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

by Joshua Guess

  The last good bit of news, really, is that we're in such a small area now that we can defend the walls pretty easily. The bad part is that there aren't any trenches or other defenses between us and the annex. Just the wall. It's not a very pretty picture, but it's what we have.

  Still no word from our people in Bald Knob, and I haven't gotten any good responses from our allies as far as getting some backup goes. The ones most able to do so, our friends in North Jackson, don't have the fuel needed to get a large force of people here. It just isn't feasible. I know the soldiers that joined with them in the winter would come help us, but without a way to get at least a few hundred of them here it's a moot point.

  We're holding out against the undead. We're hungry and will become much more so before this is over. For now being alive is going to be enough. It has to.

  Saturday, July 9, 2011

  Getting Word

  Posted by Josh Guess

  We've finally had contact with our people from Bald Knob. Those amazing people have done the impossible: they're going to be bringing reinforcements from North Jackson.

  Our people have been out of touch because they've been in areas that have been deserted for a long time, almost since The Fall itself. They've been looking for a way to transport enough people here to make a difference in the fight against the swarm outside our walls. Though the fighting against the zombies has been intense over the last few days, especially last night, we've got a little more hope now.

  The Bald Knob crew found a large bus garage north of us, and they've loaded up on all the diesel fuel they could find. That's actually quite a lot, considering the garage itself had nearly a forty school buses with at least partial tanks of gas. They've loaded each bus with what they hope will be enough fuel to make it to southern Michigan and back. They're already on the way.

  Which is really goddamn nice. I wish they'd been in an area that had cell reception, but I'll take what I can get. Jess and I are exhausted to the point of tears, and that doesn't make us anything special around here. There are a couple places on the wall where the undead are indeed walking up those previously hypothetical ramps of slain zombies and attacking the top of the wall. So far we've managed to push them back, but I don't know how long we'll be able to stem the tide. A full-on breach seems inevitable.

  Excepting the massive losses from the zombies overrunning the annex, we've done pretty well. We've lost few people, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we haven't had to fight too many zombies at one time. We're also not giving them a lot of chances to get close. We have archers posted all over the place, and the men and women that are actually fighting hand to hand are doing so with long weapons like spears. It's pretty easy to take down a zombie rushing clumsily up a hill of dead bodies while you're standing there on solid footing with a heavy weapon.

  Oh, and most of the hand-to-hand fighters are wearing armor of one type of another.

  It's almost breathtaking to watch. Men and women staying calm as a zombie gets inside their guard, shrugging off a bite to their heavily clothed and protected necks. We've got roaming groups of off-duty fighters and some of the older kids running around from fight to fight, killing any undead that happen to be thrown to the ground inside the compound.

  Will has done a lot of defending on the top of the wall himself. I've seen him wearing the turnout gear (firefighting outfit, if you aren't familiar with the term. Heavy, thick, almost impossible to bite through) that we took from a large supplier in Lexington. He fights with a quarterstaff and a machete like something out of a story.

  Not that others aren't doing the same. Every time I see a group of zombies come up one of the piles of bodies toward our folks, my heart clenches in my chest. I only relax when I witness the defenders swinging weapons and working in unison to stave off the attack. There's always more of them, though. Always another wave.

  I've lost track of the actual numbers, but I think we've lost a total of about seventy people since this massive assault began. I could be wrong there, but it sounds somewhere in the ballpark. My heart hurts for those souls, who've endured so much and fought so hard to stay alive. Their sacrifice means more to me than I'll ever be able to say.

  The practical side of me remembers how short on food we're getting, though...

  Come quickly, people of North Jackson. We need you.

  Monday, July 11, 2011

  Compound Fractures

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Should I talk about how we were rescued from the zombie swarm besieging us by the brave soldiers from North Jackson? Should I give a blow-by-blow account of that final fight?

  Should I paint a picture with my words of the destruction around us and our struggle to pick up the shattered pieces of our broken home?

  Probably. I should probably do those things. Instead, I'm going to put something out in the open that I've been asked to keep quiet, and damn the consequences.

  I won't beat around the bush. Yesterday it was discovered that the homesteaders have been hoarding food for several weeks. That was why the group of them were lost when the second part of the annex fell. Not because they were bravely trying to bring food from one of the storehouses, but because they were desperate to bring as much of their hidden cache as possible with them.

  While the rest of us have been subsiding on less and less food each day, they homesteaders have been eating well.

  Part of why this enrages me so much is because this morning I got a good look at a few of the children for the first time in days. We've only been desperately short on food for about that long, but things have been tight for a while. I didn't realize how tough it must be on the bodies and spirits of our young, whose metabolisms demand calories to grow.

