Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land (13 page)

Friday, April 22, 2011

Comfort Measures

Posted by Josh Guess

I have a toothache. It's not your average small pain, but a deep and powerful throbbing over my upper left front tooth. I can feel every beat of my heart in it, each strike of my pulse sending waves of pain through my head.
For that reason, I'll keep this short. We don't have a dentist. It's one of those things that doesn't really come up until you need it, but of all the strange and useful skill sets among the survivors here, the zombie plague seems to have kept us from having even one dentist among them.
The closest we have is Becky. Both of her parents were dentists, and that was her eventual goal. She had been going to school since I met her, and she worked in her dad's office as a dental assistant when time permitted. That said, she admits that she doesn't have anywhere near the skills or knowledge to do the job.
So, I'm going to let Evans stick a needle in my gums and see if he finds any fluid in there. The consensus seems to point toward an abscess, which probably means they'll have to cut the tooth out. I'm not really looking forward to that.
There's an abandoned dental surgery suite not too far from the compound. We've got generators. If we have to, we'll plug the equipment there up and I'll let the docs do what they have to. Evans swears he can make me a new tooth if he has to cut this one out. Again, not too excited about that.
Alright, off to the clinic. I can't work like this.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Hindsight

Posted by Josh Guess

Painkillers are a beautiful thing.
Except for the part where they make me incredibly nauseous, of course. Evans did the best he could with my tooth, but it's not pretty. Can't blame the guy for not having dental training, but the job's done. Time will tell if I lose or keep the damn thing, but for now it's still firmly attached to my skull. The filling isn't world-class, but between him and Becky they got the job done.
This minor emergency reminds me that for all the speed with which we managed to put together many parts of the compound, there are always going to be things we overlooked. I mean, the first wall we built was basically just made of cars parked around the outside of the place, the cracks filled in with whatever we could find. When more and more people started to show up, all our efforts went to getting a permanent wall in place. You've seen how well that went--it's falling to pieces in some places.
The same goes for farming. While every person in the compound is responsible for caring for the plants that we have growing in what used to be our yards, last year we pretty much raided every farm we could find around here for the crops already growing. It was only after the shepherds and farmers from out east came to settle with us that plans were made for large-scale farming outside our walls.
Every step of the way, we've had to deal with the fact that each mistake we make will eventually become a bigger problem. The zombies outside the walls may fluctuate in numbers, but they're never going to go away. At least they haven't yet. Every repair, every change of plans, every ounce of wasted effort, means risking attack. We're a strong group, but there isn't a day that goes by where I don't worry that it will be the one where we're overrun.
I look back at the very first days of The Fall, and I realize how lucky we were. Jess and I worked like crazy to fortify the house while every other person in this neighborhood except for my mom packed up and left or was killed. So many people funneled into supposedly safe areas guarded by the military. So many dead along the way to those areas...
We got really lucky. Many members of my family benefited from the early warnings I gave them. I lost far more of them than managed to survive--aunts, uncles, cousins by the score. Part of why we examine ourselves so hard here in the compound is because we've collectively lost so much. There isn't a lot of room for error.
I think the painkillers are making me a little loopy. I'm going to go before I make an ass of myself. I just worry about everyone so much...

