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Moosehead Survivors' Compound, Greenville, Maine, USA
[Before the war, the Moosehead Lake Region was known mostly for its natural beauty. During the summer Greenville Township bustled with tourists: campers, hikers, canoeists, naturalists. In the winter there were smaller crowds of skiers, snowmobilers and hunters. In the off season the population was just under two thousand for the entire town and the nearest towns of Kokadjo, population four; Rockville, population 800 and Monson, population 1200, were all nearly an hour away by car. There is only one major road, Route 15, which turns into a dirt road before it reaches Rockville. All of those towns are gone now, though Greenville is slowly being rebuilt. Of the four thousand inhabitants and the estimated two hundred thousand refugees who came through the area during the Great Panic, less than two hundred survived, barricaded inside the Moosehead Survivors' Compound. Lily Caine is one of those survivors.]
It used to be a campground. My parents bought it when I was nine, dragged us all up here from New Jersey so they could get away from the cities and the crime and the stress. My brother and I hated it, mostly. There was no cable, the school was at least a full grade level behind my school, there was nothing to do, it snowed all the damn time. I remember our first night there. We drove all the way in a moving van, my mother and the baby and I, while Dad and Brandon followed behind in our car. We didn't get in till after midnight and I remember walking down the front path of the house we were renting. The landlord had shoveled it for us and the snow on either side of the path towered over my head. I wasn't a short kid – there was at least five feet of snow on the ground. I hated it instantly. The impression stuck and as I got older I found more and more reasons to hate it; the high rates of alcoholism, illiteracy, domestic abuse. There was a joke when I was in high school, that Maine specialized in divorce by hunting accident, because every winter there was the story of some asshole who shot his wife because he thought she was a deer. It wasn't funny but it was true.
I graduated when I was seventeen and packed my bags for college the same day. I didn't ever plan on coming back and I probably never would have if not for the Walking Plague.
No one really took it seriously at that time, you understand. At least not in the general population. Anyone in the know was keeping their mouths shut and the ones who were talking about the sickness were mostly, well, the crazies. The conspiracy theorists, the alien abductees, the kind of people who talked about the end of the world every time something went wrong. It was easy to ignore.
You didn't believe there was a plague?
I believed there was a plague, yeah, but not that it was going to be the end of the world. Remember, this was after SARS, avian flu, pig flu. There had been a few epidemic threats in the years right before African Rabies and none of them turned out that serious. I mean, sure, worst case scenarios were scary but how often did that actually happen? And anyway, we had Phalanx.
Which didn't work.
Yeah. I remember the news that night. When they admitted that the plague wasn't really rabies and that Phalanx was useless. It was like you could feel the panic starting that night.
You're familiar with Breckinridge Scott's claims that the popular media should be held accountable for the Great Panic?
[snorts] Whatever. That jackass knew the plague wasn't rabies and he made a fortune selling a rabies vaccine to people who didn't need it. Maybe if he'd had his companies working to actually find a real cure – or hell, maybe if he hadn’t lulled everyone into a false sense of security we would have had more warning. People got on Phalanx, thought they were safe, and stopped caring about it. If they'd known they weren't safe, maybe we all would have tried harder, been more aware. Maybe more people would have taken preparations. It's not a coincidence that of the survivors today nearly everyone in a position of authority is one of the paranoid ones, one of the ones who barricaded their homes, purchased weapons, even packed up and headed to new homes in more defensible locations.
People like you and your family.
My family never had a lot of money. By most standards we were poor. But we owned our own land, didn't owe anyone any money. The business from the campground didn’t let us live like kings, but it was enough to feed us and clothe us and let us afford the occasional luxury like books or a trip to the movies. We learned early, my brother, sister and I, how to make things stretch. And we learned early that preparedness was key. After that broadcast I called my father and I still remember that first words I said to him.
What were they?
"This is gonna get messy, fast." [laughs] Am I psychic or what?
That was when your family began preparations?
