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

by Joshua Guess

  The fighters are being sent out after receiving word from our scouts. When a small enough group is located, one of three teams will head out and set up, the undead brought to them by the scout team. So far it's working well. It's a bit heavy on manpower and resources, but most of the folks volunteering to do it are using their free time. I can't imagine how tired they must be, working the earth seven hours a day and fighting for another three or four. It's damn impressive.

  This has been going on for days. the reports are here for me to see, and I have to say--they look good. Sure, the New Breed will adapt to the tactic eventually or just plain realize it's better for them not to chase down small teams of scouts because of the pointy death waiting for them, but in four days of these kinds of raids, our people have managed to kill another three hundred New Breed here and in surrounding counties.

  All of that without the thermite gel bombs. We're keeping the rest of those here at home for now. Eventually we'll make a bunch more of them, but for now our supplies are finite. Not small, by any means, but not easily replaceable in the very short term. We've got some good signs that we'll be able to trade pretty quickly, and there are other varieties of thermite we could make that wouldn't be as effective, but still. Caution is the best way to go.

  The end result is that while we'll probably never be able to clear the New Breed out of here, we're keeping their numbers from reaching that critical mass where they feel certain they can defeat us. By hitting them in small, dispersed attacks we're able to maximize damage to them while minimizing risk to us.

  Which is awesome, because we need some stability and time to heal, as well as time to build and gather more people here. And if the pile of work waiting for me is any indication (and seeing my brother's handwriting on a lot of it, I'm sure it is) then I have to start looking at ways to make those future plans workable. No time like the present.

  Wednesday, March 28, 2012

  Joker

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Remember a short while ago, when some of our watchers saved the lives of some Exile guards? You probably do, but a refresher: some zombies got the jump on the guards, and our guys picked off the undead with their rifles.

  The watchers on duty last night weren't the same ones, but the guards on the Exile side of the river were. Those fellas seem to draw guard duty a lot, and they've become familiar faces to every rotation of our people that man the outposts we've thrown up on our side of the river. It's the same routine at the beginning of every shift--the Exiles walk up to their post, get report from the men they're relieving, then turn to face our side of the river and give a salute to our unseen men and women. It's safe to assume they're thanking us for saving their lives, though I'm surprised they keep up the habit. Their superiors can't be happy about it.

  Yesterday was different. The Exiles did their normal thing for the first two hours of their shift, but one of them started to get fidgety. According to our people, he kept looking around across the river as if he were trying to figure out which of the several blinds we've set up were housing our folks.

  After a few minutes, the guard got annoyed and pulled out a megaphone. The guy turns it on, fiddles with the controls, and puts it to his mouth. Across the river, his voice carried very loudly. He said, and I'm going to try to get this as close as possible:

  "A man walks into a bar with an alligator under one arm. He bets everyone in the bar he can put his balls in the alligator's mouth and it won't bite him. If he wins, he gets a free drink from each person. If he loses, he buys everyone a drink.

  The patrons at the bar agree. The man orders a beer, taps the alligator on the head, and places his genitals in the thing's mouth, which slowly closes. The man calmly drinks his beer, and when he's done he smacks the alligator on top of the head pretty hard. The alligator opens its mouth, and the room breaks out in applause.

  After closing up his pants, the man jumps on top of a bar stool and points a finger around the room. 'Anyone here brave enough to try it?' he says.

  A young blond woman in the back of the room raises her hand and says, 'Sure, but you don't have to hit me with that bottle.'"

  Try as they might, our people couldn't help laughing. I don't know if the noise was enough for the guard to see where they were, but they could see him smiling through their binoculars.

  The guy kept telling jokes for a while, and people from inside the fallback point started to come out. It was near dusk by the time someone finally pulled the guard to the side and had words with him, and after that he was silent. But he and his partner kept on smiling, even gave a little bow to his unseen audience.

  I don't know if this means anything. I don't know if there was an ulterior motive, or if the guy was just bored and maybe realized that our people were probably just as bored. Two years of tension, fear, and mistrust has made me way more cynical than a guy not yet thirty should be, but I find myself hoping that it was a sincere gesture of goodwill.

  Not in a large sense. The Exile guard didn't try to broker peace with us or make new inroads to understanding the divide between our two groups. I think that for a little while, he just wanted to be normal. That he understood the people watching him and his home for signs of violence were just that--people. An enemy, sure. But human beings with hope and love and fear and yes--even a sense of humor.

  It could be that this is some cunning plan on the part of the Exiles to put us at ease, possibly to make us see them as less of a threat. I admit the possibility, though I can't believe anyone would think we were gullible to fall for something like that. The Exiles are a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them.

