With Spring Comes the Fall (30 page)

The biggest news by magnitudes is that another large group of survivors has contacted us. They aren't very far from us, actually, though I have been asked not to mention the location, other than to say that it is in Kentucky somewhere. These folks have apparently been holed up in a large building, housed with dozens of tons of canned food. I can't tell too much about their situation without giving away where they are, but I can tell you that while they went through hell itself securing the shelter they live in, losing huge numbers of men and women, once they got there it was truly a prime location to hide in. 

But fortunately for all of us, long term thinking led them to come out of hiding. They still have a lot of food left, but no way to farm, no way to do anything really constructive. They found out about us when one enterprising member of their group went out in search of some way to look and see if others had survived in the outside world. Naturally, he found a computer, got on google, and through the huge set of links the folks at google have set up since the fall of society, got in touch with us. 

They want to come here, be a part of the community. They come with open arms and under reasonable terms, and we welcome them. 

All one hundred and fifty of them. 

They have no mass transit vehicles, so we will be the ones doing the transporting. It's going to be an exciting week, getting them here and getting to know them. Right now, all we know is that they are there and want to be here badly, and are willing to submit to any reasonable precautions on our part to make that happen. 

Signs are good right now, and hope is on the rise. 

Posted by Josh Guess at 
12:09 PM
 

Not a lot of time to write today. We are on the way to pick up some of the people from the big group that contacted us. They have some folks with injuries, and since we have a few medical personnel, it makes sense. I need to take my turn on the platform on top of the bus very shortly, so I will make this update short.
Dave and I think we have figured out a way to keep downtown relatively zombie free, or at least the small corner of it we want to occupy. It involves a lot of work, using the new folks coming in for the most part (since they will be the ones living there), a lot of large equipment (if we can find enough fuel not to deplete our reserves), and ludicrous amounts of explosives. That's actually the easy bit. What we can't find, we can make.
Roger, Jess, and Patrick actually came up with an ingenious solution to the lack of arable land downtown. I will explain that when I have more time, but it's really neat and organized, and it looks as though it will make the residents of downtown self-sufficient if we can implement it as designed. Thank go for the river being so close, literally less than a hundred feet away. It will solve all kinds of problems.
Up I go. I have to keep a lookout for enemies and shoot if needed. Wish us luck.

Posted by Josh Guess at 
12:35 PM

Another day, another trip out of town to bring in survivors from that big group I was telling you about. We're evacuating them at an increased rate now, because waves of zombies are starting to hit the place they are hiding in with the same sort of increase that we have seen at the compound. Dave, Patrick, Little David and Roger are with me, due to the increased need for vigilance at our destination, but for once I have little interest in talking about how badly the zombie plague and the violence of our everyday lives has fucked us up.
Today is all about human resilience.
I am sitting here writing in fits and bursts, while listening to Patrick and Roger talk about all sorts of things. The conversation started in the area of materials strength and properties of alloyed metals. This is mildly interesting to me, as I am curious about pretty much everything, but the really remarkable part is how the chat has evolved. Ever have one of those amazing, long conversations that meanders all over human interests? You sort of go from talking about Elton John to philosophy to the mechanics of wind turbines to...well, any random thing. I think most of us have, and I have had a bunch with Pat. I always get a sort of jittery satisfaction from knowing that another person and I have communicated ideas with open minds.
Thing is, since the fall, those types of talks have been few and far between. Since the massacre last week, they've been nonexistent. All of us have been quiet and terse to some degree or another, even the wordiest of us seemingly numb to the simple pleasures of intelligent conversation. I think that many of us have felt beaten down, and until I witnessed these two chattering like magpies, I had no idea how deep and wide the silence was.
It fills me with hope, it really does. We are made of strong stuff, and sometimes we can make our hearts so damn rigid that the next blow will shatter them. But people have that remarkable capacity to heal from nearly any pain--and the broken bits tend to soften and rejoin again, mending in ways both subtle and spectacular.
Words can mean anything or nothing. Words are such a simple concept to us, but they allow us the means to empathize with others, to share our burdens. Words let us reinforce each other, grow our understanding, and become closer. Words can wound, can destroy our hopes. Words can deceive and kill.
All of that and more, but most of all, to me at least, words fill the silence. The flow of pitches and tones that magically unify to create verbal communication are a bastion against the vast and lonely world we live in when there is no one to share it with.
I am still listening to them, and even though the conversation I hear isn't world-shaking, it is heartening. My best friend and a man that is becoming something like a best friend, getting to know each other. Growing in understanding. Empathizing.
Just talking.
We should all be thankful for chances to do something so normal.

