Living With the Dead: The Wild Country

by Joshua Guess

  Funny how people can surprise you.

  It's almost annoying how much I feel Mason's loss. I can't stop thinking about how hard it must have been for him to be in the military all those years, unable to tell anyone who he really was. He was competent, dedicated, and hard working. And he could have lost it all, just because he happened to prefer men over women.

  Then I start thinking about the places we're heading, the sights we'll see and the people we'll meet, and I remember that he won't get to experience any of that with us. The practical, analytical part of me wonders coldly how many people will die down the road because he wasn't there to come up with a clever solution to a defense problem. My sense of humor asks the question: who will be the scary badass military stereotype now that he's gone?

  But he is, and there's nothing to be done about it. Mason may have played his cards close to the chest, but I know he believed in this mission. He spoke at times about how important it was that the remaining people out there build bonds of friendship, that we try to see each other as people first and work from there. He knew as well as the rest of us that while this trip was halfway an excuse to get me away from home, it's evolved into something of real importance.

  Had I, or Will, or any of us been the one to die, Mason would have saluted our sacrifice and chosen to move on. He'd have recognized the need to continue over any other factor. How can I honor his memory by doing any different?

  Sunday, November 6, 2011

  Bunker

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Our next stop is a day or two away. This stretch of the country is pretty bare of survivors, but the largest place within several hundred miles is called the Bunker. As with most communities, I can't tell you where it is, though chances are even if I did you wouldn't be able to find it.

  The Bunker is exactly what it sounds like--a heavily fortified shelter designed to protect a number of people for a certain amount of time. I'm sure this one was intended for use in the event of a nuclear blast, but the zombie plague beat mankind to the punch on that one.

  Mason was the one who put us in touch with these folks. He was in the know on the location of the Bunker and had a vast working knowledge of its capacity and capabilities. For example, it was provisioned to handle a hundred and fifty people for five years. The current population is twice that, and they're running out of food. And their water treatment system is failing. As is their waste management.

  It was a refurbished government facility, apparently known to the military and intended for important people like congressmen and senators. At some point very early during The Fall, locals became aware of it and flooded the place.

  Basically, there are a little over three hundred folks there who've been living in safety for the last twenty months or so. I envy that, to a degree: they've been spared the horrors and atrocities the rest of us have had to suffer through. And as unfair as it is, I feel a bit resentful toward them for the same reasons. They haven't had to live in a world where every day brings the risk of a fatal attack from zombies or marauders. On huge set of thick steel doors and thousands of tons of protective rock, and those problems might as well have been on another planet.

  I can't blame them, of course. It isn't like they did anything wrong by going to ground somewhere safe. Many of the people there are families, parents trying to keep their kids safe, I'm sure. I'm just irritated to a degree because their safe haven is now becoming empty and useless, and they need help.

  There's no farmland around them, or I'd try to help them set up some kind of agriculture so they could keep on living there. There's nowhere near enough game to support so many people, either. The problem is so much bigger than it looks.

  I mean, a small fraction of them might have some kind of survival skills. Maybe. But the majority are just scared people who haven't had the brutal experiences since The Fall that have forged the rest of us into the survivors we are. It's a bit like having three hundred children who need to be watched and protected at all times, because they don't understand the dangers around them.

  I think because we managed the evacuation of Black Mesa, there's some expectation we can get them out and send them to different places to settle with the same ease and speed. That just isn't the case. A lot of chips got called in for that, and every place within a reasonable distance (and a few an unreasonable distance away) took who they could. The options are limited at best, and I don't know that the logistical problems we're facing can be solved at all, much less by the five people that comprise my team.

  Still, we'll have to take a crack at it. This part of the country is pretty far removed from Black Mesa and those groups of survivors. We're closer to many groups we've never had the pleasure of meeting face to face, so there might be some options there. Mason seemed to think so, and his instincts were usually good.

  We'll keep on following the directions Mason left us until we get there or die trying. I can't help but feel the absence of him beside me as the miles roll by beneath us.

  Tuesday, November 8, 2011

  Man of God

  Posted by Josh Guess

  We'll be arriving at the Bunker shortly, but we haven't broken camp yet. We decided it would be better to approach the place during the day given that we have no idea what the defenses around the entrance might look like. I'm less worried about armed guards and guns than landmines or something even harder to see. So we'll approach with caution.

  Yesterday we ran into someone on the road. One person, walking alone, as impossible as that sounds. He was dressed in heavy clothes, worn but taken care of. He wore a backpack, stuffed with what I have to assume were supplies and festooned with melee weapons. His boots were the only part of his gear that seemed on their last legs.

