Living With the Dead: The Bitter Seasons (27 page)

at 
8:10 AM
 

Posted by Aaron

This is Aaron again. Figure I'd post up another update for everybody. 
So a bit of advice for those out there surviving the zombie apocalypse. Attempting to remove a bullet in one's leg without any sort of heavy medication is dang near impossible.  However, having an eight year old attempting to remove the same bullet is downright terrifying.  Fortunate for me, I watched Evans and Gabby do this enough to at least have some idea on how to walk someone else through it. That and I know a good amount about the human body.  Maybe not the exact names of certain things, but where they are and what they do most definitely. So thanks to Allan (one of the four that was trapped with me) I no longer have a bullet in my leg.  I'm still unable to walk on it though, but at least now it has the chance to heal properly.  But honestly, this isn't why I'm updating.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm very excited about having that bullet out, but some things are far more important.
Like, how we managed to secure the school.  Yes, we're secured.  The raiders for the most part are dead, though a few did escape.  I doubt they'll get very far though.  Like Josh, we're under a bit of siege, though not by nearly as many, thankfully.  This school is not even remotely zombie proof. I've gotten the kids to work on boarding up the massive windows in the classroom I'm held up in, and we've blocked off most the other entrances on our side of the school (it's too large to explore throughly at the moment).  I've been told they/re actually trying to make this place a bit of a maze, in case anyone else tries to invade our temporary home.  Of course, it's a home we just stole from some other folks.  I know in the last post I painted them as raiders and such.  But honestly, I don't know for certain.  I can only assume the fact that they fired upon our group which had a bunch of children in it that it was the case.  Then again, they might not have known.  They didn't really put forth much of an effort to flush us out of the room, though they might've just assumed we'd eventually starve to death.  It's a hard call.  Can't really ask them now, can I? Oh well.  Still I have five dead children and three dead adults, so forgive me if I don't seem too terribly upset about it. 
Ugh, I really wish Gabby or Evans was here about now.  I was glad to hear they were doing well wherever they are.  Still, this leg is killing me.  Maybe I can have Philip figure out some way to use the chemicals in the lab to make some sort of heavy duty painkiller.
Oh yeah.  Yeah. Philip found the chemistry lab.  Rather Gregg found it, but Philip put it to use.  It's find was a major contributer to overtaking and ousting the occupants of the cafeteria.  Basically the run of it is this;  Philip used to go to a public school before the fall, and anyone whose been to public school knows that most schools come equipped with chemistry labs in varying degrees.  Typically they store the chemicals you work with in one of the large glass cabinets that are surprisingly easy to break into.  Philip sent Gregg (via the vents) to find this school's.  Apparently this school got a substantial amount of state funding, because it had a very nice chemistry lab.  Even had a working eye wash apparently. Imagine that. Even had all the chemicals properly labelled or so I'm told.  So a little bit of saltpeter, some sugar, a little bit of baking soda, some aluminum foil and two Bunsen burners later, Philip and his group had a handful of smoke bombs.  I'm not sure how the battle went exactly. However, I'm told Philip and the other kids took down 5 of them before they even had a chance to react.  The last three made a run for it. One of those guys was knifed down by Tanya and Gregg.  The other two got away or so it sounds anyways.
I'm not sure how I feel about what the children did to be honest. Part of me is proud that they did what was necessary for survival.  The fact that they've killed now, that worries me.  Gregg and Tanya both seem so much more withdrawn, though they follow Philip around like puppies.  Philip's more or less taken charge of things here, since I'm mostly out of commission.  Though he does come to talk to me at great lengths now, discussing this plan or the next.  He's a smart kid with a good head on his shoulders.  Though, I feel like he's enjoying this being in charge thing a bit too much.  Still, what am I gonna do?  I'm pretty much immobile, and unlike me, he's not gotten anyone killed, yet.