Monday, April 25, 2011

Shambles

Posted by Josh Guess

It's been raining and storming around here so much lately that I'd kind of gotten used to it. Except for the dogs whining at the sound of thunder, the bad weather had been largely ignored in my house as we got used to the ceaseless wind and rain.
Yesterday, or more properly late last night, we couldn't ignore it any longer.
The constant downpour has had some pretty damaging effects on the compound itself, washing away huge swaths of the freshly tilled earth that we've planted in. It's probably a good thing that so much or our soil is heavy with clay, because I think that's the only reason we didn't lose the majority of our food plants. The farms are a little better off since each row of plants is on a tiny rise, letting the water trickle (and then torrent) away in the valleys between.
The storm last night was really powerful. More rain, and more strong winds, but not quite as bad as others I've seen in sheer ferocity. What last night's storm had that others didn't was actually two things. The first was about two minutes of hail the size of quarters, which beat the hell out of everything. The second was a tornado. I'm not an expert on weather, but it seemed pretty big. Thankfully it didn't hit us directly, but it came pretty close, about a hundred yards outside the western wall.
That's an area where we store lots of the stuff that we can't fit in the compound and don't need year-round. Right now it's primarily used as a place to put the stacks of firewood.
The tornado slung hundreds (maybe thousands) of pieces of firewood all over the area. The wall took an awful beating from them, and there are damaged houses and vehicles all over the place. A few people were injured, but those were minor, mostly from broken glass and the like. One good thing about a storm is that most people go inside, where it's safe.
The worst casualty of the tornado and its mad scattering of debris was our solar panels and wind turbines. Several of the panels I have set up at my house were cracked, two of them totally broken. The turbine at the clinic didn't get hit by anything, but the one of the supports broke from the constant strain of holding up in this insane storm season and it toppled. Shredded itself when it hit the driveway there.
The few other solar panels and turbines around the compound have almost all taken some kind of damage. I don't have a full report yet, but the outlook isn't very bright. Fortunately my house batteries are full right now, so I can write this. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'll be using my phone to do this in the near future, since the tiny solar charger I have for it is safe inside the house.
The one silver lining in all of this is that the zombies seem to have decided to back off while the weather is so nuts. Very few of them have been seen from the sentry posts on the wall, and even when the weather breaks for a while (as it's doing right now) they don't show up in big numbers very quick. Maybe some primal fear deep in their brains keeps them huddled in the woods. Maybe they just don't like getting wet, I don't know. It's handy, and it's good for us.
And given the sheer amount of damage around the compound right now, we're looking for any good news we can find.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Signal Loss

Posted by Josh Guess

I'm going to try to post when I can, but we're in a bad situation here. As I said yesterday, there's a lot of damage around the compound to take care of, the wall first and most important. We're very fortunate that the rain continued on last night since it kept to many zombies from getting near the wall and seeing how easy it would have been for them to force a breach. We've had people working nonstop to patch and repair, and my brother is working with a group of folks right now to get new panels and boards made for the damaged parts.
It's a lot of work, but nothing I haven't had to organize before. I even offered to help by going out and working myself, but I was shot down. I was told that there had to be someone to run the show, to act as a go-between for all the different groups of people working to make this place whole again. It isn't as wonderful as it sounds. I basically just report what I'm told and allocate men and materials where we need them.
The repairs to the compound are actually proceeding pretty well. That's not why I might not be able to post consistently over the next few days. The problem there is that the cell tower just down the road has been losing signal strength. I've talked to some of the folks at Google and a few engineers in North Jackson, and they're working on theories. The first few responses I got from them seemed to imply that at first glance it was just a power issue.
Which would be about the best scenario we could hope for. Since that cell tower was built to serve as an emergency backup for communication during disasters where the power grid failed, it's been running on the minimal power that the backup systems provide for a while now. We've got solar panels and spare turbines to use if needed, but that will have to wait until we get some kind of response from the people who know more about it than I do.
If the problem is something more complicated, we might be in trouble. No one here has the level of technical expertise needed to repair electronics that sophisticated. At least, I don't think so. Let's all cross our fingers and hope that the solar cells that run the tower are just misaligned or something. I don't want to think about being stuck without even minimal communication with the outside.
OK, I'm getting back to work now. My brother apparently needs me to talk to the council soon to see if he can go ahead and dig one of those trenches I talked about last week outside of the western wall. He thinks it will keep the zombies at bay while we get the repairs done and reinforced. Sounds like a good idea to me...

