- Location
- Australia
- Pronouns
- He/They
Pentagonology, would be my general suggestion. Here though, it might depend on where exactly the de-facto capital is located.
Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
- Thread starter veteranMortal
- Start date
- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
Yeah pentagonology doesn't work as well when they're defined by abandoning the east coast.
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
Irwinology
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Saratology, maybe - the study of the USS Saratoga and the Junta using her as their headquarters.
SemiSaneAuthor
TARDIS powered by Snark, Spite, and Tea!
- Location
- Sol-3, Memetic Quarantined World - For English
- Pronouns
- They/Them
By the way, I bought on kindle The Zombie Survival Guide and the first page has made me blue screen. I didn't remember this:
I mean, who uses the phrase, 'subhuman beasts,' as a thing? It's just ... yeah.
Like, these zombies used to be people. I mean dehumanising zombies can very well be a thing, but still ... That line makes me very uncomfortable.
I mean, who uses the phrase, 'subhuman beasts,' as a thing? It's just ... yeah.
Yeah, funny enough, the thing about Actual Demons is you don't need to spend much time demonizing them, so when you do, it makes me think you've got another agenda.
Home Front USA, Part 4
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Home Front USA, Part 4
Why does he keep describing how attractive the childlike women are and how childlike the attractive women are? It's a very odd choice when you are just talking about, like, a military officer?
I love the American party line on this. Simultaneously the most bald-faced lie and the most revelatory piece of information possible.
They couldn't keep their fighters in the air. Nothing eats parts like a fighter, and most of the factories in the US that could make parts for them were mostly full of ghouls at this point. Forget about anything else - the F-22 was mothballed because they became impossible to use. It is the same motivation behind the royalists grounding all their Apaches.
First of all - supremely fucked to compare having your fighter jet taken away to being forced to beat your friend's head in with a rock?
Secondly - there's a chicken and egg situation with the air force in the junta; was the air force neutered because they were politically in the cold, or was the air force politically in the cold because they were neutered?
DeStRes cut the air force because the air force couldn't stop them from cutting it, which was because they'd left half their assets outside of their own grasp.
We've had the lies, now it is time for the revelation. Do you know why you drop a bomb rather than send an infantry platoon? The bomb is more expensive; it has more or less always been more expensive. Rifles are cheap, bullets are cheap.
Leave aside matters of range here - there is a premium on human life. A pilot dropping a bomb on a swarm of ghouls is in almost no danger. An artillerist firing a GMLRS on a swarm of ghouls is in almost no danger. A tanker aiming the battle cannon of an M1 Abrams into the heart of a swarm is in almost no danger.
A soldier standing in a line with his buddies, clutching his rifle? Is in danger. Often, in fact, they will die. For a group which made such a fuss about how ill-treated the average soldier was in the pre-war military, the Junta carved away every last shield between their soldiers and the shambling horde.
The Junta's cost analysis makes absolutely no account for the lives of their soldiers being worth a bent penny.
They lost fighters because they couldn't keep them operational. They lost bombers because there was blood in the water, and navy thought they might be able to keep more of the fleet operational if they ratfucked the air force.
It worked, sorta.
Of course they dumped them in the Boneyard. I will pay any American - in good, hard Cuban Pesos, not whatever passes for the dollar these days - if even a dozen of the fighters in the boneyard still fly.
Almost all the planes there have been gutted for parts to repair the scant handful they still keep operational, and rotations to the Boneyard had a reputation in the US army for being a cushy way to supplement your salary.
I think the Americans pretend to focus on fuel as their problem in the war because they've "fixed it" with the reconquest, but between resecuring much of Alaska in that first Spring and the refineries in California and Washington, fuel was not the concern.
Their global network of trade partners is shot to hell and their own industrial memory atrophied in the war. That is why they stopped using jets and are still visibly struggling even now to rearm.
Airborne resupply sucks ass; you don't get enough through, and getting yourselves up in the air and over to your target eats up resources you'd ideally be handing over at the other end. We never did it.
Running caravans through unsecured areas is unpleasant, but served two key purposes - it breaks up swarms as they begin to conglomerate, as parts of them break off to pursue the caravan, and it maintains a regular two-way line of travel and communication between your enclaves, which is the beginning of forming a state. I was never a guard on one, but when we were prepping for Birmingham I rode desant on a truck out of Liverpool. It was fun, putting down ghouls as we cruised past.
Of course, that was once the area was relatively cleared out. The runs up to Liverpool before we cleared the harbours for shipping were fairly abominable.
I'd love to see this map. It has never been clear exactly what the Americans categorised their outposts as. I do know that at every stage they refused to acknowledge the existence of other successor states, even when they doctrinally accounted for them.
They had very few "Red Zones" of any real value, honestly - you cannot keep a factory in, I don't know, Kansas, ticking over for half a decade on a drip feed of spare parts, especially when most of those parts are meant to come from a factory in, like, North Dakota, which you didn't secure, or failing that, a factory in South Korea which the South Koreans didn't secure, because it was only for export and they didn't prioritise it.
They were able to reopen the mines, by and large. The rest they had to rebuild.
There weren't many of these.
Or, I tell a lie - as you get further east, these zones stopped looking to the government for assistance and started looking to each other. As they did this, they began organising, usually along parallel lines to those which existed as part of the state (which had been ripped out during the retreat). These lines would usually be a different sort of organisation - activist groups, marginalised communities, unions, churches.
And in those sentences you have a canned history of the rise of the Socialist Republic and the Christian States.
I understand the people in Blue Zones that remained Blue were mostly pretty happy with the type of supplies they got, but not the frequency - though I suppose that's self selecting. Zones that couldn't survive off of "SSDs" didn't survive the war to complain about their drops.
Airborne Resupply was never ideal, but they had to do it - partially because the means of their retreat and their approach to retreating meant they couldn't easily leave the Rockies in those first few crucial years, under siege from the swarms they drew out West as they were.
The main reason, though, was that a land convoy to their holdings east of the Rockies would get intercepted by a successor state - the SR and CSA were the biggest games in town, but by no means the only ones, especially in those early days. Even some of the people who'd embrace them with open arms in the reconquest weren't above piracy to get what they wanted.
It's quite funny that they drape this in virtue; they didn't, like, decide to only ship food to these enclaves when they had no other choice. To borrow his analogy - California had lots of fishing poles, but not a lot of spare fish.
A lot of enclaves collapsed; every nuclear reactor east of the Rockies was shut down because they couldn't keep them running without a steady supply of Uranium, coolant…
I don't think the Americans have been able to reactivate many of them, for a variety of largely political reasons.
It didn't take the Americans long to realise they were losing Blue Zones, and not just to ghouls. Not usually to ghouls, even - as a rule of thumb if they've not been overrun after a year, the ghouls aren't getting in. Usually they'd make contact with one of the successor states and end up aligning with them.
That was when the Americans started to put Special Forces teams in more important Blue Zones. Forget about going on the offensive, this was about keeping the boot on the neck. They weren't blind to what was happening in other countries. Our situation must've concerned them, and the Russians downright terrified them.
The Junta had a bastard of a time getting to some of their remote drops. To get to the East Coast they had to fly through the St. Louis-Colombia/Memphis-Charlotte corridor and then break north or south to get to their drop zone, whilst to get to the blue zones clinging to the Gulf Coast, they had to dip down over Mexico and then skim the coast, flying low.
I'm pretty sure I know what brought her down, just like how I know two hundred detonators don't get set to blow on the radio frequency of the plane transporting them by mistake.
The CSA was a lot more confrontational than the Socialist Republic of the Great Lakes, was on the offensive more or less constantly, and they had a lot of sympathisers west of the Rockies willing to "inadvertently" blow a plane into a fine mist for money or salvation.
Those blue pills sell at a premium, now. People will pay dealers an awful lot for such cleanly produced meth. I don't know why they didn't just use amphetamines; people argue they wanted their pilots addicted, but I think meth was just cheaper.
And sure, they don't "hamper your judgement" when you're off your face tweaking. I will say - they saved her life.
They flew too high, got bipped on CSA radar and some sociopath blew the tail off their Hercules with a SAM.
The CSA adored doing this shit. The SRGL was a lot more restrained; get picked up on CSA radar and you'll find out when you pick up a missile. Get picked up by the SRGL over their airspace and you'll find out when someone gets on the radio and redirects you to O'Hare and relieves you of your cargo.
I'm not super interested in defending the morality of doing that - we were never in a position where there were statistically significant supply runs over our territory, so never faced the issue, whilst they were.
Survivors of their missile command swear blind it was only over their airspace, not their entire radar envelop, so, like, you tell me the ethics here, I guess.
The CSA filled those swamps with Junta planes, and I can't tell you why beyond flexing their muscles? It's not like the supplies could be salvaged.
I expect the blast killed the rest of the crew. I hope so, anyway; if they were just unconscious, they either died on impact or… didn't.
The Junta made such unbelievably fragile radios, also - my girl says her unit's radio operator would go through 3 or 4 a month, and they were just walking with it.
Why do you need to test with actual ghouls? Why didn't they at least muzzle them? They can't have muzzled them if they were in danger of dying.
They still do this, apparently. Every officer cadet in their army, navy and air force has to go through this ridiculous gauntlet to ensure they are "prepared for Zack".
