Living With the Dead: The Wild Country

by Joshua Guess

I've been writing this blog most days for the better part of two years, yet I can't seem to find the right words to comfort him. It's frustrating to sit here and feel so impotent. I'm hoping that with a little time and the right approach, we can get Bill to open up about whatever it is that has him so bothered. He survived the deaths of every person he knew and loved, found purpose in his mission to help others, and survived on the open road for months on end despite the threat of constant attack by roving zombies.

  Whatever's wrong, how can it possibly be worse than any of that? I wonder if he had a similar reaction then, or if he's just gotten the piece of bad news that finally put him past his breaking point. Time and distance might be the only thing that will help him heal. We'll see.

  Saturday, November 26, 2011

  Revelation of Saint Bill

  Posted by Josh Guess

  The rage going through me right now is so fucking powerful that I can barely make myself calm down and type. Bill finally told us what was on his mind, but he made sure to wait until we were at our next stop and set up for the night, ready to go to sleep.

  Greg explained to Bill all about Georgetown, you see, and made him promise not to tell anyone until we'd gotten far enough away that we couldn't easy or quickly get back there to make trouble. Even so, the team and I are still awake. We have been all night.

  How the hell could we sleep knowing every man and woman in Georgetown were marauders?

  Oh, they're "reformed", all people that wanted to give up their running and start fresh. I'm not blind to that urge, I don't doubt that people can and do genuinely feel guilty about the things they've done. But Bill told us everything Greg passed on to him, which he did cold sober, and it makes me sick.

  For example, the little place I call Georgetown still had people in it when the first fifty or so marauders called it quits and decided to settle there. Twenty-seven human beings that had survived hell and worse tried to send those first marauders packing. They chose to fight rather than let murderers or worse live with them, and it cost every one of them their lives.

  The reason we had to stay locked up the other day was because a group of active marauders were the ones coming in to trade. Yeah. They still do business with them. Greg claimed only the less destructive tribes of them get to deal with Georgetown, like Kincaid and his bunch who've integrated back home at New Haven.

  Damn it. I don't know how to feel. I'm so angry, but part of that is at myself for not realizing it myself. No kids there, because marauders don't have them. Greg told Bill that the discipline there is to make every citizen remember where they came from, and to warn them about falling back into old patterns. They've agreed not to allow any children to be conceived for the near future.

  Worried about marauders taking killing them, believe it or not. Not to mention a little fear that raising kids in such a harsh, strict atmosphere would make for rebellious and dangerous youth. Wild kids. Little marauders themselves, maybe.

  Jesus, I don't even know where to go from here. Nothing I can do about it in any case. Even if my team could put up some kind of fight against them, would we want to? They aren't hurting anyone now, and the resources they provide will be sorely needed in the coming months and years.

  After all, the zombies aren't going away. The new breed is quickly spreading, and I'm afraid they're a threat great enough to destroy the rest of us just as the first zombies did the majority of humankind. Can we afford to fight each other at all anymore?

  I need to think.

  Monday, November 28, 2011

  Letting Go

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I'm afraid this stop and maybe the next will be kept completely undocumented on the blog. Citing security issues, the leadership is concerned about angry people coming after them for continuing trade with Georgetown now that their secret is out.

  I wanted to be angry about people keeping the status quo with no repercussions to Georgetown, but I found it almost impossible. I was still running hot when I wrote my last post, but I've had time to calm down and talk to some people. I've gotten a fair amount of perspective in the last day.

  Here's the thing: I think I'm more angry about them not being upfront about it than anything. I'm a strong believer in redemption and making choices, especially hard ones. I don't know what each and every one of the citizens of Georgetown have done, but they all made the decision to stop. To work together. To be better.

  I can't argue with that. I honestly don't want to know what crimes they may have committed. It isn't our place to act as executioners because of things people have done. That may not be fair to those who've had their lives ruined or ended by them, but survivors understand about dealing with the now. Can humanity afford to lose so many? I don't think so.

  On that note, something important has become apparent as we've headed further west. We saw it in Georgetown, and here at our current location it's even more obvious: there are way more living people out here than we expected. The community we're currently staying in as guests has almost a thousand people, and from what I'm told that isn't especially large for this neck of the woods.

  It's balmy and nice here, a comfy sixty degrees at night, and the land is farmed most of the year. It never snows (or almost never, at any rate) and the land is fertile. Lots of oranges and other fruits grow here easily. The network of survivors in just this group's immediate circles numbers close to ten thousand.

  I thought about that for a long time, and it makes sense. How else could the people here manage to trade enough food to keep the hundreds of hungry mouths in Georgetown fed as they mined the earth, unless there were many more here to work the land? I did the math, and it works out if you think about it. If the plague of zombies killed as much as 99% of the population, that would have left roughly three million people alive in America alone.

