Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land (Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  Oh. Yeah. You probably want to know what the hell I'm talking about. Sorry. I ramble.

  One of the big chunks of federal money we got a few years back was to upgrade the fleet of state cars. There are all kinds of them around town, several large state parking lots full of everything from sedans to vans, pickups of all sizes and even a few really big trucks. I counted two tractor trailers this morning when the thought hit us to take a much closer look at the vehicles stored there. Because many of them are flex fuel vehicles that run on 85% ethanol/gasoline (or in the case of a few of the really big trucks) ethanol/diesel.

  And we're in the middle of a town with several full-sized breweries. Of course, we've spent a lot of time distilling most of the liquor we find down into pure alcohol. It's just damn useful stuff to have around, and we've got a few hundred gallons of it at this point.

  Yes, we all feel really, really stupid for not putting two and two together before now. Stop judging me, I can feel your hate.

  Sorry, I'm just a little playful today. This is awesome for us. It gives us the ability to stretch our fuel supplies for a much longer time, and given the HUGE quantities of liquor available for us to distill down and purify at the local distilleries, just there for the taking, we're confident that our supplies will last us for quite a long time. That's ignoring the many, many other such facilities all over the state, and the fact that there is a fuel refinery in Boyd county that, while all the way across the state, probably has more fuel than we could bring back with us.

  We've had a lot of bad mojo the last few weeks. I'm just happy to share some good news.

  Monday, March 21, 2011

  Tribe

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Well, yesterday and the day before were eventful. Our trip out into Bald Knob on Saturday started out to be fairly boring and routine, but before we got very far down the winding roads of the county, Jamie noticed something: very few zombies.

  It isn't unusual to find areas that are thin at times as far as the zombie population goes. There are days when we see less than a dozen outside the walls of the compound, and they've started to learn to stay well back from the farms as well, though occasionally small groups will risk a run at them. Bald Knob was different, though--we were at the beginning of it, where there's a fairly dense grouping of houses that are pretty close to town, and we saw a total of two zombies. They were heading away from the county toward town.

  We didn't see any more the whole of Saturday. We worked our way slowly farther and farther away from town, checking houses and farms for anything of use that we could find. To be honest, there wasn't much. No food, no tools, no raw supplies. There wasn't even any animal feed. At first we though that people had just scavenged the areas closer to town, but the farther into the country we got, the more barren our pickings became.

  We also started to see signs of human habitation. Subtle ones, to be sure, but we've got a lot of practice figuring out what it looks like when there are people living in an area. So, we brought our meager findings back to the compound Saturday night, and yesterday we started looking for them in earnest.

  It was late yesterday afternoon when we found them. Technically, they found us, and the meeting was a strange mixture of violent tension and barely restrained hope. There are about sixty of them, many families banded together on a set of farms across a narrow back road from each other. They didn't know that there were survivors left in Frankfort, as there aren't any cell towers out that far and certainly no internet. Fuel has been a huge problem for them, so there haven't been any trips out of the area around their home for almost a year. Their farms sit right at the place where Franklin, Henry, and Owen counties all meet. That's as far in the boonies as you can get in this part of Kentucky. It was isolation for them.

  It was also safety.

  They'd been scavenging from Bald Knob since The Fall hit last year. Many forays toward Frankfort as well as the other counties had let them build up a massive stock of necessities. They've moved all the livestock they can handle to their farm, and slaughtered what they couldn't for food.

  They were happy to see us once they believed that we weren't there to steal from them or attack them. We explained our situation, and spent several hours filling them in on what's been going on in the world. We even sent a few people back to the compound to bring a few comfort items out to them. Deodorant, toothpaste, new clothes...stuff they'd asked about as soon as it was clear there wasn't going to be a fight. Those folks have had it hard, but the fact that they've basically cleared out the zombies from the area they live in says a lot about them.

  I'll get into the details of who they are and all that tomorrow. Right now I've got some work to do, and I want to get it done quick so I can go see if the scouts that went back out to the farms in Bald Knob last night after my group left have come back. The folks out there, the strange tribe of people who've made it this long on pure will and determination, wanted to sleep on the invitation we gave them to come here and live with us.

  Maybe they've sent us an answer...

  Tuesday, March 22, 2011

  Exchange Program

  Posted by Josh Guess

  The good news is, some of the folks from the small settlement out in Bald Knob will be moving here. Better still, they want to keep their little community running, so some of our people will be going out there for a while. The idea is to move people back and forth from our relatively dangerous community to their fairly safe one. The farming they've got going on there is pretty productive, or at least it will be, and they can produce way more food than they need, which is a net gain for all of us since they're happy to share.