Misogyny in the US Military at this time was odd, because it existed - it still exists, obviously, but they've stamped down hard - in this strange sort of quantum state where it was tolerated for other troops, other cadets and instructors to give shit to female cadets and to a lesser extent women in their first few years in the service, to "weed out" the weak, and this only stopped once they got high enough in rank as to be insulated…
But if you weren't in the military, any soldier was effectively considered above reproach.
So a Sergeant, say, would be condescended to by her senior officers and questioned by the privates under her, but if a civilian talked back to her, he'd lose his teeth from those same privates, or be threatened with a sedition arrest by those selfsame officers…
My wife says it was unbearably restrictive - even where it was good, it was still that you were being "protected" by other soldiers. By my understanding, the conceit that all soldiers were above civilians, and therefore that a female soldier has the right to beat or arrest a civilian for disrespecting her, without needing intercession from a male soldier, is now more solid.
I don't know what the internal culture is like - my information about the state of their military internally is 13 years out of date - but from the outside, a lot of the New Clique and their most prominent underlings are women so, like, maybe they've achieved their enlightened military egalitarianism.
That'll be the meth combining with the adrenaline to start leaving her a little away with the fairies.
Birds are pretty good warning for when ghouls are nearby - I knew a dude who swore blind he'd gotten from Warwick Castle to Manchester just using his falcons as a warning system.
Okay, I've been ignoring footnotes so far, but this one requires engaging with - "[5] At this point in the war, the new Battle Dress Uniforms (BDUs) were not yet in mass production."
I'm not a pilot, but replacing a Nomex flight suit with a Kevlar-Poly Blend infantry uniform does not, to me, scream "what a good idea" - instead it mostly just screams things like "it has grafted to my skin," "My fucking flight suit melted" and "oh god, the burns".
This is the meth. She's shaky, panicking, filled with self loathing. America fucked over their pilots really pretty badly, riding them into the dirt and then dosing them to the eyeballs and sending them out again. They had an almost 10% attrition rate on missions which shouldn't have involved encountering an enemy. Either the CSA shot down more than I thought, or hopping pilots on meth in lieu of letting them sleep was unwise.
Did the American Junta ever adequately explain why they never just… reactivated some Air Traffic Control towers to guide their planes in? Like, Baton Rouge or Lafayette were probably too small to have a "full" Air Traffic Control Centre,, but every airport's got a tower, every tower's got a radio…
Like, I get that the planes have to fly mostly dark to avoid… this? But they could've at least told them a plane would be going overhead - I'm sure if they were looking they could've seen it go down? There's 50 miles between the two cities and it is flat swampland.
But they weren't told, so they weren't looking.
Part of the Junta's calculation is that looking for their pilots when they go down is an inefficiency - their official view is that the odds of surviving the crash are so long that when a plane fails to arrive they mark the crew as MIA - no search and rescue is attempted until or unless one of the barely sanctioned Skywatchers calls in that they've got contact with survivors on the ground. Try your best not to think about how many pilots died waiting for rescue that wasn't coming.
Even still, the cost of printing multiple maps along her route shouldn't have been beyond their capacity.
She was lucky to ditch this far south. Much further north, she's out of range of the naval guns in the Gulf and the CSA S&R would've snatched her.
A white dude pilot could usually fast talk his way into having realised the error of his ways and become a pilot for the CSA. White female pilots like Christina here would end up married off to some southern Good Ole Boy to teach her her place in the world. Anyone else would probably have used their sidearm to kill themselves before the CSA could reach them.
That's another thing - the American radios used such corroded batteries they could barely hold charge.
Some of this is their general contempt for stuff that does not directly kill the enemy, some of it is their callous calculation that pilots won't survive a crash, but most of it is a terrible lack of capacity. Lithium was hard to come by for America, at least until they got Chile to start mining and shipping it again.
On that note - batteries in America are about to get real pricy and real shit again, so buckle up.
I'm about to unleash some patented "unsubstantiated musings" - the risk of this was always overstated. They'll moan, so the claim goes, and attract more zombies. But you can't hear shit through a car window. Motorway travel was never that dangerous, and I can't imagine some tiny road through a Louisiana swamp would be much worse. She probably drew more by splashing through the wetland.
There's enough stories of America's various unmaintained elevated highways coming down during their reconquest that I find myself somewhat doubtful. Tell me it's because they were damaged by fire from burning out trucks all you like - how do you know the I-10 wasn't? And how do you know it was built right? Look at the Royalists' moronic armoured motorways!
I didn't see many big critters like that until London; the ghouls ate the wildlife in most of the zoos and safari parks, and what they couldn't eat took sick; the wolf pack at Longleat were almost dead from that virus the ghouls generate - they have to bite to fight, right? - when someone found them. Vets had to work overtime to save enough to maintain pack cohesion.
The hippo in London Zoo, that was what scared me, though. A ton and a half of muscle, fat and bone, and it'd been overwhelmed. There were dozens of broken ghouls around it, but they'd crushed it under weight of numbers, eaten the whole thing. Poor brave brute.
They rot slow, but they do rot, especially somewhere hot and wet, like Louisiana.
Not so much in the British South West. They'll be slouching around intact on the Scilly Isles until someone pulls their finger out and sends troops out there.
Idiot. I know that's unfair; this is a weirdly common issue even in trained soldiers. A suppressor reduces how loud a gunshot is, yes. It reduces muzzle flash, sparing your eyes, yes. It protects your ears from the sound of the gunshot, yes.
It makes a gunshot quieter than a hand splashing in water? No.
We weren't issued suppressors for "stealth" - you got a suppressor if you were going to be unable to shield your ears or eyes. Otherwise you'll feel tempted to do something like this.
Lafayette and Baton Rouge eventually got themselves enough breathing room to push out - they cleared the I-10 about 3 years in, started clearing the swampland, established a stable enough and large enough "Blue Zone" that they could start to hold elections.
By the time the Junta reached them, Louisiana had its own state government back up and running as a multi-party democracy, completely ready to rejoin the United States of America. The Junta appointed a military governor with sweeping powers for the duration of their war with what was left of the CSA, and to coordinate the reclamation of New Orleans from the dead, which was accepted as necessity.
The military governor remained in power until about three years after the war, and in that time, Louisiana's democracy was subsumed into the broader American system, through a combination of inertia, corruption and outright malfeasance on the part of the federal government. They had a democracy in their state and the federal government smothered it with a pillow.
There's a lot of anger in Louisiana about that. Lot of anger all over America about things like that.
I might start skimming, hope that's alright with everyone.
She finds an SUV in the swamp full of civilian prepper shit; a guy drove it into the swamp, got stuck and shot himself.
I don't want to, like, armchair psychiatrist this, but she isn't talking about the guy in the car, here. It is manifestly obvious why a man sitting in an SUV stuck in a swamp would shoot himself.
I remember looking at a body hanging from our service station's bridge, thinking similarly about how they'd just given up. Whenever you start wondering why someone gave up, about how easy it was to give up? You're wondering about giving up.
At least, I was.
Not a chance a car works after marinating in a Louisiana swamp for over a year. She wanted to salvage the SUV because she wanted it to matter, wanted the man having given up to not be nothing but loss and waste.
See, when I felt this sort of way, it was because I had undiagnosed and untreated depression. She was feeling this sort of way on account of being on meth.
She kills a bunch of ghouls, turns her brain off for a minute and drops into fighter pilot sicko mode, and that puts her in a better mindset.
No one really likes to talk about it, but there's something undeniable about the power you feel like you have when you put a whole bunch of ghouls in the dirt. The first time I ever had a gun - an ugly SIG 9mm I took from the belt of a police officer rotting on one of their barricades in Oxford once I was alone - I put down four ghouls and very nearly blew out my own eardrum. Made me laugh until I cried.
Another footnote - [6] - "Baby-Ls": Officially a pain reliever but used by many military personnel as a sleep aid. - opiates.
I can't say I'm terribly surprised she went over her dose, any more than I'd be surprised if she took another one of her "tweeks" when she woke up the next morning - mixing heroin and meth is apparently rather pleasant.
I knew a lot of people who treated opiates like tic-tacs in the war, and that was without being in a military which handed out little baggies of them.
I guess they smelt her? I'm not sure. Maybe the shooting she did earlier attracted some attention?
I used to sleep like the dead as a kid, but now the slightest noise rouses me. It isn't the worst possible trauma response I could've picked up, even if I do end up tired. Better than sleeping through, I think.
I picked it up later than it would've been useful. Waking up in a hotel room and seeing a ghoul's pallid grey hand scrabbling uselessly at the chain across the door is a pretty singularly awful experience, and I had it more than once. I only got into the habit of light sleeping once I was in the Guards. Not even in basic; only once on deployment. Anglesey left a mark.
Getting up on the elevated Highway when pursued by ghouls means that unless your rescue helicopter happens to already be in the area, you're just running onto an enclosed platform with no way out, pursued by a swarm. That's how people die.
There's literally no way a person is getting onto a freeway without a ghoul being able to follow. They're just not safe.
We retain a monkey brain assumption that High=Safe, but if the only way to get there is a gentle slope, you'll just end up leading the swarm up after you.
