Living With the Dead: The Wild Country

by Joshua Guess

  All those people, the captives, suffered horrible things. My team and I tried to help them. Look at what we caused. Their deaths. The deaths of countless other captives. The destruction of land and animals that would have seen an innocent group of people through hard times. The deaths of those marauders, no matter how much they deserved it, doesn't make up for that. Does it?

  I'm still wrestling with that thought. How many people since The Fall had those men and women tortured, killed, and raped? How many lives have been ruined? How many more were saved? The answer I keep coming up with is that I don't know. I can't know. It's all speculative. The facts in front of me, however, are concrete. The results that followed are there to see.

  I'm trying hard not to wander off into a philosophical debate with myself here, but the concern that rises from this situation is one that is both important philosophically as well as practically. Morality has always had to shift and change with the times. Now more than ever we have to judge situations for what they are, for what the consequences will be. There's far too much at risk for rash behavior, no matter how heroic we might think they are. Would it have been better for us to leave the marauders be, and organize a force to attack them at a later time? I don't know how much damage they'd have done in the interim, but I know what damage we did by attacking.

  This entire situation has been eye-opening. I find myself playing through hypothetical situations in my mind, what I'd do if confronted by a similar situation again. The same answer keeps coming up. Wait. Ignore the screams of the innocents. Gather more information. Plan an attack, gather forces, wait for an opportunity. Don't give in to my heart and the ache it feels for those under the power of monstrous men and women. I can't come to any other conclusion. I'd do it, if the day ever comes. I'd play the long game and plan for total victory rather than give in to the urge to rescue right then, to help regardless of consequences. The last few weeks have taught me that lesson. I've learned it.

  And it frightens the hell out of me.

  Wednesday, October 5, 2011

  Pandora's Box

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Scattered all across the country, bodies are being found. Some are only pits filled with ash and bone, some are in piles six feet high. All of them are fresh. Recent.

  It's my fault. One brave group of survivors caught some marauders as they were making one such grisly pile. They were killing their captives one by one, bashing their skulls in and throwing the bodies into a ditch on the side of the road. The marauders were subdued and...questioned.

  The answer was simple: all along the lines of communication between the marauders, they're spreading the word that a group of people are killing men and women they find with captives. Anyone that looks like a marauder is treated as such.

  I don't know how many of them read this blog, but I'm sure some do. A lot of them don't have access to wireless communication, so they use etched symbols in places other marauders pass through often. Kind of like hobo codes. There's one that basically means, "Danger, eliminate captives". Once prisoners have been disposed of, a group of marauders looks like any other set of travelers.

  Hundreds of dead across the US because those men and women are worried some vigilante group is after them. This is too much. I can't even think straight right now.

  Thursday, October 6, 2011

  Stemming the Tide

  Posted by Josh Guess

  In the last day, I've sent out emails, made calls, done anything I can to halt or even slow the number of captives being killed by marauders around the country. I find myself in the odd position of giving the marauders the comfort of knowing no one is hunting them. There's no freelance vengeance squad after them. Even now, in the aftermath of the zombie plague, rumor still has a curious power to move faster than the speed of light.

  I don't know if it's working or not, but hopefully time will tell. My efforts may end up coming to nothing, but I can't sit idly by and let innocent people be murdered because of my actions.

  I also can't afford to let this situation take over my life. As much as it pains me, I have to get back to doing the job I'm out here for. My team and I have barely seen each other since we came to Carlyle, who as a community have been gracious enough to welcome us in. Here, at least, the people seem to understand our urge to protect the innocents captured by the marauders. They applaud our decision to release them, even knowing the eventual repercussions. I wonder if they'd feel we were so blameless if the flames were licking at their own doors.

  That being said, I really do need to move on. I've got a pretty awesome bit of news that needs to be put out there for ALL survivors.

  A few days ago I got an email from home. Some of our scouts have been ranging to secluded areas not that far from New Haven, no more than a hundred miles. When you think of that radius, it seems a pretty small one to search over more than eighteen months. It isn't. And it's really hard to search all that space carefully. It's equally easy to miss the ridiculously obvious. We've been so hard up for food at times, hovering on the edge of starvation for weeks at a time.

  It's frustrating to know we were driving past dozens of acres of food without even realizing it. The problem lies in the fact that our scouts aren't farmers, and the fields in question are pretty far away. They're full of white clover. Which is edible and pretty nutritious. It has to be boiled for humans to more easily digest it, but that's not especially hard. We boil our water anyway.

  Literally tons of the stuff. And when the scouts mentioned it to some others, it started a frenzy. The thing about white clover is, it's invasive as hell. Once it starts growing in a place, it spreads and kills off other plants. Bad if you're trying to cultivate other food, good if you have thousands of acres of empty land and a huge supply of seeds.