  Pat's girls are skinny, but they aren't unhealthy. Pat has gone hungry many times in his life, and he's happy to do it for them by giving up portions of his own food. Other children aren't so lucky.

  The one that really caught my attention was this girl that came into the clinic this morning. I was there putting in the last hour of a shift assisting Evans. Since the fighting ended in a coordinated hail of gunfire by our rescuers, my bow hasn't been needed on the wall. The clinic has been pressed with a constant stream of injured since the siege began, and the people working in it have been dead on their feet for a long while. In the eight hours I was there, I helped treat a gunshot wound from a stray bullet fired by one of the NJ soldiers, a broken wrist from a fall off the wall, several minor cuts, one major puncture, and an assortment of other injuries.

  When the girl was brought in unconscious and pale, I assumed she'd hit her head. Evans took a glance at her and the look on his face was terrible. He saw with eyes far more experienced than mine. She was in her early teens, but it would have been easy to mistake her for a young boy.

  Evans put her in a recliner and asked her father, who'd brought her in, what had happened. The man told us that he'd found her that way when he woke, unresponsive and with cracked lips, skin drawn. Evans pulled the girl's shirt up on one side to show the hollow stack of her ribs, her belly swollen like the pictures you used to see of starving African children.

  She'd been hungry a long, long time. Somehow she and many other people in the compound had slipped through the cracks and gotten shorted in their rations. Her father was a guard, and he said that he had been getting enough when the girl had brought their rations back to the house.

  I assume that in order to make sure her dad was strong enough to fight, she'd been giving him some of her food. Probably shorting herself on water as well, given the level of dehydration in her.

  After helping Evans get her comfortable and starting an IV, my shift was over. I would have stayed to watch over her if I could have, but exhaustion and hunger drove me back home. On my way home I saw a group of kids sitting together on a corner. They looked tired and listless, which you'd expect given the amount of work they had put in during the siege. The haggard expressions on their faces might have been from running water to
the fighters on the wall. It could have been due to being on kill squads for the zombies that fell inside the compound.

  But after what I'd just seen, I had to make sure that was all there was to it. So I asked them.

  To my surprise, they were honest. The idea had spread among not just the children of the compound, but also through most of the other non-combatants. For weeks now, as food has become more and more scare, those too young to fight have been conspiring with those too injured or with disabilities that keep them from combat as well as many pregnant women to make sure our fighters are strong. They've been shorting their own rations and giving the remainder to others. They've been starving themselves for the greater good.

  While the homesteaders have been keeping half of what they've killed in secret. Not to keep from starving or because they were worried that those of us who run the compound would somehow mismanage that food. Nothing so idealized as that.

  They kept it because they were afraid of feeling the desperate hunger they'd suffered during the occupation by the Richmond soldiers.

  While they've been living comfortably, our children and others have been putting their lives at risk because they were afraid that without strong defenders, we'd probably falter. The worst part is that they were probably right.

  I can't explain how angry I am at the homesteaders right now. I can't put in words how much worse that's made by the fact that I was asked by several council members not to share this news. How doing so, no matter how justified I may be, would hurt the compound. Sow distrust not only among our own people but with the other groups of survivors out there as well.

  My conscience is clean in this. I refuse to hide the crimes of fearful men and women who would allow others to suffer the pangs of starvation while they were in comfort. I don't have the power to get rid of those people, but I won't sit quietly by as they bully the rest of the compound into not punishing them once again. I won't let them get away with it, because they're cowards of the worst sort.

  I wonder if even one of them will care that a girl drove herself to the edge of death in her efforts to keep us all safe. Even a day ago I would have cited my personal differences with the homesteaders and said that while they might have an outlook I don't share, that they were by and large good people who would do what they could for the compound.

  Today is a different day. I feel like a different person. They were so eager to keep themselves from privation that they lost sight of the larger goal of the compound: to keep all safe and fed.

  I sit here thinking about the consequences of these words, and I hesitate. I worry about the damage I may do when I click that button, sending this out for other survivors to read. I wonder if I'm wrong to do it, and if keeping some semblance of cohesion here is worth the damage it would do to my soul.

  Then I think about the girl, body wasted as she lays not a hundred yards from where I sit. A sacrifice on her part that may have made the difference in our survival. It's something I can't ignore or forget. That kind of bravery deserves a like kind of honesty and sacrifice. Whatever happens from here on out I accept. If this is what finally breaks our community beyond repair, then so be it.

  Her name is Katie. This is for her and all like her who've given all they could to help save their home.

  Thank you.