  We stopped and talked to him for a while. His name is Bill Friese, and he's a preacher. Before The Fall, he ran one of those mega-churches that held enough people to host a professional sporting event. Bill was on top of the world--regional televised show once a week, twenty thousand congregants making his house of faith prosperous and strong, and a happy family life with his wife and five kids.

  Bill told us many things about his life before The Fall, and how he felt compelled by his faith to help others in need. In an age of profitable religion, he tried to be a man who used the wealth and influence of his position for a greater good. He organized missions of mercy to provide medical care for children in foreign countries. He aided the poor and starving. Every Monday the fellowship hall at his church ran a massive open kitchen program where volunteers cooked meals for the homeless.

  I'm a fan of people doing good deeds for any reason. And I hate to see people with genuine faith, who do those good deeds in its name, have their world view shattered. That's what happened to poor Bill.

  Bill came from a small family in the backwoods of north Louisiana. He spent his youth farming, hunting, and learning the tricks and trade of survival in the wild. His pop was a vet, and a country boy himself. For them, learning to stay alive out in the woods was a practical necessity in case a hunting trip forty miles from anything ended with a broken-down truck or getting lost.

  Even as he grew up, Bill kept those skills sharp. He taught his own sons and daughters, those who were old enough, how to fire a gun, a bow, build a shelter, make fire. He passed on some of it to his wife.

  But those skills weren't the ones he used when The Fall came. Instead of running from the zombie swarms like so many others, Bill and his family made the decision to open their church to survivors. This was in the very first days, when the country was still a chaotic mess and the majority of people had no idea what the zombie plague really was.

  His intentions were good, but it all ended in disaster. More than four thousand people came into the place over a period of days, and at the time no one there knew it was the dead that were rising. No one knew how quickly the bites could kill by spreading god only knows what kinds of bacteria. No one knew that putting so many people into such a small space was a recipe for slaughte
r.

  Bill lost his entire family. Wife, children, congregants. He escaped, ran for his life. Everything he'd built, all the good he'd done, gone.

  So, he started walking. At first because there was little else to do. Then as he encountered others, gathered supplies and traded, because Bill found he could still help if on a much smaller scale. Bill walked on, stopping to preach the word of God, still a comfort to him in the darkness at the end of the world. And Bill teaches others how to survive. How to hunt.

  He was walking away from this area as we were heading toward it. He's spent nearly a month with the people in the Bunker, trying to ready them for what they'll face on the outside. We offered to give him a lift, asked him to come back to the Bunker with us, but he refused.

  I wonder if he'll ever stop moving, if some place will ever strike him as home. I hope so. Bill seems a good man, and solid in his beliefs even after everything he's been through. I don't know if he's still running from his personal tragedies, or feels the urge to help out of guilt for the deaths of his family and flock, but I hope he finds peace somewhere. All of us, every survivor, knows the burden of living where others have died. If his needs to be channeled into making sure others live, then I can't think of anyone who'd argue against that choice.

  Hmm. All alone on the open road for more than a year and a half. The fact that he's still alive is almost enough to make a believer out of me again.

  Wednesday, November 9, 2011

  The Long Walk

  Posted by Josh Guess

  We've decided to make camp away from the Bunker itself. Things here are so much worse than we could have imagined. It isn't the logistical problems, exactly. There's enough food and water to last the people here a while yet, maybe a month if they stretch it.

  It's their attitudes and outlooks. Sure, there are a few we've met who seem genuinely interested in learning how to survive the world as it is, but the majority of the people in the Bunker are terrified almost to the point of insensibility. They've had secure walls and no zombies this whole time, little contact with the outside world until their supplies started to run low and their machinery started to break down and they had to pull their heads out of the sand.

  Most of them have no desire to make it on their own, to live somewhere else and take the risks everyday life comes with now. They're scared and in shock now that they know just how bad it is, and learning about the new breed of zombies has only made it worse. I don't know that I would have made the choice to tell them had I known the kind of overwhelming panic it would incite in them.

  Worse, they see my team as saviors. They've been catching up on this blog, they know the things we've seen and done, the odds we've overcome. They think we can make a miracle happen for them. As if the most skilled member of my team didn't die less than a week ago. We aren't superhuman. We can't wave a wand and make this better. The collective goodwill of the communities of survivors was helpful in saving the kids at Black Mesa, but everyone in that part of the country has expended what resources they can spare. There isn't room for all these folks.

