Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land (Book 3) Page 5

  The woman came back with him, and Jess is looking for a home for her. I don't even know her name yet, but then neither does anyone else. She doesn't talk, just nods or shakes her head. She doesn't seem psychologically damaged--at least, not in the way that would divorce her from reality and cause her to become mute--but more like she's just too scared to talk. I know a few women who have survived the same sorts of things she has that might be able to help, as much as I hate asking them to relive those memories. They're strong, though, so I think they're up to the challenge.

  So, it's another thing for us to think about. The base in Richmond is a juicy target, one that we need to find a way to secure. Right now it just isn't an option, but it's a project we won't be able to put off for too long. If anyone gets access to some of the weaponry stored there, we're well and truly fucked.

  I meant to write something fun and happy today, but events seem to out pace my desire. I had a neat idea, and I'll get to it soon. It's just a cute thing I thought up as a change of pace, but it isn't important beside the horrible tragedy our newest arrival has endured, or the threat that her captors may have posed.

  Oh, quickly--something weird is going on. I got a phone call this morning, very badly garbled, from a number that I've never seen. I've never gotten an international call before, but I think this had to be one, because there were a lot of extra digits in it. I couldn't make out the voice, but I did distinctly hear my name. I'm hoping that whoever it was tries to get in touch with me again, it's a very curious thing. I hate mysteries...

  Wednesday, March 16, 2011

  Five Bells

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I got another static filled, garbled phone call this morning. I could hear just a little bit better, but still couldn't make out more than one in ten words. I heard my name again, and the voice sounded female. That's not a big help, though...

  I was up for the call, mostly due to an alarm at about five this morning signaling an attack. It was a five-bell alarm, five short strikes on the bell, which signifies an attacking force of zombies estimated to be about five hundred strong. When anything that big happens, we all jump out of bed and grab weapons.

  It wasn't as bad as you would think, though. Most of them had congregated on the eastern side of the compound, which is part of the annex. That section is newer and the wall better designed and built, which gave us a nice stable platform to fire arrows from. We've got a lot of them, thanks in part to our recent trip to Indiana, but not so many that we could afford to lose five hundred of them at a go.

  There were about fifty of us on the wall, and we all took careful aim. The shots were ridiculously easy given how close our targets were, headshots an absolute necessity. Not every one of them was a clean shot, but at least three dozen zombies fell with the first volley.

  We did it again, and again. By the fourth time we drew arrows back to our cheeks, the smarties in control of the crowd seemed a little intimidated. We'd taken down about a hundred undead in less than two minutes. The patch of dirt in front of the wall had been transformed into a carpet of bodies. The normal zombies don't ever seem to pay much attention to things like that, but the smarties noticed. They knew they were losing a lot of their numbers very quickly. However it is they communicate, they started to do it. The undead pulled back from our wall.

  We fired again, then one last time. We didn't want to lose too many arrows, but we also didn't want too many of the zombies left to regroup. The more we could take out at a close distance, the better. The last volley was at about fifty feet, and after that we stopped. I'm not a professional marksman. A fifty-foot headshot with a bow in the predawn light after being awake for less than twenty minutes? Nah, not likely.

  All told we lost forty arrows, dropped somewhere in the neighborhood of 180-200 zombies, and only had one injury. That was a guy named Wilson, whose bowstring snapped on the fourth volley, lashing his hand across the back. I'm very happy with those numbers.

  Of course, that means that right now I'm the only one in the office. It's my brother's turn to do work detail while I stay here, and he took all of our trainees with him. They were going to put in a little time before their own shifts in the various places they work began, but the attack took precedence as always. Next time around, I'll be the one to stay behind and haul bodies into stacks to burn them. Looking at the mountain of reports I need to file through, I almost wish I had.

  Mason is trying to help Dodger and I out by looking for suitable people to help out making bows and arrows. We've decided to keep our focus on them for the present, because they are our best chance at truly long-term survival and defense. It's our hope that eventually every person in the compound who is physically capable of using one will have a bow available, with two full quivers of arrows (minimum) and the training to make them count. As time moves on, we're going to make it a requirement to have one and to spend X amount of time in training and practice every week.

  I hate the idea of forcing anyone to do that, but I've talked to the council about it and it just makes sense. Having trained archers is a great thing, but the most obvious thing to do is to try and make every single one of us that way. That way there is a much greater flexibility in our defenses and hunting, which means that we have greater flexibility with all of our duty assignments. I imagine a lot of people won't like the idea when we have the means to implement it.

  I don't imagine anyone will get violent with me over it. After all, I'm a pretty good shot with an arrow.

  Heh.

