by Joshua Guess
We're doing that all over again right now, and that makes me pity them. We've got a huge support structure to help us out. Years of practice and friends to lean on. A safe home with resources we can utilize. The Exiles aren't as blessed. They aren't helpless or without means, but we've surpassed them now.
I feel for them, but it's the generalized sadness I have for all human beings enduring a struggle. As hard as it is to say, despite the fact that they have children there and are to all appearances trying to be better people...
I'd let them die. I won't advocate breaking the truce and making war on them, but neither will I suggest offering them any help. It might hurt me to do it, but I could watch from the cliffs as the last of them passed from this world and not lift a finger to help. I feel that way for a variety of reasons, a slew of them over time that add up to the inescapable sense that the risk of every helping those people could never be outweighed by any possible good.
Each of my reasons is the result of a corresponding number of bad decisions both large and small from the Exiles themselves. I believe in redemption and moving forward. I'm no angel. I won't kill them without cause, but I won't risk anything to help them, either.
New Haven is growing into something more, something amazing beyond our imagination. At the moment it's as simple as running water, but even that is an achievement in engineering to be proud of. Step by step we'll add on to what we have.
I can't help but think of what's ahead for both groups. I don't wish them well, but as time goes by I become less interested in them as long as the Exiles leave us alone. Maybe a strange reason for peace, but given all we have and are working on, and thus stand to lose, it's one I'll take in a heartbeat.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Growth Spurt
Posted by Josh Guess
You may remember a while back--a long while back--that we once had plans to expand New Haven in a very specific way. That idea was derailed by a series of events beyond our control, and though current events are trying to do the same thing we've decided to use that old plan as the basis for our current expansion.
At the risk of making us appear weak at a time when several major aspects of our future are balancing on a fine edge, I can't help but share. We're seeing cases of the new plague come up again at a rate that makes us pretty sure this is a variety brought in from the outside. That itself isn't surprising; we expected it. We aren't back to a point where we have to worry because so many people have become ill again, but six falling ill in one day, two of them people who have had the plague before, is something to be concerned about.
As always, our dedicated medical staff are on the case. Though somewhat more resistant to heat than the previous strains, a nice hot sauna seems to do the trick. Our clinical people are on the ball with the newest outbreak, and it's a major advantage that people with symptoms know better than to write them off as a summer cold. People get sick, they come to the clinic, and the illness is treated as fast as humanly possible.
If recent history is any kind of measuring stick then this whole situation could turn bad very quickly. We don't know if previous exposure makes a person more or less likely to get sick again. We don't know if the new version is more or less virulent than the old one. Just as before, there are a lot of factors in play that we have no way of understanding other than guesswork based on evidence before us. To gather that evidence, people have to get sick. A lot of them.
On top of that, a few prior victims of the new plague have fallen ill with what looks like regular old illnesses. Maybe the trauma of the zombie plagues fighting in their lungs has weakened immune systems. Since the people in question all live and work together and have similar symptoms, this probably isn't as big a deal. I know when I get sick Jess usually follows or vice versa. The situation isn't more than a blip on the radar right now, but long experience coupled with a healthy desire not be caught off guard means I'll be keeping an eye on this even if no one else does. Which they will. Which probably makes me paranoid and overprotective.
Considering the work ahead, I don't think being overcautious is a bad idea. One interesting thing about the next phase of our plan is the amount of work that is being done off-site to make it happen. Part of the reason we abandoned our original expansion plan was due to the difficulty we foresaw in setting up a new wall around any areas we wanted. The idea was to go eastward, which we began with the annex of the smaller neighborhood next door. That didn't end so well. You may recall that the wall there was breached and the place set on fire. That's why the whole thing is a big farm now.
But the people coming to join us have been working with the brainy engineers in North Jackson on a solution. A way to quickly put up walls and cordon off sections of neighborhoods and empty land for our use. The idea was taken from the smaller expansion we did with shipping containers not long ago. Those giant metal boxes don't need supports or any more work than putting them into place.
So the NJ people came up with the idea to cut a bunch of shipping containers up, put hinges on the edges, and send a bunch of them (salvaged from defunct trucking companies and railyards. Thanks, Michigan, for being full of those things) to us on flatbeds. Many varieties of the them will fit together snugly if you lay the sides flat, meaning large numbers of the cut-apart boxes can be moved at once. Just slice 'em up, stack the pieces like paper, and away you go.
