Living With the Dead: Year One (Books 1-2, Bonus Material)

by Guess, Joshua; Ribken, Annetta; Ayers, Rachel; Whitwam, Lori

  Consider. Most folks have jobs that take them outdoors. A guard, for example, is outside all day. He or she does four hours on the wall watching for external threats, then two hours walking patrol around the compound, and finishes with two hours of sentry duty. During that time, depending on what section of the wall they have been assigned that day, a given person can meet and talk to fifty people. Some are going through the gate to scavenge or run raids on dozing zombies. Some are simply digging up potatoes or carrots. Some are off duty themselves, merely enjoying a stroll (though more rare now that it's so cold.) while others are taking classes with Aaron.

  Every bit of conversation, every introduction, produces a bit more togetherness. I have tried to get to know people, but it has felt all too often like trying rather than doing. It's felt forced.

  I've had a little luck with combat training, but the idea is for me to teach. It's hard to be friends with the guy who demands you try harder, be better, because he knows you can even if you feel you can't.

  So despite my heavy frame, I'm jogging. It gives me a break from the endless numbers and bits of math, and I get to be out there in the streets, smiling at babies and winking at pretty girls.

  And getting to know the people around here, learning their stories, is important to me. I need to keep grounded in reality as much as anyone else, keep first and foremost in my mind what it is we're doing here. It's not about my anger or pride, having basically founded this place. It's not about my principles or ethics, my desperate and sometimes murderously harsh actions and decisions. It's about these people. Anyone that wants to live in peaceful cooperation.

  They are the goal. Living, growing, continuing to be. Every man, woman and child are the greatest treasure we have. All else is dross that can be burned away, painfully, but ultimately expendable.

  I'm not separate from them, or different. I have as much value as anyone here, and they as much as me. Working on larger and more long term problems has done much to make me lose perspective.

  I'm going to go for a run. Maybe straighten out my vision a little along the way.

  at 11:48 AM

  Friday, November 5, 2010

  Moving Forward by Backing Up

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Damn, jogging in this weather is brutal. You can't wear a heavy coat because you end up sweating, and you can't just wear a shirt or you'll end up freezing.

  While I was out I talked to Dodger, who has completely taken over runs to the outside with the scouts. They've been out hunting groups of inert zombies just after dawn, when it's still extremely cold but with enough light to see. He told me several very interesting things.

  One is that they are still finding groups of undead here and there, but usually in small clusters. Most of those look very emaciated, as though they hadn't managed to find food in a very long time. Interestingly, those groups tend to be very small. The largest one our scouts have located so far was about a dozen. Most have been much smaller, three or four together.

  Dodger found a large group this morning, and he only did so because he disobeyed his instructions from Will. Instead of staying within the radius of travel he was given, Dodger moved much farther out on a hunch. It seems that the smart zombies (smarties) might have seen the pattern in our patrols and gone outside their reach to hibernate or whatever it is they do. The group this morning was found about ten miles from here, all laying down with leaves and brush pulled over them in a dense copse of trees.

  Dodger found them by the tracks they left in the mud around the place, so they must have been there a while. He stepped on one of them before he realized they were all laying down, but luckily the cold had the zombie so immobile that all it could do was moan before he crushed its head with a crowbar.

  I guess they tried to move far away from people before they became unable to move for the winter. I worry that this means a large number of them will go unscathed this winter, but we aren't going to take inordinate risks when the weather gets bad.

  The flip side to that coin is that a longer distance between us and them means that any warm spells would have to last a long time for them to make it back here and attack us. I see that as a big plus, since we've had no days in the last week above fifty five degrees or so.

  Oh, while I was out jogging I saw Aaron. He's been pretty busy lately trying to keep ahead of his students on pretty much every subject, but I caught him talking to a very pretty girl. I hated to interrupt, but I had some news for him that couldn't wait. I'll share it with you as well.

  My sister has been working with Jack and his people up north to try and help us with some technical skills that we sorely lack here. To that end, she will be coordinating with Aaron to send some of his more interested students up north to receive training in whatever areas of engineering and fabrication (or pretty much any other subject Jack's people know). With luck, those folks will come back with some new things to teach others.

  Roger's death drove home a lesson we already knew: we can't allow specialized knowledge and skills to be lost. Patrick worked with him and learned enough from him to continue his work, but Pat is gone right now, and that is too risky. Pat will be home again soon, we hope, and when he gets here he will stay long enough to teach what he knows. He's agreed to do that full time until there are two others that know was much as he does about smithing and metallurgy. That will be helped by the surprising delivery of books Roger's wife dropped off here this morning, which contain between them thousands of pages of instructions and bits of information, all written by him over a long career with metal. Bless that man for being so obsessive.

