Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land (36 page)

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

A Gang of Six(ish)

Posted by Josh Guess

If you missed yesterday's post, you might want to go back and read it. Go on, I'll wait here.

...

Done? Good. then you know I've been asked to assemble and lead a team of people to travel with me all over the country in a repeat performance of Courtney's trip last year. I'm to lead the team, and technically be a sort of diplomat in the field, but the council suggested very strongly that they wanted someone with me who went on the last trip. Someone the various groups of survivors had met, gotten to know, and trusted. 

So yeah, Steve is coming with me. He volunteered, since beside Courtney (his wife) there's no one that went on that journey who was trusted more than him. Little David would have been a good choice had we not lost him recently. While I'm technically the envoy, Steve is the practical choice. He knows these people. They'll listen to him much easier than they will me. 

Becky is also on the list. She's useful in a ton of different ways, and while she's getting more comfortable around the people of New Haven, she's still dealing with a lot of emotional fallout from her trip across the world to get here. She and I have grown very close in the time she's been with us, especially given that she lives with Jess and I. She doesn't want to stay in NH without me. Not to minimize how much her skill set is going to help out, mind you. I'm just glad she's been teaching people how to make explosives, or the council probably wouldn't have let her leave. 

You may have guessed already, but I'm also taking Will Price. I spent a lot of time yesterday basically telling the council that if he didn't get to go with me, I wouldn't leave. They made the argument that Will, who is still technically a prisoner, has been vital to the defense efforts here. That New Haven would be less safe without him. I made the case that we shouldn't be so reliant on a convicted criminal, which was my underhanded way of trying to have his sentence overturned, his punishment ended. Dodger, who is in charge of defense, has a lot of Will's plans and designs to work with. NH will be fine without Will. 

The outcome of this trip will determine whether or not Will remains a prisoner. I'm keen to see him do well. 

Mason is coming with us as well. He's healed up from his injuries, though the process took months. He's back to his normal, scary military man self. Plus, he knows the outside world and safe routes. None of us have gone a tenth as far as him. 

So far we haven't got a sixth person on the roster. I'm looking into it, and maybe a seventh. It'll depend on what the other members of the team think. I need to keep our numbers small for the sake of mobility and making supplies last, but I won't turn away someone who might make our trip easier or safer because it would make seven. 

That's all I have on the trip so far. My brother has outright declined to go, but he's busy making sure all the stuff we'll need for a long haul is ready. That, while he's still managing the completion of the outer wall. His work ethic is almost crackhead-like. 

One last parting word for the day--if you live in a group of survivors that doesn't sweep the main thoroughfares around your base of operations, you should. We've only been doing it for a week, and most of Frankfort is now empty. We still get stragglers here and there, and more zombies are always wandering in, but daily upkeep makes the roads, neighborhoods, and clusters of buildings so much safer to navigate. I'm really glad we started doing this. You wouldn't believe how many places we left untouched because there were too many zombies in or around them. We're finding all kinds of neat things.

Preparations to make, projects to work on. My job is never done. 

I think that's a good thing.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Human Condition

