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

by Joshua Guess

  After I posted yesterday, some of the Louisville crowd contacted us. They aren't a cohesive group toughing it out in one place like so many people do. In the city that's pretty hard. Instead small clusters of them secure locations, spreading out their numbers into dozens of places. They gather during the days to work together, and break apart again at night. It works well for them, and with the large number of undead wandering the city it's probably best they don't bring too many folks together in one place.

  The gist of the message was simple: the Louisville gang has seen some strange activity lately and my post made them wonder if it was related to the New Breed buildup out in the countryside. Just as we caught wind of the increasing numbers of New Breed far enough away from our usual runs, so too have the Louisville survivors noted rapid changes in their local zombie population. Here, in a much less urban setting, it's not a big deal to go a day or three without seeing any undead.

  In Louisville, it's unusual as hell to see the numbers of them dwindle, much less disappear entirely from some areas. But that's exactly what's happening. Neighborhoods that have seen a constant presence of zombies for months or longer are suddenly empty of them. The mass gatherings in the downtown area are slimmer. Noticeably so.

  Most of those vanishing are old school zombies. I bet you can see where this is going, eh?

  So some of the Louisville crew decided to risk a trip out into the county yesterday, or at least farther than they're used to traveling from their usual stomping grounds. They wanted to confirm that the New Breed was pulling the same trick there that they are here. Given the huge numbers of undead in and around the city, it wasn't hard to spot a group of them. The Louisville crew followed.

  All the way to the zoo. Which had been abandoned not long after The Fall. I haven't been there for probably eight years, but I've been told the folks at the zoo decided to free the animals when it became clear the end was pretty much nigh. I admit to a small amount of personal satisfaction at that--the idea of penguins and tigers and adorable creatures from around the globe wandering around Kentucky makes me smile. While I've always enjoyed zoos, I always felt guilty that those critters didn't have their freedom. Yeah, I'm a softy. Deal with it.

  Anyway, the New Breed is gathering on the grounds of the zoo. The crew was understandably reluctant to make a trip inside the gates, but even from the road (down which they drove very quickly since the New Breed saw them coming) they could see the swarms inside. They'd seen old school zombies dragged or herded in. That's about as much confirmation as any of us need.

  The Louisville group has offered to send a hundred people here for two days to help us locate and destroy the zombies in Shelby county. We've happily accepted the offer, because no one here believes the battle we won last week did much to dent the numbers there. We know the New Breed is smart and able to hold back part of their force, an example of complex tactical thinking. If they hit us with two hundred or better at the silo, then they did so because many more were elsewhere, held in reserve.

  To take out those kinds of numbers we're going to need help. I don't know that another hundred trained fighters will be enough if we have to fight them out in the open, far away from the huge advantages the walls and defenses of New Haven give us. To clarify, even if we did manage to win that fight, there's no way we could do it without heavy losses.

  I have to imagine the Exiles are reading this and getting a nice chuckle from it. They've got the river to protect them from the masses of undead. For whatever reason, we haven't seen large numbers of zombies come for the fallback point.

  Over the next day or two, I'll be busting ass on plans and preparations. We've got a chance to thin the herd enough that it will take the New Breed weeks or months to recover. Without the Louisville crew, it wouldn't be possible at all. Not without also being suicidal.

  Hmm. The thought of zombies filling all the empty cages of the Louisville Zoo has a certain appeal to me. I don't know why my inner smartass seems to find justice in that mental image, but it does.

  If this cooperative effort works, then we may return the favor for the Louisville folks and try to help them do some real damage to the zombies in the zoo. Tactics and planning. That's always the key.

  Monday, March 19, 2012

  Stone Dust

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I may have mentioned this once or twice (or a dozen times) but it's worth repeating: Becky is a fucking genius. She's come up with a means to produce truly stupid amounts of Thermite, which is going to be really useful against the New Breed.

  I'm not huge on chemistry, but as Becky and I were talking yesterday I realized how easy it is to miss really important things. She has managed to create explosives and other difficult to manufacture substances where the rest of us scratch our heads like the comparative cavemen we are. I was talking with her about our plans to hunt down and assault the New Breed before they could gather enough numbers to become a serious threat to New Haven. I was frustrated because we have all these stocks of supplies and materials sitting around, but a lot of it isn't that useful.

  I mentioned the huge storehouse we've loaded with various sundries--the old hotel where we liberated some captives not long after The Fall--and started naming off the random items that had no particular use. Keep in mind that we've been making Thermite in small amounts for a while, but the stuff requires metal dust and that's not easy to make in large amounts. The process is time and labor intensive.

  I told her about the huge case of hematite rings we left in the hotel after clearing out the marauders. What use could we have for those things, you know? I'd taken a couple of them just because I liked the shiny black rings, and they brought back pleasant memories of the various ones I'd bought from flea markets and renaissance fairs over the years.