  I have work to get back to, much as I hate to cut short. I have a good feeling about sending some of our people north to learn. It feels right.

  at 9:31 AM

  Saturday, November 6, 2010

  Growing Along the Way

  Posted by Josh Guess

  It's below freezing outside, and many of us are missing our furnaces. It's not unbearably cold, but it really sucks. Like camping ALL THE TIME.

  Moving on...

  While on my now daily jog, I stopped by the main gate and helped a repair team there fix a broken bolt. Not a big deal, we have plenty of extras, but it made me think about some of the positive things the zombie plague has done.

  I'm not saying I am glad it happened. The fall of society (which I often refer to in the appropriate caps "The Fall") was obviously the single most devastating event in the history of mankind. The greater majority of all people on Earth are dead, as far as anyone can tell. Families and communities have been sundered, and after enough time it's a real possibility that there will be too few of us left to continue on as a species.

  But hear me out.

  What is left of humankind are some of the most intelligent, versatile and resourceful people I have seen. As much as it galls me to do so, I have to say the same of many of the marauders that seem to crop up in groups across the country. I hate them, but they have managed to stay alive and thrive when most others didn't.

  Mostly, though, it's the people I see around me on a daily basis. All of us have had to learn to do things that we had never considered before. People who had spent their lives as pencil pushers worrying about the cost of groceries are now farming their own land. All of us have skills and knowledge about that now, since so much of our land within the compound is used to grow food.

  We've all learned some carpentry and building, weapons and hand to hand combat, how to fire a gun and hit what you aim for. A huge variety of skills and knowledge none of us had before. That's not even including the things we're learning from the books and copied web pages at our disposal. Many people are learning things that may never be useful, but have always wanted to know about. Groups of people are learning many useful things as well, from those of us in Evans' medical classes to the guys and gals trying to teach themselves electrical engineering in advance of trying to make our power stations work.

  It's like we became a community full of my wife. If
you've read this blog for a long time, you know that Jess has always had this weird but useful form of OCD where she gets obsessed with something and then does nothing else until she masters it. She did it with assembling computers, making chain mail, growing vegetables, sewing...the list goes on and on. She's sort of the template for us as a group.

  I can't help but wonder at the changes in all of us over the last eight months. I know many of us have had to do very bad things, but for today, I like to think about the positives we've also managed from this tragic set of circumstances.

  at 9:09 AM

  Monday, November 8, 2010

  At the end of the road

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I've been thinking about how we have been growing and changing as a community a lot lately, which has been reflected in my posts. I have talked about how we have done this, and why we have done it, but one thing I haven't really stated what we are growing toward.

  It's common knowledge that we want to be self- reliant for pretty much everything. It will take a long time to get there, but the reason for that is our desire to build a large and safe community where anyone can come and live in peace. My personal goal has always been to work toward Utopia, an impossible goal.

  My philosophy in life is a curious mix of idealism and realism. I feel that working toward an unreachable goal will generally increase how hard we work for that goal, and how far toward it we get. It also keeps people trying to improve everything they do. For now, we work toward continued survival in this world destroyed by the uncounted swarms of zombies. In the future, we will take this cluster of neighborhoods surrounded by simple and rough walls and turn it into an enormous fortification. Eventually we plan to have most of Frankfort enclosed, with enough people here to ensure the survival of the human race.

  I once read that every human alive comes from a surviving population of six thousand. I can't remember the exact circumstances that caused that catastrophe, but the details aren't important. Just think about it for a minute. Six thousand people into seven billion.

  I want to make the compound into a center of learning. And farming. Technology. Many things.

  Above all, a place of peace. Where families can come and be certain that they won't be abused and battered. Where the stupidities of the former world are dealt with on the spot, and harming others without cause won't be tolerated.

  We have a lot of hurdles to clear before we can begin to make that dream come true. It may never be possible to achieve that much autonomy and cooperation within our own walls. But if we don't aim high, we can never hope to create something worthwhile or lasting. I am determined to make sure that the zombies who destroyed society don't manage to make human beings a thing of the past.

  If you're with me, with us, I beg you to show your support in any way you can. Together we can change the world. It won't be easy and sometimes you will want to quit in frustration, but I can promise that in the final equation, it will be worth it. Maybe not for you, but for those that will hopefully come after.

  If I die tomorrow, I will be satisfied having said that. We live in a dangerous and unpredictable world now, and the time for skirting around what you feel and being timid has passed.

  at 8:57 AM

  Tuesday, November 9, 2010

  Impulse Control

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Not too many people just wake up and want to beat the hell out of someone, but there are always exceptions.

  On a related note, we don't have a dentist in house.

