Living With the Dead: The Wild Country

by Joshua Guess

  Yes. The idea these geniuses have is to enable trade by powering trains with moonshine. It makes a country boy proud.

  It isn't exactly an engineering conundrum, don't misunderstand. It looks very likely that success on the project is close. The larger problem is going to be planning routes, organizing trade stops, refueling, and of course making sure that the tracks aren't screwed up everywhere they want to send the thing. That means teams of people traveling all over America checking rails and making sure the right switches are engaged. It's huge and complicated and makes me thankful these people have lots of computers at their disposal. Just thinking about managing that huge mess is giving me a nosebleed.

  On the small scale side, the idea is to run a closed route between Google HQ and the communities near Harlen. It's ideal since Harlen and the rest provide literally tons of food to the Googlers. If it works out, then they'll begin work on a much farther-reaching version. I've got my fingers crossed.

  It just takes time. We've got some leeway for trade with the remaining fuel out there, but I'm confronted by the interesting reality that eventually things are going to change. I was such a big supporter of alternative fuels and energy sources, and now I'm seeing new infrastructure being born for them. It's not that we wouldn't use the old stuff if we could, but that's just not possible anymore. I'm not happy that it took the destruction of everything I knew to make this happen, but I'm not sad to see these changes happening.

  Silver linings, you know?

  I'm happy to see any foundations for our future being laid. We don't have the power or people to mine coal or run big power plants. But all of us can raise a crop and ferment it with a little training. Anything we can use to make the future brighter and easier is on the table for us. Ironic that large-scale ethanol production wasn't feasible before because so much of it would have been needed to service the population, and the drastic reduction in the population now makes it a perfect fuel.

  We're heading out. I'll be thinking about this for days now.

  Sunday, December 11, 2011

  Oregon Trail

  Posted by Josh Guess

  A few things about Oregon:

  I've never been here.

  And it's cold. Almost biblical in intensity.

  Luckily there seems to be a limit to how cold a zombie will get before it just says to hell with it and goes into the weird hibernation state they have. Pretty much all of them used to get stiff and begin to wind down when it got into the fifties or lower. Then the damn things started getting cold resistant. Lucky for the human race that when the mercury hits ten degrees below freezing or so, they begin to freeze up and lose mobility.

  Funnily, that seems to be the temperature our portable heaters seem incapable of dealing with as well. Or at least that was when the first one started going wonky on us. We decided to make camp and get cozy, setting up a nice fire and throwing up canvas around it in a dome to hold some of the heat. It isn't ideal, but we decided not to risk a propane heater blowing up on us.

  Human flesh will freeze at a certain point, be it human or zombie. We're unconcerned with being attacked given it's about fifteen degrees where we are. If there's a zombie walking anywhere around, we'd hear him crack the frost on the ground and the crunching sound of his frozen skin long before he could be a threat to us.

  The team and I find ourselves in a strange situation. We've stopped, made camp, and have a good amount of leeway before getting to the next community on our list. Will is taking the chance to get some hunting in to replenish our food supply (and because he gets some sick thrill from murdering furry woodland creatures, I'm sure) while Steve stays here and plays homemaker.

  He's humming as he flits about the camp, making food and checking the canvas, setting up chairs and getting plates out. Steve has become a darker and more dangerous person since The Fall began, but moments like these, where safety isn't as much a concern, remind me just how much of that is necessity. When he doesn't have to be violent and deadly, the truest parts of him have a chance to shine. His thoughtfulness, his concern for others. The happy smile on his face that shines when we thank him for the wonderful food and all his effort. Some nights I let myself remember what I'm missing back home in New Haven, and the loneliness starts to overwhelm me. He's always there with a hug and words of understanding. He never shows it, but I know he misses Courtney something fierce.

  He's a stronger man than I am by far. You might never know it to look at him unless you got to know him well. I kind of feel bad for people that don't know him as I do. Everyone should have a Steve.

  Becky and Bill are sitting on the other side of the fire. Steve keeps refilling their tea (I have no idea where the tea came from. Steve is just magic.) over their protests that they can do it themselves. The two of them are playing cards. I don't know the game, and I'm willing to put money on the idea that neither of them really knows it either. It looks complicated and involved. I'm glad I'm not playing, my brain is too muzzy and warm from the fire to care much about games at the moment.

  Rachel is writing next to me. She's not using a laptop. She likes her notebooks. It's one of the few concessions to carrying weight all of us agreed on. Rachel got to bring a stack of blank notebooks and a bag full of pens. She's a great storyteller, and her (almost creepily) good memory catches almost everything. She spent days writing about Mason after he went off to die, and today she's filling pages about Google and the brief time we spent there.

