by Joshua Guess
The injured people are taking a toll on our resources. Medical staff working nonstop for hours, supplies being used up at ludicrous rates. The number of able-bodied fighters here has dropped by a staggering percentage, and for what? To kill some zombies that may or may not even have attacked New Haven. If they had, our defenses would have been sufficient to mow most of them down before they got within spitting distance of the wall.
Were we a larger community, this would have been less of a problem. Hell, even if this morning's assault on the zombie swarm were a one-off event it wouldn't be so bad. But that isn't the case. This action is just one of many that put our people in needless danger because of the changing attitude of the council.
Before, we were led by people who believed more in reactive measures than proactive ones. Yeah, not all that brave a way to live and certainly it came with drawbacks, but not going out picking fights was a great way to keep our people alive.
It's evident with this morning's assault and just as evident in the recent spate of scout runs that the council has gotten tired of the 'wait and see' way of doing things. I'm all for long-range search and recovery of any and all supplies we can find, but why on earth do we have to send our people on missions where they're going to knowingly engage the remaining marauders. The most unreasonable and violent of the marauders, I'll add. Is the risk in going after them worth the rewards?
I talked to the council yesterday and again this morning. I made my case as best I could, and they were fair enough that they listened without interrupting. They answered my questions, and the hardest part is that I could and can see where they're coming from. For them, it makes perfect sense to send parties against marauder camps. The advantages are obvious: you reduce the number of active marauders out in the world, and the camps are treasure troves of materials and supplies. Marauders, when questioned, are also apparently very knowledgeable about where to find other supplies, since they search everywhere they go constantly.
The old me would have agreed with this, but I can't be that cold anymore. I can't see my fellow citizens--or, for that matter, my fellow human beings in general--as just numbers in an equation. I can't think of the people we lost today and how that weakens our defenses without also feeling the loss that their friends and families must be dealing with.
Yeah, the council's actions are logical, but there has to be an element of humanity to the policies here or the situation in New Haven could potentially snowball into a much worse one. How many people will die out on these trips before it sets off a riot among those left behind? How many reluctant citizens will risk their lives time and again when it isn't absolutely necessary, creating the sort of hate for those that order them to go which leads to revolution?
In the end, my meetings with the council were cordial, even professional. There was every indication they kept their minds as open to what I had to say as I did to their position. A small comfort, but that's the way things are with people. Only comic books and bad Hollywood scripts have clear-cut bad guys. The rest of us are just human beings with differing opinions. I told them mine, and the final call by the council was to ignore my advice and continue on with the status quo. They told me that I should come talk to them again if I had any new ideas, but I read the subtext of the conversation perfectly.
They would listen, they would agree with parts of what I had to say, and in the end they'd just do what they thought was right. My words were just wind to them.
This...isn't good.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Encampment
Posted by Josh Guess
Just before dawn, I went out on a recon trip with a group of scouts. It wasn't part of any of the odd jobs I'm now responsible for. Just my own curiosity. The council isn't thrilled with my urge to gather information about the Exiles and they certainly seem to be getting tired of my opinions, but so far they're not stopping me or shutting me up. This is my home, and I can't help feeling responsible for it.
The warm (for winter) weather continues unabated, and the countryside is starting to fill in with zombies. There are only so many you can kill in a day, and the new breed are some clever bastards at staying out of sight. Not that I'm overly worried about clearing out zombies since we live in a walled fort. The more undead out there, the harder it is for the Exiles to move around. I just wish the council would see it from that perspective.
No, I went out this morning for a very specific reason: I wanted to see what the Exiles were up to. The scout team I went with was very efficient and quiet, we weren't spotted by the enemy despite the clump of zombies we had to cut down in order to get a good view of the Exile camp.
They've set up across the river, right at the base of the broken twin bridges. I have to assume they've taken over the entire fallback point, which means they've got a lot of room to stage their vehicles and more than enough room to allow everyone to sleep indoors. We spent a lot of time making that place comfortable.
The Exiles look like they're preparing for war. They've got men set up in a perimeter around the fallback point, guards walking the surrounding area with binoculars to keep an eye out for any incoming danger. I don't know what they're so worried about, really. It's not like we can fly over the river to attack them. And given my people's penchant for breathing regularly and keeping our blood inside our veins, we aren't likely to try any long-range assaults across the river. We lack the needed equipment to do more than irritate them that way.
Even the council, so bent on being proactive and going after any prize that presents itself, is smart enough to realize how hard it would be for us to make any kind of concerted assault on the Exiles. I feel a bit of strange pride that our reputation is apparently so good that we inspire this kind of unreasonable fear in our enemies.
I don't know if that was sarcasm or not.
