Living With the Dead: The Bitter Seasons

by Joshua Guess

  I almost don't want to say this, but this blog has always been about the truth no matter how hurtful or disturbing, so I will: Jack died while I was with him, and I did the last rite that all survivors have drilled into them. We don't talk about it much because of how awful it really is, but I think that by not doing so, we have done a disservice to the people who read this early on, and were not warned.

  I am talking about what to do with the freshly dead, of course.

  In the very early days, not many people were aware that all of us seem to be infected with the plague that makes us reanimate into zombies. Many died when a loved one or close friend gave in to sickness or injury, only to come back shortly thereafter and feed upon them. Every survivor I know has learned the hard way to give that last rite I mentioned--severe head trauma. Luckily I was at the clinic where there are tools for that purpose within reach of all the beds, death there always being a possibility. I didn't have to go far, and I did the deed myself. I had felt Jack die, been there with him as the last threads of life wore through and parted. I owed his soul the comfort of knowing that his mortal coil would not become the enemy.

  I won't go into detail other than that. Most of you have probably done it in one way or another. Guns, hammers, a simple chunk of rock. It all ends up being the same. We had to do it for my mom when she died, though I was lucky enough not to be the one to do it.

  I'm glad I was there for Jack. Because of my presence, I was able to do the thing quickly, and left him unmarred and perfect for the funeral yesterday. It was a beautiful if simple ceremony, one used for everybody that dies here when possible. Jack came up with it, and it's as functional as it is meaningful.

  For about an hour, Jack's body rested on a bier set about thirty feet from the wall. People walked by it constantly, laying fingers on his hands or touching his cheek. Every one of them left something there, something small. Most were twigs or bits of cloth, some left things like playing cards and novels. To my great amusement, Jack's named successor and friend Susan Martin left the entire Twilight Saga there with him. I asked her about it later, and she told me that he secretly loved the series, and that she couldn't stand it. This way, she told me, both of them are happy--Jack goes into the hereafter with them, and she gets to watch them burn.

  An hour and almost a thousand people later, Jack's bier was loaded so heavily with flammable objects that Jack himself was almost obscured. The bier was a piece of aluminum machined out solely for the purpose of funerals, and all around the edges there were little holes. I didn't understand what they were for until I saw the men bringing over a cage, which they put over Jack and his accumulated fuel. The gaps in it were small, less than an inch between the lines of the fencing that made it up. The workers ran retaining pins through it, locking it on.

  It was a quarter hour later when a shout came from the wall. One of the funeral attendees ran inside the main building. With surprising speed, men brought a strange machine from inside it. It looked like a piece of train track, but with a block of steel on one end, all hooked up to big tanks. The men on the wall pointed sent a runner down to talk to the men setting up the machine. They loaded Jack's bier onto it, right next to the block of steel, and I was beginning to wonder exactly what was going on when I heard a clatter come from the machinery behind the steel block, and I watched as the far end of the rail raised up. After a minute it became clear; Jack's funeral bier was sitting at the bottom of a goddamn launcher.

  At signals from some of the guys on the wall, the angle and direction were fine tuned, and at a final signal, one of the men running the machine ran around and threw a bucket of something over the bier and it's contents.

  Then he threw a match.

  The thing started burning, and after about twenty seconds, it started burning VERY brightly. Then they launched him. I watched the thing go over the wall like a shooting star, so bright I had to squint, and then I saw a bunch of the people on the wall chuck what looked like small bags of stuff out after it. I was pretty curious about the whole thing, so I walked up and looked over.

  There was a crowd of zombies, and they were on fire. More of them were catching as I watched. The guard next to me saw the look on my face an explained: Jack wanted every death to mean something, even if the death itself seemed meaningless. Every person should, if possible, take a number of the enemy out with them. It was amazing to watch, the guard pointing to a small bag at his waist and explaining that it was a mixture of magnesium and a few other flammable materials. No wonder the zombies went up like candles...

  The whole thing kind of took my breath away. After all, who expects the last moment of a funeral, usually a somber occasion, to end up the ejection of the deceased's fiery corpse into a swarm of the living dead? I didn't. But I can't fault it. It's not how we did things, but I understand the need for a show, for the people to see the departed well and truly gone. Philosophically it makes sense--zombie population reduced, reusable cage and bier, abundant supplies of insanely dangerous explosive metals reduced in a useful way...

  Jack thought of every possibility. He named a successor, Susan, a person who worked with him every day and knows how this place works. He wanted the transition to be seamless, and it has been so far as I can tell. He did amazing things here, but he made it clear from the beginning that he was in charge. That attitude and surety of leadership has allowed the people here to accomplish much, and it all came from a man with an iron will who was simply not going to let his people die.