Posted by Josh Guess at 
10:16 AM

My tour of duty bringing in our new friends from out of town is done. Dave and I have spent so much time working on other things, going out on runs, that our everyday work is getting behind. We are still actively working on the wall, though we have made a lot of progress all things considered.
We will be finished with it in less than two weeks. One week, if we get enough folks from the new wave of people that know how to swing a hammer. The zombies outside seem almost agitated, as if they know what we are on the verge of but can't do anything about it.
Roger is still sort of shadowing me. I think his wife and kids are getting worried about the fact that by trying to keep me safe, he is putting himself in a lot more danger than he would normally be exposed to. I keep trying to explain to him that the whole thing is pointless, but now it's getting to the point where it's a little insulting. I mean, I chose to distract the zombies that had him cornered. I made the conscious decision to put myself in danger, and I got away clean, as I have done many times before. He thinks I need some kind of guardian angel? Jeez.
Part of the problem is that he's older than me, I think. He sees me as a kid, and that seems to be coloring his attitude toward me a bit. Maybe he has some ultra-strong parental drive and his brain is treating me like his own kid. Not too far outside of the box as an idea; we have similar features. Both of us have dark hair (though his is salt and pepper), we're both broad shouldered and blue-eyed, fair skinned, and have small noses.
But we're making good use of him. Dave and I are good with organization, Dave specialized in construction, and I am a good general engineer. I know a little about a lot of things. Roger hanging out in our office has been surprisingly helpful. His knowledge of metals is truly enormous, and he has the practical knowledge to correct and improve on a huge number of things that my brother and I are working on. If he's going to be around anyway, we might as well use his brain for the betterment of all of us.
I don't want to make it seem like I don't like the guy. He's a great guy, used to be a minister in his spare time. Built houses for poor folks when he was younger. It's just that he has this infuriating sense of personal honor that happens to clash with my own need for personal space.
Ok, I'm leaving it there. Too much work to do, and Jess is hollering at me to come help her pick tomatoes, which is about the most strenuous work any of us are willing to let her do. I'm out.
Cross your fingers for a slow week for zombie attacks, so we can finally and totally enclose this place.

Posted by Josh Guess at 
10:42 AM

It's been storming terribly for over an hour. We are beginning to worry that it's going to get very bad in the compound if it doesn't let up. The good is that our water gathering systems are working like a charm, and we have huge capacities to store it. The bad is that all of the work we've done around here, cutting down trees and altering the landscape, has drastically altered the way rain moves and gathers. 

It does keep zombies at bay for the most part--many of them will just stand still in the rain, seeming confused. 

Just got a call from some folks at the base of the neighborhood. Flooding along the creek is causing serious problems. We are heading out to lend a hand. 

Posted by Josh Guess at 
6:48 AM

The storms have let up over the last few hours. We've had to curtail almost all of our activities to keep up with the insane flood waters. We decided to be as proactive as we could, but we didn't have a firm grasp of just how much water we were dealing with.
Since we clearcut all of the trees inside the compound, we weren't worried overmuch about wind or lightning. But the creek just kept getting bigger and bigger, which at first wasn't all that threatening. I mean, the folks that designed this neighborhood may not have had zombies in mind, but they certainly knew their business with drainage. But time makes fools of us all, and over the years and constant floods around here, the banks became more precarious and fragile. Our concern was for big sections of bank getting sheared away by the water and being swept down to the small bridge on the west side of the compound, and taking it out.
So we were trying to keep that from happening, and as we worked and struggled, Roger came pelting up to us and made a very good point. That much rain had a very good chance of washing out our food gardens, and pretty much every spare foot of land not set aside for something has food on it.
It was a long, wet, and tiring day. We ran around here for almost eighteen hours, trying to secure supplies, keep the banks stable, and cover our gardens. We did lose some gardens, and the bridge took enough damage that for now it is only a foot bridge, but nothing too disastrous. It's just lucky that we didn't get any tornadoes, though some insanely high winds did do a lot more damage than we would have thought possible, lacking trees as we are.
So we are hoping this break in the weather will be long enough to go out and get another load of folks brought in from out of town. We're about halfway done, and I know that they all want to get here as soon as possible. The severe winds and floodwaters on the road seem to have temporarily driven off the zombies. Which makes going out that much easier.
Anyone out there get slammed with storms as well? If you did, I hope that you managed to get through it safely. It'd be one hell of a joke if nature managed to do to us what a plague of zombies and merciless killers haven't.