Yeah. I was nineteen by then, a sophomore in college and getting ready to study abroad for a semester. My father and I talked about it and decided it wasn't a great idea. There were rumors of things happening in Eastern Europe and the Middle East that I'd originally written off as paranoid babble, but after the announcement that this plague was spreading and uncontrollable… well, that paranoid babble suddenly seemed much more plausible. I stayed in the States that semester, thank god. I've heard what happened in Paris. I'm very glad I wasn't there.
I was on my way home for the summer when it all went to hell. It was like a tsunami. One minute everyone was saying what if and the next it was happening. I was driving home, made it past New York before things got really messy. I was in Vermont when the shit hit the fan and by then I was ahead of most of the refugees heading for Canada.
Were things bad that far north?
Everyone has this idea that the north got off easy, and I'm not saying we didn't have advantages. Sparse populations, few big cities, meant that there were fewer infected to start with. But all that ended when the refugees started coming through. Millions of people running for their lives, carrying the infection, leading the already dead. And that aside, the crowds blocked roads, destroyed vegetation and used up natural resources like wildlife and clean water. But that was a few days away. At that time I was mostly dealing with traffic and the occasional infected. I'd see one on the side of the road, or staggering down a hill, or trapped inside a crashed car. It scared me to death. I drove the entire way with my doors locked and a crowbar on the passenger's seat, just in case.
My travel preparations involved mostly having plenty of cash, a spare tire and a heavy duty flashlight. I had some food and water and a blanket, too. Remember, where I was going, there was snow on the ground in April more often than not, even with global warming. But I made it mostly without incident, although I saw a lot of police cars and accidents and flashing lights on the way.
But the biggest surprise was waiting for me. The campground that I'd lived on growing up was a compound now. My father had put up a fence – two of them, an outer and inner perimeter. I could get inside the first perimeter, but the second gate was locked from the inside. My father was waiting to let me in. He was carrying a gun. I think that was the biggest shock of the evening.
Your family didn't believe in guns?
No, it's just that we'd never really owned any. My father wasn't interested in hunting and there wasn't a significant crime risk. Our campers were mostly families or youth groups, so we didn't have to worry about rowdy drunks the way other campgrounds did. But in light of what was going on, it made sense that dad would invest in a firearm. More than one, it turned out.
And the Great Panic officially started while I slept that night. By morning the entire country was in chaos and reports were coming in from all over the world. I remember the way I felt that morning, watching the news from behind the barricade, noticing that at some point they'd put metal shutters on all the windows. It was dark, it was confusing – I can’t explain it except that it must be how a deer felt in the headlights on an oncoming UFO.
My father broke the spell. He put his mug in the sink and told me to get dressed, we were heading out. I hurried to get ready and we took the truck up to the trading post. Dad had the gun with him. We waited in the car till the opened for the day, along with a few other people. Then Dad gave me a credit card and told me to get food and he went off to the sporting goods part of the store.
The store wasn't crowded, not yet, but there were more people there than there should have been that early. And no one was panicking, yet, but there was this tightness in everyone's eyes and we were all moving the same way. Fast and tense. Like we were trying not to catch anyone's eye.
The next couple of days were like that. Stockpiling supplies, organizing what we had. Dad took me to the general store after that, then the old Indian Store and then the camping supply store up on the way to Kokadjo. When there was no more food, we found seeds and gardening equipment. When that ran out we got blankets and machetes and shovels. Dad bought more guns and when he sent me to pick up ammo no one even blinked before handing it over. And other people were doing the same. My dad had a reputation for being a level-headed kind of guy. He was ex-army, did two tours in Vietnam, had been a volunteer firefighter ever since we moved there. If Dad thought something might be a problem, folks were generally willing to listen.
Is that why people started coming to the compound?
At first it was just one other family. Tommy Jameson, my Dad's best friend, owned the general store in town. He and my dad got together and talked over coffee for a couple hours every morning before Dad came back to drive my brother and sister to school. When his store was sold out and it became obvious no deliveries were coming soon, he came by the house and had a long talk with my parents. That afternoon he and his wife and their daughter moved in with us. They were the first.
Who were the others?
Refugees, some. Other people from town. We didn't get as many refugees as they did down by the Great Lakes or Chicago where they say the ground was trampled flat for miles across, but there were people who found Route 15 and just kept following it as far north as they could. But most of those people were in bad shape by the time they got to us.