  Again, and not to dilute the power of the word, I say that's just amazing. More so because when I look at what he accomplished, I think of Jack the leader, Jack the strategist, Jack who saw the possibilities and set up his moves ten steps ahead of the game. I almost never think about what he was before The Fall. Most of us just don't see the people we used to be and the people we are as the same. Probably because we're not.

  Jack used to be an accounting person at the factory that used to be housed in the main building of his compound. He started here years ago as, or all things, a janitor. He went to school for years and mopped the floors at night, working toward something better.

  That's almost poetic to me. That is how I will remember Jack, how I will think of him when the lack of his company strikes my heart. I will remember him as a man who worked for the betterment of himself, but equally concerned with the welfare of others. A man who saw the need for a strong leader, and became that leader out of necessity rather than lust for power. Who Jack was and what he became exemplify the qualities in people that I most appreciate, the things that give me hope for our species and the drive to save it.

  His life can essentially be boiled down to this: a janitor that saved the lives of almost a thousand people, with nothing but his brain and common sense.

  He will be missed.

  at 8:39 AM

  Tuesday, February 1, 2011

  All Our Blood Runs Red

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Jess and I are headed out on a scout run, this time just the two of us. She's driving to give me a chance to blog. We're doing a long-distance trip this time, looking farther away than we've gone from Jack's before to look for more chain link fencing and other supplies. The vibe around Jack's is weird right now, but not for the reason you might think; rather than being quiet, reserved, or outright upset, Jack's people seem remarkably undisturbed by their leader's passing.

  Death is a bigger part of our lives than it ever was before The Fall. We've gotten used to the possibility of seeing our friends die, and it was a necessary adaptation. It might seem cold or heartless to you, but I've said it before: if we broke down and grieved as the dead deserved, we would never have time for anything else.

  Think of it this way--we're surrounded by walking tragedies all the time. The zombies that caused the world to come apart at the seams were people once, the good and bad alike. Early on we saw folks we knew coming to kill and eat us, and at the time the shock was so great that all we could do was roll with it and defend ourse
lves. We joked and made light, but over time the faces of the living dead start to leave an impression on you. Brief glimpses of expressions on them, as if they were remembering a dream. Seeing a child shambling toward you with a look of anguish from the hunger that drives her twists something inside you, and it should.

  The biggest reason why we are able to harden our hearts against them, against death in general, is because those of us who have survived push all that pent up emotion onto the living. It's damn hard to feel regret for lopping off the head of your old pastor when he's missing an arm and covered in the blood of some poor soul, trying to eat someone whose heart still beats, whose infinite potential hasn't been reduced to stumbling around trying to eat people.

  We, the living, are the only chance humanity has to survive and once again become the dominant species on earth. Anyone who's reading this who doesn't think that I'm right, that mankind is still number one? I suggest you fire a gun and wait for the crowds of zombies to roll in. They aren't us anymore, and they outnumber us thousands to one at the least. We've been reduced to a race that must struggle to get by every day, the evolution that took our natural protections from the elements in exchange for intelligence and creative thinking. Yeah, we can make complex machinery, but without fur we're hard pressed to survive in temperatures below the fifties.

  Until and unless we can rebuild enough infrastructure to make living comfortable (or at least tolerable) rather than just survivable, each other is all we've got. Jack's people are different, and that makes sense. Each group of survivors should be. After all, every pocket of the living around the country share characteristics--too many people stuck together in too small a space for way too long. Almost always hungry and lacking creature comforts, constantly fighting to stay alive against mother nature, the living dead, and other human beings. When you apply that kind of pressure to one person and let it simmer, history shows us that the person will change. You put a few dozen or a few hundred of them together, and the group tends toward similar trends in reaction, attitude, logic, you name it.

  The key to making society one day work again is making sure that no matter how different the groups of us (or the individuals for that matter) end up being, we all work toward the same goals. That was the major failing of civilization as it was--too many people ignored or hated others or their ideas, and agreement on anything of civilization-wide importance was usually false when reached, and most often not reached at all.

  So, while I personally think the display Jack's people put on when one of them dies is over-the-top and unnecessary, I'm not about to let it get between us. If they want a grand display to accompany their dead into the afterlife, more power to them. It's just not the way I think things should be done. It doesn't risk lives or safety, which is the gauge I measure most things by, as do most others. As long as it meets that criteria, it isn't a problem for me.

  The real challenge will be seeing if we can keep that mindset if and when things get easier down the road. Into the far future we're working toward, where electricity warms our homes and ovens (oh dear god, how I miss you, ovens) heat our food. When taking a jog doesn't include bringing a weapon, and having a picnic can be...well, anywhere outside of a walled fortress. Will we be able to continue to work together then? Can we act in unison as a species when the threat of consumption by our dead isn't the overwhelmingly huge problem it is right now?

