Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) (2 page)

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
No
one expected yesterday's storms to hit as hard as they did, and while
New Haven missed out on the worst of it, we got slammed badly. In
other places the devastation was much worse, though from what we've
heard not many people have been injured, and no one has died. 
Which
is kind of amazing. New Haven didn't get the brunt of the storms, but
even what hit us was so powerful that once again my brother is going
to be supervising repair work for weeks. Usually Kentucky doesn't
suffer from such bad weather so early in the year. 
I
spent a lot of time with our captive zombies, but so far not much to
report. We're still in the early stages of our observations. I'm
spending today working on other stuff, since I have to divide my time
between my regular duties and my work with Evans and Gabby.
I
don't have any time to spare right now for an extensive post. I'm
going to motor through the rest of the odds and ends that make up my
average work day now, then head out to help Dave assess the damage to
the houses and other buildings around New Haven.
The things I
deal with are interesting, at least. It's still work, but whereas the
team Dave and I trained to manage the daily administration of this
place handle most things, I'm doing some needed work as a middleman.
For example, I don't have to worry about construction materials or
food. Instead, as soon as I get done with this post I'll be working
on an estimate of the number of zombies in the county, using multiple
reports as my data set. Then I prepare reports for each section of
the administration based on what responses those sections may have to
enact. For construction, my report will involve relative strengths
and weaknesses of the zombies, how much of what types of material we
might need in case of an attack....
It's that way for each
part of this community. I get to work with factors that affect all
parts of our workforce and daily life, and decide the first steps on
how to deal with those factors.
Yeah, it's weird. It's
abstract. I know that. Still, I enjoy it. Of course, I'd be a lot
happier about this kind of work if existential threats weren't a
major part of it. That adds to the stress load a bit.
Like
killing zombies, it has to be done...

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Though
it's snowing right now (because mother nature is apparently having
severe mood swings) we've still got people out there working the
land. We're going to do some natural farming outside the walls by
utilizing crops that grow without much human intervention, but inside
the annex portion of New Haven there are big things going
on.
Obviously the ground froze overnight, so a lot of the work
Jess and her crew started yesterday in plowing the earth has been put
on hold. They broke a lot of ground, and are managing to get ahead of
schedule a fair bit. Jess is aiming to have the entire annex done by
the end of next week, rows ready to take whatever we want to plant in
them.
Cause the ground loves it when we plant our seed in it.
Aw, yeah.
I have to joke, because worrying about what may
happen without any kind of pressure release would be impossible. This
is the most critical time of the year for us. Planning and executing
the overall agricultural plan is obviously crucial to our needs, and
the problems we're facing are serious ones.
One concern is the
Exiles. They've also been working on preparing their land for
cultivation. There's a lot less to work with inside the fallback
point, and they have at least as many mouths to feed as we do. I
imagine they'll have to move out of the confines of their little
fortress and farm the surrounding land at some point. We're worried
that our new neighbors are going to run out of food before they get a
grip on farming. Their supplies can only last so long. I doubt the
tenuous peace between New Haven and the Exiles could survive fierce
hunger. That's a concern for the long haul. For now their stores will
last them.
The New Breed are a much more imminent threat. The
annex isn't staffed with a full compliment of sentries, so it's
impossible to keep all the zombies away. We guard the wall that
borders the annex, and our sentries there have seen New Breed on the
far wall. They must have watched us for a long while to have figured
out the annex walls have a thinner compliment of guards. I don't know
if that means they can count or if they gathered a general impression
of less people, but either way, they've been sneaking a look at us.
At least we know about it.
And we can't stop them from doing
it. Mounting the kind of guard we'd need to maintain all that extra
wall is beyond us with our current numbers and workload. Our concern
is split between the worry that the zombies will come over the wall
to attack Jessica's work crews, which is a very real
possibility...
...and the much more frightening thought that
the New Breed has figured out that we're going to be planting food.
The implications of that are huge and dangerous. If the New Breed
attacks our people, that's one thing. It's awful but straightforward.
But if they've realized how much damage they'd do to us by hitting
our breadbasket, then they're far more intelligent and clever than we
could have imagined.
Because if they do, we'll have to forage
outside of New Haven every day. We'll have to hunt. That means
another period of time where almost all our time and energy goes to
food and not toward innovation. Progress would stagnate, and our
numbers would surely dwindle as we worked to gather food out in the
New Breed's own territory. If they're devious enough to actually plan
hitting our food supply to flush us out in the open, that is. I could
be overreacting completely, giving them far too much credit.
