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

by Joshua Guess

  When the captives were let go, they scattered. Half-mad with disease and exhaustion, the Louisville people moved toward New Haven. The able-bodied helped the ill, brought the trucks within fifty yards when they hit the spike strips out in the grass.

  They came out of the trucks, some of them walking, others crawling. Our defenders only killed a few of them. Those became zombies quickly, and as slow as the ill were moving they couldn't escape. One after another they died in a morbid domino effect.

  It took nearly half of them dying to convince the rest to run. We burned the dead after killing the zombies that rose. In this case I saw "we" in the correct sense. I was there. I fired shots. I helped clean up.

  I wept most of that time. They weren't bad people, nor are those who retreated. They were and are scared and desperate. Blame can be placed if you like, but I can't find fault on either side. Just tragedy.

  Violence and tragedy. That's the way things go.

  Wednesday, August 8, 2012

  The Mourning After

  Posted by Josh Guess

  There have been a lot of messages from you out there who read this blog since yesterday's post. Many of you apologized for your earlier comments toward us, chastising us for not helping the Louisville people out. Some of you have said that in light of their actions you felt wrong about saying what you did. That we were right not to help.

  No. You were right to call us out. At the time, none of us knew how desperate the sickness would make our friends from Louisville. The consensus here is that we still made the right decision in not offering our aid, but course correction can't happen without feedback. More now than ever it's vital that we continue to take a critical look at each other, our motivations and actions, and speak up if we think something is wonky. Maybe if we'd have worked out some kind of minimal assistance earlier this situation could have been avoided. There's no way to know.

  Nor do I agree with those of you who say the Louisville crew deserved what they got for attacking us, or that the remaining members of their group are 'former' friends. You have the right to your opinion, obviously, but I was there. I saw the terrible shape they were in. Many of them looked starved after so long unable to keep any food in their bellies. They were weak and terrified. Doing what they did--coming here--wasn't a malicious act born out of hatred or anger. It was the last-ditch effort of a dying people trying anything they could to survive.

  Because goddammit, that's what survivors do. We've all learned by now that some principles shouldn't be put aside even in the face of death itself, but others matter more than the lives of others. I think about what I would do if New Haven were wracked by a similar plague, and I can honestly say that if I were in their position I'd probably have done the same. The people around me, my friends and family (everyone here are those to me. When you shed blood in defense of your home, that makes you family) are worth any cost. I would die or kill or threaten to keep them safe.

  Don't expect any I-told-you-so's from me. Nothing about this situation is good. One small spot of not terrible to be found is that the surviving Louisville crew managed to get away safely. The efforts of our assault teams in scouring the local landscape of zombies paid off at least that much.

  What happened was awful, and I worry about the long-term consequences. We haven't heard back from any of the volunteers that left to go assist them. We don't know if they were among the escapees or never left Louisville in the first place. I can only imagine that the ones left alive after this plague burns itself out will harbor bad feelings toward us. Hard to blame them, I suppose. And if that happens and they choose to fight about it, I'll feel bad all over again. Because I'll always defend my people, even if it means killing friends.

  Much has happened over the last several days aside from these events. As much time and attention as I've put toward them, they've actually been a minimal distraction from the work going on here. We've had all sorts of people come in from the north, and new sections of infrastructure being worked on. For what should be clear reasons I've ignored that, and I won't get into it today. But tomorrow life and this blog will go on as normal. At least I'll make my best effort.

  Thursday, August 9, 2012

  Critical Drinking

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I spent a good chunk of last night nursing a bottle of rum my wife hid away for a very, very rainy day. In this case the rain was proverbial instead of literal, but I needed a drink. Not a want, a need. I'm no alcoholic, but sometimes there's a damn good reason to let booze soak your brain. Usually the reason either falls under 'celebration' or 'forgetting'. In this case we'll call it a little bit of both.

  On the celebration side of the equation, the alterations to the plumbing inside New Haven and the small expansion--the one made up of shipping containers--is complete. The hard part is done, which I'm told was digging up and altering a lot of the old pipes and whatnot, but I now have running water in my house. From what I understand a very basic delivery system is being designed and built as needed for all further expansion sections. People will have to muddle through while that work is being done.

  That's right, I haven't mentioned the other news. We got that big load of prefab pieces of wall in a few days ago. Along with it came a good number of workers--about forty--to begin installing them along the areas we've put in support posts. As of this writing about five hundred feet of new wall is standing. It looks rough since the shipping containers North Jackson cut up to make the sections were all different colors and some of them fairly rusty, but it's beautiful. Nothing like sections of sheer steel wall soon to house new arrivals to make you feel a little hope for a brighter tomorrow.

