Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land (16 page)

Now, we've got one more. In a word: potatoes. 

I'm of Irish descent (at least partly), so I've done a little research on Ireland. I've read books about the great famine (usually called the potato famine outside of Ireland itself) and have a decent working knowledge of the blight that caused it. It's an interesting bit of history that has a lot of lessons to teach. One of which is just how awesome potatoes are as a food source that they could basically feed four million Irish. Another being that too much reliance on one staple food is dangerous as hell when things go badly. 

The blight itself isn't as much a worry for us as you might think. Though the disease itself is incredibly difficult to control through chemical and pharmaceutical means, most potatoes for a long time have been bred with a gene that is highly resistant. By using the tubers of a previous crop, you can pretty much propagate them forever safely and without fear of losing most of a crop. 

Very luckily for us, my wife is a stickler for making sure her foodstuffs are strong. Add to that the fair number of farmers that have been growing them for years, and we have a great pool of people who know what to look for in seed potatoes. If I seem to be beating this drum a little hard, then keep this in mind: if not for the fact that Jess bought bag upon bag of seed potatoes when the zombie outbreak happened, it's likely that we would have starved by now. 

So you'll understand that while I'm just as fearful and wary of the walking dead outside our walls as you are, I worry equally about the damn potato bugs that have settled in like uninvited guests to dinner. 

At first there weren't that many. Few enough last year that we could (and had to) kill them one by one. We had people whose whole job was to walk the compound's gardens, squishing them when found. At the farms it wasn't as big an issue, because that was mostly corn and wheat that had already been planted. We just took the food and the land. 

Now that the farms are also growing potatoes, the bugs have started to show up in numbers. Large ones. Enough of them that we're already having problems. There's only so much pesticide, and not enough bodies to police every plant. This is a critical time for the plants we've grown indoors and gotten large enough to sprout foliage. They're small and weak. All that careful time and effort spent growing them in late winter could be lost. More important, the potential food in them could be lost. 

We have many things to fear, and no shortage of lesser concerns. Before The Fall and encountering the reality that the dead walk and consider me a tasty snack, I'd have called you crazy if you said that I would worry about beetles just as much as a hungry corpse. 

Strange days, I know. 

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Cookie Cutters

Posted by Josh Guess

This morning brought a load of good surprises. The weather is nicer than it has been for days: a perfectly comfortable sixty-five degrees with a slight wind and just the right amount of humidity. The western trench was full of dead zombies, courtesy of an early morning rush by a group of about fifty. The sentries didn't even ring a bell, it was so easy to defend against them. Five men and women picked off every one of them thanks to the brilliant work my brother Dave and Will have done.

Oh, yeah--Will has been putting his two cents in on the new defenses. He thought it would be smart to pull up some of the stakes we've had ringing the compound and see how sticking them in the dirt berm around the trench would work. As it turns out, fairly well: the zombies in the front of the group slowed down to avoid the stakes, but the rest of them didn't. That pushed some of the ones in front into the stakes, impaling them and making it harder for the ones behind to move over the berm. Easy targets. 

I'm not sure why this particular group of undead tried to rush the only wall with a fully finished trench. They've been avoiding it for the most part and trickling around to sections of the wall that are easier to maneuver. Perhaps they were especially hungry, or were working on some kind of group hysteria. Maybe a smarty was pushing them to attack to test our defenses. We've seen it before. 

Whatever the reason, I'm glad to see the trenches are effective. More, I'm glad to see Will working on more projects. Since his punishment was handed down, I've seen him slowly become a quieter and sadder person. I know some of that has to be the fact that he feels terrible about giving us up to the Richmond soldiers. I think a lot more is probably due to the constant stream of shitty treatment he gets from some people around here. It's not like I blame them--he did an awful thing for what he thought were good reasons, and he accepted the consequences of that. It's a complex situation that contains a distressing amount of moral ambiguity on all sides. 

Basically, that means that I can't fault Will for feeling down that people hate him, nor can I blame him for getting mad about it. That's human nature, regardless of how deserved the treatment may be. Nor can I fault the people who hate Will with a passion and are doing everything they are allowed to do to make him feel that hate. They have the right, and good reason. Doesn't mean I have to like it. The situation is a hundred shades of gray, and crappy for all involved. 

I'll say this, though--Will is one tough fucker. He's been working closely with Dodger on a lot of projects to do with the defenses, and in the process had to work with a lot of people that would rather put a knife in him than hold a civil conversation. Will hasn't let that slow down his progress on some things. One of those projects was completely unknown to me, but we all found out about it this morning. 

Will has been in touch with the people in North Jackson for a while now. I don't know if he set up a trade or something with them, but this morning a pickup truck came to the north gate. It was full of mass-produced weapons. Rather, it was full of a shipment of the same mass-produced weapon. The design was Will's own, and we've got two hundred of them. 

It's basically a machete. Stamped out of thick sheets of metal, unsharpened (that's up to us), the thing is a long, heavy blade about two feet long with a six inch long spike sticking out of the bottom of the hilt. The hilt is flat like the blade, but the edges are rounded to make it less damaging for whatever material we use to wrap around them.

I'm impressed at the design, but more so with Will's ability to get this done with no one in the compound being the wiser. He has managed to circumvent the huge amount of distrust that many here and quite a few in North Jackson feel for him. I'm going to ask him about the details, but the simple fact that he managed to get us so many new and hopefully reliable weapons scores him major brownie points in my book. 