  You may wonder why I don't focus on that myself. I would, but the fact is that I was asked not to. Most people with any kind of internet access know the people in Mountain View are out there keeping communications open. Too many of the wrong people can read this blog. It's best if I don't share too much.

  One thing I can mention safely, though--they gave me a new laptop. They have a good stock of that kind of thing, obviously, and mine was getting a little buggy. This one was state of the art when The Fall came around, so it's the best I'll probably ever get to use. I don't know that we'll ever reach a point where computers are manufactured again in my lifetime.

  The thought doesn't bother me as much as you'd think. We're building again, and getting back to producing technology won't be nearly as hard this go around since no one has to start at square one. I'm just happy to see so many survivors, more than I'd have ever dreamed. A vast trove of people, with their experiences and skills being built on and passed to others. It's an excellent way to start over.

  Ah, I heard a gunshot. If Will hasn't had to drop an errant zombie, that might be our next month's supply of meat on its way. This is going to be a good day. So cold it makes your chest hurt, but good.

  Tuesday, December 13, 2011

  Beacon

  Posted by Josh Guess

  We're still in Oregon. The team and I were making our way up to Washington state, where the last leg of our west coast trip will take place, when we caught a burst of sound from somewhere far away. It's lucky we had the windows cracked or we might not have heard it.

  It was a tornado siren. It came on and off seemingly at random, until Will realized it was Morse code. In the movies, someone always knows Morse code. I have two former military personnel with me, and yet none of the six of us could catch whatever it is those faraway people were trying to say.

  So, like idiots, we started to follow the sound. It may well have been a warning to stay the hell away, but on the off chance someone was calling for help, we had to at least check it out.

  Last night was when this happened. We followed the sound, which started a little while before dark, until it was too dangerous to drive. As we stopped to set up camp, we noticed a light burning in the far distance. It flickered with artificial regularity, going in and out in time with the breaks in the siren. A message, both audio and visual...curious.

  We've been searching the area for a while, but we can't figure out where the damn light was coming from. Based on where it appeared in the night, it was in the sky. But there are no mountains in that d
irection, nothing but a steep hill way too low to have been the source of the light.

  It's super irritating to know that someone was signaling deliberately, and that we can't find them. The whole damn point was to use the signal to find them, wasn't it?

  So we're on a break. The hill is going to be our next stop. Most of our view of that jutting fist of land is blocked by the town around us, so maybe checking out what's on the other side of it will help. Maybe we're missing something, like a water tower or a thin radio tower that we can't see from here. It's thin reasoning, but thin is going to have to do with no other leads to go on.

  A few observations about this town lead us to think that something strange is going on. Will and Becky scouted ahead a little bit, and they note that the place is in good repair. No trash on the streets, no evidence of fire or severe damage. Cars parked neatly, defensive barricades carefully installed and tended. This isn't some town abandoned in The Fall as zombies ran through it in waves. This is, or at least was until very recently, a large community of obviously capable and hardworking survivors. Steve and Rachel noted in their own run that large stores of food are secured in pockets around the town.

  Whoever lived here, they didn't die. There are no bodies. They didn't get hit by a swarm from what we can tell, and even if they did the swarm clearly didn't overwhelm the place. It looks like everyone ran at one time, but some of my own observations while walking beside Bill as he hobbled on his crutches lead me to think that we haven't begun to scratch the surface of what happened here.

  The houses, the shops, all the buildings here were obviously utilized. As far away from other survivors or major marauder travel lanes as we are, they had to have done it on their own. God only knows how they managed, but they did. We had no idea this little town existed until a few hours ago. I'm willing to bet that no one else did, either.

  So why, if the people that live here ran from something, did they take time to lock every door and secure every window with armored plates and wood? Why go to those lengths if you were running for your life from some kind of threat? Will broke into a house, thinking maybe they'd all locked themselves in and died (a gas leak or something?) but the house was empty.

  I love a mystery. As long as no large groups of zombies threaten us, this is one we'll put the time in to solve. If the undead do appear, this town will have to become a memory for us. Fingers crossed, all of you. I want to know what happened here.

  I need to know.

  Wednesday, December 14, 2011

  The Bluff

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Being prisoner is not my idea of a good time, even if it's relatively pleasant captivity.

  You may have guessed, but for the record we found the people who live in this town. As it turns out, the beacon we saw wasn't for us. It was for the zombies that had massed around the town to attack. Sounds a little confusing, so let me tell you what happened to us. I think that will make it clear.

  We made our way to the hill in the direction the light was coming from not long after my post yesterday. It wasn't a perfect slope, raising up and dipping down pretty steeply before cresting again. In that small valley we saw the machinery that raised the signal light and the arm that housed the light itself. The whole thing goes up nearly a hundred feet, then retracts at the push of a button.

