Lyssa's Year

Watching the women washing clothes in the river the other day I began to wonder. My mind never really switches off and strangely it has gotten worse since we lost the internet. Normally I could distract myself with Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, web pages, they occupied the buzzing, humming part of my brain enough so that I could also get some work done. Now, though… it’s like cabin fever almost. There’s nothing to shut out the hum of my own brain, but I digress.

Looking at that, hearing them gossip, seeing the men burning the bodies, it struck me how rapidly we returned to structured gender roles. Just looking at the survey of who we have living here, we have a lot less men. So many men sacrificed themselves to save their wives, girlfriends, children before they got here that just the refugees we’ve taken in have skewed the numbers.

The guys are, largely, the ones building, collecting firewood, exploring. The women are largely the ones cooking, cleaning, washing. There’s exceptions of course, we have teachers because of the primary school here and they’re all women, at least the local ones. We have women doctors and a dentist that lived here before.

I saw a woman who used to be a something in banking I think, in town, carrying a washing basket on her hip, something she used to defer to a paid for cleaner. Something she used to think was beneath her. I’ve seen men as bookish as I was before – and still am really – stripped to the waist shovelling dirt or helping to butcher a deer.

Is this a slip back or is it just circumstance? Are social ideas going to fall back just like our technology is inevitably going to? Things were by no means perfect before, but this? It’s probably not worth worrying about, there are more pressing issues, but I can’t help but think about these sorts of things.

After all that drama I now feel left out. I’ve never been handy or technical, I’ve always been an ideas kind of guy and the part where you actually do anything has never been my thing. Nobody else really knows what they’re doing either, but at least they know what the parts are.

I knew I was getting in the way, so I walked the perimeter.

It’s so strange how this is the ‘new normal’. There’s women washing their family’s clothing in the river – well down from where we draw our water and frankly it’s a miracle the river’s still even running right now. Just across the earthen bank our patrolmen, who have gained a certain macho swagger, are burning the bodies of infected who tried to breach the bank last night.

People are taking their own initiative too, pulling up barbed wire, finding old stores of it and putting it up. Bringing the horses down from the stud farm to help move things around. The owner wants to take some horse-boxes out to the old farm park near town, see if any of the old work horses are still alive. She’s got this crazy idea of breeding plough horses for when the fuel runs out and I’ve heard old men in the pub talking about the canals or the railway.

The railway could be a huge boon to us, the rail runs right past the old scrapyard and there used to be a station there. We could extend the bank around there and then if we had a train we could run it, but diesel’s not going to last forever and I don’t know that the old Watercress line even still hooks up to the regular railroad.

It’s a pipe dream.

Still, people are dreaming, thinking, looking forward in time when they weren’t before. Even with death all around us and hanging over us and with the army to worry about.

That’s got to be good, right?

We’re back and we got everything we went for, and more besides. Bertha works like a treat and the road is now clear all the way up to Basingstoke. We were attacked, relentlessly, but for the most part we could simply ignore it. The infected threw themselves against the armour and just bounced off or got ground under the wheels. Only when we got swamped did we need to fight and then the air-cannon and the flamethrower made pretty short work of things.

The screaming was horrific though and it took some serious guts and determination for the driver to keep going – and we were all dependent on him as the tractor was cut off from the trailers. Fortunately, though, we were able to cut through it all and get to the industrial estate.

That part, at least, was quieter than before. There were just a few stragglers around and they were cut down pretty quickly and easily by drawing them over to the trailers.

We blocked the building off with Bertha and triple-checked the building, but they’d all moved on or died here. There were several rotting bodies here and there, perhaps the smell warded the others off. Perhaps they have that much sense or instinct left to them.

We loaded the panels, the turbines and everything else that looked useful or necessary into the rear trailer and camped out in the front one for the night. Believe me, a blood-splashed tractor trailer that used to carry pigs is not the best place to sleep. Especially with a dozen other snoring men cradling shotguns and each waking up at the slightest noise.

Come the morning we were at least a little rested and started back, but we ended up taking a detour to a small shopping centre we spotted signage for on the way back. It wasn’t much, just a little local supermarket, corner shop and a couple of other places but we knew we needed the food. The supermarket had been tapped out for the most part, tough we found a little, but there was a Chinese restaurant there too and they had sacks and sacks of rice just laying there.