People do this a lot. Conjure up "better" ways they could've acted in life-or-death situations, if it weren't for this or that or the other. It's a coping mechanism.
In reality, clambering over rusting and wrecked cars - masses of twisted metal and uneven heights - would've been slower and more dangerous.
One of the symptoms of abuse of drugs like meth or amphetamines is auditory hallucination. In her case, these hallucinations took the form of a voice for her better judgement, and saved her fucking life.
Substance abuse under the junta is fascinating, and someone should write a book on it. The airforce are all on meth, the navy drinks and the army does whatever they can get their hands on.
There's not a real appetite to change any of this, even in the New Clique, so it isn't going anywhere.
Lucky, lucky girl.
Lafayette and Baton Rouge had four helicopters between them, and kept them flying through trade into the Gulf; they never traded directly with Cuba or anyone, but they traded with ships that traded with Cuba, so it's a little moot.
They talk a lot after this about her "Skywatcher" - Christina insists she was real, probably a Marine or Navy pilot.
So far as it goes, they didn't section 8 her because there wasn't any reason to believe she was crazy as opposed to just tweaking and sleep deprived.
This is such an incredibly long section that doesn't really… say very much? Sorry about it.
Next time I finally get to go insane, because he interviews a bloodless royalist creep, so I get to talk about Britain.
Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE]; the women out of the Bratsk camps have started arriving, and… they really need the funds urgently.
Donate to the Lakota [HERE] - they're trying to rebuild as well as they can.
Donate to drug relief for veterans from the masterlist [HERE] - there's a bunch of charities in a bunch of countries, for veterans from a bunch of countries. Pick your favourite.
AN: This is such a long interview, jeez.
Anyway, next up is the British interviewee, who I hate. This sort of bumbling "Oh golly gosh, I'm just such an awkward geeky British man who loves the monarchy" schtick is, like… can we just skip to the bit where you call me a slur? Very familiar sort of pseudofash tory.
Article: PARNELL AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, TENNESSEE
[Gavin Blaire escorts me to the office of his squadron commander, Colonel Christina Eliopolis. As much a legend for her temper as for her outstanding war record, it is difficult to see how so much intensity can be compacted into her diminutive, almost childlike frame. Her long black bangs and delicate facial features only reinforce the picture of eternal youth. Then she removes her sunglasses, and I see the fire behind her eyes.]
Why does he keep describing how attractive the childlike women are and how childlike the attractive women are? It's a very odd choice when you are just talking about, like, a military officer?
Article: I was a Raptor driver, the FA-22. It was, hands down, the best air superiority platform ever built. It could outfly and outfight God and all his angels. It was a monument to American technical prowess . . . and in this war, that prowess counted for shit.
I love the American party line on this. Simultaneously the most bald-faced lie and the most revelatory piece of information possible.
Article: That must have been frustrating.
Frustrating? Do you know what it feels like to suddenly be told that the one goal you've worked toward your whole life, that you've sacrificed and suffered for, that's pushed you beyond limits you never knew you had is now considered "strategically invalid"?
They couldn't keep their fighters in the air. Nothing eats parts like a fighter, and most of the factories in the US that could make parts for them were mostly full of ghouls at this point. Forget about anything else - the F-22 was mothballed because they became impossible to use. It is the same motivation behind the royalists grounding all their Apaches.
Article: Would you say this was a common feeling?
Let me put it this way; the Russian army wasn't the only service to be decimated by their own government. The Armed Forces Reconstruction Act basically neutered the air force. Some DeStRes "experts" had determined that our resource-to-kill ratio, our RKR, was the most lopsided of all the branches.
First of all - supremely fucked to compare having your fighter jet taken away to being forced to beat your friend's head in with a rock?
Secondly - there's a chicken and egg situation with the air force in the junta; was the air force neutered because they were politically in the cold, or was the air force politically in the cold because they were neutered?
DeStRes cut the air force because the air force couldn't stop them from cutting it, which was because they'd left half their assets outside of their own grasp.
Article: It had been considered a triumph, until Yonkers. Now we were told that the price of one JSOW kit—the materials, manpower, time, and energy, not to mention the fuel and ground maintenance needed for the delivery aircraft—could pay for a platoon of infantry pukes who could smoke a thousand times as many Gs.
We've had the lies, now it is time for the revelation. Do you know why you drop a bomb rather than send an infantry platoon? The bomb is more expensive; it has more or less always been more expensive. Rifles are cheap, bullets are cheap.
Leave aside matters of range here - there is a premium on human life. A pilot dropping a bomb on a swarm of ghouls is in almost no danger. An artillerist firing a GMLRS on a swarm of ghouls is in almost no danger. A tanker aiming the battle cannon of an M1 Abrams into the heart of a swarm is in almost no danger.
A soldier standing in a line with his buddies, clutching his rifle? Is in danger. Often, in fact, they will die. For a group which made such a fuss about how ill-treated the average soldier was in the pre-war military, the Junta carved away every last shield between their soldiers and the shambling horde.
The Junta's cost analysis makes absolutely no account for the lives of their soldiers being worth a bent penny.
Article: They went through us like an industrial laser. The B-2 Spirits, gone; the B-1 Lancers, gone; even the old BUFFs, the B-52 Big Ugly Fat Fellows, gone. Throw in the Eagles, the Falcons, the Tomcats, Hornets, JSFs, and Raptors, and you have more combat aircraft lost to the stroke of a pen than to all the SAMs, Flak, and enemy fighters in history.
They lost fighters because they couldn't keep them operational. They lost bombers because there was blood in the water, and navy thought they might be able to keep more of the fleet operational if they ratfucked the air force.
It worked, sorta.
Article: At least the assets weren't scrapped, thank God, just mothballed in warehouses or that big desert graveyard at AMARC. "Long-term investment," they called it. That's the one thing you can always depend on; as we're fighting one war, we're always preparing for the next one.
Of course they dumped them in the Boneyard. I will pay any American - in good, hard Cuban Pesos, not whatever passes for the dollar these days - if even a dozen of the fighters in the boneyard still fly.
Almost all the planes there have been gutted for parts to repair the scant handful they still keep operational, and rotations to the Boneyard had a reputation in the US army for being a cushy way to supplement your salary.
Article: Our airlift capacity, at least the organization, was almost left intact.
Almost?
The Globemasters had to go, so did anything else powered by a "gas guzzling" jet. That left us with prop-powered aircraft. I went from flying the closest thing to an X-Wing fighter, to the next best thing to a U-Haul.
I think the Americans pretend to focus on fuel as their problem in the war because they've "fixed it" with the reconquest, but between resecuring much of Alaska in that first Spring and the refineries in California and Washington, fuel was not the concern.
Their global network of trade partners is shot to hell and their own industrial memory atrophied in the war. That is why they stopped using jets and are still visibly struggling even now to rearm.
Article: Was that the main mission of the air force?
Airborne resupply was our primary objective, the only one that really counted anymore.
Airborne resupply sucks ass; you don't get enough through, and getting yourselves up in the air and over to your target eats up resources you'd ideally be handing over at the other end. We never did it.
Running caravans through unsecured areas is unpleasant, but served two key purposes - it breaks up swarms as they begin to conglomerate, as parts of them break off to pursue the caravan, and it maintains a regular two-way line of travel and communication between your enclaves, which is the beginning of forming a state. I was never a guard on one, but when we were prepping for Birmingham I rode desant on a truck out of Liverpool. It was fun, putting down ghouls as we cruised past.
Of course, that was once the area was relatively cleared out. The runs up to Liverpool before we cleared the harbours for shipping were fairly abominable.
Article: [She points to a yellowed map on the wall.]
The base commander let me keep it, after what happened to me.
[The map is of the wartime continental United States. All land west of the Rockies is shadowed a light gray. Amongst this gray are a variety of colored circles.]
I'd love to see this map. It has never been clear exactly what the Americans categorised their outposts as. I do know that at every stage they refused to acknowledge the existence of other successor states, even when they doctrinally accounted for them.
Article: Islands in the Sea of Zack. Green denotes active military facilities. Some of them had been converted into refugee centers. Some were still contributing to the war effort. Some were well defended but had no strategic impact.
The Red Zones were labeled "Offensively Viable": factories, mines, power plants. The army'd left custodial teams during the big pullback. Their job was to guard and maintain these facilities for a time when, if, we could add them to the overall war effort.
They had very few "Red Zones" of any real value, honestly - you cannot keep a factory in, I don't know, Kansas, ticking over for half a decade on a drip feed of spare parts, especially when most of those parts are meant to come from a factory in, like, North Dakota, which you didn't secure, or failing that, a factory in South Korea which the South Koreans didn't secure, because it was only for export and they didn't prioritise it.
They were able to reopen the mines, by and large. The rest they had to rebuild.
Article: The Blue Zones were civilian areas where people had managed to make a stand, carve out a little piece of real estate, and figure some way to live within its boundaries. All these zones were in need of resupply and that's what the "Continental Airlift" was all about.
There weren't many of these.
Or, I tell a lie - as you get further east, these zones stopped looking to the government for assistance and started looking to each other. As they did this, they began organising, usually along parallel lines to those which existed as part of the state (which had been ripped out during the retreat). These lines would usually be a different sort of organisation - activist groups, marginalised communities, unions, churches.
