Living With the Dead: The Wild Country

by Joshua Guess

  I can't help but be curious, though. The island isn't huge, and the resources would be slim. Are they hauling what they need to build from the mountain itself and leaving the trees on the island alone? Are they hunting and fishing as their primary source of food? How many people live there, if it isn't a lie told by a desperate man? Damn my genetics for breeding an insane level of curiosity into me. I wanna know. Were the zombies in this state so terrible that people would decide to move thousands of feet up into the mountains rather than face the hordes? I want to know!

  But like most things in life, I'm probably not going to get my way. I have to admit, though, that the curiosity has been a nice distraction while we're locked up. I hope Will hurries, or we'll all die of boredom.

  Friday, December 16, 2011

  Free Will

  Posted by Josh Guess

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  "For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."--Carl Sagan

  I've been stuck in this cell for a few days. I've had a lot of time to catch up with people from around the country and especially back home. A great many events have transpired that are of interest to me, though not necessarily to you. One thing that I damn well should have talked about but lost track of was the amnesty for the marauders. The quote above, my favorite quote of all time, seems especially apt considering the events the amnesty brought about.

  I'm going off the rails here in just a minute onto a philosophical bender. Fair warning. Before I do that, I'll just give you the dirt: during the amnesty week, more than a thousand prisoners were released alive to various communities around the country, even a few in southern Canada. During that week, more than twice that number of marauders willingly chose to give up their ways and join communities of survivors. Most of them are living under strict guidelines, which they accept. Maybe being guarded and made to do the hardest work seems a fitting penance for the things they've done. This experiment is young, and only time will tell if it's a success.

  My two pennies is that a thousand released captives is a success any way you slice it.

  The almost insane amount of correspondence I've had over the last few days has given me a huge data set to work with. I'm sort of a polymath, not in the whole "being a genius at everything" sense, but more that I enjoy learning about virtually everything and looking at large problems or situations and trying to work out every side of them.

  The central question I asked myself when I learned that so many people had chosen to give up being marauders and to face the possible consequences of their crimes was a simple one: Why?

  That's a vague question, I know, but it spawns all kinds of reactions in my brain just as it must in yours. You know the facts well enough in a general sense to ask the same follow-up questions. Why would men and women so hell bent on surviving that they'd kill others to steal from them choose to face possible death from the very people they'd been preying on?

  A thousand other questions rise up as well. The amnesty was never meant to be a blanket pardon for all the things those people have done. Instead it was intended to serve as a cessation of hostilities (many communities have "kill on sight" orders when it comes to marauders) for a long enough time to establish a dialog. To move past the black and white stereotypes of Good guys and Bad guys. To make some headway into dealing with the violence between those who make a life for themselves and others and those who only take, take, take.

  I don't have a clue how many marauders there are (or were) in the US, so I can't hazard a guess on how effective the amnesty was in the sense of reducing their numbers through conversion. I don't believe we can think about the situation with the remaining marauders still wandering the highways as some kind of war we can win. It's a situation that exists, and one that has a huge range of possible and probable outcomes.

  I'm not focused on that right now. No, I'm still thinking over the deceptively simple question, "Why?". I've put a ton of time and thought into it, having nothing else to do, and I've come up with one simple answer and one very complex one. The complex first.

  Choice, free will, is a very human concept. The Fall took many options from us, the zombie plague destroying vast swaths of humanity and bringing our technological capability to a level about a century back for the most part. The Fall wiped clean most of the spectrum of choice, limiting our free will for surviving. I think that many of the people who became marauders probably did so incrementally, taking easy supplies at first, maybe not even from others. Maybe they just wandered and found caches much as we have. As those finds grew more sparse, self-preservation took over, and justifying taking from others wasn't so hard.

  A downward spiral. As resources grew thinner and thinner, it's easy to see how quickly these people were drawn into one terrible act after another. I'm not forgetting that there were and are some people who simply tore away the veneer of civilization from the beginning, killing and raping from day one. Humankind has always had its barbarous elements. The Fall only reminded us that small groups of them can do damage far larger than their numbers would imply. Group hysteria is a powerful thing.

  But those others, the ones who may have started out innocently enough, made choices perhaps based on what they thought was for the best at first. That's what our lives are--a series of choices. We decide what kind of people we will be, and no matter how far down we fall there is always a chance that a right choice can begin to correct us. I think that's the case with the marauders who've turned themselves over to survivor communities. I think that many of those people spent a long time believing they had no path to redemption, no way to make themselves into something better.

  Until we gave them an option. Have they done awful things? Yes. Maybe unforgivable acts. But who among any of the survivors of The Fall hasn't? Can we who chose to make stands in our groups, doing terrible things in the name of the community really judge those who made the same choices for selfish reasons? Can we condemn all marauders for doing what we have done, just for different reasons?

