Living With the Dead: The Wild Country

by Joshua Guess

  The Wild Country

  Volume Four of Living With the Dead

  Joshua Guess

  This work is ©2012 Joshua Guess

  Cover art by Rosie Coleman

  A note from the author:

  Do you like how I made that all bold and stuff? Neat. It's attention-grabbing. Usually I save these notes for the back of the book, but I wanted to let you know that after the Living With the Dead collection you're about to read, there's a bit of bonus material. It's a short story I wrote for the annual Zombiethon on Slacker Heroes, a website I write for. It's called “An Ode to Brains.” Consider it thanks for supporting my work.

  Now, onward to a world darker than our own.

  Visit JoshuaGuess.com for the latest updates on my work.

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  The following is the fourth collection of the historical record following the cataclysmic outbreak of the plague (referred to by the author as an event called "The Fall") and presented unaltered from the original.

  From an historical perspective, one wonders at the ability of the survivors of The Fall to maintain electronic communications for such a length of time. Thanks to the ingenuity of several groups of survivors and the abundance of communications satellites in use at the time, this hurdle was overcome.

  This particular collection focuses on the need to go beyond long-distance interaction, as you'll see. Humanity needs face-to-face encounters to build strong bonds. The survivors of The Fall seemed especially aware of this fact with their constant efforts to escape the trap of isolationism.

  Read on.

  Friday, September 2, 2011

  Twisted Nerve

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I've been sidelined for the last day and a half. Evans thinks I pinched my sciatic nerve, and given the debilitating pain shooting from my back to the tip of my right foot, I tend to agree.

  It's been good and bad, though. The bad is obviously a lack of mobility and having to sit in precisely the right position that I don't cry from the agony that comes with moving around. The good is that it's given me time to work on a few things, chief among them the upcoming trip across the country. I've picked my last team member: Rachel.

  You remember her, right? She's an old friend of mine, one of the people we helped escape from their home in Kansas. You might wonder what she brings to the table as far as skills go for what is sure to be an arduous journey.

  Well, she's not an expert in marital arts, has no dead-eye marksmanship skills, and knows no more field medicine than the average person. That's not to say that Rachel doesn't have the requisite skills to survive. Clearly she does or she wouldn't be here now. Rachel is tough, smart, and resourceful.

  No, the reason she's coming is simple: she asked. Though I told her we'd be gone a long time and we probably couldn't bring her husband (who was supportive of her choice if unhappy about it) she still wanted to come. Rachel has a strong desire to see the world around us, and a part of that is she, like me, has the heart of a storyteller. I've focused my efforts on sharing the goings on in my own life, and the community I live in. She wants to gather the stories of everyone we meet.

  Plus, she's got an almost perfect memory and an encyclopedic knowledge of tons of different subjects. That's not a physical skill, but it does offer potentially huge levels of help to us on the road. She's as good an addition to the team as I could hope for.

  Someone suggested to me that I take someone else, maybe a scout or one of the hunters. Someone with a lot of experience dealing with zombies in close quarters, someone physically stronger...basically, another male. I pointed out that Rachel has TONS of experience fighting zombies, and she's always done so with no regard for her gender. I guess no one told her women are supposed to be weak, right? She's fearless when defending herself and others. I want someone like that at my back.

  I'm not trying to belabor the point, really. I'm just annoyed because as I've been stuck in the house working on our game plan, I've had to listen to people pelt me with their ideas and suggestions. The experience has made me realize just how many old prejudices and stereotypes have survived the fall of human society. "Women are weak" is the one stuck in my craw this morning.

  Let me set it straight, then--my mother was a tiny woman with a gentle heart, yet I watched her mercilessly kill living people when the need arose. Rachel was the driving force in her community in Kansas, leading her people and keeping them safe. She fought tooth and nail for them, against terrible odds. She used her wonderful mind to work around a hundred problems, and she never shied from her duty. She did those things despite being less physically strong than the men around her. That's bravery.

  With her, the roster is finished. I couldn't be happier about it. Given how the pain in my back is wearing my self-control down, the next person to politely suggest that this decision is wrong may get the unhappy, grumpy version of me that swears a lot...

  Tentative date for our departure is Monday, contingent on my back getting better.

  Saturday, September 3, 2011

  Picturesque

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I'm up to hobbling around now, which is a vast improvement over my mobility the last few days. I'm still having trouble switching between sitting and standing, but I can walk. If we were going to be camping this would be a serious problem, since zombies don't wait for you to get up slowly around the pain. Good thing for us we won't have to sleep outside.

  My brother had a hand in designing the modifications to the vehicle we'll be taking, but the actual work was done by others. It's a beautiful thing, our rugged machine and trailer, but I don't want to go into details today.

