Living With the Dead: The Bitter Seasons (30 page)

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6:37 AM

Posted by Josh Guess

Yesterday was warm, far more so than any day in winter than I can ever remember. It hit sixty degrees here. Which happens to be the temperature around which even regular zombies become fully active.
Call it fate, luck, or god, but we didn't get pummeled with zombies again. Oh, there were always a few medium sized groups wandering around the hospital, but nothing too severe. We got lucky, and all of us know that no matter how great this location is, it simply isn't a long term solution as it is. We would need many more people than we have now to build a wall that would both keep out the zombies and give us enough area to farm.
One of the things that makes the compound such an ideal spot is that the surrounding landscape makes it very easy to see the undead coming and very hard for them to get you. Even at the farming areas we were running that held true. Maybe I'm just pining for home, but the more of the outside world I see, the less I think we'll find anything like home for us...
I'm on guard duty again at nine, so I'll get to the point of this post quickly. I've been in touch with the people at Google as often as possible over the last few weeks. They've been helping me and the other refugees out in a variety of ways, as well as providing tips and assistance to Courtney and her merry band on their trips around the country.
Now, Google is asking for our help. Apparently a team of people there have been working on something I touched on months ago as an idea, though they started doing it before I ever said a word. In fact, they've been working on it nearly since day one: Data backup.
Without hyping it up too much, a team of people have been working to collect and copy pretty much every piece of data they can find, to safely store and distribute. I'm talking library of congress times a thousand, here. Pretty much every piece of useful data is getting tagged and copied onto thousands of hard drives, Cd's, Dvd's, flash drives...any and every type of media. So far there are over a hundred total sets of copies made, with more to come. The folks at El Goog are sending out crews to farm info from data centers every day. I'm told one of them managed to bring in a truckload of hard drives he'd unplugged from the Wikipedia data center closest to Google HQ.
Google has asked us to find a place to hide several copies of the project. What they're going to give us isn't the completed product (I don't know that it will ever be "complete") but it is a vast array of knowledge in all the areas people will need to rebuild society to the level of technology it was at. Everything from agriculture to circuit diagrams...it's pretty huge. They are also giving us a copy of it, several actually, in hard drive, cd, and flash forms. I'm thrilled.
So, they are sending a courier sometime in the next few days, though how long it will take them to get near us from California is anyone's guess. I've been asked to find some trustworthy folks to go and meet up with him. I intend on going if possible. I know just the place to hide the ones we don't keep...
It's an amazing thing they're doing. In addition to the backups, the teams at Google are leaving laptops with each copy, wrapped and boxed to withstand pretty much any weather (I'm told that includes total submersion in water. Wow.) along with portable solar arrays to power the whole shebang. It's a big effort, but the payoff would likely be something even bigger--like the continuation of the human race.
So...any volunteers out there with knowledge of safe hiding places? I'd be happy to put you in touch.

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8:40 AM

Posted by Aaron

This is Aaron again,
I figure I would send yet another update on my position for those that are reading. More so for Josh and Gabby and them than anyone else.  I've not been able to reach Josh or Gabby or any of that whole group since yesterday morning.  It has me pretty concerned.  But it could just simply be lack of signal given that my own signal is coming and going, or they could be under siege again, or any number of things.  I was supposed to have met up with Josh a few days ago, but unfortunately we've been held up by a few things.
We originally weren't going to leave, but I discovered rather quickly that most the food stores in the cafeteria had already spoiled or been taken by the previous group of raiders.  Also the school just wasn't that defendable.  It was already becoming a burden trying to keep everything boarded up and all the zombies out.  Unfortunately, taking the bus wasn't an option.  However, there was a couple of day care vans parked nearby.  I don't want to dwell too much on why that was the case.  It fills me with a great sadness to think about it.  I took one, and Philip took the other.  Fortunately Philip was one of those self-sufficient kids who had learned how to drive well before it was even legal before The Fall, so he seemed like a logical choice.  Especially given that I'm not even sure the other kids could even reach the pedals.
The first problem we ran across was my frequent need for rest.  My leg is still pretty badly messed up (though I've somehow managed to avoid infection thus far, though lord knows how), so it gets rather stiff and if I keep too much pressure on it, I'm liable to tear the stitches that we've managed to sew in there.  This makes driving really slow. 
Second, there is the condition of the roads.  It's not great at all, and they don't exactly make all-terrain tires for day care vans, though in after-thought I probably could rig that relatively easily. Tires are tires.  Maybe I'll do that later.
Third, is the bloody weather.  It's been nice.  Really REALLY nice out.  This means that all the zombies I was hoping to avoid are out and about and hungry.  Really hungry. Ravenously.  Their ferocity is disconcerting. We've managed to avoid most of them, but hit a really nasty group of about 30 of them a few days ago.  It took some really fancy driving and some really good shooting by our group to whittle the numbers down enough that we could get away.
Right now, we're camped out at a small camp ground and I'm taking another one of my breaks.  I figure maybe another day of this and we should be able to reach Josh and them.
Or maybe not.  Just got word from one of the kids that there's some people approaching our group.
 Oh hell, I have to go, if you guys don't hear from me in the next couple of days, don't worry.  We're safe.