at 
2:07 PM
 

Posted by Josh Guess

It has become painfully clear that we can't stay in this nursing home for much longer. The snow and ice are almost gone, whisked away by a night of rain and temperatures in the high thirties. That let every cold-proof zombie have free reign to get to this building over the last day. We managed to fend them off long enough to secure ourselves in a couple of rooms, but we're heading out today.
I'm glad we took the time to harvest supplies the other day. There were lots of cars to siphon fuel from, and we even managed to squeeze in some more gas cans for each of our vehicles. The food we've found here will replace a lot of what we've used over the last few weeks. We're as well stocked and provisioned as we can be, better even than we were when we left the compound.
The only real problem is that we don't have a destination in mind. We don't want to head toward any of the places that the Richmond soldiers know about--we'd rather not endanger our allies by taking refuge with them. We have a few ideas about where we might go, but most of the safe spots we've heard about aren't much more than rumor and speculation. The driving factors for us are simple:
We're a group of more than thirty people, and anywhere we go has to be suitable for those numbers.
We're fugitives from our own home, which means that moving back toward that home is not an option.
We've got full tanks of gas for each of our vehicles, and enough extra to refill twice each.
The last one is the most pressing. We've got to assume that the fuel we have is all we're going to get. We have to plan our exit so that wherever we end up, we don't run out before we get there. Today is going to be our last day here any way we cut it, that's certain. This morning is the time when we'll decide where we're headed.
I knew we wouldn't be here forever, but I had hoped that we could at least last out the month. There's plenty of propane left in the generator, more canned food than we can take with us, and a total lack of living human beings anywhere nearby. The reality remains that this nursing home just isn't as defensible as it could have been given the right time and materials, but we don't have either.
Gabrielle and her group are doing well, so maybe we'll try to get where they are. It would take a lot of driving and a lot of luck, but I don't think it would be any more difficult or risky than trying to go somewhere we've never been in hopes of finding anything near as good as the place we're leaving. There's always the option to head in the direction of Courtney and her roving group of people, but when she left the compound to run her mission of goodwill and to lend aid, somehow I didn't see her having to give that aid to us. That's a flimsy option, anyway, given how often they move around and how patchy communication with her is.
I do want to add in here, while I still have the time, that Courtney and her group have managed to do some pretty amazing things while they've been out on this trip. She's gone above and beyond the call of duty, not only passing out supplies and providing transport for those that need it, but finding new groups of survivors and convincing some of the more reluctant groups to finally pitch in and help. She's actually had to make fuel runs back down south to restock a few times, her relief mission has been so successful. I'm proud of what she and the others with her have accomplished. Should I die tomorrow, it will be with the knowledge that in ways small and large, the world has been made a better place by some of the people left in it.
That's way more comforting to me than it should be. We're in a mess here, trying to plan out where we will go, waiting until we're sure that the zombies outside have thinned out enough for us to pile into our vehicles. Yet despite the struggle ahead and the unknowns we face, I can't help but take a lot of solace in the fact that people, a lot of people, are doing what they can to help those in need.
It's not just the holiday spirit, I'm sure. It's truly awesome to me to witness people rising up against the terrible circumstances all of us are in to recognize the basic truth that led me to found the compound in the first place: that the needs of the tribe, the larger issue of survival of the human species, is more important than any other factor.
I've said before that living in a world of the dead has forced us to learn how to truly live. Never before has that truth been more clear to me. It can't just be about survival for us. In fact, there can't even be an "us" unless it's referring to every survivor out there. I'm not saying that we won't have trouble with marauders or crazies--we will. But the greater body of the human species can survive having cancers like those removed when needed. We're all in this together, and it fills me with real hope to see that so many out there are starting to see that as well.
Ok, the last of our people have woken up. It's time to decide where to go. I'll be back as soon as I can.

at 
9:15 AM
 

Posted by Josh Guess

We've been camped out all night, about a hundred miles from the nursing home. We decided where we were headed, though just to be safe I won't be telling you more than that until we get there. I wasn't going to use the charge on my laptop to post anything today, but on our way out of the town we were staying in, we came across something that made every one of us stop dead in our tracks.
It was a pit. Not very old, almost certainly dug after The Fall, the edges of it barely eroded from the weather. The sides were almost vertical, and the backhoe that made the pit was still in the bottom of it. At least ten feet deep and thirty across, that hole in the ground was strange enough a sight to make us stop and take a peek at it.
Inside, half obscured by melting ice and slush, were bodies. Most of them were so ravaged by the weather that it was almost impossible to tell anything about who those people must have been. There were a lot of them, we estimate more than a hundred. At first we thought it must have been the dumping ground for the zombies killed by the locals--after all, it's outside of town (in the direction we didn't come by, which is why we missed it the first time) but after that initial shock we realized that it was pretty unlikely.
After all, part of why we stayed in that little town was because so much stuff had been left behind. The people that lived there left very, very quickly, and that means that it isn't likely enough people stayed behind to kill enough zombies to necessitate a hole that big.
After we searched around that area for a few minutes, we came across a body in a car, the occupant having shot himself in the head quite some time before. There was a note, and I'll give you the gist of it since none of us wanted to bring it along, for reasons that may become clear.
It wasn't a typical suicide note. The man who wrote it, the one who shot himself in his car, had been the administrator of the nursing home we had been staying at. He said in it that while some people had come to take their elderly relatives to the supposed safety of the bigger cities, most hadn't. When his staff left and there were so many left to be cared for, zombies prowling constantly...he made a choice.
He described in great detail the steps he took to end the lives of every single person under his care. He was the last one, a single man with no family and no staff left to do the work. He poisoned the residents of his facility, dug the hole here, and filled it with their bodies. He begged forgiveness for his acts. I don't know who he was asking, but I'm certainly not the one to give it to him.
I thought I had seen enough terrible things that I could no longer be surprised by my reactions. I was wrong. To know that this man methodically worked his way through the building, killing helpless people one after another makes my skin crawl. It doesn't help that part of me understands and in some tiny way almost too small to be called real, agrees with his action. I don't think I could have done it myself, but truly take a look at his situation.
He cared for them for a week entirely on his own. It became clear to him that there was simply no way to keep them alive in the short term without help, and virtually no way at all to do it in the long term is society didn't immediately rebound from the zombie plague. He had to leave most of them covered in their own filth just to get any food or water in them for the day. He barely slept, and trying to keep the zombies away was taking its toll on him.
Rather than let them suffer and die from dehydration or the horror of being savaged by a zombie and then coming back to do the same to the others, he made the deliberate choice to end their lives. A brief flare of pain before falling into peace forever. Taking his own life, he had written in his note, was the only choice he had left.
It's brutal. Terrible. And after all this time struggling to survive, forcing ourselves to become observant and aware so that we stay alive, we never thought about this. We never considered the lack of elderly people or the mentally handicapped. Hell, we rarely see anyone who even has a limp.
How many times has this scenario played out over the last nine months? The weak and injured, old and disabled...how many pits are there around the world just like that one?
I don't know. It's too much.
We'll be on our way shortly.