  As difficult as it is for me to walk around, I felt a strong urge to do it this morning. In a few days I'll be gone, and all I'll have of New Haven to sustain me while I'm away are memories. It struck me as I limped down the streets how the feeling of a place and its appearance can be so dramatically different. New Haven is being repaired and rebuilt in a hundred little ways (and a few large ones), but it still bears the scars of all the recent problems. Scorched earth where the fires nearly destroyed the inner wall. Houses with broken bricks from the heat. Craters outside the walls where bombs went off. Houses all over have had their exteriors stripped, patched, and modified in a dozen ways. It hardly looks like my old neighborhood at all.

  That's a good thing, I guess. Our home is evolving into something new and better, changing along with us to meet the needs of our times. I watch men, women, and children scramble to finish so many tasks and projects, energetic and eager to a degree I'd have thought impossible last month.

  I can't help but think of New Haven as a grizzled old cat--much like one of my own, Simon--battered and scarred from constant turmoil, but hale and strong and with a loving heart. I know that's a weird thought to have, but it hit my brain and had to go somewhere. There you go.

  As I type this my pets (minus the ferrets, who are both outside in the garden hunting bugs and trying to climb the fencing to go explore) surround me. The dogs are laying at my feet. Alexander, my kitten (no longer, I notice--he's fully grown now) is perched on my shoulder. Nathaniel is sitting in my lap. Simon is curled up on my desk and looking at me like he wants to rip my face off. That's not unusual, he always looks like that.

  I'll miss them almost as much as I'll miss Jess. With her it's an obvious thing, being my wife, best friend, and all that jazz. The difference is that she's a grown woman, a human being that can understand the rationale behind my trip, and can take solace in the company of friends in my absence.

  My pets can't. They'll miss me, pine for me at least for a lit
tle while, and won't understand. I'll miss them too, more than is probably healthy. Through all the hard times, and that's what the last year and a half have been almost without a break, they've been there. When Jess was shot, I spent a lot of time worrying, crying, and my pets often whined along with me, laying their heads on my lap and offering what comfort they could give.

  Wow. I really didn't mean to go on about my pets. I get emotional when I have to leave home, so I know you'll all forgive me. I'm just going to miss this place, every bit of it. Every person in it. We've all risked our lives together, done amazing things.

  It's going to be strange for me not to hear the plaintive howls of New Haven's dogs at night, nor the low growls and deep barks that warn us of nearby undead. I won't be able to give Patrick a hard time or learn a new bit of medicine from Evans. I've been away before, but this is bigger and more involved than anything I've ever done. It's daunting, exciting, scary, and full of possibility.

  As well as one certainty: I'll play back the memories each night as I lay down to sleep, from the faces of my brothers and sisters here to the pleasant rumble of a cat's purr, to give me comfort. It'll be the hope of coming home to make new ones that will keep me going.

  Monday, September 5, 2011

  Roundabout

  Posted by Josh Guess

  A bit of a confession: I fibbed a little about when we were leaving.

  I've been on the road with my team for about six hours now. We left at midnight with a group of soldiers from North Jackson on their way back home to resupply. It seemed better to start our trip off going in a direction we're familiar with, to a place that's very friendly with us. It'll also be a nice jumping-off point to the larger journey, which first will take us to Canada.

  We're going to spend a few days with the folks in NJ. There have been a few changes in our relationship with them in the last week, and I've been itching to tell you about it. I haven't thus far only because nothing in our negotiations was set in stone, but I can proudly say that things are officially better for all of us after finalizing our agreements.

  It's pretty simple: in return for providing the people of North Jackson with a reasonable amount of medical supplies, we're getting a permanent contingent of soldiers and workers assigned to us. They'll rotate out on a regular basis, and there won't be a lot of them, but their entire purpose is to help New Haven work on our various projects. The soldiers will help bolster our defenses. We'll share the fruits of our labors with the people of NJ, obviously, and their engineers will give us a hand with any design problems we may encounter.

  This is a big deal for a lot of reasons, the most obvious and important being zombies. The numbers of them around New Haven right now are pretty small, but our scouts have seen swarms roaming not too far from Frankfort despite our daily efforts to clear them out. It's an unavoidable fact of life that there will always be more undead out there, and that we'll need constant protection from them. Especially when working out in the open.

  Oh, one other thing we're providing for NJ as a part of this deal--we're training doctors. We've done something like this before, giving a bunch of their people a decent grounding in emergency medicine, but this time Evans and Phil (maybe Gabby if she has time) will be doing some intensive training over a long period of time to a few candidates who've spent a lot of time teaching themselves the basics. I doubt we'll be churning out physicians with the wide breadth of knowledge the pre-Fall docs had, but frankly doing that seems like it would be a waste. Right now what we need are men and women who can diagnose and do surgery to meet the basic needs of the people. The good thing is that the bare bones of medicine don't actually take that long to learn.