  My folks have started looking for seeds, and it has been easy to find. They've got hundreds of pounds. There's an old abandoned store downtown that had ten huge bags sitting right out back. There's bound to be more.

  Soon, all the land we can manage to sow will be growing clover. Not this year, but early next. And every year it will spread. We're passing this on to as many others as possible. Eat it if you find it, use it to make the rest of your food supplies stretch. Mason and some others are putting together a list of other common edible plants.

  In what seems like an endless stretch of bad news, it's a bright spot. Maybe it will help ease the food problems all of us might face this winter. I hope so.

  Friday, October 7, 2011

  Freeman

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I'm exhausted. I've only had a few hours of sleep in the last few days. Between coordinating trades and trying to keep abreast of the situation going on with the marauders across many states, I haven't had much time for rest. I ate something, though. That's good, right? I think it was yesterday morning.

  Mason is making me lay down. He's pulling rank, as it were, by pointing out how weak and tired I am and how fresh and strong he is. He told me he'd put me in bed forcibly if I refused. I asked to write a blog first.

  For the record, that big fucker is way more scary when he's talking to you calmly than when he's out murdering the hell out of zombies. Just putting that out there.

  The reason I was so insistent is because the number of bodies being found has dropped to nothing. In fact, one group of marauders did something...unprecedented. They let their captives go. Alive.

  I'm not hopeful this will become a trend, and frankly it confuses me. It's not in keeping with what I've observed about the kind of people marauders typically are. Their psychology is surely a lot more complex than I can imagine. Some people, a very small fraction of a percentage, probably had the perfect storm of mental problems or just plain evil waiting inside them for a trigger. Seeing the rule of law disintegrate overnight might have done it. Maybe watching loved ones die was the cause.

  Some of them might be caught up in group hysteria. There are a lot of possible causes for men and women to do the things they do. What I have
to wonder now is whether or not the recent actions of the captives we freed have made a few marauders reconsider their lives. The things they do.

  Was this a single act of goodness, or a desperate gamble for self-preservation? The results for that group are the same as if they'd killed their captives instead of making them free men. They'll be able to blend in if they choose. Pretend to be normal people, the kind that don't rape and murder innocents. Why leave witnesses alive? Why take that risk if they were so afraid of the consequences of being caught?

  It's something I'll have to sleep on, and that's not a turn of phrase. Mason is flipping one of those extendable batons in his hand. It's as close to subtle as I've seen him get.

  Sunday, October 9, 2011

  Stuck In The Middle

  Posted by Josh Guess

  My team and I set out from the nice, comfortable cluster of communities we've spent so much pleasant time in. Carlyle's warm atmosphere, polite people, and safe streets are now behind us. We've done a lot of good, mostly boring and complicated trade agreements. But the bad still follows each member of my team in their thoughts.

  It's early, just a bit after six in the morning. We decided to camp for a day or two, all of us spending some quiet time together to wrap our heads around the insanity of the last several weeks. Things with the marauders have calmed down, and I'm tentatively going to say that I think they've stopped the mass killings of their captives.

  We've been gone from home a month, and the changes in my team seem too drastic for such a short period of time. Rachel is more somber than I've ever seen her. She's always been so...I don't know what the word is. Carefree isn't it. Maybe it's just the relentless energy that comes with her curious nature. Whatever that bright spirit in her is, it's more tempered now. Captivity didn't treat her well, and seeing so many die as a result of our choices has made her a little darker. More contemplative.

  Will, on the other hand, gains confidence with every day. Out here he isn't treated as a criminal. He's a valuable resource to our team and he knows it. Even on his worst days back in New Haven, will was calm, collected, and controlled. He acted the part of penitent lawbreaker to the letter. He was crushed by the guilt of the choices he'd made. He's unhappy about the events of the last few weeks, but overall his attitude has brightened.

  Steve, always funny and ready with an incredibly nerdy quip, is mostly silent now. His entire personality is hidden most of the time. I talk to him pretty often, and I see glimpses of the laughing friend I've known for more than a decade. They're gone in a flash, hidden behind the armor he's pulled tight around his mind. I think someone as gentle and sweet as Steve just isn't meant for a world this harsh. It's a crime to see him hurt so badly that he has to shut out everything just to get by.

  Mason is...Mason. He deals with it. He moves on.

  Becky makes it a point to lose herself in work at every opportunity. She's a fair hand at mechanical things, so she works on our vehicle and trailer a lot. She's got a brain that runs like Ferrari's engine, and I know she can't shut off the constant replay that goes through it. Our choices, our actions, and the consequences of them. She plays over the scenarios over and over again. I've seen her wipe away tears when she thinks I'm not looking. I've felt her shiver on the bed next to me when we go to sleep. It breaks my heart.

  And me? As if you need me to tell you, right? I pour my soul out almost every day. You see it. You know.

