Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5)

by Joshua Guess

  This morning is March the sixth, I'll remind you. Our timetable for planting has little wiggle room, and the weather is not being agreeable. I can't tell you how fortunate we are that my wife has been directing her teams so efficiently. She's the reason our agricultural efforts are as far along as they are.

  The rapid shift toward cold weather brought us one unexpected but valuable piece of information: we now see a weakness in the New Breed. It's a small one, but something we can exploit in the short term.

  Yesterday morning around dawn wasn't all that cold. It was just above freezing out, causing the snow to be very wet and clingy. Thinking that we'd have the advantage over the zombies outside the walls, we sent teams out under guard to gather several large loads of firewood. Not knowing if the cold snap would stay with us or not, this seemed like a reasonable (and necessary) risk. I should add here that our teams have encountered small groups of New Breed zombies many times over the last week. Some have attacked our people, some have merely hung back at the edge of any nearby woods to observe, some have feinted toward our people only to retreat at once, testing us.

  It's becoming clear that the local New Breed are acting as one large force. They're not just trying to figure out the weaknesses in New Haven's defenses or deciding which of our gathering places in the outside world might act as a convenient feeding ground in which to kill unwary humans. There seems to be a larger push here, a guiding principle that makes me think the New Breed are trying to get a handle on every aspect of us, their enemy and potential food supply.

  Yeah, that's fucking scary. We've been working on the assumption that all our worst-case scenarios are true. That the New Breed is far more intelligent than they appear to be, and that the game they play is currently beyond our understanding.

  That's actually a much more freeing idea than you might think. We know they're watching us, could be preparing some move against New Haven and our people that we can't anticipate. That narrows down the possible responses on our part to basically two: retreat or attack. We have nowhere to run, so....

  We've armed the guards going out to protect our teams of workers with rifles and precious bullets. They have instructions to shoot any New Breed on sight, whether or not they attack. These zombies are smart, and they measure us. The last thing we can afford to be is predictable.

  Yesterday morning around ten o'clock, a cold(er) front moved in and dropped the temperatures into the low twenties in a very short time. A team of woodcutters had been sent out to gather lumber and firewood. They encountered a group of New Breed waiting for them. The zombies had been clever, seeing the snow coming and hiding themselves amid the piles of wood during the night. Our watchers check, but it's impossible to be perfect. The undead managed to find places to lay low, waiting during the snowfall for our people.

  Thing is, when the New Breed sensed our people coming close and rose from the mantle of snow covering them, they were slow. Zombies have developed a resistance to cold during the time since the outbreak began, but there is only so much a body can take--reanimated or not. Our people had plenty of time to pull back, and thank god for the perceptiveness of the guard captain. He ordered his people to hold their fire, noting something different about these New Breed.

  Their skin, usually looking dense and leathery, appeared brittle. The color was off from slate gray to a sickly blue, and even as the New Breed moved and the snow fell away from them he could see small cracked areas forming at the joints. Cold wasn't sending them into the hibernation state it used to, but clearly it was still affecting parts of their physiology.

  The guard captain ordered one of his men to strike at the first zombie with a handheld weapon, told him to aim for a joint. The man hit the elbow of the nearest New Breed, and the result was...awful. The skin basically sloughed away like a loos glove from elbow to wrist. The constant contact with the and the rapid change in temperature does things to that armored skin they grow.

  Note that I said change in temperature instead of 'drop in temperature'. Evans and I spent yesterday afternoon testing a theory, you see. On our captive New Breed. We used a lot of firewood to get the room we keep him in hot enough, but we began to see it. I put on my armor, thinking I'd sweat to death, in order to restrain our test subject. Once I had the noose pole around his neck, the rest wasn't so hard.

  As Evans directed me through the heavy fence around the cell, I tested the strength and resilience of our New Breed's skin. At prolonged lower temps, their skin can crack and separate if they move too quickly or violently before it begins to warm back up. At higher temperatures, somewhere between ninety-five and a hundred degrees, the skin begins to lose its toughness and become waxy. More supple. Way easier to pierce.

  Hell, I accidentally pulled off a chunk of our captive's skin the size of a baseball just pinching it and giving a moderate pull.

  To think that yesterday I woke up angry that this insane season had given us snow when it should be getting t-shirt warm. The freak snowstorm and following cold front were the best thing that could have happened, because otherwise we might not have discovered this chink in the armor of the enemy. How we can take advantage of that is probably going to be my main work for the near future, but it's a job I'm happy to take on.

  We had to get some good news eventually.

  Wednesday, March 7, 2012

  Fool's Gold

  Posted by Josh Guess

  There are some of you out there that have been pushing for trade in weapons lately. I've had a few messages about wanting to trade us field artillery--that is, portable artillery weapons that we could use against our enemies, as well as some less long-range items in case of a zombie swarm. There was even a comment on the blog last week about it, and with the influx of messages we've received, I feel the need to address this where all of you can read it.

