Living With the Dead: Year One (Books 1-2, Bonus Material)

by Guess, Joshua; Ribken, Annetta; Ayers, Rachel; Whitwam, Lori

  I'm proud of them, I will admit. Resisting an occupying force is ballsy, and resisting just enough to keep them from doing anything more than guard the walls and get irritated is brilliant. I'm going to do my best to get in touch with the source inside the compound directly. I'd like to get a first hand account of how things have been since we ran.

  One other contributing factor in how busy the Richmond soldiers are is the damn zombies. What started out as a small fraction of the total zombie population (which we called SnowTroopers) that are capable of functioning in the cold has now grown into a major problem. It seems that whatever mutation causes cold resistance in the zombie population spreads much easier and faster than the one that makes some of them smart. More and more of them have been popping up here, even in the last day, and word from the compound is that they are seeing daily numbers close to what we used to see in the fall. Dozens walking the walls at any given time, bursts of hundreds on bad days.

  They've got the improved defenses that Will worked on for weeks at their disposal, of course. As much as I hate that fucker for giving us up to his Richmond friends, I have to tip my hat once again to his evil genius when it comes to defensive measures.

  I'm taking a turn at sentry before long, so I need to wrap this up. One last thing I'd like to ask all of you out there--if you run in to anyone from the compound, try to help them get in touch with us. We want to try to get anyone and everyone who isn't currently either with Courtney and her group or trying to save his family (Patrick) here as soon as possible. We always seem to flourish as a group.

  at 9:31 AM

  Wednesday, December 29, 2010

  Unify

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Over the last day I've managed to get in touch with almost every refugee that managed to escape the compound. Since most of them are bunched together in groups, it wasn't that hard to contact at least one from each group. The only person who is still unaccounted for is Patrick, but he'll get in touch when he can. I'm pretty sure that everyone else is planning on heading this way, except for Courtney's group. They are still running their relief effort with a lot of momentum, so she wants to keep at it.

  Actually, talking to Courtney this morning is the whole reason for this post. She updated me on a lot of what she, Steve, and the others have been up to. Little David is still with them, slowly coming to terms with losing Darlene to the Richmond soldiers when they came to take the compound from us.

  Courtney passed on a lot of information to me, and I want to share it with you, because while the individual pieces might not be much alone, together they make a pretty interesting picture...

  First is that recently her convoy has been making trips north. They've been as far as South Dakota in their efforts to help survivors struggling to cope with the winter along with the plague of zombies. That far north, the cold isn't just awful; it's sometimes deadly. What she saw there was swarms of zombies, none of them seeming to suffer from the cold at all beyond a little stiffness as they moved. People from her convoy confirmed multiple sightings of active zombies pretty much everywhere they went. So it looks like whatever mutation is causing them to develop cold resistance has either spread or at least become active almost everywhere. We suspected this, since so many people have reported seeing or fighting zombies since winter began, but this brings us data from a dozen states in a period of only a few weeks.

  The second main thing we talked about was how successful her trip has been. At first she and her group left the compound to work with a coalition of volunteers from several other large survivor communities we had gotten in contact with. You'll recall that we managed to secure some awesome donations of manpower, vehicles, and supplies to make the trip possible. You might also remember that some of the large communities were reluctant to lend aid or supplies, but eventually gave in to help. The cool news here is that along their way, Courtney's people have discovered many more groups of survivors. Some of them have even joined the relief effort, giving fuel, people, vehicles, food...you name it. Many more of them decided to join with other groups to the south, bringing everything with them they could haul. This has resulted in a huge influx of people and needed materials to the south, swelling the number of people in the larger communities while also bolstering their supplies. Which, any way you cut it, is sweet.

  The last thing we talked about was pretty awesome.

  Most of the people that Courtney and the others talked to wanted to know what's been going on in the world, and how so many people had managed to get together so much to help those in need. So, she told them. She explained to every person who asked about how we at the compound had set up the relief effort, had managed to convince others to help us. Part of the reason that Courtney's efforts to help out have managed to go on this long is due to the assistance of some of the people she's been finding on the trip. People who have given much needed gas to keep the convoys running, or food to take on to the next stop. And pretty much every person who found out what the Richmond soldiers did to us is really, really pissed about it.

  So....

  The end result is that every single group of people she's run into or worked with has put an embargo on the compound for as long as the Richmond soldiers are in charge of it. Some of the smaller groups may have needed a little convincing from the larger ones, but in the end they all agreed. There will be no trading with the enemy. Since all of the groups that she's run into or worked with total more than six thousand people, the Richmond boys can't really do much about it. It's pretty great.

