Living With the Dead: The Wild Country

by Joshua Guess

  God knows we need it.

  Saturday, January 14, 2012

  Glass

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I went out on a round of searching early this morning. We've decided to wait out the weather here in our little abandoned town and our stone shack. Since we're stationary for a while, it seemed like a good idea to stock up on everything we could use. To that end we've redoubled our scouting efforts and started doing house-to-house searches and venturing farther away from our base.

  Rachel found a farm supply store not far from where we are, and we raided the hell out of it. I've got a new set of insulated heavy boots, a set of very nice coveralls, and more scarves, toboggans, and gloves than I could ever need. I like to dress in layers when I'm going to be outside when it's less than twenty degrees out.

  I went out with Steve about two hours before dawn. We decided to make our way to the edge of town and move in a broad circle around the perimeter. The buildings out that way are farther apart, but they're also surrounded by thick woods and undergrowth that made us hopeful the contents hadn't been disturbed too much. Someone has looted this town in the past, but not heavily. It looks like whoever has been through here only snagged easy items from the homes nearest the main road.

  For example, the first pharmacy Rachel found had barely been touched. There were lots of medications and supplies to be had, which is nearly a miracle considering our current situation. The same can be said of the houses on the outskirts of town. The first few we went to hadn't been touched, and produced a variety of items that might come in handy. We've found more guns and ammo than we can realistically carry given our limited space, so we've put them into a stockpile to be sorted later.

  The fifth house we found was the most interesting of all. Two stories high, old but well maintained, the place looked like most of the other places nearby. Aside from being so screened in by trees that we almost walked right past it, the house didn't seem at all different from the neighboring places a hundred yards on either side. That was what we thought, right up until we walked into the place.

  The first thing we noticed was the heavy locks on the doors. Expensive ones. Took us a few minutes to get in. The interior didn't seem off at first glance, though the fireplace was bricked over in what was clearly an amateurish bit of work. We searched the first and second floors, not coming up with anything of great significance. A few hunting knives, some .45 caliber bullets. A whole box of trashy romance novels, which we would have used in the fireplace to warm the house while we searched. Oh, a few Stephen King paperbacks, which I stuffed in my backpack.

  Don't want to forget the meth lab in the basement. That part was unexpected.

  I was scared to go down there at first. I've had this deep aversions to unlit basements since I was a little kid, when my brother David began telling me that all the bad guys from slasher movies were going to come up from there to get me. Rationally, I know that's not the case, but the seed of fear in my psyche has had decades to grow and now has heavy roots.

  Completely aside from that, meth labs are scary for totally rational reasons. They contain explosively flammable gases, some of the deadliest chemicals known to man, and are usually run by people with no training in chemistry or lab safety and who are addicted to the substance they're making, which turns their brains into overcooked pot roast.

  So yeah, fun times. The lab itself was reasonably neat and orderly. There were supplies to harvest, mostly in the form of tanks of propane and some burners (which we plan on cleaning very thoroughly before we use) plus a few other things.

  The really insane part was the pound or so of crystal meth sitting on the counter. For a few seconds, my brain rebelled at the idea that what looked like a giant back of rock salt was of any value in any way. It was just this stuff you couldn't eat (safely), couldn't use for pretty much anything. Plus it alters your mind, which is always a huge risk. Useless stuff.

  Then my outlook shifted just a tiny bit. Ice. Glass. Meth. The stuff had been a plague on the US, especially in the south. That bag had, at one point, been worth tens of thousands of dollars. Now what value did it have? None that I could see. Steve and I left it where it was and took the other gear upstairs. The people who had owned the lab must have enjoyed four-wheeling. Steve and I found three of them in the garage. Gas, too.

  If I weren't worried about starting a forest fire, I'd go back and burn that house down. There are some things that should be left in the past. Humankind has enough threats, from zombies to our own people, hanging over our heads. One less thing to damage us is a win, in my mind.

  Sunday, January 15, 2012

  Evolution of Man

  Posted by Josh Guess

  A comment on my post yesterday got me thinking. The reader pointed out that we should be careful with the tanks of propane we gathered, as they might contain anhydrous ammonia, an incredibly volatile and deadly substance used in meth cooking. My thanks to that reader for thinking of our safety, but I was already aware of the danger. That thought, remembering my firefighter training and the meth fire I helped put out while I was in school, led me to this post.

  I've always been a curious person. Before the zombies came and burned our world down, I'd had a lot of jobs. I've talked about that before, but I think it bears repeating. I've got a degree in Fire/Rescue Technology, and a ton of training in all the crazy things you need to know to be a firefighter. I loved school, loved the fact that a good firefighter has to be a solid generalist. You've got to know a lot about the construction of many kinds of buildings, the materials that go into them. How they burn, their strengths and weaknesses. I got an EMT certification during the first six months of the program, which is a whole other set of skills. I know ropes and knots, the tensile strengths of a dozen kinds of ropes made of various materials. I was fascinated.

