
    A perfect world.
    Rumors of Utopia began about year three.
    We dismissed them as hearsay, but nonetheless we enjoyed hearing the tales.
    Two years after we stopped looking for people, Bentley and I decided to go on a search.
    It was the last one we did.
    Packs of savages now ran rampant and it was no longer safe. They hit you by surprise.
    We happened upon this man named Kirk. He was running from this new breed of self inflicted mental mutants.
    He was the most adamant about Utopia. He claimed he’d been there, lived there and was kicked out because he didn’t belong.
    The location of Utopia wasn’t known. Those taken there never saw where it was and when they took you out; they knocked you out and dropped you somewhere.
    You had to fit in, look a certain way, go through some sort of training, and if you failed you were tossed out.
    I thought that was ridiculous.
    After Kirk, we heard similar stories from others.
    Utopia by definition means a perfect world, and if this place did exist they were trying to create it.
    A perfect world in a plague ravished world?
    That alone made me dismiss the existence of this Utopia. To me it was a place made up, like a goal in life, an aim for some.
    Find Utopia.
    I didn’t need to.
    Civilization was hit with a plague and had gone mad.
    For me, Utopia would be taking a bad situation and making it the best you could. Even if there was turmoil. That’s what we did.
    To me the real Utopia was Gray’s mountain. Our community.
    We had our violence, illness and crime, but it was the best place to be.
    The only place to be.
    And I was there for the duration of my life.

6.
The Hit
    If nothing else, the one thing that could be said about the folks on Gray's Mountain was that we had great hair.
    I was always a fanatic about my hair. Since