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

  Oh, yeah--Will has been putting his two cents in on the new defenses. He thought it would be smart to pull up some of the stakes we've had ringing the compound and see how sticking them in the dirt berm around the trench would work. As it turns out, fairly well: the zombies in the front of the group slowed down to avoid the stakes, but the rest of them didn't. That pushed some of the ones in front into the stakes, impaling them and making it harder for the ones behind to move over the berm. Easy targets.

  I'm not sure why this particular group of undead tried to rush the only wall with a fully finished trench. They've been avoiding it for the most part and trickling around to sections of the wall that are easier to maneuver. Perhaps they were especially hungry, or were working on some kind of group hysteria. Maybe a smarty was pushing them to attack to test our defenses. We've seen it before.

  Whatever the reason, I'm glad to see the trenches are effective. More, I'm glad to see Will working on more projects. Since his punishment was handed down, I've seen him slowly become a quieter and sadder person. I know some of that has to be the fact that he feels terrible about giving us up to the Richmond soldiers. I think a lot more is probably due to the constant stream of shitty treatment he gets from some people around here. It's not like I blame them--he did an awful thing for what he thought were good reasons, and he accepted the consequences of that. It's a complex situation that contains a distressing amount of moral ambiguity on all sides.

  Basically, that means that I can't fault Will for feeling down that people hate him, nor can I blame him for getting mad about it. That's human nature, regardless of how deserved the treatment may be. Nor can I fault the people who hate Will with a passion and are doing everything they are allowed to do to make him feel that hate. They have the right, and good reason. Doesn't mean I have to like it. The situation is a hundred shades of gray, and crappy for all involved.

  I'll say this, though--Will is one tough fucker. He's been working closely with Dodger on a lot of projects to do with the defenses, and in the process had to work with a lot of people that would rather put a knife in him than hold a civil conversation. Will hasn't let that slow down his progress on some things. One of those projects was completely unknown to me, but we all found out about it this morning.

  Will has been in touch with the people in North Jackson for a while now. I don't know if he set up a trade or something with them, but this morning a pickup truck came to the north gate. It was full of mass-produced weapons. Rather, it was full of a shipment of the same mass-produced weapon. The design was Will's own, and we've got two hundred of them.

  It's basically a machete. Stamped out of thick sheets of metal, unsharpened (that's up to us), the thing is a long, heavy blade about two feet long with a six inch long spike sticking out of the bottom of the hilt. The hilt is flat like the blade, but the edges are rounded to make it less damaging for whatever material we use to wrap around them.

  I'm impressed at the design, but more so with Will's ability to get this done with no one in the compound being the wiser. He has managed to circumvent the huge amount of distrust that many here and quite a few in North Jackson feel for him. I'm going to ask him about the details, but the simple fact that he managed to get us so many new and hopefully reliable weapons scores him major brownie points in my book.

  Hopefully it will do the same for some others around here.

  Wednesday, May 11, 2011

  Berserker

  Posted by Josh Guess

  One of our sentries, a man name Jeff Williamson, is dead.

  Jeff was on the wall during the night, and as a small cluster of zombies wandered toward his position, he jumped over the side and went crazy. His partner, who asked not to be named, said that Jeff did this right in the middle of a sentence. One second they were standing there calm as can be, the next Jeff was gone before his partner even had a chance to stop him.

  Jeff screamed as he cut down the first few zombies. His partner says that at no point did Jeff even try to keep from being bitten. He was apparently focused on killing, end of story.

  I talk sometimes, especially recently, about the strains and stresses we have to put up with. You would think that after Will's betrayal and the occupation, we'd be able to deal with just about anything. After all, that's what happens in stories. People suffer, but they find the inner strength to deal with the horrid cards they're dealt, and they overcome. They live happily ever after, knowing that they've weathered the storm.

  Real life isn't like that. When you face the things we face, sometimes there isn't any coming back. Not too long ago we lost another guard, who killed himself quietly. I don't think two people is a trend, but this worries me. We have to face some pretty hard truths nowadays. Sometimes when people break, there isn't any putting them back together.

  I'm worried that food rationing has played a part in what Jeff did. Yesterday afternoon I had to put in my recommendation to the council that we cut back on how much we're eating. There is a lot of concern with the pest problem and the uncertainty of the weather. We're worried that food will start to run short before we can begin to harvest. So, it looks like we'll have to hedge our bets by saving as much of the staple foods that will last a long time as possible.

  The news didn't make me very popular. A lot of folks were unhappy with it. A few despaired. No one wants to be told that their hard lives will be made even harder by a further reduction in rations that will make the already-pervasive hunger we feel a little worse.

