Living With the Dead: The Wild Country

by Joshua Guess

  Nelson's song stuck a chord in the larger sadness that's been plaguing me off and on for months, but I'm glad for that. All of us have outlived loved ones, dear friends, even society as we knew it. We've all got the ghosts of terrible choices haunting us.

  But the real lesson here is that we've got more to lose. Every one of us has some stake in the world even as it is now. It may be something as simple as a mission--say, to kill zombies so that others might be safe--but if we didn't have a reason to struggle and fight...I don't think most of us would. Not with the weight of our traumas cutting into our hearts. Each of us goes on for some reason, some driving force, and it's our responsibility not just to do what it takes to keep going, but to do so in the best way.

  I've been up all night thinking about this. Nothing that's happened since The Fall is as black and white as any of us might think. I know our trouble with the homesteaders might have been dealt with better. Betrayals aren't necessarily all of a kind, are they? Maybe we've acted too rashly and with more haste than we should, and I deeply regret my role in pushing people toward that. Not to mention acting that way myself on more than one occasion.

  Regrets are a part of life, just like everything else. We deal, we move forward. We must.

  Wednesday, December 21, 2011

  Touch the Sky

  Posted by Josh Guess

  We've had to take a detour, because I'm dumb. I've been working on navigating our route down south, and somehow forgot that there's a huge range of mountains in our way. While it would probably be easier to just avoid them and go south, the team and I have agreed to take the chance of traveling as close to the Rockies as possible. We won't try to make it over them, that would be ridiculous. There's probably enough snow up there to stop us from making it very far, or to kill us with bad roads or avalanches. That's assuming the roads up that way aren't packed with abandoned vehicles. I somehow doubt people have made any effort to clean that area up.

  We're traveling the foothills because damn it, we want to see the mountains. I've never seen one up close. Well, I've been through the Appalachian range twice, but they aren't what I think of when I hear the word 'mountain'. I want to see a part of the earth reach up and touch the sky.

  We're stopped right now outside of a huge shopping complex in northwestern Colorado. We're siphoning fuel to top the tanks off again, just to be safe. It's not all that cold here, but there's been no sign of life or habitation since we left Karen and her people yesterday. No more farms after we exited her area, very few zombies. After a few hours, there were no zombies at all.

  It's peaceful here, but not comfortably so. This mall seems dead in a way that most places don't. I can't put my finger on it exactly. None of us want to stay for very long. I'm only writing instead of helping gather fuel because Bill is still having trouble walking, and we refuse to leave him alone and defenseless in case something bad happens.

  Will, Becky, and Steve are siphoning and hauling gas from the cars in the parking lot. Rachel is making a very careful exploratory trip into the mall itself to see if there are any supplies we can use. Given the ridiculous number of cars here, I'm guessing not. There's a Costco here, though, so maybe we'll get lucky and find some food that hasn't expired yet. Even if it's just some well-preserved rice, that would be a nice addition to our current fare. We've got potatoes (thanks, Iowa!) and plenty of dried meat, but a lot of the time we have to gather edibles from the wilderness. That's pretty hit or miss. This time of year, where we are? More miss than hit by far. Anything to bolster our stocks would be a treat. I honestly don't know how we run so low on food so often.

  Still, we can always hunt. We won't starve.

  Huh. I just realized what's weird about this place. There are no animal sounds. Usually you hear something, even if it's just a bird way off. I haven't seen so much as a squirrel. That's...very disturbing. I think I may need to take a walk outside for a minute.

  Friday, December 23, 2011

  Landmark

  Posted by Josh Guess

  After driving relentlessly for what felt like endless hours, we made it to Texas. This is kind of our 'reorienting' stop. From here we change direction sharply, heading southeast for quite a ways and making more frequent stops than we have recently.

  We're staying at a decent-sized homestead in the northern part of the state. There are thirty people here, and my team slept in what is clearly some new construction: a long communal house, meant to hold around fifty people. It's not as spare as I would've thought given how hard it is to build things nowadays, with lots of space for families and privacy plus many small creature comforts. I mention this only as a fact interesting to me, since my brother has been moving toward this design in his constant efforts to rebuild and improve New Haven.

  The reason the long house is bigger than it needs to be is that these people are expecting to raise more kids here. Four of the women are pregnant, and there are already five young children here. There should be six, and that sad and simple fact is what I find most fascinating about our stay here.

  Sandra Duncan and her husband Brad are parents to two of those five children. The older one is five, and from what I've seen a pretty damn good shot with a rifle. The younger child turns a year old in January. Her name is Jenny. She's adorable, and I'm happy to report that during a minor scuffle with a small pack of New Breed zombies, I was pressed into babysitting while her parents picked off the attackers with gunfire.