  The other awesome thing is that Courtney and her people will be heading here at some point in the future, or at least sending a little aid our way as well. It seems that the plight of the refugees from the compound has moved the hearts of a lot of the people we've helped, and they have appealed to all the big survivor groups to help us in return. All told, it's a pretty amazing display of what I've been hoping to see all along--human decency and a sense of community on a large scale.

  The dead walk the earth, hungry for the blood of the living. We have been damaged in every way by the zombie plague, and nothing can ever bring back what we've lost. After talking with Courtney, though, I am now certain beyond doubt that we can work together to remove the debris from the foundations of society, and unify to build something new atop them.

  When I first came up with what ended up being a personal motto, the words seemed simple and obvious. Protect. Survive. Hope.

  I mean, we protect each other as best we can, because no one can be on guard all the time. We watch out for one another not only in dangerous situations, but in every aspect of our lives--being there in whatever capacity is required of us. We survive as a baseline, every effort we make bent toward that effort. Hope was always more ephemeral to me, a bit of philosophy that had no real world application, other than it being better to hope fruitlessly than to despair.

  After this morning, despair just isn't an option for me. I've seen Hope with a capital H, and it's every one of you that has taken up the cause we helped start. All of you out there have done something amazing, not just for the people you have helped directly or indirectly, but for the human race itself. You've set an example for cooperative survival and betterment that no one will ever be able to ignore or dismiss. You are heroes. You're amazing.

  And you're all everyday people. That's the best part.

  Hope.

  You've made it real to me. Thank you.

  at 8:37 AM

  Friday, December 31, 2010

  Slammed

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I've been awake for thirty-six hours. In that time I have taken part in more than a dozen coordinated attacks, most of them from large groups of undead. The zombies, it seems, have more than a few smarties among them.

  For those of you just tuning in, smarties are my cute little nickname for the unusually intelligent zombies out there. Thank god that strain of the plague isn't as easily transmissible as the one for cold resistance is, or everyone here a
t the hospital would probably be dead. It also helps that we were already in the process of making sure the ground floor windows were all doubly secured with boards and steel, anything we could find to make them useless as means of entering our space.

  The great thing about hospitals in general is that the first floor of most of them tends to be taken up with the ER, lab spaces, radiology, and the like. At least, that's how it has been in my experience, and the one we're holed up in now is no exception. There aren't a lot of ways for the undead to get in, and given that the attached parking lot most of us were staying is walled, we're pretty safe.

  It was the sheer numbers that blew us away. We've killed at least a hundred of them over the last day and a half, most having gotten over the wall to the parking lot. We'd set up a defensive position at the door, though, so it wasn't that hard to hold them back. Given our currently limited supplies of ammunition, the majority of the work (see: killing) has by necessity been done with handheld weapons. I've been using an Iaito, one of the katana I took from home that is durable and very good for cutting. It's nicked and scratched all to hell now, but it still does the job.

  A few other people are using some interesting weapons. Jess is manning her rifle, of course--she took to that particular weapon much faster than she did to blades. Gabby even joined the fight at one point, using a brush hook. Have you ever seen one of those things at a Lowe's or Home Depot? It looks sort of like a four foot long halberd, with a wide, flat blade that has a curved end to it for yanking brush out after you cut it. It's fucking scary to see in action, especially when a tiny woman is furiously screaming while chopping into the skulls of walking corpses...

  There are a few other people using swords, but now that the main body of the zombie horde outside seems to have called it quits, they have put down their weapons in favor of sleep. I'm going to do the same before too long, but I felt the need to let everyone know what's been going on since I didn't have a chance to post yesterday due to the fighting.

  I think I'll start offering basic weapons instruction in the next few days. We lost a few people because of their lack of practice or familiarity with their weapons. At the compound, we had the advantage of numbers and time, so that those of us who have spent years sweating it out in a dojo carefully learning how to use a blade could teach those who hadn't. I don't want to see another person get bitten and turn because they lost their grip on the hilt of their weapon, no one having prepared them for the sudden change in weight as the blade bit into the body of a man once-living.

  There's been talk about trying to put up extensions to the parking lot wall. If we can find some plywood or other large materials to raise up, it seems like a good idea. Of course, without a walkway of some kind or a support structure it would simply be a defense that would blind us, but if it stopped the undead from getting over, I'd be ok with that. At least then we could safely use the parking lot again, for cooking or what have you.

  OK, the level of sleepiness I'm feeling is beyond description. I need to catch some sleep while I can, and help with whatever search may go on for supplies in a few hours. Or, help defend if this place gets hit again before then...

  at 6:37 AM

  Saturday, January 1, 2011

  The Ark

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Yesterday was warm, far more so than any day in winter than I can ever remember. It hit sixty degrees here. Which happens to be the temperature around which even regular zombies become fully active.