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Ray of Light

Posted by Josh Guess

This morning is sunny. It's the first time in more than a week that we've had the slightest break in the clouds. During that time the longest stretch we've gone without rain was about two hours. About ten between thunderstorms.
It's been clear all morning, and we've had people following the instructions Google gave us for looking at the nearest cell tower. Fortune seems to be smiling on us, because it is a power problem as far as we can tell. The base of the tower has a small building that houses the batteries that get charged by the solar cells that sit around it. It isn't much for communications, really, maybe a couple of kilowatts, but enough to get us on the internet here and there. Some of the panels have been pretty badly damaged by the storms, and Google has several options for us.
The first is obvious: repair. We've got unused turbines and spare solar panels. We could, assuming that the zombie swarms were thin enough, put up new panels and build props for the turbines, turn them into wind turbines. It would be a lot of work to provide minimal power to the cell tower closest to us.
Another option that I wasn't even aware of until this morning is a lot more appealing.
Major communications companies had been providing mobile disaster relief communications for a while before The Fall. Some towns' fire and police departments have trailers that carry what is essentially a mobile cell tower. Some have an even larger version that is itself a truck. Sort of like those vans that supply a satellite signal to news agencies in the field.
Frankfort doesn't have one of those. Part of why the cellular companies were allowed to put their towers right up next to some of the local fire stations was due to the fact that they built expensive fail-safes into those towers for emergency communication. Which is why I've been able to write this blog and keep in touch with people over the last year plus.
I think it's time to make some changes. Jamie has volunteered to take and extended scout trip to look for one or more of these things. If he can find one, we're planning on basically stealing all the batteries from the closest cell tower, the one we're working on, and setting the whole shebang up inside the compound itself. We'll actually get more and better communications with the mobile unit than we do sitting right on the edge of this tower's area of service.
This may not seem like a big deal to a lot of you, but it is to us. Knowing that we can quickly take down and protect our means of communication with the outside world is hugely appealing. I think most of you out there can get that. We're all survivors, regardless of the specifics that got us to this point. Every one of us knows the loneliness and deep discomfort that comes from living in a safe zone surrounded by the walking dead. Human beings by and large need news and interaction with the wider world. It's just a part of who we've become.
I'm hopeful that since we live in a rural area not known for its generous cellular coverage that Jamie will be able to find one of these things. He's only taking three other scouts with him, one of them being Mason. I'm hoping that they can find one soon and get back home safely.
There's enough work to do here that we can't spare them for long.

Friday, April 29, 2011

Beautiful

Posted by Josh Guess

For right now, we've got regular power going to the cell tower. It's going to have to do until and unless Jamie can find a portable unit we can take back to the compound. That's why my post is so late today--we've had people wiring new solar panels up and setting up a small wind turbine.
It's been a nice day. We've missed a lot of work time out on the farms because of the constant rain, so today we made as much makeup progress as we could. It was so nice out that I think most people just enjoyed the change in the weather and the chance to socialize as they worked. Pretty much everyone was out working...
It's going to take a while to fix all the storm damage. The wall is functional if not pretty right this second, and roofs are being patched. There's no handy replacement glass for all the windows that were shattered by the debris the tornado kicked onto us, so for now it's whatever we can find to cover them.
So that's it for updates.
Looking outside isn't easy at my house. We took some pretty extreme measures early on to safeguard ourselves, which means that when I'm at home and working, it doesn't matter what the outside looks like. My office is always the same.
But I'm sitting on my front porch right now, looking at the sky. I'm seeing beautiful streaks of red and gold across the bottoms of the clouds, all mixed with blue. It's a lovely sight.
I don't want to get too philosophical on you. I know it gets old.
But this is important to me. I look up at this sky, a vision that has no meaning in and of itself. I see the sun passing through the atmosphere and bouncing off the clouds, and I recognize something important. Life is full of a thousand little things that have no base emotional value. They are wonders only because we make them so. We love the striations of a sunset, and we want to share that sense of awe.
Sunsets. Babies coming into the world. The gentle grace of a deer. Small, simple things.
And well worth fighting for. Staying alive in and of itself if vital. Feeling alive is something that we have to always remember to work for...