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

  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 23rd, 2011