Living With the Dead: The Bitter Seasons

by Joshua Guess

  And no shots fired. Always a plus.

  With the recent spurts of zombie attacks due to so many of our folks being outside of the walls working, Trying to organize about a billion details, making decisions in the council, worrying about a new leader (and worrying about everyone else, come to that...), I find myself feeling remarkably normal. It's not that I don't feel pain at the loss Jess and I share, simply that I find that one of my mother's sayings turns out to be true: the only way to deal with tragedy is to go on, to live and work. To not let it dominate and control your life.

  She was a brilliant and wise woman, but in all honesty, I am glad that she didn't live to share this particular pain. I hope that whatever heaven she may be in, she is smiling that I learned at least one lesson from her.

  at 6:57 PM

  Monday, September 20, 2010

  Shades of Gray

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Things have quieted down for the most part around here in the last day. The zombie attacks on our workers have slowed down dramatically with the first truly cold mornings of the year. It also helps that Jeff Thomas, the guy who figured out how to modify some electric motors (taken from some hybrid cars) to run milling equipment finished his work. We can now crank out enough lumber to keep up with the needs of the hoard of people working on the annexes.

  Our detachment of additional guards has reached the people we sent to look for the farmers willing to drive their sheep here. It's looking good weather wise for their trip here. Helps that those farmers have about thirty large dogs with them to harry the zombies they will certainly run into and to herd the sheep. Keep your fingers crossed.

  I guess the only big news around here today is that Will Price took his first unaided steps today. His arm is still a few weeks from freedom, but today he walked. He only made it about five feet before he needed a crutch, but it's pretty great progress. Evans thinks that he will be totally mobile in a few weeks, though he will have to rebuild the strength in his limbs. He's pretty excited to start pulling his weight, and is frantically trying to learn just about everything around here. With Patrick gone (still no word...) he is spending about an hour a day with Roger learning metallurgy and smithing. He's still doing two hours of classes with Evans on medicine. He is acting as the council's consultant on defense, which is at least three hours at a stretch several times a week. He spends a lot of time with Aaron, taking classes and acting as a teacher's assistant when called for. He does many other things, and watching him soak it all up is pretty impressive. To have had such a burning urge to learn all this time, and to hold it in check says volumes about his willpower.

  Speaking of Aaron, he has opened up a little. That's a relative statement, mind you, because he is still pretty reclusive when not teaching, but at least now he leaves his quarters for walks occasionally, and once in a while stops to talk to people. I think part of what has been helping him is that I put him in touch with my sister, who was our primary teacher here before she left for the safer realms up north. Aaron and Jackie communicate every day, and conversing with someone who shares his passion has given him some stability. It has also helped him become more creative in his lessons, but that is going to be tomorrow's post. It's interesting, and I want to do it justice.

  I hate to leave on a down note, but we have gotten some disturbing reports from those we send out in our ever-expanding sphere of exploration for materials and supplies. Signs show that there might be (or have been) a lot more survivors than we previously thought. Evidence leads us to believe that pockets of survivors have been hiding and then worn down over time by constantly roaming hordes of zombies. Fresh blood and bodies, abandoned supplies, cars still running...at first we thought that these were isolated incidents, but a pattern is emerging. It seems to me that finding other living humans has to be made high on our priority list if we are going to keep the human race going. It also explains why so many of the undead are still walking around instead of starving. We know that they can go for a very long time with nothing, and truly we have no proof that they actually need to eat...god, I hope they do. Because if not, then that means that their numbers can only be reduced by us killing them...

  at 9:43 AM

  Tuesday, September 21, 2010

  Aaron is Enlightening

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Today's post isn't action packed or full of emotion. It's dedicated to the remarkable work Aaron is doing in making the education around the compound truly comprehensive.

  As a preface, I will say that I have always had some serious misgivings about how the educational system in the US has operated. Not the basic stuff, of course, like reading and the foundations of mathematics, but pretty much anything after grade school turned out to be repetitive and less than stimulating. I agree with Robert Pirsig's idea that people tend to learn at peak efficiency when they choose what to learn, and learn at least efficiency when forced to study things that are of no interest to them at all. The other problem I have had with my education at least is the total isolation of subjects. Subject A is taught as an independent entity from subject B, and any correlation between the two is for the student to discover.

  I have always thought that teaching one thing should inherently include other subjects. This teaches logic and comprehensive understanding while grounding the student in a broad number of subjects, creating a good generalist thinker. Good generalists can become good specialists, but rarely is there a good specialist without the ability to think with a wide scope.

