Living With the Dead: The Bitter Seasons (36 page)

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11:25 AM
 

Posted by Josh Guess

Human beings are incredible creatures. Look at the history of our species, and you'll see more variety than you can comprehend. Or, at least I do when I think about us.
We're capable of terrible atrocity. We kill for land, religion, food, water. We kill for skin color and, sometimes, for no reason at all. The interesting thing to me is our capacity for cooperation and harmony held against our violence tendencies in as stark a contrast as I can think of.
I just got back from a short run to the lumberyard we've been getting supplies from. I got up at about two this morning to take a shift leading a group to transport from it. Jack has decided that it would be best for us to gather those supplies here and store them for when the heavy work on the hydroponics bay starts. Yes, I called it the hydroponics bay. Enough of the people here are nerds like me and fans of Star Trek that the name was suggested and stuck in record time.
What brought on this sense of amazement is the flurry of activity I see over the screen of my laptop. I'm sitting just inside the door of the factory we're going to be using for the hydroponic food, watching between paragraphs as more than two hundred people scurry and work. Men and women are taking apart the remaining machines with almost robotic speed and precision--these are folks that have a lot of experience working on industrial equipment. They are handing off parts to waiting gophers who pass them on. Nothing is wasted, every nut and bolt saved for possible use later on, even if it's just melted down for the metal.
Lines of people are passing pieces down to the doors where teams are loading them into trucks and hauling them to the main building of Jack's compound. Others are working on measuring the roof for cuts to be made later on to add in more skylights. Yet others are taking measurements to determine just how much pipe and hose will be needed to convert the sprinkler system into an irrigation system for the plants.
It's pretty awesome to behold. If the work continues at this rate, they will have the place empty in a few days, a week at the outside. The only thing slowing us down is the long corridor of open land between Jack's and here. The zombies in this area have been fairly quiet lately, but crowds of them as large as a dozen still drift right through the little road that connects the two factories a few times an hour. The guards that accompany each truck between the two places have to stop, clear them out, and make sure they are really, super dead.
There's talk of bringing in every roll of chain link fence we can find, and anything that can be used as a fencepost. I mentioned yesterday that it's about a quarter mile between the two, and that's a hell of a distance to cover with fence. Jess and I are going back out today on a long scouting trip to look for as much fencing as we can find, because what there is at the lumberyard isn't going to be anywhere near enough. Not to mention that we'll have to find chain link that's tall enough to keep zombies out, which most residential fencing just isn't.
We'll figure something out. This is Michigan, after all, and you can't throw a rock in any direction without hitting a building that manufactured or stored something in industrial quantities. There is a solution, we just have to find it. Not that we're in a great hurry or anything, because it's still about four degrees here. The ground is way too hard to dig holes in for fence posts.
Wow, I really didn't expect to write that much about fences and such. I just get excited about seeing people come together to do something truly helpful for their community. Seeing people come up with ingenious solutions to their problems gives my heart a little boost. Being a part of it makes me proud.
I'm off to catch a nap before Jess and I go out with our team. I'm happy to report that Courtney and Steve will be going with us, since both of them know the immediate area very well. Hopefully we'll find something useful, but at worst we will know where not to look next time, and be more efficient.
The wind chill is so bad that even the cold resistant zombies (which seems to be almost all of them around here, now) are taking it slow. Which is good. I don't feel like fighting today.

