Living With the Dead: The Bitter Seasons (45 page)

at 
8:59 AM
 

Posted by Josh Guess

I'm in a mood. Not a good mood, nor a bad one. Just...a mood.
I've been thinking about what the zombie plague has really cost us. I've written before about the cost in real terms--safety, shelter, food, and the like. The thing is, the more I think about what's happened to the world as we approach a year into this mess, the more I think that every bit of bad has had an equal amount of good.
This isn't a new concept. I've talked about it before. Let's take the Richmond soldiers as an example, shall we? While I'm still furious (along with every other citizen of my compound, at home and abroad) that we were betrayed and had our home taken, a lot of good has come from it. Call it fate or kismet, but events have worked out to be largely beneficial for many, many people since my home was taken over.
The various groups of refugees have accomplished a lot since they've been gone from home. Courtney and her convoy built friendships and trade agreements with dozens of groups of survivors as well as securing a lot of new supplies and bringing in many new people. Gabrielle and Evans' group managed to bring in new blood as well, and build goodwill with their short-lived medical practice at the hospital. They even managed to find another doctor, and Phil has been knocking the rust off his old skills very well. My group hasn't accomplished as much, to be honest, but since we've been here at North Jackson, I think we've done a lot to help the citizens of this place deal with the horrible tragedies that have hit them.
Funny, none of them blame us for bringing it down on top of their heads. That last attack, anyway, happened because we're here. I take it as a sign of incredible maturity as a people that they didn't blame us for that. They took us in, they took the risk, and they accept that.
Which is exactly my point with this post. Look at how irrational and short-sighted people used to be, and compare that with how those around you act now. I have seen so many people use their logic and reason when they would have once simply reacted out of anger or fear. Though the Richmond soldiers have my home, I can't help but feel some satisfaction that those of us who managed to escape have used our freedom for the betterment of ourselves and others. It's awesome.
The cost, to me, is a hard one but ultimately worth it. I don't know if that's my stupidly powerful optimism making the situation look better than it actually is, but that's how I feel. We've paid a heavy cost in human lives since The Fall took away so many, and we'll do so again. But because of that crucible, those of us who are left are better than we probably could have been before. Inch by inch, we are moving toward being a people that have less need for violence between ourselves, and more towards a cooperative society. There are, of course, exceptions--like the Richmond soldiers.
I'm fine with the fact that my dreams have been broken, likely forever. I used to want to be an author, someone who wrote fantastic tales and had a comfortable, wonderful life because of his popularity. Big house, decent car, none of the struggle to pay the bills that had defined my life until The Fall.
Look at me now. I'm a writer, all right. But now I huddle over my laptop or phone, desperately telling the facts as a way of keeping myself sane. I'm ok with that, since this blog has saved the lives of many people, and acted as an instrument for other groups to find us and start the process of working together. My dream of being the next Stephen King or Patrick Rothfuss is probably dead forever. I'm alive, though. I'll take that as a win.
It's the same for most people. The happiest people before The Fall are likely still the happiest as survivors. Those folks didn't want the trappings of success or the ease of life that comes with wealth. Chances are, those folks wanted to live a full life, one with purpose and love, and everything else was just icing on the cake. I envy that attitude, and I hope that I can feel that way permanently some day. I want to leave behind my old life completely, forget the old hopes that no longer apply, and forever simply be here, now, in the life that I have.
I hope the same for each and every one of you. May all of us learn to be happy as things are, and find the joy in the everyday that the best among us take for granted. Though some of us are far away from home, we can manage it. I know it.
I've got some things to see to tomorrow that can't wait, so I won't be posting. I've sent a text to Patrick to see if he can keep all of you entertained in my absence. Hoping he'll get the message, and will be able to send something out...

at 
8:13 AM

Posted by Patrick

Well, true believers, your friendly neighborhood Patrick is free from Florida and back with Dodger's convoy of hope. I even liberated his laptop to write this, teach him to give me middle watch. I thought that we would be headed to North Jackson for some much needed R and R, but Dodger had other ideas. The convoy was getting real low on ammo, so they would have had to head there soon. Guess I should have thought of that before we brought about ten thousand rounds with us. So now we get to travel the eastern seaboard, lucky us.

