by Joshua Guess
I do want to add in here, while I still have the time, that Courtney and her group have managed to do some pretty amazing things while they've been out on this trip. She's gone above and beyond the call of duty, not only passing out supplies and providing transport for those that need it, but finding new groups of survivors and convincing some of the more reluctant groups to finally pitch in and help. She's actually had to make fuel runs back down south to restock a few times, her relief mission has been so successful. I'm proud of what she and the others with her have accomplished. Should I die tomorrow, it will be with the knowledge that in ways small and large, the world has been made a better place by some of the people left in it.
That's way more comforting to me than it should be. We're in a mess here, trying to plan out where we will go, waiting until we're sure that the zombies outside have thinned out enough for us to pile into our vehicles. Yet despite the struggle ahead and the unknowns we face, I can't help but take a lot of solace in the fact that people, a lot of people, are doing what they can to help those in need.
It's not just the holiday spirit, I'm sure. It's truly awesome to me to witness people rising up against the terrible circumstances all of us are in to recognize the basic truth that led me to found the compound in the first place: that the needs of the tribe, the larger issue of survival of the human species, is more important than any other factor.
I've said before that living in a world of the dead has forced us to learn how to truly live. Never before has that truth been more clear to me. It can't just be about survival for us. In fact, there can't even be an "us" unless it's referring to every survivor out there. I'm not saying that we won't have trouble with marauders or crazies--we will. But the greater body of the human species can survive having cancers like those removed when needed. We're all in this together, and it fills me with real hope to see that so many out there are starting to see that as well.
Ok, the last of our people have woken up. It's time to decide where to go. I'll be back as soon as I can.
at 9:15 AM
Thursday, December 23, 2010
The Pit
Posted by Josh Guess
We've been camped out all night, about a hundred miles from the nursing home. We decided where we were headed, though just to be safe I won't be telling you more than that until we get there. I wasn't going to use the charge on my laptop to post anything today, but on our way out of the town we were staying in, we came across something that made every one of us stop dead in our tracks.
It was a pit. Not very old, almost certainly dug after The Fall, the edges of it barely eroded from the weather. The sides were almost vertical, and the backhoe that made the pit was still in the bottom of it. At least ten feet deep and thirty across, that hole in the ground was strange enough a sight to make us stop and take a peek at it.
Inside, half obscured by melting ice and slush, were bodies. Most of them were so ravaged by the weather that it was almost impossible to tell anything about who those people must have been. There were a lot of them, we estimate more than a hundred. At first we thought it must have been the dumping ground for the zombies killed by the locals--after all, it's outside of town (in the direction we didn't come by, which is why we missed it the first time) but after that initial shock we realized that it was pretty unlikely.
After all, part of why we stayed in that little town was because so much stuff had been left behind. The people that lived there left very, very quickly, and that means that it isn't likely enough people stayed behind to kill enough zombies to necessitate a hole that big.
After we searched around that area for a few minutes, we came across a body in a car, the occupant having shot himself in the head quite some time before. There was a note, and I'll give you the gist of it since none of us wanted to bring it along, for reasons that may become clear.
It wasn't a typical suicide note. The man who wrote it, the one who shot himself in his car, had been the administrator of the nursing home we had been staying at. He said in it that while some people had come to take their elderly relatives to the supposed safety of the bigger cities, most hadn't. When his staff left and there were so many left to be cared for, zombies prowling constantly...he made a choice.
He described in great detail the steps he took to end the lives of every single person under his care. He was the last one, a single man with no family and no staff left to do the work. He poisoned the residents of his facility, dug the hole here, and filled it with their bodies. He begged forgiveness for his acts. I don't know who he was asking, but I'm certainly not the one to give it to him.
I thought I had seen enough terrible things that I could no longer be surprised by my reactions. I was wrong. To know that this man methodically worked his way through the building, killing helpless people one after another makes my skin crawl. It doesn't help that part of me understands and in some tiny way almost too small to be called real, agrees with his action. I don't think I could have done it myself, but truly take a look at his situation.
He cared for them for a week entirely on his own. It became clear to him that there was simply no way to keep them alive in the short term without help, and virtually no way at all to do it in the long term is society didn't immediately rebound from the zombie plague. He had to leave most of them covered in their own filth just to get any food or water in them for the day. He barely slept, and trying to keep the zombies away was taking its toll on him.
Rather than let them suffer and die from dehydration or the horror of being savaged by a zombie and then coming back to do the same to the others, he made the deliberate choice to end their lives. A brief flare of pain before falling into peace forever. Taking his own life, he had written in his note, was the only choice he had left.
