Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) (13 page)

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Evans
has released me and the others from isolation. Overnight the
remaining three Louisville people had sudden and dramatic
improvements. They're up, breathing well, and apparently on the mend.
It's sudden but fits with the results of the autopsies he's been
performing.
Which I didn't get to hear the results of until
this morning, because he didn't want to get my hopes up or scare me
to death. That the line between the two was narrow enough for him to
withhold information is pretty terrifying by itself.
Because
I'm free to move about (if gingerly since I still have a huge
stitched-together wound in my belly) and because today is my wedding
anniversary and I'd like to spend as much of it with Jess as
possible, I'm going to have to keep it short. Again.
Evans
says that whatever hit these folks isn't likely to be transmissible
anymore. I don't know what his reasoning is there, but he's the
expert. The lung tissue of the people who died was badly damaged, as
if a giant fist had squeezed them. The fibrous material threaded
through them, the parts of the zombie plague that grow inside each of
us, were brittle and withered. Evans thinks some pathogen began to
attack the plague itself, at the lungs first because it was likely
airborne. The last few weeks we've been seeing the Louisville crew
acting as the battleground between the plague organism and whatever
has been attacking it.
That's his theory based on the
evidence.
Not that he can really look at the lungs (or most
other parts of a person) who is still alive to confirm. So we'll just
work on the operative idea that we can't do anything about it and
hope that these folks were exposed to whatever this is before they
came here to help us. Seems to have a long incubation period, which
is a silver lining.
Jess is doing a lot better. Her wounds are
annoying the hell out of her, but she's keeping a positive attitude
and frankly managing to get a lot more work done than I am. Don't
know if we'll be able to do anything special today. Being alive,
being together, is something wonderful all on its own. I cherish that
even if nothing else happens today.
One good thing is that the
zombie attacks have stopped. Well, good in the short term. I don't
imagine they've just given up. Maybe deterred considering the number
of bodies we created during their test runs.
Ahhh okay, I'm
drifting. Time to give the wife some cuddles. Cuddles are manly.
Don't judge me.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Over
the course of the last few years, there have been many occasions
where our plans and reality had serious disagreements over who was
right. Reality always wins. Once in a while that ends up in our
favor. For example, the recent spate of zombie attacks on the walls
seems to have made the New Breed unwilling to hit us with their main
force. Our Beaters haven't found a trace of them in days.
Then
there's the news we got this morning. My brother was sitting with me
in the clinic going over pieces and parts of our plans for the
expansion when I got a message from a contact who lives relatively
nearby. By sheer chance, Dave and I were looking at the estimates on
how long the new wall was going to take to complete using the bricks
our folks are shaping out of the local clay. The message came in, and
our plans changed.
The contact in question has asked that we
not share any but the most general information about him. He lives on
a river that connects to the Kentucky river. He's not that far away.
He is the head of a group of people that we've been trying to
persuade to join us for a few weeks now. They live in an area that
did a lot of river trade before The Fall.
Long story short,
they're at the nexus where a train yard and a large river shipping
company meet. They've got several barges small enough to traverse the
Kentucky river and more shipping containers than they can fit on
them. They've made the decision to join us because they've come up
with an idea that will allow the new wall to be built in a period of
days rather than months.
I'm sure you've figured it out, but
the contact (we'll call him George) and his folks are going to bring
loads of those beautiful long metal boxes to us. From the spot on the
river we'll be unloading them from it's just a five minute trip to
New Haven. We've got everything we need to move the containers,
though the process will be tricky. Getting them to New Haven will be
the easy part. Making them into a wall will be marginally harder.
Stacking them two high will require a crane, I think. That's the main
issue we'll have to worry about.
But hey, think about the
positives. The expansion will have a wall twenty feet high, made of
metal and with no chance of allowing the undead to climb them. If
there is enough fuel to manage multiple trips to George's base, there
are enough containers that we would have all the extra metal we'd
need for years. We could armor the stone wall around New Haven with
them, use them as raw materials, cut them up to make shields. The
possibilities are wide open.
