American Recovery

by Joshua Guess

  The fuckers camouflaged themselves. Must have been doing it for a long time now and mostly in the night or at least away from where our scouts patrol. Yesterday was warm all day, but they must have been waiting to come in the darkness. Problem was, it got super cold. By the time they rose from their hiding places, debris and leaves stuck to their bodies with blood and ichor, a hard freeze was setting in.

  Hundreds of them came from all directions, unceasing. Over less than an hour more than a thousand zombies stood out of easy bow range. We couldn't know if more were coming, and the batteries powering the big spotlight rigged to the main watchtower don't last long. We had to make a choice: take the fight to the undead outside the safety of the walls and the buffer, or stay safe and risk god knew how many more showing up and overwhelming sections of New Haven.

  Our walls and the buffer are strong and useful, and we have a lot of people, but New Haven is many times larger than it was. Defending every inch of the perimeter is...problematic at best. Breaches are manageable but not when the pressure is so widespread. The cold slowed them down, made them cautious, but experience told us they were also desperate. Just like living people, the New Breed need food to keep them going through the winter. Old school zombies are a food source, but my guess is it's not the same as living flesh.

  Nothing risked, nothing gained...

  We've been moving out in medium-sized attack groups nonstop for the last twelve hours. The cold has been horrific, forcing us to move out in groups of fifty and only for half an hour, forty minutes at a time. I've been out several times myself and the sweat and freezing air is nearly enough to kill by itself.

  I need to get some food and maybe another hour of sleep, so I'm keeping this short. Because the morning is here and the light of day shows us a landscape hardly touched by our efforts. So many of them. It's still below freezing right now. That buys us some time. If this had happened a month ago there wouldn't be much chance of avoiding disaster. For now it's a frenzy of activity, sending groups out to fight and rotating them back in. Hand to hand is trimming their numbers. It might be enough.

  Pray for cold weather all day. It's the best advantage we have. In a few hours we'll have a massive front of fighters ready to move. All we need is time to set up.

  Thursday, November 15, 2012

  Terracotta Army

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Our scouts have yet to report in to us, but it's safe to say that if they are alive they weren't successful in driving away the huge swarm of zombies headed this way. The horde must have taken a turn at some point, because they've been filtering into the county since yesterday afternoon.

  There must be four, five thousand undead out there right now. They aren't moving in--thankfully the temperatures were near freezing yesterday and are well below right now--but once they get in position they don't do much but watch. At least a fifth of them are New Breed, and they seem to be having trouble with the cold more than their old school counterparts. I'm being told that the New Breed are tearing apart their lesser brothers and eating them. Stoking the furnace before the attack is our guess.

  We aren't sitting idly by. Long-range observation shows us the hunger in their faces. They're sitting in front of an all-you-can-eat buffet of delicious people, yet they aren't attacking. Whether the cold or just a desire to plan is responsible, we're still taking advantage. The undead put up a hell of a fight when our assault teams move in to thin the herd, but it doesn't incite all of them to action. Maybe that's just the basic desire not to share food surfacing, who knows. We've seen so many behavioral changes over the last year that predicting why the undead do anything is becoming impossible. All we can do is take it at face value and try to save our own asses.

  The leadership made the call last night to only send out select groups to fight. The best trained and most experienced are the ones suited for this, we're told. The soldiers are first into the breach, followed by the Beaters and assault teams we've relied on for the last few months. Shields and spears have become pretty common weapons even outside of the little group we call the Spartans, and they're being used effectively.

  Groups of fifty, two at a time, then replaced after thirty minutes by two more groups of fifty. They've been rotating like that for too long, now. Hand-to-hand combat with zombies is relatively slow and incredibly dangerous but so far they've been able to thread the needle and not take fatalities. Thank god or Gaia or fate or science for this cold. Even the most mobile of the zombies has a hard time focusing as the parasite inside them suffers from this weather.

  Patrick and I have been trying to convince Will to let groups of archers go out with the assault teams all morning. I did it yesterday, and while having the extra people there made it a bit confusing for the melee fighters, we managed to kill more zombies than any group has done so far today.

  Will keeps saying no, that the teams are handling it, and that we need to send out the minimum possible in case the swarm becomes more active and starts to move on New Haven's walls. It's a tactical decision, he says, and it's his to make. Still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

  Becky has been up and about for days now as she works on large-scale options for dealing with the swarm. It's a good thing instant coffee lasts pretty much forever and that I've stockpiled a supply here. I hate coffee, but it's handy in a pinch. I gave some to Becky, of course, and to Dave and Dodger, who are even now very loudly conversing in my living room. They're trying to come up with some solutions that can flatten the swarm. Everyone has a finger in the pie. The problem isn't so much that we're unable to hand the odds against us; we've fought off a lot worse, albeit with more firepower than we currently have at our disposal.

  It's that with New Haven being so large geographically, any breach becomes a serious breach. We physically can't bring everyone in to Central, there just isn't enough room to house them all. Even if we could we'd still have to retake the outer sections as they're overrun. Except for West, of course, since it's so tall and impossible to climb thanks to the shipping containers that make up its walls.

