Living With the Dead: Year One (Books 1-2, Bonus Material)
Page 27
We've been dealing with it. But yesterday afternoon was brutal, and today it's not even nine in the morning and it's already 85 out there. We are baking. It's making everyone testy and on edge, and caused a few fights.
Resetting the traps has been a pain in the ass, and hauling new supplies down here from our storehouses was more difficult than I would have imagined. The smarties (smart zombies, for those of you that aren't aware) are probably now aware of the fact that we have trapped nearly every square inch of perimeter, but there isn't a lot we can do about that. We've adjusted for the fact that when they do hit us all at once, they will probably avoid the tripwires. It's makeshift at best, but we have set up a series of pull wires to set off the traps if we need to.
There is a lot of talk around here about heading back home soon, regardless of whether or not the smarties attack us. It's been shouted down by more reasonable people, but you would be amazed at how quickly a degradation of living conditions will make people irrational. We can't go back as long as a large force of them is roaming around, and if more than a few dozen leave here we'll start to have holes in our defenses.
Just got a text message...
Jesus, one of the smarties just mauled three people in the hotel. The folks over there think it must have slipped in the other day and hid. I have to go.
Posted by Josh Guess at 9:13 AM
Thursday, August 5, 2010
V for Victory
Science is awesome. Really.
Imagine for a moment that you are a tired and ragged group of survivors, watching as a horde of relatively intelligent zombies are moving in a giant mass toward your safe haven. Further imagine that you have fought a smaller group very recently and were hard pressed to repulse them. Add to that image the certainty that they know you have trapped the area and will be actively avoiding them if possible, requiring you to activate the traps remotely, and thus less efficiently.
It's pretty bleak, don't you think?
So there we were, every able bodied person waiting for the assault on our fallback position at the hotel, the tower, and the civic center. A ring of human bodies, armed to the teeth and only able to look on as the hungry thousands edged closer.
Then, the glorious rain. It had been looming all morning, a bank of iron gray clouds that promised relief from the oppressive heat but at the cost of visibility. Thunder hammered the sky while we waited, and distant lightning danced.
When it came, it struck like a comet. The rain pounded the undead, and the thunder seemed to unsettle them. The moved much faster toward us from many directions but the majority over the bridges. The trapped, deadly bridges. The bridges with tall steel streetlights on them. Of course, those streetlights were the posts that our tripwires and such were anchored to, and that made a nice circuit to the drenched road when the lightning hit.
Electrocution can now be added to the short list of things that will permanently kill a zombie. It didn't take out a lot of them, maybe only three dozen, but it was enough to scare the shit out of the ones coming up the bridges. It made them careless and frenzied, more like dumb zombies. Watching in confusion as the front of their ranks fell all at once, we took the opportunity their hesitation gave, and we began to mow them down.
Traps slinging about, gunfire ripping into them, every person choosing shots. We waylaid them. We also prepared a group to go out and fight them hand to hand, and that worked out very well. I was one of them.
We figured that no matter what we did, at least some of the smarties would make it to the base of our buildings. A dozen of us were outfitted in the hodgepodge armor that has worked so well for us. It was tiring as hell, since all that fabric absorbed a lot of water, but we had secured all of the gear we were wearing with duct tape so none of the smarties could undo our helmets or get inside our Gi. There was nothing to it but wading out into them and cutting as many of them up as we could. We moved in two groups of six, watching each other so that no one got mobbed and weighed down.
Handguns and katana, with cover provided by people right above us with rifles. Good thing about living in Kentucky is the huge numbers of hunting rifles and ammo.
We won. WE WON!
We didn't get them all, of course, but we feel confident that there will be enough time now to truly secure the compound before they have enough numbers to threaten us again. We will surely have worse days, but for today at least, we are the victors.
Posted by Josh Guess at 10:59 AM
Friday, August 6, 2010
Just like "The Wrath of Khan" but with zombies
I just want to go home.
Yesterday, after we had the big fight with the smarties, we began to pack up. It was our intent to come home this morning. We started to, in small groups with heavy guard. Jess and I were in the sixth group to go out. It turns out that the smarties are a hell of a lot smarter than we thought.
We were so sure that we had scared off what remained of them by killing so many in such an overwhelming display of force. We were so certain of it that we failed to accept the possibility that their tactics could adapt quickly. So while we were on the way home, our group got hit.