It does represent a heavy investment in fuel, which we're struggling to find more and more, but we've got enough ethanol to make that stretch for a long while if we use vehicles that can burn it. North Jackson has a couple heavy trucks that can. We've got a small team of people working on setting up support posts for the new walls even as I type this, based on the specifications sent to us by the folks in NJ. I'm curious to see how this will work out. It's a brilliant idea, honestly. Instead of using a whole shipping container to make a wall section, we'll be using the hinges to put half a box together. A ninety-degree angle, tall side standing up, short side on the ground. A little welding of braces, then attaching the thing to the posts our people are placing, and voila.
Wall.
It's a great idea, and it means being able to grow at a much faster rate than we could have ever hoped for. Most of the work is going to wait until we have the hands to do it, but with this plan in mind I see not just a greater possibility that it'll work, but a high probability that it will. Think about that. More than two thousand people living here, working together. Making the future happen as one.
We'll certainly have to dodge some obstacles to get there, but when was the last time our lives were easy?
Monday, July 30, 2012
Surface Area
Posted by Josh Guess
One of the advantages to having our teams out clearing away the undead is the freedom we have to work outside with minimal protection. True, the local zombies are extremely pissed off at the assault teams, which means the odd straggler our other workers come across have to deal with unusually aggressive enemies, but it's well worth the price. For their part, the teams seem to take a twisted pride in being the object of so much hate from the undead.
As long as our numbers hold out--and they are so far, no crippling outbreak of the newest version of the plague yet though a few more people are sick--then we'll have people out there working on the expansion. We're moving in three directions, primarily, since the last expansion takes up a good chunk of our western wall. The small groups moving around are putting up posts on the southern edge of New Haven at present. That area has traditionally been our weakest front, and once the expansion actually takes place there will be some advantages to starting there.
You may remember that the southern edge is where one of the abandoned nursing homes is. We've got plans to set it up as our central clinic. My mom's old house has been our medical center for so long that it's going to take some adjustment for all of us to deal with the change, but it'll be a good one. More room, more resources, a more centralized location for the new New Haven.
&n
bsp; After the southern area is done being dotted with posts to hitch the sections of wall to (hopefully coming soon!) then our people will work on the entire eastern and southeastern section. We were going to avoid moving into the southeast if possible because there isn't a lot of residential space over that way, but Will and Dodger have made a pretty strong case for going there. The medical pavilion we'll be engulfing is full of brick buildings with a lot of floor space. Good for group dwellings and emergency defense. Also, the idea is to keep New Haven as square as possible to reduce the number of guards and sentries we need on the walls.
That area will be farmed heavily next year. We already have a ton of wild greens growing there, though the heatwave has been less than kind to them. Great thing about clover is that as soon as the rain starts up--and it has, this month--it starts growing like mad again. We can fill a lot of bellies if need be.
The biggest and hardest part of the expansion will be annexing the neighborhoods across the road from New Haven. There's a whole hell of a lot of houses over that way, butting up against my old high school and middle school. We're going to take them all. Some of those houses are crazy huge and were expensive back when money was still a thing, while an older adjoining set of neighborhoods are filled with more modest homes. It goes without saying that people will be assigned places. If we leave it up to them it will be inevitable that tons of people will want big houses. And everyone is going to have to share.
Depending on how many sections of new wall we can get in our mitts, we might try to expand all the way to the schools. Those things are on a lot of arable land, and they're built like fortresses. That's not in our current game plan, but it's a nice dream to have. If for no other reason, we'd like to have the schools for the number of folks we could move in there. Yeah, it'll all work with just the houses, but that's not an ideal situation and isn't meant to be a permanent one. As time goes on, we plan on using the surface area we have available to its fullest capacity: we want to build upward. Dave has been keen on this for a long time. He even has some ideas how to integrate living spaces with vertical farming.
I'd love to move outward, but we have to think upward with such a large population. Babies are going to be born and we'll need space. Given our recent (and now very recent) bouts with illness, I'm of the opinion that clustering ten or fifteen people to a house is not a sustainable or smart way to do things. We'll need people more spread out for the sake of their privacy as well as preventing a disease from rampaging through our citizens with ease because they're packed together like sardines.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Heartbreaker
Posted by Josh Guess
You know as well as I do that the world as it is requires hard, sometimes terrible choices. I don't have to give you examples. You understand. Survival is the bedrock element upon which everything we do is based. Without that as our driving force, we would make mistakes too large to live through. Pretty much every other thing going on in New Haven at the moment--the expansion, the Exiles, food struggles, and even the new plague--is out of my thoughts. Instead I'm focused on a tragic situation that nearly took my breath away when I learned of it.
And I am not alone in this. Most of the citizens here are heartbroken at the moment. Not just because of the bad news at the root of our sadness, but at the necessary decision that came as a consequence of it.
