Living With the Dead: The Bitter Seasons

by Joshua Guess

  And I have work to do. Scraped knees and split knuckles won't just fix themselves! Well, I guess technically they do fix themselves, but they'll do it much better and faster if I'm there to give a helping hand. Besides, my lunch break is over.

  Back when I was a nurse on the floor, passing meds and running flat-out most of the time, I rarely got a chance to stop and relax during my shifts. Lunches were unheard of. I guess in all the bad, you have to find little slivers to be thankful for, and that's one of mine. Meal breaks.

  I'll write again when I have some news for you.

  at 9:23 AM

  Thursday, February 3, 2011

  Glass House

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Jess and I are hunkered down right now in what used to be a rest area about a hundred and fifty miles away from Jack's. Our SUV's gas reserves are holding out well--we brought about a hundred extra gallons. We've been siphoning from anything we find anyway, just to be safe.

  Thank god we decided to take a smaller SUV, and loaded it up so well with provisions and fuel. We only did it in the first place because we were worried that we might get stuck somewhere and have to leave the engine running to stay warm. It ended up being a godsend, because the extra capacity has given us the ability to stay our longer and look a little harder for things we might need.

  We found some big caches of stuff, ranging from construction materials to a pretty large stock of fence, which we've been looking for pretty hard. The best find was a good sized town that was stripped bare of every scrap of food and valuables. Valuables under the old way of looking at things, not the way we look at them now. There wasn't any cash or jewelry to be found there, nor so much as a cracker. I guess you can chalk it up to the town being fairly isolated, but it seems like the people that looted it fled not long after, and no one stayed to try and hold their ground.

  If they had, we wouldn't have run across what amounts to a treasure trove of materials. There's a small factory that made plumbing supplies: pipe, hoses, fittings, the whole nine yards. There's a huge distribution center for lumber that has more stacks of planks, boards, timbers, and sheets of plywood than any place I've ever seen. Best of all, there are several flatbed trucks that have diesel in them, which means we can get loads down to Jack's provided Jess and I can make it there.

  It's a coin flip at the moment. Just in case we don't get out of here, I've sent detailed directions to all of the little caches of stuff we found over the last few days as well as a map to the town with the lumberyard.

  We stopped at this rest area to try and contact Jack's. This places we've been over the last two days have had zero cell service, and have been seemingly deserted by living people completely. The dead, however, seem to be numerous and omnipresent, which has made it slow going at times and difficult when one of us has to go to the bathroom.

  A good number of rest areas around the country have emergency cell towers run by solar arrays. I've mentioned that before several times, but it never hurts to repeat information that can be so valuable for a person on the run. We stopped here because our phones started getting signals, and we were eager to stretch out and catch a nap somewhere (anywhere, really) that wasn't the cramped interior of our CR-V.

  Lo and Behold, my friends and readers, it was a MIRACLE! Not only did we manage to climb in through an unlocked bathroom window, but the place was untouched. We broke into the vending machines and let me tell you: my first coke in months was like a bit of heaven. A little flat, and I didn't exactly search for an expiration date...but it was great. The snack machine still had some candy and chips in it, though we stuck with a few candies. We did check those for expiration dates. We weren't going to take too many risks...

  We found a couch inside the tiny office where the rest area attendant presumably worked when they weren't up front. The car was locked and safe outside, the doors were all secured, and Jess and I snuggled up together at about five this morning to catch a few z's. When we woke up a while ago, there were zombies clustered around the place thickly enough that busting out some of the glass and running just isn't an option.

  I don't know if we drew them here with the sound of our car crunching through the snow or what. I can hazard a guess that maybe a group of them were watching this place, a dim memory of motorists stopping here on a regular basis giving birth to the concept of an ambush. Sounds pretty smart. Which makes sense--there are smarties among the dead faces pressed against the heavy glass in the lobby. A lot of people ask how you can tell the difference just by looking at them; what makes the smarties stand out from their less intelligent brethren?

  Your average zombie has that thousand yard stare coupled with the knitted brows of a hungry beast angrily searching for a meal. It wanders aimlessly until it finds prey, and then it gets focused. A smarty can and will hold back the base instinct to feed if it sees a need. Its mannerisms are more controlled and methodical: it watches you, trying to figure you out. Sort of like the way Velociraptors were described in Jurassic Park. You're being studied by a walking corpse when you look at a smarty. A dead body that has thoughts about you and the best way to catch you.

  There are two pieces of information I will leave you with that seem important to pass on. I will let you decide if they matter or not. One is that the group that's currently putting a distressing amount of weight against the glass walls of the lobby are all covered in blood, and it looks fresh. They've been feeding. They're also covered in bits of fur, and a few have the mangled remains of what might be rabbits or squirrels in their hands. This group, anyway, has been doing what most zombies only do as a last resort--eat animals.

