Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land (8 page)

It was sometime during her amazing trek across the middle east and most of Europe that she learned about the compound. Circumstances kept her from knowing more, but the promise of a safe place to live was enough to convince the group of men and women she found to try their hand at crossing the Atlantic. There were two dozen of them when they set out in a stolen and heavily modified yacht, loaded with food and water. By the time the ship came within sight of American coastline, there were less than a dozen. 

The ship hit submerged rock a mile out from shore. The last eleven of them swam. 

One by one the others died as they made their way from the shores of Delaware toward Kentucky. Zombies took some, the cold others. Marauders killed the last two of Becky's companions while they were foraging in West Virginia. Those last few hundred miles, she walked alone. She hid when she had to, fought when there was no other choice, and kept one thing and one thing only in her mind: finding us. Getting to safety. 

Coming home. 

The satellite phone was a lucky find in an abandoned military Humvee. She hadn't talked to anyone in weeks, and the loneliness was starting to affect her mind. She says that the only thing keeping her going, the only shield she had against the dark things she had seen and done to survive, was the thought of us. She told me that every time she got a strong enough signal to call out, she tried. It had taken her a long time to remember my number, and every time she could hear my voice, she cried. With joy, she assures me, that we were really here. 

I started this blog to warn others. To help them prepare. It evolved and grew from that to be so many other things. It's a chronicle of this new world we live in. It's the closest thing we have to a book of deeds. It's a warning to those that come after, showing each failure along with the victories. On a large scale, it has also been a place where people can come to gain hope, to learn about the others out there that have survived, and who now live for the better tomorrow we work so hard for. 

With Becky's appearance, the truth of just how strong a driving force this blog can be really hit me. Not because of my words, but for what it represents--a small shred of sanity in an insane world. A voice of reason and hope amid the tumultuous cries of the dead and the angry shouts of marauders. For Becky, just knowing the blog was here, that we were here to write it, was enough to keep her going. I take no credit for that, but it fills me with joy that I can't describe. 

I've forgotten about a lot of people over the last year. I never would have been able to tell you just how much Becky meant to me had she not appeared. Her face made me remember how close we were, how much we cared for each other. How much fun we had together. How deep our bond is. The idea of this blog and what it represents are what is important to people, not me in particular. Not even, I have to admit, the others who write on here. It was that idea, the island of humanity nestled among the monsters, that brought her back to me. 

We love you, Becky. Welcome to the family.

Monday, March 28, 2011

The Hangover

Posted by Josh Guess

I haven't been drunk in more than a year. I'm pretty sure I haven't even had more than one or two drinks since The Fall began. Being constantly threatened by the zombie swarms and violent men tends to put you off the urge to dull your senses with alcohol.
Last night, a bunch of us got together at my house and had ourselves a little party. Honestly, my core group of friends and I needed the break. We've been running full tilt for so long that the time had come for a night off. Becky and Jess were there, of course, and Patrick. Little David, who seems to be dealing with Darlene's death better these days, came over and smiled for the first time in weeks, at least that I've seen. Dodger and Jamie came as well. Elizabeth, who I haven't seen in months, brought Al (remember her? Allison, haven't seen her in a long time, either) and another woman, whose name I don't remember.
We had a blast.
It was such a good time, actually, that I'm writing this blog surrounded by the sleeping (possibly passed out) forms of my friends. Jess woke up about an hour ago with a killer hangover, and given the sheer volume of rum and whiskey my friends and I consumed, I imagine the rest of them will follow suit before too long.
I, on the other hand, never suffer from hangovers. I don't know why, it's just the way I am. Oh, I'll get sick if I drink too much too fast, but no matter how bad it is, I never feel it in the morning. Chalk it up to being Irish and German. I've always joked that my heritage means I will get drunk and take over Europe.
I'll admit, though, that even though I feel fine this morning, last night I was pretty hammered. It was really strange to have my mind altered with strong drink after such a long time of having to be hyper-vigilant and watchful, always having to be ready to react swiftly and clearly. Even though we cleared our night of fun with the council and made sure there were people to cover us if there was an emergency, I still feel a little bit guilty that we got to cut loose.
I shouldn't, I know. Despite the need to constantly patrol the walls in case a major swarm of zombies hits us, most of the people in the compound (with the exception of the last several weeks) have time to socialize and have a good time. Granted, most people around here don't go to the lengths that we did last night (Patrick doesn't drink, so he was bartender--he says the rest of us went through half a gallon of rum in three hours. Wow.) but they still historically have had a lot of free time to do as they wished.
The core group of people, my family and friends, who have all been here since close to the beginning of the compound (and the end of the world) haven't been so lucky. I'm certainly not complaining (much) about my duties, because fulfilling them aids the compound in continuing to be what I always hoped and planned for it to become--a safe haven. If that means that a small group of us have to put in more hours than others, so be it. If that means that we choose to take on more and broader responsibilities, that's no fault of anyone's but our own. I'm just saying that it's been a long time coming for us. None of us realized how badly we needed a carefree evening until we got it.
I saw flashes of the old Becky last night. She smiled and laughed at times in a way that made me forget how far she's come and how much she's suffered since then. The darker edge to her was still there, but it almost seemed like getting drunk was just the excuse she needed to be someone younger than her years, someone more innocent and fun. Someone I remember well.
It was in the wee hours of the morning, and I had my laptop out, music playing. Jess was dancing slowly with Little David, who seemed happy--as he should have, since Jess is very tall, very large in the chest, and David is relatively short. His head was at just the right height to rest in my wife's cleavage. My own head rests there often enough, so I know how peaceful and great it is.
I was dancing with Becky, though about three quarters of my job was holding her up at that point. She was almost boneless against me, relaxing against my frame as we slowly rotated. It almost brought a tear to my eye, knowing that despite all she's been through, Becky still trusts me enough to relax that much with me. I want so much to help her become comfortable here, to feel like the compound is truly the home, the safe place, she wants it so badly to be.
It'll take time. Being on the run and in constant fear is like clenching your fist as hard as you can. Becky did that for more than a year, and it's going to take some time for her to get past that painful moment of terrified agony as she relaxes. Being scared and tense is like anything else--it has its own momentum. True strength isn't dealing with the fear; it's being able to face the pain of letting go and trusting that the change back to normality will be worth it.
She, Jess, and I all crashed on the bed last night (California King. We could have fit a few more comfortably) in a puppy pile of arms and legs. It was pretty chilly by the time we made it there, and after a fun evening of revelry and drinking games (most of which I won), it felt perfect to snuggle up together, sharing warmth. The heat of our bodies kept us physically comfortable.
The nearness of loved ones did far more for our minds, hearts, and spirits.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Training Day

