Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land (17 page)

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Laying in Wait

Posted by Josh Guess

One good thing about the summer rains is that the zombies seem to have built up a healthy fear of storms. Given the terrible ones we've had lately, it shouldn't surprise anyone that when the sky clouds over and the more gentle downpours come they hide in fear. We've seen the undead evolve and change in startling ways over the last fourteen months, but this one is the first that's helped us. 

The rain outside right now couldn't have come at a better time. The teams of hunters and scouts have been pushing themselves really hard the last several days to bring in as many kills as possible. Late yesterday they found an area about five miles from here where there are signs that large numbers of animals have been passing through. I'm not all that good a hunter, but I'm told that the signs are heavy and fresh, meaning that if we can get a team positioned at the right places, there's a good chance they can bring home a heavy haul. 

The particular area the teams are looking at is pretty big. Jamie has been talking with the hunt/scout teams, trying to figure out the best way to maximize the number of kills. To that end he wants to get as many of us out there at once as possible, spread out in clustered teams among the trees. 

Yeah, I said us. I don't know the ins and outs of hunting like some of the people around here, but I'm very good at handling myself in the open where zombies can show up at a moment's notice. Plus I'm a good shot with a bow. We're going to be as careful as possible...

We'll be setting up early in the morning, probably before dawn. There are a few guys out right now getting the area ready, putting up stands and building simple blinds. Not too many, since we don't want to frighten off our prey.

I'm not all that thrilled about being out in the early morning. Reduced visibility, no walls around us, sitting in the middle of nowhere with our necks exposed. Plus, I just hate waking up that early. 

Ha. I would like to say the last was a joke, but the idea of being half-asleep and out where zombies can walk right up to me is unnerving to say the least. But it will be worth the risk to build up a reserve of dried meat, assuming we can keep up the level of daily hunting our men have managed so far. We can't organize trips like this often.

When we can, though, we will. The last few months have taught us the value of planning as far ahead as possible. When the Richmond soldiers devoured our stores, it left us in a hard place. Harder than I could have imagined. We will do everything we can to make certain that our people don't go hungry. As a man who, before The Fall, was a strong advocate of environmental causes, understand: I will see the land here stripped bare if needed to make sure my people live. I know the long-term consequences of such an act, which is why we're taking steps to avoid that sort of extreme.

We want to convert some greenhouses from the abandoned nursery on the east-west connector into places to grow food year-round. Given the closed environment and controllable conditions, we're thinking potatoes. Assuming we can manage to heat them without killing ourselves with smoke inhalation. A few people also had the idea to start seeding the Game farm, a local wildlife preserve right down the road from the compound, with fish. There are two lakes there that used to serve that very purpose. The hard part will be finding ways to do that. I imagine someone around here knows how. Is it as easy as transporting fish from the river? 

We want to try other things as well. Lots of ideas floating around.

We'll need all hands on deck to manage those goals, so pray for us that tomorrow's trip will give us a buffer so that we can keep our extra people home to work on them. After all, you can't build new things without hands to work.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Trauma

Posted by Gabrielle

Hey guys. If you missed my name under the post, this is Gabrielle. I'm writing this morning because Josh is injured and currently being stitched up, and I promised him I would tell everyone what happened.

Josh is the last of the wounded to be treated this morning. The large team that went out in the early hours decided that it would be best to get there a little before they planned. The teams were all in position by four A.M.

The reason they went out so early was because of the rain. The local zombies have been showing a lot of reluctance to go out in bad weather of any kind, and since it had started to shower around three, everyone wanted to take advantage of it to get in position in relative safety. Luck was with them, and the rain kept on going.

Fifty-six men and women went out to hunt this morning. Eleven of them didn't make it.

They had killed a fair number of animals by the time the trap was sprung. Some of our people had left the concealment of their blinds to collect their kills. Some were still in the trees. It was just light enough to see out when the zombies appeared in truly large numbers. At least two hundred of them.

Every one of our people had taken one of the weapons sent to us by North Jackson as a backup. The fact that each of our people had a strong, sharp, reliable blade was probably what saved more of them from being killed.

