Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land (9 page)

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Memento

Posted by Josh Guess

As I was settling in to work in my office this morning, I noticed that one of my trainees had apparently done some work on my desk area while I slept. They like to come in early to work on things, and I guess in the process of cleaning out a spot to set up their own little space, they found some of my old junk.
Sitting in front of me on the shelves just at eye level over my desk, are all the various bits of zombie-themed junk I collected over my many years as a fan of the genre. It's a little weird.
I mean, I live in a surreal world. No one who ever watched any of George Romero's living dead movies really thought that they would come to pass. Not one person sitting in a theater flinching at Danny Boyle's kinetic, rage-fueled undead believed that such an event could actually happen.
As I sat there looking at action figures of zombies, a few small posters (and one huge one for Boyle's "28 Days Later"), even my little Zombie Survival Kit, which is especially funny now, I can't help but think of how different the reality is to the fantasy I once immersed myself in.
Outside the walls, right now, chances are about even that I could see a zombie shuffling about. Any section of the compound's wall, at that. They are always there, day and night, sometimes moaning with the hunger they feel for the blood and flesh of living things. Sometimes they're silent, watching us with eyes that see more than a dead thing should. Some of them are slow and shambling, some are fast and nimble. All of them are lethal. All of them are sad.
Look at the little figurine there, sitting on the shelf. It's a caricature of a reality that is all too harsh and dangerous. His little arms in front of him like Frankenstein's monster from the old Universal pictures. Frankenstein was the original zombie, I suppose. The figurine is wearing a tattered business suit, charcoal gray with a red tie. His cuffs are frayed. His face and hands are a pale green, but whole, looking more like a desiccated mummy than a true, fresh corpse. The look on his face is blank, his jaw slack. His eyebrow are raised as if to ask, "What have I become?"
In much the same way that old cartoons made a mockery of the animals they gave voices to and animated, so does the collection of stuff above my desk. All this stuff was funny once, had some pop culture value. Now it's just another reminder of how unprepared we were for the truth of what we face every day.
I once saw a zombie woman dragging the body of a child behind her. The child hadn't reanimated, it was simply dead, its head partially crushed in. There was such a forlorn look on the dead woman's face as she walked, puffs of dust trailing her and the limp body she pulled, that I went out of my way to send her to the final peace of the ever after.
I can't imagine a sorrow more profound than losing one's child. Something deep inside that woman, nestled in the reptile part of her brain, recognized the scope of her loss. It may not have even been her own kid she was toting around with her, it could have been anyone's. That, somehow, seems even worse; that she could have felt such a deep need for her lost offspring that she would find a replacement.
Even as I shot her, the look on her face transformed from despair right into beastly hunger.
The assorted mementos in front of me just don't do justice to that. None of them convey the dark mixture of pity and rage that we have for the dead outside our walls. No movie, comic book, or novel ever managed to get it right. What we live with every day; the fear, the worry, the hope, the moments of happiness. I don't blame fiction for missing the mark, because until The Fall happened, it was all speculative.
Even though I write this blog most days and am living through the actuality of the zombie apocalypse, words aren't enough. Rather, the right ones just don't exist to really record with any accuracy the mood of our daily lives. It's something that I struggle with often, and I don't think I'll ever get to the point where I can capture it perfectly.
I'll leave them there. As reminders go, my little collection is a valuable one. Looking at it, I will always keep fresh the memories of what I thought we would face, and the knowledge of what really is out there. I will remember our mistakes, and strive each day not to repeat them. I'll see the covers of the graphic novels and DVD's and know that once, there was such a place as a world where safety was the norm, and monsters were fun things. Evil was easily consumed in ten minutes to two hours, and guns never ran dry.
I'll look up every morning and remember the cost of our innocence. The price of our lessons learned.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Ice Age

Posted by Josh Guess

I'm going to try to keep it short this morning, because there's a lot of makeup work to do today. We've been having some pretty dramatic fluctuations in the weather lately, but the need to get a lot of our seeds and sprouts in the ground made us take the risk of a hard frost. 

We'd hoped that we had managed to avoid that, but this morning the ground was (and still is) covered in a thick mantle of the stuff. There are people out right now in force, trying to do everything they can to save what we've planted. We're lucky, really, because much of what we've got in the ground right now is cold weather food, meant to be planted early. About thirty percent of it, though, isn't. Which means a lot of scrambling about, trying to determine what we'll lose and what will live. 

I'm taking Becky out with me today. She's going to play the part of personal assistant since I've got my trainees busy with other things, as well as being my second set of eyes for zombies, since we'll be out in the open. Becky has been quiet the last few days, not really wanting to leave the house. So far I've avoided giving her a work assignment, since she's still recovering from the arduous trip here. Given how well she handled her liquor over the weekend, I'm guessing she's able to work. 

The problem is, I want to utilize her skills. She's got a lot of knowledge floating around in that massive brain of hers, but her sharpest talent is keeping people alive and putting them back together. She's reluctant to take a spot in our clinic, though, because we're flush with staff there, and she's got some...issues with providing any kind of medical care at present. Just talking about it sets her trembling, and from what I can gather that's due to her terrible journey here. I can't imagine how hard it was for her, trying to keep so many companions alive on the way to the compound, only to lose every last one. 

Some took infection from wounds despite her best efforts. Others from trauma she couldn't mend. I think her experiences since The Fall have accumulated in her mind, giving her the same sense of futility about trying that many of us have felt at one point or another. 

