Living With the Dead: The Bitter Seasons (5 page)

Posted by Josh Guess

Today's post isn't action packed or full of emotion. It's dedicated to the remarkable work Aaron is doing in making the education around the compound truly comprehensive.
As a preface, I will say that I have always had some serious misgivings about how the educational system in the US has operated. Not the basic stuff, of course, like reading and the foundations of mathematics, but pretty much anything after grade school turned out to be repetitive and less than stimulating. I agree with Robert Pirsig's idea that people tend to learn at peak efficiency when they choose what to learn, and learn at least efficiency when forced to study things that are of no interest to them at all. The other problem I have had with my education at least is the total isolation of subjects. Subject A is taught as an independent entity from subject B, and any correlation between the two is for the student to discover.
I have always thought that teaching one thing should inherently include other subjects. This teaches logic and comprehensive understanding while grounding the student in a broad number of subjects, creating a good generalist thinker. Good generalists can become good specialists, but rarely is there a good specialist without the ability to think with a wide scope.
Aaron agrees.
His lessons for the younger people are great to watch. This morning he started teaching basic botany, using the local plants and trees. He did what you would expect, naming the various species and their uses, but he added so much more into the lesson. Aaron made the students take note of which types of trees produced the best wood for building and for fires, which ones burned quickly and slowly. Which had useful saps and produced edible nuts. He even pointed out which ones would provide the best windbreaks because of foliage density and total area, and what types of roots would make farming difficult. Mind you, I am just writing what I can remember as an observer. But I can tell you, not one of those kids looked bored.
He is teaching adults as well. Aaron is putting in a lot of time learning skills and even more time teaching himself how to apply principles to them and how to derive principles from them. He is learning the smattering of Aikido, Judo, and Iaido that I and a few others teach, and is teaching some folks how to apply the body mechanics of those marital arts to everyday life, including work. I saw him showing someone how to use a basic Aikido stance as a base for learning a perfect hammer stroke to drive a nail, all the while explaining the physics of what he was teaching in understandable terms. The equations and formulas for force and work are so much easier to understand when you have real world experiences and examples to learn them with. I had to leave during that particular demonstration, but he was moving on to anatomy and physiology when I left, going on about the properties of the bones, tendons and muscles doing the swinging of the hammer, how the brain and nerves conduct those signals...
I know it seems like a lot of stuff to read it here, but the greater part of what impresses me here is that Aaron manages to make people understand and retain without overloading them. He is incredibly talented as getting people excited about what he is teaching by 
how
 he is teaching it. And that flash of energetic understanding in a student that is the hallmark of all truly awesome teachers like my sister? His students have it. Not once in a while or once a day, but often throughout a given class. It's like watching the audience of a movie with a lot of strange plot twists, constant surprise and flashes of an new understanding of the whole.
In this way he is giving our young and old alike an amazing ability to comprehend the whole of something, and to apply knowledge from one area to something seemingly unrelated. He is gaining popularity quickly, though I can't be sure he's entirely comfortable with it.
I think we might have lucked out into a resource we can't afford to risk in Aaron. So maybe we need to talk to him about avoiding going out of the compound. I think he can make us stronger in ways not many of us could have grasped a few weeks ago, and I don't want to lose that chance to some random zombie catching him off guard.

at 
11:12 AM
 

Posted by Josh Guess

I'm writing this in bed. My brother is shouldering the burden today, since I am sick.
I feel like I have the flu, and for all the bitching I used to do at how shitty the medications my doctor used to give me for it were, now I wish for them so much that it actually hurts.
I only decided to write anything today because we have finally heard from Patrick and the volunteers with him. They have had a lot of trouble getting to the facility where the parts and supplies we need are stored. They didn't lose any people, and I think that has a lot to do with Pat as a leader. He's very cautious, indeed, very creative in being cautious, toward keeping people alive. He is also very patient, and he needed that to out wait a large swarm of zombies, and some local survivors that were hunting them.
The really good news is that there are literally dozens if not over a hundred trucks there, and most of them capable of carrying large turbines. It will take a few trips, but Pat and the others with him think that there is enough fuel between all of them to make half a dozen two way trips. All of us here are stoked at the news.
OK, that's all I've got today. Jess is still staying in bed most of the time to heal up her bullet wound, and now I am pretty much useless right now too. Will is hanging out with us today, helping Jess and I out. He made us breakfast this morning. I want to know where he found bacon. I could kiss him for that.
He has also been eying my Playstation 3 pretty dreamily. He never got a chance to play the last Metal Gear Solid game, and my house has enough solar and wind power to run it along with my computers...
Huh. We must be adapting to the world around us as normal if Will has an urge to play video games. More, I have my normal urge to show him how much better I am at it...but since I'm sick, I will let him go to town.