  I don't speak for anyone but myself, but I can't.

  The clear fact is that when presented with this choice, those two thousand marauders exercised their free will to do something better, to be something better, than what they were. I think that merits a lot of thought and consideration.

  The second and very simple reason I think they did it? Love. Maybe not love for others, at least not yet. But the amnesty gave them a chance to atone, and to eventually find a way to love themselves again. That sounds very preachy and pop-psychology and sappy, but it's true and powerful. With very few exceptions, people can't accomplish great things living in a pit of self-hatred.

  Sagan's quote was referencing the great expanse of the universe. The cold, empty deeps of space and the pale blue dot of Earth floating in it, insignificant to the larger cosmos. Love, even just loving oneself, is what Sagan suggested makes our tiny sphere matter. Love is what gives our lives meaning and context. Love is what keeps us from riding over the brink of destruction as a species.

  The Fall, the zombie plague, is our vastness. The empty places where mankind once lived are the equivalent of the huge distances between stars. In the face of the bleak world before us, surrounded by a universe unconcerned with our struggle, love makes we small creatures fight on.

  I believe that now more than ever.

  Sunday, December 18, 2011

  From Washington

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Ah, freedom never tasted so good! Yesterday Will finished his repair work and the rest of us were let go. In point of fact, we were pretty much thrown out. Those people didn't want us around in a very serious way. So, we started the next leg of our journey north. One bright piece of news is that we're topped off on fuel. Our captors had no problem with us draining every vehicle we could find outside the confines of their defenses.

  We made it to Washington state with no problems. An unexpected advantage of the new breed strain of the zombie plague being so virulent is that the small clumps of und
ead seem to consistently congregate into larger groups. This area of the country is running low on zombies, or so it seems. We only caught sight of a handful on the trip up here.

  The roads are clear thanks to the huge number of people across the whole of the west coast that trade with one another, as well as the marauders that have slowly cleared away obstructions for purposes less constructive. I guess if you're looking for silver linings, that's one--marauders do make traveling easier for the rest of us. Or they did...

  There have been few reports of marauder bands attacking anyone since the amnesty. We know they are out there thanks to the information being supplied by so many of their number joining with us. We know that several large bands still operating consist of the more crazed elements, men and women who've basically lost all sense of right and wrong. A few of the people who joined New Haven with Kincaid were originally from such a band--their previous leader tried to kill them for wanting to leave.

  They sound like swell guys.

  I'm trying to stay optimistic, but the combination of knowing the remaining marauders are also the most vile and dangerous of them along with reports that the new breed of zombies is making its way across the continent with terrifying speed is a little much. Even if the team and I started home right now, abandoning the rest of the trip, we probably wouldn't make it to New Haven before the new breed became fully entrenched in Kentucky.

  We won't stop, of course. We have only one stop here in Washington state, and it's not for trade. Well, it is in a way, but not for trade goods. This is an information trading stop. We're going to be receiving some data about the locals, but they don't want it transmitted electronically, at least not all of it. Some stuff is marked as being alright to share, other bits not so much.

  As backward as it seems, we'll be heading south again after this. We'll head in a nice diagonal from our next stop, cutting across the map above most of our previous stops and heading for the deep south. We'll have to refuel a few times, but with the huge amount of extra fuel we carry at all times, that shouldn't be all that difficult. Not to mention the caches of gas and ethanol the good people of Sparta have been nice enough to leave along our projected trail for us.

  If we avoid disaster, we shouldn't get low enough on fuel to have to scavenge. Fingers crossed.

  We're past the halfway point in the trip. We've got very few stops between here and the warmer climes of the south, and from there we'll be running east before swinging back toward home. If all goes well, we'll be home by the end of January. It's strange to even think about. After all this time away, all the places we've been, and all the new things we've seen, I feel like a totally different person. It's almost unreal to me that within two months, god willing, the people in my life won't be a static crew of five others and a constantly changing group of strangers I may never see again.

  Don't get me wrong, I'm eager to be home. I miss my friends and family. I miss my dogs, cats, and ferrets. I miss my wife more than words can say.

  And dammit, I miss having sex. A LOT.

  Monday, December 19, 2011

  Close Encounter

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Before The Fall, Idaho was known mostly for two things: being the state with the funniest shape, and potatoes. As it happens, there are still people here growing spuds, and they've got lots of extra. Potatoes are a favorite food of mine (I’m incredibly Irish) not only for their taste (delicious) but for the ease with which they're cultivated and the huge span of time throughout the year they can be grown in. It goes without saying that the small communities we've spent time at over the last few hours or so will be getting any trade we can offer. These people had to compost a bunch of their crop in the summer because there was no one to take it off their hands.