Of course, I could be reading the entire situation wrong. Maybe they've spotted a big swarm of zombies coming from the east and want to be ready for it. New Haven might not even be a blip on their radar right now, since there's no easy passage across the river. Our guards at the remaining bridge tell us that the Exiles have posted their own a few hundred yards away. Stalemate.
For now, life in New Haven has to go on. We're keeping safe and trying to prepare for anything, but until more information reveals itself (or until we're attacked) there's no sense in letting the mere presence of the enemy stop us from living our lives. The zombie plague put us in a world where danger is constant; this is just the flavor of the month.
Damn it, that made me want ice cream. Stupid end of the world killed all the Baskin-Robbins.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
On Angel Wings
Posted by Josh Guess
It shouldn't surprise anyone out there to learn that New Haven has been cut off from all trade for the time being. No one wants to send their people into what is sure to become a war zone soon, and our people aren't holding that against them. It does create a slew of potential problems down the road if we can't reestablish trade, but for the time being all is well.
One exception, though. We are connected with a group of survivors that are very secretive, and who have access to a large quantity of aviation fuel, a cargo plane, military air drop crates (with parachutes!) and a pilot brave enough to come this way. So yeah, we're working on having some trade goods we've been waiting on for a while dropped right on our doorstep. Okay, not actually anywhere near New Haven itself, because no one wants to be crushed by a huge box falling from the heavens. But still. Air drops. How freaking cool is that?
Yes, I'm excited. Inside every grown man is a boy still obsessed with 'army guys' and their associated toys.
Still, we'll be in a bad situation if we can't find a way to get goods out of here. We could subsidize all the items we ship out and just send team after team of people on long-term trips, but that would be stupidly inefficient. The whole point of the trade system is to spread the cost in fuel and effort among all the groups within it, saving any one gr
oup from having to use way more resources than they can spare. We'd only be able to manage for a short while before we had to stop. We've got a lot of fuel and a lot of ethanol to mix with it, but the future is a long time to go without...
We're the only producer of antibiotics of any kind, as far as I'm aware. Most of what we make it topical, but we live in a dirty world where wounds are incredibly prone to festering. I hate to think of the people out there who might suffer without our goods. Not that there's a lot we can do about it, since we don't have a skyhook just laying around, or for that matter anyone to do a flyby and grab it if we did.
Will is working with Dodger to come up with a solution. Safe routes are difficult to cultivate, but given how quiet things are with the Exiles at the moment, it's a problem we can work on. They're still holed up in the fallback point, and have given us no signs they're attempting to come across the river. Which of course makes me mad with curiosity, because why the hell would they be so nonviolent, so complacent, if they weren't up to something? It makes my brain hurt.
I will admit to one satisfying piece of good news. We've been pretty happy about the increasing number of zombies showing up around here, and the face that most of them are on our side of the river. The undead are dangerous, sure, but they make it much harder for the Exiles to move around in our part of town. At least, they would do that if the enemy were crossing over to it.
So, the scout team and I had a little fun yesterday. We trotted around town, gathering up a trail of zombies behind us. We must have had fifty or sixty following when we gunned our engines and left them all at the river bank. Right across from the fallback point. All those zombies, standing at the edge of the river, watching the tasty humans on the other side. Dangerous to the Exiles? No, probably not as long as they don't try to cross. Annoying as hell? Yep. I'd say that's likely.
Sometimes being petty is deeply, deeply gratifying.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Slow Game
Posted by Josh Guess
It's taking armed guards holding some of out people at gun point to keep us from starting a war. Well, escalating a war. The Exiles started it, but it took us a few days to realize how deep a game they were playing.
Last night about a dozen people got sick. Really, really sick. By this morning, five of them had died. We track everyone's meal assignments at the mess, and it's obvious what the cause is. They've been poisoned.
We were so goddamn arrogant to think that the storehouses had been left alone. We saw signs of tampering and assumed that since the same signs didn't appear elsewhere that we were safe. The Exiles didn't want to kill all of us, or they didn't have enough poison to go around. Instead they simply laced a bag of black-eye peas, the only bag we had, with something deadly. Everyone who ate those peas are victims of this conflict.
One of those victims was a child of five. He died just after midnight.
I want to haul ass down the hill and rain down bloody murder on these fuckers, but I know it isn't a viable option. It's taking all my willpower to sit here and write this rather than load up a gun and fight my way to the river bank through the zombies still walking along it. Jess is a great help in keeping me steady. I only wish I could do the same for all the others who've lost someone or may lose someone to this attack.
Make no mistake, I'm furious with the Exiles, but I can't escape a lesser rage at the council. The situation isn't entirely their fault, since we all chose to kick out the homesteaders and to give amnesty to the marauders. But they did make the situation worse by attacking the remaining marauder camps. That was likely a big factor in bringing two different groups of enemies together against us.
