With Spring Comes the Fall (16 page)

And they bring children. Many of them are families, finding the strength to survive in each other. And all of them made the choice to come here. 

It was altogether another experience to see them fight off the large horde of zombies that followed them in. They had been picking them off for a while, and when they pulled up, we were all ready. 

You can say you know someone for any number of reasons. Time spent together, long time friendships, ideas shared late at night after your passion is spent. But no act compares to the bittersweet dance of violence in the name of survival. Once you join in the motions of death with a person for the purpose of mutual survival, you reach an understanding that cannot be matched. 

They are here now, and are doing their best to blend into our home. We are having some serious talks about some recent decisions around here, and doing what we can to reassure. It's stressful, but good. Most of us have redoubled our hope for the future with so many people joining us. The feeling that we are truly building something, an organic thing that grows and changes, is strong. 

Posted by Josh Guess at 
11:39 AM

Because I'm on the road again. Sorry, call me a fool with a deep love of music, especially all the old-school country I used to hear on the radio when I rode in my dad's car as a kid. I'm on the way to a town called, I shit you not, Raven, Ky. Not a whole lot could have pulled me away from the compound when so much is going on, especially when new folks have joined us and with such a raging debate going on. But this particular task I just don't want to risk with anyone else. Call it ego if you will, but my accomplishments speak for themselves, and when it comes to retrieving people, I trust my core group.
Pat is driving, Jess is up front with him. We're in a big SUV, trundling along at a stately twenty miles an hour. Damn zombies are crossing the road all over the place, and every so often we have to do some fancy driving to lose them. We're making this run to bring someone to us, a single person that thankfully, our contacts at Google were able to locate. He's an old army surgeon named Evans (a last name was all he would give us), and he wants to join us. He's been holed up in an old store almost since the beginning, living off the food there. I gather it's some sort of general store, since he tells us that it's all brick, and smack in the middle of town. And the middle of the town is packed tight with bodies. The moving, biting type.
I said before that we needed a doctor. This is still true, especially if we are going to survive long term, build a new society. We need someone to teach us, to give us the ability to do more than first aid, more than wound treatment. Hopefully he can make some of us decent surgeons, effective diagnosticians. He may not be our only chance at this, but he is our first and therefore best shot.
We're going to get in there, get him out, and bring him back with us. To do this, we will have to fight our way through hundreds if not thousands of zombies, get him out safely, and make it home without getting killed. That's a best case scenario, not even thinking about the possibility that there are marauders there, or any number of other possible threats. We'll get him out.
But I have no idea how.

Posted by Josh Guess at 
11:41 AM

We're stuck in Raven at the moment. We managed to get to Doctor Evans, but now we're trapped in the store with him.
We thought we were being terribly clever. We drove through the town, me standing up out of the moonroof to get the attention of all the damn zombies following us. We wanted to draw them away and lose them, load up the doc and his supplies, and get the hell out of town. It was working, until the pothole.
It has been raining, and we didn't realize that the puddle we were driving toward was a massive hole in the road, deep enough to bog down the whole front end. So there we were, a giant swarm of undead behind us about a hundred yards, and the store ahead about the same distance. We booked it, made it through the door, and now the road is packed with them.
Evans is pissed. He's been trapped here for a long time, and from his point of view things are worse than ever. He's also really low on food, and we brought little to eat, enough for a few days at most. For us, this is just another challenge to face. We try to keep it positive-we're alive, unhurt, and still armed.
Ok, Evans is looking at me like I'm an idiot, for tapping away at my phone for so long. I need to help them come up with some kind of plan. We don't have any power here, so I have no way to charge it. Ideally, we will be out of here before it runs out of juice, but if not, I think it will last until tomorrow.
Wish us luck.
Wish I didn't have to end so many posts that way, but luck is all we have sometimes.

Posted by Josh Guess at 
9:16 AM

Patrick has been gone for a long time. He left us when a small break in the crowd outside gave him a window. There's a ball of ice where my stomach used to be. After three hours, I have to start seriously considering that he may be dead.
We thought about trying to draw them away again, but they apparently aren't going to take that bait, or they would have all followed Pat, instead of mulling around here. Hopefully their reluctance helped Pat to find a vehicle, or at least shelter.
My phone is about to die.
If this is my last communication until many of you back home see me, then please don't worry. Mom, please remember that we will be careful, and cautious. We will sit here and think about how to get out as long as it takes to figure out a plan. We might get lucky. We might die. But if we do, please, everyone at home remember to be human to each other. In a good way.
But do not, under any circumstances, come here looking for us.
I think we can do it. Shit. Ok, got to go. Hopefully see you all soon.

Posted by Josh Guess at 
2:04 PM

Pat made it back to us. Thank god that everyone and their mother had an iPhone, because the car he found had a charger in it. We're still in Raven at the moment, but we are sitting in the car, waiting to take off. Jess is driving, Evans and I are in the back seat, and Pat is going to do something really brave and extremely stupid. He's outside the car, dressed in so much clothing and what little armor he could salvage from the SUV that it's unlikely the zombies will be able to bite him.
But he's still out there, running through the crowd trying to thin it out. He's never been the most gifted student of the sword (nor have I, to be honest...) but he is doing a fantastic job right now. I just worry that he will get swarmed and fall, because enough of them could eventually tear through all his stuff. It should be only a few more minutes, and he will have thinned the herd out enough for us to drive through.
Cutting short here, need to be ready.

