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

by Joshua Guess

  I guess the hours I spend with the Louisville crew drives that point home to me. It's easy to line up and label a lot of threats we face. Zombies we can fight, Exiles we can avoid, food we can gather, shelter we can build. But illness is harder to pin down. I remember working at the nursing home, seeing people get sent out to the hospital from time to time. X-Rays (which we actually do have though the power supply at the clinic has its problems) were the simplest of diagnostic tools. Now they're the best we have. It was an unavoidable element of my job to deal with people dying, sometimes from causes bizarre and impossible to predict or diagnose.

  Now we're going to adapt to that as a part of life in general. None of us have many illusions about it. It's one more thing we have already put up with. The flu hit a bunch of people over the winter, one or two people had strep throat. It sucks ass to suffer through, it takes a lot longer to recover, and every time someone gets really ill there's the worry that without proper treatment they could die.

  A surprising side effect of the healthy diet forced on us by circumstance is that we're all getting our servings of fruits and veggies. We're taking in the nutrients we need, which boost our immune systems. Phil has argued often that part of the reason we don't see a lot of illness is because our people are eating the right things. As usual, I bow to the people with superior education and experience. The fact that he's probably right about how bad our old diet of fast food and boxed dinners was for us doesn't for one second alter my desire for a giant deep-dish pizza.

  I mean, if it were a choice between being well and having a pizza, I wouldn't choose to be sick. Certainly not if it were a choice between pizza and death. I don't want one that bad.

  ...probably.

  Ah, way off topic. For now, we'll continue limiting exposure to whatever it is that has our guests sidelined. Doesn't look contagious, though that could be because our medical staff (me included) are very cautious about infection control. We're mostly healthy as a community, and we're going to do our damnedest to stay that way.

  Monday, April 2, 2012

  Cornucopia

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Jess has been working her ass off with the agriculture side of things for a while. Really, she's been keeping busy (aside from recuperating from injuries) pretty much since the onset of the zombie plague. Her weird assortment of skills and knowledge, gained from years of being obsessively curious about things like making chainmail and how to make fabric from scratch, have been as invaluable to us as they are unusual for any one person to possess.

  As most of you know, she spent a lot of time teaching other people those skills and sharing her wide range of knowledge. It's almost like she was just getting that out of the way so she could work on farming full-time, because my lovely wife has found an area in which she doesn't just shine, she burns like the sun.

  Keep in mind that in the time New Haven has existed, tracking and running all the different elements of our farming and food supply needs in general has been a nightmare. With Jess in charge, the system has become streamlined and efficient. What really blew me away was learning that with just what we can grow inside New Haven's walls (including the annex), we'll be able to meet eighty percent of our food requirements.

  That's more than we expected. About twenty percent more. Remember that we send out hunting parties regularly, and that the whitetail population in this state has exploded since The Fall and continues to grow. We expected about twenty percent of our needs to be met with wild game. Then there's the tons upon tons of edible greens sprouting up all over town and in the county. That was intended to make up the difference. So, boom. Extra food.

  Of course, we're sure that the wild greens growing around town, along with a few large plots of fruits and veggies we've spread about town, will suffer from the old standby: zombie trample. That's something not a lot of us thought about in the early days, but the undead are hell on things that grow. The huge swarm that nearly wiped us out all those months ago destroyed the crops we'd cultivated just by moving though them.

  Which brings me to the whole point of this post: Jess is smarter and more practical than the rest of us put together. I've been so busy with worrying about the New Breed, the Beaters, the Exiles, the politics of trade, and the dozen other hats I wear that I missed the fact that my pragmatic wife has managed to solve one of the most basic needs we've got.

  Remember our outpost in Bald Knob? Yeah, in the midst of all the other things going on, a lot of us didn't either. Jess did. Through deal-making and wheedling in her sweet voice, and smiling with her adorable girl face, she managed to convince the folks in charge of the different aspects of New Haven to lend her extra people to go to Bald Knob.

  This has been going on for a while. Since a few days after we left on our trip. So, six months as a round number. In that time, when the weather agreed, those extra folks have been helping expand the area of farmland in Bald knob. They've hunted down and spread seeds for clover and other foods we can grow in the open. They spent most of the winter, during the warmer days (which were plentiful here) preparing the ground for new planting.

  Oh, and they build a greenhouse the size of a house. With all the clearing going on there was plenty of wood and brush to heat it with. Thousands of seedling plants grown in trays, just waiting to be put in the ground. How much extra food does Jess estimate the crews at Bald Knob have or will have ready to send here?

  Enough to meet fifty percent of our needs. Just from that one place.

  So, yeah. Jess is awesome. While the rest of us worried about other things, admittedly important things, she took care of business. She did it with minimal staff, no official title, and a boatload of initiative. What this massive amount of excess edibles means is that we can bring in new people without fear of starving ourselves out, which has several implications. Like being able to better secure ourselves, work on the expansion, and the like.