About an hour before dawn, a messenger arrived from Louisville. I've been negligent in mentioning the Louisville crew for a while now. They've been trying to grow much as we have, taking in people from the outside and working to build a serious central location for everyone to live in. Somewhere they can farm and defend, somewhere rock solid and safe.
It was going well enough until the new plague hit them. The Louisville group suffered some harsh losses, but managed to keep attracting newcomers. After all, the plague was everywhere. No harm in bringing people in when everyone is already getting sick.
After Kincaid's idea to burn the illness away with saunas spread, our friends in Louisville began to improve, then prosper. They treated their ill and moved into their new home, a location I still plan to keep secret. The messenger this morning brought dire news, a quick and mournful shift in their fortune.
Much as we've seen here on a very small scale, the people in Louisville have come through the new plague more prone to catching an illness. Someone must have carried a nasty bug in with them, because in a matter of days more than three quarters of their population have developed serious symptoms. Maybe not so bad in a world with hospitals, abundant doctors, and facilities to produce medicine...but in the world that is, bad enough to cause a lot of worry. Vomiting and diarrhea, sharp fevers and profuse sweating, weakness and a few others. Very, very easy to spread, and with all the hallmarks of an outbreak of a nasty flu.
Their community has gone from growing to a grinding halt in half a week. Without the kind of infrastructure we've built here and with so many people sick, life in Louisville has become nearly impossible. The sick people rely on those still well to make them food, keep them hydrated. Water there is easy to get from the river, but needs to be filtered and purified to drink. That takes time and energy, and when three of four people are on their backs, the rest become overwhelmed quickly.
Naturally the messenger asked for our help. We had to turn him away. While we have extra people here, probably enough to see them through this crisis, we simply can't risk it. Sure, putting off our expansion plans to give some help wouldn't be the end of the world (again) but our immune systems are likely just as compromised as theirs are. Anyone we might send to Louisville would probably end up sick, and would bring that home to us.
I was with Will when he gave the messenger the council's decision. No one from New Haven would be sent to help. Any citizen could choose to go of their own free will, of course, but they would not be allowed back through our gates for at least sixty days. A long time to make sure that any sickness wouldn't be carried back here, but again a needed precaution. So far, no one has volunteered to go.
I don't like it. No one likes it. I know that we might be consigning good men and women, people who have fought by our side, to a slow and painful death. Tears keep trying to form in my eyes as I write this, because I know that many of them probably hate us for this. I would hate us, too, even knowing how hard this decision is.
I'm reminded of a very early lesson back in college. My primary teacher in my Fire/Rescue classes told us that the first duty of a firefighter is to survive. The job, he said, was to save lives if possible but also to manage risk. Danger is an acceptable part of the situation, but there are degrees. You might go into a burning building to try to rescue a person, but when the floor ahead of you falls away, it's time to back out and cut your losses. Your life isn't less important than those of the people you're trying to help.
Risk is fine. Every day we live is filled with it. But something like this, something so potentially deadly to so many of our people, isn't acceptable. I write that with a heavy heart and more sadness than I can express in words, but also with resolve. I hope the Louisville folks pull through, and if we can think of ways to help that don't expose us to the disease rampaging through their ranks then I'll be the first to volunteer to go.
Until and unless that happens, I'll keep them in my thoughts. Because for now, that's about all I can do.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Sideways
Posted by Josh Guess
The fucked up thing about forward momentum is that the faster you go, the more damage is done when you get that small nudge from one direction or another. We're working our asses of trying to make a go of this expansion, and so far we've been lucky enough to avoid major conflicts with the Exiles, no crushing defeats at the hands and teeth of the undead.
Just goes to show you that it doesn't take a supervillain to derail a train moving at speed. Sometimes trains collide.
Enough beating around the bush, I guess. We're in trouble. Our decision to with
hold aid to Louisville wasn't an easy one to make and to be blunt it hasn't been popular with some of our allies. A few of them have made it plain that they think we've made the wrong choice, that we should "risk much to save much." I understand that point of view--it's one I've wrestled with over and over again recently--but ultimately the safety of our people trumps any other consideration.
It isn't pretty or nice. It's actually pretty fucking terrible. But those of you out there who aren't happy with us at the moment...well, you're about to get a whole lot unhappier.
I don't have the heart to get into a long post about it today, but some of the Louisville people are planning to come here if things get much worse there. We're sending out scout parties to make sure they don't get close enough to infect us with whatever version of the plague is devastating their people.
I understand desperation pushing people to do things like this, but we'll shoot the tires out from under their vehicles and lay traps if we have to. This isn't up for debate. Causing a ton of division and hard feelings both inside New Haven and beyond, but as policy goes it's pretty much concrete.
Friday, August 3, 2012
Forks
Posted by Josh Guess