  That was when she stopped me. The look on her face was priceless. You'd have thought I'd told her casually about a store of hidden treasure.

  She explained to me that Hematite is the stuff that goes into a particular blend of thermite intended to cut through steel. We've had some of it before, even. We just didn't know exactly what was in it. Turns out we've been sitting on enough raw materials to make a few hundred pounds of the stuff. Of course, the rings aren't enough on their own. We need powdered aluminum in large quantities. If only we knew a manufacturing center that had such a supply...

  So, yeah. North Jackson is sending their next trade caravan to us early. We're doing a bit of separate trading with them, direct instead of utilizing the network we've set up, exactly for situations like this.

  Becky, Will, Dodger, Patrick, Jess, and I are all working today on how to weaponize this stuff. It's going to need some fine tuning and testing. It's not a complex problem to work out. All we really need to manage is a way to deliver the dust to the bodies of the New Breed, and to ignite it without having to be too close. Granted, it's really dangerous stuff and tricky to set on fire, but we've faced this problem before.

  Now that we have a viable way to use heat against the New Breed (and I feel like an idiot for not giving Becky a list of all our supplies earlier. All those hours people have spent filing metals down...) there's a strong feeling of hope around New Haven. In a worst case scenario, the swarm in Shelby county has hidden themselves away and we can't find them. So they attack here.

  That's bad, but we're going to have a large supply of an incredibly effective weapon on hand very shortly. If the New Breed hits us here, we'll be better off a few days from now than we are right now. I'm curious to see what the effects of direct and indirect heat will be on the New Breed physiology. I don't know how much of a weakness the heat will turn out to be. So far we know it weakens their skin and underlying armored layers, but that just means it's easier to fight them. To cut them.

  Becky has prepared a small amount of the new mixture for me to use on two of our test subjects. One is going to get the direct heat treatment, the other indirect. It should be interesting. We've never exposed the undead to this kind of heat in a cont
rolled environment. The results will hopefully help us in determining the most efficient way to utilize our new weapon.

  I've got it in a plastic bag stuffed into one of my cargo pockets. The stuff just looks like black dust. It's crazy to think that the amount in my khakis is enough to cut through most of an engine block. Thousands of degrees of potential heat. Basically stone dust, engineered by human intelligence (again, let's give Becky the credit here) into something useful. That's nuts to me.

  I'm excited to test it out. And I need to get to it before the meeting I have with the others later. It's going to be a busy few days, but with any luck they'll be productive ones. And by productive, I mean we'll be able to kill a lot of zombies with minimal risk.

  Tuesday, March 20, 2012

  Mad Method

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Four this afternoon is zero hour. New Haven is now playing host to a large contingent of volunteers from the Louisville area. Becky has been hard at work, missing sleep and recruiting workers to make as much thermite as possible. We've got a plan, and it's going to be incredibly risky.

  The good news is that our scouts have been busting ass to keep tabs on the zombie swarm in Shelbyville. We know where they are, about how many of them we'll be facing, and what the terrain looks like. We're sending seventy people of our own, enough to do a lot of damage when working in tandem with our guests. We're splitting the thermite evenly between home and the folks going out. There should be enough gel bombs for each of us to have one.

  I'll explain Becky's genius idea to weaponize the thermite tomorrow. It's not all that complicated, but I'd rather not brag on her behalf before we've used the stuff in the field.

  Um. I'll be honest: she told me not to. She doesn't want me to get people's hope up if these weapons fail utterly. She hits hard, so I'm doing what she tells me.

  We've actually got a pretty good strategy worked out for the fight. I'm not trying to sound overconfident, but I think we've worked out a good way to engage the New Breed on open ground without losing cohesion given that more than half our force are people we haven't fought with before. Again, that's almost a post by itself and I want to do it justice. Because my brother Dave worked out the logistics of the thing, and it's beautiful. Solves a lot of problems we'd face in dealing with the New Breed on their own turf.

  I can tell you why we're confident. Becky's idea for turning the thermite into a useful weapon is part of it. Dave's work with portable defenses is another. But we wouldn't even be considering this move if the results of my tests with our captive New Breed hadn't yielded shocking and frankly amazing results.

  You may remember me saying that we would be testing direct and indirect heat on the zombies in question. The indirect heat method turned out to be less useful than I'd have hoped. A flare of thermite had to be within a foot of the test subject to have a serious effect on it. That's not due to any lack of heat--the stuff burns at something like three or four thousand degrees--but more because it burns really fast. A flare going off within a foot will do immediate damage to the zombie. Past that and the zombie's reaction to the white-hot fire is quick enough and the distance great enough that they only take minor damage. That is, within two feet of a thermite flare, they'll lose some of the strength to their toughened skin.

  So, if we had tons of the stuff, we'd be able to set traps around New Haven and weaken an attacking swarm. Assuming we could set off the stuff without too much trouble. Really not an option.