Posted by Josh Guess

I'm down to two trainees. I didn't kill and eat the rest of them, I swear. I'm down to just two at any given time. Several other people have come forward in the last few days, showing interest in learning the ins and outs of the job I share with my brother. As a means of accommodating that, we've decided to break them into groups, and have them here more often. With the recent (relative) calm and the new folks from Bald Knob to balance our numbers, that is now a doable thing. 

Fortunately, there haven't been any big zombie attacks lately. The numbers of the undead outside the wall are low at present, which gives me time to really work with my trainees on things. See, I learned to do what I do--manage our resources and plan projects, basically running the day to day business of the compound--by experience. I had the luxury of starting with a small group of people and gradually building that over time, so I wasn't overwhelmed. 

I had to do that while we were without a wall, and in the midst of the most chaotic times we've seen. So maybe it balances out.

The trainees don't have the advantage of being able to start small as I did, though part of how I am teaching them is by giving each one a smaller section of the overall compound schedule and letting them work on it. There's always overlap, of course, so it's also a neat lesson on how to work together and manage efficiently. 

I'm also making them work on logistics for different projects, like shoring up the wall. See, the wall itself isn't uniform all the way around, and while many of its parts are well built (especially the newer sections, where we'd learned from our errors) other sections are in need of repair or rebuilding and some support structure added in. Months of constant drubbing by zombies will eventually cause problems, as you may have guessed. 

It's actually a pretty important thing, so I'm watching them work through it all with a careful eye. There are so many aspects of this job that most people don't think about. I'm a physics nerd, and interested in learning about pretty much anything, so over my lifetime I've gained a pretty wide and generalized base of knowledge about things. I did a lot of the engineering on the wall from day one, and have learned from that. I know exactly what we'll need to build additional supports to strengthen the wall from the inside, and how to put them together. 

What I want to see is how each of my trainees deals with gathering that information for themselves. Some of them might already know how (one of them used to be a federal engineer, who built bridges) but some of them don't. It's important that anyone who might be called on to fill in for me or Dave be able to find out anything they need to know quickly. There's no putting off what needs to be done because the problem is too hard. 

Training these folks has really shown me how important critical thinking is to our long-term survival. Aaron is doing great things with shaping the younger minds in the compound, making their brains work in new and exciting ways. But it isn't just the kids that need this, because for now the adults are the backbone of our survival. We can't get to the future without living through the present. 

I'm pretty sure that most of the people around here have the ability to problem solve in terrible and difficult circumstances, to one degree or another. It's just that I see the huge number of problems that will inevitably arise, and I don't know if our inherent reactions will be enough to face them. So, we train. We teach each other to be faster, think creatively, and make our minds work in brand new ways. 

To that end, I've also come up with some mock disasters and thought experiments that should give my trainees some idea of how hard this job can be...

You can cue an evil laugh right there. It's justified. 

