Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land (27 page)

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Lost Ground

Posted by Josh Guess

The last few days have been hell, and I'm not just saying that because of the fires we've been using to keep the undead back. Will has been working like a madman on the defenses, but eventually they'll fail completely.
As it is we've already suffered some heavy damage. The annex, two smaller subdivisions we fenced in and connected to the larger original compound, has been partially overrun. That was actually intentional on our part, as we knew that the fire wouldn't hold them off forever.
Will came up with the idea. He's spent a lot of time on the walls, and though he's been a busy guy he has also been observing. The smarties that are found in small clusters among the larger swarm of zombies, seem to be having a harder time commanding their less intelligent brethren. Even as the fires in the trenches burned you could see the hunger almost pushing the normal zombies to consider attacking despite the flames.
So Will gave them an easy target. He suggested to Dodger (because Will is still a condemned man and thus has no actual authority) that we allow a section of trench to run out of fuel and let the zombies overrun it if they attacked. It was dangerous, but better to prepare a massive trap and tease them into attacking where we wanted them than risk a break in the defenses at a random place.
One of the good things about how we built the walls in the annex is that each of the two smaller neighborhoods that make it up has its own complete fence surrounding it. We brought the undead into the older and smallest part, letting them fill the streets before we cut loose on them.
We set fire to the wall where they'd come in. It was on the side farthest from the original compound, so we weren't worried about the main area going up in flames. That cut off the zombies' escape route.
Then we pelted them with dozens of vials of ammonia. The smell is overpowering to them, and our observations make it very clear to us that zombie communication, such as it is, is based on smell. So much ammonia in such a small area confused them and made them lose focus.
That's when we went for the kill.
At one corner of the giant square killing zone were two dozen men and women, trained to fight in unison with homemade spears and shields. Those folks, our Spartans, took positions on the corner of the square most in need of defense--the intersection point between the original compound and the two parts of the annex. All along the wall between the two parts of the annex were archers with arrows of many types, all of them interesting.
At the far side of that wall, a team of men working a catapult set on one of the raised platforms each corner used as a sentry post.
Clear on the other end were fifty warriors. Some had cutting weapons, some homemade flamethrowers. They formed a line of death, pushing the swarming zombies staggering in confusion from the ammonia, right into the middle of the giant square formed by the roads and houses.
We weren't worried for those fighters, though they were on foot and not heavily protected. The zombies were not able to get close to them at all because we used every drop of the secretions put out by a very special zombie to assure their safety. You remember, don't you? That zombie the folks in bald knob found, vomiting up a substance that made others of his kind run away?
Turns out that being surrounded by them on all sides makes him a very sick boy. He's been vomiting all week in the cage we keep him chained in. It isn't hard to collect the stuff.
On every rooftop, there were groups of three or four people raining down alcohol, heavy rocks, metal scraps, and anything else we could hit the zombies with. Not the least of which was a liberal dusting of magnesium dust and some leftover thermite.
You can see where this is going, yes?
It was a slaughter. Will planned the whole thing and it worked like a charm. Our people on foot escaped on the signal, which was only sent when the fire began to spread among the trapped swarm. Our folks on the rooftops used the walkways we've built between all our roofs to get out. Our archers and Spartans didn't have much to do but clean up the stragglers. Our catapult crew did all the hard work, dropping a few small explosives in just the right places.
I don't know how many we killed, but there are noticeably less zombies outside the walls now. I'd say about a third of what we faced int he beginning died in the annex yesterday. Maybe half of the total number gone.
That still leaves a hell of a lot of zombies, and us with a lot of problems. As soon as the fires died out in the annex, not more than a few hours after our people pulled back into the original compound, the killing ground was overrun again. The flaming section of wall had died out, and when it did the swarm hit it with their full might.
That's about a quarter of all the homes we had, lost. The homesteaders are taking it hard, since the majority of them lived in that section. None of them are angry at us about it, you understand, which I find rather odd. But they've lost their homes and many possessions, not to mention the gardens that provided them at least some food.
We're left with the same problems. We've conducted a masterful defense so far, but food is getting rationed hard and we'll begin to starve if we can't get out to hunt, especially with that part of the annex and its resources lost to us. We still haven't heard anything from our folks in Bald Knob, and no word about whether or not we'll be getting any help.
I guess the good news is that we've got less area to defend.
When I see the thin faces of the starving children around me, that doesn't seem much comfort.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Never-ending Battle