And in those sentences you have a canned history of the rise of the Socialist Republic and the Christian States.
Article: It was a massive operation, not just in terms of aircraft and fuel, but organization as well. Remaining in contact with all these islands, processing their demands, coordinating with DeStRes, then trying to procure and prioritize all the materiel for each drop made it the statistically largest undertaking in air force history.
We tried to stay away from consumables, things like food and medicine that required regular deliveries. These were classified as DDs, dependency drops, and they got a backseat to SSDs, self-sustaining drops, like tools, spare parts, and tools to make spare parts.
I understand the people in Blue Zones that remained Blue were mostly pretty happy with the type of supplies they got, but not the frequency - though I suppose that's self selecting. Zones that couldn't survive off of "SSDs" didn't survive the war to complain about their drops.
Airborne Resupply was never ideal, but they had to do it - partially because the means of their retreat and their approach to retreating meant they couldn't easily leave the Rockies in those first few crucial years, under siege from the swarms they drew out West as they were.
The main reason, though, was that a land convoy to their holdings east of the Rockies would get intercepted by a successor state - the SR and CSA were the biggest games in town, but by no means the only ones, especially in those early days. Even some of the people who'd embrace them with open arms in the reconquest weren't above piracy to get what they wanted.
Article: "They don't need fish," Sinclair used to say, "they need fishing poles." Still, every autumn, we dropped a lot of fish, and wheat, and salt, and dried vegetables and baby formula…Winters were hard. Remember how long they used to be? Helping people to help themselves is great in theory, but you still gotta keep 'em alive.
It's quite funny that they drape this in virtue; they didn't, like, decide to only ship food to these enclaves when they had no other choice. To borrow his analogy - California had lots of fishing poles, but not a lot of spare fish.
A lot of enclaves collapsed; every nuclear reactor east of the Rockies was shut down because they couldn't keep them running without a steady supply of Uranium, coolant…
I don't think the Americans have been able to reactivate many of them, for a variety of largely political reasons.
Article: Sometimes you had to drop in people, specialists like doctors or engineers, people with the kind of training you just can't get from a how-to manual. The Blue Zones got a lot of Special Forces instructors, not only to teach them how better to defend themselves, but to prepare them for the day they might have to go on the offensive. I have a lot of respect for those guys.
It didn't take the Americans long to realise they were losing Blue Zones, and not just to ghouls. Not usually to ghouls, even - as a rule of thumb if they've not been overrun after a year, the ghouls aren't getting in. Usually they'd make contact with one of the successor states and end up aligning with them.
That was when the Americans started to put Special Forces teams in more important Blue Zones. Forget about going on the offensive, this was about keeping the boot on the neck. They weren't blind to what was happening in other countries. Our situation must've concerned them, and the Russians downright terrified them.
Article: That goes for the pilots as well.
Hey, I'm not minimizing our risks at all. Every day we had to fly over hundreds, in some cases thousands, of miles of infested territory. That's why we had Purple Zones. [She refers to the last color on the map. The purple circles are few and far between.] We set these up as refuel and repair facilities. A lot of the aircraft didn't have the range to reach remote drop zones on the East Coast if in-flight refueling assets weren't available. They helped reduce the number of ships and crews lost en route. They brought our fleet survivability up to 92 percent. Unfortunately, I was part of the other eight.
The Junta had a bastard of a time getting to some of their remote drops. To get to the East Coast they had to fly through the St. Louis-Colombia/Memphis-Charlotte corridor and then break north or south to get to their drop zone, whilst to get to the blue zones clinging to the Gulf Coast, they had to dip down over Mexico and then skim the coast, flying low.
Article: I'll never be sure what exactly brought us down: mechanical malfunction or metal fatigue combined with weather. It might have been the contents of our payload, mislabeled or mishandled. That happened a lot more than anyone wanted to think about. Sometimes if hazardous materials weren't packaged properly, or, God forbid, some shit-for-brains QC inspector let his people assemble their detonators before crating them for travel…that happened to a buddy of mine, just a routine flight from Palmdale to Vandenberg, not even across an infested area. Two hundred Type 38 detonators, all fully assembled with their power cells accidentally running, all set to blow on the same freq as our radio.
I'm pretty sure I know what brought her down, just like how I know two hundred detonators don't get set to blow on the radio frequency of the plane transporting them by mistake.
The CSA was a lot more confrontational than the Socialist Republic of the Great Lakes, was on the offensive more or less constantly, and they had a lot of sympathisers west of the Rockies willing to "inadvertently" blow a plane into a fine mist for money or salvation.
Article: [She snaps her fingers.]
That could have been us. We were on a hop from Phoenix to the Blue Zone outside Tallahassee, Florida. It was late October, almost full winter back then. Honolulu was trying to squeeze out just a few more drops before the weather socked us in till March. It was our ninth haul that week. We were all on "tweeks," these little blue stims that kept you going without hampering your reflexes or judgment. I guess they worked well enough, but they made me have to piss my kidneys out every twenty minutes.
Those blue pills sell at a premium, now. People will pay dealers an awful lot for such cleanly produced meth. I don't know why they didn't just use amphetamines; people argue they wanted their pilots addicted, but I think meth was just cheaper.
And sure, they don't "hamper your judgement" when you're off your face tweaking. I will say - they saved her life.
Article: I'd just zipped up when suddenly there was this massive jolt like God had just drop-kicked our tail…and suddenly our nose was dipping. The head on our C-130 wasn't even really a toilet, just a portable chempot with a heavy, plastic shower curtain. That's probably what ended up saving my life. If I'd been trapped in a real compartment, maybe knocked out or unable to reach the latch…Suddenly there was this screech, this overpowering blast of high-pressure air and I was sucked out right through the rear of the aircraft, right past where the tail should have been.
They flew too high, got bipped on CSA radar and some sociopath blew the tail off their Hercules with a SAM.
The CSA adored doing this shit. The SRGL was a lot more restrained; get picked up on CSA radar and you'll find out when you pick up a missile. Get picked up by the SRGL over their airspace and you'll find out when someone gets on the radio and redirects you to O'Hare and relieves you of your cargo.
I'm not super interested in defending the morality of doing that - we were never in a position where there were statistically significant supply runs over our territory, so never faced the issue, whilst they were.
Survivors of their missile command swear blind it was only over their airspace, not their entire radar envelop, so, like, you tell me the ethics here, I guess.
Article: That was the worst moment, right there, just hanging helplessly. I could see the other chute, above and north of me by about three and a half clicks. I looked for the others. I tried my radio again, but wasn't able to get a signal. I figured it had been damaged during my "exit." I tried to get my bearings, somewhere over southern Louisiana, a swampy wilderness that seemed to have no end.
The CSA filled those swamps with Junta planes, and I can't tell you why beyond flexing their muscles? It's not like the supplies could be salvaged.
I expect the blast killed the rest of the crew. I hope so, anyway; if they were just unconscious, they either died on impact or… didn't.
The Junta made such unbelievably fragile radios, also - my girl says her unit's radio operator would go through 3 or 4 a month, and they were just walking with it.
Article: Did the air force prepare you for situations like these?
We all had to pass the Willow Creek Escape and Evade program in the Klamath Mountains in California. It even had a few real Gs in there with us, tagged and tracked and placed at specific marks to give us the "real feel." It's a lot like what they teach you in the civilian manual: movement, stealth, how to take out Zack before he can howl your position. We all "made it," lived, I mean, although a couple of pilots washed out on a Section Eight.
Why do you need to test with actual ghouls? Why didn't they at least muzzle them? They can't have muzzled them if they were in danger of dying.
They still do this, apparently. Every officer cadet in their army, navy and air force has to go through this ridiculous gauntlet to ensure they are "prepared for Zack".
Article: You wanna talk about being alone in a hostile environment, try my four years at Colorado Springs.
But there were other women…
Other cadets, other competitors who happen to have the same genitalia. Trust me, when the pressure kicked in, sisterhood punched out. No, it was me, only me. Self-contained, self-reliant, and always, unquestionably self-assured.
Misogyny in the US Military at this time was odd, because it existed - it still exists, obviously, but they've stamped down hard - in this strange sort of quantum state where it was tolerated for other troops, other cadets and instructors to give shit to female cadets and to a lesser extent women in their first few years in the service, to "weed out" the weak, and this only stopped once they got high enough in rank as to be insulated…
But if you weren't in the military, any soldier was effectively considered above reproach.
So a Sergeant, say, would be condescended to by her senior officers and questioned by the privates under her, but if a civilian talked back to her, he'd lose his teeth from those same privates, or be threatened with a sedition arrest by those selfsame officers…
My wife says it was unbearably restrictive - even where it was good, it was still that you were being "protected" by other soldiers. By my understanding, the conceit that all soldiers were above civilians, and therefore that a female soldier has the right to beat or arrest a civilian for disrespecting her, without needing intercession from a male soldier, is now more solid.
I don't know what the internal culture is like - my information about the state of their military internally is 13 years out of date - but from the outside, a lot of the New Clique and their most prominent underlings are women so, like, maybe they've achieved their enlightened military egalitarianism.