  Thursday, March 17, 2011

  Unintended Consequence

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I've thought about many aspects of humanity over the last year. When the zombie plague flashed into a worldwide catastrophe and destroyed the vast majority of the living population, many of us thought the world (and our place in it) was over. An afterthought.

  Some of us struggled to survive, banding together to live and thrive, choosing to listen to the better angels of our nature and work with unity of purpose. I've said a lot of good about my people here at the compound. About the people of North Jackson. About every survivor who doesn't go the path of the marauder.

  I've said a lot of bad about the marauders themselves. The truth, as most of you know, is that nothing is really ever that black and white. We've told ourselves time and again that there are those who want to live in peace (us) and those who don't, and should have the threat they represent eliminated (them).

  That's how many of us see the world now. Us versus Them. We, as the heroes in our own story, are always virtuous. Always right. That's how stories go, isn't it? There's always a clear villain, some evil that everyone can agree on. The zombies. Marauders. Hungry soldiers bent on taking over a better place to live.

  I wish it were always so easy.

  This morning, a vehicle approached the north gate. The windows were blackened, and it didn't respond to any of the commands our sentries shouted at it through the megaphone. When it got within the hundred foot mark and didn't show any signs of slowing as it moved toward the gate, two of our riflemen on the wall used precious bullets to take out the tires. Not terribly difficult shots from their position--dead on at ground level as the vehicle neared the gate. One advantage of having a wall partially made up of chain link fence.

  The SUV stopped and a few people with guns jumped out. They weren't shy about them, either, pointing directly at our guards. The sentry in command shouted through his megaphone for them to drop their weapons, that they would be treated fairly if they would lower their guns.

  He told them that they had five seconds to comply, or they would be fired on. Standard procedure in this kind of situation.

  Unfortunately, the people outside the gate didn't listen. They raised their weapons as if to fire, and in a fraction of a second, they were mowed down. Bullets from one of the larger, mounted guns ripped through them as a careful burst was fired at the cluster of them in front of their vehicle.

  It was only after the fact th
at we were able to figure out what had their hackles raised to the point that they would take on on overwhelmingly superior force. Inside the SUV--thin and sick, nearly starved--were two children, maybe twelve. Twin boys who looked as though they had been unable to eat for a long time. The adults didn't look much better on a closer inspection, rail thin and hollow-eyed. The sentry guessed that they were searching for food, and probably had no idea we were here. Starvation can do strange things to the human mind. It's possible they didn't even understand what our people were saying to them. The children were dead when our guards searched the SUV. The rounds from our big gun went through that vehicle like tissue paper.

  Were they a threat to us? Yes. Without question. Were our guards correct in their actions? Again, certainly. But the larger issue we face is this; was it right?

  No, I don't think it was. Necessary, but not the right thing to do. It would have been more risky for our people to duck below the walls and wait to see if the people outside fired at them, but at least there would have been a chance for those poor souls. That would have been right--but dangerous and risky. We teach people not to do dangerous things unless they have to. To minimize the danger by being cautious and proactive when threatened.

  Ahh, Damn it. How can you reconcile something like this? Our people did the best they could in a fast and dangerous situation, and some innocent people who probably couldn't think clearly are dead as a result. Innocent kids are dead right along with them. No one was right or wrong, in the end. It was a thing that happened. A tragic thing, but one that I don't think could have been avoided.

  It's a terrible morning, a sad one. Some days this world mostly empty of the living seems so much darker than others. Today seems to be all shadows.

  Friday, March 18, 2011

  Dreams

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Last night, Jess and I watched a movie. Not something we do often, mind you, but the house batteries were at full charge after a long, sunny day, and my laptop has a DVD player.

  It was something to take our minds off yesterday's events. Everyone around the compound is feeling a little down that those people were killed. We gave them a proper burial, even though a team of guards had to go out into the group of zombies outside the gate to secure the bodies. Also, to take steps ensuring that the dead people from the firefight didn't come back themselves...

  It felt like the right thing to do, burying them. It's a sad consequence of our need to protect our home that those people died, and the least we could do was honor their deaths by giving them some of our time and effort.

  Afterward, the wife and I watched Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams".

  Somehow in the nearly six years Jess and I have been together, I've never gotten her to watch it before. She'd never seen any of Kurosawa's films, and I'm a huge fan. I've got a few of them sitting around, and I decided on "Dreams" for a very simple reason: it is beautiful in every frame.

  I'm not going to go off on a tangent about the director's brilliance or the influence Kurosawa had in the film industry. None of those things matter any more. Watching the film, from the opening sequence with the Kitsune in the forest to the final part showing the old man fixing the waterwheel and the funeral procession after, I realized something of almost overwhelming importance.

