In the end, only one person chose to leave. He set off the following morning after a warm goodbye from all of us. I told him he was welcome to return and I did truly mean it. Getting locked up in a basement together for fifty years tends to bring people together, even if there was one murder.
One of the first things we did was go through all the storage places in the house. We found plenty of clothing for us to wear, by the looks of it a large family had lived here before the war, as well as some old farming equipment. Lawrence had worked as a farmhand before he was taken, so he started teaching some of the others how to work the land. Before we had really realized it, we brought new life into the farm.
We started noticing some changes from certain group members. George and Byron were th