Hopefully it will do the same for some others around here.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Berserker

Posted by Josh Guess

One of our sentries, a man name Jeff Williamson, is dead.
Jeff was on the wall during the night, and as a small cluster of zombies wandered toward his position, he jumped over the side and went crazy. His partner, who asked not to be named, said that Jeff did this right in the middle of a sentence. One second they were standing there calm as can be, the next Jeff was gone before his partner even had a chance to stop him.
Jeff screamed as he cut down the first few zombies. His partner says that at no point did Jeff even try to keep from being bitten. He was apparently focused on killing, end of story.
I talk sometimes, especially recently, about the strains and stresses we have to put up with. You would think that after Will's betrayal and the occupation, we'd be able to deal with just about anything. After all, that's what happens in stories. People suffer, but they find the inner strength to deal with the horrid cards they're dealt, and they overcome. They live happily ever after, knowing that they've weathered the storm.
Real life isn't like that. When you face the things we face, sometimes there isn't any coming back. Not too long ago we lost another guard, who killed himself quietly. I don't think two people is a trend, but this worries me. We have to face some pretty hard truths nowadays. Sometimes when people break, there isn't any putting them back together.
I'm worried that food rationing has played a part in what Jeff did. Yesterday afternoon I had to put in my recommendation to the council that we cut back on how much we're eating. There is a lot of concern with the pest problem and the uncertainty of the weather. We're worried that food will start to run short before we can begin to harvest. So, it looks like we'll have to hedge our bets by saving as much of the staple foods that will last a long time as possible.
The news didn't make me very popular. A lot of folks were unhappy with it. A few despaired. No one wants to be told that their hard lives will be made even harder by a further reduction in rations that will make the already-pervasive hunger we feel a little worse.
When you're trying to plan for an entire community, these kinds of decisions have to be made. I didn't recommend it to the council lightly or without a lot of research and weighing of options. I also pushed very hard to have extra hunting teams sent out for game. If we have to cut back on dry staples, we can at least do what we can to bring in more meat, right?
It might have been that Jeff was simply going to lose it eventually, and this morning was his time to snap. It may have been caused by the realization that no matter how hard we work and how clever we may be, some periods are going to be tighter and harsher than others. Maybe Jeff felt like it was never going to get better around here. We'll never know.
It's my hope that others are dealing with the restrictions in a better way.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Disrupted

Posted by Josh Guess

I don't have much time to write today. Really not much time.
Some folks have gotten pretty angry about the reduction in food rations. So much so that they've threatened to strike if we don't come up with a solution. I'm only writing a post at all because one of the conditions on which they agreed to continue working while we try and find a solution is that I make a post about it.
They want everyone out there to know that we're struggling. That for all the help we've made a point to give to others, we aren't getting offers in return. I'm not putting my two cents in on that at the moment, because I personally think that trying to help others shouldn't be something you expect to build credit with.
And while I'm generally not all that thrilled with the idea of caving to threats, I would have posted about this anyway. Not to mention the practical aspect--we kind of had to agree to their wishes. We need those people working, or a lot of problems would crop up that we'd have a hard time dealing with. I know that I'm admitting ho weak the position of everyone who isn't threatening to quit is, but it's also the truth.
I'm going. I may post again later, but for the moment I have to try and work out what steps we can take to get more food here with my team. They're smart folks. I hope we can come up with something good...

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Technical Difficulties

Posted by Josh Guess

As you may or may not have noticed, I didn't post yesterday. I worried that you all might think that something major and bad had gone down here, something terrible enough that I was unable to take a few minutes to write.
It didn't. In fact, things here have taken a moderately good turn, but I'll get to that in a minute. The problem yesterday was that the people at Google got hit with an early summer storm and it knocked out a bunch of servers. Since The Fall, Google HQ at Mountain View has been running solely on renewable energy. That means that they've only been able to power a fraction of the servers they once had. Enough to keep communication going, some email services. Certainly enough for the small percentage of people who've managed to survive.
It took a while for them to get everything running again. Hell, I'm just impressed they managed it at all. I know there has to be a ton of work and expertise involved in doing everything they do on a daily basis to keep people in contact. I'm nothing but happy to have them.
I will say this, before I move on--it was strange and frightening not to be able to blog. I know I take days off on Sundays and occasionally during the week, but I still CAN write to all of you if I want. Knowing that the possibility existed that the blog might be completely gone, and unable to return...that left me in a cold sweat.
So, on to some good news.
Our hunting parties have been joined by our scout parties in order to range out and try to bring in a lot more game. All told there are about thirty of them out in a given day. Yesterday they got pretty lucky. They brought in six deer, two wild pigs, three turkeys, several dozen squirrel and about ten rabbits. We've also got a few groups of people doing some fishing on the river as well as in Benson creek. It's net fishing, which is mighty unfair to the little fishies. But we gotta eat.
The good news being that we're bringing in just enough extra food right now to keep from lowering rations. It's exactly what the folks who were threatening to strike wanted, and frankly I think most people are very happy with this outcome. It does kind of suck that we don't have scouts out there looking for new caches of supplies and the like. Honestly, though, I see the strikers' point--without adequate food, people just aren't going to be able to work effectively.
I'm not naive enough to think that this solves the problem and we can just forget about it. We had a good haul yesterday, and we're hoping to keep that up. The creek and river are pretty stable sources of fish, but we can't feed everyone on what is caught. I know that the situation could become critically worse with even a week of bad hunting. We're just going to have to make sure to spread our efforts out over a large area so as not to scare off or over-hunt the local populations.
One thing that does make me worry is that the zombies around here have been living off of animals for a while now. We've seen a marked decrease in the deer population that can't be wholly attributed to our hunting practices. The damn things breed like rabbits in Kentucky at least. Hunting used to be the only thing that kept the deer population in check. Even our community isn't big enough to have caused such a dramatic dip in numbers...
Right now, the zombies eat animals because their primary choice for meals, us, are too hard to get a hold of. I worry that we're going to run into herds of zombies that are after the same prey we are. Scary thought, trying to hunt while being hunted.
For now, we're okay. That's all we can ask for.