The thing is, it was still raining when the zombies attacked. I don't know if the large number of dead animals combined with the smell of so many people made them overcome their fear of the rain...but a few of the people I treated seem to think the whole area was a trap for us. Set by zombies. It makes sense to me, I guess. The smarties have been known to observe for long periods of time and act creatively with what they've learned. It certainly seems like a trap was sprung to me.

From what I've heard, none of the zombies that attacked our people showed the slightest fear at the worsening weather. If this was a trap, that piece of behavior scares me more than any other. Were they faking us out on that the whole time? Building our confidence up that they wouldn't come in numbers during a rainstorm? The implications are awful.

We did lost eleven people to the zombies, but it would have been a lot more if Jamie and Will hadn't drilled emergency orders into every person that went out. If an alarm went up, everyone was to move toward a predetermined spot and get into a box formation, weapons at the ready.

Most of the injuries we dealt with this morning are a result of that box formation. Forty-odd men and women swinging away at the undead around them with a new and unfamiliar weapon. There were cuts and scrapes all over. One woman lost three fingers. If half of them hadn't been inside the box formed by the other half of them, firing arrows out into the crowds of zombies, I think it would have been a lot worse. As it is, I have several people who might lose limbs. Seven with deep tissue lacerations that will take months to fully heal. Five with wounds that required dozens of stitches.

All in all, it's been a busy morning. I've been sent out of the clinic since I got off duty at three in the morning and was woken back up when the injuries came in. Luckily, we now have enough people trained in the basics that I wasn't needed for anything but the worst injuries. Having two doctors here to teach people is amazingly helpful.

Oh, and Josh. He was in a tree stand when someone blew the foghorn to sound the alarm. He tried to climb down, but the dark and unfamiliar equipment got in the way. He fell the last ten feet out of the tree. Nothing broken that we can tell, but the arrow he had ready to draw snapped when he fell and the head went into his leg. He landed on his machete, which fortunately only slid about five inches out of it's sheath. The cut going up his wrist from that looks awful, but it's actually pretty shallow. I expect him to do very well, though it'll be a while before he can type at full speed again.

I guess the only good news is that a lot of our people survived what should have been certain death. It wasn't through brave heroics, though our hunters fought like devils to keep each other alive. It was because a few minutes into the fight, most of the undead that were still standing gave up and moved on. Our people didn't understand why until they started doing damage assessment in that lonely stretch of woods. The ones that had attacked our people might have just been a distraction.

All their kills were gone. We lost eleven priceless men and women, with not a scrap of meat to show for it.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Empty Handed