  Aaron agrees.

  His lessons for the younger people are great to watch. This morning he started teaching basic botany, using the local plants and trees. He did what you would expect, naming the various species and their uses, but he added so much more into the lesson. Aaron made the students take note of which types of trees produced the best wood for building and for fires, which ones burned quickly and slowly. Which had useful saps and produced edible nuts. He even pointed out which ones would provide the best windbreaks because of foliage density and total area, and what types of roots would make farming difficult. Mind you, I am just writing what I can remember as an observer. But I can tell you, not one of those kids looked bored.

  He is teaching adults as well. Aaron is putting in a lot of time learning skills and even more time teaching himself how to apply principles to them and how to derive principles from them. He is learning the smattering of Aikido, Judo, and Iaido that I and a few others teach, and is teaching some folks how to apply the body mechanics of those marital arts to everyday life, including work. I saw him showing someone how to use a basic Aikido stance as a base for learning a perfect hammer stroke to drive a nail, all the while explaining the physics of what he was teaching in understandable terms. The equations and formulas for force and work are so much easier to understand when you have real world experiences and examples to learn them with. I had to leave during that particular demonstration, but he was moving on to anatomy and physiology when I left, going on about the properties of the bones, tendons and muscles doing the swinging of the hammer, how the brain and nerves conduct those signals...

  I know it seems like a lot of stuff to read it here, but the greater part of what impresses me here is that Aaron manages to make people understand and retain without overloading them. He is incredibly talented as getting people excited about what he is teaching by how he is teaching it. And that flash of energetic understanding in a student that is the hallmark of all truly awesome teachers like my sister? His students have it. Not once in a while or once a day, but often throughout a given class. It's like watching the audience of a movie with a lot of strange plot twists, constant surprise and flashes of an new understanding of the whole.

  In this way he is giving our young and old alike an amazing ability to comprehend the whole of something, and to apply knowledge from one area to something seemingly unrelated. He is gaining popularity quickly, though I can't be sure he's entirely comfortable with it.

  I think we might have lucked o
ut into a resource we can't afford to risk in Aaron. So maybe we need to talk to him about avoiding going out of the compound. I think he can make us stronger in ways not many of us could have grasped a few weeks ago, and I don't want to lose that chance to some random zombie catching him off guard.

  at 11:12 AM

  Wednesday, September 22, 2010

  Contact

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I'm writing this in bed. My brother is shouldering the burden today, since I am sick.

  I feel like I have the flu, and for all the bitching I used to do at how shitty the medications my doctor used to give me for it were, now I wish for them so much that it actually hurts.

  I only decided to write anything today because we have finally heard from Patrick and the volunteers with him. They have had a lot of trouble getting to the facility where the parts and supplies we need are stored. They didn't lose any people, and I think that has a lot to do with Pat as a leader. He's very cautious, indeed, very creative in being cautious, toward keeping people alive. He is also very patient, and he needed that to out wait a large swarm of zombies, and some local survivors that were hunting them.

  The really good news is that there are literally dozens if not over a hundred trucks there, and most of them capable of carrying large turbines. It will take a few trips, but Pat and the others with him think that there is enough fuel between all of them to make half a dozen two way trips. All of us here are stoked at the news.

  OK, that's all I've got today. Jess is still staying in bed most of the time to heal up her bullet wound, and now I am pretty much useless right now too. Will is hanging out with us today, helping Jess and I out. He made us breakfast this morning. I want to know where he found bacon. I could kiss him for that.

  He has also been eying my Playstation 3 pretty dreamily. He never got a chance to play the last Metal Gear Solid game, and my house has enough solar and wind power to run it along with my computers...

  Huh. We must be adapting to the world around us as normal if Will has an urge to play video games. More, I have my normal urge to show him how much better I am at it...but since I'm sick, I will let him go to town.

  at 10:14 AM

  Thursday, September 23, 2010

  Not too Hot

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Still really sick. Enough that I couldn't even get up when a bunch of smarties broke through a soft section of the south wall.

  It wasn't too bad, from what I have been told. Maybe ten of the smart zombies got through. They found a way to get the regular zombies with them to pile all their weight against a section of wall that is mostly thin plywood. Lucky for us, we anticipated that weak spot getting hit at some point, and always have extra guards posted. The smarties made it about forty feet before they were cut down, but the alarm was sounded the second they penetrated our defenses.