  A smaller group of people are rounding up materials from all over the county and beyond to make the houses in the current expansion more comfortable. Since the plumbing won't be set up for running water right away, they're trying to find storage for rainwater (or some filtered river water if we have to pump and haul it there.) We'll be digging cisterns and small reservoirs, of course, as we've done in New Haven proper, but it's nice to have as much capacity to store water as possible.

  On top of that, we're having to haul in beds, blankets, and all manner of things our new arrivals will need. The next group arriving from NJ will have many of their own supplies, but I'm sure there are people who have had to do without. We'll have the wall finished around their expansion (or nearly so) by the time they arrive, so at least we don't have to go about zombie-proofing houses. That's a plus. The only real snag is that there are more coming in the first large group than would be comfortable in the housing available. Dave is tackling that problem, but that's for another post.

  All that is worth celebration, and definitely a drink. But the other half, the forgetting...

  Some of the Louisville crew that escaped the slaughter outside the walls the other day didn't get far. Some of them ended up getting bitten and turned to zombies. Others looked to have died from their sickness before they could get out of the county. The twelve New Haven citizens taken captive and subsequently released by the Louisville folks took up the task of...

  I was going to say something like "cleaning them up" or some other euphemism, but misguided or not these folks were our allies.

  Our temporarily exiled citizens, living outdoors to keep from vectoring the disease they may be carrying, killed those poor people. Yes, they had turned into zombies, but that doesn't make it any easier to know that former friends are dead. Twice.

  Worse, there were a few survivors. Not many, just a handful, and not sick enough to be on the verge of death. They were hunkered down out in the woods, trying to come up with a plan to get over the wall and into New Haven. We know this because one of our exiled scouts was sitting up in a tree above the place the group came to rest. He heard the whole conversation, which he repeated to us via walkie-talkie. Thank god for rechargeable batteries and the forethought to put communications devices in the packages we leave for our exiled citizens.

  That handful are no lon
ger a threat. Their attempt to infiltrate New Haven can't become a reality. Desperate people will do stupid things, as I've said a lot lately.

  I want to thank our people living rough for protecting us in so many ways. By keeping away, you're protecting us from the virulent disease that may yet claim your own lives. By doing what you had to do without hesitation, you've stopped those stragglers from Louisville from making your own sacrifice meaningless. It was a hard choice. I've made similar ones myself.

  Friday, August 10, 2012

  The Widening Gyre

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I'm not huge into poetry or anything, but many years ago I read a book by Clive Barker--Weaveworld--that contained a piece of poetry by William Butler Yeats. It's a famous poem calledThe Second Coming, and it's fairly short:

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  Surely some revelation is at hand;

  Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

  The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

  When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

  Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

  The darkness drops again; but now I know

  That twenty centuries of stony sleep

  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  I think I've mentioned this poem before, but it bears repeating.

  As I worked last night and early this morning on the very mundane and kind of boring task of organizing parts of the expansion, it struck me how chaotic things are around here. Sort of a controlled chaos, since we're working on so much at one time. The assault teams are still out there scouring the land of zombies, fighting for hours each day to ensure the boring task of managing logistics here in my office is safe.

  The gyre is widening each day. New Haven as it is now will soon be only a small center in a whirlwind of activity. The scant few hundred citizens that have lived here longer than a few months will be lost in a press of new arrivals, a relative flood of humanity we only dreamed of a year ago. While Yeats was waxing poetic about the end of the world using biblical imagery, I can't help but see the parallels again and again over time. We've been through the absolute worst the world had to throw at us; we've persevered through it.

  Time and again we've had our feet kicked out from under us. Friends and families lost, setbacks in every shape and size. We've hurt each time, but ultimately New Haven always stands back up, brushes off the dust and wipes the blood from our eyes, and soldiers ever onward.

  That's who we are. It's what we do. Not because it's the only choice; it isn't. We could lay down and die or give less than our all in our endeavors. No, it's because our identity as a people demands a high level of sacrifice and effort. We push each other to do better, to do more.

  Make no mistake, we think this expansion and the resulting immigration of so many new people is a good thing. It's just that there's a sense of loss around here lately. We've had to make terrible choices to keep ourselves safe and to ensure the expansion moves forward. The people of Louisville suffered for that, regardless of what side of the line between right and wrong they were on. Aaron said in a comment about the Louisville group's illness that we had changed, and while I still think we made the only choices we could in order to survive, he wasn't wrong in that assessment.