It's brutal. Terrible. And after all this time struggling to survive, forcing ourselves to become observant and aware so that we stay alive, we never thought about this. We never considered the lack of elderly people or the mentally handicapped. Hell, we rarely see anyone who even has a limp.
How many times has this scenario played out over the last nine months? The weak and injured, old and disabled...how many pits are there around the world just like that one?
I don't know. It's too much.
We'll be on our way shortly.
at 7:47 AM
Friday, December 24, 2010
Doctor Who?
Posted by Gabrielle
It took me a while to convince him that people knowing his first name wouldn't be such a bad thing. It brings me great pleasure to finally be able to call him something other than "the new doctor" or "the other doctor". His name is Phil.
That's right. Doctor Phil.
We don't call him that, of course. We never call Evans "Doctor Evans". It'd just be weird. Thinking about it, though, makes me wonder if he didn't want us to tell people his name just so no one would make that stupid joke...
We've been doing a lot of work around here lately. People are still coming in here and there, some staying while the majority move on or go back home. We've had patients from as far as three hundred miles away come to us. I wouldn't have thought so many people would have the resources to make it so far, but one thing about being able to look outside and see the dead walking is that it greatly increases your ability to handle surprise.
And trust me, we can see them walking out there. A lot of people were living out in their cars or in tents before the large groups of cold-proof zombies started to show up. The parking lot for this hospital is walled in, so none of them were in too much danger, but I get why so many of them wanted to have more brick between themselves and the undead.
We've picked up some interesting facts from the people that come to us for treatment. Phil has an amazing bedside manner (which is strange considering that most doctors are...well, that's just the nurse in me coming out...) and people tend to open up to him easily. For instance, there is a farm about forty miles south of where we are that has almost as many people as the
compound did before we fled, and the people there have managed to stockpile truly huge amounts of food. Also neat is the tip we got about a small oil refinery a hundred miles down the road, one that has plenty of gas ready for the taking.
We've gotten dozens of nifty tidbits like that thanks to Phil. He's sort of the opposite of Evans. Where Evans is, and I say this with love, sort of a surly bastard, Phil is gentle and caring. The flip side to that coin is that while Evans has forty years of practical experience with trauma and emergency medicine, Phil is racing to relearn the basics of those things. He's not an idiot or anything--it's just that once he specialized in working on cancer, he didn't need to keep up with much else.
I really don't want to make it sound like Phil is doing anything wrong or isn't pulling his weight. He's working ten or twelve hours a day with patients, then spending at least two hours with Evans and a few of the students learning surgical procedures, treatment options, diagnostics...he's actually pretty amazing in his work ethic.
We're doing a good thing here, no matter what else is going on. Thinking about how things have gone in the last weeks makes me wonder if running from the compound doesn't have its major upsides. If we hadn't, we would never have met most of the people we've been caring for, never built what connections we have made. Our group has achieved communication and a lasting good will with so many other survivors since we left home, and I don't think that should be dismissed.
I would like to think that eventually, we would have trained enough people that we could have sent some out into the world to do exactly what we're doing now. The truth is that I doubt it would have happened. Risking a resource as limited as a person who has the knowledge, gained over years, to cut you open and fix you, then sew you back up? It's a hard leap to make, at least for me.
I wish the soldiers from Richmond hadn't done this to us. In a way, I'm glad they did, because I don't know that we could have reached a point of stability in my lifetime to make the citizens of the compound willing to take the risks we're taking now. It took the threat of total destruction or complete oppression to put us on this path.
And as long as we're forced to be on it, I will take solace in the good we're doing. It's that easy.
at 8:21 AM
I Still Live (For Now)
Posted by Patrick
This is just a quick post to let every one out there know that for the moment I'm still alive. Though what I've seen and done in the last couple of weeks makes me wish that I wasn't. The only reason I continue to fight and draw breath is all that is left of my family, my two nieces and the daughter of my oldest friend. These three little girls are all alone in the world except for me.
My phone is getting ready to die again and I'm feeling faint from the blood loss, so please know that as soon as I find some power, and signal again I will try to post more. I just pray that happens. We are on foot and with out any real weapons, just blunt objects.
Please know that if I don't make it, that I had to do this and numbers wouldn't have made any difference. The only reason that I made it this far is I was alone. When you remember me I really hope that it brings a smile to your faces. Sorry for being so macabre but the odds can only be so long before you have to face reality. Will continue to fight though, you aren't dead until your dead, and even then you don't get to rest any more.