  I don't know, but I have a lot of hope that we can manage it.

  Wow, I kind of went on for a but there, didn't I? I've been meaning to try and keep things a little more down to earth here lately, keep you guys informed about what's going on with everybody and try to give updates on the situation we face with the Richmond soldiers. The truth is, things haven't changed all that much over the last eleven months: life is still life. I'm not in a gripping struggle against an enemy every day, and I don't get updates from people unless they have something to tell me. When I know, you'll know.

  Although I do want to tell everyone out there about Mason and the lessons he's giving a lot of people (including me) back at Jack's. Learning from someone like him is a whole education in Things I Don't Know. His skillset is immense, and he makes my ten years of martial arts look like nothing. I'm looking forward to telling you all about it.

  Just not today. We're getting into some rural-ish areas, and my bars are fluctuating as I peck away at my phone to write this. I'll leave off here, and save Mason for another day, maybe tomorrow.

  Be safe, and remember that the person you disagree with may be the man or woman in the trenches with you tomorrow. Remember what's important, and as my mom used to say, "Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's all small stuff."

  Her favorite quote, and especially apt now.

  at 9:31 AM

  Wednesday, February 2, 2011

  Upgrade

  Posted by Gabrielle

  Hey all, long time no see. Post. Whatever.

  Josh and Jessica are still away. He called last night to let us know that their signals were getting weak and that they might lose contact. I decided that since I haven't been very active on the blog lately that I'd give you an update on what's been going on in the clinic and maybe a different perspective on how the people around here are dealing with losing Jack.

  First--the clinic. A while back I talked about how we were looking for things to make it better. It's been a big task, finding and safely transporting equipment in the unpredictable and terrible weather we've had lately. The good news is, we've made big steps. There is now a fairly well stocked area of the clinic that houses an x-ray machine (digital, no old-school stuff here), several dialysis machines (along with a lot of supplies for them--we found an untouched dialysis clinic), enough materials to build a small but fully supplied operating room, and lots of other stuff.

  The biggest problem was putting it all together without draining too much power from the grid here. We've got a pretty steady flow of patients for one thing or another, though thankfully the flood of them has tapered away over the last week. Keeping some of our equipment on and plugged in could mean the difference between life and death. So we had to work on a solution that wouldn't overtax the power.

  As some of you might remember, one of the things that used to be made in this complex of factories was solar panels. Jack's has a lot of them hooked up, but the weaker sunlight in winter means less efficiency and less power. Not to mention that adding more of them, building the cases to hold them and running cable, etc, is pretty much impossible given the current weather conditions. We're running on the main power system right now, but we're still concerned that the breakers will blow if someone switches on a bank of lights elsewhere in the building. Remember that there is a machine shop and one or two presses working most of the time. That eats a lot of juice.

  There are a few decent sized turbines left from the big spate of construction Jack's people went through last year, when they were stealing anything that could produce power. We talked to some of the engineers about setting up a wind turbine just for the clinic to take some of the load off of the main supply. They told us that the same problems with installing new solar panels would exist if we tried to build a new wind turbine.

  That's a shame, because it's been windy as hell lately. We need the power, though...and someone came up with a pretty good idea: why not set up the core of the turbine indoors, in a frame, and make it person-powered? Exercise is good for people, especially during winter. We took that idea to the engineers, and they seemed to think that it would work. The guy I talked to went on about gear ratios and material stress. I tried to look interested, but my specialty is putting people together, not machines.

  It's going to be a few days at least before we hear anything about that--they have to do all sorts of calculations before they can put anything together. That's fine with me, I don't want some big contraption coming apart while people are using it. A bunch of injured people would weaken us as a community, not to mention a stupid amount of extra work for me.

 
; I have to admit, it has been strange seeing the natives of Jack's compound react to his death. Or, more accurately, not react to it. I saw something similar back at our own compound, but on a smaller scale and not as widespread. I get that people nowadays have to deal with grief quickly and then move on to the job at hand. We did that back home pretty well. The people here had their moment at Jack's funeral, and then nothing. No one talks about it. No one talks about him. It's as if by dying Jack became someone that never existed.

  Most of my own people, the refugees from Kentucky and the folks we've gathered to us since we escaped, still call this place Jack's. Every time one of the natives hears me call it that, they react in the smallest way. A frown, a tiny expression of surprise. Some people work through their pain by thinking about it. Here, the trend seems to be ignoring and suppressing until the pain goes away.

  I'm not judging. Please don't think that. We're at a point in our fight with mother nature and the zombies at the walls where none of us can afford to be judgmental about how others get through it. As I think about that sentence, I realize that Josh might be right--we have to think about the long term, and plan for what to do when the threats we face are lessened. I said we can't afford to be judgmental because of how bad things are...but should we become so just because the threats are gone? It's complicated to think about.