I will happily admit that I don’t understand how towns and modern warfare work together. From what I’ve read, it seems ridiculous, which means that I’m certainly missing something. Thankfully, that problem doesn’t matter, here.
The “biker gang attacks town” idea has encountered the agency problem. Our good townsfolk are not going to be willing to hand over control of their town if they are already sufficiently organized. One of the points of this attack is to show that they are not sufficiently organized. However, that doesn’t mean that they are not organized at all.
There will need to have been prior attacks, not necessarily by people; monsters, feral dogs, whatever. This means that our intrepid sheriff (Ken) will have made some sort of lookout and response plan. It may not be a great one, but it will exist.
The “going to town for dinner” scene in chapter 16 needs to be refined to account for that (it’s kind-of there, but not much). The biker gang attack needs to be crushed by the werewolves either before that plan can fail or immediately thereafter (don’t want all the townies to die).
This is also going to restructure chapter 21, which is about recruiting town folk.
As for the biker gang’s agency, I don’t care. There are many reasons they might attack our town. It really doesn’t matter since they’re all going to die. I see no reason that the classic pillage and burn with a side of rape will not suffice.
The town that I’ve coopted as Kier has a population of about 350. That’s the number I’m using for the fictional one, too. It’s safe to assume that there are more than 350 guns in the town, although not evenly distributed. Fifty seems a low number for volunteers to help keep watch and defend. I would expect more.
While I don’t care about the biker gang’s agency, I would like them not to be total idiots. 20 bikes with 30 people seems big. What would lead them to believe that a raid would have few enough casualties to be worth the attempt?
Fuel is a motivation – especially after they’ve already arrived and paid the cost in fuel. Even if resistance is greater than expected, that’s an irreplaceable sunk cost. Perhaps that’s how it starts. They don’t start as obvious raiders, just people who want fuel. After lulling suspicions, then it becomes a raid. That might be plausible.
Ken (the sheriff) needs to give Tom (our intrepid alpha) a radio. There are plenty of places I can add that.
I need a subcategory for “figuring stuff out over lunch so I can write that evening”.
Marked Up 