  I know, that sounds crazy. It isn't, really. People who're learning medicine in the here and now don't have four years of pre-med to do. They don't have a lot of classes to take. They'll learn their anatomy and physiology by doing and watching. It's much easier for most people to learn about the human body, how it works and how to fix it, by observing and participating. In the world that was, we had time to let our medical students work slowly toward their practical education. The world that is requires them to learn on the fly, which greatly accelerates the process. Also, no math classes or fillers, so the whole thing should go quickly.

  That wasn't where I intended this post to go, but I'm glad I wrote about this. It's important to me to chronicle the way some things have changed, and the rapid pace with which our students learn skills isn't limited to medicine, though it's a good example. Most things are like that now, people learning by doing, unencumbered by all the useless crap they don't need. Not to say there won't be classes, but Evans is of the opinion that it's far more important for a student to understand how, say, a finger works and know how to set the bone than what the scientific name of it is.

  Down the road when we have things like hospitals again, that may change. For now, it's enough to have the skills.

  Our agreement with NJ is important. It serves as a template for cooperative effort and mutual gain that I'm hoping to replicate with many of the groups we're going to be visiting. The world is a bigger place than it was two years ago, our settlements struggling most times and groups of living humans far apart. Few of them have the resources to make regular travel possible. The best chance we have, and by 'we' I mean humanity in general, is to work together to make the highest number of people possible safe and productive. If that means scouring the country for vehicles that can run on E85 and setting up a distribution network for fuel, then that's what we'll do.

  That's presuming a lot, I know. We still need to meet many of these people, set up channels of trade, and figure out what resources will be needed to make those trades possible. It's a daunting challenge.

  Right about now, I'd love to say something epic and inspiring about how I never back down from a challenge. Cue music from Rocky, and start montage. Right?

  Except that's not true. I have doubts like anyone else, and before The Fall I was as prone to laziness and procrastination as anyone else. I feel that I've grown more mature and determined since then, but here I am riding in our vehicle, armed and armored, festooned with extra storage and fuel tanks, writing twice as many words as I intended. Putting off thinking about how big the job ahead is.

  It's a roundabout way of saying I'm worried about failing, I know. But I am. The difference between the old me and the me that writes these words is that where before I would give up before even trying, now I'll do everything I can to make it work. I'm still scared to fail, but if I do it won't be from lack of effort.

  Whew, okay. Time to wake up a few of the others. Dawn is coming, and it's going to be a long day.

  Tuesday, September 6, 2011

  Bastion

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I've got a few minutes before I sit down to have a very long and hopefully productive discussion with the leadership of North Jackson. I want to spend them babbling my amazement at the changes here since my last visit.

  It's clear that the best possible thing that could have happened to North Jackson was the soldiers joining them. The sheer amount of manpower freed up by not having to patrol or provide defense has allowed the people here to massively expand. Where one main building used to house almost all the citizens, now a truly huge area is under their control. They've kept the old walls, much as we tried to do, and built large berms around the entire area with barricades on top. And around the outside of the berms--you guessed it--trenches from the excavated dirt.

  It's an amazing setup. New buildings have been raised, but built partially below the ground to keep the temperature stable. The level of farming here is outstanding. NJ has taken to growing food with a passion. The building we loving nicknamed the "hydroponics bay" is now a verdant greenhouse, the ground aside from footpaths and roads is crisscrossed with plots of vegetables everywhere.

  They've even put up some light barriers around a large area adjacent to the main compound that's only for farming. No structures, no paths. Just f
ood.

  I've asked around about where they've managed to get all the materials from, and the answer explains a lot. Parties have been out and about for many months stripping every useful item from the surrounding areas. When that began to peter out, the teams began to range farther and look harder. They've got stockpiles of materials we can't even dream of. They've been finding abandoned tankers and siphoning every vehicle they can, but that's been just enough to keep their trips out for materials going. Well, that and keeping the construction equipment going. It's a constant process around here.

  The one really strange thing is the behavior of the local zombies, which is opposite to what we've been experiencing lately. Ours have learned to be afraid of us to a certain degree, and our daily runs around town to thin out their numbers keeps us from having to deal with too many of them at once. The smell of burning zombies tends to drive away the rest of them.

  Here, that isn't the case. North Jackson has been doing the same things we have, but the number of undead doesn't seem to be dropping. They don't seem frightened. The best defense NJ has aside from their walls is the fact that there are more than a thousand people here, and they all pee. There's almost an industry here for reducing urine into its constituent parts to produce ammonia. There's a lot of it around here, more than enough to defend their walls for weeks at a time. This is good, as ammonia would be a good trade item...