Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land (Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  One of the main legs of the tower is cracked and splintered about three-fourths the way through. If it breaks and comes apart, the whole thing will fall and probably topple onto a house. We've evacuated the surrounding homes for the time being, which makes for tighter quarters than usual.

  My brother estimates that with a team of decent carpenters he can completely repair the tower in about three days. That's not so long for the folks that live nearby to hunker down and double up in beds. The problem is that there are other, more vital fixes that need to be seen to.

  The tower took the worst damage, but the largest threat is the beating the wall took. The storm came in from the west, and that section of the wall is riddled with small breaks and missing boards. At first glance none of them are large enough for a zombie to get through, but now that it's daylight a better look can be taken at the integrity of the thing. My guess is that for every obvious gap, there's probably a cracked board or loose log that couldn't be seen in the dark. I'm wondering if we didn't get hit by the edge of a tornado given how much debris is laying around.

  It's a lot of work, and I seem to be saying that a lot lately. The spring storms here are stronger than most years, and that's causing us a lot of grief. As always, we'll put forth some extra effort and get the repairs done as best we can.

  I'm just hoping the April showers are nearly over. Our people need a nice, long period of calm to rest up.

  Thursday, April 21, 2011

  A Strand of Web

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I saw a piece of dandelion fluff this morning. It was stuck to a single strand of spiderweb, tenuously strewn between two walls of my enclosed porch. As I noticed it thrumming back and forth in the breeze, a powerful thought struck me.

  Life is just as precious and fragile. Though circumstances have changed in a way that dramatically shows this by contrast, it's as true as it has always been. The zombie plague has thrown the eventual survival of humanity into question. Those of us left behind are like the piece of dandelion fluff, a seed that holds the possibility of survival for humankind.

  The dead walk among us, hungry and terrible. They are to be pitied as much as they are to be feared. They are the breeze that shakes us, one of many things that threatens all we have worked toward. The recent storms and the damage they've wrought serve to show us that there are many things to fear beside the undead. The rage of nature is always an obvious terror, as are the zombies themselves. But just as dangerous are more subtle threats--disease, despair, darkness of the human soul.

  What we are and what we face are two of the more obvious parts of this weird realization. The fluff, a piece of potential that faces the wind which threatens it. The most powerful part of that single moment for me wasn't seeing the struggle of we human survivors against powerful forces in that one image. It was realizing that what kept the fluff safe, what held it aloft in defiance of the wind, was a strand of something so thin that it was invisible yet so strong that it couldn't be broken.

  What is it that keeps us going? What is the name of the force inside all of us that has driven humanity to survive through all of the horrors and disasters throughout our history? I once said on this blog that I had read somewhere that all the billions of people alive had come from a near-extinction event that left a mere six thousand of us alive. My god--what sheer force of will it must have taken those six thousand to struggle on. to hunt and farm, to make the awful choices they likely faced. Where did it come from? Where did they find the strength?

  An animal will, if injured badly enough, lay down and die. Some people will too. So many of us, however, will choose to fight. Clawing and scratching for every moment of existence. We do it for ourselves on one level, and for those we love on another. I think that deep down, below all that, we find wells of determination and grit that spring from the simple urge to see our species survive. I don't know if that makes us unique in the animal kingdom, but it does make me proud.

  It's almost profound in its simplicity, and enormously complex in its implications. Life is persistent and powerful in all its many forms. Human life is difficult and frightening, especially now, yet we do not lay down and accept that it can overwhelm us.

  What holds people together is impossible to see until something comes along and shakes us. When we are under strain from something awful, the edges of what binds us can just be glimpsed. It is that resistance that shows us that our bonds are real. Call it hope or determination or whatever you like--it's something that all of us share with each other, making a net so strong that only total destruction of our species could break it.

  Only a day after the last storm, and that single strand of web was there. Did it survive the wind and rain? Did some enterprising spider decide to rebuild it so quickly?

  We have rebuilt. We have survived storms.

  A thought, from a single strand of web.

  Friday, April 22, 2011

  Comfort Measures

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I have a toothache. It's not your average small pain, but a deep and powerful throbbing over my upper left front tooth. I can feel every beat of my heart in it, each strike of my pulse sending waves of pain through my head.

  For that reason, I'll keep this short. We don't have a dentist. It's one of those things that doesn't really come up until you need it, but of all the strange and useful skill sets among the survivors here, the zombie plague seems to have kept us from having even one dentist among them.

  The closest we have is Becky. Both of her parents were dentists, and that was her eventual goal. She had been going to school since I met her, and she worked in her dad's office as a dental assistant when time permitted. That said, she admits that she doesn't have anywhere near the skills or knowledge to do the job.