  Direct heat, however, has a much more useful and interesting effect. Basically, it well and truly fucks a zombie up.

  It was a bitch getting one of my test subjects strapped down, but SO worth the effort. I put a very small amount of thermite on the thing's wrist. Smack in the middle of the joint. The amount was tiny, about the size of a grain of rice. Took me a few tries to get it lit, especially because the zombie was trying his damnedest to pull his hand away. When I finally got the magnesium striker to catch the thermite, the burn lasted for about three seconds.

  The zombie's hand and arm up to the elbow stopped working. Completely.

  That blew me away. I expected it to do some damage to the thing's skin, sure, and to burn through and cause some structural chaos...but at no time did I expect the results I got. I was so stunned that I had to show Evans and Gabby right away. Had to understand what had happened. Because we've done a lot of bad things to zombies before. Even setting them on fire usually takes a while to kill them. This was really fast.

  After removing the zombie's arm, I took it to the people with the fancy medical degrees, who dissected and studied it. When you flay open a zombie's body, you can see the tendrils of material that make up the plague organism. The color varies, but usually the fibers of the parasite are a pale purple or a dark red. The test subject's arm contained blackened ash up to the elbow.

  Evans thinks the initial burn heated up the portion of the organism under the flesh, which through some mechanism we don't understand tried to shed the heat, causing the temperature of the surrounding tissues to rise. Which caused the newly heated portions to shed the heat...you get the idea.

  What it boils down to is that a very tiny amount of this stuff on the skin is incredibly damaging to the undead. The huge temperature change over such a short period of time basically cooks the plague out of that area. And if the reaction of the zombie I was testing direct heat on is any indication, this is one of those things that causes great fear in the undead. Maybe not because of pain, since they don't seem to feel it, but maybe by the unnerving experience of suddenly losing a big portion of itself.

  After a few more tests, I killed the subject with a shot to the head. Took a few tries, as the thickened skin and underlying fibrous armor (not to mention the skull itself) can take a lot more punishment. In the end, I used a blob of thermite gel (I love you, Becky) about the size a big cherry to manage it. Right on the thing's crown.

  Five seconds of burn, no more zombie. That is what we're taking into battle today. If we're insanely lucky, it'll work.

  Thursday, March 22, 2012

  Triangles

  Posted by Josh Guess

  As far as epic showdowns with mortal threats go, yesterday was pretty good.

  Our scouts were the first in the field. They ran quite a way ahead to get the attention of the New Breed. The New Breed, as it turns out, has scouts of their own. Apparently they've taken to copying some of our tactics. Our scouts made it back to us without taking any losses. Theirs saw our assembled force and turned back the way they came.

  What the New Breed scouts saw was a hundred and sixty people out in the middle of a field. No defensive structures, no large weapons. Only a few vehicles since we left them safely back. The fight was going to be all-or-nothing. No escape routes.

  When the main force of Shelbyville New Breed came for us, we still looked like a relatively defenseless group. They were cautious, spreading around us in a very wide circle before getting close. We let the circle tighten, the zombies surrounding us get within about thirty yards before our front ranks dropped to the earth. Every man and woman that dropped hauled on heavy ropes and straps, pulling up custom pieces of metal, each with very carefully designed edges. Most of them were triangular, old pieces of car hoods welded together and unfolding. Our people locked theses devices together, built-in supports swinging out and locking into place.

  Diamond shapes all around us. My brother has been working on portable defensive structures for a long time, precisely for this situation. The things aren't tall, five feet at most. But the center seam and the angles made it almost impossible for the undead to climb the things. They were forced in between the diamonds, funneled into small areas where our teams of shield-bearers could hold them off while others mowed them down.

  We were worried at first that the New Breed would retreat when they saw our people react with what was clearly a pre-planned routine. To better entice them, we made sure one of the deer our hunters brought in that morning was set aside. The smell of
blood and raw meat probably wouldn't do it alone, but the New Breed couldn't smell that and see us, greatly outnumbered, and just walk away.

  I didn't get any front-line action in the fight. I was serving as a bowman and unit commander. I was the one who ordered the people in my wedge of our circle to raise their diamonds. I shouted for the shield-bearers to move into position just as the first few zombies rushed forward. The spearmen (and women) behind them didn't need orders--they rushed forward exactly as practiced and set their weapons butt-first in the earth.

  The people behind them? They threw the first volley of gel bombs. Becky's nifty invention.

  I don't know what the hell she mixed the thermite with to turn flammable dust that's very tricky to ignite into a sticky gel that's hard to wipe off, but she did it. Every gel bomb is a just a water balloon (one of the small ones, about the size of a grenade) filled about halfway up. The things aren't tied at all, because the opening of each balloon has a magnesium fuse in it. Turns out you can make those really easily, and you don't need tons of magnesium to do it. Mixed with some easily flammable dust (mostly scraped from matches), those things light without too much fuss. It's dangerous as hell to light one, but that's unavoidable.