Then
again, I watched our captive New Breed for a while this morning. He
was playing with a simple puzzle, one of those twelve-piece jigsaw
ones that small kids use. In the time I was there, he didn't try
putting the thing together, but he studied it. Turned the parts over
in his hands, glanced between the pieces as if to look for clues on
how they related to one another. Studying. Learning.
I put
nothing outside the realm of possibility with the New Breed.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
We
went from seventy degree weather one day to raging storms the next,
and then yesterday we got about six inches of snow. It came on
suddenly and dropped in less than eight hours. Since yesterday
morning when we woke up to see the beautiful blanket draped across
the world, the temperature has dropped to the mid-twenties and stayed
there.
This morning is March the sixth, I'll remind you. Our
timetable for planting has little wiggle room, and the weather is not
being agreeable. I can't tell you how fortunate we are that my wife
has been directing her teams so efficiently. She's the reason our
agricultural efforts are as far along as they are.
The rapid
shift toward cold weather brought us one unexpected but valuable
piece of information: we now see a weakness in the New Breed. It's a
small one, but something we can exploit in the short term.
Yesterday
morning around dawn wasn't all that cold. It was just above freezing
out, causing the snow to be very wet and clingy. Thinking that we'd
have the advantage over the zombies outside the walls, we sent teams
out under guard to gather several large loads of firewood. Not
knowing if the cold snap would stay with us or not, this seemed like
a reasonable (and necessary) risk. I should add here that our teams
have encountered small groups of New Breed zombies many times over
the last week. Some have attacked our people, some have merely hung
back at the edge of any nearby woods to observe, some have feinted
toward our people only to retreat at once, testing us.
It's
becoming clear that the local New Breed are acting as one large
force. They're not just trying to figure out the weaknesses in New
Haven's defenses or deciding which of our gathering places in the
outside world might act as a convenient feeding ground in which to
kill unwary humans. There seems to be a larger push here, a guiding
principle that makes me think the New Breed are trying to get a
handle on every aspect of us, their enemy and potential food
supply.
Yeah, that's fucking scary. We've been working on the
assumption that all our worst-case scenarios are true. That the New
Breed is far more intelligent than they appear to be, and that the
game they play is currently beyond our understanding.
That's
actually a much more freeing idea than you might think. We know
they're watching us, could be preparing some move against New Haven
and our people that we can't anticipate. That narrows down the
possible responses on our part to basically two: retreat or attack.
We have nowhere to run, so....
We've armed the guards going
out to protect our teams of workers with rifles and precious bullets.
They have instructions to shoot any New Breed on sight, whether or
not they attack. These zombies are smart, and they measure us. The
last thing we can afford to be is predictable.
Yesterday
morning around ten o'clock, a cold(er) front moved in and dropped the
temperatures into the low twenties in a very short time. A team of
woodcutters had been sent out to gather lumber and firewood. They
encountered a group of New Breed waiting for them. The zombies had
been clever, seeing the snow coming and hiding themselves amid the
piles of wood during the night. Our watchers check, but it's
impossible to be perfect. The undead managed to find places to lay
low, waiting during the snowfall for our people.
Thing is,
when the New Breed sensed our people coming close and rose from the
mantle of snow covering them, they were slow. Zombies have developed
a resistance to cold during the time since the outbreak began, but
there is only so much a body can take--reanimated or not. Our people
had plenty of time to pull back, and thank god for the perceptiveness
of the guard captain. He ordered his people to hold their fire,
noting something different about these New Breed.
Their skin,
usually looking dense and leathery, appeared brittle. The color was
off from slate gray to a sickly blue, and even as the New Breed moved
and the snow fell away from them he could see small cracked areas
forming at the joints. Cold wasn't sending them into the hibernation
state it used to, but clearly it was still affecting parts of their
physiology.
The guard captain ordered one of his men to strike
at the first zombie with a handheld weapon, told him to aim for a
joint. The man hit the elbow of the nearest New Breed, and the result
was...awful. The skin basically sloughed away like a loos glove from
elbow to wrist. The constant contact with the and the rapid change in
temperature does things to that armored skin they grow.
Note
that I said change in temperature instead of 'drop in temperature'.
Evans and I spent yesterday afternoon testing a theory, you see. On
our captive New Breed. We used a lot of firewood to get the room we
keep him in hot enough, but we began to see it. I put on my armor,
thinking I'd sweat to death, in order to restrain our test subject.
