Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land (Book 3) Page 8

  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.

&n
bsp; 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.

  Thursday, March 31, 2011

  Memento

  Posted by Josh Guess

  As I was settling in to work in my office this morning, I noticed that one of my trainees had apparently done some work on my desk area while I slept. They like to come in early to work on things, and I guess in the process of cleaning out a spot to set up their own little space, they found some of my old junk.

  Sitting in front of me on the shelves just at eye level over my desk, are all the various bits of zombie-themed junk I collected over my many years as a fan of the genre. It's a little weird.

  I mean, I live in a surreal world. No one who ever watched any of George Romero's living dead movies really thought that they would come to pass. Not one person sitting in a theater flinching at Danny Boyle's kinetic, rage-fueled undead believed that such an event could actually happen.

  As I sat there looking at action figures of zombies, a few small posters (and one huge one for Boyle's "28 Days Later"), even my little Zombie Survival Kit, which is especially funny now, I can't help but think of how different the reality is to the fantasy I once immersed myself in.

  Outside the walls, right now, chances are about even that I could see a zombie shuffling about. Any section of the compound's wall, at that. They are always there, day and night, sometimes moaning with the hunger they feel for the blood and flesh of living things. Sometimes they're silent, watching us with eyes that see more than a dead thing should. Some of them are slow and shambling, some are fast and nimble. All of them are lethal. All of them are sad.

  Look at the little figurine there, sitting on the shelf. It's a caricature of a reality that is all too harsh and dangerous. His little arms in front of him like Frankenstein's monster from the old Universal pictures. Frankenstein was the original zombie, I suppose. The figurine is wearing a tattered business suit, charcoal gray with a red tie. His cuffs are frayed. His face and hands are a pale green, but whole, looking more like a desiccated mummy than a true, fresh corpse. The look on his face is blank, his jaw slack. His eyebrow are raised as if to ask, "What have I become?"

  In much the same way that old cartoons made a mockery of the animals they gave voices to and animated, so does the collection of stuff above my desk. All this stuff was funny once, had some pop culture value. Now it's just another reminder of how unprepared we were for the truth of what we face every day.

  I once saw a zombie woman dragging the body of a child behind her. The child hadn't reanimated, it was simply dead, its head partially crushed in. There was such a forlorn look on the dead woman's face as she walked, puffs of dust trailing her and the limp body she pulled, that I went out of my way to send her to the final peace of the ever after.

  I can't imagine a sorrow more profound than losing one's child. Something deep inside that woman, nestled in the reptile part of her brain, recognized the scope of her loss. It may not have even been her own kid she was toting around with her, it could have been anyone's. That, somehow, seems even worse; that she could have felt such a deep need for her lost offspring that she would find a replacement.

  Even as I shot her, the look on her face transformed from despair right into beastly hunger.

  The assorted mementos in front of me just don't do justice to that. None of them convey the dark mixture of pity and rage that we have for the dead outside our walls. No movie, comic book, or novel ever managed to get it right. What we live with every day; the fear, the worry, the hope, the moments of happiness. I don't blame fiction for missing the mark, because until The Fall happened, it was all speculative.

  Even though I write this blog most days and am living through the actuality of the zombie apocalypse, words aren't enough. Rather, the right ones just don't exist to really record with any accuracy the mood of our daily lives. It's something that I struggle with often, and I don't think I'll ever get to the point where I can capture it perfectly.

  I'll leave them there. As reminders go, my little collection is a valuable one. Looking at it, I will always keep fresh the memories of what I thought we would face, and the knowledge of what really is out there. I will remember our mistakes, and strive each day not to repeat them. I'll see the covers of the graphic novels and DVD's and know that once, there was such a place as a world where safety was the norm, and monsters were fun things. Evil was easily consumed in ten minutes to two hours, and guns never ran dry.

  I'll look up every morning and remember the cost of our innocence. The price of our lessons learned.

  Friday, April 1, 2011

  Ice Age

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I'm going to try to keep it short this morning, because there's a lot of makeup work to do today. We've been having some pretty dramatic fluctuations in the weather lately, but the need to get a lot of our seeds and sprouts in the ground made
us take the risk of a hard frost.

  We'd hoped that we had managed to avoid that, but this morning the ground was (and still is) covered in a thick mantle of the stuff. There are people out right now in force, trying to do everything they can to save what we've planted. We're lucky, really, because much of what we've got in the ground right now is cold weather food, meant to be planted early. About thirty percent of it, though, isn't. Which means a lot of scrambling about, trying to determine what we'll lose and what will live.

  I'm taking Becky out with me today. She's going to play the part of personal assistant since I've got my trainees busy with other things, as well as being my second set of eyes for zombies, since we'll be out in the open. Becky has been quiet the last few days, not really wanting to leave the house. So far I've avoided giving her a work assignment, since she's still recovering from the arduous trip here. Given how well she handled her liquor over the weekend, I'm guessing she's able to work.