Right now we are in South Carolina headed to a smallish post of survivors. Then we have stops in Maryland and New Jersey. Sigh, I might never get everyone back together again. Oh well, it's good work. This trip we are bringing fuel to some rural camps. Courtney negotiated with a group of people on the Gulf Coast that had set up at one of the refineries for a couple of tanker trucks. David and the rest of Dodger's convoy picked them up. I know the group in S.C. really need the gas badly, their reserves got water in it and haven't been able to go out foraging in weeks. So off to the rescue.

Tell you what though, it's real good to be back with friends again. To be able to talk them, share worries, fears, and joys. To be able to tell the whole truth and not the half truths I had to always tell the girls for fear I might upset them. Only problem being back in semi-civilization is temptation. They have pain killers here, and good ones at that. I told Dodger and Jamie about what I went through coming off of them, they agreed to keep an eye on me. Being a former three hundred pound chain smoker I can tell you self control isn't my strong suit.

Alice is really glad to have kids closer to her own age to play with, and I mean play. She followed Kylie around constantly, mostly because Kylie is short for her age, but they never played together, they just did what needed doing. I'm afraid that Alysa and Kylie are still to wary of every one around them to relax and be kids again. I don't even know if they can anymore.

Part of it was my fault. When we met up with the convoy, only those on watch carried guns and I didn't think to tell anyone how important the guns were to the girls. Well, David tried to get Alysa and Kylie to give up their guns while I was off talking to Josh on the phone. The shot brought me running. I found both Alysa and Kylie with guns drawn, their backs to the wheels of a bus, and David with a look of surprise, anger, and just a little bit of fear. The shot was of the warning variety and only put a little hole in the ground, albeit right in front of David's feet. Hours of talking, pleading, negotiating, and even yelling by me, and David, found us in the same position, final result, girls kept their guns. Hate to say it, but I'm more than a little proud of them for standing their ground.

Well that is how things stand now. As to how we got out of the Nazi HQ, well I guess I still have some time until my watch shift is over.

We got out pretty much the same way we got Dodger and Jamie in, lots and lots of ammo. Luckily Dodger, Jamie, and Alysa are better shots than me. The lack of cold to help us meant we needed to get rid of the smarties and they did just that. All three lining up shots on the same smartie, if one missed the next fired, before the bastard could run off. Even Alysa got one, though Dodger claims that he hit it, it just hadn't fallen yet.

The next part of our plan was the systematic genocide of all zombies around us, easy enough without the smarties to guide them. Just start at the back of the horde at the walls and work your way inward. No automatics this time though, no need to waste any bullets. It took the better part of a day to get the numbers down to hand to claw fighting numbers.

The next few hours after that were still a little tough on me, the memory of Mom and Dad zombie still fresh in my mind. I don't know why I had more trouble mentally with close up fighting than through the scope of a gun. Who knows. Well the last fifty or so fell to Jamie and Dodger's swords and my mace. Thats right, I got to use a mace. Damn sight better than the crowbar I'd been using up to that point. Thanks for the loaner Jamie, won't even ask why you have a mace, buddy.

Alysa had to save my ass, though. A mace is not as fast a weapon as the swords I'm used to using, and when it got a little crowded, my reaction times were a little slow. Alysa's sharpshooting kept me from being zombie burgers.

After that the guys went out and found a box truck with some gas, jumped the batteries and brought it back. Even though it was well after dark when they got back, we started loading up all the ammo and some of the guns and finished a couple hours before dawn. Man, I hadn't been that tired in awhile, guess that's what easy livin' gets you.

We started out shortly after dawn, we took turns driving and sleeping on swaying crates of ammo in the back. We took it slow most of the way. Luckily there are not a lot of cities along interstate 75 in Northern Florida, so no major herds of zombies. We finally met up with David and the rest of the convoy outside of Lake City GA.

