by J. Thorn
The eyes that looked back at me in the mirror today had nothing soft about them. They were the hard eyes of a stranger, and they frightened me.
Day 163. Making amends.
Much of the day went on overhauling our defenses. Everyone was in a somber mood since we had buried Rajiv yesterday, and the urgent need for better defenses didn’t need to be reinforced.
The first step was to repair the gate leading to the bungalow. It had been knocked off its hinges well before the chaos began, and nobody had bothered to repair it, since my former boss came and went in his chopper, spending no more than a week a year here, relying on his caretakers to maintain the place. The gate would ensure that at the very least, we wouldn’t have kids venturing off again.
The other change I wanted was to take up a more aggressive defensive posture – sorry for lapsing into Army lingo, but in plain English, to not just sit around and wait to find out if we were under threat. We spent much of the afternoon putting up a small post, ringed by sandbags and crates about halfway down the hill. During the day, I plan to have a two-man team there at all time, connected to the bungalow via one of the walkie-talkie sets Teng left behind. At night, I’d love to have a guard there, but it’s bitterly cold so we’ll probably make do with the guards near the gate, who will have space to light a fire. At any rate, the post halfway down the hill also creates a natural choke point. As I’ve mentioned, the path is pretty narrow, and at the middle, probably at best three people can walk abreast at one time. Our post further narrows that, and makes it impossible for a large group of Moreko to get up together. As I’d done before when I was here alone, we will light torches along the path at night to ensure we don’t get surprised.
Everyone joined in the work and we were done by evening. Nobody said anything about my little bout of madness yesterday, but the aftermath is clear, and I can’t say I’m displeased with it. Several buildings near the foothill have been reduced to ashes, and now we should get much more of a warning if a solitary Moreko wants to come visiting.
People are now having dinner together in the dining room, while I’m sitting alone in the study. With so many people around, meals are always noisy affairs, and I can now hear someone singing. As I look down at the city, I wonder whether our sounds are carrying to the Moreko and what they make of it. Do they mourn, or even register their losses like we do? What makes them want to attack us when we could just leave each other alone? If my journal were to be written from their perspective, what would they make of this man who lives up on a hill and slaughters them?
After the border incident that effectively ended my career, I had to see a shrink who was supposed to evaluate me. I wonder what she would have made of the fact that I’m sitting alone in a nearly dark room thinking about the undead instead of joining people in the next room?
Day 164. Taking it easy.
For a change, we had a slow day. No Moreko to shoot, no emergencies, no lost kids, no bloodshed. In short, the kind of day we had all forgotten. So I organized some of the guys to go down into town and salvage some more supplies. We came back loaded with bottled water and some canned food, but it’s obvious that we will need a longer-term solution. Someone was talking about planting crops in the big field we have out back, and I don’t have the foggiest idea about agriculture but he seems to know what he’s talking about. He wanted me to take him down to look for seeds, which we did in the afternoon, and he was quite happy with what he managed to collect. Another woman was talking about making tanks to collect rainwater for us to drink. It’s amazing what people can think up when they’re not worried about being eaten alive by the undead for a change.
My ex-boss did have a few fruit trees in the back, which are barren now. However, come summer, they should also provide some food. Of course, that’s assuming we last till then, but let me not share such happy thoughts with the others and spoil their mood.
Day 166. Back to school
The last three days have been the most peaceful that we have known in many months, and that’s given us a chance to get on with as normal a life as we can hope to have. I have started weapons training every evening. We conserve ammunition and so don’t fire any rounds, but we run through basics of cleaning, loading and rudimentary combat tactics. A couple of the women wanted to learn how to defend themselves, and I’ve started giving lessons on unarmed combat in the morning.
On the less violent side, where I unfortunately have far less to offer, Negi has started a school for the kids. We have no books for them and no blackboard, but Negi, smart cookie that he is, has decided to focus on not just basic arithmetic and language, but also history. He says that the next generation must not grow up thinking that our world was always the way they see it now. They need to learn of how things were before the rise of the Moreko. Everyone’s chipping in, and I can see them enjoying it, because it also serves to remind the adults of how life was.
For a change, I joined them today, and as I began talking to the kids about the great wars of the past and why they were waged, a six-year-old asked a question that stumped me. She asked why people fought over land and money when we now know that none of that is worth anything. Good question.
Day 167. Crime and punishment.
Tell me this, did I ever offer to stand in an election to become our leader? Did I make any bloody campaign promises? Did I make up a manifesto and offer people a better future? Did I ask for any privileges or special status in return?
Short answer – no frigging way.
So why in God’s name are they putting the burden of this decision on me? I raved and ranted to Negi, and he told me that unless we had rules, we would tear each other apart without needing any help from the Moreko. As for why me, he says that people will listen to me because most of them are afraid of me. Talk about back-handed compliments.