There are a lot of details to
work out. Looks like we'll have to send a team to George's place to
coordinate and look for fuel supplies for the barges. But, you know.
Train station next door. Sure to be some diesel fuel there.
The
Exiles will be an issue. They've got patrols going up and down the
river. I think they'll abide by the truce, but George and his people
could prove to be too tempting a target. We'll see, I suppose. For
now I'm incredibly excited to see George and his crew finally decide
to join up. We've had to play that low-key, and knowing now what
resources they can bring to us makes the stakes that much
higher.
Jess is practically vibrating with the news. She's
been laying on the cot next to me, tossing in her two cents here and
there. She already has plans for the new wall, ideas that Dave and I
might have come up with weeks down the road. She came up with them in
minutes. Damn wife, showing me up.
Ah, and our breakfast/lunch
is here. Bit of a busy morning today, so the meals are erratic. Dave,
Jess and I will need our minds on task, so we better eat. We've got
an entire new community to redesign, and only a week or so to do it.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
I
keep poking myself in the tummy. The incision where Evans cut me open
and played in my guts is healing up well, faster than I hoped for and
better than my expectations. Thank god for small favors.
It's
really difficult not to fiddle with the lump of hardening scar tissue
on my abdomen. It's like a loose tooth--there, and new, and thus
impossible to ignore. Doesn't help that my laptop bumps into it when
I work.
Still, I have a long road ahead of me. It's nice to be
able to get some work done even if I can't go out and fight with the
others. And they could have used me the last day, that's for sure.
Every able hand would have been a huge help, but we couldn't risk
fielding more than a handful.
The New Breed are back, and
they've come with friends. Will is guessing that their disappearance
was only for as long as it took to gather all the numbers they could.
Idiotically, we assumed that our scouts and beaters had been seeing
the large group of them and that it was the majority of the New Breed
in the county. Sure, there were small groups and our people attacked
them, but all of those together never added up to the larger group
we'd seen.
Maybe. Maybe not. It's hard to track movements and
numbers in the field. We thought the New Breed were gathering in one
mass and that the smaller groups were zombies that just hadn't been
integrated yet. New arrivals, probably. We didn't consider the idea
that the large swarm we saw was the one they were 
letting 
us
see, and we should have. We should have known it based on every
interaction we've had with them.
Yesterday evening, a pair of
our scouts came in at full speed, screaming for us to let them
through the gate. They'd caught sight of a large group of New Breed
less than a quarter mile away, at least two hundred of them. We had
the lookouts on the tower scan all around, and what they saw was
bone-chilling. Four such groups in total, spread out around us.
Zombies on all sides.
They haven't attacked us yet, and this
morning when we sent out those volunteers, the nearest troupe of
undead retreated. Our people aren't stupid, so they didn't chase.
Getting drawn far from home and into the retreating center of a
zombie swarm is a good way to get trapped as the arms of that swarm
close in around you.
No, they're just waiting out there. We
keep taking warning shots at them, but they're just out of range of
our air cannons, much less out arrows. Bullets would be a pointless
waste. Two more teams have ridden out since that first one with the
same results. Maybe if we had more people, and so many of us weren't
injured, we could risk pushing a little harder and faster. Take the
fight to them for real.
Waiting is awful. Knowing you're about
to fight for your life, for the lives of those you love. The
anticipation is brutal. Sitting here, I can only hope that the undead
hold decide that we aren't a prize worth the risk. I don't have much
expectation of that. They wouldn't be out there in those numbers on a
bluff. They've shown us they're smarter than that.
I'm
chalking it up to the funny little pill Evans made me swallow about
two hours ago, but I'm not stressing out right now. I know I should
be worried and fidgety about the possible death sentence waiting
outside the walls to hit us like the fist of god, but I'm not. I
mean, I feel it, but it isn't overpowering. I can be objective.
