by Joshua Guess
I'm working on the food situation while also trying to get an idea of how our construction supplies look, how much water we have (it looks good, lots of rain in the last few days) and a hundred other tiny things that need managing. I'm not complaining, by any means--I love being back here doing my job, despite the horrible consequences we're having to deal with. It's just that I've spent the last few months trying to stay alive, then learning new skills as I went on to North Jackson. It's overwhelming to have to get back into the mindset that my job requires.
Especially difficult given that every time I look up from my computer, I see the perfect stacks of books and supplies in my office that remind me that a man who gave us up to the bad guys also took pains to safeguard the very place I'm working. It's a distraction that I can't afford right now. That's part of why I'm heading to the farms.
Oh, and the zombies started showing up again yesterday. Not a ton of them, but enough that we have to post a lot of extra guards at the gap in the north wall. No firearms--bullets are more valuable than gold at this point, so we're not using guns. An extra twenty people with bows are keeping an eye on the undead drifting by the north wall. An unexpected consequence of driving them off with ammonia seems to be a reluctance to gather too closely to that area. Which makes guarding the gap easier.
Unfortunately, it means that the zombies are now wandering more on the farms. Which is another reason I need to head out there...
Enough shop talk. I'll update everyone on what's going on with Will tomorrow. I need to get out and focus on figuring out just how threatened we are in our weakened state, and come up with solutions. Not alone, though. For the first time in months, we're all together again. My friends, my family, the people I love.
Any amount of stress and worry is worth it for that.
At 9:57 AM
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Eve of Judgment
Posted by Josh Guess
I've been pretty religious in making sure that there is something on this blog most days. I used to take Sundays off to spend with my wife, but that went out the window when we had to flee the compound. Now we're back, and I may take up that habit again. Not today, obviously, but I almost certainly won't be posting tomorrow.
As I look back over the the last year, I think about how far we've come since the first days of The Fall. Our community along with many others of its kind have grown and strengthened in that time, we've built bonds with one another that will hopefully last for years. So, too, have the terrible marauders and violent takers banded together, using force when words and peaceful intent would likely have sufficed.
We've changed and evolved. I'm a more realistic and frankly brutal person than I was when this began. Our shared view here at the compound that survival of the group has to be paramount has led us to see human lives in a different light than before society fell. It isn't that we don't value individuals, far from it. Rather, it's a learned willingness to sacrifice a few to save the many. To do what is needed regardless of how painful it might be for the good of the tribe.
A single person might have the will to cut off a finger, a hand, or an entire arm to save their own life. This might be the first time in human history when an entire community would do the same--expect and allow for a large number of their own to perish that the majority may continue on. In that sense, all of us here see human lives as commodities. Numbers that need to balance with reality. The difference is that while each of us might be a figure in the grand equation of our little society, we still love one another, respect one another. We still weep when the loss of a brother or sister survivor comes. We honor our dead for their willingness to fight for the vision we all share.
It's that steely core in us, that one guiding principle, which drives the people of the compound forward. We make summary judgments based on that criteria--hence Will Price's trial, which is happening tomorrow. See, with the Richmond soldiers, there was no other way we could have gone. Death was the answer. They had weakened us, stolen our home, eaten our reserves, and stifled the progress of our people. Invaders are to be dealt with quickly and with prejudice.
With Will, though, things are different. People want to give him a public trial in order to make the facts clear for everyone. Yes, Will did an awful (unforgivable?) thing when he gave us up to the enemy. He allowed all of those things I wrote above to happen. He also probably saved a lot of lives by doing it, and during the occupation of the compound he went to great lengths to help people.
I once wrote, "If what you are is what you do when crisis comes, then they were monsters, worse than the shambling dead that surround us at all times." It's that first part that I look at now, that makes me seriously consider how I have changed and how my perspective has altered over time.
A crisis came, and Will handed us over to the enemy. His intent is the key to it all. Was it to give this place to the soldiers, or to save lives? Intent does matter. Actions matter. And for all the suffering Will caused, he spent a lot of time with us before. Fighting for our lives, protecting our allies. Saving Jessica's life. My wife lives because of this man.
Will Price is one of us. I don't know if that simply makes things worse gives more weight to the act of betrayal, or if it means we should look harder at what he did and the consequences of it. I have the feeling that every avenue of discussion is going to be addressed at the trial tomorrow. Every angle of his actions will be examined. It will take all day, I'm sure, but eventually a decision will be reached, and consequences made clear.
I will be testifying, as will many others. Because so many people (all of us, really) will be at the trial at one point or another, everyone who is physically capable of it will be pulling extra duties on the wall and at the farms while the rest are at the trial. We need it, too--the zombies have been showing up in more numbers at the farms since my post yesterday. They're going after the farmers as well as animals now, and judging by the two sheep they managed to get hold of yesterday while I was out there, we'll need constant eyes on our livestock.