  I'm going to choose to believe that this was a human moment, maybe a way to thank our people for saving his life and that of his partner. Bringing a smile to someone's face is a gift, especially in times like these. I say we take it at face value and be thankful. Still careful, always cautious, every wary...but thankful. We can all use a few laughs now and again.

  Thursday, March 29, 2012

  Lori

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I think one of the most profound truths that we as survivors can recognize is the power of human stories. That's a big part of why the joke-telling Exile guard struck such a chord in me. The guy wasn't doing anything superhuman or amazing. He was just trying to be funny, to connect for a minute with people he had every reason to fear at the least.

  Most people around here had a similar reaction, and came to some approximation of the same conclusion: people are strange. Wonderfully so at times. Enemies can kill each other one month and respectfully salute the other side the next. We haven't forgotten (or forgiven) the Exiles for the horrendous deeds they've wrought (I've wanted to use the word 'wrought' in a sentence for a while. You're just going to have to deal with it being there now) but that doesn't mean our attitude toward them is unbending or unchanging.

  Now we're starting to see them as individuals instead of a group. Racism and prejudice of all kinds throughout history has been perpetuated because of the path of least resistance--hating groups is easy. Because you can slap all the worst things people in it have done on the whole shebang. None of us doubt that every person with the Exiles has had to do some awful shit, but as I've said (a trillion times), so have we all. But not every person in the group is likely to be at the worst percentile of the psychopath bell curve. We know that intellectually. It just took one guy bucking the attitude of his people, taking a risk in trying to give our watchers a laugh, to make our hearts begin to admit that truth.

  And so, we come to this morning.

  There's this woman, see. And her husband. And their son, and his wife.

  I'm allowed to say that her name is Lori, and that she lives in Minnesota. While I'm sure that Minnesota is a lovely state, I'm baffled as to why any human beings would choose to live there. I like snow and winter as much as the next guy, but not when we're talking about cold that can shatter your will to live and snow so heavy that whole parking lots of cars can get lost un
der it.

  Oh, well. Thinking about that, I guess a lot of the settlers there were originally Scandinavian, so that makes sense. Vikings for the win.

  Anyway.

  So my post yesterday apparently got Lori's attention. She and her very small group live together, far away from other people. That's by design. Since The Fall Lori and her family have seen a lot of bad things happen, and not all of it by the undead. Human cruelty has been a huge driver for her and the family in keeping away from other groups of people, reinforced by the occasional bands of zombies wandering through.

  Something about my post yesterday, or more accurately something about the joker guard yelling into his megaphone across the river--got Lori's attention. She's a savvy lady from what I've gathered in the few messages we've shared since five this morning. She's not nostalgic or easily swayed by overly emotional bubbling (which I may be guilty of from time to time).

  It was, she said, the basic humanity displayed by the guard that made her finally speak up and communicate with the outside world. That, and the response by New Haven in general to take the jokes as they were given, no suspicions or fear attached. Just a funny moment.

  I didn't feel like it was a catharsis or anything, just a nice thing for the guard to do. Most of us thought the appropriate response would be to accept it in the spirit given. Lori, as an outside observer, sees something more important in the exchange. She says that the fact we can open ourselves up enough to the enemy to accept even a small gift like a joke is important. She says that the enemy's ability to make jokes is indicative of the deeper humanity still alive and well across the river.

  Weird, I know. I just thought it was a joke vaguely alluding to blowjobs.

  Lori is an interesting person. Though her group is very small, just her family, their progress has paralleled that of other much larger groups in many ways. They've got a farm setup, they have walls around their place (smaller in area but much taller than our own) and even a portable cell transmitter. They monitor things going on around the country but choose not to take part in it. They live quiet and happy lives in their secluded part of the country.

  They certainly aren't going to leave all that to risk their lives traveling toward a large group that may or may not give much of a shit about them. It would take a lot more than one moment of good vibrations between people with bad blood to make that happen. But I'll admit to walking on sunshine today, because something I passed on to the world made someone who'd lost faith in that world decide to speak up. It's a small thing, but to me any positive is a great thing.

  Saturday, March 31, 2012

  Punch-Drunk

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Yesterday morning one of our teams of Beaters (what we're calling the strike teams that are taking out small groups of New Breed) suffered their first fatality. Two of the ten people involved in the actual fight went down when a section of one of the defensive constructs collapsed. Thankfully it happened at the end of the fight, due to a large number of zombie corpses piled on top of it. There were only a handful of New Breed left to swarm the breech. Could have been a lot worse. Would have been, had the failure happened at the start of the fight.

  Dave has been worried about this kind of thing happening. The diamonds take constant abuse and damage from the ceaseless trips out into the county as our Beaters do their best to keep the New Breed population under control. Boards crack, metal dents, hinges pop. There are two carpenters who spend half their time every day fixing the things.