We were in a truck, a big super cab Ford packed with people. I was in the back with three other guys to act as lookouts and guards, and out of the tall grass (pretty much all grass is, now) a pack of twenty or so of them rose up and swarmed us. We were just passing the intersection where a big set of apartment complexes looks out over the river valley. I've been there a few times, one of my friends used to live there.
That's where I ran to when I fell out of the truck. I hit my left elbow on the pavement, tore it open pretty badly. The blood and the fact that I was easy prey made all of them focus on me. The truck took off as soon as it saw an opening in which it could speed up. Don't get mad that I was left behind--it is our standing order that groups must leave a person behind when confronted by overwhelming numbers. I can only imagine that my wife was screaming for them to stop, but I am glad they didn't. I can't imagine what I would do if she or the baby she's carrying were killed.
Besides, I'm pretty sure they could see me run like hell. They wasn't much chance of me getting snagged up by the truck since the horde was so close on my heels. I booked it to (crestview? I can't remember for sure what the place is called...) and tried to lose them between the buildings. There are some houses over there as well, and how lucky am I that a few zombies were already roaming around?
I went the only direction I was sure they couldn't follow quickly. I made for the edge of the giant fucking cliff the whole place sits on. I vaguely remembered looking up from the river valley and seeing the place, noting that at the extreme edges of the neighborhood, the cliff softened slightly into hills. I made my way there as fast as my feet could take me.
I didn't dare try to pull my pistol out and try to fire. I had lost my rifle when I fell out of the truck, and a knife wasn't going to do much good with no armor.
It was nerve wracking to say the least, and the hunger of the clever zombies chasing me actually worked to my benefit. Several of them moved too fast chasing me down the incredibly steep terrain, and fell a few hundred feet. The rest were more careful and slow, allowing me to keep some space between us.
When I made it to the bottom, I ran. I wasn't all that far from the fall back position we had just vacated, but there were some stragglers on the road I ended up on, so I went the other way. Unfortunately, the other way was into the closed off area of south Frankfort, and we had blasted out the bridges. There were undead on Louisville hill, so getting home that way was a no-go.
I am in south Frankfort now, and it sucks.
I am only a few miles from home, but until a big enough group can get down here and clear out the zombies that are beating on the walls of this place, I'm stuck. I know I am somewhere on the far side of capital ave. but not at all sure what street or block. All I know is I am stuck in a house with boarded up windows that I managed to get into as the zombies were chasing me, mainly because it
looked like the best chance I had to survive long enough for rescue.
I have already talked with people at the compound. They will be sending some people this way as soon as the move back home is done. Hopefully it won't take more than a day or two, because I skipped breakfast. But I understand the rationale perfectly, and I agree with it.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or, in my case, the one.
Wow. This is making me want to watch the 'Star Trek' movies.
Gonna try and nap now. Might lock myself in the basement or a room without windows. Those planks are rattling mighty hard...
Posted by Josh Guess at 12:48 PM
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Under the Radar
Phone is almost dead. Still stuck in the basement of this damn house. I am really lucky that there aren't any windows, because the zombies would have gotten me in no time. But now I am well and truly stuck, for about the last twelve hours. I came down here yesterday to sleep, and right after I woke up they started to really try to come in here and get me.
I came beck into the basement because the zombies managed to bash in some of the windows, plywood over them and all. I have reinforced the door that comes down here, but the house above me is packed. The folks back home told me that were sending a rescue party out, but now I am worried that they won't be able to find the place. I mean, the zombie horde outside was sort of a dead giveaway that a living person was in here.
Now, though, they are in the house. I don't know if enough of them are outside to make the place stand out. If not, I am in for a long and hungry wait, as they do a house to house search.
Ok, less than twenty percent power now. Going to wrap this up and save the rest of my battery for calls if I need them.
Posted by Josh Guess at 5:28 PM
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Democracy in Motion
I have been rescued. Rejoice!
I have been home and left again. It took the teams a little while to draw the zombies away from the house I was staying in. They had to come in and clean out the stragglers. I spent last night in the arms of my wife after a very wonderful meal of rice and venison. One of the great things about living in Kentucky is that the population of white tail is so large that we used to have to hunt them as pests. Now that there isn't any out of season poaching, there is plenty of meat for patient folks with firearms.
I had a lot of time to think while I was stuck alone. The onset of the zombie plague literally destroyed society in a matter of weeks, and for the first time I really had to ask myself: was that because the plague was so powerful, or because society was too weak?