Bad how?
Hungry. I'm – not to diss on the city folks, but these people had no idea what they were doing. I think half of them thought they could forage for berries. And none of them seemed to understand how cold it gets up here. You understand, it's always cold up here. Down south it drops below freezing and they think that's cold. Up here, it gets below zero and we don't even blink. But that winter was bad, even by our standards. The ash, you know? All the cities that burned – all the trees and the countryside – I heard one of the scientists on Radio Free Earth say it was worse than a volcano erupting. All that junk in the air, blocking out the sun to huge chunks of the world, just in time for winter. We lost power up here early on – being rural meant the hordes took longer to get to us, but it also meant that once we lost power and communication we didn’t get it back. So there's no electricity, no grocery stores, the roads are packed with abandoned cars, the dead are roaming the highways, following refugees and it's September now, so it's starting to snow. Just a dusting, nothing bad, yet, but a city family from New York or DC or Atlanta isn’t prepared for the weather up here. The ones that made it as far as our walls were begging for supplies and weapons but almost no one was asking for sanctuary at that point. Most of them were warning us of the hordes that followed, calling for us to go on. They meant well.
When did people start asking for sanctuary?
Yonkers.
How did you hear about Yonkers?
Solar panels on the roof powered the satellite television. Dude, we were rural but we weren't Amish or something. My parents put the solar paneling in long before the Walking Plague, just because we did always lose power. We all sat there, my family and the Jamesons, and watched it all go to shit live.
The day after that, Dad brought another family, the Prescotts, to stay with us.
It must have been hard to feed that many people.
Not really. We had food stored up, more than you might think. It was normal to stockpile for winter, because what if you got snowed in for weeks on end? What if the food shipments got delayed because they couldn’t make their way up from the warehouses in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania? Plus the extra stockpiling my dad and I had done that summer. My mother's vegetable garden had been expanded all summer as well, my sister and brother and I weeding and watering and digging a solid acre of plants. You know which vegetable grows fastest?
Which?
Radishes. They can fully mature in two to three weeks. We ate radishes all damn summer to save on the canned goods. On salads, roasted, sautéed. Radishes and carrots and a dozen other vegetables. I hate radishes so much.
The Jamesons and the Prescotts brought supplies with them, too. Everything they had, and not just food. Blankets, candles, lanterns. My house was heated with a big, old fashioned woodstove, the kind you could cook on as well. It was super-efficient, but it still got damned cold in the house at night. Try heating a five-bedroom, two-story house with one woodstove, no matter how efficient, when it's twenty below zero outside. But we'd done that before. Until the horde came, it was just a particularly crowded but otherwise unremarkable winter for us.
What happened when the horde came?
They came up the highway, following the trail of refugees. Route 15 was mostly still by then, blocked with abandoned or wrecked cars. We had scavenged most of those cars, I admit, taken anything useful that the owners had left behind, which wasn't much. People packed DVD players and laptops and god knows what else. But after Yonkers we all knew that it was better safe than sorry. It was going to be a long time before help came.
We'd already seen infected, more and more of them, but with winter coming we were hoping that they might slow down. They were dead, right? No body heat, so they should freeze. Especially if they got wet. My brother would take a hose up to the outer perimeter and douse them in water to hurry it up. But when Yonkers happened, winter was just starting to get serious, and they were still moving.
It was just barely dawn. We were all awake, drinking weak tea and coffee because my mom wanted to stretch it for months and months, said she'd rather be infected than live with a bunch of people going through caffeine withdrawal. My sister was up on the roof, sweeping the solar panels of the dusting of snow from the night before. We all heard her when she started yelling.
Have you ever left meat out and gone away for the weekend? You come home and there's a writhing mass of maggots squirming over each other, slowly spreading out from the center. The horde was like that. We got my sister off the roof and shut her up and the men, my brother and I all took a weapon and took up positions along the inner perimeter. We were hoping they would pass us by. We were more than a mile back from the road, Mom and the girls were being absolutely silent, none of us were even breathing loudly. We'd seen the news reports from the stations that were left, but we still hoped.