  But as I sat with Will and the council, interviewing the team of Beaters that lost those people, it became clear to everyone in the room that we need to change tactics here. The people going out to fight are doing it on their own time. And while everyone in New Haven is relatively fit due to the near-impossibility of overeating and the hard work everyone has to do, no one is conditioned for this kind of constant physical abuse.

  Will and the council asked my opinion after the interview was over, but I'd been reading Will's notes as we talked to the surviving team members. I know him well, how his mind works. My point of view was exactly what Will's was, and the council's: time for a game change.

  As much as it's going to suck to pile more work on less people, the leadership has decided that the volunteer groups of Beaters will be phased out over the next few weeks. We can't stop them all at once without risking an instant boom and probably retaliation from the New Breed, but we can slow down their missions as we work to introduce a team of full-time beaters.

  We're going to have two teams of ten men and women. They'll alternate days for being on duty as Beaters, and on their off days they'll be training four hours a day and working the other six. It's going to be brutal, but that's why we're only taking volunteers. We naturally want the people who are out there protecting New Haven with preemptive strikes to be as prepared and safe as possible. More practically, we need them to stay alive, as our recent losses are approaching unsustainable levels.

  Dodger and I already have some basic training routines going for the folks that have volunteered. Most of them have already served as Beaters, so they aren't starting from scratch. Over the next few weeks we'll be setting up more specified programs and exercises that will make our new force of Beaters something to be reckoned with.

  Hopefully it will be enough to prevent further casualties, or at least keep them to a bare minimum. We're trying to take the approach that the military had really good reasons for training and conditioning troops the way they did, and follow that example.

  It's already making the sowing harder, but now that the weather has taken a very lovely (well, not frigid) turn, we're back in the full swing of planting. Jess thinks we'll have all the early-season crops done by Monday morning. And with the Beaters keeping the zombie population in check, we've actually got a good chance of keeping this crop alive until harvest.

  I wish I had the skills to put into words how thankful I am for all the people who've risked their lives as Beaters, and to those who lost theirs doing it. Seeing those folks sitting in front of the council, beat-up and tired, was hard. A few of them were so exhausted that they barely stayed conscious for the interview, two more had head injuries that kept them from entering into the discussion much at all. That, combined with their obvious willingness to go back out and do it again, was what spurred this decision. Sending those folks out injured and tired from their normal work isn't just unfair, it's dangerous to the point of stupidity. And we're the ones who made that call.

  Better the rest of us work harder so those folks can be well and truly rested when they go out to fight for us. I'll gladly put in the extra hours. At the clinic, on our little farm annex, building the new wall, whatever it takes.

  Sunday, April 1, 2012

  April's Fool

  Posted by Josh Guess

  It's kind of funny in hindsight that we used to have a whole day dedicated only to messing with people. It doesn't really translate now, I guess. Hard to play tricks on people nowadays without risking a gunshot or a heavy blade getting accidentally put through you because you caught someone by surprise. I guess there's the old stand-by of telling clever lies, but somehow I don't think telling a person fake bad news ("Your family was eaten by the undead. APRIL FOOLS!) is a great idea.

  Still, mother nature seems to be in the mood to joke around. Yesterday was rain pretty much all day long, and this morning isn't looking any different. It's actually a good thing, because the landscape is vibrantly green as it soaks up the water. I guess after such an insane winter with its fifty degree swings over a few hours every day, the old lady decided to play a trick by giving us exactly what we need.

  It's not all good news, though. Our remaining Louisville citizens are still here and still sick. Evans thought they'd be getting better by now, but whatever has infiltrated their lungs is tough and resistant to every effort to treat it. Granted, the patients aren't much worse, but still. We wanted to see some progress.

  Which brings up another point that I kno
w is a growing concern with a lot of other communities out there: lack of medical care. I know a lot of you have made yourselves into first-rate field doctors through education and experience. Most communities of any size have someone who can sew and treat wounds. Trauma is something almost all of us have some kind of handle on, but New Haven is a perfect example of how ill-equipped humanity's survivors are to deal with the more subtle and dangerous things we deal with.

  I mean, we have two doctors and a nurse with the equivalent skills and knowledge of one. Yet even their decades of combined experience does us no good at all against something as simple as the flu. We're two years into The Fall, and none of us have had a vaccine for anything in that time, or close to it. There are stores of medicines around the country, but time is waging a war with them that we can't even begin to fight. Much of it is starting to go bad or already has. The liquid stuff that needed to be refrigerated, often some of the most potent medicines, were lost to us in the first weeks of The Fall. Gone. The processes to make things like insulin and the vaccine for Polio are preserved, thank god, but the material requirements for them are way beyond us.