I can't get my thoughts straight this morning. And I really don't have much time to write. I have to help sort through all the remaining supplies we brought back from our storehouses and see what we can salvage. God only knows if anything else has been poisoned. You'd think the Exiles would have done something bigger if they had the means. It's pretty clear they mean to fight us despite how roundabout they've been about it. Maybe this is just an attempt to keep New Haven off balance.
I can't say much, but I will say this: Newton had it right. For every action, there's a reaction. Don't doubt it.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Tiny Little Pieces
Posted by Josh Guess
There was no question that we'd retaliate against the Exiles for poisoning our people. The difficulty was trying to figure out a way to do it. We wanted to hurt them as they hurt us, but logistical problems denied us at every turn. We went through a lot of ideas.
There was the plan to go down the hill and simply lay into the fallback point with a rain of arrows and a hail of gunfire. This was discarded immediately for practical reasons: we can't afford to waste the ammunition. Also, the fallback point was designated as such because it's really hard to attack. Doing so across the river in this way would be wasteful to the point of stupidity.
Then we moved on to stealth. The idea was proposed to send an elite group made up of our best scouts and some of the military folks from North Jackson on a mission to hit the Exiles where they live. It would have taken a while since they'd have had to travel pretty far north or south to get to a bridge the Exiles aren't guarding. Then they'd have to manage sneaking past security and finding a way to damage the enemy without being caught. This one was vetoed quickly also, due to the extreme risk involved for anyone that went.
Another that was shot down was one I came up with, and I wasn't ever serious about it. I only mention it here because I think it shows how irrational rage can make even the most reasonable person. See, I had the idea that we could build a catapult...
For the record, very few good ideas begin with building a catapult.
Anyway, I was trying to think of ways we could get zombies across the river to do some real damage to the enemy. There were dozens of reasons this wouldn't work--building the damn thing, the fact that zombies like to attack and getting them on a catapult would be impossible, the inevitable broken limbs that would happen when the zombies hit the other side, making them far less effective as killing machines. The idea was stupid and cartoonish, but we'd gone through a dozen others by that point and weren't any closer to a solution.
So, I took a break and picked up the book I'd been reading to clear my head. It was one of the Sword of Truth novels, and as I was reading I was struck by an idea. In one of the novels in the series, a small group is threatened by an overwhelming mass of enemy soldiers. The solution they came up with was creative and awful for their enemies.
Our original idea was to copy that maneuver outright. We were going to send teams in to nearby buildings to take all the glass they could find. We were going to crush the glass into dust and fling it at the Exiles over the river. Yeah, who wants to inhale jagged pieces of glass dust? Or get it in their eyes? Or swallow it. The idea was beautiful and had merit, but the logistics of it failed as a few of the others did. We tried crushing the glass, but when it got close to being dust one of our people accidentally inhaled some. We decided it was too dangerous to attempt on a large scale.
The next best solution? Sand. Specifically very hot sand.
We rigged up one of the compressed air tanks that power some of the defenses on the wall (I'm gonna kiss the guy to found the air compressor and hooked it up to our small solar grid) to a good-sized air cannon kept inside the walls as an extra. We tested it with sand, and it worked really well. At a hundred feet, the sand was still cohesive enough to knock a man down. After that it starts to disintegrate into a cloud and disperses quickly.
We set up five of these cannons in the back of pickup trucks, easily raised to a firing angle in a few seconds. Laying flat, the cannons were virtually invisible as we made our way down the hill. We went unarmed in the hope that it wouldn't drive many of the Exiles inside the buildings. We made our way down the hill slowly, both to make the enemy curious and to keep the wind from cooling the pots of sand too much.
&
nbsp; I should mention here that the curious shape of the hill leading down to the fallback point gave us a huge advantage. The road goes between two tall cliffs, was in fact cut from the bedrock that used to be between them. It's a hill blown in half and the whole thing acts as a perfect corridor for any wind. A slight breeze compresses when it hits the cliffs, turning into pretty hard gusts by the time it hits the river.
We stayed back about a hundred and fifty feet, and we acted quickly. From the time we stopped our vehicles, it was maybe twenty seconds before we fired our cannons. Five loads of sand hot enough that we were a bit worried it would fuse to glass or melt the PVC of the cannon barrels went into the air almost at the same time. One of the shots actually did knock down one of the enemy, and the resulting impact spread the sand all around him instantly.
We only got a rough glance in before we ran like hell, but I'd guess there were at least forty people in the clouds. I heard a chorus of screams as they writhed to get red-hot grains of silica out of their hair, from inside their clothes. Some of them are probably blinded. I don't feel good about causing so much pain, but I don't feel bad about it either. I wish I could be the kind of man who still has the moral strength to regret this kind of thing even while finding it necessary, but I'm not. They got what they deserved, and my only wish is that I could have made it cleaner and just killed them.