Once I had the noose pole around his neck, the rest wasn't so
hard.
As Evans directed me through the heavy fence around the
cell, I tested the strength and resilience of our New Breed's skin.
At prolonged lower temps, their skin can crack and separate if they
move too quickly or violently before it begins to warm back up. At
higher temperatures, somewhere between ninety-five and a hundred
degrees, the skin begins to lose its toughness and become waxy. More
supple. Way easier to pierce.
Hell, I accidentally pulled off
a chunk of our captive's skin the size of a baseball just pinching it
and giving a moderate pull.
To think that yesterday I woke up
angry that this insane season had given us snow when it should be
getting t-shirt warm. The freak snowstorm and following cold front
were the best thing that could have happened, because otherwise we
might not have discovered this chink in the armor of the enemy. How
we can take advantage of that is probably going to be my main work
for the near future, but it's a job I'm happy to take on.
We
had to get some good news eventually.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
There
are some of you out there that have been pushing for trade in weapons
lately. I've had a few messages about wanting to trade us field
artillery--that is, portable artillery weapons that we could use
against our enemies, as well as some less long-range items in case of
a zombie swarm. There was even a comment on the blog last week about
it, and with the influx of messages we've received, I feel the need
to address this where all of you can read it.
In short, the
title of this post says it all: this is fool's gold. Way more
valuable in appearance than in reality, at least for us.
While
I would love to have some rocket-propelled grenades or similar in
case a huge swarm of zombies comes at New Haven, we haven't had a lot
of luck finding any at the various military outposts we've come
across. I have to assume that the military had similar thoughts and
loaded up everything they could find. I know a lot of you out there
have large chunks of surviving soldiers embedded in your communities,
and that many of them brought such weapons to you. All of us here
appreciate your willingness to trade for them, but we have to
decline.
There are several reasons. While it would be an
advantage to have some smaller, less destructive weapons to use
against a zombie swarm, we couldn't rely on them long-term. After
all, they take ammunition, and it isn't ammo that we can make
ourselves like bullets (and even that is really damn hard to do). The
main advantage over our current system of air-powered defenses is
mobility. We can't take our most powerful weapons out into the field
for the most part, which makes us weaker against potential hordes of
undead.
As for longer-range stuff like portable mortars (this
is getting into an area I don't know a lot about, so I'm taking Will
and Dodger's word for it) we don't have any use for them. Yeah, we
could probably use them against the fallback point, but I'm certain
that the Exiles, who I'll remind are currently under tentative truce
with us, have such weapons and know how to use them. The fact that
they haven't is a perfect example of why they are valueless to us.
I
don't have to tell anyone out there how important all our resources
are, including the homes we've made for ourselves. I can't think of
many circumstances in which we'd be willing to destroy the fallback
point just to eliminate an enemy that isn't attacking us. I'm equally
sure the Exiles don't pummel the walls of New Haven to dust because
they do plan at some point to attack and try to take what we have.
Maybe that will be a true takeover much as the Richmond soldiers did
last year, or maybe just taking our supplies and some of our people
before running. I don't know.
I 
do 
know
that no even partially sane person is willing to destroy perfectly
good supplies and shelter for the sake of vengeance. Do we hate each
other? Sure. But we're not stupid and for damn sure not wasteful.
I
don't doubt that there are some of you out there in situations with
different factors. I'm not disparaging anyone that uses those kinds
of weapons, but we don't need them. It's too much risk. Explosives
are a danger, and easily used artillery means one person with access
to them having a bad day could lead us into another war. One idiot
messing around with them could blow half of New Haven to dust.
So,
no. Despite the positive impact (no pun intended) those kinds of arms
would have in our fight against the undead, they just aren't worth
that to us. I wish more than anything that we could avoid all
conflict and focus one hundred percent of our energy on building a
better future. We can't, of course, and we won't whine or complain
(too much) about it. But we certainly won't complicate our efforts by
bringing such massively dangerous weapons here.
And remember,
we 
are 
a
community beset by enemies on a regular basis. If we were to be
conquered again as the Richmond soldiers managed, would you want a
stockpile of mortars that could destroy your entire home in minutes
in the hands of such people? I wouldn't.
We thank you for your
offers, but we politely decline. Now I'm off to study our captive
zombies. Something interesting is happening, and I want to spend time
watching it.