Tomorrow is going to be a rough day for everyone, and it's pretty much guaranteed that no one is going to walk away happy. Those that want Will dead will be furious if he isn't executed, those that want leniency will be furious if he lives, and everyone except the injured will be overworked, underfed, and pissed that it's still chilly outside. As one of the people who is looked at to set an example, I will run between my testimony, guard duty, and regular daily work with a smile nailed to may face so well that it might crack my bones.
If what you are is what you do when crisis comes...I re-read that line, and I can't help but shy away from thinking about that in terms of myself. The things I have done, though the reasons behind them were justified, have been terrible. Is there such a thing as a good monster? A man (or woman) who can do unspeakable wrongs to support the greater right, without falling onto the slippery slope toward becoming what he hates? I don't know, but it scares me. I feel good about that, at least--my own actions haven't scared me in a long time. Looking down the barrel of our judgement of Will, I can't help but reexamine the last year and see so much killing, so much pain at my hands that I wonder if I really have been on the side of the angels.
I've got to get to it and try to get as much done today as possible. Tomorrow is going to be a beast for everyone. See you on March 1st.
at 11:39 AM
Behind the zombie: How Living With the Dead was born
Josh here. This is a sort of informal, behind the scenes section. If you aren't interested in how or why this blog came to be and couldn't care less about the weird everyday inspirations that make it happen, then you can skip ahead to the short stories and Lori's novella. I won't get mad. Go ahead. Feel free.
...Are they gone? OK, free beer for everyone!
OK, so a lot of people have asked me a lot of questions about LWTD. I thought I’d take a little time to give everyone a good idea of how the whole thing works, and some tidbits you won't get anywhere else but from me.
Or one of m friends. Maybe from my mom. This section is pretty much all spoilers, so if you skipped ahead about five hundred pages, go back. You've been warned.
I had the idea to start writing a zombie story a long time back, probably sometime in 2005. That was when I started reading “The Walking Dead”, the amazing Robert Kirkman comic. I've been a fan of zombies and zombie movies since I was a kid, and I really liked the idea of a zombie comic as a zombie movie that never ends.
However, one thing that had never been done in zombie fiction, at least that I had ever seen, was a truly day-to-day account of how one would survive, what it would do to people long term. I mean, “The Walking Dead” does an awesome job of showing how characters change given the insane circumstances, but the reality is that the book comes out once a month, and all the characters deal with these huge, life-crushing scenarios. I wanted to get more detailed, go deeper, and try to do something that examined the everyday life of the survivors.
Of course, I was also pretty lazy about my writing in those days, so I put it off forever. Jump forward to late 2009, and I'm starting to hear some very interesting things about the Kindle. I decided that I would start in on an abandoned novel I had sitting on my hard drive, and I started to work on it in earnest.
A few months later, and I found myself barely writing. I needed something to motivate me, sharpen my writing skills, and MAKE my lazy ass write every day.
So on a whim, I registered LivingWiththeDead.net on blogger, and wrote a post.
I shared it on facebook, made my friends and family check it out, and kept on writing. I’d love to tell you that it went viral and got a trillion hits, but that isn't real life. Just under a year in, and I'm at about 50,000 page views. I'm happy with that.
In the beginning, this whole thing was just a big writing exercise for me. Yeah, I got to scratch my zombie itch (which sounds like a particularly bad venereal disease), but mainly it got me motivated to write every day and to sharpen my skills. It helped that people actually started reading it.
Most of the people in the blog, at least the main characters, are real. The idea was to write the thing from my own perspective, as if the world as it was and the world I created diverged on March 2nd, 2010. The skills that I list as my own are, for the most part, skills I actually possess. I have done martial arts off and on for years, I've got a degree in Fire/Rescue, I've been an EMT, a nurse aide, and yes, both of my parents are actually nurses and Mom taught me to read and treat a wound at the same time. I'm a generalist, so a lot of the knowledge my character has isn't just stuff I ripped from Google—it's things the me in the story would really know.
Jess, Patrick, Mom, my brother and sister, Little David, Gabrielle...all of these people are real. I've had a great time royally fucking up the lives of their fictional selves, but by far the strangest moment was killing off my mom.
It was something that I knew I wanted to do in the story almost from day one. Imagine my surprise a little down the road when I sit down with my mom and, totally unaware of my plans, she suggests that I kill off her character. Her reasoning was nearly identical to my own—it created an emotional turmoil that truly alters the fictional me. Plus, mom's character was a stabilizing force for everyone else, an authority figure that kept heads cool and settled disputes. As a reader, she recognized that for me to take the story where I wanted to go, that influence would have to vanish.
Writing a serialized story almost every day is really, really hard. I wanted to balance the minute details while still keeping it interesting, which is how the entire idea of the compound got started. I needed a vast cast of characters to draw from, and the logic of grouping together fit very well. I really enjoy writing about group dynamics and working toward mutual goals, and the compound gave me a huge laboratory to experiment in.