  When you're trying to plan for an entire community, these kinds of decisions have to be made. I didn't recommend it to the council lightly or without a lot of research and weighing of options. I also pushed very hard to have extra hunting teams sent out for game. If we have to cut back on dry staples, we can at least do what we can to bring in more meat, right?

  It might have been that Jeff was simply going to lose it eventually, and this morning was his time to snap. It may have been caused by the realization that no matter how hard we work and how clever we may be, some periods are going to be tighter and harsher than others. Maybe Jeff felt like it was never going to get better around here. We'll never know.

  It's my hope that others are dealing with the restrictions in a better way.

  Thursday, May 12, 2011

  Disrupted

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I don't have much time to write today. Really not much time.

  Some folks have gotten pretty angry about the reduction in food rations. So much so that they've threatened to strike if we don't come up with a solution. I'm only writing a post at all because one of the conditions on which they agreed to continue working while we try and find a solution is that I make a post about it.

  They want everyone out there to know that we're struggling. That for all the help we've made a point to give to others, we aren't getting offers in return. I'm not putting my two cents in on that at the moment, because I personally think that trying to help others shouldn't be something you expect to build credit with.

  And while I'm generally not all that thrilled with the idea of caving to threats, I would have posted about this anyway. Not to mention the practical aspect--we kind of had to agree to their wishes. We need those people working, or a lot of problems would crop up that we'd have a hard time dealing with. I know that I'm admitting ho weak the position of everyone who isn't threatening to quit is, but it's also the truth.

  I'm going. I may post again later, but for the moment I have to try and work out what steps we can take to get more food here with my team. They're smart folks. I hope we can come up with something good...

  Saturday, May 14, 2011

  Technical Difficulties

  Posted by Josh Guess

  As you may or may not have noticed, I didn't post yesterday. I worried that you all might think that something major and bad had gone down here, something terrible enough that I was unable to take a few minutes to write.

  It didn't. In fact, things here have taken a moderately go
od turn, but I'll get to that in a minute. The problem yesterday was that the people at Google got hit with an early summer storm and it knocked out a bunch of servers. Since The Fall, Google HQ at Mountain View has been running solely on renewable energy. That means that they've only been able to power a fraction of the servers they once had. Enough to keep communication going, some email services. Certainly enough for the small percentage of people who've managed to survive.

  It took a while for them to get everything running again. Hell, I'm just impressed they managed it at all. I know there has to be a ton of work and expertise involved in doing everything they do on a daily basis to keep people in contact. I'm nothing but happy to have them.

  I will say this, before I move on--it was strange and frightening not to be able to blog. I know I take days off on Sundays and occasionally during the week, but I still CAN write to all of you if I want. Knowing that the possibility existed that the blog might be completely gone, and unable to return...that left me in a cold sweat.

  So, on to some good news.

  Our hunting parties have been joined by our scout parties in order to range out and try to bring in a lot more game. All told there are about thirty of them out in a given day. Yesterday they got pretty lucky. They brought in six deer, two wild pigs, three turkeys, several dozen squirrel and about ten rabbits. We've also got a few groups of people doing some fishing on the river as well as in Benson creek. It's net fishing, which is mighty unfair to the little fishies. But we gotta eat.

  The good news being that we're bringing in just enough extra food right now to keep from lowering rations. It's exactly what the folks who were threatening to strike wanted, and frankly I think most people are very happy with this outcome. It does kind of suck that we don't have scouts out there looking for new caches of supplies and the like. Honestly, though, I see the strikers' point--without adequate food, people just aren't going to be able to work effectively.

  I'm not naive enough to think that this solves the problem and we can just forget about it. We had a good haul yesterday, and we're hoping to keep that up. The creek and river are pretty stable sources of fish, but we can't feed everyone on what is caught. I know that the situation could become critically worse with even a week of bad hunting. We're just going to have to make sure to spread our efforts out over a large area so as not to scare off or over-hunt the local populations.

  One thing that does make me worry is that the zombies around here have been living off of animals for a while now. We've seen a marked decrease in the deer population that can't be wholly attributed to our hunting practices. The damn things breed like rabbits in Kentucky at least. Hunting used to be the only thing that kept the deer population in check. Even our community isn't big enough to have caused such a dramatic dip in numbers...

  Right now, the zombies eat animals because their primary choice for meals, us, are too hard to get a hold of. I worry that we're going to run into herds of zombies that are after the same prey we are. Scary thought, trying to hunt while being hunted.

  For now, we're okay. That's all we can ask for.

  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.