  So, I'm going to let Evans stick a needle in my gums and see if he finds any fluid in there. The consensus seems to point toward an abscess, which probably means they'll have to cut the tooth out. I'm not really looking forward to that.

  There's an abandoned dental surgery suite not too far from the compound. We've got generators. If we have to, we'll plug the equipment there up and I'll let the docs do what they have to. Evans swears he can make me a new tooth if he has to cut this one out. Again, not too excited about that.

  Alright, off to the clinic. I can't work like this.

  Saturday, April 23, 2011

  Hindsight

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Painkillers are a beautiful thing.

  Except for the part where they make me incredibly nauseous, of course. Evans did the best he could with my tooth, but it's not pretty. Can't blame the guy for not having dental training, but the job's done. Time will tell if I lose or keep the damn thing, but for now it's still firmly attached to my skull. The filling isn't world-class, but between him and Becky they got the job done.

  This minor emergency reminds me that for all the speed with which we managed to put together many parts of the compound, there are always going to be things we overlooked. I mean, the first wall we built was basically just made of cars parked around the outside of the place, the cracks filled in with whatever we could find. When more and more people started to show up, all our efforts went to getting a permanent wall in place. You've seen how well that went--it's falling to pieces in some places.

  The same goes for farming. While every person in the compound is responsible for caring for the plants that we have growing in what used to be our yards, last year we pretty much raided every farm we could find around here for the crops already growing. It was only after the shepherds and farmers from out east came to settle with us that plans were made for large-scale farming outside our walls.

  Every step of the way, we've had to deal with the fact that each mistake we make will eventually become a bigger problem. The zombies outside the walls may fluctuate in numbers, but they're never going to go away. At least they haven't yet. Every repair, every change of plans, every ounce of wasted effort, means risking attack. We're a
strong group, but there isn't a day that goes by where I don't worry that it will be the one where we're overrun.

  I look back at the very first days of The Fall, and I realize how lucky we were. Jess and I worked like crazy to fortify the house while every other person in this neighborhood except for my mom packed up and left or was killed. So many people funneled into supposedly safe areas guarded by the military. So many dead along the way to those areas...

  We got really lucky. Many members of my family benefited from the early warnings I gave them. I lost far more of them than managed to survive--aunts, uncles, cousins by the score. Part of why we examine ourselves so hard here in the compound is because we've collectively lost so much. There isn't a lot of room for error.

  I think the painkillers are making me a little loopy. I'm going to go before I make an ass of myself. I just worry about everyone so much...

  Monday, April 25, 2011

  Shambles

  Posted by Josh Guess

  It's been raining and storming around here so much lately that I'd kind of gotten used to it. Except for the dogs whining at the sound of thunder, the bad weather had been largely ignored in my house as we got used to the ceaseless wind and rain.

  Yesterday, or more properly late last night, we couldn't ignore it any longer.

  The constant downpour has had some pretty damaging effects on the compound itself, washing away huge swaths of the freshly tilled earth that we've planted in. It's probably a good thing that so much or our soil is heavy with clay, because I think that's the only reason we didn't lose the majority of our food plants. The farms are a little better off since each row of plants is on a tiny rise, letting the water trickle (and then torrent) away in the valleys between.

  The storm last night was really powerful. More rain, and more strong winds, but not quite as bad as others I've seen in sheer ferocity. What last night's storm had that others didn't was actually two things. The first was about two minutes of hail the size of quarters, which beat the hell out of everything. The second was a tornado. I'm not an expert on weather, but it seemed pretty big. Thankfully it didn't hit us directly, but it came pretty close, about a hundred yards outside the western wall.

  That's an area where we store lots of the stuff that we can't fit in the compound and don't need year-round. Right now it's primarily used as a place to put the stacks of firewood.

  The tornado slung hundreds (maybe thousands) of pieces of firewood all over the area. The wall took an awful beating from them, and there are damaged houses and vehicles all over the place. A few people were injured, but those were minor, mostly from broken glass and the like. One good thing about a storm is that most people go inside, where it's safe.

  The worst casualty of the tornado and its mad scattering of debris was our solar panels and wind turbines. Several of the panels I have set up at my house were cracked, two of them totally broken. The turbine at the clinic didn't get hit by anything, but the one of the supports broke from the constant strain of holding up in this insane storm season and it toppled. Shredded itself when it hit the driveway there.

  The few other solar panels and turbines around the compound have almost all taken some kind of damage. I don't have a full report yet, but the outlook isn't very bright. Fortunately my house batteries are full right now, so I can write this. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'll be using my phone to do this in the near future, since the tiny solar charger I have for it is safe inside the house.