  Call it fate, luck, or god, but we didn't get pummeled with zombies again. Oh, there were always a few medium sized groups wandering around the hospital, but nothing too severe. We got lucky, and all of us know that no matter how great this location is, it simply isn't a long term solution as it is. We would need many more people than we have now to build a wall that would both keep out the zombies and give us enough area to farm.

  One of the things that makes the compound such an ideal spot is that the surrounding landscape makes it very easy to see the undead coming and very hard for them to get you. Even at the farming areas we were running that held true. Maybe I'm just pining for home, but the more of the outside world I see, the less I think we'll find anything like home for us...

  I'm on guard duty again at nine, so I'll get to the point of this post quickly. I've been in touch with the people at Google as often as possible over the last few weeks. They've been helping me and the other refugees out in a variety of ways, as well as providing tips and assistance to Courtney and her merry band on their trips around the country.

  Now, Google is asking for our help. Apparently a team of people there have been working on something I touched on months ago as an idea, though they started doing it before I ever said a word. In fact, they've been working on it nearly since day one: Data backup.

  Without hyping it up too much, a team of people have been working to collect and copy pretty much every piece of data they can find, to safely store and distribute. I'm talking library of congress times a thousand, here. Pretty much every piece of useful data is getting tagged and copied onto thousands of hard drives, Cd's, Dvd's, flash drives...any and every type of media. So far there are over a hundred total sets of copies made, with more to come. The folks at El Goog are sending out crews to farm info from data centers every day. I'm told one of them managed to bring in a truckload of hard drives he'd unplugged from the Wikipedia data center closest to Google HQ.

  Google has asked us to find a place to hide several copies of the project. What they're going to give us isn't the completed product (I don't know that it will ever be "complete") but it is a vast array of knowledge in all the areas people will need to rebuild society to the level of technology it was at. Everything from agriculture to circuit diagrams...it's pretty huge. They are also giving us a copy of it, several actually, in hard drive, cd, and flash forms. I'm thrilled.

  So, they are sending a courier sometime in the next few days, though how long it will take them to get near us from California is anyone's guess. I've been asked to find some trustworthy folks to go and meet up with him. I intend on going if possible. I know just the place to hide the ones we don't keep...

  It's an amazing thing they're doing. In addition to the backups, the teams at Google are leaving laptops with each copy, wrapped and boxed to withstand pretty much any weather (I'm told that includes total submersion in water. Wow.) along with portable solar arrays to power the whole shebang. It's a big effort, but the payoff would likely be something even bigger--like the continuation of the human race.

  So...any volunteers out there with knowledge of safe hiding places? I'd be happy to put you in touch.

  at 8:40 AM

  Sunday, January 2, 2011

  Are we there yet?

  Posted by Aaron

  This is Aaron again,

  I figure I would send yet another update on my position for those that are reading. More so for Josh and Gabby and them than anyone else. I've not been able to reach Josh or Gabby or any of that whole group since yesterday morning. It has me pretty concerned. But it could just simply be lack of signal given that my own signal is coming and going, or they could be under siege again, or any number of things. I was supposed to have met up with Josh a few days ago, but unfortunately we've been held up by a few things.

  We originally weren't going to leave, but I discovered rather quickly that most the food stores in the cafeteria had already spoiled or been taken by the previous group of raiders. Also the school just wasn't that defendable. It was already becoming a burden trying to keep everything boarded up and all the zombies out. Unfortunately, taking the bus wasn't an option. However, there was a couple of day care vans parked nearby. I don't want to dwell too much on why that was the case. It fills me with a great sadness to think about it. I took one, and Philip took the other. Fortunately Philip was one of those self-sufficient kids who had learned how to drive well before it was even legal before The Fall, so he seemed like a logical choice. Especially given that I'm not even sure
the other kids could even reach the pedals.

  The first problem we ran across was my frequent need for rest. My leg is still pretty badly messed up (though I've somehow managed to avoid infection thus far, though lord knows how), so it gets rather stiff and if I keep too much pressure on it, I'm liable to tear the stitches that we've managed to sew in there. This makes driving really slow.

  Second, there is the condition of the roads. It's not great at all, and they don't exactly make all-terrain tires for day care vans, though in after-thought I probably could rig that relatively easily. Tires are tires. Maybe I'll do that later.

  Third, is the bloody weather. It's been nice. Really REALLY nice out. This means that all the zombies I was hoping to avoid are out and about and hungry. Really hungry. Ravenously. Their ferocity is disconcerting. We've managed to avoid most of them, but hit a really nasty group of about 30 of them a few days ago. It took some really fancy driving and some really good shooting by our group to whittle the numbers down enough that we could get away.

  Right now, we're camped out at a small camp ground and I'm taking another one of my breaks. I figure maybe another day of this and we should be able to reach Josh and them.