  We walked to the edge of the hill, and I say edge because the crest leads to a sheer drop of about two hundred feet. The other side is the remains of a quarry or open-air mine, I don't know which for sure. Whatever it was, the whole thing had been abandoned for decades because the people operating it blasted into the wall of the hill one day and discovered a magnificent set of natural caves. Cue civic response to save the caves, a lengthy legal battle, and after some time the site is shut down.

  As you can tell, I've asked some questions. Now that I'm writing it down I realize how stupid it was not to wonder whether it was a mine or a quarry. That's going to bug the hell out of me.

  At any rate, we made our way to the top of the hill and saw at least a thousand zombies at the bottom. Most of them were dead, burned and crushed by massive rocks. The people of the town were in the caves, gathered at the large blast hole in the side of the cliff that became a scenic overlook after the caves became a protected area. It was from that hole and from platforms set into the side of the cliff that were accessible from other, smaller holes that the townspeople rained down hell upon the swarm.

  The idea is to signal the staff on duty in the cave, who will raise the light tower and start the siren. That gets the attention of the zombies. The townspeople lock their houses and gather at the northwestern edge of town, where a large sewer entrance awaits. They discovered years ago that only a thin partition of earth separated the sewer from the caves. When The Fall came, they decided a nice hidey hole was just the thing. One knocked out wall of dirt and stone later, and you have a huge cave system to hide in.

  The folks here are practiced at luring zombies into the pit. They've got a pair of baiters that ride out on dirt bikes to get the zombies' attention and keep it once the siren goes off. The elegant part of the whole thing is that even if that doesn't work, by the time the zombies are paying attention to the town again, the people in it are gone, so they give up on attacking it. I've lost track of the number of creatively brilliant defenses I've seen since I left home, but I'll add this one to the list.

  Now, if they'd just let us out of these cells, my day would be perfect. At least they let me have my laptop and phone. I was kind of shocked to see cell service this far out, but these folks are self-sufficient in a lot of ways. They're suspicious of us because the only people they have contact with are marauders, who haven't been treated nicely (which is fair since marauders don't treat others nicely). They use their cell tower for communication with each other, and that's about it. They don't have a lot of curiosity about the rest of the world. They seem to be isolationists.

  I think they would have let us leave, if under guard, except for one detail: We broke into one of their houses. I don't think they're going to execute us or anything, but for the moment we aren't going anywhere.

  Thursday, December 15, 2011

  Work Release

  Posted by Josh Guess

  The rest of us are being kept under lock and key until Will serves his sentence--he's got to rebuild the door and door frame of the house he broke into. That's not a quick and easy job like it used to be. He has to take the raw lumber (thankfully there's a supply of it here, this being Oregon and all, or he'd have to cut down a tree and start from scratch) and work it into what he needs. The door is salvageable with some work, but the frame is gonna be a job. He's putting in twelve hour days until it's finished, and spending his nights here in the cells with the rest of us.

  I wasn't wrong when I called these folks isolationists. As it happens, they've deliberately stayed away from outside communications since the first weeks of The Fall. The zombie attacks in this neck of the woods have been shockingly steady as undead move back and forth between California and Washington. The massive swarm that hit Harlen recently came close to this place, though that's a relative statement. Call it twenty miles from the main roads. We only came this far away from the highway because our next stop is westerly, and the maps we were given put us on this path. Said it was quicker. Ha.

  I don't know the names of anyone here. I don't know the original name of this town, or what they call it now if it's different. The desire to keep to themselves is strong, and I'll respect that. I won't share the location on the map with anyone, nor will my team. If these folks want to be left alone, that's their business.

  However.

  They aren't totally cut off. As I mentioned yesterday, marauders do make their way here once in a while. The locals have developed methods of dealing with the zombie swarms that take hand-to-hand combat out of the equation for the most part, and drastically reduce the need to expend ammo. I say that so you understand that every group of marauders to come this way has been met
with overwhelming force in response. They save bullets and arrows by not having to use them on the undead. People with guns of their own are a different matter.

  The locals aren't quite as shy telling us the hearsay they get from the marauders they encounter. One place in particular I talked about with my guard is Crater Lake. I've been interested in it for a while, just as a bit of a geology nerd. It's the deepest lake in the US, a huge circular caldera from a collapsed volcano in the Cascade Mountains. The area itself was a national park before The Fall, and I've wanted to go there for a while. The views are supposed to be amazing. But my real point of interest is the island on the edge of the lake, Wizard Island. Yes, it's really called that. It's pretty big, and the summit of the thing is called the Witch's Cauldron, a 500-foot wide depression at the top of the volcanic cinder cone that built the isle.

  I've always thought it was neat, but now there are apparently people living there. I don't think we could make it up that far into the mountains in our vehicles at this time of year even if we had the time to try. The overwhelming likelihood is that the whole area is snowed in, given the altitude.