  Tonight we're having a dinner in Jess's honor at my house. For her work, obviously, but also simply for who she is. When I freaked out at the report she handed me, detailing all this information, she just shrugged. To her it's nothing special. She just did what needed to be done to the best of her ability. I think I married a superhero without knowing it.

  Tuesday, April 3, 2012

  Foundation

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Before The Fall, I hadn't spent a ton of time doing what my brother does. Dave started in the construction business while he was still in high school. From drywall finisher to running that business to eventually managing the construction of hospitals. Sure, I did a little drywall work with him (which I hated) and put in a good number of hours helping him build his house (which I liked) but I never did it for a living.

  Still, one thing that the last two years of working with him has given me is an appreciation for the potential of things. Knowing that the bare patch of ground in front of you is going to be someone's home, built by your design and with your own hands, is pretty awesome. I got those feel-good vibes this morning as we walked the area where the expansion is going to be built.

  Mind you, we did it with and armed guard that took the occasional zombie down, but that only slightly marred the experience for us. I don't know where they came from, but there's been a sizable influx of old school zombies pelting New Haven for the last day.

  So, guard in tow, we took a walk. The expansion is going to be big. Dave has been toying with the layout for a long time, and I saw a lot of spray-painted rectangles and squares on the ground where he'd begun marking off where things would go. One major advantage in being able to build a huge section of new housing from scratch is that you can design the thing to every specification you want. For example, the center of the expansion is a large building meant to house the living and office spaces of the council and other folks who run New Haven. It will have its own wall, enough space to hold a few hundred people in an emergency, and will be topped with a watchtower.

  Also, there will be plumbing. I haven't been b
rave enough to ask Dave how that's going to work, but he assures me there will be running water aplenty. If he's figured out a way to have flush toilets, I'm going to name a kid after him.

  While the majority of the expansion is just in the planning stages, work has actually begun on the new wall. Or at least on the trench that will become the new wall. The soil around here is heavy with clay, and since that's such an abundant resource, Dave has some people digging a series of concentric trenches around where the new wall will be. The material being excavated will be shaped and baked into large bricks, which will eventually be the foundation and structure of the wall.

  So far, just holes in the ground. But holes with potential, damn it!

  The work is going to go slowly for a long while. We're saving the fuel for the heavy machinery until we absolutely need it, so it's hand tools for the people working. Lot of folks are putting in an hour here and there in addition to the small crew of dedicated workers under Dave's direction. Slowly, we'll get there. Once we can entice more people to join us, the expansion should begin to grow at a good pace.

  As we walked along I listened to Dave excitedly explaining his ideas to me, and I couldn't help but smile. My brother has always been that way about his work--calculated, efficient, but with undertones of the child he had been. The one who loved building blocks for all the permutations they could be shaped into.

  I smiled with him, and realized that not only would we be building something from nothing, but also something new. Not a repurposed building from before The Fall, or a wall made of old materials. The expansion will be something born of the adversity we face, created by us in an era with no easy solutions. That's a hell of a thing. It makes me proud. Proud for what we've achieved, and for the willingness of our people to manage greater things.

  Thursday, April 5, 2012

  Birds

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Once upon a time, there was a guy named Josh who never hunted because he didn't like to kill animals. Then the zombie plague came and made it impossible to live without killing creatures great and small. But still, he didn't enjoy the act.

  Until the birds started showing up and attacking his food supply, and then Josh was like, 'Fuck these birds!'.

  Yeah, you get the basic idea. Like most people, I've never thought about birds all that much, save for the occasional flash of irritation when one of them tried to dive-bomb me for walking too close to a nest. Turns out that in the absence of population-control measures (like plane engines or vast hordes of angry farmers with guns, I guess. I have no idea what affects bird populations) the damn things tend to swarm in a fashion not unlike zombies.

  Really, I don't know if it's because of a swing in population or if we just got unlucky, but the flocks blackening the sky in Franklin county are creepily huge. It's good that we have sentries that actually do their job and who manage to think on their feet, because the annex is full of recently planted seeds and sprouts. When the massive swarm of birds came in, two or three guards fired off their guns to scare them away.

  Which worked. For maybe a minute.

  Of course, several clustered gunshots also sent many people inside New Haven into high-alert mode, and more shots rang out over the next several minutes. I was asleep at the time, and woke up scrambling for my clothes. Naturally I assumed we were under attack, so I didn't think about the pain in my knees from where I fell off the bed as I threw myself over Jess. Didn't worry that I kicked Becky kind of hard in the hip doing it, either. Steve was also crammed in the bed since Courtney stayed up all night at their place working, and he wanted to rest quietly. I dream of a day when my friends won't crash on my mattress on a regular basis. That's what I get for having a king-size bed.