Gaaaaah. I want to keep this brief. Anyway, I'm going to take her with me, partly because she needs to get out of the house for a bit, see some other people and visit the farms for the first time, and partly because her judgment is still sound, her brain quick. I value her opinion and her skills as a problem solver. Maybe she can come up with some ways to keep any future frosts from killing what we plant. 

Seems like the only way this Winter is going to die is if we chain it down and stab it in the heart...

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Blow

Posted by Josh Guess

We had an unfortunate thing happen here yesterday. A guy named Harry, one of the cooks who run our mess halls, did several lines of cocaine and beat the hell out of Will Price.
I don't know where he found the blow, but it isn't hard to imagine. We've rifled through more than half the houses in Franklin county, and almost every one of us has been on a trip to do it. I'd guess Harry found it somewhere and kept it for a rainy day. Yesterday was a hard one, as we lost a bunch of our crops just after we'd planted them. Maybe that was what made Harry want to get high, the thought of the constant hunger that goes with not having quite enough.
For the moment, I'm going to ignore the incredible stupidity of dulling your brain with a substance as powerful as coke. I'll also ignore the further idiocy of doing so when zombies could attack in force at any time. I'm not going to talk about how that would have made him a threat not only to himself, but to everyone else as well. It's been made clear what we do with threats.
No, I'm pissed about what he did to Will. Most people are, even a lot of the folks that wanted to see Will executed for handing the compound over to the Richmond soldiers. Will lives under a lot of punishment, which I've described before--the only food he eats has to be given to him by a citizen. The only way he sleeps indoors is if someone invites him, though for the sake of convenience he's been sleeping on the floor of Dodger's office while he works on defense projects. Will has to do any task he is asked to do, unless he's working on orders from the council, as he is right now.
Will was just walking by the house that Harry shares with several other cooks. Harry was out of his mind at that point, and his hate for Will overcame his already fuzzy judgment. He just attacked Will for no reason.
Will took every punch and kick. He curled up on the ground to protect himself, and though the beating only lasted long enough for people to reach them and stop Harry, Will took a lot of damage.
This is simply not acceptable. Will lives under constant punishment, and he is a criminal found guilty of treason, but we still have rules around here. His punishment is severe, but that doesn't give anyone the right to commit unprovoked violence against him. He's still a human being, and one whose life was spared because most of us still see value in it. In him.
Harry's in some serious shit, and I've got the feeling that the council is going to make an example of him. No one can be allowed to walk away from this thinking that this sort of chaotic behavior won't be severely punished. If we were to give Harry a slap on the wrist, people would start to think that it wasn't such a bad thing to do. Which could eventually lead to people thinking that it wasn't wrong at all. It's a slippery slope that leads to utter havoc and to the land of do-as-you-please.
That's how marauders do things. Not us.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Facing the Wind

Posted by Josh Guess

I'm not going to spend a lot of time rehashing the events involving Harry and Will Price. You can go back and read that if you want to. Long story short, Harry got whipped. Three lashes. One for the assault on Will, one for the recklessness of putting himself in danger by doing large amounts of a dangerous drug, and one for putting the rest of us in danger. On top of that, Harry now has to cover Will's old job driving the honey wagon around and picking up people's buckets of excrement. He has to keep doing it until Will is healed up, though Will is in good enough shape to continue his work with Dodger on the defenses.
Moving on...
We've seen a big change in the weather around here since my last post. From a hard frost last week, we're now in relatively balmy temperatures in the high sixties. The down side is that the wind has picked up a lot, and that makes working outdoors difficult. Kentucky is usually pretty windy in early spring, but the gusts have been unusually strong.
This has had an interesting effect on the local zombie population. I stood on the walls earlier this morning, checking the placement, number, and sharpness of the stakes we planted in rows to slow the zombies that wander toward the walls, and I saw several of the undead as they were buffeted by the wind. About half of them would just stop when the wind hit them hard, tucking their heads down toward their chests until it eased up. This was such weird behavior that I can't even begin to theorize on what caused it. I've seen plenty of zombies in my time, in many different situations. Wind is a pretty common occurrence, but this reaction to it is totally new to us.
One thing that we've learned to accept and watch out for is the fact that the undead seem to evolve continuously. Or rather, the fungus or bacteria that animates them does. We've seen a small number of them become more intelligent, those we call the smarties. We've seen them develop a capacity to ward off the hibernation-inducing effects of cold in a matter of a few months. We've seen one of them develop a sort of territorial marking reflex, but just that one being used by the folks out in Bald Knob. The search is still on for others, but our time and resources are limited.
Those are just the obvious bits of evolution that we've been able to witness. There are other implied changes that we suspect might have happened in the zombie population over time. One of those seems to be the capacity to store a lot of the flesh and blood they consume in their stomachs, preserved for future consumption in presumably the same manner that their flesh is preserved. It seems to be the most logical explanation for why they can go so long without feeding.
What's the point of this? I don't know that there is one, aside from making it clear that we have to keep our eyes open for any changes we see. I've talked many times over the last thirteen months about how we humans have had to push ourselves hard to grow and change, but it's just as important to note that the primary threat to us, the zombie hordes, do this as well. The best weapon we have against them is caution and knowledge, to arm us against whatever survival mechanisms that may grow in them over time.
I hear the creaking axles of the honey wagon coming through. I plan on giving Harry a big smile when I hand over my bucket. Maybe this punishment will teach him a lesson, and help him to grow.
The sad thing about people is that we're just not as consistent as zombies are. They WILL adapt and change, while we have to hope for the same results. It's almost funny, if you think about it.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011