Article: I unclasped my chute—they teach you not to waste time concealing it—and headed in the direction of the other chute. It took me a couple hours, splashing through this cold slime that numbed everything below my knees. I wasn't thinking clearly, my head was still spinning. No excuse, I know, but that's why I didn't notice that the birds had suddenly beat it in the opposite direction.
That'll be the meth combining with the adrenaline to start leaving her a little away with the fairies.
Birds are pretty good warning for when ghouls are nearby - I knew a dude who swore blind he'd gotten from Warwick Castle to Manchester just using his falcons as a warning system.
Article: I did hear the scream though, faint and far away. I could see the chute tangled in the trees. I started running, another no-no, making all that noise without stopping to listen for Zack. I couldn't see anything, just all these naked gray branches until they were right on top of me. If it wasn't for Rollins, my copilot, I'm sure I'da been a goner.
I found him dangling from his harness, dead, twitching. His flight suit had been torn open[5] and his entrails were hanging…draped over five of them as they fed in this cloud of red-brown water.
Okay, I've been ignoring footnotes so far, but this one requires engaging with - "[5] At this point in the war, the new Battle Dress Uniforms (BDUs) were not yet in mass production."
I'm not a pilot, but replacing a Nomex flight suit with a Kevlar-Poly Blend infantry uniform does not, to me, scream "what a good idea" - instead it mostly just screams things like "it has grafted to my skin," "My fucking flight suit melted" and "oh god, the burns".
Article: I found myself burning up, mentally. Fucking weakling, I told myself, f**king loser. I started to spiral, not just hating myself, but hating myself for hating myself. Does that make any sense? I'm sure I might have just stayed there, shaking and helpless and waiting for Zack.
But then my radio started squawking. "Hello? Hello? Is anyone out there? Anyone punch outta that wreck?" It was a woman's voice, clearly civilian by her language and tone.
This is the meth. She's shaky, panicking, filled with self loathing. America fucked over their pilots really pretty badly, riding them into the dirt and then dosing them to the eyeballs and sending them out again. They had an almost 10% attrition rate on missions which shouldn't have involved encountering an enemy. Either the CSA shot down more than I thought, or hopping pilots on meth in lieu of letting them sleep was unwise.
Article: I answered immediately, identified myself, and demanded that she respond in kind. She told me she was a skywatcher, and her handle was "Mets Fan," or just "Mets" for short. The Skywatch system was this ad hoc network of isolated ham radio operators. They were supposed to report on downed aircrews and do what they could to help with their rescue.
Did the American Junta ever adequately explain why they never just… reactivated some Air Traffic Control towers to guide their planes in? Like, Baton Rouge or Lafayette were probably too small to have a "full" Air Traffic Control Centre,, but every airport's got a tower, every tower's got a radio…
Like, I get that the planes have to fly mostly dark to avoid… this? But they could've at least told them a plane would be going overhead - I'm sure if they were looking they could've seen it go down? There's 50 miles between the two cities and it is flat swampland.
But they weren't told, so they weren't looking.
Article: I reached for my GPS but it had been torn from my suit when I was sucked out of my ship. I had a backup survival map, but it was so big, so unspecific, and my hump took me over so many states that it was practically just a map of the U.S.…my head was still clouded with anger and doubt. I told her I didn't know my position, didn't know where to go…
She laughed. "You mean you've never made this run before? You don't have every inch of it committed to memory? You didn't see where you were as you were hanging by the silk?"
Part of the Junta's calculation is that looking for their pilots when they go down is an inefficiency - their official view is that the odds of surviving the crash are so long that when a plane fails to arrive they mark the crew as MIA - no search and rescue is attempted until or unless one of the barely sanctioned Skywatchers calls in that they've got contact with survivors on the ground. Try your best not to think about how many pilots died waiting for rescue that wasn't coming.
Even still, the cost of printing multiple maps along her route shouldn't have been beyond their capacity.
Article: I checked on the map and realized that directly north of me was the I-10 freeway. Mets told me that was the best place for an S&R pickup. She told me it shouldn't take any longer than a day or two at best if I got a move on and stopped burning daylight.
She was lucky to ditch this far south. Much further north, she's out of range of the naval guns in the Gulf and the CSA S&R would've snatched her.
A white dude pilot could usually fast talk his way into having realised the error of his ways and become a pilot for the CSA. White female pilots like Christina here would end up married off to some southern Good Ole Boy to teach her her place in the world. Anyone else would probably have used their sidearm to kill themselves before the CSA could reach them.
Article: She said, "Stay alive, stay alive and do your job." Then she added, "And stop using up your weekend minutes."
She was talking about battery power—she didn't miss a trick—so I signed off and started moving north across the swamp.
That's another thing - the American radios used such corroded batteries they could barely hold charge.
Some of this is their general contempt for stuff that does not directly kill the enemy, some of it is their callous calculation that pilots won't survive a crash, but most of it is a terrible lack of capacity. Lithium was hard to come by for America, at least until they got Chile to start mining and shipping it again.
On that note - batteries in America are about to get real pricy and real shit again, so buckle up.
Article: She warned me to stay off it and every other road that crisscrossed the basin. "Roads mean cars," she said, "and cars mean Gs." She was talking about any bitten human drivers who died of their wounds while still behind the wheel and, because a ghoul doesn't have the IQ points to open a door or unbuckle a seatbelt, would be doomed to spend the rest of their existence trapped in their cars.
I'm about to unleash some patented "unsubstantiated musings" - the risk of this was always overstated. They'll moan, so the claim goes, and attract more zombies. But you can't hear shit through a car window. Motorway travel was never that dangerous, and I can't imagine some tiny road through a Louisiana swamp would be much worse. She probably drew more by splashing through the wetland.
Article: She said, "You'll be up above the swamp. How are more zombies gonna get to you?" Because it was built several stories above the swamp, this section of the I-10 was the safest place in the whole basin.
There's enough stories of America's various unmaintained elevated highways coming down during their reconquest that I find myself somewhat doubtful. Tell me it's because they were damaged by fire from burning out trucks all you like - how do you know the I-10 wasn't? And how do you know it was built right? Look at the Royalists' moronic armoured motorways!
Article: I saw a lot of bones on the patches of raised mud. I couldn't tell if they were human or animal. One time I found this rib cage; I'm guessing it was a gator, a big one. I didn't want to think about how many Gs it took to bring that bastard down.
I didn't see many big critters like that until London; the ghouls ate the wildlife in most of the zoos and safari parks, and what they couldn't eat took sick; the wolf pack at Longleat were almost dead from that virus the ghouls generate - they have to bite to fight, right? - when someone found them. Vets had to work overtime to save enough to maintain pack cohesion.
The hippo in London Zoo, that was what scared me, though. A ton and a half of muscle, fat and bone, and it'd been overwhelmed. There were dozens of broken ghouls around it, but they'd crushed it under weight of numbers, eaten the whole thing. Poor brave brute.
Article: The first G I saw was small, probably a kid, I couldn't tell. Its face was eaten off, the skin, nose, eyes, lips, even the hair and ears . . . not completely gone, but partially hanging or stuck in patches to the exposed skull.
They rot slow, but they do rot, especially somewhere hot and wet, like Louisiana.
Not so much in the British South West. They'll be slouching around intact on the Scilly Isles until someone pulls their finger out and sends troops out there.
Article: It couldn't moan, its throat had been too badly mangled, but the splashing might have attracted attention, so I put it out of its misery, if it really was miserable, and tried not to think about it. That was another thing they taught us at Willow Creek: don't write their eulogy, don't try to imagine who they used to be, how they came to be here, how they came to be this.
Idiot. I know that's unfair; this is a weirdly common issue even in trained soldiers. A suppressor reduces how loud a gunshot is, yes. It reduces muzzle flash, sparing your eyes, yes. It protects your ears from the sound of the gunshot, yes.
It makes a gunshot quieter than a hand splashing in water? No.
We weren't issued suppressors for "stealth" - you got a suppressor if you were going to be unable to shield your ears or eyes. Otherwise you'll feel tempted to do something like this.
Article: I found myself wondering why it had been the only one I'd seen.
That was a practical survival question, not just idle musings, so I got on the radio and asked Mets if there was something I was missing here, if maybe there was some area I should be careful to avoid. She reminded me that this area was, for the most part, depopulated because the Blue Zones of Baton Rouge and Lafayette were pulling most of the Gs in either direction. That was bittersweet comfort, being right between two of the heaviest clusters for miles. She laughed, again…"Don't worry about it, you'll be fine."
Lafayette and Baton Rouge eventually got themselves enough breathing room to push out - they cleared the I-10 about 3 years in, started clearing the swampland, established a stable enough and large enough "Blue Zone" that they could start to hold elections.
By the time the Junta reached them, Louisiana had its own state government back up and running as a multi-party democracy, completely ready to rejoin the United States of America. The Junta appointed a military governor with sweeping powers for the duration of their war with what was left of the CSA, and to coordinate the reclamation of New Orleans from the dead, which was accepted as necessity.
The military governor remained in power until about three years after the war, and in that time, Louisiana's democracy was subsumed into the broader American system, through a combination of inertia, corruption and outright malfeasance on the part of the federal government. They had a democracy in their state and the federal government smothered it with a pillow.