  In short, the title of this post says it all: this is fool's gold. Way more valuable in appearance than in reality, at least for us.

  While I would love to have some rocket-propelled grenades or similar in case a huge swarm of zombies comes at New Haven, we haven't had a lot of luck finding any at the various military outposts we've come across. I have to assume that the military had similar thoughts and loaded up everything they could find. I know a lot of you out there have large chunks of surviving soldiers embedded in your communities, and that many of them brought such weapons to you. All of us here appreciate your willingness to trade for them, but we have to decline.

  There are several reasons. While it would be an advantage to have some smaller, less destructive weapons to use against a zombie swarm, we couldn't rely on them long-term. After all, they take ammunition, and it isn't ammo that we can make ourselves like bullets (and even that is really damn hard to do). The main advantage over our current system of air-powered defenses is mobility. We can't take our most powerful weapons out into the field for the most part, which makes us weaker against potential hordes of undead.

  As for longer-range stuff like portable mortars (this is getting into an area I don't know a lot about, so I'm taking Will and Dodger's word for it) we don't have any use for them. Yeah, we could probably use them against the fallback point, but I'm certain that the Exiles, who I'll remind are currently under tentative truce with us, have such weapons and know how to use them. The fact that they haven't is a perfect example of why they are valueless to us.

  I don't have to tell anyone out there how important all our resources are, including the homes we've made for ourselves. I can't think of many circumstances in which we'd be willing to destroy the fallback point just to eliminate an enemy that isn't attacking us. I'm equally sure the Exiles don't pummel the walls of New Haven to dust because they do plan at some point to attack and try to take what we have. Maybe that will be a true takeover much as the Richmond soldiers did last year, or maybe just taking our supplies and some of our people before running. I don't know.

  I do know that no even partially sane person is willing to destroy perfectly good supplies and s
helter for the sake of vengeance. Do we hate each other? Sure. But we're not stupid and for damn sure not wasteful.

  I don't doubt that there are some of you out there in situations with different factors. I'm not disparaging anyone that uses those kinds of weapons, but we don't need them. It's too much risk. Explosives are a danger, and easily used artillery means one person with access to them having a bad day could lead us into another war. One idiot messing around with them could blow half of New Haven to dust.

  So, no. Despite the positive impact (no pun intended) those kinds of arms would have in our fight against the undead, they just aren't worth that to us. I wish more than anything that we could avoid all conflict and focus one hundred percent of our energy on building a better future. We can't, of course, and we won't whine or complain (too much) about it. But we certainly won't complicate our efforts by bringing such massively dangerous weapons here.

  And remember, we are a community beset by enemies on a regular basis. If we were to be conquered again as the Richmond soldiers managed, would you want a stockpile of mortars that could destroy your entire home in minutes in the hands of such people? I wouldn't.

  We thank you for your offers, but we politely decline. Now I'm off to study our captive zombies. Something interesting is happening, and I want to spend time watching it.

  Thursday, March 8, 2012

  Altered States

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I'm writing this early in the morning, or from my perspective late at night, because I've been unable to sleep. I feel...off balance right now, given the last day's events. I don't know where to begin, really.

  At the beginning, I suppose. It's old wisdom, but it works for a person in freefall.

  Yesterday our woodsmen went out to bring in loads of firewood again. The lumber yard is one of the few places we have to go every day, and is apparently a favorite target of the New Breed. They know we'll go there, that we have to. When our teams arrived, though, there was not a stick of wood to be found.

  The New Breed had been busy throughout the night. Our people moved in cautiously, stepping to the edge of the forest to make certain that our supplies hadn't been dragged just a small distance away. It smelled of a trap, a lure to pull my people into the dangerous woods where they could be separated and more easily brought down. The guards didn't allow anyone to make that mistake.

  Not that it mattered. As soon as the bulk of our people had spread about the lumbering site, zombies popped out from behind trees and bushes. A hail of thrown weapons came down on our team, chunks of cut wood that knocked a few of them senseless and distracted the rest.

  More New Breed moved in, attacking in numbers. Four men were lost immediately, though the guards managed to rally a defense somehow. Several more of our folks were savaged badly by the undead, only one of them surviving the trip home.

  That man was looked over by Evans, Gabrielle, and Phil. They agreed that there was nothing to be done. The wounds he'd sustained were too much, and he was going to die. Deep damage to his viscera by zombie fingers would mean a slow, lingering death made worse by the fact that our patient was conscious. I find myself ashamed to admit that I was the one who brought up the point everyone in the room except our patient was thinking about.

  What an opportunity for study. Terrible, and a loss to our people, but a chance to understand the change as a person went through reanimation. How much could that knowledge help us down the road?