Well I'm sad to not be headed home yet, but then again North Jackson isn't my home.

at 
2:11 AM

Posted by Josh Guess

Yesterday was a busy time. I've talked about a lot of projects that have been started or at least looked into, the most vital of which is the massive overhaul of the nearest factory so we can turn it into a greenhouse. Most of us call it the hydroponics bay, because we're massive nerds and enjoy making Star Trek references when possible, but there won't be any actual hydroponic growing happening inside.
So, yesterday I worked on that for a long, long time. There were several key steps to the setup that needed to be seen to, and I was asked to act as foreman, since my job at my own compound was managing logistics. The greenhouse requires the seamless integration of a number of systems, and yesterday was a key point for making those plans come together into a useful whole. I won't go into too much detail, because it really isn't all that interesting. I'll say that I'm pleased with the results, and it seems that plans have come together better than expected. It's looking like we'll see good results.
This is going to be a lot shorter a post than I would like, but in putting my focus on the greenhouse, I've done some digging around for things related to growing food. In that search, I found a place in Canada that looks to house an enormous cache of seeds and seed vegetables. I trust this info--it's from an old friend who used to live here in Michigan for a long time. He worked for a company that made trips into Canada to import a lot of stuff from the place where this cache is supposed to be. He thinks the warehouses that he used to visit are probably still there and stocked--they look like any other industrial building from the outside.
So today, in fact in just a few minutes, I'm leaving to head north with Jess and a few others. With Pat and Dodger's group heading east, it's going to be a while before all of us are together again. I'm hoping that when I come back here to North Jackson, it's with glad tidings.
Wish us luck. This is going to be an interesting trip.