There's a lot of anger in Louisiana about that. Lot of anger all over America about things like that.
I might start skimming, hope that's alright with everyone.
She finds an SUV in the swamp full of civilian prepper shit; a guy drove it into the swamp, got stuck and shot himself.
Article: I couldn't see any other wound, no bites, nothing. That hit me hard, a lot harder than the little faceless kid. This guy had had everything he needed to survive, everything except the will. I know that's supposition. Maybe there was a wound I couldn't see, hidden by his clothes or the advanced decomposition. But I knew it, leaning there with my face against the glass, looking at this monument to how easy it was to give up.
I don't want to, like, armchair psychiatrist this, but she isn't talking about the guy in the car, here. It is manifestly obvious why a man sitting in an SUV stuck in a swamp would shoot himself.
I remember looking at a body hanging from our service station's bridge, thinking similarly about how they'd just given up. Whenever you start wondering why someone gave up, about how easy it was to give up? You're wondering about giving up.
At least, I was.
Article: I brought up the idea of maybe using the SUV itself. Mets asked if I had a tow truck and some jumper cables. Almost like a kid, I answered no. She asked, "Then what's keeping you?" or something like that, pushing me to get a move on. I told her to just wait a minute, I leaned my head against the driver's side window, I sighed and felt beat again, drained. Mets got on my ass, pushing me. I snapped back for her to shut the f**k up, I just needed a minute, a couple seconds to…I don't know what.
Not a chance a car works after marinating in a Louisiana swamp for over a year. She wanted to salvage the SUV because she wanted it to matter, wanted the man having given up to not be nothing but loss and waste.
See, when I felt this sort of way, it was because I had undiagnosed and untreated depression. She was feeling this sort of way on account of being on meth.
Article: I must have kept my thumb on the "transmit" button for a few seconds too long, because Mets suddenly asked, "What was that?" "What?" I asked. She'd heard something, something on my end.
She'd heard it before you?
I guess so, because in another second, once I'd cleared my head and opened my ears, I began to hear it too. The moan…loud and close, followed by the splashing of feet.
She kills a bunch of ghouls, turns her brain off for a minute and drops into fighter pilot sicko mode, and that puts her in a better mindset.
Article: It was another twenty minutes before Mets asked me for an update. I gave her a body count and she told me to remind her never to piss me off. I laughed, the first time since I'd hit the mud. I felt good again, strong and confident. Mets warned me that all these distractions had erased any chance of making it to the I-10 before nightfall, and that I should probably start thinking about where I was gonna catch my forty.
No one really likes to talk about it, but there's something undeniable about the power you feel like you have when you put a whole bunch of ghouls in the dirt. The first time I ever had a gun - an ugly SIG 9mm I took from the belt of a police officer rotting on one of their barricades in Oxford once I was alone - I put down four ghouls and very nearly blew out my own eardrum. Made me laugh until I cried.
Article: I got as far away from the SUV as I could before the sky started to darken and found a decent enough perch in the branches of a tall tree. My kit had this standard-issue microfiber hammock; great invention, light and strong and with clasps to keep you from rolling out. That part was also supposed to help calm you down, help you get to sleep faster…yeah, right! It didn't matter that I'd already been up for close to forty-eight hours, that I'd tried all the breathing exercises they taught us at the Creek, or that I even slipped two of my Baby-Ls.[6] You're only supposed to take one, but I figured that was for lightweight wussies.
Another footnote - [6] - "Baby-Ls": Officially a pain reliever but used by many military personnel as a sleep aid. - opiates.
I can't say I'm terribly surprised she went over her dose, any more than I'd be surprised if she took another one of her "tweeks" when she woke up the next morning - mixing heroin and meth is apparently rather pleasant.
I knew a lot of people who treated opiates like tic-tacs in the war, and that was without being in a military which handed out little baggies of them.
Article: I slept hard. The sky was already light by the time I opened my eyes. I'd been dreaming about, what else, Zack. His moans were still echoing in my ears when I woke up. And then I looked down and realized they weren't dreams. There must have been at least a hundred of them surrounding the tree. They were all reaching excitedly, all trying to climb over each other to get up to me.
I guess they smelt her? I'm not sure. Maybe the shooting she did earlier attracted some attention?
I used to sleep like the dead as a kid, but now the slightest noise rouses me. It isn't the worst possible trauma response I could've picked up, even if I do end up tired. Better than sleeping through, I think.
I picked it up later than it would've been useful. Waking up in a hotel room and seeing a ghoul's pallid grey hand scrabbling uselessly at the chain across the door is a pretty singularly awful experience, and I had it more than once. I only got into the habit of light sleeping once I was in the Guards. Not even in basic; only once on deployment. Anglesey left a mark.
Article: According to my map, the I-10 was close enough for me to make a run for it, be spotted by a rescue chopper, and be lifted off before these stink bags would ever catch up. I got on the radio, reported my situation to Mets, and told her to signal S&R for an immediate pickup. She told me to be careful. I crouched, I jumped, and cracked my ankle on a submerged rock.
Getting up on the elevated Highway when pursued by ghouls means that unless your rescue helicopter happens to already be in the area, you're just running onto an enclosed platform with no way out, pursued by a swarm. That's how people die.
Article: I reached the freeway, looming above the swamp like the ruins of a Roman aqueduct. Mets had been right about its relative safety. Only neither of us had counted on my injury or my undead tail. There was no immediate entrance so I had to limp to one of the small, adjoining roads that Mets had originally warned me to avoid. I could see why as I began to get close. Wrecked and rusting cars were piled up by the hundreds and every tenth one had at least one G locked inside.
There's literally no way a person is getting onto a freeway without a ghoul being able to follow. They're just not safe.
We retain a monkey brain assumption that High=Safe, but if the only way to get there is a gentle slope, you'll just end up leading the swarm up after you.
Article: Grabbers?
The ones reaching through broken windows. On the open road, I at least had a chance of dodging them, but on the on-ramp, you're hemmed in on either side. That was the worst part, by far, those few minutes trying to get up onto the freeway. I had to go in between the cars; my ankle wouldn't let me get on top of them.
People do this a lot. Conjure up "better" ways they could've acted in life-or-death situations, if it weren't for this or that or the other. It's a coping mechanism.
In reality, clambering over rusting and wrecked cars - masses of twisted metal and uneven heights - would've been slower and more dangerous.
Article: She never let up, never gave me an inch. "What are you, some weak little victim?" At that point I thought I was. I knew I could never make it. The exhaustion, the pain, more than anything, I think, the anger at f**king up so badly. I actually considered turning my pistol around, wanting to punish myself for…you know. And then Mets really hit me. She roared, "What are you, your f**king mother!?!"
One of the symptoms of abuse of drugs like meth or amphetamines is auditory hallucination. In her case, these hallucinations took the form of a voice for her better judgement, and saved her fucking life.
Substance abuse under the junta is fascinating, and someone should write a book on it. The airforce are all on meth, the navy drinks and the army does whatever they can get their hands on.
There's not a real appetite to change any of this, even in the New Clique, so it isn't going anywhere.
Article: A black dot was heading at me from out of the morning sun. It was following the freeway and grew very quickly into the form of a UH-60. I let out a whoop and popped my signal flare.
The first thing I saw when they winched me aboard was that it was a civilian chopper, not government Search and Rescue.
Lucky, lucky girl.
Lafayette and Baton Rouge had four helicopters between them, and kept them flying through trade into the Gulf; they never traded directly with Cuba or anyone, but they traded with ships that traded with Cuba, so it's a little moot.
They talk a lot after this about her "Skywatcher" - Christina insists she was real, probably a Marine or Navy pilot.
So far as it goes, they didn't section 8 her because there wasn't any reason to believe she was crazy as opposed to just tweaking and sleep deprived.
This is such an incredibly long section that doesn't really… say very much? Sorry about it.
Next time I finally get to go insane, because he interviews a bloodless royalist creep, so I get to talk about Britain.
Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE]; the women out of the Bratsk camps have started arriving, and… they really need the funds urgently.
Donate to the Lakota [HERE] - they're trying to rebuild as well as they can.
Donate to drug relief for veterans from the masterlist [HERE] - there's a bunch of charities in a bunch of countries, for veterans from a bunch of countries. Pick your favourite.
AN: This is such a long interview, jeez.
Anyway, next up is the British interviewee, who I hate. This sort of bumbling "Oh golly gosh, I'm just such an awkward geeky British man who loves the monarchy" schtick is, like… can we just skip to the bit where you call me a slur? Very familiar sort of pseudofash tory.
- Location
- boundless optimism
Well, if the rest of the interview is correct, when this book comes out the interviewer will be jumped by a couple of officers and beaten to shit for making perverted remarks to one of their own.
Top-tier Imperium Brain.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
During the later part of the war's hot phase, we got contracted by the Spanish, who could pay us in weapons and at that point were too choosy about where it went, to run fuel off of the north sea platforms down to them. I got chatting with one of their officers (I think she was into transwomen), and she told me a bunch about their turbo prop program.
Apparently, and I've seen this even more now I live in Southern France, they use turbo props for a lot of things. They hang noise makers off them and use them to manipulate swarms. They drop napalm and low level bombs. The way she told it it's one of the things that lets them gel their various outpost lines together because they can gin firepower up whenever they need it without having to support an entire artillery battery at every single base.