  So, we asked the patient for his consent. We would put him under sedation with enough painkillers to allow him quick passage from the pain of his injuries into whatever lies beyond. I was surprised that he agreed.

  What happened next was surprising. I still can't quite wrap my head around it.

  We've always assumed that all people, when they die without steps being taken to preclude reanimation, turn into what I call 'old school' zombies. We know beyond doubt that the many structures of the organism that brings us back in a state of undeath already exist in our bodies. We've studied that, we know it to be fact. The organism grows in the living, learning the systems of the body, and after the heart stops and the brain goes cold, it takes over. Usually this process takes a few hours, on rare occasions it only takes a few minutes.

  But the assumption has been that the New Breed makes more of itself by turning standard zombies. By infecting them with bites. We've seen many victims of the New Breed rise.

  That changed with our volunteer. His death was painless and swift, and his resurrection came within a few minutes. We'd secured him in a cell before even administering his medicines, of course. We aren't stupid. I watched as the change came over him. I had tears in my eyes as I took my notes, and a part of me felt a deep disquiet at what I was doing. I noted every aspect of the change as it came over the subject.

  The subject. Jesus. His name was Rick. He was a nice guy.

  Rick changed quickly, but it didn't stop. Over a period of several hours of observation, his skin began to change color, losing pigment as it moved toward the tones that so clearly mark the New Breed's tougher hide. It wasn't a complete change, of course. The thick bands of fibrous material beneath the skin will take time to grow as the organism within metabolizes nutrients to fuel the change. But now we know for certain that the New Breed truly is just that--they're capable of infecting living people with their strain of the zombie plague. People can turn into them straightaway.

  We imagine it's airborne. There simply wasn't enough time for Rick's organism to be co-opted by the New Breed strain. He had to have already been carrying it.

  Which means most of us probably are. The medicos think that the New Breed strain is likely far more hardy and invasive than the original zombie plague. We've seen this thing evolve over the last two years, and it's frightening to realize how we've had to evolve with it. I watched a man die today, helped kill him in fact, so that we could understand the enemy a little better.

  I know all the arguments, all the reasoning. I know he was going to die anyway. The logic of the situation doesn't do anything for the hollow place in me that wishes I hadn't agreed to this experiment. I had no idea it would come so far, so quickly.

  The damnable thing about the whole situation is that it really is doing a lot of good. I could almost wish that weren't the case, so I could pack up and call it quits. I'm sick with myself that we lost people yesterday, good men, and my first thought wasn't for them or their friends and families.

  No, I had to ask, 'How can we use this?'

  Friday, March 9, 2012

  Hot Box

  Posted by Josh Guess

  We can now confirm that the New Breed strain of the zombie plague is airborne. The old school zombie we'd brought in to act study as a control against our captive New Breed has made the change overnight into a New Breed himself.

  The change seems to happen faster in zombies that have been reanimated for any length of time. Over at least twelve hours, but possibly as long as eighteen since we didn't look in on our old school zombie very much, the infection has done the majority of its work. The skin is thick and gray, there are the first signs of thickening around the neck and head. The fibrous armor that grows beneath the skin has already made significant progress.

  That in and of itself is a change. At first those bands of material weren't visible without removing the skin, but now they're growing thicker and easier to see.

  Since we have three New Breed zombies in our holding area, Evans and I along with Gabrielle have decided it's time to take our testing to another level. I still don't feel right about what we're doing, but I'm determined to go on until my conscience absolutely demands otherwise. I could argue about the pros and cons all day, but you probably already know them. The fact that I'm torn is a good sign. The warning bells should only start to ring when I stop questioning the morality of my own actions.

  So, today, our newly made New Breed is going to get cooked.

  It sounds awful (and it is awful) but we aren't actually going to cook hi
m like a roast or anything. We've got a large hot box set up that will allow us some degree of control over the temperature in it. It looks a lot like a grill, but it really isn't. The highest we'll allow the heat to get to is around a hundred and thirty degrees. Hot, yes, but to a zombie that's not even noticeable.

  I can tell you that for sure. One interesting discovery we've made is that zombies don't experience pain the way you and I do. They recognize touch and extremes of hot and cold, but there is no indication that such a thing as discomfort even exists for them. When we were studying the effect of heat on the New Breed's skin the other day, the mounting heat in the room caused no visible reaction in the undead. Hell, we stripped some of his skin off (I shudder at the memory) and got a grunt from him. That was it.

  We're going further today mainly to see if the underlying layers of thickened tissue are effected by heat in the same way as their skin. We'll be working in increments. I've got a knot of dread in my belly even thinking about what I'm going to do, balanced out by the buzzing excitement of curiosity.

  I've been stuck on our experiments a lot lately. I'm trying to move my focus away from them in my daily life, because the stress of knowing what horrible things we have to do is starting to seriously affect my routines. On that note, other news.