Unfortunately we took too long and got cut off from the tractor. We had to hole up in the restaurant until things cleared a little, which they didn’t until we convinced the driver to do a circuit and draw the infected away. Once they were gone – or run down – we were able to move into position for when he circled back around and to gun them down before scrambling back into the wagon.

The noise just drew even more of them and that slowed us up even more, but we got back with all the gear and a bunch of food. Enough to make a real difference to us for a while and to help us hold out until the crops start to come in. At least I hope so.

They’re still not back, but I’m not going to panic yet. The council meetings have mostly been about our looming food crisis. If Bertha can make it to Basingstoke and back safely we can start sending her out, so long as the diesel holds, to visit the surrounding towns and villages for tinned food, bottled drinks and ingredients.

Cigarettes too. I’d fight off twenty infected for a single Marlboro.

Come back safe love. I don’t want to write this for you.

He’s gone again. They left this morning in Bertha as the clouds came in and it began to rain and they haven’t come back yet. They said they should be back tomorrow but when they’re away I worry.

He left his journal with me to look after again in case anything happens to him and I’ve read back a bit. I know he’ll see what I write here too.

I’m worried about you. You’ve taken on the responsibility for the whole village yourself and you’ve done a huge amount for everyone, but we have sensible people on the Parish Council now and we’ve survived this far. Not everything is your responsibility and you’re not the only person looking out for us any more. You don’t have to be suspicious of everyone and everything. Let others take the strain.

A little cooler today, a little darker. Maybe it’ll rain soon and then we can take our trip to town. Weird that such a simple thing has become such a project. Honestly, I’m still having second thoughts. I think we should, perhaps, wait until we’re sure of the military before we gather more food or electrify the village. They’re strong enough to take whatever we have so, perhaps, we shouldn’t have so much until we’re sure we can protect it.

The longer we leave things, the more likely they are to be damaged and destroyed though. Maybe with power we can find new ways to protect ourselves as well.

The attack while the army was here revealed some weaknesses in our defences which we’ve saught to fix. Where there’s weak spots we plan to put out some barbed wire and snares and while wasting more gas on flamethrowers isn’t a useful way to use our limited supplies we can run compressors off a generator and we can make more ‘shotguns’ out of bird scarers and pipes. They’ll save ammo and should give us the ability to hold off larger bands of infected and, from my point of view, allow us to give any raiders a nasty surprise. That goes for the army too.

Nothing but sunshine and blue skies as far as the eye can see.

Life goes on and the bloody army is still the topic of conversation with everyone. I have my suspicions but I can’t go outside the defences without some help and nobody is interested in putting themselves at risk just for a ‘walk in the woods’ and I don’t want to offer up my paranoid ideas as a justification, it’s costing me a lot of respect already.

Hardly anyone seems to truly agree with my suspicions about the military folks, but my insistence means we’re going to keep the precautions going and otherwise we’re just going to press on with our own survival plans as though they weren’t there.

That means taking Bertha out, the moment the weather turns in our favour and bringing power back to the village on a permanent basis.

A weather forecast would be nice. The satellites are still up there, we’ve just got no way to look at them. It’s so frustrating. So much of civilisation is still laying around and we just can’t use it, even if we do get power.

Last night, suspiciously to my eyes, we had the biggest attack we’ve had in weeks. About three in the morning when we were at our lowest ebb a bunch of screaming infected all emerged from the copse on the road to Andover and came charging down into the village. At least forty of them, probably more. If the army hadn’t been here with their night vision and SA-80s they might have gotten into the village. Our shotguns and crossbows simply can’t do enough damage quickly enough to stop that many all at once.

They piled and incinerated the bodies too, to save us the ‘work’. It is a disgusting job and nobody has many complaints about that, and who can blame them.

They’re all over the place today, talking to everyone about what they can do to help, sampling the home brew, being given gifts. Either people are suckers or I’ve become so cynical and paranoid that I can’t accept a good thing when it happens.

They did ask for some supplies, things they’re ‘short of’ back at their camp. Distilled alcohol and beer, things we actually have a decent supply of and don’t mind getting rid of.

Then they headed off, taking our scout and his family with them as ‘ambassadors’. They say they’ll be back in two weeks and I can’t help that that just gives me a feeling of dread.