Posted by Josh Guess

We've lost the other part of the annex, and along with it a large chunk of hope. Even if we manage to keep the zombies out of the original compound, which is where our entire population is now, we'll starve.
I should point out that the larger part of the annex is bigger than the portion we intentionally set on fire the other day. More than half of the compound as it was a week ago is overrun. The section we lost last night had a lot more open areas in it than any other part of the compound, and was farmed more. The break in the defenses came suddenly and from three sides, driving our people back with incredible speed.
We lost almost forty people in the attack. Twenty-five of them were homesteaders that somehow managed to get caught between the three swarms of zombies that broke through the walls. They were farther away than I would have expected anyone to be. A few folks said that they were trying to bring food stores over, but the homesteaders weren't anywhere close to the buildings we stored food in over there. I imagine they got caught up in the confusion of the attack and lost their bearings.
We're packed into the original compound pretty tightly. We've got enough food to last us for a little while, maybe a week, and then we start getting very hungry.
I don't want to sound callous about losing so many people, but the reality we face right now is that they simply got to whatever is waiting for us on the other side a little ahead of us. We've got a chance to survive, but it isn't very high unless we can get some help.
The last good bit of news, really, is that we're in such a small area now that we can defend the walls pretty easily. The bad part is that there aren't any trenches or other defenses between us and the annex. Just the wall. It's not a very pretty picture, but it's what we have.
Still no word from our people in Bald Knob, and I haven't gotten any good responses from our allies as far as getting some backup goes. The ones most able to do so, our friends in North Jackson, don't have the fuel needed to get a large force of people here. It just isn't feasible. I know the soldiers that joined with them in the winter would come help us, but without a way to get at least a few hundred of them here it's a moot point.
We're holding out against the undead. We're hungry and will become much more so before this is over. For now being alive is going to be enough. It has to.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Getting Word

Posted by Josh Guess

We've finally had contact with our people from Bald Knob. Those amazing people have done the impossible: they're going to be bringing reinforcements from North Jackson. 

Our people have been out of touch because they've been in areas that have been deserted for a long time, almost since The Fall itself. They've been looking for a way to transport enough people here to make a difference in the fight against the swarm outside our walls. Though the fighting against the zombies has been intense over the last few days, especially last night, we've got a little more hope now. 

The Bald Knob crew found a large bus garage north of us, and they've loaded up on all the diesel fuel they could find. That's actually quite a lot, considering the garage itself had nearly a forty school buses with at least partial tanks of gas. They've loaded each bus with what they hope will be enough fuel to make it to southern Michigan and back. They're already on the way. 

Which is really goddamn nice. I wish they'd been in an area that had cell reception, but I'll take what I can get. Jess and I are exhausted to the point of tears, and that doesn't make us anything special around here. There are a couple places on the wall where the undead are indeed walking up those previously hypothetical ramps of slain zombies and attacking the top of the wall. So far we've managed to push them back, but I don't know how long we'll be able to stem the tide. A full-on breach seems inevitable. 

Excepting the massive losses from the zombies overrunning the annex, we've done pretty well. We've lost few people, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we haven't had to fight too many zombies at one time. We're also not giving them a lot of chances to get close. We have archers posted all over the place, and the men and women that are actually fighting hand to hand are doing so with long weapons like spears. It's pretty easy to take down a zombie rushing clumsily up a hill of dead bodies while you're standing there on solid footing with a heavy weapon. 

Oh, and most of the hand-to-hand fighters are wearing armor of one type of another. 

It's almost breathtaking to watch. Men and women staying calm as a zombie gets inside their guard, shrugging off a bite to their heavily clothed and protected necks. We've got roaming groups of off-duty fighters and some of the older kids running around from fight to fight, killing any undead that happen to be thrown to the ground inside the compound. 

Will has done a lot of defending on the top of the wall himself. I've seen him wearing the turnout gear (firefighting outfit, if you aren't familiar with the term. Heavy, thick, almost impossible to bite through) that we took from a large supplier in Lexington. He fights with a quarterstaff and a machete like something out of a story. 

Not that others aren't doing the same. Every time I see a group of zombies come up one of the piles of bodies toward our folks, my heart clenches in my chest. I only relax when I witness the defenders swinging weapons and working in unison to stave off the attack. There's always more of them, though. Always another wave. 

I've lost track of the actual numbers, but I think we've lost a total of about seventy people since this massive assault began. I could be wrong there, but it sounds somewhere in the ballpark. My heart hurts for those souls, who've endured so much and fought so hard to stay alive. Their sacrifice means more to me than I'll ever be able to say. 

The practical side of me remembers how short on food we're getting, though...

Come quickly, people of North Jackson. We need you. 