For the most part, I take inspiration for each post from things that are really happening to me. When I say I'm sick on the blog, I am in real life. When I wrote about Patrick Rothfuss and Brandon Sanderson, and how the Wheel of Time would never be finished, I was re-reading “The Gathering Storm”. I see so many little things in daily life, and have to ask the question—how would this work or not work in the zombie apocalypse? Would we need it? Could we do without?
Don't get the wrong idea: this is not a solo project. I talk to mom on a regular basis about the blog, and she gives me some amazing perspective to work with, and a lot of good ideas. Which I steal blatantly. I should add here that mom HATES zombies, really hates them. I tried to convince her at first that good zombie fiction only uses the undead as a device to tell human stories, but she didn't believe that. Understandable, since she doesn't watch or read anything that deals with the undead.
Well, she does now, I guess. She started reading because I'm her son and she loves me, but she kept reading because I realized that to draw in a larger audience, I really had to make the daily life of a survivor something that just about anyone could get into. If my zombie-hating mom could do that, anyone could. So I tinkered and came up with ideas, fleshed them out, and kept her attention. Now, she's fan numero uno, and not because I'm her kid. If you knew her, you'd understand just how quickly she'd shoot me down if she hated my work. I love her for that.
There are many others. Patrick has given some great advice and made very keen criticisms over the last year, and when he started writing on the blog, his observations got even better. Pat isn't a writer, or at least he isn't trying to do it professionally. He has powerful and moving ideas, but he's years out of practice. He started writing on the blog in late 2010, and each of his posts has gotten better. If you've read through this eBook, you might have noticed it for yourself. He overcomes severe Dyslexia to write, and while sometimes I do edit his posts for simple errors (Dyslexia makes that hard to avoid), his prose has become very good in a short period of time.
Courtney and Treesong were two of my earliest cohorts on this project, and their posts are always wonderful. Tree is more reactive, and doesn't criticize much. Living so far away from me and being super busy, it's hard for us to talk often. Courtney lives far away also, but is less busy, so we talk a fair amount. She kept me from making some HUGE errors early on, and one piece of her advice changed the entire course of the story.
And then there's Aaron. He started reading the blog after he saw the link on Patrick Rothfuss' website. Aaron emailed me, we started shooting them back and forth for weeks. He's been a great sounding board for ideas as well as a source of them. I love his posts, because they capture what I love about the zombie genre—the everyman trying to get by.
I've been asked a few times what my favorite post is. It changes over time as I and others write new ones, but right now the winner by a country mile is “Homemade Hero”, which was an interesting one to write, and incredibly fun. I wanted to put Jess and I into a situation that was realistic and didn't involve any miraculous saves by unknown parties. I wanted to create a scenario in which we were trapped and had to find a way out with nothing but what we had on hand. When I got us stuck in that rest area, I had no idea exactly how we were going to get out. It took me about two hours of really hard thinking to come up with the idea for body armor made of all the junk we found around the place. I like that whole series of posts because I feel like I did my job perfectly for them—incorporating humor, suspense, horror and even a creatively creepy catch in the smiling zombie.
Telling this story has been one of the most fun things I've ever done, and at times one of the most demanding. There were times when I thought I was going to burn out and give up, but milestones got reached and friends supported me. They kept me going, and now that I'm having a reasonable amount of success with Kindle sales, I get excited to write every day in a way that I've never experienced.
And it's all because of you, my readers. You are the ones that make this worth it in time and in money, and I can't ever thank you enough. Enjoy the short stories ahead, and the novella that is dark enough and beautiful enough that by itself, it was worth the price o
f this work.
Stories
As a special bonus to you, the reader, this section contains several short stories and one novella, all set in the Living With the Dead universe. After each tale except my own, there will be a short bio on the writer. I strongly recommend that you check out the links for the talented ladies that have put so much love and care into crafting wonderful stories for you to read.
If You're Bitten By Zombies, You're Off The Guest List
by Rachel Ayers
If you’re reading this then you already know about Josh, and the Compound, and everything that happened there. This isn’t a story about that, although we got there eventually.
My name is Rachel, and this is part of my story, and part of the story of the end of the world.
The funny thing is that one of the reasons Chris and I knew we were good together was that we’d both owned a copy of Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide. We both spent idle hours planning what to do in a zombie attack; where to go, who was in charge of grabbing the guns and ammo, who was in charge of barricading the house. All of it a silly thought exercise.
It saved our lives.
Chris and I had been dating for a year when the zombies started showing up on the news. Like everyone else, we laughed it off uneasily and thought it was some kind of disease. I was in the middle of planning a wedding—a simple, quiet wedding with a handful of family and friends, but a wedding nonetheless, and I was wrapped up in my own world. I could afford to ignore the news: it was on the other side of the country and my friends were gathering for my shower.