American Recovery

by Joshua Guess

  I've covered society-wide changes as well. I've tried to couch as much of my, and our, experience in this evolving world in terms we can all grasp and relate to, but even there I've failed at times. A better man than me might have been able to express who Patrick and Becky and Will are as people, might have captured their essence and those of my other loved ones in such a way that it made a difference not just to us, but to our enemies.

  Maybe if they saw us as people with hopes and dreams and fears and worries, this whole war could have been avoided. Then again, that's a lot of responsibility to heap onto my own shoulders, and frankly even my own neuroses won't go that far. I might have made a difference there, but things are as they are and there's no use crying over what I can't change.

  I'm at peace with not being allowed to leave. That's a quick reversal, but the reason is simple: the war took a turn that scares me beyond belief. I was informed early this morning and I've been sitting here staring at the screen as I try to wrap my mind around exactly how to say this.

  I'll just say it and be done.

  Yesterday, fourteen teams of Union soldiers along with seven teams of people from the west struck at the heart of UAS territory. The goal wasn't to engage in traditional warfare. There was no shock or awe involved. In no way do I blame our coalition forces for their actions. Faced with a large and much better-armed enemy, survival is reliant on unpredictability.

  Those twenty-one teams hit the three major bunkers where a huge number of UAS residents still live. Being bunkers, a direct assault was pointless. Designed to withstand nuclear attacks, after all. Our teams, and even the westerners fall into that category since they fight the same enemy, have been working at this for at least eight days.

  The UAS takes materials into their bunkers like clockwork. In theory every trailer packed with propane or water or whatever is supposed to be inspected, but the UAS is made up of people just like anywhere else. Unlike them, we actually see those human beings as people. I know I feel a small degree of sadness for them.

  We haven't got any idea what the casualty list looks like, but the point of hiding explosives in those tanks of propane wasn't to kill a lot of people at one time. Nor was the act of contaminating nearly every drop of water with so much salt that it became undrinkable. Surely there were deaths when those sticks of dynamite went off, especially in such a relatively small space as a bunker, but those have to be acceptable losses.

  The point was to drive them out, to force the UAS onto the surface with the rest of us. It took our very best people to manage these jobs without being caught, and while I don't know the precise mechanics of how they did it, I'm pretty sure this isn't a trick we can pull twice.

  What it means for the war overall, no one can say. We've dealt them a huge blow, but it's possible restoring the bunkers will be priority one. It's possible that the damage to all three isn't as bad as we think it is, and this will be a minor setback. The volume of things we don't know could fill a solar system.

  What's frightening is what we do know. We know that two of the Union teams were run down and captured. In the aftermath of their actions, angry UAS citizens lynched half of them before any semblance of order could be restored. When the leadership finally managed to pull things together, the other half were given a barebones trial right there on the smoking plains amid the fires and chaos of escapees from the bunker, and were put to death. The method was brutal; the crowd moved in right after the sentence and stabbed at them, tore them apart. The remaining Union soldiers watching this unfold--two of them under cover in the crowd before finally escaping in the night--saw it all. They heard the cries of hate and anger and fear. They heard the threats. They saw the determination.

  I wonder how well-informed the citizenry of the UAS can be. If they know what their leaders have been doing, then they have to know we're in a fight for our survival. Something like this was bound to happen. The sad, sad reality is that our watchers on the ground there saw a people who might not have been committed before, but are now. For them the war is no longer an abstract. It's a personal and vicious thing.

  Once things in UAS central calm down and get organized, we're in for it. The intent of the Union/Western forces here was to strike a blow that would weaken the enemy and demoralize them for long enough that we could build ourselves up, then strike the coup-de-grace. We did manage to buy time, for now, but we underestimated the reaction. Far from slowing this war down, all we've done is earn a short period of rest before an entire furious populace comes down on us like the hammer of God.

  I'm fine with staying home and not heading to the front because it's perfectly clear that the front will eventually make its way here.

  Tuesday, February 26, 2013

  Using Every Moment

  Posted by Josh Guess

  The mood around New Haven is...complicated. The people here either read my posts or know someone who does. They're kind of a water-cooler discussion topic. Thus, everyone here has some kind of opinion about the fact that we hit the UAS where they live. I'd say we bloodied their nose, but that's not accurate.

  What we did was kick them in the balls. Hard enough and personal enough that they need time to recuperate, but it made them mad as hell and probably beyond reason. That we were totally justified in doing so is unimportant to the enemy, and even if they had full access to the facts it wouldn't much matter at this point. There is, after all, a huge difference between a war distant from your home and one literally happening inside it. Once your place of safety and comfort gets hit, all other factors cease to be relevant.

  People here are happy to know our troops will be safer during the immediate drawback of UAS forces. They're moving back home for the most part and for the moment, which gives us breathing room. No one here has any doubts about how the whole thing is going to play out, though. New intelligence puts the number of people in the main UAS camps near twenty thousand. God only knows where they're all coming from, but it's an army's worth of people to be sure. And most of them are really pissed off at us.