Posted by Josh Guess

First, I want to give my heartfelt condolences to everyone in the compound that lost a friend or loved one in yesterday's horrible attack. The zombies hit us hard, and took men and women from us. Loss is always terrible and hard. We will stand together in mourning, and soldier on. What else can we do?
I also want to thank Gabrielle for taking the time to share on the blog yesterday. It was important to me that someone present the events as they happened, or as close to it as reports can manage. I'm also happy that she relayed my own injuries, though she left out the fact that my awkward fat ass fell out of the tree when I got tangled up trying to climb down. The fact that I was at the edge of the kill zone is probably why I'm still alive. I wasn't part of the fight.
We're pretty definitively worse off because of this trip. The worst is, or course, the loss of life. It's hard to write about losing people without wanting to go into detail about how hard it is for all of us. I want to tell you about the sad faces I see, the stories people are telling about the fallen. I want to dedicate so much time and effort to making you understand the impact it's had on us.
But you know. Anyone out there who is reading this blog is a survivor. You've lived through the same hell as the rest of us, and you understand what we're feeling. Further, if you've read this blog for any length of time, you understand that it's not simply a place for me to vent my feelings. It's also a record of our collective struggle. It keeps track of our decisions and hard calls, for good or ill. Maybe to teach us what we've done right and wrong. Maybe it will teach others.
Aside from our fallen hunters and scouts (and there they go, with one sentence. Moved past them as they exit, stage left. Terrible. Terrible and necessary, so that we can focus on how to keep going)  we're left with the same problem we've faced to an increasing degree over the last few months. We still have people out hunting, fishing, and trapping. It's enough for now to keep us from enacting harsher rationing, but not nearly enough for us to build up additional stores of food.
On a purely social and psychological level, yesterday was devastating. Morale is low, and no amount of positive attitude seems to do much good. I mean, Pat is one of the most upbeat people I've ever met. Folks love him. Yet the citizens see him smiling and trying to strike up conversations about projects we want to work on, and they see it as a sad attempt to change the subject. To gloss over what happened.
Because a lot of people are seeing the zombie assault yesterday as being the fault of those who organized it. Those who run the compound. Part of that is the human need to blame, to assign fault for the painful things that happen. Part of it is a reflection of the intense individualism that makes our population such good survivors.
To a degree, they're right. It's our responsibility as the council approved the plans and gave the orders. But responsibility isn't fault, is it? Well, I claim that we're at fault here as well as being responsible. We saw a prize that fit our needs, and we didn't waste time. We didn't take the time to really look at the larger area around the kill zone. We didn't pause to consider that the zombies might be setting a trap for us. There are enough smart ones around for it.
We were rash and hungry. We were trying to head off the hot tempers of citizens who were fearful of rationing. We wanted to capture enough food at once to make a start at a nest egg of vittles. We wanted; we took a shot.
We were stupid.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Two Can Play

Posted by Josh Guess

As you may remember, my brother has been working like crazy to get the trenches finished around the compound. It has been fairly slow going for a variety of reasons, and it looks like it'll be a long while before the project is completed.
This morning he and his crew were working on it while the rain was pattering down. In fact, he even had a few extra people out there with him. They were working with hand tools, the backhoe sitting unused. The part of the compound they were digging outside of isn't too far from a decent sized patch of woods. Dave and his crew made a lot of noise.
There were only a few sentries on the wall there, all of them keeping dry inside the small enclosures built for that purpose.
The zombies saw men out in the open with little protection. They came out of the woods in a pack of nearly a hundred. See, normally when we see any undead going into that bit of woods, we send in teams to clear them out. We don't let them build up numbers in there. Yesterday evening when Dave was laying out the stakes and lines for today's work on the trench, the sentries saw a few zombies hiding among the trees.
Then Dave thought it might be a good idea to give the undead a bit of their own medicine. So, he told the sentries to keep an eye peeled on the woods, but to do it without looking like they were paying too much attention. Over the course of the night, the woods slowly filled up with zombies moving ever so slowly. Carefully. My guess is that they were almost all smarties. Normal zombies lack the finesse to move with such caution.
So when they attacked the workers outside the wall, they had no idea that we'd set a trap for them. They came in a massive wave, and not twenty seconds later arrows came over the wall, about ten of them. Attached to each was a small vial of ammonia. The shattering glass of the vials released the gas in a wide arc around the zombies, forcing them to move closer to the wall.
Which would have been good for them if ropes hadn't been thrown over the wall so Dave's crew could escape. They'd have been an easy meal. Dave himself hopped into the backhoe, which has a cage of heavy mesh welded onto the cab. Basically, the thing's a tank.
Then my brother, always one of the most calm and rational human beings I've ever known, had himself a fun time. Trapped inside a shrinking bubble of good air, the zombies didn't stand a chance. Dave crushed them, sliced them in half with the wide scoop on the front, and smashed them in groups with the boom arm. A few of them ran through the ammonia to escape, but by that point there were archers on the wall to pick them off. That was easy, since the gas makes them slow and stupid.
It doesn't solve any of our problems. We're still scrambling to catch and kill enough to eat. There are still some very angry people who aren't happy with the way things are going. It doesn't bring back the people we lost in the attack the other day.
There are a hundred less undead to contend with. In a world where the overwhelming majority of the population has succumbed to the zombie plague, that's less than a drop in the ocean.
But it's a start.