They didn’t pass. They lined up along the outer fence and stood there, moaning, some of them clawed or knocked on the fence. We were officially under siege.
That was the day the news broke about the Redeker Plan and the military pull-out.
Did your family try to evacuate?
No. Others did. We saw some of them try to push through the horde in trucks. We heard snowmobilers moving through the woods. Some of them probably made it. My parents and the Jamesons and the Prescotts discussed it, but my dad didn’t think it was a good idea.
We weren't in bad shape. We had two perimeters – the outer one circling more than forty acres, most of it forest – enough food to last the winter, weapons if we needed them. We'd been cut off before, though usually only for a few weeks. We knew what we were dealing with here. Out there? How far would we have to travel to meet a military convoy? Would we be able to keep up? We couldn't fit many supplies in one truck. How would we get more gas?
So we stayed. And we made it through the first winter, the twelve of us. The woodstove kept us warm enough and we had plenty of blankets. Mr. Jameson and Mr. Prescotts taught the Prescott boys and my brother, father and I how to hunt so we had rabbits and squirrel and deer. We had a well for water and plenty of snow. We tapped maple trees and made sugar candy. And unless we got too close to the outer fence, the horde was usually far enough away that we couldn’t hear them.
After Christmas was when things got really cold. The first night it hit thirty below, my father decided it was time. We went out that morning and the horde was almost completely frozen.
What did you do?
We went into town. To see if there was news, mostly. Some folks were doing pretty well. When they saw us they started coming out, too. I figure maybe five hundred people were still in town, holed up in their houses. That number went down all winter. People starved, had hunting accidents, fell, froze, got infected, died of the flu or killed themselves. We touched base with the town once every couple weeks, only when it was extremely cold. And on our way back to the campground, every time, we put down as many of the infected as we could. We must have killed hundreds, but from the roof the horde looked untouched.
There were a couple of thaws, the one in January was milder than it usually was, and the one in late March meant spring was coming. All of us over fifteen started taking shifts going out on the coldest mornings and putting down as many infected as we could. No bullets. Baseball bats and crowbars. Mr. Prescott used a metal spike and stabbed them in the eyes. I think we were hoping that if we could work the horde down to a smaller number maybe help would make it through. I dunno. It was important work, because we had to keep their numbers down, had to keep them from being a risk, but there was no way we were getting rescued. The horde was huge by then, bigger than we guessed. It would have taken us years to clear it out completely. It did take years and even then it was only with the sweeps. Every now and then one still turns up.
Spring came and the horde was still there. The little kids and my mom started planting the garden again. The rest of us started building a guest house. We built three of them that spring, and a couple more every spring after that.
How did people from the town feel about your families inside the compound?
Mostly good, I guess. I mean, they wanted something from us, so of course they were gonna act nice. But mostly people saw we had a good thing going there and they wanted in. There's something to be said for company, if nothing else. A few people thought we were abusing our power, playing favorites.
Was there any truth to those accusations?
Sure. I mean, we didn’t go around saying "Hey, I don't like you, hope you die." We did invite the people we trusted most to join us first. And there were people we turned away entirely. Drunks and thieves, mostly. Dad said we couldn’t risk that kind of behavior. And when Dad said something, people mostly listened. So that was the final say. Some people didn’t think that was fair, especially when it was their friend or relative being left outside the perimeter. Dad just told those folks they were free to leave and go join their friends. None of them did, of course.
There were problems inside the walls.
Oh yeah. Get two hundred people in close quarters under stressful situations and you've got nothing but trouble. Folks who didn’t want to work or didn't like their jobs or thought they deserved more food or wanted a private residence. Everyone worked. The old men and women knit clothing and blankets. The littlest kids weeded the gardens and collected kindling. Everyone worked. And no one had a private residence, hell, the first year or so even the married couples had to bargain for a private room if they wanted one. Privacy was secondary to warmth – the more people in the room, the easier it was to heat with just a fireplace. That was just life.