In the time that I was trapped in the house, before I went into the basement, I could see the top of the capitol building through a thin crack between boards over one of the windows. It's funny that I have lived here for twenty years, seen the place a thousand times, and yet in all that time I never really stopped to think about what that sprawling stone campus and all like it say about us as people.
We were a society built on the idea of elected officials acting in our best interests, because we voted them into place. All of us know how that worked out. But I think even the most cynical of us was shocked at just how self serving almost everyone in the country proved to be when the fall hit us. Government collapsed, the armed forces collapsed, and it was pretty much every man for himself. Those bold facts lead me to believe that our previous government was, by and large, run by a group of people obsessed with their own public persona, rather than any sense of true public service.
A great example of how this obsession and belief in their own perfection created a system of inflexible bureaucrats incapable of dealing with society in realistic terms, much less forces capable of destroying it: when I was young, I visited the capitol building with school. I was fascinated by the sheer size of it, the precision and detail with which the vast stones were fitted together. Never mind that it must have cost ludicrous sums of money to heat and cool, or that repairs to any of the granite and marble had to be done by men whose craft had become so rare as to cost more than many luxury cars for even simple work. What always stuck in my mind about that trip was when the tour guide walked the group over to an open door, and pointed to the middle hinge. She pointed out that the hinge was missing a screw, and had been for about a week. With a charismatic and simple smile, she informed us that by law, all pieces and parts of the building had to be exact copies of the originals. Every desk and chair, every nail and bolt, had to be individually ordered made from scratch to meet the specification of the old part, despite the fact that the old ones were created in a time where electricity had yet to make its way to this part of the country.
Can you imagine the cost over the long term? What waste, and what hubris.
So for the last hour or so, after a few days thinking hard about what we need to leave behind us as a people, and a longer night at home remembering all the good things our government did for us, I have been systematically dismantling things in the capitol building. Doors, desks, chairs. Anything we can use, anything that can be made a part of the great machine that is our small but growing community, we are taking. Maybe some day we will use this building for its intended purpose, as a seat of government. When and if that day comes, I truly hope that we can do the same good that our previous democracy was capable of, while keeping an open mind and a ready memory of the bad that we not repeat those mistakes.
I sincerely hope that someday, we will have the need for a large representational government again. I believe in the power of democracy, and I yearn for the safety and population that will both allow and require it. Truly, I miss what we had. But this is our chance to revise the errors we once adhered to with all the conviction of young priests to the dogmas.
Until that day comes, we will cannibalize what we need from here, and this place will be an empty tomb memorializing the idealists who built our nation, and standing as a warning to us of the egotists who corrupted that vision.
I believe that the time will come when we can take the words of the founding fathers as they were meant: as basic guides for government and society. Jefferson himself believed that society would have to evolve and change, that only a self-correcting and progressive system of governance could survive long term. I will leave you with that quote:
"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment... laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind... as that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, institutions must advance also, to keep pace with the times.... We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain forever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
Posted by Josh Guess at 10:13 AM
Monday, August 9, 2010
Another Brick
Work work work work.
We're doing nothing else but working on the wall, finishing it up and adding to it. Every single person we have is doing it, except for a few off duty folks who are either pregnant or injured. They are working to make food round the clock so we can work three shifts.
Jack sent a bunch of trucks full of advance units of wall section along with fifty people to help install them. Jack is giving us a big hand here, and surely part of it is that if we all die, one of the bigger sources of their food will dry up.
We've repulsed a few small attacks while we've been working, nothing we couldn't handle. All of us are on the razor's edge of wrath, tired as hell of having to constantly be on the alert. We have been extremely brutal and quick about taking them out...
I need to finish my lunch and get back to the wall. But we will finish the wall in a few days. The framework was the hardest part, but we have been working on that for months. This is it. Soon, we will be able
to relax for the first time since all of this began.
Posted by Josh Guess at 11:12 AM
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
The Paradigm Shivers
We're almost done with the walls. Pretty much everyone is falling over with exhaustion. We've burned a lot of fuel using some of our big machines to move large sections quickly. We decided to do this because of the risk we run while exposed. I would rather be safe and low on diesel than dead with full reserves.
We used a lot of those old heavy wood doors from the capital for reinforcement all over the wall. Pretty much every square foot outside the wall is studded with stakes and pits.