  Tuesday, July 12, 2011

  Breaking Up

  Posted by Josh Guess

  One small ray of light in this whole mess between the homesteaders and the rest of us is that the soldiers from North Jackson brought their own food. Not enough to last for weeks, but at least for a few more days as we straighten up our lives and try to get our affairs in order.

  After my post yesterday, shit hit the fan in a big way. The homesteaders got angry that I'd called them out so publicly, telling me that I had no right to air the compound's business like that. I told them that I didn't consider them a part of our community anymore since they'd taken it upon themselves to hoard food to the detriment of the rest of us.

  So now we're basically trying to figure out a way forward. The homesteaders are sticking together for the most part, though there are a few that have given up on the group. Most of them are going right back to their previous attitude, which is the idea that we can't do anything to them because they'll all go on strike.

  Not this time.

  We've got loads of soldiers backing us that don't take kindly to men and women who let children starve themselves. We're not going to let this pass.

  I don't know what the ultimate solution to this situation is going to be, but we have to do something. We can't let anyone act so blatantly above the rules. We're here to make sure that all are safe and fed, not to let some selfish fucks do whatever they want and damn the rest of us.

  We've got half our land destroyed, our farms ruined. The crops are gone, our livestock shredded by the zombie swarms, and there isn't time to let political haggling distract us. We've got to either pull together and work as one for the community, or those unwilling to do so will have to leave. Those are the only choices.

  We're going to be dangerously short on food in a matter of days, so hunting parties are going to be working overtime. I don't see how we can manage it without the homesteaders, but the rest of us don't trust them not to hold back food they kill. It's maddening.

  For now we've got enough to do that I don't have time to bitch about it any more.

  Wednesday, July 13, 2011

  Push

  Posted by Josh Guess

  No time for a long post today, but the word needs to be put out: the homesteaders are gone from the compound. Not all of them, but seventy were forced into exile by the soldiers. Seventy men and women who refused to accept responsibility for their heinous actions over the last several weeks.

  The rest of them have accepted the fact that judgment will come for them, though for now that's going to have to wait. We've got a lot to accomplish in the few days that the North Jackson soldiers will still be here. We're hoping to repair the walls in the annex sections enough that we can use them to grow food. With the soldiers aiding us in the push to get the homesteaders out of here, we find ourselves with few enough people that we don't have to use the annexes for living in at present.

  I hate that it's come to this point, but there wasn't much choice. We let them take weapons and supplies, but no food or vital items like medicine.

  I'm off to it. All of us have to pitch in if we're to have a chance at surviving.

  Thursday, July 14, 2011

  Terra Firma

  Posted by Josh Guess

  With the help of the soldiers from North Jackson, we've managed to shore up the walls that were burned and broken in the annex. They're not pretty and aren't safe enough for a sizable population to live in, but it's enough that we can begin to plant there. We're also working on making a couple houses there zombie-proof, so that some of our farmers can take up residence and keep an eye on what will hopefully be crops.

  We've still got seed corn and seed potatoes, as well as some other things to plant. I don't know that we'll have enough to see to the needs of all our remaining citizens when and if the plants bear vegetables, but it'll have to do. Until then, we've got hunting parties working overtime to bring in food.

  The soldiers left this morning with the sunrise, and they did us one last favor before they went--a group of about thirty of them went hunting late last night, and brought us home a haul. God bless and keep men with firearms and spare bullets...

  It's enough to feed us for a few days. We'll be making large pots of stew with their kills, and after that we'll have to eat what we can bring in day to day. The vegetables already being grown all over the compound aren't going to be nearly enough.

  It helps that so many of the homesteaders have been driven out. Seventy less mouths to feed means we've got a better chance of avoiding starvation until the group of folks out west who've promised us a delivery of food can manage to help us.

  The exile of so many of our people is the
only thing people talk about around here except for the food shortage. We haven't even seen a zombie outside the walls since the soldiers came and annihilated the swarming undead. People buzzed about the discipline and precision of the soldiers as they formed lines and closed in on the zombie horde, firing in a careful rhythm as they moved forward. Our saviors, clad in familiar uniforms and with the bearing of men and women who had spent years perfecting their skills.

  It was an amazing sight, but quickly forgotten in the face of our troubles.

  I won't deny that I'm uneasy at the thought of sending so many people away. I'm heartbroken that such a large number of men and women once considered family would be so selfish, though I understand the deep fear and anger that drove them to such lengths. I'm equally worried that they haven't gone far and intend to take some action against us in the future. Honestly I'm hoping that they decide to move along and try to start over somewhere else. Seventy is a good number to build a community with, and there must be places out there that have the resources they'd need to make a good showing of it.