Here’s what happened. One of the troopers with Ashok, a guy called Sumit, had been eyeing one of the teenage girls in the group. We only have three single young women with us – the others are all over forty and married, so I never thought much of the fact that the younger guys would occasionally try and flirt with them. Clearly Sumit had more on his mind than some harmless flirting. The bastard took her out back and tried to rape her. When she tried to fight him off, he hit her, and my blood boiled when I saw one of her eyes shut closed and swollen. Her screams attracted attention and now Sumit is locked up in an outhouse.
The rest of the group is in the living room, and many of them are asking for his blood. I can see a couple of Sumit’s old ITBP pals cringe and this could really blow up out of control. The girl is sitting alone in a corner, not saying much. I feel for her – she’s a college student who’s alone here without her family, and part of me wants to just go over and blow Sumit’s brains out, but if each of us starts acting as judge, jury and executioner, where does that lead?
Back after a ten-minute break. I told the folks that we’d reach a decision in the morning and they should all get some sleep. I also shouted at the guys who should have been on guard duty outside to go and do their job, otherwise while they debated and talked here, the Moreko would be coming up to join us for dinner. That got them outside in a hurry. I doubt I’ll get much sleep tonight, as I think of what to do.
Day 168. Ground rules.
As things turned out, I didn’t have to think too hard to make the rules as far as crime and punishment went. Call it paranoia or call it intuition, I had a feeling something would happen last night, so I had taken up position in the back, armed with my rifle. I had been there for an hour and was beginning to regret freezing my butt off for no good reason when two of Sumit’s buddies came out. They were fully armed and were carrying an extra set of warm clothes. It didn’t require a genius to figure out that their plan was to make a getaway, and to fight their way out if it came to it.
I waited till they were trying to break open the lock on the outhouse door, so that at least one of them had his rifle on the ground, before confronting them. I never thought they w
ould fight, but the other one raised his rifle, so I broke his nose. I wanted to shoot them there and then, but when I thought about it later, it was good I held my fire.
This morning, I called everyone to the living room and without much ceremony or debate, laid out the rules. I am putting them down here in an attached piece of paper so that if anyone has any doubts, I’ll pull this out. Every resident has signed below the rules so that there is no debate later.
If you assault, rape or murder a fellow resident (or try to), you will be sent down into the city with no food or weapons and not allowed back in.
If you steal anything from another resident, you will have to go down alone on a sortie to the city and bring back food and supplies for the community.
Feel free to argue, bitch and squabble (and we will all do that at times), but before you escalate any argument, remember rule 1.
If you have any doubt about whether you’ve violated a rule or not, come and talk to me. I can explain, with some practical demonstrations, the subtleties of assault and battery.
The world is a fucked-up place, and we have very little other than ourselves, and very little going for us other than the fact that we are stronger together than scattered. So don’t sweat the small stuff and remember the big, bloody, fucked-up picture we are dealing with.
As Sumit and his friends were led down, one of them was crying. Sumit glared at me, not brave enough to challenge me, but angry enough to vow that he would kill me one day. Good luck to him.
Negi came by and asked me why I didn’t have Sumit killed as many people were demanding. I simply told him that there was a fine line between fighting for survival against the Moreko and killing a fellow human being in cold blood. Killing a man is a bit like unleashing a genie, it changes you in ways you can’t possible imagine, and before you know it, you start developing a craving for it, even if you don’t want to ever admit it. I wouldn’t bring something like that upon the people in our community. I know it only too well – for I unleashed that genie years ago, and I struggle to keep it bottled up every single day.
Day 169. Humanity.
When everybody was having a breakfast of rice (rice is pretty much the staple for every meal) and some beans, we heard screams from the city. Most of the folks rushed out, and our lookouts halfway down the hill radioed in to say that they had seen Sumit and his friends run into some buildings, followed by at least a dozen Moreko.
A couple of the guys were scanning the buildings below through binoculars and I took one to have a look myself. We couldn’t see much, but the sounds were terrible. The screaming stopped, only to be replaced by an even uglier noise, part whimper, part sob. The fact that it carried all the way up told us just how much pain was behind it. Then the sounds stopped. I could see movement in one of the buildings for a second, but then there was no more movement. Someone muttered next to me that the Moreko might have exited through a back door not visible to us. I thought they might have stopped to feast on the bodies, but as usual, I kept my morbid thoughts to myself.
I put the binoculars down, and when I looked at the people around me, I saw something curious. Many of them had moist eyes, and one or two were crying openly. Shedding tears for a man they were ready to lynch a day ago. I guess humanity is as fickle as conscience – there one minute, and gone the next.
After all I’ve seen, I’ve stopped believing in simplistic concepts of people being good or bad. Some people are able to keep their dark sides in check a bit longer than others, that’s all. Anyways, I was happy that folks were troubled by the deaths of Sumit and his friends. I hope it teaches them that it is far easier to bay for blood than to actually deal with its aftermath. Killing a man is easy, dealing with the dreams that come night after night afterwards is not.
Day 170. Where there is smoke...