  I've always been that way with my work. I've worked a broad spectrum of jobs that made me surf the web, learning more about all manner of details of what I did for a living. Combine that with my curiosity in general, and you've got a person with a very broad set of skills. I can build a house. Set a bone, stitch a wound. I spent many years pursuing education in the martial arts not because I wanted to be a badass, but because I wanted to build an understanding of the mechanics of the human body and how to exploit them. The philosophy also attracted me, obviously.

  I don't say this to make myself sound impressive. Of all the skills and pieces of knowledge I've picked up, none are as dear to me as the survival skills I learned. Those classes were fun but far more important gave me the rudimentary knowledge I needed to survive in very harsh circumstances.

  In short, I was lucky. I had many chances to fill my brain with information that might come in handy one day, and I took them. The larger realization that hit me yesterday was that most people who've survived The Fall are the same. Maybe not slackers like me who were directionless in their lives as long as I was, allowing me the time to learn at my leisure, but generalists with a lot of very useful knowledge. Many people have had to learn on their feet since the zombie plague hit, and I'm damn impressed by that. I had the luxury of calmer times and quiet reflection to amass my skills. Most other people had to pick it up or die.

  This is a subject I've talked about before, as I've said, but I can't help banging this drum. If you're reading this (and sometime in the last few days, LWtD reached 100,000 hits, which is nearly a miracle) then you've survived under conditions and facing threats that were too much for the vast majority of people to handle. I see Rachel, Steve, Becky, and Bill working around our little cottage here, shoring up drafty spots in the roof, working leather into usable clothes, making meals that efficiently combine nutrition and calories, and a hundred other little things. They are little things, but I really want you to think about that.

  Think about all the small things you've had to learn since all this began. Did you know how to sew? Could you have done a decent set of stitches in a ripped pair of pants? Maybe, maybe not. But I bet you learned. I
bet you put your mind to that and a ton of other skills that are simple but incredibly useful in daily life. I've said before, with many caveats and moments of hesitation, that The Fall has some silver linings to it. This is one of them. People are improving themselves to meet the challenges of the world we live in. We have to.

  I just find it very impressive. It's a bit funny as well--for example before The Fall, I knew maybe one or two people who knew how to make gunpowder. I can think of three dozen who do now off the top of my head. I know men who had never done a bit of auto repair, always taking their cars to the shop at the smallest sign of trouble who can diagnose and fix any of twenty common problems with their vehicles.

  I see it in the efforts of the team to make our little temporary home more comfortable and livable. We used to focus so much on how hard it was to live in this new world that at times we ignored the lessons it was trying to teach us. I guess what I'm saying with this long, winding rant is that I'm proud of us. All of us. We may never reach our full potential, but by god we're gonna keep on trying.

  Monday, January 16, 2012

  New Horizons

  Posted by Josh Guess

  We're on our way again. We left our little town behind a few hours ago, and we're making decent time. The weather actually turned in our favor yesterday afternoon, melting much of the snow on the roads, but we wanted to leave fresh and rested rather than only go for a few hours and have to find a campsite.

  Will is holding up pretty well. Becky is stiff with all her stitches, but she can take care of most of her own wounds without help and has no problem tending to Will's as well. My primary concern with moving him was with infection, getting caught far away from any safe haven that we could care for him in. That was before we ransacked a pharmacy, however. Barring any further trauma, we have enough medicine and supplies to handle just about anything Will's body can throw at us.

  I wish I could say that the trip from Block has been easy on him so far, but that's not the case. It hurts him to move at all, and we have to care for all his needs. I don't mind being the guy with the bedpan, as I was a nurse's aide when The Fall came around. I don't like having to move him around and jostle his leg at all. Every time is a risk. When we transfer him on the stretcher we brought from Block (one of many they'd taken from abandoned ambulances in the area) we do a little better, but he still yells out in pain when we hit the smallest bump.

  You'll understand why we keep him pretty doped up. The amount of pain one person can deal with is finite, and Will Price has a lot of tolerance. He won't ask for pain meds until he's already hurting so bad that he can barely speak. We make that choice for him.

  As the official leader of this little group, the ultimate call is up to me. I'm not comfortable with the idea of basically forcing him to medicate. Philosophically, it bothers me to make that choice for anyone. On a practical level, I've spent way too much time in healthcare. You wouldn't believe how many people get addicted to pain medicine. It's way, way more than you think.

  Get down to brass tacks, though, and we don't really have much choice. Will can twitch in his sleep and wake up screaming. On the road in relatively warm weather where zombies may be out walking, that's a recipe for disaster. Not to mention the psychological damage enduring so much agony for so long can do to someone. It's a lot like being tortured, only you can't give up information to make it stop.