  It was after the third stop when we encountered a group of people traveling on foot. We'd spent ten or fifteen minutes each with the groups of farmers we ran into before we hit a nice open stretch of road. The team and I meant to keep on rolling for a good long while, as we've been driving since midnight and wanted to cover as much ground as possible. When we saw folks just walking across the road in the middle of nowhere, we had to stop.

  There were twenty of them, mostly men but a few women. Turns out they were only walking back to their vehicles when we spotted them. At first the numerous weapons draped across them and the ragged state of their clothes made me think they were marauders. But the usual reactions marauders have when surprised and confronted with new people were absent. In fact, though it was obvious they were eager to get some rest, the lot of them were happy to sit with us and chat.

  All of them are either widowers or widows. Most of them lost kids. None of them have any family left to speak of, no close friends. The farming communities here haven't suffered through starvation as many others have, and marauders have been less of a problem here than other places mainly due to the huge excess of easily stolen food. The worst problem here has been the zombies, which comes as a surprise to no one.

  The group doesn't have a name for itself. Their leader's name is Karen, a younger woman who is scarily comfortable with her weapons and looks like a college cheerleader. She's kind of a barbie, if there was ever a Barbie doll dressed in tattered clothes soaked in the blood of the undead and carrying a hatchet. Karen tells us that there are no large groups around here. Most of the farms are run by families and friends who've come together to survive. She hasn't come across a group anywhere in her patrol area with more than twelve or thirteen people together.

  Yeah, Karen and her folks patrol. The zombies around here spread out quite a bit to match the farmers being so far apart. Everyone with Karen is someone who lost everything, who felt no sense of purpose until she found them. After she lost her own family, Karen fell into a deep depression and almost gave up. Something inside her, whatever spark it is that makes us survivors, took over. It wasn't enough to make her want to pursue a new life with new people, to settle somewhere else and try again. But it was enough to make her angry and to mold her fury into a weapon.

  Too broken to live a normal life but with too much tenacity to die, Karen and those who've joined her choose instead to fight. They move between the local farms, clearing out any zombies they find and sleeping wherever they can find shelter. Some nights that's in the homes of the very farmers they protect. Occasionally it's out in the open, with only fires to warm them and their own senses to protect them from danger.

  Karen doesn't seem fatalistic, nor do any of her people. There's a certainty to their mannerisms, as if they've found a satisfaction that's almost perfect. Maybe it's the clarity of purpose, or the simplicity of their chosen work. I don't know. None of them look happy, but I don't think they'd rather be anywhere else.

  Except being with their lose loved ones, of course, but only death might make that happen. Is that what they're looking for? I wonder.

  Tuesday, December 20, 2011

  Night's Song

  Posted by Josh Guess

  We spent the day and evening with Karen and her folks, and they were happy to accommodate us by graciously not actually trying to attract zombies to our location. Yeah, they do that. They don't try to bring in a swarm or anything, but there are they do sleeping in shifts, so at least five of them are always awake.

  They try to get the attention of any wandering zombies nearby by singing. Softly at first, then louder if a fair amount of time goes by without an attack. The idea is to A) kill zombies, which is pretty much their whole thing, and B) grab the attention of any undead so that the ones sleeping aren't murdered while they're dreaming.

  They didn't do that last night, instead just keeping a standard watch. A few of them did sing as they sat around the fire, though it was too low to carry more than a dozen feet. One of the singers, an older man named Nelson, has a wonderful voice. I didn't ask if he'd been a professional singer before the fall, but he could have been. Even pitched not to carry, the sounds coming from between his lips were clear and strong, smooth against my ears.
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  Karen's people don't have a set list of songs they do or anything. They just sing, whatever happens to strike them. Nelson is a fan of belting out very loud opera in languages I don't understand, and he sang one to me last night. It was a quiet thing, meant for the ears of us around the fire. He sang in Italian, a haunting flow of subtle notes that went beyond language. I didn't have to know the words to understand the story.

  It was a sad song, bringing to mind all the loss we've suffered. Parts of his song had edges, rough pieces that contained trace anger. I found myself thinking about everything that's gone now, all the potential the world no longer has in it. As Nelson breezed through the words, I remembered every friend who'd passed too soon, every family member lost to this cold, dark world and its hungry citizens.

  It put me in a mood, let me just say that.

  I've been down lately, but I've tried to keep my chin up. It's getting harder. More and more, I feel as though I've let my friends and remaining family down back home. I've fostered so much discontent, rightly or not, that I was essentially forced out on this trip. Is our goal a worthy one? Absolutely. I'd have done it even if I thought there was a choice involved. I miss my wife terribly, and I know she misses me. I don't feel like I've failed them because I'm gone. I feel that way because I've had a lot of time to think about my actions and words since The Fall began, and I truly regret not doing more to broker peace and build bridges.