by Joshua Guess
It always made sense to me. In fire/rescue school, I learned that hard lesson. All firefighters have to internalize it until it becomes second nature. Helping others is a noble choice, but no first responder should take a suicidal risk to save a life. Because if you die and they die it was pointless, and all the other people you might have saved down the road won't have you there.
But Raven's people are doing that. I'm not knocking their choice at all, I think it's wonderful that they're taking on victims of mother nature's fury. Any survivor knows fear on a deep, visceral level when they encounter strangers, though. To take a risk like this and accept large groups of unknown variables into their home...well, I can only imagine it because we've done something similar here. Granted, North Jackson acted as a sort of barrier for us in that sense, as they had time to learn about our new arrivals before sending them here. No surprises for us.
It's a brave thing Raven's people are doing, and I hope there are no bad apples among the people that come to live in her home. The cynic in me wants to talk about how dangerous this move is, but that wouldn't be news to anyone. I'm more amazed and kind of awed by it, to be straight with you. That an entire community can overcome that instinctive terror and risk so much out of sheer compassion fills my heart. I wish we were strong that way...but then that cynical part reminds me that we've had the chance, and would likely have suffered greatly as a result, and I'm glad that someone else is doing it but also glad we didn't.
That might make me a bad person. I can live with that.
Friday, November 9, 2012
The Stacks
Posted by Josh Guess
With the Exiles mostly gone--the local ones on our side of the river, at any rate--and the Hunters no longer a problem, we find ourselves in the curious position of having ample hands and relative safety to accomplish the big jobs that need to be done around here.
I should mention at this point that in the peaceful few days following the mass extinction at the Hunter community. the rest of the people from North Jackson finally made it down our way. This time there were no human attacks. Only zombies to deal with. The line of cars and other vehicles was said to have stretched for nearly an eighth of a mile.
We couldn't have managed it so quickly without the supplies pillaged from the Hunter compound. They kept their fuel underground and used a pump to fill their vehicles. So...thanks for that, I guess.
Dave is working on his big project Du Jour this morning, which is one of the crazy ideas he's been working on to house all these people. A lot of folks are packed in houses like sardines. Many more fill the hospital. Quite a few went over to the husk of our local superstore and cleared it out. Not far from the hospital, it makes a pretty nice temporary home. Lots of skylights, a few of which were knocked out and the holes modified to be used as vents for makeshift fireplaces and stoves.
Honestly, I think some of them might decide to stay there. It's a neat setup.
But there are many more who want to live inside the walls here, and who can blame them? Safety in numbers, fresh air if you fancy a walk, and one enterprising newcomer is trying to convince Will to let him open a brothel. No, I'm not kidding. I'm not against it, nor do I think most people would really care, but how would people pay? We don't use money. Funny, though.
That desire to be near people but also to not freeze yourself to death or get elbowed in the face while you're trying to sleep three people on a twin bed is what's pushing my brother to greater lengths. It's weird not to be a part of the process, weird every day and with no reduction in intensity. When Dave came by this morning with his sketches, I felt that familiar pang. The same one I've had every time I come across something I'd have been a part of from the ground up.
It's not a big deal, just strange and a little sad. But given our enormous expansion in the last few months, it would be impossible for me to cover even one section of New Haven's operations on my own. There's a real command structure growing now that we have enough people to fill positions. Dave had the help of an actual architect and two structural engineers in making his idea a real thing.
That's how he came up with The Stacks.
He calls them that because they're basically apartments, and he says that all apartment complexes should have a name. The idea is that a name makes them more unique, more a home. I can't say I agree. I've always felt that any place can be made to feel like home if you fill it with love and happy moments. But hey, I'm also the guy who saw the end of the world coming and refused to leave his house. So take what I say with several grains of salt.
It's a name that's kind of a joke. The Stacks are exactly that: a huge monolith of a building primarily made out of shipping containers. There are more of the things being found and hauled in here every day, some from stores around the area (and up to fifty, sixty miles away as more teams get mobile) and a good number brought from the train stalled on the tracks a few miles away. Dave is going to stack them four high, reinforce them and build frames to keep them in place and take some of the load off, and then build a hollow rectangle with them. The short side will be two containers wide, the long side four. The corners will be interesting: dave isn't overlapping the containers. Instead he wants to build completely new structures in the empty space where the open ends of the boxes sit at right angles to each other. Stairways will fill two of those corners.
The middle of the square will be filled with more apartments, these made of wood. Much easier to work with, obviously, and the steel of the containers wrapping around it will act as a nice support structure and protective barrier. People will live in both sections. Dave even showed me how he's going to cut each door from the containers leading into the wooden section of the building, how the plumbing will work, and a lot of other details that made my brain go fuzzy.