  I'd almost forgotten how great babies are. Given my experiences over the last few years, I might have tried to forget that on purpose. The moment struck me as pretty amazing, making nonsense words to the little girl and trying to make her smile while the muffled sounds of gunshots rang in our ears. I did it, too--she cooed and giggled, her soft smile and shining eyes gave my heart a little boost.

  I'm a sappy guy, I know. I can't help it. Kids bring that out in me.

  After, I talked with Sandra and Brad for a while. I learned that Jenny had a twin brother named Thomas who died just before he turned six months old. These people are regular contacts of ours--they know the lay of the land as well as anyone. Losing their child devastated them as it would any parent. They were inconsolable. Add to that horrible tragedy the knowledge, gained by hard experience, that they'd have to...do something about poor little Thomas after the plague activated in his small frame, reanimating him, and you can understand why it's taken this long for them to tell anyone about it.

  They put Thomas to rest in a small makeshift crib with high walls after he passed, unable to bring themselves to harm their child's body as it lay still. When he came back, perhaps things would be different, they reasoned. Their instinct to protect themselves and their other children might kick in, and though they would hate themselves for it, they would act.

  Except that didn't happen. Every person I've seen die (with the exception of people who've suffered severe trauma) comes back, unless you take steps beforehand to ensure it doesn't happen. You've all seen it. I know I have. And I've seen kids reanimate. Thomas didn't. He stayed gone. Eventually the family buried him, after it became clear that they wouldn't have to watch their child die twice. The longest I've seen a body go before turning is about ten hours, I think, though that's not counting people who were caught in the elements. Extreme cold can stretch that process into a few days.

  Thomas died in the spring, and he lay in that crib for two days. It appears that he was never infected, which is something new. I don't know if it's important to our survival directly, if it's something that is more common than we think, or if this is just a one-off situation. I can speculate to the ends of the earth about why Thomas only had to go through the doors of death once, but the why of the thing is less important right now than the simple fact itself.

  This child was not infected. We're all infected. That's what we thought. Every one of us a carrier, the hidden invader within us waiting for the heart to stop and the brain to cool before taking over. This is new. This is...I don't know the word. Amazing.
Full of potential. If there were still a CDC or a government to run it, I'd beg for a vial of Jenny's blood to send out for testing. Maybe then it would be possible to create a vaccine so that none of us would have to worry about being eaten in our sleep after a loved one died in theirs next to us. Maybe then we could have a little hope that the next generation of people could live in a world where eventually there would simply be no more zombies.

  But we don't have that capacity. There's still hope, of course, don't mistake me. I'm thrilled at this development, and it reinforces the romantic view I have of people as constantly evolving beings that can meet any challenge. How much more proof do we need than this? We might not be able to make a vaccine or, even better, a cure that could drop the zombie population in its tracks, but that's okay. Because we have proof now that the plague isn't unbeatable. We have a little light to guide us down a dark road.

  I made little Jenny smile. She's a good girl, because believe me, she returned the favor.

  Saturday, December 24, 2011

  Head Case

  Posted by Josh Guess

  We'd barely been on the road an hour this morning when we came across a horrible sight. It was a small building, surrounded by the corpses of fallen zombies (and a few live ones). The small town we were passing through when we arrived on the scene wasn't on our map of known settlements, so we decided to investigate.

  It was awful. People had obviously tried to defend the place, their bodies pulled through windows and half-eaten. The few remaining undead were wary, as most of their brethren were either dead from head injuries or writhing on the ground as they tried to extinguish their burning flesh. That fire was tenacious--homemade napalm is my guess.

  We mopped up the last few zombies, firing arrows from the bed of the truck as we slowly circled the place. When we were convinced there weren't any hidden enemies outside the building, we grouped up and made entry. We called loudly in case there were survivors inside too afraid to come out. There were no responses.

  It only took about ten minutes to search the inside. One survivor out of a dozen people. He was so traumatized he wouldn't do anything but sit with his knees against his chest, arms wrapped around him. We tried everything to reach him, but the poor guy was destroyed.

  I pulled Will to the side and asked him quietly to make sure the slain bodies of the man's friends didn't come back. He gave me the nod I always associate with Will--a short, concise bob of the head. Not sharp or angry, but not lazy either. The response of a man who knows his duty and deals with having to perform it by doing it well.

  Will grabbed the nearest body and picked it up with a careful reverence. He got about two feet away before the traumatized survivor snarled as he jumped to his feet, screaming that he wouldn't let us hurt them. He lunged toward Will, who even in his surprise didn't drop the body, and yanked Will's gun right out of his holster.

  I didn't see the others pull their weapons, and I heard Steve, Becky, and Rachel's shots as one single noise, they were so close together. We've practiced as a team a lot. Putting ourselves at angles to reduce the chance of accidentally shooting one another in situations like this comes naturally to us now. Recognizing and reacting to danger with necessary force is ingrained into us. Dealing with the psychological consequences of those actions, though...that's something you can't teach. People are still people. The good ones feel pain and guilt when they kill.

