Living With the Dead: The Bitter Seasons

by Joshua Guess

  I wish there was something we could do to help, but we were given orders not to fight. We don't have much in the way of guns or ammo with us as supplies are still very low. Courtney brought some with her, but her team had trouble finding people willing to trade for ammo, which is totally understandable. We've mainly got handheld, melee weapons with us, which wouldn't do a lot in a fight with what looks like at least four hundred zombies.

  Maybe if we were driving some of the modified vehicles that worked so well during the huge attack a few months ago up here, we could make a difference. We're not. Those things aren't used for scouting trips. So, instead of driving in to the crowd of undead and mowing them down in a blaze of glory, we wait.

  It's surprising how much waiting you do in your life when distractions like television and the like are gone. It takes a lot of work to make daily living happen nowadays, but there are still long periods of time where there's nothing to do but sit and talk, or look out at the world around you. I'm sitting here tapping away on my phone, glancing up occasionally to make sure the swarm hasn't breasted the berm of dirt that makes the base of the wall around Jack's. It hasn't, though the piles of broken blacktop and debris that form the wall itself are littered with bodies. I hope they're the enemy...

  Hmm. Pause!

  Ok, sorry. I never know when to insert something that mentions time has passed between paragraphs, but now it's about twenty minutes later than it was before I said "Pause!". Jess got a call while I was typing, telling us to drive around the far western and eastern sides of the clearing that Jack's is in. The lookouts there saw movement in the trees and wanted confirmation. We got it; looks like a hundred or more zombies waiting in the little woods that are left around here. They're getting antsy and shuffling around.

  We're back to our little hilltop. Nothing seems to have changed on the walls at Jack's.

  As I look at the building that houses the majority of his people, I'm realizing something that had been in the back of my mind for a while. I've been thinking about it without knowing I've been doing it, I guess.

  Nature is going to take back almost every square foot of land we ever stole from her. Back at our own compound, we had some animals around that moved from house to house, grazing on the bits of grass that hadn't been plowed up for growing food. Most of our yards, back and front, had been broken up to make farm land. For us, there wasn't a lot of upkeep on yard work. We took down all of the trees within the compound. Our numbers made it easy to do the little maintenance required.

  Jack's is the same. The vast majority of the ground inside the walls is for growing food, and the kudzu and other creeping plants that try to move up the walls of the buildings here are killed by the citizens here regularly. It seems that most places that have a decent amount of people tend toward being neat and untouched by the destructive power of a living, growing thing.

  Elsewhere, though...

  We've been scouting off and on since we've been here. It's winter and the ground is mantled in snow, but the signs are still there to see. Grass left uncut for months sticks out through the smooth white coat everywhere you look. Houses are being covered in vines, though many are brown and dormant right now. Weeds are breaking through the concrete all over.

  It says something deep to me. Seeing the slow march of earth's greenery, temporarily halted though it is by the season, take over and break apart the things that have marred the beauty of the land amazes me. It's a perfect example of the persistence of life. I don't want to get all emo here, so let me quote a movie: Life finds a way.

  It really does. The slow crawl of creepers over brick, shattering them with time and pressure, is an obvious and awesome example to be sure. Think also of people, survivors; we're converting a factory into something that will make food, grow living things. It will take time and effort, but we will make life work there. Plants do as their genetics command them. Are we any different? Our chromosomes are packed with the base pairs that give us conscious thought, creativity, and ingenuity. The structure of our cells makes we human beings strive to not just live, but to alter our circumstances consciously to better survive. To thrive. Spectacular.

  And I am reminded, as I look at the figures methodically bringing makeshift spears and clubs down on the advancing hordes of undead, that our most prevalent enemy is perhaps the best example of life's determination to persist that I can find. Something--a bacteria, fungus, or parasite--infiltrates our bodies as we live and breathe. From what we can tell, it learns us and how our bodies operate. When we die, that silent invader takes the empty shell and makes it useful again. Makes it walk and survive.

  And eat.

  Terrible, it's true, but remember also the adaptability of whatever it is that reanimates our dead. It got better at using the intelligence of the its host (us), making the smarties. Thankfully only a small number of zombies seem to be able to handle that strain of the disease, or we'd probably all be dead. Think about the much greater (I would guess approaching total) number of them that have adapted to the cold. We went from not seeing any undead when it got below forty five degrees or so, to watching them move toward us, half frozen, when we ourselves could barely move even within the layers of clothes we wear.

  Human beings adapt by changing the circumstances we're in. Sort of like Captain Kirk hacking the computer that gave him the Kobayashi Maru test, the unbeatable scenario now winnable through his manipulation of the test itself. (If you don't know this reference...shame on you. Everyone should! Ask a nerd about it.) We do that--changing the rules around us to make survival and thriving possible.