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10:03 AM

Posted by Josh Guess

I'm stuck outside Jack's compound with my wife and the rest of our scout team. Twelve of us all told, and we can't get back inside any time in the near future. We only left a few hours ago, but we turned around when I got the call that Jack's was under attack from a swarm.
We're sitting on a low hill in our vehicles watching the action. We're about as far away from Jack's as the factory that we're converting into a hydroponic mega-garden, say a quarter mile. From this distance it's easy to forget that the small figures darting about in front of us are people (or used to be people, depending on which side of the wall you're seeing).
I wish there was something we could do to help, but we were given orders not to fight. We don't have much in the way of guns or ammo with us as supplies are still very low. Courtney brought some with her, but her team had trouble finding people willing to trade for ammo, which is totally understandable. We've mainly got handheld, melee weapons with us, which wouldn't do a lot in a fight with what looks like at least four hundred zombies.
Maybe if we were driving some of the modified vehicles that worked so well during the huge attack a few months ago up here, we could make a difference. We're not. Those things aren't used for scouting trips. So, instead of driving in to the crowd of undead and mowing them down in a blaze of glory, we wait.
It's surprising how much waiting you do in your life when distractions like television and the like are gone. It takes a lot of work to make daily living happen nowadays, but there are still long periods of time where there's nothing to do but sit and talk, or look out at the world around you. I'm sitting here tapping away on my phone, glancing up occasionally to make sure the swarm hasn't breasted the berm of dirt that makes the base of the wall around Jack's. It hasn't, though the piles of broken blacktop and debris that form the wall itself are littered with bodies. I hope they're the enemy...
Hmm. Pause!
Ok, sorry. I never know when to insert something that mentions time has passed between paragraphs, but now it's about twenty minutes later than it was before I said "Pause!". Jess got a call while I was typing, telling us to drive around the far western and eastern sides of the clearing that Jack's is in. The lookouts there saw movement in the trees and wanted confirmation. We got it; looks like a hundred or more zombies waiting in the little woods that are left around here. They're getting antsy and shuffling around.
We're back to our little hilltop. Nothing seems to have changed on the walls at Jack's.
As I look at the building that houses the majority of his people, I'm realizing something that had been in the back of my mind for a while. I've been thinking about it without knowing I've been doing it, I guess.
Nature is going to take back almost every square foot of land we ever stole from her. Back at our own compound, we had some animals around that moved from house to house, grazing on the bits of grass that hadn't been plowed up for growing food. Most of our yards, back and front, had been broken up to make farm land. For us, there wasn't a lot of upkeep on yard work. We took down all of the trees within the compound. Our numbers made it easy to do the little maintenance required.
Jack's is the same. The vast majority of the ground inside the walls is for growing food, and the kudzu and other creeping plants that try to move up the walls of the buildings here are killed by the citizens here regularly. It seems that most places that have a decent amount of people tend toward being neat and untouched by the destructive power of a living, growing thing.
Elsewhere, though...
We've been scouting off and on since we've been here. It's winter and the ground is mantled in snow, but the signs are still there to see. Grass left uncut for months sticks out through the smooth white coat everywhere you look. Houses are being covered in vines, though many are brown and dormant right now. Weeds are breaking through the concrete all over.
It says something deep to me. Seeing the slow march of earth's greenery, temporarily halted though it is by the season, take over and break apart the things that have marred the beauty of the land amazes me. It's a perfect example of the persistence of life. I don't want to get all emo here, so let me quote a movie: 
Life finds a way.
It really does. The slow crawl of creepers over brick, shattering them with time and pressure, is an obvious and awesome example to be sure. Think also of people, survivors; we're converting a factory into something that will make food, grow living things. It will take time and effort, but we will make life work there. Plants do as their genetics command them. Are we any different? Our chromosomes are packed with the base pairs that give us conscious thought, creativity, and ingenuity. The structure of our cells makes we human beings strive to not just live, but to alter our circumstances consciously to better survive. To thrive. Spectacular.
And I am reminded, as I look at the figures methodically bringing makeshift spears and clubs down on the advancing hordes of undead, that our most prevalent enemy is perhaps the best example of life's determination to persist that I can find. Something--a bacteria, fungus, or parasite--infiltrates our bodies as we live and breathe. From what we can tell, it learns us and how our bodies operate. When we die, that silent invader takes the empty shell and makes it useful again. Makes it walk and survive.
And eat.
Terrible, it's true, but remember also the adaptability of whatever it is that reanimates our dead. It got better at using the intelligence of the its host (us), making the smarties. Thankfully only a small number of zombies seem to be able to handle that strain of the disease, or we'd probably all be dead. Think about the much greater (I would guess approaching total) number of them that have adapted to the cold. We went from not seeing 
any
 undead when it got below forty five degrees or so, to watching them move toward us, half frozen, when we ourselves could barely move even within the layers of clothes we wear.
Human beings adapt by changing the circumstances we're in. Sort of like Captain Kirk hacking the computer that gave him the 
Kobayashi Maru 
test, the unbeatable scenario now winnable through his manipulation of the test itself. (If you don't know this reference...shame on you. Everyone should! Ask a nerd about it.) We do that--changing the rules around us to make survival and thriving possible.
Zombies, though, seem to change themselves. That's a huge advantage. If human beings were capable of single-generation mutations that way, there's no telling how far we could have gotten. It's staggering to think that we face something like that, and fills my heart with pride to know that we've stood against it and found ourselves equal to the task.
Time will be the judge of which way is ultimately better. It will have to be us or them eventually, and we're tough. We won't lose easily.
Back to watching the battle. We will try to get in through the gate if there's any break in the fighting. I don't have much hope for that anytime soon; my instinct says this will be a long, long day of waiting...and thinking about the way our enemies work.