Well from the way the girls are staring at me the dead have caught us up again, the cold has slowed them down a lot but they don't have to rest, must get going.
at 8:37 PM
Saturday, December 25, 2010
The Greatest Gift
Posted by Josh Guess
What do you say on what's supposed to be one of the best days of the year to a world of people that have lost so much?
On thanksgiving, I talked about trying to find the hidden good in the situations we find ourselves in. The zombie plague has taken most of what we are, but at the same time it's burned away the dross and left us stronger and more pure.
Christmas is different. It has so many meanings. For Christians, it is a celebration of the life of Jesus. For others, a time to give generously when the world is cold and harsh. Yet others simply celebrate togetherness and the warmth of being a family.
For me, on this Christmas, I think about the real gifts we've given one another. Regardless of the season, we now live in a world as hard and sharp as the dead of winter. We've given each other the gift of life--fighting for one another to protect. But violence, even when it is meant to preserve, is so integral to who we are as a species that it's an easy gift to give.
We've given each other that gift of life in other ways. We've buckled down and learned to farm, working our fingers in the earth until our muscles protested and our bodies became weak. We have learned to make things to preserve life, people with no experience at all striving to understand the workings of armor. It may seem strange or silly to you to think of these things as gifts, but they certainly are. It would have been much easier for so many of us to become marauders, to take and take from others. I see the gift of honest effort as one of the greatest that has been given to us by each other, and I thank you for it.
The single greatest treasure that we've shared is also the one that surprised me the most. Seeing my fellow citizens of the compound, both before and after the other refugees and I fled it, find moments of real normality. Watching people tell jokes and invite others over for dinner. Seeing two sentries have a friendly disagreement about what NBA team had the greatest legacy. Watching a young boy and girl share that same first peck on the cheek that one of them would call their first kiss for the rest of their days.
We have been changed in ways that may take years for all of us to fully understand. We can't do the things we've done, make the decisions we've had to make, and remain the same people. The world as it is has shaped us and removed the complications that used to clutter our everyday lives. It has made us grim and frighteningly realistic about the risks we face on a daily basis.
But it hasn't taken the core of us. Everything I have seen makes me believe that there is something inherently good in people, powerfully so. When the worst case scenario came, we struggled and suffered, we cried our tears. Instead of falling into the instinctual behavior to kill and take, we found ourselves sharing compassion and love. We allowed ourselves to feel completely at ease with the way life is now, to take small pleasures and pass them on to others.
That's a gift that can't be measured. You have all given it to me, and I to you. Today, let's celebrate being alive and together. Remember with a happy pride that we've accomplished that by treating each other as we wished to be treated, and acting like the civilized people that we know ourselves to be.
Merry Christmas. Happy Hanuka. Whatever your reason for the season, enjoy today. You made it happen.
at 7:31 AM
How?
Posted by Patrick
When I read Josh's post to day, it hit me like a hammer that today is Christmas and it brought me great sadness. I look at the three girls sleeping on the floor, and I listen to them whimper and cry in their sleep, the exhaustion to great to give them escape from their nightmares, and wonder how? How do I tell them it's Christmas?
I don't believe that I can tell them, even though where we are is sort of a Christmas miracle in it self. We stumbled into a place that is well fortified against the dead and was well stocked. The girls got canned veggies for the first time in months, which may have saved their lives as much as the protection this place offers. Their gums have been bleeding badly and most of their teeth are loose with some missing. That and with the ease at which Alice broke her arm makes me think that they have scurvy.
While Alice talks a little both Alysa and Kylie have yet to say a word, considering where I took them from and the thing I saw there I'm surprised that they're still aware of the world at all. Even though Alice is only six and thankfully dosn't understand half of what she saw and heard, she paints a bleak picture of what mostly Alysa endured to keep them aliv
e.
Yet those girls amaze me at how tough and strong they are, today they helped me cauterize my stump with out flinching. Good thing too because the tourniquet was turning my stump a little smelly, and I've already had to cut more of my arm off twice in the last two days. Guess thats what I get for making a rookie mistake buy putting my hand in reach of a zombie that I thought was down and out.
At least it was my left hand so my love life won't suffer. Sorry lack of sleep is effecting me, will try to post again soon.
at 5:42 PM
Monday, December 27, 2010
Roots
Posted by Josh Guess
We've managed to make it to where Gabby and her group are staying. I didn't want to tell anyone our destination in case any of our enemies had managed to figure out where she was. I didn't want to be intercepted on our way here.