  Zombies, though, seem to change themselves. That's a huge advantage. If human beings were capable of single-generation mutations that way, there's no telling how far we could have gotten. It's staggering to think that we face something like that, and fills my heart with pride to know that we've stood against it and found ourselves equal to the task.

  Time will be the judge of which way is ultimately better. It will have to be us or them eventually, and we're tough. We won't lose easily.

  Back to watching the battle. We will try to get in through the gate if there's any break in the fighting. I don't have much hope for that anytime soon; my instinct says this will be a long, long day of waiting...and thinking about the way our enemies work.

  at 9:46 AM

  Friday, January 28, 2011

  Lead Us Not

  Posted by Josh Guess

  We were stuck outside Jack's compound until almost dark yesterday. Zombies kept coming in relatively small but steady waves, but a just before the sun set an indescribably cold mass of air swept in. The majority of the undead are resistant to cold now, but in less than an hour it dropped from about twenty degrees to below zero, and kept on falling.

  Below zero, even the SnowTroopers freeze up.

  Someone had, at some point during the fracas, come up with the brilliant idea to run a hose out to the wall where the main force of the attack was happening. Jack's people have done this before, you may recall, but this time they weren't electrocuting the undead. They were soaking them.

  They didn't use more than a few hundred gallons, easily replaced in the water tower with snow. The thing is heated, so we can just pile snow in there until it's topped off again. We drove closer as the cold front dropped down on us like a lead coat; if it was going to get so cold that our vehicles might not work, we wanted to be able to at least try a run for the walls.

  I got to watch as the zombies slowly froze. First it was their clothing. Those that weren't mostly naked from the constant wear and tear of their unchanging outfits turning them into rags were slowed down first. The ice restricted their movements as it stiffened the cloth. Then their skin started to frost over, eyeballs hardening next. It took a while, but as they got really slow my team moved in, breaking skulls open and cutting off the heads of the undead. It was really easy at that point, and the ones that managed not to get hosed down hurried off when they saw how outnumbered they were. A few took backwards g
lances at us. Hunger is a powerful driver.

  We're staying here in the compound until it gets warmer. It's about ten below right now, and none of us want to risk getting caught in that. Not only for our own sake, but we also don't want to chance ruining vehicles, either.

  While the sudden cold certainly helped with the zombie attack, they would have lost eventually. Jack's people are too practiced and too numerous to be taken that way. They have some technology that helps them against big swarms, but this attack wasn't bad enough to call in the big guns. It was just annoyingly long. It does give me some ideas about alternative defenses, though...I'll have to talk to Jack about that sometime soon.

  This place is on minimal crew right now. There are people at the guard posts, kept warm by fires near the small buildings they're in (as well as those very hot rocks I mentioned the other day). There are lookouts on the roof, also in small shacks that have heat pumped directly to them from their own fires inside the main building. The rest of us are cuddled up inside the wooden barracks inside, people going out in turns to throw logs on the fire and shuffling around the heated stones that warm our plywood quarters.

  This intense cold and the lack of work have given me a lot of time this morning to think about where we are. By 'we' I mean the refugees from the compound. Most of us have made it to Jack's now, and I expect word from Dodger, Jamie, or my brother any day about locating Patrick and his girls. More than a hundred of us, and we're getting comfortable here. I don't like that.

  Don't get me wrong, Jack and his folks have made this a great place to live. Mason has made a point of telling us how the people of this place are way ahead of the folks back at Google in some ways. He's taken a like to Jack's, and is teaching the people here many...interesting things.

  It's just that I don't want us to get too comfortable. I know that probably goes without saying, and I don't think that any of my people will forget about those left in the clutches of the Richmond soldiers back home. I just don't want to get so used to being here that we start making excuses to put off our eventual attempt to get home. I guess this worries me so much because I know we're going to be here for a while, at least through the worst parts of winter.

  Maybe I'm just worrying too much, I don't know. I'm snuggled up next to my wife, whose arm is draped over my waist as I lay here and type. I'm warm, comfortable, and there's a box of cereal bars next to me that are calling my name. It would be all too easy to get used to this.

  If I can feel that way, the guy who founded the compound in Kentucky in the first place, how much easier would it be for someone who came afterward? I couldn't blame them, of course.

  I just don't want to lose people to the easy choice, knowing that a harder one is down the road.

  at 8:31 AM

  Saturday, January 29, 2011

  Atropos' Shears

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Today, I experienced one of the most horrifying events of my life. It shook me to a degree I didn't know was possible.

  Before The Fall, I was a Nurse Aide. I took care of the elderly, injured, and sick for a living. It's certainly not an easy job, and while physically difficult, the emotional trauma of doing the job any length of time weighs down on you. Watching people you care for grow more out of touch with reality, seeing family members get sadder every day as their loved ones drift away and become lost inside themselves...it's horrible. Seeing death is awful, but seeing it and being the one who has to care for the body after it's stopped being a person and become a shell is something that leaves a mark on your soul. You learn to deal with it better, but it never stops hurting.