  The one silver lining in all of this is that the zombies seem to have decided to back off while the weather is so nuts. Very few of them have been seen from the sentry posts on the wall, and even when the weather breaks for a while (as it's doing right now) they don't show up in big numbers very quick. Maybe some primal fear deep in their brains keeps them huddled in the woods. Maybe they just don't like getting wet, I don't know. It's handy, and it's good for us.

  And given the sheer amount of damage around the compound right now, we're looking for any good news we can find.

  Tuesday, April 26, 2011

  Signal Loss

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I'm going to try to post when I can, but we're in a bad situation here. As I said yesterday, there's a lot of damage around the compound to take care of, the wall first and most important. We're very fortunate that the rain continued on last night since it kept to many zombies from getting near the wall and seeing how easy it would have been for them to force a breach. We've had people working nonstop to patch and repair, and my brother is working with a group of folks right now to get new panels and boards made for the damaged parts.

  It's a lot of work, but nothing I haven't had to organize before. I even offered to help by going out and working myself, but I was shot down. I was told that there had to be someone to run the show, to act as a go-between for all the different groups of people working to make this place whole again. It isn't as wonderful as it sounds. I basically just report what I'm told and allocate men and materials where we need them.

  The repairs to the compound are actually proceeding pretty well. That's not why I might not be able to post consistently over the next few days. The problem there is that the cell tower just down the road has been losing signal strength. I've talked to some of the folks at Google and a few engineers in North Jackson, and they're working on theories. The first few responses I got from them seemed to imply that at first glance it was just a power issue.

  Which would be about the best scenario we could hope for. Since that cell tower was built to serve as an emergency backup for communication during disasters where the power grid failed, it's been running on the minimal power that the backup systems provide for a while now. We've got solar panels and spare turbines to use if needed, but that will have to wait until we get some kind of response from the people who know more about it than I do.

  If the problem is something more complicated, we might be in trouble. No one here has the level of technical expertise needed to repair electronics that sophisticated. At least, I don't think so. Let's all cross our fingers and hope that the solar cells that run the tower are just misaligned or something. I don't want to think about being stuck without even minimal communication with the outside.

  OK, I'm getting back to work now. My brother apparently needs me to talk to the council soon to see if he can go ahead and dig one of those trenches I talked about last week outside of the western wall. He thinks it will keep the zombies at bay while we get the repairs done and reinforced. Sounds like a good idea to me...

  Thursday, April 28, 2011

  Ray of Light

  Posted by Josh Guess

  This morning is sunny. It's the first time in more than a week that we've had the slightest break in the clouds. During that time the longest stretch we've gone without rain was about two hours. About ten between thunderstorms.

  It's been clear all morning, and we've had people following the instructions Google gave us for looking at the nearest cell tower. Fortune seems to be smiling on us, because it is a power problem as far as we can tell. The base of the tower has a small building that houses the batteries that get charged by the solar cells that sit around it. It isn't much for communications, really, maybe a couple of kilowatts, but enough to get us on the internet here and there. Some of the panels have been pretty badly damaged by the storms, and Google has several options for us.

  The first is obvious: repair. We've got unused turbines and spare solar panels. We could, assuming that the zombie swarms were thin enough, put up new panels and build props for the turbines, turn them into wind turbines. It would be a lot of work to provide minimal power to the cell tower closest to us.

  Another option that I wasn't even aware of until this morning is a lot more appealing.

  Major communications companies had been providing mobile disaster relief communications for a while before The Fall. Some towns' fire and police departments have trailers that carry what is essentially a mobile cell tower. Some have an even larger version th
at is itself a truck. Sort of like those vans that supply a satellite signal to news agencies in the field.

  Frankfort doesn't have one of those. Part of why the cellular companies were allowed to put their towers right up next to some of the local fire stations was due to the fact that they built expensive fail-safes into those towers for emergency communication. Which is why I've been able to write this blog and keep in touch with people over the last year plus.

  I think it's time to make some changes. Jamie has volunteered to take and extended scout trip to look for one or more of these things. If he can find one, we're planning on basically stealing all the batteries from the closest cell tower, the one we're working on, and setting the whole shebang up inside the compound itself. We'll actually get more and better communications with the mobile unit than we do sitting right on the edge of this tower's area of service.

  This may not seem like a big deal to a lot of you, but it is to us. Knowing that we can quickly take down and protect our means of communication with the outside world is hugely appealing. I think most of you out there can get that. We're all survivors, regardless of the specifics that got us to this point. Every one of us knows the loneliness and deep discomfort that comes from living in a safe zone surrounded by the walking dead. Human beings by and large need news and interaction with the wider world. It's just a part of who we've become.