When the Big Death hit, and I was left to take care of hundreds of children living in Thunder Mountain, I had no idea how we would survive. I had to ask the smallest of the children to help me drag dead bodies outside to burn, all the while wondering if the dead were still contagious, if I had reached the stage where the Big Death would view me as an adult and kill me. I thought we would all die for awhile. I had to send children out to explore our world, give us reports, and bring back as much material objects they could find. We needed everything, and I knew that for many years we would be relying upon what was left to rot in the post Big Death environment. The teams of children, some so small, would take whatever they could find, knowing someday it could be invaluable. We have bunkers filled with clothes, books, canned food, gallons of gasoline, drugs of various types by the box load, even various electronics with the hopes that they can all be put to use at some point. Anything the teams could carry, they brought home. Our storage facilities are a bit of a hodge-podge, though we have had one dedicated group that administers and catalogues all the finds.

While we survived, the very core essence of humanity changed. For many years, we were a culture of youths, with no support, no guidance, and dead bodies left everywhere. I think we all went a bit mad. A culture of leftover orphans feeling abandoned and betrayed, but with no one left alive to blame. And we live in constant fear of its return, since few really understand how the Big Death started. My generation is very cynical, but still quite responsible. We would not have stayed alive without learning to cope and adjust. We are a resilient generation. But the first children, the next generation, who started arriving within a few years after the Big Death, they are ... different, it feels. They were born into a world that survived the Big Death, and have no concept of how humanity existed before. They are being born without doctors, often killing their own mothers in the process. They have no formal skills, though many communities such as ours freely offer basic literacy and survival skills programs. Some of the more frightening children we meet have been born into communities of religion or of extremity. Having children being raised on beliefs that humans were punished for their transgressing sins and having an essential evil nature is sick. We expose our children in Thunder Mountain to as much diversity as we can in our own belief systems, and try to instill in them a love for all people. We want our children to love and accept all people left alive - there are so few of us left. Hate should be left in our collective past.