  Huh. That gives me an idea. Dave and Dodger will love this.

  Friday, November 16, 2012

  The Calm Before

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Someone commented on yesterday's post, asking why, if New Haven is so difficult to defend now given its size, don't we make each section seal off in case of a breach. As in put barriers up between them to keep a swarm from spreading.

  The answer is: there are walls between each section. New Haven has been added to over time (a lot more recently than in the past) and every time we just build on to what we have. The problem is that logistically it's nearly impossible to keep everyone in one section or to move between them quickly without sacrificing a lot of lives in the process.

  Today that isn't an immediate concern, but I felt like the question deserved an answer. It was a good one.

  For the present we're still mostly on lockdown. As of this morning the assault teams are on standby but not going on any active runs against the swarm. While the zombies still aren't attacking New Haven for whatever reason, they have become more proactive when our people go up against them. We've done a lot of damage to the crowd out there over the last few days. Tireless efforts and brutally efficient tactics can work against any enemy, and the piles of bodies attest to the effectiveness of our teams.

  But no matter how good you are, when you go from dealing with maybe a hundred zombies reacting to your attacks at a time to three times that actively moving to kill you before you can get in position, it's time to rethink the situation. We still don't know why they're not swarming in, though my bet is on waiting for warmer days and planning an assault that will allow them inside with speed. But we're not wasting the safety and free time they're giving us.

  I took my idea to Will, Dave, and Dodger yesterday. They all loved it. Becky is helping out, and if the slapdash engineering works out a team will be executing my plan this evening. I should probably tell you wha
t it is, but the showman in me wants to have a big dramatic reveal tomorrow. Also, I'm really tired and need to lay down.

  Not to mention that not telling you what it is keeps me from looking like a complete ass if it doesn't work. I'm not going to brag before we've tried it out on the zombies.

  After ten hours of working on it with Pat and Dave last night and until about two hours ago, I got nothing left. I can't remember ever being this tired in my life.

  Saturday, November 17, 2012

  The Storm

  Posted by Josh Guess

  It was an hour before dark. The world as we know it, the small patch of country that makes up our home and the area around it, was a study in contrasts. Dusk was settling in, the faint winter sun struggling to light the scene before us. Brave men and women stood arrayed along the wall, all of them wearing some kind of protective gear. All of them armed. Their eyes were locked on the throng below. Many different individuals joined together as a people, every one sharing that steely determination.

  Survivors. Wondering if the gamble in front of them was going to pay off.

  Below, stretching from just outside the buffer all the way to the treeline, were living nightmares. The teeming dead were no longer spread across the rambling line of New Haven's perimeter. They had gathered through the warming day along a single side of wall. One section--the weakest part of East--that would certainly fall under the pressing weight of even a fraction of their number. They were silent, those with minds sharp enough to understand the danger before them gazing back at the defenders with desperate hunger barely held in check.

  Zombies. Too focused on the painful need for food to consider backing off.

  Before the undead could move forward, a bell sang in the deepening gloom. On cue five hundred fists tightened on weapons, and all across the line of human defenders, people broke out in smiles. Not sunshine grins, those faces. The predatory smile that hides fear. Confidence in the face of terror.

  The New Breed can read body language to some degree. They must be able to. Because they knew that the time was right to attack. The humans--us--were on the edge of some terrible moment of action. The hunger took over, then. The idea of failure and being unable to feed on living flesh must have been too much. Thousands of walking corpses moved forward as one, immediately crushing those in the front ranks against the ropes and cables of the buffer.

  I was standing on that wall with my bow in hand. I heard the supports creak and wires snap. I saw bodies forced through the buffer like some horrible Play-Doh toy. The buffer didn't fail in one place when it went down. The very nature of the reinforcements--power lines and industrial steel cable stretched along the whole thing--meant that the stress of the undead pushing on it would put strain across the entire thing. It took less than two minutes for the enemy to push through.

  They covered the yards between quickly. Traps, explosives, and a hidden trench killed hundreds in that crossing. There were simple too many. One-time devices did their work well, but were spent and gone. The trench filled with bodies immediately. Then they were coming right at us. I could smell the heavy scent of wood smoke behind me as I readied myself to fire. I felt the tingle of absolute terror run down my back.

  Then I heard the hiss of tanks being opened and the overwhelming odor of ammonia washed forward and over the wall. Just like that, the front ranks stopped and tried to reverse course only to be caught in the crush of the countless bodies behind them. It was confusion and chaos on a grand scale. So much so that only the zombies in the very back noticed the trucks rolling in, each carrying a shipping container on their back. there was no time to practice the maneuver beforehand, but our drivers did their jobs well, creating more than a dozen islands of metal, tall and safe, around the outside of the zombie swarm.

