Author's Note - I have hit a little bit of writer's block with The Long Road. I know exactly where I want to go with it, and it's flowing nicely, but I have so many other things going on I find myself wrapped up in other projects. I am writing this, the diary entry of one of the characters from The Long Road ( it's not a spoiler ) just to break up the monotony.

September 27th, 2009

It's been over a year now, and sometimes I still can't believe how far down the shitter the world has gone. Most of the leaves began to turn in August, so I reckon it's probably going to be an early, colder than usual winter. We're stocked up pretty well for the number of people we have. Last time a count was taken it was somewhere aroung two hundred.

Not many folks come around anymore. When all of this started happening we would get a few new residents a day. After a few weeks, that died down a lot. Then there was a period of time where we had travelers stopping by on their way from one place to the next. The last of them we saw was a man named Thomas on his way to Canada for some ignorant reason. That was three months ago.

Everything has went to hell outside of Clayton. We spent a good six months clearing out the areas around us and foraging for any thing we might be able to eat or use. Then we noticed the occasional dead-head staggering around. At first we thought they were just stragglers or that they had been trapped in houses or vehicles and somehow escaped. The men said they checked all of this out in our sweeps, but I imagined the possibility was still there.

But I was wrong. Horribly wrong. A few weeks after we started running into the rotting bastards again they started showing up in groups, and before long swarms. Two of my boys headed out for a week or so to see where they were coming from, and I'll be damned if they weren't coming from the big cities a few hours east of here. It didn't take long for our outposts in Hixson and Perry to pull back here, leaving us with no information about the world immediately outside our fences and walls.

We have given up all hope of any sort of redemption or salvation from the governments of the world. About the first week from Z-Day, as some of the young 'uns call it, the formal government communications such as press releases and interviews stopped. All we heard then was the governor of such-and-such state or the commander of the Whatever Brigade had been designated the leader of some hair-brained project or unit. After several months, even they failed to broadcast on the airwaves.

There's this one girl, though, a teenager, who still holds onto the hope that the Army will still come and save us. Anet is her name. A real sweet girl, she is. I've known her since she was knee high to a grasshopper's ass. She thinks there is a part of the country where the government still has control, and that they are functioning just like they did before all this went on. I don't have the heart to bust her bubble, though.

What she doesn't realize is that when all this started, most of our military was overseas. All your first responders such as police and EMTs we're also the first to die. It took the citizens of The United States of America about two weeks to fully accept what was going on. I reckon the government knew well ahead of that.

I know the order was given to bring all our boys home, but that is all I know. Most TV stations were knocked out later that week. I often wonder how many of them even made it back to American soil. I don't guess it matters, though. If enough of them to matter had made it back, we probably wouldn't be hiding with our heads in the sand and our asses sticking out.

We still had enough troops to make a showing, though. All the reserves, National Guardmen still state-side, and the small state militias were all federalized. The news broadcasted video clips of tank columns and airplanes, tactical nukes and high-powered machine guns. I can't help but laugh about it all now.

America and the rest of the world thought they could fight this like any other war or infection and live. Their modus operendi was to clear out an established area, be it a town, county, or whatever, and to kill and burn those deemed as infected. If only it were that easy.

This wasn't like World War II, where we could just make landfall and every inch of land we won was from then on under our control. It sure as hell wasn't like Vietnam, where we used propaganda and shock-and-awe tactice to try and bend the peoples' will.

There was one monumental thing seperating this from any other war we had ever encountered; fear. Fear is what every overt military operation plays on. Men fear being shot. Nations fear being nuked. People fear for their families safety.

But what happens when you fight an enemy that has no fear? They do not duck when someone shoots at them. They have no family for you to capture and torture or kill. They have no concept of the nuclear weapon. If you drop a bomb on them, the ones that weren't killed still move on, unaffected.

Everyone thought the tanks would be the deciding factor in the big cities. You throw a handful of them in with some infantry and the combination of fire-power and armor will give you the upper hand. Whoever came up with that idea was dumber than a box of rocks. We saw what happened on tv. It takes a good bit of time to reload the big guns, and if those things were close enough to be opened up on by the machine gun, they were already too close. Those tanks could only carry so much ammo, too. A tank shell causes a big boom, knocks a building down, kills a few people, but in the end it's all about fear. It's shock value. All it does it tell the dead-heads where you're at, and unless the tanks could retreat with the infantry, all they were after a while was a can sardines.

It didn't have to get that bad, though. If people had just used their common sense we would have been ok. In the first days, it wasn't the packs of dead-heads the police and guardsmen had to worry about. They were easily taken care of. It was the mother who locked her bitten son in the bedroom, or the psycho-lover who kept his dead girlfriend's body around hoping she will remember him when she rises. People refused to accept that their loved ones were goners, so whenever the troops moved from point A to point B, someone in point A would get bitten by the relative they were hiding and depending on how quick it spread the troops would probably find themselves surrounded.

That's all in the past though. We coulda, shoulda, and woulda done a lot of things. But I don't really have time to worry about all that. Each day the undead population around here gets a few more new neighbors. It's hard to fight an enemy where you can send fifty men against fifty dead-heads, and in a worse case scenario all your men join their ranks.

We're doing the best we can, though, and so long as we can keep food and water we can hold out pretty good. We're going to try our hands at planting potatoes tomorrow early in the morning, so I had best turn in for the night.

Sincerely,

Colonel Peter J. Merriman