Posted by Josh Guess at 
12:07 PM

Super fast update, so that no one back home makes any hasty decisions to come after us.
We're halfway home, but out of gas. We're in a little town whose name I didn't catch, and we had to push the car a quarter mile to get here. Not too many zombies around here, which is a surprise considering how dense this area has been packed. I think we'll have to spend another night here, as we're all bushed and the search for fuel is taking a lot of time. I really don't want to travel at night, and another day of rest will do us a lot of good.
I can't help but wonder what is going on back at the compound. I have managed to get a few calls off, but reception is pretty shoddy all around. I wish that the solar charger Evans was using for his phone would have worked on mine, I could have kept in touch much more easily.
I hope you're all doing well, and that we will see you soon. We're safe, and secure in this little house we found. Keep an eye out for us in the morning.

Posted by Josh Guess at 
11:59 AM

This is patrick, on josh's phone. We are outside of lexington, we have been in an accident. Evans is working on josh, he's hurt but evans doesn't think it's too bad. We have another car, just waiting for evans to get done.
we have to make the drive through lexington, we were detoured by a group of marauders.
keep watch for us, we will be on our way soon.

Posted by Josh Guess at 
10:45 AM

Thanks to several tips, we were able to get through Lexington without too much trouble. I'm dealing with my injuries, which are not too bad, but will leave impressive scars. Mostly a few big cuts from broken glass. Two broken fingers.
And I think my collarbone is broken. Again. This makes four times.
I'm getting a lot of shit from a lot of people about going off to rescue someone, when I have responsibilities here, blah blah blah. Other folks are giving me shit for risking myself (Mom...). I have told the first group to shove it, mainly because I am unwilling to risk the life of the person in need of saving so we can have a long, drawn out talk about it. If someone needs help and wants to join us, I'll go. It's that simple.
The second group is living under some illusion that we are ever safe. Life is a constant exercise in avoiding various sorts of death now, and if I am going to be at risk, I choose to do it in a way that at least creates the possibility of helping another, not to mention improving the lives of the others here. Yeah, you can argue that I can help others here and all that, but the fact is, not too many people were keen on going out to get Evans. Didn't seem to think risking a team of people was worth the life of one person.
Lovely.
So we're home, and it seems like Evans is pretty satisfied with our homemade clinic. At least, that is the impression I get, since he didn't belittle it. He's kind of a tough guy to read.
It's looking like we're actually going to have to split some of us who are in leadership positions off into full-time administrators. By that I mean that we are facing so many massive logistics issues that just planning and managing all of the projects and resources is taking up a full day's worth of work time. So those of us that have been doing all of this 
and 
working shifts on the wall, farming, and all the rest are barely getting three hours of sleep. I really don't think we have other option, if we want to effectively manage our projects and keep our little society running.
Let me know what you think.

Posted by Josh Guess at 
7:37 AM
 

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Leadership is a funny thing.
In the current context, it is vital. When you are out in the world, not surrounded by walls that keep out the undead, it can mean everything. Having a cool head when confronted by a swarm of zombies is essential; you may understand why I have a select group of people  that I choose to associate myself with in those types of situations.
Many of us have never encountered the real thing. Maybe military folks have, but I think that for the most part the rest of us have only ever had "leaders" who were in charge of us because of a superior position at a job, being an elected official (which equated, I think, to being a better liar than the other candidates...) or some other factor that took the choice of who would lead away from those being led.
I have always felt that being a leader of people meant more. That it was imperative to gain trust, to set an example for others, so that they would follow you by choice, from respect, and not because some arbitrary set of rules helped you get lucky.
I was voted in, and by extension so was the committee that keeps me balanced. And soon, we might be voted out. It seems that our growing community has fallen victim to one of the oldest of society's stumbling blocks: a case of the have-nots.
Need an explanation? No problem.
You see, last night I fielded the idea to a great many folks about the possibility that those of us who have been actively coordinating all of the construction, farming, and other work going on around here doing that as full-time work. Or I should say, as our only full time work, since it takes up so much of our time. This was met with a pretty even split in opinion, with slightly more than half of the people in favor of it. But the problem I ran into wasn't whether or not John or Jane Doe was ok with this, it was that seemingly every person had some project or idea that they felt was vital to us.
But none of them had any idea how to accomplish them. Well, a few had some thoughts on that, but most didn't. The prevailing opinion was that it seemed pretty easy to do what we have been doing, planning and executing it all, and most of the people thought that it would be no more difficult to fulfill their ideas as well. The logistical nightmares we have been dealing with did not occur to them, because we haven't been shouting about them from the rooftops. We encounter a problem, and we solve it, because we HAVE to.
So now I have a ton of people getting pissed because I couldn't hand them promises, or because I had to explain why an idea they had wasn't feasible. Many grumbled, asking why we needed to have full-time jobs in running this place, if we weren't going to do what we were asked.
Maybe they will vote us out, that would be a nice break.
But we did make it official: I and my council (which is what the committee is now called; we have committees for individual projects now, the council oversees them all) are doing our jobs full-time. This pisses people off, but I really don't care. I won't allow the people that have been doing all of the work designing and implementing plans for our long-term survival to burn out from overwork. So we'll be busting ass to get as much done as we can in the shortest possible time, just in case they do kick us out of office.
Cheers!