  This concerns me for several reasons. One is that they must be desperate for nutrients indeed if they are going so far as to eat animals--I've talked about that before, how they seem reluctant to do it. The other is the fear that given how easily the zombie plague seems to mutate, animals will start to be affected by the plague if they get such intimate exposure.

  The other piece of information I feel a need to share? There is one zombie in particular, one smarty, that seems especially intent on us. He's more alert than the others, his eyes almost human as he looks at me. He's watching me type on my phone as if he knows exactly what I'm doing. Every so often he raps a knuckle against the glass. I ignore him when he does this, though I do glance up without moving my head now and then, getting a look at him without letting him know I'm doing it. A few minutes ago, he slammed his hand into the window so hard that I couldn't stop my reaction--I looked up at him.

  And he smiled at me.

  You can imagine, it wasn't what I'd call a sunny grin. I've never seen the undead exhibit anything other than vacant stares or hungry rage. What I saw on his face might have been an instinctual reaction to my fear, but to me it seemed to be what it looked like: a joyous response to a predator that knows it has just frightened its prey to its core. A smile can mean so many things. I think this one means that there are depths to the smarties that we haven't considered.

  That's something to think about.

  at 11:32 AM

  Friday, February 4, 2011

  Thinking Inside The Box

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I don't know what kind of glass this place is made of, but it's a lot tougher than it looks. The zombies outside have been beating the hell out of it for most of the last day with rocks. There are scratches all over, but no spiderwebbing or cracks that I can see.

  We haven't been able to get any sleep since yesterday. The sound of stone against glass has been constant and in this small space it rings like a church bell every time. I haven't seen that creepy smart zombie for a while. I'm hoping he's given up and moved on. I doubt it--the numbers outside don't seem smaller, which means he's probably around here somewhere, waiting in some dark corner to jump out and scare the shit out of me. That smile reminds me of a clown. I fucking hate clowns.

  Jess and I are going to have to figure out a way to escape soon. There isn't any water here, and the soda in the mac
hine isn't really a solution for thirst in anything but a short term sense. We need water, real water, and soon. We're used to dealing with hunger, and we can survive a long time without food. I'm hoping it doesn't get that bad, honestly. I've been thinking of ways to escape since yesterday morning. None of the options so far are very pleasant to think about, and all of them are stupid risky. We're going to work on it today, and decide something by tomorrow morning if the situation here doesn't change drastically before then.

  Mason offered to lead a team up here to get us. I declined the offer (so far) because of two very important facts: the people at Jack's need him and his knowledge along with the training he's providing them. And, because while I can't get a solid count on how many zombies are out here, I am relatively sure that there are over a hundred. It would take a good sized team to distract that many of them, a much larger one to kill them. Which would risk every member of the team that did it. I'm just not willing to let so many people risk their lives for my wife and I.

  I'm not being a self-sacrificing douchebag, here. I'm all about getting out of this and heading back to Jack's. I just look at the situation with the proper math, and it tells me that as long as we are safely locked in here, there is no need to risk others to get us out. Two aren't worth the lives of a dozen. Not even two people as fantastically good looking as Jess and I.

  Mason didn't like it, really, but he agreed with me. He's so busy right now teaching SO many things to everyone at Jack's that he really doesn't have the time to come here. I mean, he could, certainly, but he's trying to cram a lifetime of skills and knowledge into a few months at best. He knows what happened to my people at the compound, and he's eager to help the people at Jack's (and we refugees) learn all they and we can in the hopes that such catastrophes can be avoided in the future. It's not perfect, of course--there's no way anyone can perfect any of the things that he's teaching in such a short time. He is giving people a good basic knowledge of a lot of things--woodland survival, urban and wilderness movement training (so you don't get caught), some down and dirty fighting techniques, how to make weapons out of just about anything...plus a wide strata of knowledge about all kinds of things--materials that are commonly found most places and how they can be utilized for survival, weapons, etc. The weakest parts of the human body and how to exploit them.

  There's a LOT o stuff. There are people working with him to copy it all down to use as the basis for some manuals. Aaron is working especially closely with Mason to try and unify all of the different pieces of what he knows into one big, scary lesson on how to survive. How to kill.

  And damn it, how to be creative about it. That's important.

  I talk a whole lot about "the world as it is" and "the world we now live in". It's a delineation that most of us make without thinking about it, but it's vital that we DO think about it. Right now we're like kids in a giant, zombie infested candy store: the world ended less than a year ago, and the corpse of society is still fresh enough that we can pick off the best parts. Gasoline is still around, metals are still plentiful. There are, as you read yesterday, still literally hundreds of tons of usable, cut wood to be taken. There's even canned food to be found, though it's starting to get a lot harder to do that.