at 
9:46 AM

Posted by Josh Guess

We were stuck outside Jack's compound until almost dark yesterday. Zombies kept coming in relatively small but steady waves, but a just before the sun set an indescribably cold mass of air swept in. The majority of the undead are resistant to cold now, but in less than an hour it dropped from about twenty degrees to below zero, and kept on falling.
Below zero, even the SnowTroopers freeze up.
Someone had, at some point during the fracas, come up with the brilliant idea to run a hose out to the wall where the main force of the attack was happening. Jack's people have done this before, you may recall, but this time they weren't electrocuting the undead. They were soaking them.
They didn't use more than a few hundred gallons, easily replaced in the water tower with snow. The thing is heated, so we can just pile snow in there until it's topped off again. We drove closer as the cold front dropped down on us like a lead coat; if it was going to get so cold that our vehicles might not work, we wanted to be able to at least try a run for the walls.
I got to watch as the zombies slowly froze. First it was their clothing. Those that weren't mostly naked from the constant wear and tear of their unchanging outfits turning them into rags were slowed down first. The ice restricted their movements as it stiffened the cloth. Then their skin started to frost over, eyeballs hardening next. It took a while, but as they got really slow my team moved in, breaking skulls open and cutting off the heads of the undead. It was really easy at that point, and the ones that managed not to get hosed down hurried off when they saw how outnumbered they were. A few took backwards glances at us. Hunger is a powerful driver.
We're staying here in the compound until it gets warmer. It's about ten below right now, and none of us want to risk getting caught in that. Not only for our own sake, but we also don't want to chance ruining vehicles, either.
While the sudden cold certainly helped with the zombie attack, they would have lost eventually. Jack's people are too practiced and too numerous to be taken that way. They have some technology that helps them against big swarms, but this attack wasn't bad enough to call in the big guns. It was just annoyingly long. It does give me some ideas about alternative defenses, though...I'll have to talk to Jack about that sometime soon.
This place is on minimal crew right now. There are people at the guard posts, kept warm by fires near the small buildings they're in (as well as those very hot rocks I mentioned the other day). There are lookouts on the roof, also in small shacks that have heat pumped directly to them from their own fires inside the main building. The rest of us are cuddled up inside the wooden barracks inside, people going out in turns to throw logs on the fire and shuffling around the heated stones that warm our plywood quarters.
This intense cold and the lack of work have given me a lot of time this morning to think about where we are. By 'we' I mean the refugees from the compound. Most of us have made it to Jack's now, and I expect word from Dodger, Jamie, or my brother any day about locating Patrick and his girls. More than a hundred of us, and we're getting comfortable here. I don't like that.
Don't get me wrong, Jack and his folks have made this a great place to live. Mason has made a point of telling us how the people of this place are way ahead of the folks back at Google in some ways. He's taken a like to Jack's, and is teaching the people here many...interesting things.
It's just that I don't want us to get too comfortable. I know that probably goes without saying, and I don't think that any of my people will forget about those left in the clutches of the Richmond soldiers back home. I just don't want to get so used to being here that we start making excuses to put off our eventual attempt to get home. I guess this worries me so much because I know we're going to be here for a while, at least through the  worst parts of winter.
Maybe I'm just worrying too much, I don't know. I'm snuggled up next to my wife, whose arm is draped over my waist as I lay here and type. I'm warm, comfortable, and there's a box of cereal bars next to me that are calling my name. It would be all too easy to get used to this.
If I can feel that way, the guy who founded the compound in Kentucky in the first place, how much easier would it be for someone who came afterward? I couldn't blame them, of course.
I just don't want to lose people to the easy choice, knowing that a harder one is down the road.