Given that Spain rode out the apocalypse just about best of anyone, I think we can say it worked pretty well, and when I got to see it in action it seemed like it did to. A lot of the turbo prop aircraft they're using for it are drones now, though I think they'll probably get into using some kind of cheap PGM kit in the near future, on account of the number of enclaves in France and the like who have put serious effort into acquiring MANPADs.
If you do for some reason have a crate of high quality Russian or Chinese MANPADS (or even low quality shit like Stingers), or a good anti-air piece and a decent supply of ammo, then you can make a killing among the enclaves in Southern Europe and the Magreb who don't want to find themselves dominated by Spain.
The Junta just loves to make a virtue of necessity don't they? You don't usually get to pick what a position needs. Either you got it or you don't. Either you can get it their or you can't.
My big worry about an unscripted ghoul encounter (as this seems to be) would be infection hazard. Same as with the whole "climb up all the cars" later. A lot of ghoul infections aren't from bites, they're from a cut getting a bit of black goo in it. It certainly sounds super badass to face the Zees, but it also sounds like a good way to end up with a bunch of your candidates infected.
There's a really bizarre and judgemental tone to so much of Junta thought that I really don't like? Like, yeah, obviously someone will occasionally die from poor judgement, but everyone has a lapse in judgement sometimes and it's the job of a good crew or a good organization to put in procedures that will limit how many people can die from those lapses in judgement.
"Didn't you notice where you are without your GPS??!? LOL LMAO." is like... what?
In terms of the CSA SAM threat thing, there were always some communities who just really wanted to shoot at fellow survivors who they saw as "encroaching." It definitely happened to us more than a few times, though nothing heavy.
It's really interesting seeing what someone who genuinely drank the Junta's Kool-Aid without any cynicism or doubt.
See also: 'The Junta's cost analysis makes absolutely no account for the lives of their soldiers being worth a bent penny.'
You're not the only one.
I like learning about mundane changes caused by the war. It helps ground it all, I think. Here's a fun one: the walls between apartments in newly constructed buildings are on average, at least in America, twice as thick as they were immediately before the war. They're all much better insulated, too. Part of it's an imagined feeling of safety, part of it's that a great many of us have trained ourselves to take immediate notice of unexpected footsteps. That such a large percentage of the adult population still experiences night terrors probably plays a role too.
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It's a ridiculous way to fight even from a practical perspective, because ghouls numbers only regenerate when one of us dies. The focus of counter ghoul operations should always, IMHO, be on loss prevention. Every person who is infected is one more ghoul that everyone else needs to deal with.
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The Junta willingly threw away most of their industrial base, both in terms of knowledge and manufacturing. Those Junta radio things were built by people with minimal understanding of what they were doing, using subpar or salvaged materials.
The only benefit they had was that the Junta could actually produce them in relevant numbers. And, depending on what broke, you could literally duct-tape a new one together from bits of broken ones.
There were a couple of times where I wanted to give up, just sit down and let the world take me. My hatred of what the Junta did got me through those moments, until I could find my own reason to live.
Children, even if they're not your own, can do wonders when it comes to keeping people going.
I slept through a tornado once as a kid, and I sleep just as deeply now. Though I made sure I only slept when I was sure I would be fine.
Sleep deprivation sucks, but if you have experience with it, it's not *that* hard to deal with short term. Though there were a few times where I had to take out a ghoul or two that wandered into the area I cleared.
Fuck communities, I and several others I've encountered would take potshots at those Planes. Almost like a Duck Hunt.
The plane full of explosives the gal's buddy was flying could've gotten taken out by some mad genius with a large caliber rifle, or one of the handful of Enclaves squatting on bases with access to ManPads.
Those Junta Pilots are a strange mix of suicidal and crazy.
- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Honestly, we resented them - those were supply runs to civilians, every one they intercepted was stealing vital supplies. They killed people, doing that.
I guess at the end of the day, it's the junta's fault we were competing with them over supplies to begin with, instead of sharing and cooperating, which could've kept more people alive on both sides.
At least they were trying to stay alive. The CSA shooting down planes was just psycho shit.
Yeah, it's some insane hazing ritual. If you freeze up and get your face bitten off, or if you have a mental breakdown afterwards, you're not officer material.
This is true. On the other hand, within the military there were degrees. You had the soldiers, the guys out there killing Zack, then there was us, the ones doing the dirty jobs, the REMFs. Battlefield Sanitation, Graves Registry, Human Reclamation, also combat engineers...we were military, but we weren't "real soldiers". If you were Battlefield Sanitation, you could swagger around and nobody could touch you, but to the Army and Navy and even the babies in the Air Force you were the next thing to a civilian.
Graves Registry and Human Reclamation had it hardest, I think. Those people, nicest, most heartfelt individuals in the world. Every one of them genuinely cared about what they were doing. They were some hard drinking motherfuckers too, high suicide rate on Graves Registry especially.
Graves Registry...that insane quixotic plan to record the names of every American who was killed in the war. The government keeps it going for propaganda purposes, but someone's gotta do it. It's such an impossible task though. There's millions of zombies we're never gonna be able to identify, millions of people who are just never going to be confirmed dead. They're the guys who read all the suicide notes, all the apocalypse logs of enclaves that fell, cause it's all identifying information. We worked closely with them. I know...knew...a lot of them personally.
Human Reclamation, they got shit for expending resources trying to rescue feral kids and quislings when some of the Army sickos would prefer to just kill 'em all. Gutted after the war too, and with how fucked the issue is they gotta beg for every cent. At least they saved a lot of people, rehabilitated them, got them back into society.
And then there was us. BS, Battlefield Sanitation. The scavengers, thieves, glorified gravediggers. Guilty on all counts. Zombies, yeah we did zombies, but we cleaned up human corpses too. Burying a zombie, I felt nothing, a zombie is just an evil sack of walking meat, but a human corpse...that was still a human. We cleared out the enclaves that had fallen, where people had died of starvation or sickness or suicide. We found the mass graves left by the CSA. We cleaned up all the bodies left by the Great Panic, the ones who'd been killed but not reanimated.
There were...a lot of people. So many people, and you gotta carry them in your head. That's why so many of us got Sectioned out, or punched our own tickets. And for those of us who are still around, it's why we drink.
Not really related, but fuck I hated clearing those traffic snarls. Yeah grabbers weren't dangerous, but you brain screams at you a lot when you're going into a confined space where you know something could be waiting to kill you.
Lafeyette and Baton Rouge were the shining examples of loyalist enclaves. They were majority Black so they'd never join the CSA, they were close enough to the Gulf to be defended by the Navy. They were self-sufficient or close enough, they were jump-points for the supply runs in the Southeast. Unlike lots of smaller enclaves or military bases, they were cities with a couple hundred thousand survivors between them, almost as much as the Hero City. They even managed to keep democracy alive where the US didn't.
When we marched in, the atmosphere was incredible, it was like Mardi Gras. Their war was over, so they thought. It was the best feeling I'd had in a long time. But it wasn't long after we marched out again that the military governor was forced on them.
I passed through there again, after the war. That place is a powderkeg.
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On the suicide thing. Yeah. When we were salvaging an urban area you'd find a lot of suicides of various kinds. Hangings, people who'd obviously slit their own wrists etc. People just get like that sometimes. You get used to it after a while if you're hunting through areas that have been overrun or abandoned.
There was often a bit of a feast or famine approach. Either someone who'd totally used up their resources, or someone who'd done all the prep, and now had to face living a long time and didn't want to do it anymore now it was a reality. Finding a suicide corpse and a prepper store was definitely not so abnormal as not to become a known thing, even if the majority of suicides were of the "used up everything" type.
If you do find yourself in that situation, it'd be courteous to leave an "all out" message, or, if you do have stores, mark them up for the salvage team that will eventually come through. We wasted a ton of daylight searching through houses like this otherwise.
Indeed, if you're going to abandon a structure and don't intend to come back, please mark everything useful for us looters. Anything you leave will be gone anyway (unless we sell it back to you on one of the big auction sites) but you're putting lives in danger if you hide stuff and make us tap the walls to find your stash.
There was often a bit of a feast or famine approach. Either someone who'd totally used up their resources, or someone who'd done all the prep, and now had to face living a long time and didn't want to do it anymore now it was a reality. Finding a suicide corpse and a prepper store was definitely not so abnormal as not to become a known thing, even if the majority of suicides were of the "used up everything" type.
If you do find yourself in that situation, it'd be courteous to leave an "all out" message, or, if you do have stores, mark them up for the salvage team that will eventually come through. We wasted a ton of daylight searching through houses like this otherwise.
Indeed, if you're going to abandon a structure and don't intend to come back, please mark everything useful for us looters. Anything you leave will be gone anyway (unless we sell it back to you on one of the big auction sites) but you're putting lives in danger if you hide stuff and make us tap the walls to find your stash.
khan2012
Very Tired.