  Though I couldn't hear it I knew those trucks were spewing ammonia of their own as they moved in to create a vast circle to repulse the zombies, pushing inward into a huge mass. It wasn't a foolproof plan by any means; the undead will move through a cloud of the stuff to escape it if necessary. But it was enough in that confused panic. It bought enough time to allow two of our firetrucks to extend their ladders well over the wall and above the fray. Atop each stood a pair of defenders, one manning the integrated hose at the end of the ladder and the other using a line run up separately.

  Turns out that making alcohol gel is a lot easier than you'd think. Becky just scaled up the process. And you know we've got ethanol to spare. Many thousands of gallons of it. Those fire trucks won't be good for much after what the stuff did to their pumps, but it's a small price to pay. From my vantage point, I'd say a good quarter of the undead were soaked with flammable gel in the first twenty seconds. Fire arrows followed.

  The world lit up in beautiful blue flames. Ethanol burns much cooler than many other fuels, but that's okay. It still does hellacious damage to undead tissues given the lack of bodily defenses from heat. Might have helped that specially trained groups of defenders began launching bags of thermite over the wall. Bags that were designed to split and scatter their contents. The gel wasn't hot enough to ignite it. Which is why people like me and our partners ignited the heavy dusting of magnesium on the tips of our arrows and cut loose.

  The zombies didn't like that at all. Much worse for them was the dull realization that they were being slaughtered. That was when they tried to run away from New Haven, but the outer ranks resisted them. The non-flaming zombies didn't want to be pushed into the ammonia cloud around them any more than they wanted their fiery brethren to burn their flesh by shoving into them.

  The truck drivers had all popped out of the hastily-made hatches in the cabs of their vehicles and hopped onto their trailers. There they pulled kingpins that held one side of each trailer on, allowing it to fall open and reveal the survivors waiting within. That job was given only to volunteers, being the most dangerous. Exposure in the face of thousands of undead...

  Didn't stop them from doing it right, though. Twenty people with their equipment were crammed into each container, giving us more than two hundred and fifty soldiers on the field. Outnumbered more than ten to one, it sounds like a suicide mission. If you don't reckon on heavy crossbows with dynamite strapped to them, people hurling tanks of propane with a contraption my brother designed that looks like a wee, adorable catapult, and soldiers with heavy guns firing into the crowd with practiced ease. Oh, and we also had some folks shooting what were basically giant bolos at the undead from a few of the homemade air cannons borrowed from the wall. Big weighted ends with a length of strong cable between them moving at a few hundred feet per second does not a good day make if you're attacking our home.

  And just as the remaining zombies began to rally into a force, escaping their burning brothers and braving the cloud of noxious gas before them, the tanks came out to play. Two dozen modified vehicles burst around the corners of the wall, clear from the other side of New Haven, and began mowing down the ranks of the dead just as the isolated groups began to retreat inside the shipping containers as the horde advanced. Two groups weren't able to pull the chains that raised the container's side quickly enough; only six of those forty people survived the swarm, and those only because they ducked into weapon crates and locked themselves in.

  There were still more than a thousand zombies left outside when Dodger, not far away from me on the wall, called for the ramps to be brought up and laid over the side. Thin things, all metal, and easily detached should zombies try to mount them. We flooded down the inclines in waves, running through the charred masses of our enemies and crashing into the zombies, tearing into them with controlled fury. Shield carriers in front, melee fighters in between, breaking skulls and removing heads, and archers in the rear firing over the heads of the crouched men and women bracing their shields.

  Firing at eye level and from less than fifteen feet away, we couldn't miss. I had thirty arrows in my quivers, and each one struck the head of an enemy. A few skittered of, but one advantage of facing down the undead i
s that most of them are looking right at you. Hitting a human face from so close is easy.

  Fire, ammonia, and a determined group of killers bent on cutting you to pieces. Three things the undead fear deeply, and we used all of them. A few minutes into the ground war and the zombies began to retreat. Rather than cut our losses and let them flee, we chased. Some of our people circled around the mob, picking off stragglers to keep the group cohesive. A few of the truck drivers thought on their feet and helped us out, moving across the escape path to block the way. The tanks did likewise, and in the end less than five hundred were left of the original swarm before we gave in to exhaustion and stopped chasing them.

  The storm came, and we survived it. Much was risked, and much was lost, but our people won the day. As night fell, we retreated back up the ramps, wary for undead bent on catching us unaware.

  The worst had come, but we won. That was the only thing that mattered when I went to sleep.

  Monday, November 19, 2012

  (B)rain Damage

  Posted by Josh Guess

  In the aftermath of our carefully orchestrated attack on the undead bent on attacking us, the world around seems a little clearer. That clarity may seem like a good thing--and in the long run it probably is--but right now we're seeing the consequences of our ballsy choice to make the first move.

  We were fired up to attack. There was a fever and energy in New Haven. We didn't want to be victims, cowering in our homes like fearful dogs beaten one time too many. It was an infectious kind of emotional drug, if you want to know the truth. Think of it like group hysteria, aimed at an enemy and honed to a razor's edge. I was in that mindset just as much as anyone. I was still there when I wrote that last post. I called that battle "The Storm", and it was one. Just like all large, violent bursts of fury from mother nature, there was aftermath.