  I won't lie, it was a little tense at first. Meeting a new group of people is always hard, especially given the trouble we've run into over time with marauders. I imagine it was just as difficult for them, but the fact that we tried as hard as we did to gain their trust (giving up weapons on their land, giving them things they were short on) seemed to ease their fears a lot. They weren't desperate for anything vital like food or water, but I think their leaders, a couple named Sherry and Kyle Wilkins, came close to kissing the guy that handed them the bag full of soap and deodorant.

  I'll try to keep you updated on what's going on with the tribe of folks from Bald Knob, but it's looking like we're off to a good start. I wonder if there are more groups like them around the more rural parts of the state? I guess we'll find out eventually.

  I got yet another one of those static-filled phone calls this morning. This one wasn't as clear as the last, and given the recent excitement of meeting new allies, I sort of forgot that I had been getting them. My curiosity got the better of me, and I sent out a mass email asking all of the people I have regular contact with if they knew of anyone trying to get in touch with me, or if they'd gotten any similar calls. So far, no one has said that they have, so I will just have to go on wondering.

  Oh, I'm glad I remembered this! The folks from Bald Knob explained to us how they've been keeping such a huge area pretty much free of zombies. We thought they might have stumbled on to the weird effect ammonia has on the undead, and started distilling it from urine like we've been doing. But no, that's not it. Apparently they've encountered a zombie that does something strange, something none of us have seen one do.

  About eight months ago, Kyle's brother Gary was on guard duty. Not a hard job out there, but at that point they had cleared out a lot of the zombie population through sheer attrition, by killing them. It helped a lot that there weren't a great many of them out in the country anyway, but there were occasional groups of zombies coming through all the same. This particular day, Gary was looking at a lone zombie through the sights of his rifle, waiting for it to get closer to get a clean shot. After a few minutes of watching, he spotted a pair of zombies approaching from a different direction than the one that was alone. As the pair got closer and the lone zombie noticed them, the singleton bent over and vomited something a bright yellow-green color onto the ground.


  Gary thought that was pretty gross, but his disgust was short lived. It was replaced by surprise, because the pair of undead stopped dead (pun intended) just a few seconds later. He said it was like watching them walk into a wall, and they turned around and went back the way they came. Gary's a pretty smart guy, so he figured whatever the yellow stuff was, it might keep other zombies away. So, he got a few of the others and they caught the lonesome vomiter.

  They've been using him to mark territory since. The stuff only lasts a few days, but while it's there no undead will come within a dozen yards of it. They always turn away.

  None of us has ever seen this happen before, but then most of the time we deal with zombies in groups. I have to think that given the ridiculous rate at which the plague seems to adapt and evolve, that such a weird mechanism for marking territory has to have come from single zombies that never found a group. Whatever the cause, it seems like an amazingly useful thing.

  I love meeting new friends. You never know how they're going to surprise you. If you had asked me even a week ago if there was the slightest chance that the idea of zombie puke could make me happy, I would have just given you a look that was equal parts derision and queasiness and walked away. Today, I want to bottle the stuff and see how long it will last outside of the stomach that makes it...

  I've seen a lot of weird shit in the last year. This, dear readers, takes the prize.

  Wednesday, March 23, 2011

  Generation Z

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I'm one of those folks that falls into the category of being a "generation x" person. Just barely, by most definitions, given that while the whole concept of the thing is amorphous and generalized, but growing up it seemed that every time "generation x" was described, I fit in the categories used to explain it.

  What Aaron showed me this morning gives me a lot of hope. I call it, as you will have guessed by the title of this post, "generation z".

  Z for obvious reasons; Gen Y has been around for almost two decades--many of them are older now, though a good portion of the millennial generation now fit into this new group--the younger people around the compound.

  Aaron has been using the wonderful brain god gave him in concert with his natural frenetic energy and desire to make those who will come after us better able to survive to improve the way we teach our young. I've talked a few times before about how he teaches them--holistic education, where many aspects of a thing can be examined and learned all at once. Now he's including that in a larger program that aims to make our kids far better survivors than we adults are.

  Part of that is what he's been doing: teaching kids about practical things they will need to know in order to make the best and most efficient use of what they have. What woods will resist rot and decay, to better build housing and defenses. Ignition temperatures of those same woods. Usefulness of their sap, historical applications of the material, optimal growing conditions, harvesting methods...the list for any given thing goes on and on. You get the idea.