  Last year, when I posted about the unfinished books out there, singling out "The Wheel of Time" by Robert Jordan and "The Kingkiller Chronicles" by Patrick Rothfuss, I touched on the truth that hit me full force last night.

  One of my all time favorite quotes is from Alan Moore's "Watchmen". It is this--"I am looking at the stars. They are so far away. And their light takes so long to reach us. All we ever see of stars are their old photographs."

  The realization that hit me? It's that watching movies, reading books, talking about cars...anything that has to do with the world as it was before the zombie plague destroyed humanity is just opening up the shoebox full of memories and looking through the pictures of times that can never come again. Yes, we aim to make something new and better...but we can't let go of what was.

  "Dreams" really made me think. Kurosawa made the film out of many dreams he had experienced over a lifetime, and you can see the growth of his spirit and character from one sequence to the next. How he left behind things he once considered important in order to move on to new frontiers and goals. Part of me recognized the futility in holding on to my favorite books and movies while the rest of me recognized the deep sentiment I have attached to them.

  In the world as it is now, we use fiction and entertainment in general less and less over time as a means of escape. Part of that is sheer necessity due to the lack of enough electricity for most folks to be able to do something as simple as watching a movie. People still read, of course, but the strain on our time that it takes is harder to justify every day. I'm not saying that we should give up our books or movies or what have you. I think that would be a dramatic gesture at best, with little sincerity to it. I'm just saying that I've noticed a trend, or rather that I realized one was happening, and it blows me away.

  Think of it in terms of a visual illusion. You look at the picture one way, and see the vase. Then you relax your eyes and see that instead of a vase, it's two old ladies facing each other. The mind-blowing part isn't in the realization that there are actually two images present. It's in the fact that once you see it, you can never look at that picture without seeing both images. It's the same with the stacks of books and movies around my house.

  I see them, and remember the feeling I had when I read about the heroes and villains within. How they made me feel. From Kvothe to Indiana Jones, Gandalf to Luke Skywalker, the sense-memories of late nights in dim light spent reading while immersed in my own imagination are strong. The smell of popcorn and the cool breeze of a dark theater tickle my mind when I hear the opening themes to my favorite films. These memories and sensations are so deeply rooted in my mind that I can never forget them, nor do they lose their impact.

  But now a new set of feelings runs parallel with them. When I think about cracking open a book or start rifling through the DVDs in my office, I see them as antiques. Sad, old things that are shiny and new, but still relics of an era that has irreversibly passed. It's a little like living with the ghosts of old friends, seeing them when I sit down to work and hurting a little as I think about what has gone.

  I've been thinking about this all morning, and the further realization just hit me: the people that died yesterday don't even have that. They made it through The Fall and more than a year of survival only to meet their end at the hands of people who would have been happy to take them in, had their hunger-addled minds not driven them to become dangerous. I grieve for them, for the potential that was lost with their passing, though I didn't know them. I wish things had been different. I would have shared my thoughts with them.

  Maybe we could have taken comfort in one another as we mourned the passing of an age.

  Saturday, March 19, 2011

  Gassing Up

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I'm out of the compound right now, doing a little exploring with Jamie and a squad of scouts. It's a lovely, crisp day to be out dodging zombies and enjoying the sunshine. You'd think that in all the time we've been searching Frankfort for food and supplies that we'd have hit pretty much everywhere, but that isn't the case.

  We're all taking a lunch break right now, and as we're right at the edge of a cell tower's reception I thought I'd take a few minutes and post.

  There are a few places around the county that we've ignored up until now. Most everything else has been easy pickings, but the need to conserve fuel and the limited amounts of things we can bring back because of that has made us stay relatively close to home. Unless we're out on a longer trip out of town, of course, but those tend to be well worth the time and effort we put into them.

  Now, though, we're able to manage a little better, and we're heading out into the Bald Knob (and no, I'm not making that name up) area of the cou
nty. It's all country out there, lots of farm land and heavy woods. We're hoping to find some livestock that we can slaughter, and maybe keep some to bring back to the closer farms for breeding.

  How are we able to use fuel with such casual concern? Because we're all a bunch of dumbasses, that's why. Especially me.

  You might not think it about Kentucky, but this state leaned pretty heavily in the direction of green technology before The Fall. You might think otherwise considering how dependent our economy was on coal, but the heavy cost of lives in the mines over many years combined with some very sparkly federal incentives meant a healthy dose of green technology here in the capital and elsewhere.

  Any one of us natives (well, I moved here when I was seven. Close enough.) should have thought of it sooner, and I really can't believe I of all people didn't. It's my job to come up with solutions to many of our problems, and I'm a self-proclaimed green tech nerd.