The
New Breed are dangerous as hell, that's a fact. Their many advantages
over the original recipe zombies make each New Breed worth four of
the old school ones in a fight. They're fast and tough and smart, and
that's not good for us. More, they've got experience with our
defenses and probably have plans to overcome them.
Medication
is kind of awesome, though. Because I feel a strange (and possibly
false) sense of security. Yes, the New Breed are lethal. But
they 
are 
zombies.
Which were once people. Which means they have weaknesses and blind
spots we can exploit.
Ah, the sound of bells. Seems the time
has come to see if some of our more clever plans will pay dividends.
I really, really hope whatever this is doesn't wear off before the
battle is done. Jess is here with me and I'm worried the blocked-off
fear will overload me all at once and make me piss down my leg or
something.
Time to make myself scare. The clinic will be busy
soon, and I don't want to be in the way. Wish us luck.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Today
I'm without drugs in my system, but I'm happy about it. Evans made
the right call in doping me up yesterday, because the bells just kept
on coming. Eight of them, of course. Eight hundred New Breed hit us
all at once.
They came from all sides, and they were clever.
The first wave, about fifty on each side of New Haven, rolled logs or
carried heavy pieces of wood. The logs hit our traps, setting them
off and creating safe routes through the outer defenses. Once the
traps were no longer an issue, the remaining forces moved in behind
them.
I'm cobbling all this together from what Will and others
have told me, so if it seems a little confusing you'll have to
forgive me.
Our archers took careful shots, no wild flights of
arrows. Each target was chosen, shots taken only when an archer
thought they could kill with a headshot. As you can imagine from our
prior experience with the New Breed, they moved in loose ranks.
Groups moved forward to pick up the logs and set them against the
wall. The undead were clearly using logs and wood from our
woodcutting site.
As those zombies came forward with their
logs, those with chunks of wood gave them cover by throwing their
missiles at the people on the wall. Keep in mind this is going on all
around New Haven. Every person we could spare carried weapons along
the wall.
New Breed can be mighty clever. They aren't quite a
match for people scared for their lives, though.
Everyone was
kind of surprised that they came at us so hard. The New Breed know
how dangerous arrows are, they knew we would take a toll on them.
According to Dodger, their skin is tougher than the last time I
fought them. Maybe it's the diet of other zombies or just a
progression of their particular mutation, but it's harder to damage
them.
Which means it's harder to put arrows through their
heads. Luckily, we evened the playing field with fire.
It took
a lot of effort and some losses on trades, but we managed to
stockpile enough materials to make about half a ton of thermite. Some
of which Becky worked into a thin gel. Which was carefully spread out
across the field.
So while it was hard for our folks to hold
back until the New Breed got right up on the wall in one convenient
mass (well, four convenient masses) it worked out very well. Because
they'd been traipsing about in liquid death. They had rolled their
logs through the stuff.
It wasn't the crazy powerful kind of
thermite Becky made before. This was simpler stuff, but we managed to
get hold of a large amount of magnesium, shavings of which were mixed
in. Makes it easier to ignite.
Didn't kill most of them, but
the logs went up like torches, ruining the hands of the zombies
holding them. The feet and lower legs of others burned. We didn't
take out many of them with arrows, but we crippled all but a
hundred.
Our people went out the gate and brought hell with
them. Squads went out and methodically destroyed their brains. The
Beaters took point, setting up diamonds to deal with still-mobile
enemies. Others sprinted about in small groups, shields and spears
and other killing tools at the ready as they finished off those
zombies that couldn't move easily.
Our folks took a lot of
injuries, and fourteen people died. That's a smaller loss than we
expected, but no one could have imagined the sheer panic we caused.
Our people took the fight the them, used every trick they've learned,
and wiped almost all of them.
I know this is shaky and not up
to my usual standard, but I wasn't there. That bothers me, of course.
I know intellectually that there was no way for me to be there and do
any kind of good but that doesn't change the fact that my heart feels
heavy. For not being there. For knowing that people I've spent time
with and shed blood beside are gone. Just like that.