Posted by Josh Guess at 
9:02 AM

We've had a good twenty four plus hours without rain, and that makes for strong efforts to start carting in more of the folks from out of town. We're about three quarters the way to having all of them here, and we've sent trucks with them to start bringing in the bulk of their supplies as well.
Good weather also means zombies, and today was a bad one.
Several dozen hit here about an hour ago, right after we let the vehicles out. These were fast moving, not at all the shambling husks we're used to. They all looked freshly dead, and they fought hard. They must have been lying in wait for us to open the doors, which is scary for a ton of reasons. It implies some sort of long term thinking, the ability to be cunning and bide their time...they waited until the last vehicle was just going out, and rushed in.
Thank god we had some smart people on the gate and at the wall. Roger was doing a shift at the gatehouse, and his opposite number for the other gate door, a woman named Abby, both saw the threat and started cranking the gate doors shut. Twenty or so of them got in, but about the same number were shut out. It was quite a ruckus, I'm told, and while we managed to kill the ones that got in with minimal injuries, it took a while to ferret out the last few. The first thing they did when they made it through was split up into twos and threes. More planning. Fucking scary.
Our folks on the wall came down to hunt the intruders, which is entirely according to the rules, but one straggler noted that as he was leaving the wall, he saw the zombies outside immediately run off, out of the line of sight. So they saw that they were vulnerable and unable to reach us, and they ran for it. I have to wonder if this means that they are rejoining a bigger group. We need to have a council meeting to discuss this, what the implications are. If we are dealing with zombies that are becoming smarter to this degree then we have a problem bigger than any we have faced so far.
Opponents that can only be killed by head trauma, with the ability to think tactically? Major issue. Worse, what if they figure out that their heads are the weak spot and start protecting them?
Like I said, council meeting.
Roger has been on my mind a lot lately, and not only because he made a point to watch out for me like I was his puppy. Which, by the way, he has eased up on considerably. I've been thinking about the kind of man he is, and how I have let myself once again become very distanced from most of the people around me. I've gotten to know him, as have you, because he made it a point to be around me. If he hadn't, I think that he'd probably be another nameless face I wave to when taking a walk. I need to change that.
Abby, for example. She showed remarkable calm and dedication to duty in the face of immense danger. She acted in the best interest of all of us, even though the zombies ran within feet of her and had to be more frightening than anything we've seen yet. That deserves some attention. All of the residents here do, but today is her turn.
Abby is tall, thin, and blonde. She takes a lot of pride in maintaining her appearance, which makes sense given that she used to be a model. Not a supermodel or anything, but a regional model that worked in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. She did catalog shoots and the like, stuff that appeared in newspapers. But she's also a mountain girl from eastern Kentucky. She's a miner's daughter, and knows her way around guns. Four older brothers taught her at a young age to be tough, and that toughness served her very well in dealing with photographers and agents that wanted to take advantage of her.
Of course, it's doing pretty well by her nowadays, too.
Abby is sitting here talking with me while I type. I am maintaining casual conversation with her, and I don't think that she knows I am writing about her. I don't know if any of this will interest you out there, but her actions saved lives today, and I think that deserves a little recognition. Even if it is just letting people know a little about her.
She's not dating anyone, and she says its not from lack of trying. I'm not sure how that's possible, but there you have it. She's very patient with me while I take breaks from talking to type, and she laughs a little when I look up in confusion at something she said. Hard to listen to every word when you write.
She's just finished her shift at the wall, so I think it's time for her to have an early lunch with Jess and I. Maybe the wife will try being matchmaker, I dunno. But after I let people know how her steady hand and bravery kept them safe today, I'm sure that she will get plenty of offers.
I just wonder how she managed to work the gate wheel so fast without even chipping one of those long, pink nails.
Abby: Zombie Hunter.
Ha.
'Till tomorrow.