Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land (Book 3) Read online

  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...

  Saturday, April 30, 2011

  Ruins

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Jamie, Mason, and their team have found a mobile cell transmitter. They looked at a few fire departments and emergency management centers but found nothing. In the early days of The Fall, the cellular networks were slammed with millions of people, myself included, trying to get in touch with their loved ones.

  If we'd have thought about that beforehand, we could have saved a lot of time. As it is, it took most of the morning for the team to get to the spot near Louisville where they found it.

  Or, I should say, them.

  It looks like the safe zone the military tried to set up included a major communications center. There are two large cell trucks, and three smaller trailer units. Jamie reports that they are going to be hard to get to, surrounded by discarded and damaged equipment. It's enough for now that his team found them. We'll worry about moving what we need later, when we can spare the manpower to get through the labyrinth of bodies and heavy gear scattered through the safe zone.

  I'm hoping that this trend of good news will continue. It seems as though the storm fronts that have been wracking us nonstop have finally let up. The storms must have damaged some of the cell towers in the deep south where some of our allies live, because we haven't heard from them in a few days. Other than that, things here are going pretty well. We're able to field a lot of people on the farms to try to catch up on our planting.

  I'm pretty envious of the people of North Jackson for their luck in having that big contingent of soldiers join with them. A dedicated force of guards would leave the rest of us to do other things. On the other hand, they'd also leave us with a lot of extra mouths to feed.

  As time goes by and groups of survivors join together and pool their resources, we'll get stronger. Some communities will get bigger in bursts that way. Some, like us, will eventually even out and have to grow slowly. The amount of people we can absorb and support has reached its limit unless we can find enough time to expand our resources.

  It's fine with me. I'm hoping that the spring storms have finally passed, and that there will be opportunity for us to strengthen our reserves.

  It's funny to realize that the means of our continued communication with the outside world was sitting right there in the ruins of what should have been a haven for people. We've been past that fallback point a dozen times, but all we saw was a sad remnant of the efforts of our government to save people. We didn't see it as anything other than another sad sight.

  Which just makes us stupid, really. We didn't see anything useful there, since most of the weaponry and easily removed supplies had already been fleeced. We won't make that mistake again.

  Sunday, May 1, 2011

  On the Margins

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I generally don't post on Sundays, but given the outages in communications over the last week I have the urge to enjoy being able to write while I can.

  I was doing a little rearranging in my office, and I came across a milk crate shoved in the back of my closet that had all my old notebooks and folders from college in it. While I would love to say that I kept all that shit from seven years ago because I'm a super-genius and saw the zombie plague coming even then, and hoarded my carefully written notes against future need, the truth is that I'm just a terrible pack rat.

  However accidental it might be that I kept them, the notes themselves are interesting and possibly helpful. In the margins of pages and on sheet after sheet of notebook space, I wrote hundreds of little facts and tips about the various subjects I studied in college. The majority of them have to do with urgent treatment, emergency care, and fire/rescue, since that was my main area of study. I'd forgotten how many interesting tidbits my instructors had passed on to me. Things that might make the difference between life and death in an emergency.

  With the zombies roaming outside our walls, our lives are now a continuous state of emergency.

  Then I came across my folder for my Geology class. I've always been a science nerd, but I avoided hard science classes in college because at the time my workload was already almost too heavy to bear. In fact, I only took Geology because I was going to be a credit short of graduating, having miserably failed an art history class online. Damn teacher assigned the wrong book.

  At any rate, I ended up really enjoying the class. The teacher had three or four degrees, and a deep love of science. He was also a very dedicated and devout Christian, which lead to some interesting discussions in class. Mike, our teacher, loved to give example after example of why science and religion have zero actual disagreement on how the universe and everything in it formed. Mike's lectures were a huge part of my own unique view on religion, the universe, and everything.

  I was flipping through the pages of that folder when a hastily scrawled note in a margin caught my attention. It said, and I quote, "Huge earthquake in southeast Ky decades overdue. We're all gonna die."

  I read that, and I laughed. I began to vaguely recall the class in which Mike discussed some huge fault line in Kentucky that was a catastrophe waiting to happen. I remembered that I thought about that potential disaster often in the months after, then less frequently over time.

  Since The Fall, I've thought about it little if at all.

  And that's important, I think. Human beings have a certain upper limit for how much they can worry about things. When the priorities of your life shift from worrying if there will be enough money in your checking account to buy gas to worrying if that sound you heard was
a dead person intent on biting you to death, your priorities have to shift.

  The best way I can describe it is by sheer practicality. We worry about growing food, protecting ourselves, the movements of the undead, and the like because those are things that we have some measure of control over. We can do things to affect the outcome. With the weather or potential earthquakes or whatever the impending DOOM may be, we're helpless. No amount of worrying or thinking about it will alter the outcome.

  Well, quantum physics may disagree with me there, but I've got no proof that worrying alters the outcome, so I'll have to assume that it doesn't. (Told you I'm a nerd.)

  I mentioned to Jess and Lena, one of my trainees, that I'd found my old notes. I told them about the straining fault line. What interested me were their reactions and how different they were. Jess is practical to a fault, but she does have a tendency to let things she can't control take root in the back of her mind. I could see her brain clamp down on the idea and start working overtime.

  Lena didn't look concerned. She just asked me if this was a test, and if I wanted her to try and figure a plan for rebuilding and whatnot in case an earthquake does happen. I almost laughed and told her no before realizing that it was a good idea. Also a pretty reasonable one.

  The whole episode made me realize a few things. One is that I do a disservice to those I live with at times by writing this blog. I write in my own voice, and sometimes that makes it appear as though the people here are just one big homogeneous group that agrees with me and my point of view. It's hard to encompass all the different voices here in my writing. It's impossible to give each of them their well deserved due.