  I don't know if that's the case, but experience shows that larger groups tend to gather in areas that are easy to farm or have valuable trade resources. I can't imagine how many people are alive along the west coast. I mean, ten thousand within just a few dozen miles of each other. That's nuts.

  But all of them need metals. Georgetown might be full of criminals that have done awful things, but they're ones that all decided at one point or another to change that. They punish themselves with strict rules and a harsh, spartan way of life. From a pragmatic viewpoint, people need what they produce, and badly. There might come a time when it's logistically feasible to seek justice for the things they've done...but that time isn't now.

  My people accepted Kincaid and his bunch. Georgetown isn't asking anyone to take them in, to live next to people who've lived a lifestyle counter to what the rest of us stand for. They're doing it on their own, and for now we all have to focus on the needs they meet for thousands of people who are living and in need. Not their victims, who I imagine are mostly dead and beyond any help other than a prayer.

  Tuesday, November 29, 2011

  Like Stars in the Sky

  Posted by Josh Guess

  A lot has happened since my post yesterday. It's hard to even know where to begin.

  Since I can't talk about this community but for the barest, vague terms, let me point out a strange and illogical circumstance. It's sort of the basis of the events over the last day.

  It's this: with thousands of survivors living, working, and trading in such a small area, logic suggests that marauders would tend to stay away. After all, no band of them is big enough to raid the local areas without risking retribution by many times their number, right?

  For the most part that's true. The locals aren't threatened in their homes, though their farm holdings are huge and some quite far-flung, so marauders have been known to nibble at the edges. They also sometimes attack trade caravans, though they rarely have to harm anyone. They just take supplies, not lives or people.

  That was the case until yesterday around noon. Which was when, to everyone's surprise, a vast swarm of marauders came swooping in on us. The people we're staying with
(whose community I'll call Harlen for the sake of not annoying everyone) responded with practiced ease. Bells sounded, which caused guards at posts farther away to sound others, and so forth, until even workers at the edges of the property knew that danger was coming.

  We saw the marauders heading toward Harlen from the north, maybe a hundred vehicles. There was a lot of time to see them approach, thanks to flat terrain all around, with Harlen's main cluster of buildings set on a hill looking over it. Nearly two hundred men and women, plus my team, stood on the cinder block wall surrounding the place. Most people had bows, some hand weapons, and even a smattering of guns. Our orders were to hold the marauders off long enough for the workers farthest away to reach the safety of the wall.

  We didn't have to.

  A hundred yards away, the marauders stopped. One of them got out of his vehicle, threw down his weapons, and ran for the main gate. He was yelling the entire time, but we couldn't make out what he was going on about until he got closer.

  Zombies, he said. Like the stars in the sky, too many to count.

  The marauders stopped before the walls were all that was left of more than fifty groups scattered across the northwest, from where we were relatively south all the way to the Canadian border and beyond. A hundred vehicles remained from nearly a thousand in the original group. The marauders had warned and joined up with anyone they knew or met along the way, moving many hundreds of miles south to our location.

  I don't know that I'd have believed anything he said, but after a few minutes of talking to us from outside the wall, his cohorts realized we weren't going to shoot him out of hand. A small group of them also threw weapons down and came toward us, half a dozen people carrying something wrapped in heavy plastic sheeting. When they got close enough for us to see, they threw it down and unrolled the contents.

  It was a zombie. From our distant vantage, it certainly looked like an example of the new breed, but we couldn't tell for sure. We had to know. Because from everything we'd gleaned about zombie behavior and the spread of the mutated versions of the plague, no new breed should have been that far north. Certainly not "too many to count".

  I turned to see if the team was willing to go down with me, and found Becky and Rachel already gone. They'd run for the front gate as soon they realized there was a body in that plastic. Neither showed the slightest fear when they went through the gate, seven men before them who might be killers, rapists, and god knows what else.

  Of course, by then there were at least fifty more people on the wall with bows who had joined us while the marauder was talking. That's a lot of arrows. The marauders knew where they were pointed.

  Becky examined the zombie, cutting almost surgically with her knife to check for the telltale signs. After a few minutes she faced the wall and nodded.

  There was a lot of discussion by our hosts after that. Fast talk. Had the marauders simply killed a new breed to trick their way inside the walls? If not, could we turn them away? How could we know it wasn't a trick?

  The marauders were anxious and getting impatient when a messenger shouted from below us. I recognized him--he was one of the kids that worked at the small communications center here. He shouted to us that about sixty miles northeast, another community had been hit. The people there, the few left, were running this way. One drew the short straw and stayed behind to send a warning.

  Thousands upon thousands of new breed. Coming this way.

  Wednesday, November 30, 2011

  Horizon

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Harlen's leadership sent out a team of scouts yesterday on motorcycles. It took them a few hours to get back, but even that time is nearly miraculous in the times we live in. The roads in this area have long been cleared, making trade simple and easy, even if the gasoline runs out.