at 
8:54 AM

Posted by Josh Guess

This is going to be one of the longest posts I've ever done. It's worth it, so bear with me.
I want to start out by apologizing to everyone who reads this blog. I have tried to be a beacon of hope and light in the dark place this world has become. I have tried to help others survive the hordes of zombies and the vicious  marauders by being open, detailed, and above all, honest.
And I've been lying to you for a few days. Well, honestly, I've been doing it in doses since my group and I came to North Jackson. I've been telling you for weeks that our plans to take back the compound were set for a time in the distant future. That we'd be bringing in massive force to retake what is ours. I tried my very hardest to make it seem as though my fellow refugees and I were settling in at North Jackson, planning for the long term as we have always advocated.
Sorry about that. Really.
I hope that I haven't broken the trust of too many of you, because though that is a high price, the reward is well worth it. Overnight, we liberated the compound. We are home.
This is probably sudden to many of you, I know. If it seems that this has come from nowhere, then I did my job well. We've been working on a plan to retake this place by stealth for a while, though it was a combination of several factors that allowed it to happen.
The key was always weakening the defenses enough that we could get the Richmond soldiers to either panic or surrender. It has taken a lot of coordination of effort between those of us outside the compound and those still left inside. The plan was complex and full of variables, but we pulled it off. Not without losses, but I'll get to that in the course of explaining how we did it.
So, onward. The first part of the plan was getting every person still inside the compound (our people) to agree on a signal. When that signal came, everyone was to attack and subdue as many soldiers as possible. This was incredibly risky, as the general populace weren't allowed weapons. It was the first major hurdle to overcome, because many of our cohorts from NJ and almost all of the refugees (including me) were against letting the people who had lived under the thumb of the soldiers take such an enormous chance. We were convinced, eventually, but I still don't like that it was necessary.
The conditions inside the compound have gotten steadily worse since I and the others left. The huge surplus of food we left here has been heavily depleted by the soldiers, who apparently ate all they could. This left the rest of the people, most already hungry, in a state of near starvation as the stores were kept under guard and meted out to them in dribbles. Five brave people, three men and two women, all of whom were very weak and hovering on the edge of death, volunteered for the next part of the plan.
All five of those people sacrificed themselves for the freedom of the compound. The soldiers, being understandably paranoid about their safety while sleeping, constructed a rough barracks, guarded while occupied. Of course, my people were sent in to clean up and gather laundry and the like, so it wasn't actually all that hard to hide bodies in there while it was mostly empty. Three of my people went in there, and none of them came out alive. They carefully concealed themselves, you see, and then took overdoses of some medicines that were too common to be under lock and key--sleeping pills. The other two hid themselves near a popular gathering spot for off-duty soldiers and did the same.
Let's put those five people to the back of our thoughts for right now. Don't forget them, but rather think about their bodies as I explain the rest. Their intact, dead bodies, waiting for a change to come...
The other major aspect of the plan was weakening the defenses. I've dropped hints over the last few weeks, unable to contain my inner smart-ass, but I had to stop short of taunting the enemy, lest they figure out what we planned. This is a good point to tell you that Patrick wrote a lie the other day as well--he isn't heading for the east coast. He's with Dodger's group with Jamie and my brother Dave, right here. They beat us here by about twelve hours, and started clearing out the local zombie population from around the compound. How? You guessed it: ammonia. The guys carefully went about putting the stuff all around the far edges of the area we needed clear. It was risky, because we didn't want the smell to drift toward the compound and give up the fact that someone was out there spreading chemicals.
We needed the area mostly clear of zombies to make the next part work. Pat, Dodger, and the rest of their group (which includes a lot of volunteers from other groups of survivors--that's what Dodger and Jamie have been doing all this time, gathering people to help us) underwent a pretty significant change. They were made up to look like zombies, caked in grime and some nasty stuff taken from actual zombies. It wasn't a perfect disguise, but given that they were only active at night when they'd cleared off the majority of the undead, it worked. It's very helpful that zombies are typically ignored if they aren't an active threat. The soldiers (and most folks nowadays) won't waste ammo or arrows on a zombie that's just scratching at the wall trying to get in. Or, for that matter, three dozen of them in a hundred-foot section. Those kinds of numbers just aren't a threat to a place as heavily fortified as the compound.
Able to get close in relative safety, the boys worked to spread an interesting mix onto the wall that houses the main gate. It's a concoction made of various flammable materials, but mostly magnesium. After most of a night of people imitating zombies coming and going as they slathered the walls in powdered metal, that section was basically a tinderbox waiting for a spark.
When the first screams came from the southern part of the compound, followed by gunfire, we gave it that spark. The bodies of those five people had reanimated, though not all at once. The source of the terrified shrieks was the barracks, where the darkness and locked doors allowed the chaos and bloodshed to really blossom. As a numbers game, it didn't do much to reduce the amount of soldiers in the compound. What it 
did  
do was cause a panic that sent soldiers flying from the walls to respond to the threat. After all, a few watchful men left at the northern wall could surely keep their eyes on a few dozen zombies. Right?