It's really cool, really efficient, and will house something like three hundred people without being crowded. Seems like a lot of folks, but since each section will have shared cooking and bathroom facilities there's a lot of room left over for sleeping space.
I wish I could have been a part of the process, but that's okay. I'm keeping busy with several other projects right now. My job is different and maybe not a job in the eyes of some people (like me, because I enjoy it too much. Jobs are supposed to be soul-crushing and hated...) but there's a lot of work to be done when you're attempting to compile a complete history of a place and the people in it.
I guess seeing how excited Dave was about The Stacks and the prospect of getting it built fast is what bothered me. It wasn't really being out of the loop, because it's not like I'm just sitting here with my thumb up my ass. It was missing out on the shared fun of creating, the joy of working together to make something new.
But to get things done efficiently we have to make sacrifices. The Stacks are important, and the cold right now is keeping the local zombies relatively docile. Time is a factor in that. They're slowed down for the moment, but as the population out there recovers from the spanking we've given them, the strong will devour the weak and they will be energized. They'll come at us with renewed zeal.
Hmm. That's probably one of the reasons people want the safety of the walls, too.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Stampede
Posted by Josh Guess
I had a post all planned out today. It was going to be interesting and informative. Instead I've been asked to issue a warning we ourselves received only a short while ago.
Coming up from the southwest--or at least southwest of here, a few hundred miles away--is a massive migration of the undead. It's sheer dumb luck that anyone saw the swarm in the first place since we don't have a lot of allies that direction. A trade caravan moving between two communities saw movement across a plain far below the high roadway they were on and stopped to check it out. They hoped it was a herd of animals that could be hunted for meat.
It was people. Zombies. Several thousand of them and no small percentage New Breed. They're quite a ways from any known communit
ies, and at the pace they're traveling they can't reach the closest for days. If you've got strong defenses, bulk them up even more and hunker down. If you don't, I suggest keeping your eyes open and a keen ear for messages. We'll try to keep a constant update going along our other means of communication as well as this blog.
You may have to run. I know that won't be a problem for many of you given the time we've all spent worrying and planning for that possibility. This is a large swarm, big enough to pile atop each other and walk over the bodies and onto the walkways of our own walls. Be cautious and alert. Chances are they'll stick together and accumulate more undead as they travel through, but they can only move in so many directions.
The way it looks at the moment, they're not heading toward anyone. The witnesses made a rough calculation, and a straight line following the highway they're on would take them rather far west of here, and there just aren't any other communities that we know of around that way. Not ones zombies could find without help, anyway.
The only other piece of info I have is that the zombies seemed to be moving pretty hurriedly awayfrom something. I've seen them scatter and move miles away from a bad beating at our hands, but they always reorganize and come back in a few days. People are food to them, and even when food fights back you don't abandon the hunt that easily. So I doubt it's a band of marauders they're hightailing it from.
My guess is something much bigger and more primal, like a prairie fire or some other catastrophic event. Maybe a chemical spill? I imagine a big enough ammonia spill would drift across the land and drive them like cattle. That's one thing I've seen firsthand, the effect of ammonia on their reactions. They'll bolt and keep moving for days from a big enough fire or smells that overwhelm their senses.
I really hope they miss us. We've had less trouble dealing with our own local undead than is usual and I'd love to see it stay that way. That's an unlikely dream to have since the temperature was over forty degrees all night and is nearly sixty now. That's the range even the most sensitive zombie finds appealing. Above fifty, they don't suffer any slowing from the chill. Which means the next few days will become interesting and busy for all the wrong reasons if the weather stays nice.
It's a bitch wishing for piercing wind and sub-zero temperatures, especially in the face of a potential threat as dangerous as the wandering swarm headed roughly this direction. But what can you do? That's the world today. Black is white, up is down. Good is bad, and pretty weather is a dangerous, hateful kind of climate to live in.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Butcher, Baker, Delicious Cheese-Maker
Posted by Josh Guess
The council ordered two groups of scouts to leave New Haven this morning on a mission to gauge the size and specific direction of the enormous zombie swarm plodding across the southwest. In a pinch they have permission to attempt to lead the zombies away from populated areas, but only if they're trending more in our direction than we believe they are at the moment.
The teams are heading out in a fleet of hybrid cars with additional gas tanks added in, carrying enough gas to get them nearly a thousand miles without refueling. It should be more than enough to cover any other travel they have to do, including pointing the undead in another direction. I was out this morning when the scouts were gearing up to leave, and I chatted with them for a few minutes before they started to drive away. Problem was, they didn't head for the main gate. They were moving toward the gate between Central and East. When I asked them why, they told me it was for the hamburgers.
The fucking hamburgers. Yeah.