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4:43 PM

Posted by Josh Guess

You'll have to forgive me if this post is a little sloppy and short. I'm not quite a hundred percent yet. See, a bunch of us were apparently poisoned.
It turns out that one of the people that came here last week to get treatment was actually one of the Richmond soldiers. We know this because he left us a damn note after he put something in the food to make us wish we had died. Not to actually kill us, you understand, but affect us just enough to let everyone here know we can still be targeted, and in ways we might never expect.
Thankfully the food he tampered with didn't get everyone. The people that were on sentry duty didn't eat, obviously, nor did most of the medical personnel since they were also working.
I hate being sick, and whatever he put in the stew did its job very well. Vomiting, fever, the runs, coughing...the whole flu experience compressed into a few days. It still feels like my head is going to roll off my shoulders and hit the floor.
At any rate, I don't have much else in me at the moment. We're OK if miserable, and even with a third of our numbers out of commission we've been pretty safe from the zombies ambling around outside, holed up as we are in the hospital...
Back tomorrow. I've only been up an hour, but I need a nap.

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11:44 AM

Posted by Josh Guess

I'm still recovering, but I wanted to update you all on the situation around here.
We've been sieged with constant, if small, groups of zombies. There hasn't been a lot of traffic in or out of here since we were poisoned until this morning. Gabby and Evans tell us that those of us who ate the tainted food should be OK since we're all getting better. I think that the idea wasn't to kill us, but only to drive home the point that we're vulnerable, that we can be reached and hurt by the Richmond soldiers if they want to.
It's a pretty clear message. Fortune has smiled on us, in that we are going to be able to send a message right back to them.
See, the guy who poisoned us ran. We didn't plan on trying to find him. I mean, with the zombies beating at the walls of the hospital and the weather taking a turn for the worse, not to mention the chaos created by two dozen deathly ill people, who would? Fate or coincidence or whatever you want to call it can be a cruel and hateful bitch at times, as our lives since March have shown.
Sometimes, though, she can hand you a gift-wrapped present, free of charge.
A carload of people were heading this way yesterday, and ended up colliding with the vehicle our escaped poisoner was driving. Not by accident, either--we sent out a lot of emails and calls describing his car, to warn anyone out and about to keep clear of him. The folks that hit him were given the heads up by whoever pointed them our way, and when they saw his car, they pushed him off the road.
And fought him to the ground. Tied him up. Brought him back here. Oh, yeah.
We've got a prisoner, and we intend to learn as much as we can from him before we send him back to the compound. Don't be surprised by that; he didn't kill any of us, so we aren't going to kill him. Not that the idea didn't get tossed around. We're going to send him back home in a few days, alive.
This is a golden opportunity for us to get a different perspective on what's going on inside the compound. We'll have a chance to get the viewpoint of one of the soldiers who took our home from us. We've set aside the urge for vengeance in favor of gathering intelligence. If we want to stay ahead of our enemies, stay alive, it's crucial that we know as much about them as possible.
I'll tell myself that every time I run to the bathroom, shitting my guts out from whatever it was he put in my food. Which I do about thirty times a day. I'm drinking about two gallons of water a day just to stay hydrated, which puts a dent in our water supplies since several dozen of us are having to do it. We've got reserves, and the weather lately has been generous with rain, and there's always creeks and whatnot...but it takes a lot of effort to do all of that, and this bastard has cost us that effort, and the time it takes.
It'll be weeks before any of us are back to full strength. Used to be that when you got sick, you had reserves of fat to draw on when you got better, general good health and decent living conditions. We've all been losing weight since The Fall began, our various injuries and illnesses taking their toll on us. Not to mention this hospital isn't heated since we can't afford to waste the propane it would take to run the generator that hard. We live in a building that's constantly fifty degrees on the inside, and that's just not helpful to getting better.
I'm off to ask some questions. I'm sort of worried that some of the Richmond soldiers might have gotten hold of Aaron--I've lost touch with him in the last day. Anything could have happened, of course, even just his phone losing signal, but the current situation makes my mind lean towards the bad guys by default.
Can't forget my crowbar. Those always help when trying to pry the truth from reluctant lips...