  At any rate, I yanked on my clothes and grabbed my bow as the others started working their way toward something resembling consciousness. I forgot my glasses and smacked my face on the corner of my door, which gave me a lovely bruise. At the time I was laser-focused on helping fight whatever threat was bearing down on us.

  There were no warning bells. I realized that before I made it twenty steps from my house. At about the same time, I noticed that I hadn't put on a shirt, and it was cold. Confused, with a throbbing face and aching knees, I wandered back inside to dress. Because I can only take so much irritation right when I wake up, and my nipples were dangerously close to getting chapped.

  In due time Jess and I made our way to the annex to see what was happening, and we were told about the birds. Total elapsed time from the first gunshots, maybe fifteen minutes. By then the sentries were walking around the rows of plants with pieces of wood, slapping them together to scare away the birds. Crude but effective.

  We'll come up with some kind of deterrent today, I'm sure. But that doesn't stop me from wishing we could take the lot of them down and cook them up for supper. I don't know if birds (I think they're starlings) taste good, but I do know this:

  I don't mind being injured while protecting others or during the course of my other duties. My pride and dignity can take one hell of a beating for the well-being of the community. But what I feel right now is an overwhelming desire to gloat over the deep-fried wings and drumsticks of a new and hated enemy.

  Now I'm going to go to the clinic and make sure I didn't hurt myself too badly. My knees feel like I've been reminded that I owe a mobster a large debt, and I'm afraid I might have knocked a tooth loose on the door. I've had chances over the last few years to feel like a hero, or at least like I've done Good Things for the sake of others. Hell, I've even felt like a badass once or twice.

  Today? Not one of those days.

  Damn birds.

  Friday, April 6, 2012

  Statement

  Posted by Josh Guess

  It seems like every time we start to see positives, right when our emotional level starts to finally equalize, bad things happen. This time it wasn't something that happened to New Haven, but it still made for a terrible morning.

  We got the word from our watchers about half an hour ago.

  The guard our people saved from a zombie attack, who not long after started telling jokes at our watchers across from his position at the fallback point, was just getting off duty. The replacement sentries came to relieve him and his partner as they always did, but with them came a squad of people. That was new.

  The additional group wore riot gear. You know the kind: shiny and black, made to stop bullets and knives, covering the entire body. There were four of them, heavily armed and walking with the dangerous step of a wary person expecting violence.

  Our watchers couldn't hear the words being exchanged between the guards going off duty and the armed and armored people who took him into custody. It was a quick thing, maybe thirty seconds of heated exchange and then our comedian was handcuffed. His partner backed away, hands raised, which seemed to satisfy the captors.

  A man came out from under the darkened overhang of the parking garage inside the fallback point. We'd blocked that off a long time ago, but the Exiles made an opening once they moved in. The man wasn't tall, but our folks relayed that he was big. Broad across the shoulders, wearing a heavy coat and obviously well-fed. Not fat, but built like a lineman. Used to work.

  He walked up to the captive guard, squatted down to talk to him. The big guy's long gray hair whipped in the morning wind across both their faces, he was so close. The watchers gave a detailed description of this person--the leader of the Exiles, we assume--and it's one I'll remember. Scar going down the left side of his face, jutting over sharply to just below his mouth. Square jaw, heavy brows. Body language that screamed an absolute lack of mercy.

  How could the watchers tell that last bit? Because when the captive guard began to thrash, trying valiantly to get away, the scarred man hauled the poor guy up by his handcuffs. Scar waved away the armored guards as they moved in to help him, instead walking the captive right to the edge of the nearest bridge until the guard's feet stuck halfway over the broken-toothed concrete rim.
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br />   Scar didn't shout at our people, didn't make a gesture toward them. He knew he was being watched. Knew that the chance he was being sighted down a rifle scope approached a hundred percent. The big man held the captive guard still with his right hand, and pulled out a heavy revolver with his left. Without preamble, Scar put the barrel against the head of his captive and pulled the trigger.

  The spray of blood and brains and pieces of skull made it almost halfway across the river. The guard slumped immediately, and Scar pushed him into the water before turning around and walking away.

  As messages go, this one couldn't have been more clear had it been shouted to us from the heavens. We are not your friends, it said. We are not your allies. We abide by the terms of the truce because we have to, but we are and will remain enemies.

  That kind of candor would be refreshing if it hadn't cost a man his life. Any movement our attitude toward the Exiles might have made in positive directions has reversed course, hard. Our course of action from here out has to be iron-clad. No Exile can defect, we can't take the risk of one of them being an agent. Now the general population in the fallback point will know that. And the actions taken by their leadership sent a message to those same people: if you have thoughts of reconciliation with New Haven, or are starting to see them as people, or are thinking of leaving...forget it. Those aren't survivable options.