Curious, I hitched a ride with them to this shack hastily built into the side of a house. The house itself is occupied by three families--it's a big house, as most of the ones in East are--and their cohabitation is not an accident. One of the ladies was a butcher before The Fall, and she is again. We eat a lot of rabbit and deer meat nowadays, since we keep rabbits for that purpose and hunt the plague of whitetail around here like it's going our of style. Cows are becoming more plentiful in the wild as the various herds of them don't have any major predators hereabouts and Kentucky was home to many tens of thousands of cows back in the day. This woman gets roughly a cow a week, which is something I'm sure our hunting teams are doing because they like hamburgers just as much as the rest of us.
She butchers the cows, and the baker that lives with her--her husband, apparently--makes buns. Bread of all kinds, but buns specifically for this. Their friend from North Jackson is actually one of the soldiers that are becoming our full-time sentries and guards, but the guy grew up on a dairy farm and made money in high school by making artisan cheeses and selling them. Wisconsin. GOD that place must have been boring.
So they make cheeseburgers for people. They give some away to the hunters who bring them meat, and some to people who give them other supplies they need. They sell the rest. Not for money, of course, but for favors or in trade for services or things they need or want. The scouts got theirs for free. The butcher lady, who called herself Sissy, said it was for being brave enough to go so far away from home and take deadly risks for the rest of us.
I'm pretty sure she slipped the team leader a list of things she would like them to keep their eyes open for along the way, but who can blame her for that? The area of the country they're heading toward is one we haven't pillaged for supplies. Chances are good that they could find some useful loot.
I got my burger for promising to talk to Patrick for them. They have two hand-cranked meat grinders, and Sissy wants a large funnel for one of them so she can load more beef at one time. Pat says he can make one easily and quickly after he takes a few measurements...if the price is right. I love cheeseburgers with the heat of a thousand suns, but Patrick is on a level I can never reach. It's like a vampire and blood, man. For real.
It was nice to sit with the scouts for a little while and shoot the breeze. I briefly considered asking Will if I could go with them since I haven't been further than a few miles from New Haven in what feels like forever, but I didn't end up asking. He would have thought about it because he's my friend. He might have said yes for the same reason. But I'm starting to understand that with so many people here we really do need to differentiate into specialized jobs. I know that our friendship weighs on Will when I ask him for things, and I don't want that bond to be a burden to him.
My place is here. After several months of that being a fact, I think it's time I get used to it. So I toasted to those brave soldiers and wished them well, took the last bite of my burger, and came home. Better in the long run to let them do the work they're best at, and set myself to work of my own.
I had a lot of doubts about society after The Fall, but if we're at the point where three people can set up a sandwich shop, I call that a step forward in civilization. It's like discovering fire but way tastier.
Monday, November 12, 2012
Falling Down
Posted by Josh Guess
The Exiles across the river have been quiet for so long--not wanting to draw attention to themselves as their counterparts on this side attacked us--that we nearly forgot about them in the press of recent events. We still have watchers keeping a close eye on them, though I don't get reports from them immediately unless something happens. Most of the records I keep now can suffer a few days without having 'no news' slipped into their folder.
This morning wasn't one of those boring times.
Not long after the guard change at five, a man from inside the fallback point walked up to the guard platform. The Exiles have become a little better at manning their posts lately, recovering from whatever internal struggle or disease that weakened them recently. The fellow went up to the guards on duty and appeared to chat with them, then without warning drew his sidearm and killed both men.
When a group of worried people burst through the exit to see what the screams and gunfire were about, the man opened fire on the crowd before putting the gun under his chin and taking the express train out.
It
was random and sad, and the watchers who watched it happen under the generator-powered lights at the guard station were baffled. The guy had seemed calm and relaxed, then BAM! Killing spree. Those kinds of things used to happen with fair regularity in the world that was. Less often now, but with the pressures we have to deal with it shouldn't catch us off guard.
Maybe the other side of the river is dealing with an unstoppable mass of zombies, or there isn't enough food, or his woman (or man, I guess) broke it off with him. Maybe someone important died. Could have been nothing at all. We'll likely never know, and even though it happened to the Exiles I feel a little bad for them. I don't feel much pity for them in general, but having one of your own turn on you is above and beyond. I'd be willing to fight and kill them if it came down to it, but it would be honest. Betrayal, especially now, is about the worst thing I can imagine. It hurts all the way to the bone.
No one should have to deal with that, even enemies.
I guess I'm a bummer today, but that's all I've got. The scouts should reach our giant swarm sometime tomorrow, and unless the local zombies take advantage of the warm weather to come at us, conditions seem good. Which means something terrible is going to happen. It always does.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Frenzy
Posted by Josh Guess
I've had three hours of sleep in the last day. I was right about the zombies taking advantage of the warm weather the other day. A lot of them gathered, way more than we'd have guessed were nearby. The damn New Breed are clever at hiding, and they aren't just hiding their own kind now. The reason we didn't see them or the throngs of old school zombies they were leading?