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10:14 AM

Posted by Josh Guess

Still really sick. Enough that I couldn't even get up when a bunch of smarties broke through a soft section of the south wall.
It wasn't too bad, from what I have been told. Maybe ten of the smart zombies got through. They found a way to get the regular zombies with them to pile all their weight against a section of wall that is mostly thin plywood. Lucky for us, we anticipated that weak spot getting hit at some point, and always have extra guards posted. The smarties made it about forty feet before they were cut down, but the alarm was sounded the second they penetrated our defenses.
I just reread that. I should be more specific. Will Price was the one to suggest we post extra guards at the weak spot. The rest of us figured that the usual patrols would suffice at first, though he convinced us otherwise. In our defense, the south is the area we are hit from least, since it's mostly woods. We have lumbered it out to a distance of about fifty feet, but it's very hard for zombies to navigate through it so most of us don't worry about large attacks from them there.
Of course, that is where the attacker came from, the one who shot Jess. So yeah, we are inclined to listen.
Evans thinks I will be feeling better tomorrow. My fever broke today, but the vomiting and...other symptoms are taking their toll on me. I am drinking a lot of water, but our supplies are getting thin. We haven't had a decent rain in a long time, and our reserves are almost gone. We still have the creek, of course (we dammed it up a while back to build a small reservoir, but it takes time to haul and filter it)  but I hate having to ask others to go get it for me. For us, since Jess is still injured.
I need to eat some lunch, and I hope I can hold it down. Will is still taking care of us, though he's making a point not to hover over us. Roger is giving him a hand today as well, I think the two of them are in my kitchen playing poker at the moment...

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12:10 PM

Posted by Josh Guess

Jess is up and about, if a little slowly, and she's lording that fact over me. I'm still pretty sick, but not nearly so bad as the last few days. 

It's sort of disconcerting that being sick has cut me off from so much of what goes on around the compound. Zombies have been attacking regularly in the last few days, but not in big numbers. It's still unseasonably hot, and the theory is that they are surging before the cold comes in. 

I really hope that cold weather brings us some relief from the attacks. Work on the annexes can continue for a long time in cold weather, but without the constant assaults on our workers, it will go much faster and allow the folks from downtown to be close to the compound, and to pool our resources. 

Of course, as the weather gets worse, the less big projects we will be handling. This is going to give my brother and I a lot more free time for other interests as the need for us to plan them lessens. I want to pick up a few trades, learn some more skills, and work on writing things other than this blog. 

I had nearly completed the last edit on my first fantasy novel before the fall of society. It's still sitting there on my hard drive, waiting to be tweaked and finished. It's been all I can do to write this blog with all we have been doing to survive and thrive, and I think it will be nice to work on something else as well. Should be a short project, since I had been working on it for a year before then...

One way of another, I will be up and about tomorrow. The only way I won't is if I am dead. I can't stand another day of laying here being ill, and there are things I need to look into, supplies to be gathered and cataloged before the truly cold weather gets here. 

Damn it, I want to feel better. 