We went out in the morning to grab some supplies from the city. Knowing the Moreko were out just yesterday, I didn’t take any chances. I had a dozen armed men cover the thirty other adults who went foraging, so that if it came to a fight, people wouldn’t have to juggle bags, bottles and guns. People consciously avoided the building where Sumit and his friends had been last seen, but I went in to have a look. There was blood everywhere, but no bodies. So they must have been bitten and attacked but they were not butchered, otherwise there would have been something left of their bodies. I went outside, wondering if becoming a Moreko was a fate in any way better than death.
We had shifted focus from just finding packaged and canned food to finding water. We had plenty of rice (some of which we had ferried from the Taj Mahal Inn in the car we found there) so we wouldn’t go hungry anytime soon, but we did need water. Today was a good day. We got into what seemed to have been a guest house, and their stocks of water – at least twenty large cases of plastic bottles – were still untouched. Also, importantly, we found a water purifier. Now we can easily collect rainwater or even fetch it from nearby streams and convert it into water suitable for drinking or cooking.
As people were beginning the climb back up, each person carrying as many bottles as they could and two people carrying the purifier, I saw the smoke. It was rising over the city, several kilometers away. I radioed back to the team at our guard post and they said all they could see were three pillars of smoke rising in the distance.
Everyone is excited about the purifier and the water we’ve found but I’m here in the study, writing and watching the smoke. Moreko do not light fires. Someone else is out there. I have no idea what to expect, but I don’t want to take any chances. Tonight, there will be guards at the bunker halfway up the hill, even though it will get really chilly at night, and we won’t have the space there to light a fire. Plus, a fire kind of defeats the purpose of a hidden checkpoint. And I’ve increased the number of guards on duty tonight to ten, four of whom can stay inside but need to be awake and with easy access to their weapons.
People are grumbling, and I overheard one or two of them whisper that I’m too keen on a fight. No, I usually don’t seek trouble out, but I want to be ready in case trouble finds us.
Day 171. Visitors.
We didn’t get attacks but we did get some unexpected visitors last night. I was one of the two miserable sons of bitches sitting in the checkpoint in the cold. I had Ashok for company, and he produced a half bottle of brandy that he had found in our last foray into town. (Oh yes, that’s another unwritten rule – all food and water salvaged must be put into the communal kitty, but clothes and booze are all yours to keep.) We passed the bottle between us, and I was thankful for the warmth it gave as it worked its way down my throat.
Around four in the morning, I thought I spotted some movement at the foot of the hill. Our torches began only about three quarters of the way down, but my eyes had gotten used to the moonlight well enough. Still, I wanted to make sure before raising the alarm so I asked Ashok to have a look, and he also thought he saw movement. I radioed back, asking folks to be ready but to wait for my signal before doing anything. At night, we always kept all lights off in the bungalow because we didn’t want to attract any unwanted attention, and so we sat there in the darkness, hoping that the movement was nothing more than a stray animal.
That was till I heard voices. At first it was a man’s voice and I thought Sumit or one of his friends might have escaped the Moreko, but then we heard the voices of at least two women and then a baby crying. Not sure who or what was coming our way, I radioed for backup and asked Negi to come down with six armed men. I had a flashlight and when the voices grew closer, I shone it down the path, to see a sight I had not expected at all.
There were ten of them, six adults and four kids, the two youngest barely a couple of years old. They all looked miserable, cold, and more like walking skeletons than humans.
We took them in and before doing anything else, we got them some warm clothes and food. They’re all sleeping now, and we’ll learn more about our visitors in the afternoon when I hope they’re in better shape to talk. But whatever little I’ve le
arnt makes me worry. One of them, a man in his sixties who seems to be their leader, kept talking about an evil army on the march, burning everything in its path.
Ruchi, one of our moms, who was a nurse, has been taking care of our visitors, and told me that our visitors are in pretty bad shape. All of them are dehydrated and a couple have really bad colds. She’s trying to keep them warm and hydrated and told me that it’s best to let them sleep for now. Not that their sleeping is reassuring many of us – the kids keep screaming in their nightmares.
Everyone’s a bit spooked by the talk of an army on the march, and the smoke we see rising in the distance doesn’t help. Till our new guests wake up, let me go and do some morale-building.
Day 171. Welcome gifts and unwelcome news.
It’s been a long day and it’s going to be an even longer night. I don’t think too many people are in a mood to sleep, though Negi has been doing his best to get people to rest, so when their turn comes to stand guard, they aren’t total zombies. Okay, scratch that last bit, inappropriate use of the word given all the shit we’ve been through with the undead.
When I had just joined the Army, I’d wonder why people made such a big deal about regular haircuts and shaving every day. I mean, when you’re sitting on some bloody hill located halfway between nowhere and Hell, who cares if you shave or not? Later on, I got it – small things like shaving make a person feel more in control and give them some degree of normalcy to hang on to. So this afternoon I went down to the city on a little errand. I had every intention of going alone, but Ashok insisted on coming along. I agreed, because I didn’t mind the company or the added pair of eyes.