Posted by Josh Guess

We're still deciding on the team, so no updates there. But working on this trip into the wider world, going farther and bigger than I ever have before got me thinking about a lot of things.
I've said before that the human race had reached an evolutionary choke point. We're a species on the edge of extinction, staring as a unit into the vast gulf of nonexistence. If such a thing came to pass, if the swarms of undead consumed us (which would be almost fitting--philosophers have been saying for centuries that the only true threat to humankind is itself. This is just a more literal translation of that) then what would be left?
Cities are already crumbling. The process will take years, but eventually the broken windows of the skyscrapers that act as tombstones for the human race would fall. Our bridges will collapse, our monuments retaken by the earth, weathered down to smooth stones. Should we fall, there will be precious little to tell our story. Humanity would be just another species that failed Darwin's test.
Eighteen months it's been now, and still we hold on. More than that. Though we struggle and our numbers dwindle, there are children being conceived and born. What was unthinkable for most of us in the first weeks after The Fall is now happening on a wide scale: a new generation. More people, ones that will live their entire lives in a broken world. Children that will never understand what cable TV was, or be able to simply drive up the road to grab a cheeseburger and a shake.
They won't miss these things. They will only know them in the abstract.
Instead they will live in a world that is a strange hybrid in many ways. We'll have electricity thanks to renewable sources of energy, and our level of technology has taken a beating but hasn't been killed. Eventually we'll have many of the comforts we lost in The Fall. Air conditioning, electric heat. Vacuum cleaners, maybe.
Those kids will also spend their lives learning to survive. To raise livestock, tend gardens not for fun or pleasure, but to live. To eat tomorrow. Every one of them will learn a smattering of skills, from building houses to repairing turbines. They will, by necessity, know the land and trees intimately and with great reverence.
I find this duality appealing, truly.
Pondering a future with those children in it, many of them yet unborn, I pull back mentally and look at the larger picture. The question burning in my mind is the same that many of us ask ourselves time and time again.
Why?
The religious sometimes posit that The Fall was the biblical end of days. They may be right, since as I'm not God I have no way to know. The rapture may have come and gone. Yet I wonder: if they truly believe that's the case, then why keep on? They were not the chosen. Are they working toward our goals because their faith drives them to it? Sometimes I'm afraid to ask, but then I remember an important truth.
It doesn't matter.
I personally believe in a higher power, a greater creative force in the universe that exists on such a vast scale that my mind is physically incapable of perceiving or understanding it. My belief is that such a being is too infinitely complex for me to ascribe any sort of intent to its actions. It would work on such a vast canvas that the comings and goings of one race on one planet sitting in the middle of a backwater galaxy would be as far from its notice as microbes are to us.
I don't blame that force for what has befallen the world. Nor do I give it credit for the good I see in people. It simply is, like the sky and stars. We, ultimately, are the masters of our fate.
Because surviving and working toward a better society is not about motive. Human beings as they are now have very few choices in life. You can take the easy route and become a marauder, taking what you want. You can take the harder route and work with your fellow man for the benefit of the group. Or you can die.
That's it.
At this point I don't care why my fellow survivors do what they do. I'm only concerned with the results: a better world for those who come after. Simply going on is not an option for us any longer. It would be the depth of cowardice to merely survive and the worst kind of apathy not to improve what we have. It isn't for ourselves that we should labor, but for the young.
The driving imperative behind every living thing is to propagate the species. Humans are no different. We invent or believe a lot of reasons for doing this, even for going to greater lengths. We're different than the animals because we work to make a better world for our young. That more than anything has been the impetus behind the rapid evolution of human society.
Do not blame God for the situation we're in. Don't expect him to deliver us, either. Not in any kind of miraculous sense. I'm sure that many of you will say that God works through you, and I'm no disagreeing with that. I respect that belief, but I don't care what your reasoning is. You could tell me that inter-dimensional squirrels are driving your body like it's a robot, and I'd be cool with that.
Actions matter. And every one of you out there who've acted with honor and grace are heroes to me. You're what we should be, now and always. Whatever drives you, I respect it for making you the people you are. Because each of you knows it's not about us. It never really was.
So, I just wanted to say:
Thank you. Thank you so very much.

Author's Note:

This cycle of
Living With the Dead
was very, very difficult to write. If you've made it here, then you either enjoyed it enough to read all the way through, hated it but soldiered on to see if it got better, or skipped to the author's note because you've got a weird jones for these things. I know I do.

Because the story evolves on a daily basis, I rarely have precise plans more than a few weeks in advance. I know how the story is going to go in big, vague chunks, but generally the specific stuff is very off-the-cuff. I spent a lot of time building the first year, setting the stage for this part of the story. The survivors in the compound had a lot of luck and good fortune, only to have it taken away. They had too many days where things went right, and the pendulum was bound to swing the other way eventually.

So the fundamental premise for this volume,
The Hungry Land
, was born. I've always formulated the basic themes of each six-month chunk around what I think are reasonable questions to ask in the otherwise wholly unreasonable setting of a zombie apocalypse. With volume one, it was 'how do we survive?'. In volume two it was 'how do we deal with war?'. In volume three, which you've just finished reading, it was 'what happens when we begin to starve?'.

The spark that made me work up to that was actually given to me by my mom, who, despite her hatred of zombies and the horror genre, is a huge fan of the blog. Not because I write it, though that
is
why she gave it a chance in the first place...

She posed the initial question to me: what happens when you run out of canned food?

Since I had already begun to address that issue, I built story around the idea that tragedy can strike, destroying food supplies. People can endure a ridiculous number of stress factors. We can work all day to stay alive, kill when we have to, commit awful acts to safeguard ourselves and those we love. Human beings will go to incredible lengths to survive.

But when you are starving, the game changes. People don't function efficiently when hungry, or thirsty, or when they can't sleep for lack of shelter. Our three basic needs. I had to pick one, and food was the easiest to take away.

I know some authors take great pleasure in doing bad things to their creations. I don't. I had a hard time dealing with some of the situations I had to write. Well, okay...there might have been moments here and there when I laughed maniacally as I hunched over my laptop, tapping away at the keyboard. But not many.

I swear.

Joshua Guess

September 23
^rd
, 2011