  Still, we're on the road now and every minute brings us closer to home. I can't tell you where we are right now, but we're several hundred miles away. If the roads were totally clear of snow, cars, and trees, I'd say we could be there as early as tomorrow. We're still finding long stretches that have had the cars cleared from them only to abruptly end in huge traffic jams of abandoned vehicles. Trees are down all over, causing us to detour often. Patches of ice make the going even slower. We can't afford to be anything less than cautious at all times.

  We're also stopping every two hours. All of us have needs to attend to, and it's imperative that we keep a close eye on Will's leg. We're in a hurry, but we can't afford to be hurried, if that makes any sense to you. It's worth stopping for ten minutes every few hours if it means whoever is driving won't be distracted at a critical time by a full bladder. It's worth it if changing Will's bandages far more often than they need it keeps his wounds from getting infected.

  Slow and steady, just like the turtle. Every mile of this last bit of the trip is us exploring a new place, even if it's only through a window.

  Time's up. We're packing it in to continue on, and I'll have to turn off the transmitter. Stay warm out there. Stay safe.

  Tuesday, January 17, 2012

  With Bells On

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I killed a man in cold blood this morning. I cut his throat while he slept, and I held him down as he bled to death.

  I don't feel bad about it at all.

  Yesterday afternoon, we stopped at a small homestead. We'd seen the smoke from the road and decided to investigate. The long driveway was peppered with zombies, a few dozen maybe. We drove past them, as they didn't seem interested in attacking our vehicle. They were new breed undead, and they followed us toward the house.

  The house itself was grand--a big old farmhouse that had clearly been around for a century or so. There were additions sprawling out from it, and a wall built around the whole thing maybe a hundred and fifty feet across. A big circle with a single gate, ten feet high. The top of the thing sloped outward, as if someone inside had taken the last two feet of wall and pushed it at an angle. Spires of metal jutted out like claws. All in all, a good defense. Maybe not as effective against the new breed, but clearly the people that lived there were good at keeping them at bay as well.

  A face poked up over the gate as we approached, an arm followed. The small boy pointed at the undead following us, his intent clear: clean up your mess before you come in. Steve, Rachel, and I climbed onto the roof of the trailer with our bows as Bill parked the truck. We only had to kill half a dozen of them before the rest made a tactical retreat back to the edge of the woods nearby, giving us time to get through the gate.

  I'll say this much: the primary goal wasn't to get a warm place to sleep. The weather is insane right now, going from deadly cold to almost spring-like. It stormed hard yesterday and we wanted a place to park with at least some protection from the wind.

  I introduced myself to the small group of women and children that came out to greet us. Most of them were family, the ladies a pair of sisters plus one of their friends, the children belonging to the three of them. Plus one orphan who had wandered onto their property. I introduced myself and the team, but only I was invited in. We were strangers, after all. Trust is a beautiful commodity, but at times has to be treated as precious goods. Not easily shared.

  The team didn't want me to go in alone. I agreed it was a bad idea, and I went anyway. My reason was simple--I was curious. Not about a small group of survivors out here on their own, I've seen too much human tenacity and resilience to be surprised by that kind of thing anymore. The thing that got my attention was the body language of the women and kids who met us. They screamed nervousness with the way they carried themselves, but it wasn't me causing it. When those women looked at me, I saw something else entirely.

  Hope.

  I won't give you a long account of how my evening went, just the broad strokes. I had dinner with the whole group of people who lived on that farm, twenty-two of them. Of that, six were children. Twelve were women. The other four, men. Well, two grown men and two boys that were old enough to shave but barely that. The leader of the group was a big man named Alex. He was probably six-three, two forty or so. Solid guy. His manners were impeccable with me even if his treatment of the women and kids was more brusque than I'd have liked. We talked about the trip I'm on, the team, New Haven and all the places I've been. He seemed genuinely curious.

  Naturally, I wondered what was making the women and children (and from what I could tell, the other three adult mal
es there as well) so afraid of Alex. Was he abusing them, and if so why didn't they just take matters into their own hands? Did he have some kind of hold over the rest of the group I couldn't guess at?

  Later in the evening one of the women, a slip of a sixteen-year-old girl, managed to get me away from Alex for a few minutes. Turns out that outhouses are becoming quite the rage, and those people don't let anyone go out alone. Alex wasn't thrilled to see me leave his sight with one of the women, but I'd been searched for weapons, and the girl had a small knife pointed at one of my kidneys. I suppose I should have been angry at those kinds of measures, but again, I've seen too much to blame anyone for their caution. I can have a good pee under pressure. Lots of practice.

  During the sixty seconds or so we were outside, the girl fiercely whispered a story to me. The gist was that Alex was the only one with guns, safely locked away in his room with a stockpile of ammo. He only let the others use them when zombies were very close to the walls and in such numbers that firearms were the only choice. Alex was, she told me, very dangerous. He was fast, strong, and clearly had combat training. He carried a small .38 snub nose on him and could whip the thing out and fire with lightning speed.