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8:29 AM

Posted by Josh Guess

My Sister sent me some very, very bad news this morning.
Jackie lives in southern Michigan at present with her husband and kids, at Jack's compound. They have been pretty safe where they are, a large industrial park where Jack and his people manufacture things for trade to us.
This morning, a single zombie was spotted walking near the south wall of their perimeter. Protocol at Jack's is to leave individuals and small groups alone if they are not attacking or behaving in a threatening manner. It's a practical consideration meant to ensure the conservation of ammunition and to protect guards from unnecessary risk.
But in this case, someone should have disobeyed and wasted a bullet.
The guard that saw the zombie reports that it was just wandering about forty yards from the wall, occasionally looking toward the fortifications and stopping for a few moments.
Studying. He actually used the word. Warning bells should have been ringing. I have made it clear to Jack, as has Courtney during her biweekly diplomatic calls, that any zombies displaying abnormal behavior, the slightest signs of intelligence, should be brought down at once. The smart zombies, who we call smarties, are incredibly dangerous. They brought a force against us that drove us into the fallback point downtown for a week. They aren't to be underestimated...
But the guard just watched in curiosity, and it was only when the zombie gave him one last look and backed away that he realized something was out of whack.
As you can imagine, I am scared shitless for my sister and her family. I am worried about the people that live there (and there are a lot of them), and I am worried that the one place that left with the means to produce some technology is about to have its existence threatened.
The rest of my day is probably going to be spent in council, all of us trying to figure out what exactly we can do to help them out. We can send some people, but I think that if that lone pilgrim manages to infect a big enough number of other zombies with its own, better strain of the plague, there is no number that we could send that would make the difference.
No, I think that if this becomes the fight I would lay money on it being, materials, training, and tactics are going to be the forces that tip the scale in favor of Jack and his people.
I just hope that this is the beginning, and that the lone walker at the walls was just getting there, and that it wasn't a scout sent in to look around for weak points. If it still has to infect its own army, then there is a chance that there will be enough time to devise some strategies for victory. Or, at the least, survival.
Is there a difference anymore?

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9:01 AM

Posted by Josh Guess

Today is a very important day, for several reasons.
The harvest has started. The major one, anyway. We are gathering all of the food we can, preserving much of it for the coming winter. We have had to slow down work on the annex walls to accomplish this. The good news there is that the work on the annexes is coming along quickly, and the two adjoining neighborhoods should be safe enough to move into in a few weeks. The heat wave that we have been under seems to have finally broken this morning, and it's pretty damn cold out. That was what brought on the harvesting operations...
In an unrelated note, my brother Dave and I are planning some stuff for the spring. We have so many projects that we want to get done, like our power stations, but with limited people to make them work, we have to pick and choose. It is our hope that we will find more survivors to bring here, and if we can, then we plan on annexing further and further from the compound, building on to it until it lies at the center of a much larger safe zone for what we hope will be thousands of residents. Planning for it, just in case...
The sudden cold seems to have driven the zombies into hiding. The few that the patrols have seen while ferrying supplies back and forth have seemed slower than normal, almost tired. Maybe they are running out of energy and finally starving. That would be great. But even if it's just the cold slowing them down, at least that might give us a good long respite from fighting and killing them. One can hope.
Probably the biggest news today is from Jack's compound up north. A small group of Smarties attacked in the night, probing the defenses. They were cut down, of course, but this means that their timetable for dealing with the threat has moved up immensely. We had a long meeting in council about it yesterday and again after getting the news last night, and some decisions were made.
We will be sending a group to Michigan to aid Jack and his people in setting up defenses and running kill patrols against the smarties. They are already out hunting, trying to keep the numbers of converted zombies to a minimum. If they can prevent the spread of the strain of the zombie plague that enables them to become more intelligent for long enough to improve their defenses, they should be alright. We're sending forty people who have all had direct contact with smarties and know what they can do, led by Courtney, Steve, and Will Price.
There were some people who thought that we shouldn't send Will, those folks who think that he isn't fully trustworthy. Treesong and some others made the point that he is tactically and strategically knowledgeable, more so than any of the rest of us. Tree pointed out that he's proven his loyalty to the satisfaction of most of us, gave the obvious examples. The good news is that the number of people that are still eying him with undue suspicion are dwindling. The bad news is that Courtney is still one of them. Not in a spiteful way or anything, just that her inquiring and critical nature makes her harder to convince in the short term than most people. It's one of the qualities I love most about her, and I think this experience will do a lot to either help her trust Will, or find some evidence that he isn't trustworthy. I'm just glad he's able to move about on his own now. His leg and arm still hurt him quite a lot, but he can at least use them now.
They are leaving tomorrow. Not a lot of time to prepare, but there you have it. We are prepping several vehicles to move out, this time some hybrid cars we have managed to gather over the last few weeks. It's taken a while to get enough of them together, but it will help us save what we can of our limited supply of gas, which is becoming increasingly hard to find. We might have to start sending groups out looking for tankers and siphoning out whole parking lots of cars....
Sort of rambling now, sorry. So much going on, so much to do. If we can go the day without being pelted by hungry zombies, we will have had time to make some headway on our efforts. With that in mind, I should go. Every hand helps.