  I just reread that. I should be more specific. Will Price was the one to suggest we post extra guards at the weak spot. The rest of us figured that the usual patrols would suffice at first, though he convinced us otherwise. In our defense, the south is the area we are hit from least, since it's mostly woods. We have lumbered it out to a distance of about fifty feet, but it's very hard for zombies to navigate through it so most of us don't worry about large attacks from them there.

  Of course, that is where the attacker came from, the one who shot Jess. So yeah, we are inclined to listen.

  Evans thinks I will be feeling better tomorrow. My fever broke today, but the vomiting and...other symptoms are taking their toll on me. I am drinking a lot of water, but our supplies are getting thin. We haven't had a decent rain in a long time, and our reserves are almost gone. We still have the creek, of course (we dammed it up a while back to build a small reservoir, but it takes time to haul and filter it) but I hate having to ask others to go get it for me. For us, since Jess is still injured.

  I need to eat some lunch, and I hope I can hold it down. Will is still taking care of us, though he's making a point not to hover over us. Roger is giving him a hand today as well, I think the two of them are in my kitchen playing poker at the moment...

  at 12:10 PM

  Friday, September 24, 2010

  Over the Hump

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Jess is up and about, if a little slowly, and she's lording that fact over me. I'm still pretty sick, but not nearly so bad as the last few days.

  It's sort of disconcerting that being sick has cut me off from so much of what goes on around the compound. Zombies have been attacking regularly in the last few days, but not in big numbers. It's still unseasonably hot, and the theory is that they are surging before the cold comes in.

  I really hope that cold weather brings us some relief from the attacks. Work on the annexes can continue for a long time in cold weather, but without the constant assaults on our workers, it will go much faster and allow the folks from downtown to be close to the compound, and to pool our resources.

  Of course, as the weather gets worse, the less big projects we will be handling. This is going to give my brother and I a lot more free time for other interests as the need for us to plan them lessens. I want to pick up a few trades, learn some more skills, and work on writing things other than this blog.

  I had nearly completed the last edit on my first fantasy novel before the fall of society. It's still sitting there on my hard drive, waiting to be tweaked and finished. It's been all I can do to write this blog with all we have been doing to survive and thrive, and I think it will be nice to work on something else as well. Should be a short project, since I had been working on it for a year before then...

  One way of another, I will be up and about tomorrow. The only way I won't is if I am dead. I can't stand another day of laying here being ill, and there are things I need to look into, supplies to be gathered and cataloged before the truly cold weather gets here.

  Damn it, I want to feel better.

  at 8:29 AM

  Saturday, September 25, 2010

  Pilgrim

  Posted by Josh Guess

  My Sister sent me some very, very bad news this morning.

  Jackie lives in southern Michigan at present with her husband and kids, at Jack's compound. They have been pretty safe where they are, a large industrial park where Jack and his people manufacture things for trade to us.

  This morning, a single zombie was spotted walking near the south wall of their perimeter. Protocol at Jack's is to leave individuals and small groups alone if they are not attacking or behaving in a threatening manner. It's a practical consideration meant to ensure the conservation of ammunition and to protect guards from unnecessary risk.

  But in this case, someone should have disobeyed and wasted a bullet.

  The guard that saw the zombie reports that it was just wandering about forty yards from the wall, occasionally looking toward the fortifications and stopping for a few moments.

  Studying. He actually used the word. Warning bells should have been ringing. I have made it clear to Jack, as has Courtney during her biweekly diplomatic calls, that any zombies displaying abnormal behavior, the slightest signs of intelligence, should be brought down at once. The smart zombies, who we call smarties, are incredibly dangerous. They brought a force against us that drove us into the fallback point downtown for a week. They aren't to be underestimated...

  But the guard just watched in curiosity, and it was only when the zombie gave him one last look and backed away that he realized something was out of whack.

  As you can imagine, I am scared shitless for my sister and her family. I am worried about the people that live there (and there are a lot of them), and I am worried that the one place that left with the means to produce some technology is about to have its existence threatened.

  The rest of my day is probably going to be spent in council, all of us trying to figure out what exactly we can do to help them out. We can send some people, but I think that if that lone pilgrim manages to infect a big enough number of oth
er zombies with its own, better strain of the plague, there is no number that we could send that would make the difference.

  No, I think that if this becomes the fight I would lay money on it being, materials, training, and tactics are going to be the forces that tip the scale in favor of Jack and his people.

  I just hope that this is the beginning, and that the lone walker at the walls was just getting there, and that it wasn't a scout sent in to look around for weak points. If it still has to infect its own army, then there is a chance that there will be enough time to devise some strategies for victory. Or, at the least, survival.

  Is there a difference anymore?