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Death Race

Posted by Josh Guess

There's something incredibly wrong with being up at four in the morning. Today, I did it because my brother and I decided that the best way to test our trainees, to make them think very hard about what they're going to be facing in the event that they cover for me or Dave, was to catch them off guard. What better way to accomplish that than waking them out of a dead dead sleep and giving them a false emergency to deal with?
We had just woken up the first two of them, a husband and wife team, when the alarm bell went off, signaling a zombie attack. It was a two-bell alarm, meaning that about two hundred of them were concentrated in a small area against the walls. Normally, that wouldn't be cause for all that much concern. With the trenches, traps, and stakes we have outside the walls of the compound, it's impossible for too many of them to gather against the wall itself and try to break through it.
Not impossible, I guess, but very difficult. The whole reason we have sentries and guards is to pick off the undead as they wind their way through the defenses, reducing their numbers to within safely manageable limits.
This morning it wasn't so simple. Shortly after the two-bell alarms went off, the incessant jangle of the emergency alarm followed it. That's a big bell we took from the old catholic church downtown, which we only use when some major shit is going down. In this case, it was the goddamn smarties, proving to us once again that we can't underestimate them.
Smart zombies had apparently been watching our work on the walls, noting that certain areas had been the focus of our attention. There is a spot, where the annex and the original compound come together, that has degraded pretty badly. It's a corner that seldom sees any trouble, but is at the bottom of two hills. Water tends to gather there when it rains, and the damage the constant runoff has done to the hastily built connection between the two parts of the compound is pretty extensive. That's where the smarties chose to hit.
The emergency bell was being sounded because the swarm that came after us was actually able to make a small breach where the wood had rotted away. Not enough for more than one of them to squeeze in at a time, but scary as hell nonetheless. Truthfully, a huge part of why our mostly haphazard and thrown-together wall has held up this long is because we've take measures to assure that no big groups can easily beat on it for any length of time. It's pretty sturdy, and reinforced from the inside in a lot of places, but there are weak spots. Usually we put a car or something equally heavy right behind such places until we can reinforce or rebuild, but the corner that was attacked this morning didn't have anything like that. It was scheduled for repair starting at daybreak.
The fighting wasn't really all that bad given how small the breach was, but it still shook people that a section of wall actually failed. I made it to the hole about the same time Dodger did, and I asked him to hold off on attacking the swarms outside, to give my trainees a chance to shine. So I asked them what the best way to disperse the zombies outside the wall would be, and they gave me several answers before deciding on one.
They suggested Ammonia, which they shot down themselves before I could. Too windy, too dangerous for our defenders, who couldn't withdraw as long as there were zombies coming through the hole. Then it was flights of arrows, but the sparse lighting would have made that a waste of materials. Then they gave me a very good answer: Tank.
Not an actual tank. THAT would have been awesome to watch. No, what they were talking about was something Dodger has had Will Price working on for the last week or so, ever since we started bringing the flex-fuel vehicles up here from the various state parking lots. Will has been working long, long days on various projects, doing the grunt work of three people. Dodger has been feeding him and giving him a place to sleep, since Will has been very determined in his efforts to improve the defenses.
When Dodger let slip that we'd hit upon a way to vastly stretch out our fuel supplies, Will took that as a chance to tell him about an idea he'd had for a while but hadn't seen as being viable given our need to ration gasoline. It was for a vehicle like the ones he used up in North Jackson last year, when Will had been a hero instead of an indentured criminal. The scout vehicles he had used to run strikes on the zombie swarms there had given him an idea for an assault vehicle we could use in case of a big attack.
Take a heavy pickup or SUV, armor the thing up nicely. Not so much that you bog it down, but thick wire screens over the windows with small holes in them for weapons ports. Reinforce the engine mounts and any weak areas like the axles, radiator, all that. Add a structure to the outside that includes a bladed scoop on the front, and heavy blades jutting out from all sides. It looks sort of like a mixture between a snow plow and a hedgehog, but the damn thing works.
Dodger actually let Will drive the thing, since it was a maiden voyage. Will was the one who knew it best, and had the highest chance of not rolling the thing. There were two others in the Tank with him (this version, the first, is made from an SUV. Has backseats.) to make sure he didn't try to escape. I don't think driving away ever occurred to Will. He was having way too much fun plowing through the milling zombies, letting out his frustration on them, to think of anything else.
It wasn't pretty, but it was functional. The scoop on the front broke ankles and legs, sometimes cleaving all the way through. There were about fifty left crawling when all was said and done, easily killed by the cleanup teams. The blades on the sides of the vehicle didn't work quite as well. One of them snapped off after the first few hits, though it killed the ones it did hit outright before failing. The problem seems to lie in bracing, or so I'm told. Will says he's going to improve the design in the next few days.
One aspect of the Tank that I hadn't been aware of was a last-minute idea Will had had, which was adding a chain with a heavy weight to the back of it. As I watched from the wall, I kept wondering why he was whipping the Tank around so much. I thought he was just trying to swipe the thing into groups of zombies. In reality he was making that chain whip right after him, breaking yet more legs out from under the undead and crushing the skulls of many he'd cut down.
All in all, a pretty effective way to disperse a crowd. My trainees made a good call. Will made a good thing, which means that perhaps a few more people might be willing to give him food or shelter down the road. Above all, we now have what seems like a good way to keep big groups from doing us harm.
Now the trick is going to be getting the walls inspected thoroughly, and reinforced very well. That sounds like a job for my minions.
I love having minions.