Too bad for them, really. There were six of them left on the north wall, and even as Dodger was igniting the wall with a road flare, Mason was climbing an unwatched section of it, making his way toward the nearest guard. The wall went up with a fair gout of flame, and our faux zombies looked away as they pulled water guns, water balloons, and flasks from the places on their bodies where they'd been hidden. Water and magnesium makes a hell of a light show. It can blind you if you're looking right at it. Mason didn't need the stealth skills he'd picked up over years of service--those men literally couldn't see him coming.
While Dodger and his men were taking the north wall, the other teams came out from hiding to storm it. The north wall was easy to scale and get over with no one left to defend it. Well, we thought there weren't any left, but apparently a few of the soldiers were keen enough to avoid the mob of people looking to pummel them and head that way. A group of about ten of them showed up while me and my crew were slapping thermite blocks onto all the artillery and heavy weapons located in the north section of the compound. We'd made the thermite packs to be simple to ignite--just push a button and run. It was awesome to see the stuff melt into the metal of those guns, though we were careful not to hit the ammo. Dangerous...
It wasn't really a firefight when those soldiers showed up. They were armed, sure, but there were a lot more of us. Someone threw a lit thermite block at them, and that broke up their group. Mason himself picked off three of them with his pistol, and we swarmed on the last seven. Frankly, their fear and confusion kept them from spraying into us wildly, though five of our number were killed as we took them.
Around the compound, counting the five who sacrificed themselves, we lost a total of twenty-four people. Seven of them were people I didn't have the pleasure of knowing, having come from NJ or with Dodger and Jamie. Five who killed themselves to cause the panic. Five in my group. Seven more from the group of people who fought like nine kinds of hell to subdue the main body of the Richmond soldiers. I'm actually surprised that the numbers were so low, but I'm told that most of the weapons discovered with the captured soldiers didn't have any bullets in them. Why risk the populace taking them by force and using them, eh?
All told, thirty five soldiers died in the conflict, leaving forty-two of them alive. One of those was Will Price, who betrayed our trust and gave the compound to the enemy. Will is in a holding cell waiting on the pleasure of our justice. The rest of the soldiers have already been dealt with.
In the spirit of renewed honesty, I have to tell you the truth here. I've wondered what we would do when and if we finally took our home back. What would be our course of action in dealing with the soldiers? The answer came in our democratic way, and it was overwhelming: death. Every one of those men have been killed. We offered them no chance to speak for themselves, no chance at life through exile. The simple fact is that they came here and took our home. There might have been room for leniency of one kind or another if they hadn't greedily hoarded the food, tearing through six months worth of edibles in less than three. They oppressed the people here, threatened them and debased them, and made them starve. Man, woman, and child, they kept them on the edge of death. We didn't even waste bullets on them. Knives work just as well. It took as many as six men to hold down a few of them, but each one got the same treatment--throat cut, head crushed right after. Brutal, awful, and necessary.
I said it before, and for anyone out there who thinks of us as a target rather than as a potential ally: DO. NOT. FUCK. WITH. US.
Will Price is going to be a bit more of a spectacle. The people here who had to suffer through months of watching him walk freely along the roads of the home he had betrayed deserve to see his trial and punishment for themselves. Not today, though, because we have a lot of work to do. I do want to say one thing, something that unsettles me a little: My house, the home that Jess and I fled a few months ago, is untouched. It has been lived in, by Will himself from what I'm told, and it's been taken care of. I'm there now. Nothing taken other than food, nothing disturbed. Will's sleeping bag is in my living room with a small case for his toiletries. I don't know why he would live here or why he seemed to care what happened to my house, but there it is. Strange, but I'm thankful nonetheless. A small favor when placed before his betrayal, but I accept it anyway. My animals are certainly happy to see it, especially the cats.
It's strange to be back here, but fighting for my home, going through the process of planning these events, has taught me something very valuable. When I was younger, I believed that most problems could be solved rationally and without violence. I thought that war was a last resort that should only be used when the stakes were too high for any other option. I was wrong. Even though the government is gone, I still identify myself as an American. Not because of where I was born geographically, but for the ideals for which the country was founded on. Never before have I understood that sense of community with my countrymen as I do now. The compound is its own community, and I feel as strongly about it as I do my identity as an American. We fought to take our home back, we did it in such a way that casualties were at a minimum, and we won.
We killed the enemy because we had to. The risk of keeping the soldiers around for labor or sending them out to exile was just way too high. We did what was required to keep the people of this community safe along with any others they might have encountered in the future. It makes me feel sick inside when I relive the images of their deaths. But it also fills me with pride. We made the hard choice. It was also the right one.
When there is time, we will mourn our fallen properly. Right now I'm too energized from victory and the chaos we're still trying to get under control to really touch on how deeply the last twenty four hours has affected us. There are a lot of fires both literal and figurative to put out, and many, many wounded to treat. That's part of the consequences that I just can't bring myself to get into: all the collateral damage. People being the largest part of that. It's almost too much for my brain to handle.
Most important, the people here are free again. We refugees are home, and though there are a host of problems that need solutions, for now at least we can find some happiness in that.
Once again, from my desk at last--I will be back tomorrow.