at 
10:43 AM

Posted by Josh Guess

The situation here is bad. Very bad.
Some might say dire, but those people are probably already dead from The Fall itself, having been unable to manage the rare achievement of surviving the apocalypse when it tore through society like lightning.
Early yesterday morning we sent out a small group of scouts to search for signs of any large swarms of zombies. They were back in less than fifteen minutes with extremely shitty news: a crowd of at least a thousand was heading our way. We didn't even bother trying to set up a defense inside the walls of the attached parking lot; we just locked ourselves in and double checked the barricades. Oh, and hoped. We hoped very hard.
In the wait before the swarm could get to us I sent out call after call, shot emails to people, and generally did everything I could to all of the folks headed this way to warn them off. I even contacted Google to make sure they warned the courier carrying the copies of the Ark to stay away if he was anywhere near, though I strongly doubt he could be this early in his trip.
Long story short? Messages received. Patrick and Aaron's group were the only ones to not eventually get back to me, and I desperately hope that they were holed up somewhere safe and not anywhere close to here in hopes of getting in.
The attack went badly from start to finish. We had a lot of ammo here, or at least a lot for the way we fight. Our philosophy is to conserve as much as possible, the way my survival instructors (bless them for having such a dim student but trying anyway) taught me. Primarily we have used our firearms as long-range weapons and backups in close combat, instead relying on edged weapons, crowbars, makeshift clubs, and the like.
We really didn't have a lot of options when the swarm hit the wall of the parking lot, zombies trampling their own kind and piling up until the back ranks could just walk to the top of the wall. Not to mention the hundreds beating on the barricaded and boarded windows on the ground floor of the hospital, few as they are. We started picking off those that we could, Jess up on the roof using her rifle along with others who had long guns. The rest of us, including those with shotguns, used the windows on the second floor as our firing platforms. I hung halfway out of one for most of an hour, a kid reloading my magazines for me and handing them up. It was insanely difficult to fire accurately that way for me. I'm right handed but have a dominant left eye for sighting when I shoot, so I have to angle my head sharply to even get the ironsights to line up.
That was pretty stressful. I pretty much stuck to firing at the ones coming over the wall, and I tried to take headshots whenever one of them came over the section closest to me. The sad truth is that with the number that got over and into the parking lot, it was only a matter of time before they beat their way through the heavy  stuff we put in front of the doors. Most of us using handguns decided to get down to the ground floor and set up a killzone there before that happened.
When the inevitable happened, every single person with a firearms was needed.
We formed lines in a V shape near the door, the point of the V away from the doorway. The front row of us (myself included) were kneeling, a helper behind us reloading our magazines and speedloaders. Behind them, riflemen and women stood, popping off shots and aiming at distant zombies through the shattered remains of the door.
It actually worked out a lot better than we'd hoped for. There didn't have to be a lot of us in the V at one time. It took the zombies a while to get in, which gave us a bit of time to set up a sequence for us to fire in so that no one wasted bullets. The undead had to fight the heavy vending machines and other junk we'd piled in front of the door out of the way. Then when they crowded the way in, we let loose with a salvo to drop as many of them in one place as possible.
For a while it was a simple matter of people on the right of the V firing at the right side of the double doors, and those on the left shooting at the left. In order according to the simple sequence we'd put together. It was simple to maintain that, and it took the zombies time to move the still bodies of their fallen out of the way enough to get in.
It went that way for a while. Pile up dead zombies, watch as zombies became visible and tried to move them, pick off the movers to make the pile bigger. We were methodical, thorough, and calm, at least on the outside. Those that weren't actively in lines patrolled around the rest of the ground floor, making sure no breaches popped up. The main door to the parking lot was our big worry, since that was the one portal to the outside we used, and we hadn't taken the herculean efforts to keep it closed that we had on the rest of the building.
No breaches. But the swarm pushed us to our limits; it was only the narrow entryway combined with coordinated effort that kept us from breaking and getting slaughtered. Bless my firearms instructor (my brother David) for helping me to learn my favored shooting stance, for teaching me the right way to hold my arms. And bless all the people with me for keeping cool heads during an attack that, by all rights, should have killed us.
We managed to stay alive. We took down a LOT of zombies. My .40 caliber Glock 27 has been my constant companion right along with my wife, and it performed beautifully yesterday.
But guns are just clunky rocks without bullets. And we're out.
Not totally. We've got a few left for the odd small caliber weapons here and there, a handful of deer slugs for a couple shotguns. Jess has five rounds left for her 30.06. That's about it.Thank god we were using old ammo that came boxed, and not the homemade rounds. I've been told that using hard cast bullets would eventually cause my Glock to go...boom. We went through virtually every round we had, though the constant hail of gunfire was apparently enough to send the remains of that swarm away looking for an easier meal. Or maybe it's the smell of zombies made finally dead that overpowers their hunger in situations like this. I don't know. Never did figure that out.
Because we have no other choice, we're leaving. Not in a few days or when we get a chance. Before lunch. We knew there were circumstances that might make us leave, and this is one of them. We can't defend this place against a similar attack again and hope to survive it, so we're heading out for our next destination. Where we're headed, I'm not worried about not having much ammunition. We've got some locals (Well, they live within an hour of here, anyway) willing to shepherd us out of the area in return for what will be left of the medical supplies here after we take what we need. It isn't great, but we planned for it.
Oh, and sometime during the attack, the soldier we had tied up got himself loose and escaped. We managed to interrogate him before he got away, but the information he gave us was virtually worthless. Given the state we left him in, I doubt he'll get far. I don't really care if he does get back to the compound at this point. We'll be gone for a new location before he gets halfway there.
He's on foot. Since he didn't want to respond to us asking nicely, we had to take very drastic measures. When I say he's on foot, I mean it in the most singular way possible. We tossed the one Evans cut off him out into the parking lot. Guess a zombie ate it.
Time to finish packing, load up the dogs, and hit the highway for a while.