  I also realized from Lena's reaction that for all my practice at running the day to day operations of the compound and skill in organizing projects, I'm pretty reactive. Lena isn't, at all: she thinks proactively all the time, and she's really good at it.

  I guess what I'm saying is that I realize I'm not perfect. I've gone back and read a lot of my older posts and see that sometimes I'm arrogant and judgmental. I have respect for people as a base setting, yet some of you out there, my brother and sister survivors, have gotten the impression that I have something against some groups. Religion, the military, other groups of survivors...I get it. The truth is that I don't judge groups. Really. But I do get that I'm imperfect and thus subject to the failings of humankind.

  I may not be as fair or open as I would like to be. I'm a smart guy, and the problem with smart people is that they always seem to think they're right. But there I was, not even considering a what my response would be to an earthquake that would probably level half of the compound, because it was too big to worry about. Lena, on the other hand, knew that a plan prepared ahead of time would cut down on our response time and probably save a lot of time, effort, and lives. I'm the guy in charge of thinking about shit like this. I should have been the first to say, hey, you're my trainee and have the time to work on this project--go do it!

  Instead she suggested it, and I barely recognized how dumb I was being in not thinking of it first.

  I've always tried to be as honest about myself as possible on this blog. It does no good for anyone for me to try and sugar coat who I am, who we as a community are. Honesty is a core requirement for trust, and trust is the only thing that allows us to manage.

  So, I'll be honest. I don't know if I'm still the right guy for this job. Not the blog; that isn't a job. I mean running "ops", to use a bit of Star Trek terminology. Coordinating this place and planning for things is a responsibility that just gets bigger and more complex. I'm beginning to think that my arrogance in assuming I could do it all is more of a risk to us than it's worth.

  That is something I will worry about. Not just because it's important, but also because it's something that, if true, I can change.

  Monday, May 2, 2011

  Breaking Down

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Sorry if I got a bit emotional on you guys yesterday. I've just been worried a lot about how we're going to manage this year recently, and it all sort of came to a head.

  I would have posted a little earlier today than this, but my brother Dave wanted me to sit and talk with him about the post I wrote. It seems that he has been feeling the burden of trying to manage way too many things at one time as much as I have. When he and I started doing this job, it was with the intent that one of us could serve as a backup for the other if something happened. In reality, the responsibilities we've had added to our workload means that both of us together can barely keep up.

  Between trying to keep the walls capable of holding off the zombie swarms and the forty other things we have to keep an eye on every day, it's getting to be too much for us. Honestly, the sheer volume of work to be done is so large that it's almost certain to lead to mistakes. Bad ones.

  So Dave talked to the council (well, the rest of the council--you may remember that both of us are actually on it) and basically told them what our trainees have already figured out: we need a larger full time coordination staff.

  He did most of the talking, I did most of the sitting and being quiet. It worked out pretty well. While the council are trusted friends and colleagues, most of them do other things full-time. They make decisions as a group for the compound, but they don't handle the day to day operations of it. That's what my brother and I are for.

  Were for, I should say. Now we have seven people working for us full time. The trainees have been pulled from their old work and will each be doing part of the job that I used to do. Some will do scheduling. Some will manage materials. Some will do projects. You get the idea, yeah? And the neat thing is that they will rotate out every few days on what part of Operations they handle, so that everyone gets the same amount of experience and practice in covering every part.

  Dave will be in charge of implementation. That's a fancy way of saying he gets to keep doing what he's doing--building stuff. I'm in charge of coordinating all of the Operations staff. Which is dandy with me. I'm happy to shift so much of the workload to others as well as getting fresh sets of eyes on the problems we face. Getting feedback from people that think differently than I do is important, since you never know what I might miss and they might catch.

  I get to do the same thing I've always done, really, but with the lion's share of the grunt work spread out among all of us. I hate to think of reducing our workforce to manage this, but breaking down the responsibilities that Dave and I have managed for so long will (hopefully) make this place safer and more efficient in the long run.

  Now I need to go. Lena and I are working on a game plan for a team of Jamie's scouts to go retrieve the mobile cell transmitters. Hoping to get everything ready to go by the morning.

  Tuesday, May 3, 2011

  The Downpour

  Posted by Josh Guess

  The scout trip out to gather the mobile cellular transmitters has been put off for at least today. It started raining again yesterday evening, and it hasn't stopped yet. Since The Fall, roads haven't been getting the love they need to endure the harsher elements. None of us want to risk men or vehicles hitting a puddle that hides a hole in the road two feet deep. It might seem silly to some, but we're not in such desperate straits that we need to take an unnecessary risk.

  So, another day with little to nothing getting done outdoors. We've got the larger part of the planting done, but there's still a lot of repair and upgrade work to do on the wall. This incessant rain is driving all of us a little bit crazy.

  It makes for a slow day, people not being able to go out and work on things. It would be a nice break for them if they hadn't had a week of being idle before it. It's actually really good for me and my brother, since we can take this time to work out routines with our former trainees, now our subordinates. Running the compound is a big job, easily big enough for all of us and then some. For all the time we've spent teaching these folks all the pieces and parts of what the job is, our focus has been on doing all of it alone.

  Now the
trick is going to be working out a method of integrating each person's data with everyone else's. That's one part of my job. Basically the trainees do the grunt work of sorting through whatever reports and data are involved with their area, while I take each of their finished products and put it all together.

  If it sounds annoying and complicated, that's because it is.

  For now, anyway. We'll get a system in place and smooth it all out over time. Right now I expect bumps in the road. While I'm as irritated as anyone else at how far behind the rain has put us, I'm glad for the break in zombie activity it gives us. Every day we go without an attack is a chance to improve the defenses, plant crops, do something to make us better and stronger.