  I've also talked about how a lot of the kids are starting to rotate around to learn different skills from different people. Aaron has been working like mad to take that idea to full-scale implementation, so that every child has a full day of honing real skills and not just memorizing rote data. At first he focused on farming, weaving, that sort of thing. Subjects were added as they were thought up, so now there are five major areas where kids practice skills and crafts. Farming, Materials (making fabric, working leather, weaving chainmail, making weapons, etc), Survival skills (cooking, herbalism, wilderness survival, basic medicine, defensive tactics, combat training, etc), General Knowledge (which includes math, history, geology, communication, important facts like the above mentioned tree and related important things, and how to utilize general knowledge. Confused? That's okay. It takes some explaining...), and Critical thinking.

  The last one is my favorite. The other four areas give the kids a huge education in pretty much every area they will need to become better survivors. The last trains their minds to work in different and more powerful ways to build the mental strength, creativity, and reactions needed to properly use what they know. Aaron has instructed all of the folks teaching the kids to create problems and situations that will tax their minds, make them come up with many solutions. Aaron himself is now doing things to throw the kids out of their comfort zone, like throwing in sudden questions about, say, the effective firing range of a given type of bow while in the middle of teaching a class about making pottery. He's trying to get their minds used to coming up with answers on the fly, and he say he will eventually make the system more complex.

  Can you imagine what it will be like for them after months or years of this? Every day their minds will be stretched a little further, made a little stronger. Before they realize it, they will be analyzing every problem without thought, weighing solutions instantly. Better yet, at some point they'll begin looking at everything around them and catching potential problems before they happen, and improving things. It's a dizzying thought.

  Of course, I'm a realist. I know that for the immediate future, the kids are likely to be grumbling and unhappy about this. It's going to be hard for them, but it's a necessary step. We're trying to do everything we can to give them tools to survive and improve.

  Hmm. Just got another one of those damn phone calls. It's bad enough that we have to deal with the hordes of the undead, but I really thought annoying phone calls were a thing of the past. So much for the apocalypse.

  I've tried calling the number back, but it never works. This is driving me nuts.

  Thursday, March 24, 2011

  An End

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I've always believed that every person should have the right to end their own life if they choose. It isn't something that comes up a lot nowadays. I think that's due to the fact that the zombie plague burned away the people most prone to killing themselves, leaving only those with the strongest survival instinct.

  There are some pains, however, that are too much for any person to bear.

  This morning one of our guards didn't show up for his shift. It was the guy who was manning the heavy gun the other day, when the group of starving people were killed at our gate. When his room was searched, his body was found.

  I'm deliberately not mentioning his name here, because it isn't important. His actions were his to take right along with his life, but that doesn't mean that he will be named as some kind of example to others out there, for good or ill. His note was short and to the point, describing the sleepless nights he had over the last several days. He felt overwhelming guilt about killing those starving people, and he couldn't live with it any more.

  I can understand that. I think all of us can. No one feels good about what happened, but the rest of us are realists enough to understand that while the deaths of those people were tragic, ultimately they were unavoidable. The hunger had damaged their judgment, as far as we can tell. They were, from our perspective, a threat that had to be eliminated. It doesn't matter what the truth of the situation was--they were at our door with weapons drawn. Action was needed.

  I'm of two minds on this man's choice. On the one hand I recognize the pain he was in and his inherent right to make the decision to end his life. On the other, I see his reaction to the threat as completely reasonable given the circumstances, and committing suicide only weakened the compound. His loss is a loss to all of us, which makes me angry. It makes a lot of us angry.

  Again, it's one of those situations that you can't just feel one way about. The zombies outside the walls have destroyed the world, made it almost impossible for us to manage. We've buckled down and worked our asses off to get where we are, and we've lost a lot of good people in the struggle along the way. I hate to think that the hard and awful choices we've steeled ourselves and made over the last year plus have been toward a purpose. This man's death seems to cheapen that in my mind, as if to say that there is some upper limit to the idea that the
needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

  I hate that those people had to die. All the same, I would have killed six times as many starving people in the full knowledge that they weren't in control of their actions, if they posed a direct threat to my home. Honestly, I can't imagine many things I wouldn't do to protect this place and the people in it. I feel like I've failed them already by running with the other refugees when the Richmond soldiers came. That's a scar that runs deep, still red and swollen, and I lose some sleep myself with the ache of it.

  I have no intention to let the people here down again. My resolve is strong on that. I choose to live, because that is the only way that I can make sure that everything possible is being done for the residents here. I choose life, though it is harsh and painful, because it gives me chance after chance to do better. To balance the guilt I feel for running away, little by little.

  The gunner will always have a negative balance. He folded under the pain, and chose to go quietly into the night. His debt to the people he killed can never be met now. Instead of choosing a life with purpose, to make amends for the lives he took, justified though it was, he gave up. I see people around me every day that shoulder heavier burdens than mine by far, heavier than his was. They try and try to do good. Sometimes they fail, but I see them push themselves harder every time they do.