But there were a couple of people who became serious problems. One or two people just kind of snapped and we did our best by them – as long as they weren't violent, or likely to wander off and open the gates to the horde, we just made them comfortable and gave them projects to keep them busy, like gathering firewood. But we had more serious problems. Fights. Occasionally some guy would hit his wife or girlfriend or kid. There was one man, I won't say his name since his family is still alive, but he lost it one night. I don’t know if he was always an abusive jackass or if he just went nuts, but he went off on his wife, started beating the shit out of her. The guest houses were more like barracks and pretty full, so there were a bunch of people around. They pulled him off, but it took a half dozen people to wrestle this guy to the ground. They dragged him off to cool down and my mom came down to talk to his wife. The next morning a couple of the men, including my dad, gave him a pack of supplies and the handgun he'd brought with him and told him to go back to his old house. He wasn't welcome anymore.
[pauses] There were very few incidents after that. Which was the point.
There are accounts of people resorting to desperate means to get through the winter.
Yeah. I don’t know how I feel about that. It didn’t happen here, though we might have come closer than I like to think. The rationing got tight a couple of times those first few winters.
[She gestures to herself. She is tall and lean and muscular.]
I used to be heavy. Not huge, but big. I'm still big but it's mostly muscle now. But back them I was overweight. I lost twenty pounds the first winter. Twenty more the winter after that. We had plans, preparations, crops, wildlife and we still had an old woman who bred cats to eat. The boys will kill stray dogs as easily as a deer or a rabbit. We even had a protocol for skinning them in the woods just in case they used to be someone's pet. So I can believe it when I hear that people resorted to… distasteful measures.
Do you feel that people should be held accountable?
[she frowns] It depends. Nothing's that easy. I wasn't there, I don't know what their story is. As long as nobody got hurt, I can only hope that whatever they did isn’t something they can't live with.
After the first couple of winters, how did your situation improve?
Well we all got a lot better at hunting and fishing. [laughs] That made a huge difference. Those early winters might have been a lot easier if more of us had any idea what we were doing with a rifle.
We also started expanding the fences to take over the hunting lodge next to us. We turned the gardens into fields. Me and the Prescott boys even went foraging down south to Abbot and made our way back with pigs and goats and chickens.
We made it more than ten years until the sweepers came through and liberated us. [she grins] Most of us stayed, so I'm not sure if it really counts as liberation.
A lot of survivor colonies didn’t welcome the military with open arms. How did your people react?
I've heard about the rebels, of course. There was nothing like that here. And while there were a couple of the mountain men survivalists in this area, I don’t think any of them turned violent. There was the occasional near miss as some poor bastard who'd been holed up in a shack with no company but the dead and his gun for god knows how many years didn’t know how to react to seeing people again. Here, we were mostly happy to see them. We still had the solar panels, though a few had been damaged during the winters, but it was more than enough to keep the radio going. We knew the sweepers were coming. For a couple of years we tracked their progress, kept a big map up in the kitchen of the main house, used thumb tacks to show where the line was advancing. Kept an estimated countdown to their arrival. When it got closer, my mom and a few of the other women organized themselves to prepare a party; a big dinner, with mead and sugar candy and decorations. When the sweepers came into sight over the horizon we started cheering. A few folks were still bitter about being abandoned, but it wasn't these guys fault, you know?
Do you think the Redeker plan was morally acceptable?
Fuck no. No one does. But I have yet to hear any one come up with a better idea. The only way we could have avoided the Redeker plan is if people – not just the governments of the world, but all of us – had gotten off our asses and paid attention and gotten prepared. Better safe than sorry, and we were damned sorry when the Great Panic hit. Sorry that as a people, as a country – as a species – we decided we'd rather die than look stupid. And most of us did just that. If everyone had prepared just a little bit, had food stored up, prepared their homes, had an evacuation plan, we might have made it through. We might have stopped it before it became a worldwide plague.
Is that why you and your family continue to live in the compound even though victory has been declared?
Partially. This area isn't entirely cleared, just like everywhere else that has a heavy winter. There's still a lot of cleaning up to do and I feel like this war won't really be over for me until that happens. Maybe after that I'll think about leaving. But I don't know. It's strange, isn't it? I was in such a hurry to leave this place, once. Now I think I'm a little scared.