Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) (10 page)

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.

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.
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.
Credit is due to our
watchers for not taking the shot they surely wanted to take. It would
have been easy to react to cold murder with one of their own, a few
ounces of pressure on a trigger. A moment of rage that would have
taken one terrible person out of the human race even as it reignited
a war.
God help me, I almost wish they'd done it.
Which
is idiotic on an intellectual level. We've got crops to grow,
projects to build, zombies of all types to defend against, and a
hundred other things to worry about. I 
know 
that.
But what I feel is totally different.
And I'll leave it there
before I start a war myself.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
The
mood in New Haven in the last day has been tense. Not overtly angry,
but as if every person is clenching their fists in concert. We never
lost sight of the things the Exiles have done to us, but it was
jarring to have them give such a stark reminder. That guard dying
like that, as an example to others.
Well, that just pisses me
off. But I have been asked not to focus on that. Which only means
that cooler heads than mine realize pushing the issue, considering
how it upsets people who are already high-strung, is probably a bad
idea.
One thing that probably helped people relax a little
yesterday was Jess's solution to the massive flocks of birds going
after our crops and seeds. At first she sent people out among the
rows to bang together pie pans (which work a lot better than pieces
of firewood) but that was still inefficient and a waste of manpower.
It left the walls low on sentries and guards, so we put our brains to
coming up with something else.
Again, Jess was the one that
came up with it. We've spent a lot of time and effort to gather and
slowly breed dogs. We have to be careful of how many we have due to
food concerns, but when it comes to early-warning systems for
zombies, you don't get better than a dog's sense of smell. My own
two, Bigby and Riley, have saved my life a couple of times.
Riley
was already fixed before The Fall came, which is a real shame. For
all the destruction his over-energetic ass caused back when my
biggest concern was paying the mortgage, he's turned into a
first-rate guard dog since. He has the nearly unlimited vigor of a
growing puppy, and he fucking 
hates 
birds.
If he had hands instead of paws, I'd give him a fist-bump.
Bigby,
on the other hand, was not fixed. We've bred him once already, and
the puppies were awesome. Riley is half Golden Retriever and half
Great Pyrenees, and it makes me sad to know that he won't pass those
beautiful looks on. But he's also lanky and somewhat awkward, so not
ideal for what we need.
Bigby is half Chow, half Norwegian
Elkhound. He's massive and built low to the ground. Hit mate was
abandoned by one of my neighbors early in The Fall, a pure Malamute.
The puppies have grown to be meaty, strong adults.
So Riley,
Bigby, and his progeny (six of them) are spending their days under
the supervision of two people scaring the living crap out of birds. I
can't help smiling when I think about it. Watching them gambol and
play even as they put the fear of god into their prey makes my heart
a bit less heavy. It's another example of how we have to utilize
every resource we can. My ferrets and cats are great for controlling
vermin from bugs on up to rats. Our large pack of dogs are good for a
lot of tasks from guard duty to scaring birds, even acting as pack
animals from time to time.
Of course, my boys and their pack
out in the annex 
do 
have
to be watched. All of them are prone to digging, and that wouldn't be
a very good thing. Still, with so many targets to keep their
attention, it's not a bad situation. Plus we can let some of the kids
out with them. Makes the kids happy, which makes the adults happy,
which we all need.
Zombies still wander around outside the
annex walls, but the dogs seem to be keeping any New Breed among them
from risking a climb. That's a lot easier to do in that part of New
Haven given how bad the damage is to parts of it, but apparently it's
more than birds my boys can keep in line.
Maybe not the most
important or moving thing to talk about, but it's better than the
alternative. Some days you have to force yourself to avoid the bad,
no matter how much you want to dwell on it. So I think I'll had over
to the annex and let my pups knock me over and give doggy kisses.
That kind of loyalty and love can do wonders.

Posted
by 
Aaron
Hello
everyone. Aaron here. Miss me? Josh is being kind enough to let me
post my little update on the actual blog here today for those that
have been worried or concerned about me. As he mentioned, I left New
Haven awhile ago. Now, it wasn't because there's anything wrong with
New Haven. Quite the contrary. I miss New Haven greatly and love it
so much. I left because I wanted to find a few people. See, before
the Fall I was one of those people who did long distance dating via
the internet. At the time of the fall, I was with a girl from New
Jersey. We actually had been together for about two years and spent a
great deal of time traveling back and forth to visit each other and
what not. Heck, she even planned on eventually moving to Kentucky.
However, the Fall had a funny way of ruining plans. I lost touch with
her. I sent her a few messages but never got anything back. So I
assumed the worst. She was one of the casualties of the Fall.  
So
imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail from her, not only
telling me that she was fine, but had heard about New Haven and
wanted to come down here. The only real problem was that she didn't
really know how to get here, nor did she feel safe to try to on her
own. So I packed what I could and with the permission of the (now
defunct) council grabbed one of the trucks and began to make my way
toward New Jersey. This was back in the beginning of November.
Now
on top of my own personal mission, I had been asked to make contact
with a few known groups of survivors to set up possible trade
arrangements. Probably why I was allowed to go at all.  Not that
they would've genuinely stopped me, but there would've been many more
attempts to persuade me to stay and it was already difficult for me
to do so. Plus they wouldn't have let me have the truck.
So my
first stop was a group of survivors who had decided to hole up in one
of the old coal mining towns in West Virginia. The first thing that
really surprised the heck out of me was that they had electricity.
Like street lights and stuff. It made everything seem so...bright.
This was greatly offset by the thin layer of coal dust that seemed to
cover most of everything. So in the end I chose the name Soot for it.
I don't know. It seemed appropriate.
The people there seemed
genuinely pleased to see me when I got there. I got the feeling I was
expected. They were all a hardy lot, about hundred and fifty of them
in all. They worked the mine in shifts and those not working in mine
usually worked on other projects. Like the massive electrified fence
that surrounded the entire town. It's their main means of defense. A
large 15 foot tall metal fence they can keep electrified for when the
zombies (or marauders back when they were more plentiful) attacked.
It was a site to behold. I got to see it in action a few times.
Seemed to even keep this New Breed at bay for the most part.
I
ended up staying there until about the middle of March, for a number
of reasons. The first was the chaotic weather. Not that it was overly
cold there (though colder than how it was in Kentucky apparently) or
there was a whole lot of snow, but it was enough. Plus it took awhile
to work out the arrangement between New Haven and Soot. More so cause
of the political turmoil in New Haven. That and communication was
really tough. Despite having a more or less regular source
electricity they did not have very consistent internet connection. In
fact, it was downright impossible to stay on the net for more than an
hour or so at a time. I'm amazed they were able to get in touch with
the outside world at all. But they're a resourceful bunch.
So
anyways, I took my leave a couple of weeks ago to head toward my next
stop in Virginia and had the most damning of things happen. I let
myself run out of gas. So I've been hoofing it ever since. I just
finished crossing the Appalachians a couple of days ago and finally
got signal today. I'm hoping to hit my destination sometime in the
next week or so and assuming all goes well there, I might be able to
check out D.C. area. I guess we'll see what happens.
I miss
you guys back and New Haven and I look forward to when I can see you
all again. Stay safe back there and I'll try to send more regular
messages through Josh when I can.