  One of our scouts, Jamie Packard, is sitting in isolation right now after getting into a fight with Dodger. To be accurate, I should say that Jamie and Dodger had a heated disagreement which the former tried to end by blindsiding the latter. Jamie sucker punched Dodger when the poor guy thought the argument was over and lost two teeth for his optimism.

  It's not the issue of the fight that makes me want to tell you about this incident, but rather why the fight happened in the first place.

  While on his daily run outside with the scouts, Dodger wanted to go searching for more groups of hibernating zombies beyond the patrol area. It was very cold this morning just as it was yesterday at that time, but yesterday got warm. Which means that some of the undead got up and started moving around. With that lovely bit of information, you might see why Dodger was so intent on finding a group of zombies while they were helpless.

  Jamie was fine with the idea, as were the other scouts. They have been making runs with Dodger regularly since last week and have come to mostly trust his judgement on this type of thing. Ahh, but that qualifier has to be put in: mostly. See, by the time they actually found a group of undead, it was already pushing fifty-five degrees. Dangerously close to the temperature they wake up at. Indeed, a few of the hardier zombies were stirring even as the discussion was going on whether to stay or go.

  Dodger wanted to go, Jamie wanted to stay. As the disagreement grew more heated and some insults were hurled at Dodger, he decided to pull rank and make the call to come back home, at which point Jamie called him a coward and slugged him while wearing his armored gloves.

  That brings us up to right now, I guess. Rich, our arbiter for all legal situations, is having to judge the attack on Dodger based on what happened today. Problem is, all of us know how Jamie feels. As I came to find out while hearing about this whole scenario, Jamie has had it harder than most of us. He managed to get his immediate family safe, only to watch some of them die in a brutal zombie attack. Acting as the leader of his small group long before he met us, he found himself alone after a while. Every person he loved was killed, leaving him no one. Imagine how badly that must have scarred him, and the anger those deaths must have stoked.

  To give some perspective, let me share something about myself I'm not especially proud of. It's short and not so sweet.

  A few weeks ago some people were over at the house taking my combat class. One of them left a bar of chocolate out. They must have saved it from Halloween. Anyway, one of my dogs got into it and ate the damn thing. Made him sick enough that I thought he was going to die. I went from house to house looking for who had done such a thoughtless thing, totally ignoring the fact that it was an accident in my rage, and when I finally got to the right house, the lady who did it admitted the truth. I lost it, screamed at her, and while she seemed a little worried that I was going to attack her (reasonable, since I was yelling in her face) she also took my outburst with a fair amount of calm.

  Of course, I eventually apologized. I overreacted. My only defense is that I love my dogs and all my other animals almost as much as I do my family and more than I do most people. They are sweet and loyal and unconditional with their love for me. I don't take the illness or death of my pets very well.

  I was almost on the point of violence for the sake of my sick dog. Jamie lost his entire world to the plague of zombies, so who among us can blame him for his intense desire, bordering on a need, to kill them? No one.

  We are, however, a community built on the idea of peaceful cooperation. We can disagree all day long, but at the end of it we have to do so with each other non-violently. Else we risk so many of the same mistakes that society made before. We have laws and punishments for that reason. There have to be consequences to actions.

  I'm not the one who got punched. Dodger is. He's a pretty reasonable guy, but who would blame him for wanting to see Jamie punished for his actions? Jamie was in the wrong. It's a shitty situation.

  There's a famous quote whose source escapes me. It says something to the effect that to achieve real compromise, you have to make both parties feel as though each of them got the best deal they could get, but leave them wishing for something a bit better.

  I don't know if that sort of wanting satisfaction can be reached here, but I really hope so. Not for the sake of a fistfight that the two men will probably both grunt out an apology to each other for (because that's what we men do, in case you didn't know), but because all of us carry that fury around with us
. All the damn time. We are bitter and frustrated animals struggling to fit within the cage we have built to contain us and keep us safe. We trust that our reason and self control will overcome the more impulsive and vengeful side of our nature.

  Not always possible. We all know that. This incident only underscores the truth that we are all capable of doing something stupid and destructive when our buttons are pushed. I hope that we can keep that sort of thing to a minimum, but I also hope that when outbursts do happen we can have some compassion and flexibility on both sides. A little understanding.

  It's personal for me.

  If my dog had died, I don't know if I would have had the self control not to lash out at that woman. Given how I feel about men who abuse women, that there is even a question in my heart about it is enough to make me worry about just how high my stress level has gotten. Again, not just me: all of us, at least every adult here, deals with similarly injured hearts. How do we deal? How can you heal the pain of a thousand cuts as this world of the dead continues to bleed us day after day?