  This morning is cool. It's a brisk fifty degrees. I'm the only one awake, safely tucked away as we are and not needing guards. I've heard words of comfort from every friend I have. I've come to the same conclusion that every person who's ever had to deal with unintended consequences has come to: I can't change the past.

  I can only choose to move forward. If there is such a thing as Karma, it may come around to bite me in the ass. I can't fight it if it does. I know I'm a more careful man for the horrible events of the last weeks, and a colder and more calculating one as well. The fire inside me that has always pushed me to act, to help, to save, is just embers now. I'll be more cautious. I'll do what I can, but never again can I let so many monstrous acts spring from my kindness. The past is over, and a new day is breaking over the land. There are a lot of other places we've got to be.

  We've got a mission. A job. Purpose.

  Better get to it.

  Monday, October 10, 2011

  Evolver

  Posted by Josh Guess

  All the drama of the last few weeks has almost been enough to make us forget the most pervasive threat to human beings in the world today. Zombies have become a part of the background for us, albeit a dangerous part, but every so often something happens that reminds every survivor how dangerous it is to marginalize them.

  We've seen the undead, or at least the organism that animates them, evolve to meet the needs of the environment around them. When The Fall began, some zombies were slow, shambling creatures. Some were fast, better coordinated. Then smart zombies started appearing, with the ability to infect a small percentage of others with their own version of the plague, sort of upgrading normal ones into smarties. When the cold became too powerful, the plague mutated again, making the zombies functional when the temperatures dropped. We've even seen one example of a zombie, who is still held captive in New Haven, that produces a...discharge that acts as some kind of territorial marker that drives away others of his kind.

  I'm told that Evans, New Haven's head physician, has finally given it a name. George.

  Early this morning, we came across a scene that stopped us in our tracks. Mason, Will, and I were out hunting before we left out toward our next stop when we stumbled upon a group of undead in the woods. They were inert, laying in neat lines in a small clearing. That isn't unusual; when there's a lack of food, most zombies will go into a deep rest mode to conserve the stores of liquefied proteins and fats they keep in their bellies. Hunting parties run across them fairly often, and for the most part smaller groups aren't that dangerous. They take twenty or thirty seconds to get going once they know you're there. Plenty of time to start running or, alternately, go on a killing spree if you're so inclined.

  These were different. Will noticed it, and signaled for Mason and I to look carefully. Each of the six zombies laying before us had strangely rough skin, darker than the medium gray normally associated with the undead. The closest thing I can compare it to was leather, covered in small, fine wrinkles. Will took a few steps into the clearing to get a closer look, which was when they woke up.

  We managed to kill all six of them, but it was a lot harder than it should have been. Their skin really was tougher than normal, and there were strong, fibrous growths in their necks that made hacking off heads one hell of a chore. We ended up going for the old classic: breaking their heads. Causing severe head trauma is the safest and easiest way to do it.

  Except, their skulls were thicker. Will kept one of the heads to study, and he thinks the bone is about twice as thick as it should be. There was also a pretty dense layer of the same fibrous stuff under the scalp.

  I'm putting out the word as widely as I can. Word needs to be spread if these things start showing up more elsewhere. I can't tell you where we found them on this blog, but send me a message if you've encountered something like this. We're on the road in ten minutes, heading southwest. We'll be at our next stop by tonight if all goes well, and will stay for a day or two. I'll do what I can to look into reports from anyone else who's seen these things then.

  Keep your eyes open. I don't like this.

  Tuesday, October 11, 2011

  Tracking Changes

  Posted by Josh Guess

  All across the country, people are seeing changes in the undead, now that they know to look for them. There are obvious ones, like the extra-tough zombies we ran across, and more subtle differences. Reports indicate that some zombies are working in coordinated, leaderless units when they hunt. Others point to some smarties, the smart version of zombies, becoming sharper and even more clev
er.

  The advantage human beings have over the mindless swarms is that they're mindless. We're clever and can think on our feet. We face an enemy that for the most part has been predictable and relatively easy to kill. The game is changing on us, and no one likes it. The good news is that we've managed to catch many of these changes before they could be sprung on us.

  The community we're in right now, our latest stop, is the one that's noticed the small coordinated groups. It was something the survivors had to look for, but once they saw it the truth became obvious.

  It's only in the last few weeks that they've had to start hunting. Most of the year the residents here (the folks call it Sparta) just trade for most of their food. What they farm and hunt gets stocked up for the winter. Though I've never mentioned it by name, I've talked about Sparta before. They're the people who're sitting on top of a stock of fuel whose volume is measured in the tens of thousands of gallons. This stop is especially important, as Sparta is bound to become a hub of activity. We're negotiating trades for fuel to make pretty much every other trade we've brokered possible.

  As I said, they've just now started hunting for the season. A couple of their hunters, some very sharp-eyed women who look as tough as Mason, noticed movement in the distance. They thought it might be a deer, so they stalked very carefully in the direction of the motion.