- Location
- North Carolina
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They/Them
IC: God, the Lafayette-Baton Rouge government. I think what happened to them was what convinced my dad to get me out of the country on college education. Strangling a democracy like that, one that willingly - eagerly even- rejoined the US, was a mask off moment for a lot of the Charlotte survivors. Things were already getting tense with the soldiers stationed with us, but that ratcheted things up to eleven. I think the CSA being objectively worse in every possible way was the only thing that kept us working with those soldiers, now that I look back at it. Nothing but respect in my heart for those poor Air Force pilots, though. Their government actively used them up like cheap paper, but they still flew, and that kept me and mine alive.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
It'd be fun to try to see someone keep a reactor supplied through the air. That's a hundred thousands tonnes of uranium, after all.
It's simple really. Any powerplant without a functional rail or barge connection is dead. Trying to keep anything more than a generator alive is pointless, and you end up burning more fuel to move fuel than you can actually use.
Fundamentally though, I don't think anyone can still make a nuclear power plant, or will for the foreseeable future? Maybe China still has the capacity, but everything else is toast.
The funny thing, I don't see why they thought they needed to do this?
Planes don't fly on their own, every plane they had, was there because someone flew it there. Pilots shouldn't have suffered much attrition, and with the dismanteling of the fighter and bomber forces, as well as mass recruitment of civilian pilots, they should have far more pilots than planes. Especially as they started losing airframe due to the impossibility of maintaining them.
Then again, they had those mass dismantling plants. I heard they came up with some pretty horrifying kitbashing to put the planes they tore apart back together, but in a military shape.
Squidfam
Functionary of the Gender-Communist Party
- Location
- Atlantis, Sweden
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Narcotics and suicide, my favourite!
It took me a couple of years to figure out that they'd just wanted to fall asleep blackout drunk and never wake up.
Speaking of! The youngsters today have trouble believing the Swedish government ever had a monopoly on alcohol: Everyone needed strong stuff to survive through the winters and homebrewing absolutely exploded and alcoholism came back roaring into fashion like the welfare state never happened. On this point I'll give the government kudos: they've taken a hard line on this and works hand in hand with the temperance activists, but it's an uphill struggle, especially with mental health services in shambles.
They have enough resources as-is so I won't post any charity links to temperance workers, but I'd encourage you once again to donate to the Sámi communities [here] and to the Meänkieli Language Preservation Group [here]
I had the blessed fortune of being holed up safe and cozy in one of the big island redoubts on Gräsö for most of the war, but when the reclamation proper began I was assigned to a "cleanup crew" to clear paths on the mainland for the new rail system coming down from the north. I was of course never supposed to see any dead bodies, but you found more of them than one might expect. One thing we kept finding were bodies right in the middle of nowhere absolutely surrounded by empty bottles of alcohol. My crew supervisor told me and some of the other young crew members that they were unfortunate souls who'd tried to stay warm by drinking, believing the popular misconception that it raises your body temperature when it actually widens your blood vessels and makes you more susceptible to hypothermia.
It took me a couple of years to figure out that they'd just wanted to fall asleep blackout drunk and never wake up.
Speaking of! The youngsters today have trouble believing the Swedish government ever had a monopoly on alcohol: Everyone needed strong stuff to survive through the winters and homebrewing absolutely exploded and alcoholism came back roaring into fashion like the welfare state never happened. On this point I'll give the government kudos: they've taken a hard line on this and works hand in hand with the temperance activists, but it's an uphill struggle, especially with mental health services in shambles.
They have enough resources as-is so I won't post any charity links to temperance workers, but I'd encourage you once again to donate to the Sámi communities [here] and to the Meänkieli Language Preservation Group [here]
silverpower
Communism is yuri and nothing else!
- Location
- Portland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
There used to be a few hundred computer science programs offering doctoral-level studies in the United States. Now I can count the ones that I actually see in journals on one hand, and it's not because the ghouls ate every single professor back home. I did my doctorate at University of Havana (Second and Last!) because by the time I finished my undergrad at University of New Orleans the EECS research program got "realigned" out of existence, and frankly I wasn't waiting for the other shoe to drop with the Junta.
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- He/They
I got a lot of love for the airlift folks. We were in one of those Blue Zones that attracted Z like a moth to light and they were our only source of any sort of manufactured goods. We were close to the CSA fundies, but too useful as a Z sink for them to come and "salvage" us. A lot of folks who the CSA said were damned wound up on base, God knows what they would have done had they gotten to us.
Sad that the brass kept them on drugs to get over here and then abandoned them post-war. While I was in the army, I refrained from using, out of necessity - addiction runs in my family - more than principle, but a lot of good folks wound up using just to get by. Service against the hordes was supposed to be a glorious effort, we were quite literally popping heads of an enemy that can never be humanized and only wanted to consume everything, but that feeling didn't last, especially when we were responsible for "reconnecting" with folks who'd rather not be under military control.
I ... did some things I'm not proud of in the name of America, the one in my head, the land of freedom and equality, the one that didn't exist pre-war and definitely doesn't exist now. Those things are what keep me fighting, trying to atone for what I and my country did in the name of reunification.
Did you know that we were always told we were fighting some splinter of the CSA down here when we had to clear independent zones? That the people would hate us because their fire-and-brimstone preachers said that now was the time of Armageddon and we were stopping God's Will? I believed it at the time - damn fool that I am - because it was the only reason I had to justify shooting the walkers that weren't dead. Now that I'm doing private sector service I can see that all of that was bs. Junta wanted all of America, didn't care about any cost outside of the material. They damned a lot of good folks when they decided that pills were the solution to the "problems" of weariness and unscheduled tiredness. We were like those Nazi tankers in WW2, hyped up to keep us moving on schedules and within the plan.
In all honesty, they tried to make machines out of humans, because they wanted to reserve their big guns for the folks who didn't want them back.
Sad that the brass kept them on drugs to get over here and then abandoned them post-war. While I was in the army, I refrained from using, out of necessity - addiction runs in my family - more than principle, but a lot of good folks wound up using just to get by. Service against the hordes was supposed to be a glorious effort, we were quite literally popping heads of an enemy that can never be humanized and only wanted to consume everything, but that feeling didn't last, especially when we were responsible for "reconnecting" with folks who'd rather not be under military control.
I ... did some things I'm not proud of in the name of America, the one in my head, the land of freedom and equality, the one that didn't exist pre-war and definitely doesn't exist now. Those things are what keep me fighting, trying to atone for what I and my country did in the name of reunification.
Did you know that we were always told we were fighting some splinter of the CSA down here when we had to clear independent zones? That the people would hate us because their fire-and-brimstone preachers said that now was the time of Armageddon and we were stopping God's Will? I believed it at the time - damn fool that I am - because it was the only reason I had to justify shooting the walkers that weren't dead. Now that I'm doing private sector service I can see that all of that was bs. Junta wanted all of America, didn't care about any cost outside of the material. They damned a lot of good folks when they decided that pills were the solution to the "problems" of weariness and unscheduled tiredness. We were like those Nazi tankers in WW2, hyped up to keep us moving on schedules and within the plan.
In all honesty, they tried to make machines out of humans, because they wanted to reserve their big guns for the folks who didn't want them back.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
That, or you're uncritically accepting a lot of verbal cues from people who are.
I was thinking about this in the context of people saying that Max Brooks has actually turned out surprisingly non-fash since (I could be wrong, but I thought I heard people saying it). What it comes down to is a large-scale application of "You Are Not Immune To Propaganda."
People who don't consciously want to project a fascist message, or support a fascist agenda, or who are not consciously bigoted, can nonetheless be influenced by bits and pieces of the content that fascists (or non-fascist bigots) they put out into the ecosystem. Bits and pieces of those evil products float to the surface in the damnedest places as a result.
This is not me saying "this is what was happening with Brooks." I don't have a good read on the guy.
This is me saying "huh, funny how that can happen."
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It just boggles the mind, all the resources wasted on the air freight boondoggle that probably could have been used to secure direct trade routes to the locations instead, or that could have been used to bomb entire megaswarms flat. But that would have meant actually wanting to deal with the zombie issue, instead of just using zombies as an excuse to secure and maintain an iron-clad grip on power, I guess.
It's literally the worst possible method of delivering supplies. You'd do better building river-boats and hand-poling everything along the fucking waterways, or with well-protected caravans, or with a secured - or even unsecured! - rail line.
I know a lot of European air forces just used barrel-bombs filled with nails or napalm, and those could take out a shocking number of ghouls; you couldn't use them near your forces, because a burning ghoul will keep moving, but it certainly helped thin out some of the bigger megaswarms at near-zero risk to human life, and it was cheap, too.
It's literally the worst possible method of delivering supplies. You'd do better building river-boats and hand-poling everything along the fucking waterways, or with well-protected caravans, or with a secured - or even unsecured! - rail line.
I know a lot of European air forces just used barrel-bombs filled with nails or napalm, and those could take out a shocking number of ghouls; you couldn't use them near your forces, because a burning ghoul will keep moving, but it certainly helped thin out some of the bigger megaswarms at near-zero risk to human life, and it was cheap, too.
SemiSaneAuthor
TARDIS powered by Snark, Spite, and Tea!
- Location
- Sol-3, Memetic Quarantined World - For English
- Pronouns
- They/Them
On Hippos, a small part of me wonders what happened to the hippos in South America. Did they get eaten, or did they survive?