  Unfortunately it also makes an easy path to follow for the giant swarm of zombies headed this way. And that's what the scouts had to report: they are definitely going to hit us. Estimates put them here sometime tonight, possibly early next morning. The new breed are strong and fast, but we don't yet know if the energy they expend comes with a price. Do they rest in short bursts? The original strain of zombies went inert in the cold to conserve energy, so maybe the new breed can't walk or run straight here without stopping. The cold isn't slowing them down, either, though what the people in this place call cold is little more than a brisk spring morning back home, and Kentucky isn't nearly as cold as some places I've been...

  The preparations for the inevitable battle are going well. The team and I are going to help any way we can, but at the moment the major aspects are taken care of. I'll say this for Harlen and the surrounding communities--they're nearly mechanical in their preparations for war. Having so many people in such a small area of the country makes them a magnet for the undead, and the people here have the scars to prove it.

  I've got hope that this won't be a total disaster. As I said, the preparations and defenses are good, well-designed and don't rely too much on one element. Something that caught me by surprise was that there are protocols at the nearby communities for attacks like this. There's an agreement in place for reinforcements and aid, which makes sense given how close these folks are to each other. New Haven has no close neighbors, and the outside help we've had has been from trusted friends from far off.

  I'm not looking forward to the fight, I'll be honest. I'm twenty-nine years old, and I've had two birthdays since the zombie plague destroyed my world. Twenty one months of the undead, of surviving where no one had any right to manage it. I've killed the walking dead as well as living people, I've fought to protect, for revenge, for reasons less noble than both of those.

  I have no appetite for it. Oh, I'm want to live and to help provide for the safety of others, have no doubt. It's just that the careful black and white picture I've had of the world has been splashed with shades of gray and color over the last few months. Hated enemies in the form of marauders have become allies and in some cases trusted survivors in their own right. The swarms of undead have become more dangerous than ever, more a threat to the things I hold dear...

  ...And yet I can't bring myself to hate them. Nor do I feel anger, sadness, or any of the other things that used to come to mind when the threat of being devoured was staring me in the face. The zombie threat is, in my mind, now just a part of the world. It simply is, and there's nothing I can do to change that. Much as I would use an umbrella to escape the rain, I will stand behind a wall and defend from the onslaught. But hating them, worrying about the coming storm, is to me as useless and wasteful of my energies as being angry at the gods for a hurricane.

  There's change on the horizon, and it's approaching fast. Human beings are fabulous at adapting to ever-changing circumstances, and this one is no different. Maybe more difficult, but not insurmountable. Sometime in the next eighteen hours to a day, we're going to be fighting for our lives. Philosophy and reflection will take a back seat to the battle at hand, but it's the preservation of that ability, of the unique machine known as human intelligence, that will give us strength.

  We'll need all the strength we can get.

  Saturday, December 3, 2011

  Bodies

  Posted by Josh Guess

  This is going to be a very short post, because I'm writing instead of eating on my lunch break. We've been working nonstop since the battle to get rid of all the zombies outside the walls of Harlen. Turns out that thousands of bodies are a bear to get rid of, even with help.

  If they were all or even mostly dead it wouldn't be a problem. That isn't the case. Some of them were burned so badly that enough of the pervasive organism controlling the bodies was destroyed that they're dead. That helps. But most of the burned ones were only damaged and trapped, their immobility ranging from total to the ability to crawl.

  Then there are the ones taken out by traps. Cutting off feet and damaging legs in general is a great way to greatly decrease how much of a threat they are, but it means having to go out
and finish them off as well. We're working in two person teams. Steve is my partner. One of us carries a shield to deflect potential attacks and to hold the zombie down, while the other uses a "push spike", which is a nifty weapon designed by one of Harlen's residents. It's basically a four foot length of metal with a wicked sharp point, and a footrest about a foot from the bottom.

  Guy with the shield bashes the prone zombie stupid, holds it down by the neck with the shield, and you lift the spike with your foot on the rest. Push with your arms as you step down, and it treats a skull like butter. Rinse and repeat.

  Like, three hundred times. We lost count.

  There are about two hundred of us doing this job. Most of the others are managing the pyres, which teams of porters are carrying in after we kill the zombies. They pyres are fed by wood being cut from the edge of the clearing, which is why it's so far back. They've done this every time a big attack has come this way, taking the treeline back a little every time. Fresh wood doesn't burn well, of course, but douse it with enough accelerants and eventually it goes. Helps that zombie physiology makes them burn pretty easy.

  Everyone is working two shifts a day. Half of us are doing cleanup while the other half works the fields. The ashes will be used to fertilize the crops, which would bother me if I didn't know how fire treats bacteria and other harmful organisms. They've been doing it for months with no negative results, which is enough for me.