  I feel as though some kind of fundamental shift has happened. I can't explain it very well. I see my friends, who all had so many doubts, steel their resolve in the face of a fight we know must come to our doorstep. People who feared the kind of people we were becoming are now embracing the reality that we absolutely must fight to stay alive. We're well over the precipice now; there isn't going to be a diplomatic solution to this.

  The world is warming back up, but no one around here seems concerned about the undead. Zombies have become something of a background worry given the incredible danger we're all about to face.

  Beckley is going to post tomorrow, and I hope you enjoy it. His impression of New Haven and his style of writing are welcome sunny spots in all this terrible news. I know I'm not the only frustrated person who wishes we could call all this fighting off and just move forward without more bloodshed, but I also know I'm not alone in recognizing the futility of that hope. We deal with what is, not what can't be.

  Then again, maybe some of the UAS who actually get to read this blog will read Beckley's piece tomorrow and find a little hope in it. I know the rage many of the enemy feel at having their home attacked, and I know that for some of them, no reason on our part is good enough to justify that attack. I can hope, however, that there will be others like Beckley, men and women who see the value in living and letting live, who are willing to swallow their pride and anger and take a hand at peace.

  I'm going to cover that in my next post, which will be the day after tomorrow, which is the last day of this month. Strange to think that it'll be three years since The Fall in just a few days. Stranger still to realize that we've survived all this time through the plague of the dead only to fall into the same old predictable human patterns again. We fight to dominate and control and to own, despite the fact that our low numbers guarantee as much land as anyone will need for many generations.

  It saddens me. At the same time I take a great deal of pride in the peop
le around me. All of them are tough and brilliant, willing to go the distance to protect the group even if it means doing terrible things. It's not much of a bright spot, but it's what I have.

  It's a part of the infinite pool of hope we have for the future. Yes, war is coming and on a scale most of us have never dealt with. Yes, the Union could fall. But until and unless that happens, we will use every moment to better ourselves and our home. We will build right up until someone strikes down our work. We will plan for tomorrow to the last day of our lives.

  We are survivors. To do less would be impossible.

  Wednesday, February 27, 2013

  Getting to Know You

  Posted by Beckley

  Hey everyone, it’s A.J. again. Mr. Beckley if you’re nasty. Josh has given me permission to occasionally post here. I guess it makes sense from a propaganda standpoint to have the voice of a defector ring out for people in UAS territory. Still, that’s a very cynical way to look at it and I like to believe that Josh is a standup guy who just wants another point of view as he continues to work as the historian to all mankind.

  So to those people in the UAS who have access to this blog, I want to tell you a little about this new home I have. New Haven is fantastic. But first, let’s start with the lies. I have no doubt the UAS has told you all that I and the three others that left with me are locked up or being tortured for information. We were all debriefed, of course. It wasn’t particularly pleasant, but being questioned in a small room seldom is. There was no torture, no one went Jack Bauer on me, there were just questions. Unfortunately I didn’t have much to tell them. It’s not like I was in a compound with the higher-ups in the government. I just lived in a UAS town with my laptop. I only started getting attention from the more important UAS figures when my posts on the blog got noticed.

  Let’s talk about the good in New Haven. They have…and am not even joking about this…they have cheeseburgers. God help me, real cheeseburgers. Do you have any idea how completely at a loss I am for words right now? They’re not free, of course, you have to barter. It’s worth any price, though. This couple makes the burgers and they gave me one for free when they found out I was a defector from the UAS. It was refreshing to know that there was someone willing to accept me at face value. When I told them that, they pointed out that whether I’m exactly what I say I am, or whether I’m a spy, there’s nothing they can do about it. So why not believe the option that causes the least amount of pain? So I shut up and ate my burger.

  New Haven itself is a tightly run ship. I’m not going to discuss all that for two reasons. One, Josh already talks about the goings on and I don’t want to just parrot information. Second, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m passing information about defenses. But what I will say is that people are specialized here. Since the fall we’ve all had to do everything. I’ve had to defend our walls before, I’ve had to go out foraging, I’ve been on an undead raiding party. It didn’t matter that I’m a horrible shot or that I favor a baseball bat over an assault rifle. We defend what’s ours and we all do what’s asked so that everything gets done. New Haven has been settled for so long, and has enough people, that they have their own force patrolling the walls. They have their own force of beaters to go out and trounce some undead booty. There’s no rotating schedule among the population at large. People all have jobs, but they’re jobs that they actually know how to do. When the powers that be in New Haven asked me what job I could do, I didn’t know how to answer. I’m so used to being put on a schedule and having a new job each week. These people are not savages or anarchists like the UAS tells you. They’re organized and disciplined. They have developed their own metropolis here and it’s closer to the world that was than anything else I’ve seen since the Fall.

  Oh, and the medical facilities here are phenomenal compared to what I’ve seen in this post-Fall world. I paid them a visit to introduce myself and give them my medical information. All of the workers are great people and the hospital itself looks pretty much like a pre-Fall hospital. That is almost as incredible to me as the cheeseburgers. In a world where people can die from a scrape because penicillin is no longer readily available, this hospital – fully stocked and manned by professionals– is nothing short of a miracle.