Monday, July 11, 2011

Compound Fractures

Posted by Josh Guess

Should I talk about how we were rescued from the zombie swarm besieging us by the brave soldiers from North Jackson? Should I give a blow-by-blow account of that final fight?
Should I paint a picture with my words of the destruction around us and our struggle to pick up the shattered pieces of our broken home?
Probably. I should probably do those things. Instead, I'm going to put something out in the open that I've been asked to keep quiet, and damn the consequences.
I won't beat around the bush. Yesterday it was discovered that the homesteaders have been hoarding food for several weeks. That was why the group of them were lost when the second part of the annex fell. Not because they were bravely trying to bring food from one of the storehouses, but because they were desperate to bring as much of their hidden cache as possible with them.
While the rest of us have been subsiding on less and less food each day, they homesteaders have been eating well.
Part of why this enrages me so much is because this morning I got a good look at a few of the children for the first time in days. We've only been desperately short on food for about that long, but things have been tight for a while. I didn't realize how tough it must be on the bodies and spirits of our young, whose metabolisms demand calories to grow.
Pat's girls are skinny, but they aren't unhealthy. Pat has gone hungry many times in his life, and he's happy to do it for them by giving up portions of his own food. Other children aren't so lucky.
The one that really caught my attention was this girl that came into the clinic this morning. I was there putting in the last hour of a shift assisting Evans. Since the fighting ended in a coordinated hail of gunfire by our rescuers, my bow hasn't been needed on the wall. The clinic has been pressed with a constant stream of injured since the siege began, and the people working in it have been dead on their feet for a long while. In the eight hours I was there, I helped treat a gunshot wound from a stray bullet fired by one of the NJ soldiers, a broken wrist from a fall off the wall, several minor cuts, one major puncture, and an assortment of other injuries.
When the girl was brought in unconscious and pale, I assumed she'd hit her head. Evans took a glance at her and the look on his face was terrible. He saw with eyes far more experienced than mine. She was in her early teens, but it would have been easy to mistake her for a young boy.
Evans put her in a recliner and asked her father, who'd brought her in, what had happened. The man told us that he'd found her that way when he woke, unresponsive and with cracked lips, skin drawn. Evans pulled the girl's shirt up on one side to show the hollow stack of her ribs, her belly swollen like the pictures you used to see of starving African children.
She'd been hungry a long, long time. Somehow she and many other people in the compound had slipped through the cracks and gotten shorted in their rations. Her father was a guard, and he said that he had been getting enough when the girl had brought their rations back to the house.
I assume that in order to make sure her dad was strong enough to fight, she'd been giving him some of her food. Probably shorting herself on water as well, given the level of dehydration in her.
After helping Evans get her comfortable and starting an IV, my shift was over. I would have stayed to watch over her if I could have, but exhaustion and hunger drove me back home. On my way home I saw a group of kids sitting together on a corner. They looked tired and listless, which you'd expect given the amount of work they had put in during the siege. The haggard expressions on their faces might have been from running water to the fighters on the wall. It could have been due to being on kill squads for the zombies that fell inside the compound.
But after what I'd just seen, I had to make sure that was all there was to it. So I asked them.
To my surprise, they were honest. The idea had spread among not just the children of the compound, but also through most of the other non-combatants. For weeks now, as food has become more and more scare, those too young to fight have been conspiring with those too injured or with disabilities that keep them from combat as well as many pregnant women to make sure our fighters are strong. They've been shorting their own rations and giving the remainder to others. They've been starving themselves for the greater good.
While the homesteaders have been keeping half of what they've killed in secret. Not to keep from starving or because they were worried that those of us who run the compound would somehow mismanage that food. Nothing so idealized as that.
They kept it because they were afraid of feeling the desperate hunger they'd suffered during the occupation by the Richmond soldiers.
While they've been living comfortably, our children and others have been putting their lives at risk because they were afraid that without strong defenders, we'd probably falter. The worst part is that they were probably right.
I can't explain how angry I am at the homesteaders right now. I can't put in words how much worse that's made by the fact that I was asked by several council members not to share this news. How doing so, no matter how justified I may be, would hurt the compound. Sow distrust not only among our own people but with the other groups of survivors out there as well.
My conscience is clean in this. I refuse to hide the crimes of fearful men and women who would allow others to suffer the pangs of starvation while they were in comfort. I don't have the power to get rid of those people, but I won't sit quietly by as they bully the rest of the compound into not punishing them once again. I won't let them get away with it, because they're cowards of the worst sort.
I wonder if even one of them will care that a girl drove herself to the edge of death in her efforts to keep us all safe. Even a day ago I would have cited my personal differences with the homesteaders and said that while they might have an outlook I don't share, that they were by and large good people who would do what they could for the compound.
Today is a different day. I feel like a different person. They were so eager to keep themselves from privation that they lost sight of the larger goal of the compound: to keep all safe and fed.
I sit here thinking about the consequences of these words, and I hesitate. I worry about the damage I may do when I click that button, sending this out for other survivors to read. I wonder if I'm wrong to do it, and if keeping some semblance of cohesion here is worth the damage it would do to my soul.
Then I think about the girl, body wasted as she lays not a hundred yards from where I sit. A sacrifice on her part that may have made the difference in our survival. It's something I can't ignore or forget. That kind of bravery deserves a like kind of honesty and sacrifice. Whatever happens from here on out I accept. If this is what finally breaks our community beyond repair, then so be it.
Her name is Katie. This is for her and all like her who've given all they could to help save their home.
Thank you.