  We have changed. New Haven as it is now will soon cease to exist. Maybe we're afraid that the sense of identity will become diluted or vanish within a sea of thousands of people. Maybe we've spent so long being in control of our choices and our future that we're afraid of losing that to a larger group. It's not unreasonable fear at all, but neither is it a reaction that will change the path before us one iota.

  People come and go at all hours, shipments of supplies from the north come in more often, and things are being built. We might be a little scared of what this will mean for us, but we're also excited about it for the same reason. Dreams of a New Haven bustling with life and love and laughter aren't some abstract hope for a tomorrow long down the road. It's happening now, right in front of us. We're making it happen.

  Think about that for a second and marvel at the strange alchemy of it. Through nothing more than logical choices like building walls and making the county safer to move around in, creating running water and trucking in busloads of people, we're making New Haven a place where new life will be created. Just through hard work and planning, many more babies will be born here, people will fall in love in greater numbers, laughter could spread among thousands instead of hundreds. The potential of our home is being expanded right along with the protective walls around it. That's beautiful.

  And, yes, I know that along with the wonders come all the dangers. No one understands the pitfalls of human nature better than we do. Survivors can't help but be aware of how far we can fall.

  But today, despite all the heartache that we're dealing with (or perhaps in spite of it), I choose to be positive. To think about the good. If we didn't make that choice now and then, I think we'd have died off long ago.

  Sunday, August 12, 2012

  Flip Side

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Hey. Kincaid here again. Josh is probably going to sleep through most of today. He was up for almost forty hours, splitting his time between organizing our assault teams and working with a group of new arrivals that came early. These guys are doing electrical work and installing solar panels and wind turbines. I don't know much about that kind of thing, but I promised Josh I'd leave the field and take over running the assault team management duties for today and maybe tomorrow if he needs it.

  With that also comes blog duty. I don't know that I have much to add to all the recent goings-on. I want to be honest here, that's important. If we're going to build a future as a larger set of interconnected communities, we have to be straightforward about our differences of opinion. Especially when it comes to perspective.

  A lot of people are still down about what happened with Louisville. I'm not holding grudges against the ones that came out of the situation alive, but I haven't lost any sleep over it either. I don't know if that's because there's something in me that's broken or just too many nights on the road trying to strangle the part of me that rebelled against the things I did. I don't wish any of them ill. I don't mourn the fallen.

  Not because they made a choice. Some of them may not have been in their right minds, and some of them really did choose to come after us with clear heads. I don't blame them for that. I don't mourn because it was a thing that happened that I can't change. We can't change. They did a thing they knew could end badly for them. We acted to save ourselves from a potentially devastating disease.

  I feel remorse, generally speaking. If I didn't then it's not likely I'd be here in the first place. Just not in this situation. Those folks got very unlucky and we did what we had to. I guess it's more accurate to say I feel bad that they died but I don't feel responsible.

  Seeing people coming in from North Jackson with excitement in their eyes and profound determination to improve this place is a good reason not to feel so bad. It is to me, anyway. I watched those guys scamper around, modifying power lines and busting their asses to get things done. I simply can't feel guilt for actions that meant protecting that. I fired shots that day too. I watched people who had fought by our
side die.

  This morning, I heard two of the new arrivals discussing putting actual electric heat in one of the communal sleeping quarters. Something about an array of heavy batteries and ultra-efficient furnaces. Maybe not enough to make the place cozy since heat eats up volts like a starving hobo, but enough to keep people alive. I know people--mothers--who've lost babies to the cold. There will be a lot of children born here before very long.

  I weigh that potential, the safety and well-being of those yet to come, against the failing health of people at the end of their rope. It's not even close.

  Monday, August 13, 2012

  First Wave

  Posted by Josh Guess

  I admit to a fair bit of fudging the truth from time to time when it's necessary to protect our interests. Sometimes--as in the last few days--that comes in the form of minimizing the facts about what's going on in New Haven. I can now say without fear that the report Kincaid gave yesterday was true, just not the whole truth. Work here has progressed far beyond what we've said almost completely at the hands of the people that have migrated here so far.

  For example, the first new expansion is done. Not done as in completely finished, but that big ass area is wholly walled in and defensible. More defensible, in fact, than some parts of the original compound. You wouldn't think we could have managed that in such a short time, but it turns out Kincaid is a brilliant guy. Back in his marauder days he kept losing people to zombie attacks from the spotty protection their vehicles gave them. As a solution his people found some heavy steel cable and attached a bunch of heavy stakes to it. Then they made a rough grid around their camps, which tripped or slowed down the undead coming for them.