  Will's gun didn't get high enough to shoot above his knee before three large-caliber rounds smashed into the man's body. Steve and Becky put two rounds in his chest, Rachel's went right through his right eye socket and out his left. It was gruesome.

  The man dropped. Last survivor of his crew, dead at our hand. It's a hard lesson to learn that on the road you have to be a harder person than you are at home. Zombies can come from anywhere. Threats can be found in the most unlikely places. And people are all strangers when you get down to brass tacks. The ultimate choice for us is to react slowly and assess the situation with caution...or to shoot on first instinct and ask questions later. It's a sad way to live, but there's little choice. I wouldn't have put Will's life at risk on the chance the crazy guy was just going to point a weapon at my friend and that we might be able to talk him down.

  It's a goddamn shame. Especially because upon further examination of the remains, it became clear that the fellow wasn't part of a group of people brought together by chance. Everyone here looks a lot alike. Family. They share the same straight nose, the same dark hair. They were all olive-skinned, though that's paling now as they all lie here sharing the same quiet fate.

  Sunday, December 25, 2011

  Black Christmas

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Wow, that title sounds ominous, doesn't it? I promise not to be all dark and angsty. Today is definitely a black Christmas for us, for the simplest possible reason: we're underground. Not in the way that many independent bands were underground before bands stopped existing. I mean literally underground. Beneath the earth. Beyond the reach of the sun and stars.

  We're staying with a group of people who've made their homes in a system of natural caves near the town most of them come from. The caves open in some areas, as they're pretty close to the surface, and that's where I am right now. Sitting by our truck, parked next to a wide opening in the earth. This is one of a few entrances to the cave system that zombies have a very hard time finding. The path here is hard to find, and slants down between two high hills, cutting a narrow chasm. It's nice.

  We'll be here all day at least. It took a little creative driving for Will to shake the zombie swarm we ran into a few miles away. The last thing we wanted on this leg of our trade mission was to accidentally bring a swarm of undead right into the home of our allies.

  Not that they don't get quite enough traffic from the undead without our help. This area is warm year round, and the terrain and large populations of people at the time of The Fall made for a seemingly endless supply of the dead.

  Part of me wants to do a post about Christmas and what it means. The other part of me just wants to take the day off. We all had a nasty emotional shock yesterday with the death of that man and his family. None of us are feeling all that festive. We're all tired. We miss our home, our friends, our families--especially today.

  So I think I'll cut it short and do that. I'll give Jess and a few others a call, and take the day for myself. I woke up about two hours ago, but I think a nap is in order soon. Maybe I'll sleep off this malaise.

  Merry Christmas.

  Colorado Blues

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I was hoping no one would notice, but a few of you pointed out to me that I left the strange lack of life in Colorado hanging without telling you if we discovered the source. It's been a while since I've posted twice in a day, but after reading some of the messages I've received about this and talking with the team, I feel an additional post is called for.

  I'm sorry if this dampens whatever holiday spirits you may have...

  The answer to the mystery is as simple as it is awful. Before I tell you, understand that the reluctance I've had to revisit this topic is for two reasons. The first is that I didn't want to horrify anyone more than the present conditions of the world already do. The second will become clear in a moment.

  We searched in a very wide circle for several hours. We finally began to see signs of life about two miles from the mall, but nothing larger than a chipmunk for another mile after that. Something had killed everything there, utterly and completely, and it had been catastrophic enough that the rest of the creatures nearby were still afraid to return.

  The source was at the mall: what appeared to be military hardware for dispersing chemical and biological weapons. We found many canisters, all empty. Some were in the mall itself, others in the backs of vehicles. Army vehicles. There were signs that the gases had been driven around while dispersing, probably to cover a greater area.

  We found men and women in Army uniforms among the many dried and r
otten corpses. I don't know if this was a military action, or the act of rogue troops who went crazy during The Fall, or if the military was trying to kill the zombies alone, or even if some civilians overpowered the soldiers and used the weapons instead. The bodies were little more than bones and gore long gone to rot, wrapped in barely recognizable clothes.

  Too many possibilities from the evidence we found to say with any certainty what happened. The reason we kept quiet and ignored the matter on the blog was due to fear that there might be canisters of weapons there we couldn't locate, which would make powerful weapons for any group that had them. A liter of some neurotoxins I've read about could wipe out a population the size of New Haven in minutes.

  So, when it became clear that people weren't going to leave this alone (which is my fault for posting about it in the first place) we asked some people we've been in contact with and trust implicitly to head up to the mall and clean up. To be blunt, the place isn't there anymore. Not in any meaningful way.