  Let’s touch on the bad. I don’t want to seem like I’m whitewashing everything. New Haven isn’t perfect. It has its seedy areas as well. Walking through the place, there were certain houses that looked more rundown due to their occupants being slobs. At least one place was pretty clearly running a gambling establishment with a bouncer out front who had a jailhouse swastika tattoo on the side of his neck. Another house looked to me to be a speakeasy (if the exiting drunks pretending to act sober were any indication.) Yet another house had its owner sitting in a window in her underwear, pretty obviously looking for clients. She was also scratching herself in a profoundly unladylike way. You’d think that would deter people, but she didn’t have long to wait in that window before someone came in. And then he appeared to insist that she keep the curtains open.

  So New Haven is – gasp! – like any other city that used to exist. It has some good parts and some bad parts. And the people are the same. A lot of people have given me their support. Still, there are others that clearly hate me because I once believed in the UAS. If I go for a walk around town, a long walk, mind you, there will be at least one person who will spit in my general direction. Or at least glare at me until I walk away. One kid, maybe thirteen, threw a muddy rock at me once. That’s as bad as it’s gotten, though. Just some cowards throwing mud and their own spit.

  What this all comes down to, though, is that by living here, I get to be myself. It goes back to what I said before about specialization. I don’t have to do a stint on the wall or in the kitchens. If I want to go back to being a therapist, I’m allowed to. Hell, I’m encouraged to. It’s a way for me to pull my weight and I do think that, given recent traumas we’ve all experienced, it’s a necessary service to have. Of course, I don’t know who would want to have a therapist who was involved with the UAS, but the point is that I get to find that out if I choose to. This is a place that can be a home, not just a place to survive. The time for survival is over. We have to start living again, otherwise mankind truly is extinct.

  So, in closing, I want everyone in UAS territory to realize that there are other options. You want to stay with the UAS, fine. But know that there’s a whole world out there. One with cheeseburgers, with a stabilized work force, one with floating craps games and hookers with Chlamydia. It’s a real world, not a shadow of what once was promising to resurrect a world long dead. And it’s run by people who don’t gas children in their beds like mass-murdering cowards. Think about it.

  Thursday, February 28, 2013

  One Small Step

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I doubt many of you out there want to hear about how I feel, but that's what you're going to get today. As always when the anniversary of The Fall is near, I become even more reflective of my life and experiences in the world as it is today.

  Two days from now it will have been three years since all of this began. The end of the world, such as it was. Now we find ourselves past that end and into new beginnings. Hell, past even those. We're actively building a new society. Much like the old one, we fall victim to the bad choices and worse reactions that have plagued humanity since the first caveman realized a spear could kill his enemy as well as his dinner.

  It's a delicate thing to try to explain, but I'm going to try:

  We're changing. All of us. Everyone in New Haven, every survivor out there, is a dynamic being. We aren't solid things that endure and never change. We are shaped by the forces we survive and combat. The zombie plague and the sporadic threats brought against us by relatively small groups made us tough and reliant on each other. We knew then that the zombies were enemies to all, and even if there were more of them, we were different. We could think. We were people.

  The marauders and othe
r groups were smaller in number, and we always had the comfort that the majority of survivors opposed them. We reconciled ourselves to murdering them hand over fist because we knew they were that small minority who lost some essential human qualities when everything around them disintegrated. They were the borderline cases, people who were held in check by society, glued together by the pressure of the overwhelming majority pushing at them with laws and tradition and group morals. Turns out the few of us left after The Fall weren't enough to keep that going.

  Now, things are different. Now we are embroiled in what can only be the opening stages of a war that may end civilization in this country as we know it. Our enemy, the UAS, aren't marauders. We can tell ourselves whatever we want, but the facts are there. These people are probably decent folk for the most part. Their leadership was and is arrogant, to be sure, but while we can fiercely disagree with their aims and methods, when you get to brass tacks they just want what the Union and the Westerners want. To live. To survive and grow. To have stability and safety.

  That's the truth, and no matter how angry you are at the UAS, no matter how much you hate them for the things some of them have done, you'd better remember it. I have had the good fortune these last months to spend a lot of time dealing with my own problems. I've been so lucky to have supportive friends and access to all the help I could ask for the get my head on straight. I'm not there yet, and may never be. All of us are works in progress, after all.

  Because I've been so introspective, I can more easily see the changes in others. War, and having an enemy of the magnitude represented by the UAS, has curious effects on individuals and groups. I see the light going out of people's eyes. I see my friends becoming more focused but darker human beings. Those who are the most angry about recent events are obvious in this way; they want to fight, to kill the enemy and to destroy the threat. But even people like Jess aren't immune. She practically lives in the greenhouses now, because the war effort means we need to be able to produce as much food as humanly possible. She's wearing herself out trying to ensure our well-being. She's worried about the fight to come and terrified that she will somehow fail her people.