  Worse, I've asked the people at Google to start canvassing every group in this area, though there aren't very many of them close. Three within two hundred miles, scheduled stops all, but we've never met them before, only communicated via phone or internet. They're small groups with few resources. There just aren't any groups close enough with the resources to do any good.

  All of which I've got to explain to the people in the Bunker. We can help them get ready to leave, but when and if they go, it's got to be on their own feet. Mason was brilliant enough to leave suggestions for this possibility written down, ideas to help the people here survive a trek through the arid southwest toward a place capable of sustaining them for the long term.

  My team and I are under no illusions. Even a best case scenario with them moving on foot is going to mean losses in the dozens. I'd bet closer to half, and that's not counting an attack by a large swarm of zombies. Three hundred people exposed on open land? Such an attack is an eventuality rather than a possibility.

  Still, the advantage of the local terrain and sparsity of human beings is that the people in the Bunker have few zombies to worry about. Their hidey hole was a good place to avoid notice, and far enough away from anything that they'd have likely been undiscovered even were it above ground.

  There is no part of me that's looking forward to telling them what I have to tell them today. That they've got to leave their home soon, with all the food they can carry and all the water they can coax out of their wells. We'll see about rigging up carts or something for bulk transport of supplies, but I don't know what we could possibly use.

  Enough stalling, I guess. On to tell them the bad news.

  Thursday, November 10, 2011

  Climb That Mountain

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Things didn't go as badly as we expected yesterday. The people here took the news that they would have to walk away from here rather than ride pretty well. They even dealt with the immediacy of the problem with reasonable aplomb. I think it gives them some focus to have goals after so long merely hiding away and worrying. Knowing the mountain of work ahead of them before they can even take the first step toward whatever unknown home appears to be motivating to some degree.

  We're trying to work with the few local communities to make that unknown home a little less mysterious. None of my team know the area around here at all, so we've enlisted the aid of anyone and everyone within a three hundred mile radius to pass along what info they can. I don't have to go over the specs with you, we all know the drill for resources and shelter. It's good that we can farm out some of the leg work to others. I think they feel guilty that they can't take these people in.

  The Bunker is big. Really, really big. I don't know what it was before it was turned into a shelter, but it has vast empty spaces that must have held something at some point. There are several areas that have never been explored, the doors leading into them locked and impossible for the folks here to breach.

  They didn't have a Becky with them. Their loss.

  She's working on making some of the inaccessible areas a little more user-friendly. Maybe there are more supplies in them or at least something useful. We have to explore any and all options, because our resources here are limited.

  We have managed to come up with an idea for transporting supplies a little easier, though I don't know how well it's going to go over with the natives. I'll be bringing the idea, which Will, Steve, and I came up with together, up at the morning meeting in ten minutes.

  I'm very cautiously optimistic. Few here seem happy with the fact they have to leave, and a disturbing number of people have openly (and loudly) expressed their desire for 'someone to help them' and for the 'government to do something'. I've explained to a few that there is no government to speak of, that we're on our own. That they are on their own. But some people don't seem capable of accepting the reality that there isn't anyone out there to save them. That they are going to have to buckle down, do the work, and save themselves.

  Huh. That paragraph was supposed to be about optimism. I guess the truth came out while I was writing it. Put bluntly, I'm really only optimistic because less people in the Bunker are freaking out and wailing at the unfairness of it than I expected. It's looking like it will be difficult to convince a number of them to put forth effort, that they'd rather bitch and moan and talk about how hard it is.

  Damn it. I want this to work. I don't want to see these folks fail, but I just don't know if most of them can overcome the shock at how bad the world has become to live through it.

  My team concurs.

  Friday, November 11, 2011

  Fix Your Wagon

  Posted by Josh Guess

  There's a small town about ten miles away. It has almost nothing of value in it, not because it's been looted but simply due to location and a population that mostly evacuated here. The locals came to the Bunker, and they brought most of the food an
d other supplies with them.

  One thing they left were the cars, trucks, and other vehicles. The whole town had a population of less than a thousand, but luckily there's a mechanic's shop. We've got a dozen people working to strip down every vehicle we can use to the frame. There isn't enough gas to use them to transport everyone, not by half. So we're doing the only thing we can think of--removing the engines, panels, anything and everything we can to lighten them up, and we're going to use them to carry supplies. They'll have to be pulled by people, but with three hundred of them, it won't be hard to do. Just annoying.

  I'm helping oversee the rationing of the supplies for the trip, so today's meeting is being run by Will and Becky. Steve is helping organize packing, and Rachel is feeling out some people who want to learn the real necessities of surviving and fighting out in the real world.