  We have to be creative to survive in the long term. We have to think around corners, outside of boxes, and be five steps ahead of our enemies. The situation Jess and I are in is proof of that--it's Darwin plain and simple. More, survivors have to start looking into the far future and start thinking about what problems will be ahead once the easy stockpiles of supplies, the useful but finite leftovers of a society that was, are gone.

  I'm worried that we won't get out of this building for a lot of reasons. I love my wife and I want to be with her, safe. That's the biggest one. I love my friends and family, and I want to grow old with them (as unlikely as that seems at times). That's close behind.

  Also--I love people. In general. I love humanity for every flaw and every virtue. I want so much to see how we move along from here. I can't do that if I die in a glass cage surrounded by an army of the hungry dead, and one smirking bastard intent on creeping me out.

  I guess it's time I get creative, too...

  at 9:36 AM

  Saturday, February 5, 2011

  Homemade Hero

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Zip ties. Duct tape. Lots of paper. Extra clothes. Blankets. Sleeping bag. Wet floor signs. Wood paneling torn from the walls and desk.

  Rolls of toilet paper soaked in flammable cleaning fluids. A broom handle broken at the base.

  This was my armor, these were our weapons. Jess climbed onto the roof of the rest area from the inside. Thank god the office window was high enough that she could reach up and snag the eave. She almost didn't make it up, but the tiny bathroom in the office has its own exhaust vent, and she was able to grab the pipe coming out of the roof and pull herself up. I swung the broom handle at the heads of the few zombies that came close. They didn't crowd the back of the building as much, not reckoning on us coming out that way.

  When her hand floated down, I slung the backpack full of toilet paper and cleaner toward it. She gave me the all clear, and I made my way into the lobby.

  I had to have looked like and idiot. I was wearing every stitch of extra clothing we'd brought inside with us. Heavy sweater, winter coat. On top of that we'd layered paper thickly, held together with duct tape. Everything from copy paper to those brochures that are all over rest areas ("Welcome to Michigan!"). It was strong, but left my joints exposed. It had to, since the weight of it reduced my mobility to a frightening degree. Over that, sections of desk paneling, the wet floor signs, and pieces of anything flat and hard were taped and zip tied all over me. In my right hand I carried my makeshift spear--the broom handle. On my left forearm one of the plastic doors from a bathroom stall (thankfully those cheap half-stalls. I couldn't carry a full sized one) was waiting, zip ties through messily drilled holes for me to hold it like a shield.

  I went to the front door, and waited with my thumb and forefinger on the lock. As soon as I unlocked it, the smart zombies would start shaking the doors. They opened outward, so it would only take a second for them to get at me. I waited, sweating in my horrible makeshift armor, wishing distantly that we'd found a football helmet or something. My head was exposed, though I looked like I was wearing a turtleneck made of gray spaghetti. It was a mop head, pulled tight and tied off. Sexy, I know.

  Two loud thumps came from the roof. That was the ten second warning. I set myself, raised my "spear", and when the last thump came, watched as arcs of flame came down into the crowd of zombies at the door. Several of the rolls of toilet paper unfurled as they flew, loosened and rerolled by Jess and I to give them a chance to spread out when thrown, even soaked with chemicals.

  My eyes darted to the CR-V parked twenty feet away. It was a short distance, but an impossible one through the crowd before me. The trek started looking more likely as the zombies panicked at the rain of fire from above them. They started to move away as Jess pelted them with flaming paper, making a rough corridor through to the SUV.

  I threw the bolt, and the noise got the attention of several zombies that were still close. They rushed the doors, which were balanced to open easily, and I waited until they were almost to it before I kicked the hell out of it. The doors flew open and smashed them in the face. The force of it, along with the surprise, knocked them backwards. My heavy frame barreling into them, "shield" held out like a battering ram, took them to the ground.

  Honestly, I don't remember the run to the car. I recall slinging my hands about, possibly hitting zombies with the stall door. I know I slung my broom handle at some heads, but I can't imagine that I did more than irritate one or two of them. When I reached the CR-V, I glanced down at the keys, duct-taped to the front of my awesome, awesome armor. Good thing I looked before I grabbed for them, because that little glance saved my life.

  That smiling bastard, the smarty who had been messing
with my head, was under the car. I saw his hand shoot out, and I pulled my foot back. He squirmed on his back far more quickly than I was comfortable with, trying to work his way free and get hold of me. I was so focused on him that I didn't notice the zombies crowding around me. Only seconds since I'd run from the doors, yet they were already swarming.

  I felt hands tearing at the paper and plastic covering me. I bent over, trying to get my head away from them, and the smiling zombie reached up toward my face. I didn't think about it; I just slammed the stall door down on his head as hard as I could. It caught him right in the mouth, and I could hear the hollow crack as I broke his spine, probably his jaw, and apparently severed what passed for his spinal cord. He stopped moving at once.