  When The Fall came, making the decision to stop going to work was one of the hardest I ever had to make. I didn't talk about it then and I don't really want to talk about it now, but I have to. You'll understand when I'm done.

  In Frankfort, the zombies spread like wildfire. By the time they'd hit us, people all over the country knew something terrible, something world-changing, was happening. At the nursing home I worked at, the families of the residents were taking their loved ones in droves. By the time The Fall had reached a point where most people weren't going to work and most of the machinery of civilization was in chaos, there were only about twenty people left. Twenty souls who had been wards of the state, or whose families lived too far away to come get them.

  Or had no one left to come for them. Worse, one or two just had families that didn't come get them. By choice.

  I find it hard to blame them, honestly. I quit going to work when the numbers got that low, when everyone who was going to be taken from the facility was taken from it. By that point, society had taken a dive and was shuddering its last breath face first in the dirt. I was told by my boss that the remaining residents would be taken to a secure location run by the military. That the rest of my coworkers had been told to stay home, lock up, and keep themselves safe.

  I told myself I believed that, but over time I came to doubt it. I think my boss was trying to save my life, and told me what I wanted to hear so I didn't feel as guilty about caring for my own first. What it boils down to is that I don't honestly know if those folks were ever rescued. I did the right thing in taking care of myself and my family. I don't feel that choice in itself was immoral or unethical. But I do feel like shit about it, and I should. I made the right choice, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a terrible choice to have to make.

  All I know now, looking back, is that when we raided the place I used to work at, there were no people there. Not living, not dead, not zombies. No one. The doors were locked and everything was relatively neat. Maybe they did make it out. I hope so.

  I'm telling you all of that so you can understand something: taking care of others is my nature. Protecting and saving people is ingrained deeply into me. I was a good CNA. Every person that died while I was doing the job has a place in my mind, their faces clear as day. When I think about them, it hurts. But I remember them with fondness also, because I grew to know them, to love them, to joke and enjoy their company.

  I've seen a lot of death. At work, it was most often from the rigors of age or illness, once in a great while a complication from surgery. After The Fall, it was most often from zombie attacks or the violence of marauders. Today, it was different.

  Jack, the man who has led the people of this compound to do amazing things, to survive against all odds, died in my arms.

  I was working in the clinic overnight, since it's still too cold to go out on scout runs. It's been a while since I used my skills as an aide, but it's not rocket science. I moved from person to person, checking vital signs, adjusting injured limbs for comfort, even fluffing pillows. I did some wound care as well--between my mom and Gabby, I'm well trained for it.

  Jack came in at about five this morning, complaining of a very upset stomach. Phil was the doctor on duty, and did his thing, checking bowel sounds and various other things. Jack took some medicine to calm his stomach, but it didn't help. Nausea, cramps, feeling full when he hadn't eaten anything, all of that got worse and worse.

  At seven this morning, I went to check on Jack as he lay propped up on the cot we'd put in a corner of the clinic for him. He was laying crooked, his eyes distant, blood welling up from his mouth and running in dark rivers down the side of his face. I ran to him, turned him on his side and watched in horror as what seemed like gallons of the stuff poured out onto the floor. I screamed for Phil, but as I held him I felt his lack of breath, my free hand reached his neck just in time to feel the last few, feeble beats of his struggling heart before it stopped.

  When it did, the face of every person who had died ran through my mind. Every resident from work, every fellow citizen from the compound, every friend and loved one over the years of my life. Now, this man, who had done the impossible in gathering and saving almost a thousand people with nothing but his iron will and a determination to survive that I have never seen matched, was gone.

  I can't tell you why this particular death hit me so hard. I've lost
less people than some, but my mother and my unborn son were among them. Those deaths wounded me, and I grieved. But seeing Jack die so suddenly, so messily...I don't know why. Call me a broken record. I can only say that my mind can't let go of the image of his face and the pool of blood beneath him. My fingers still feel an imaginary tingle from the memory of his pulse going quiet beneath them. My ears ring with the faint gurgle that dwindled to silence as that last uncatchable breath was given up for lost. The smell of old blood, rich and coppery, won't leave me.

  So, I had to write. It's my way of dealing. Today, it isn't helping at all. People all over are grieving for the loss of a great man, and no amount of trying to distract myself will erase the impression of his passing from my mind. It hurts, and it disturbs me, and it makes me sick to my stomach.

  So why can't I cry?

  at 8:35 AM

  Monday, January 31, 2011

  Viking Funeral

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I'm surprised at how well the residents here at Jack's compound have dealt with his death. I suppose I shouldn't be--he was an incredibly thoughtful and thorough man, and he had this place prepared to lose him almost from day one. He certainly knew how to plan ahead.