Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) (17 page)

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
In
just a few minutes our people and the Louisville crew should be
starting their attack on the zoo. I intend to break my regular
schedule and write tomorrow as well to give you news on that. I
realized when I woke up this morning that I was looking forward to
hearing the details of the fight. In fact, I was looking forward to
the day's workload as well, which comes in 'help finalize designs for
the expansion's housing and defenses' flavor. Sounds boring. Probably
is boring to some people.
And
that thought right there is when it hit me. I mean, freight train to
the brain pan powerful.
I've spent a lot of time writing about
how The Fall has affected us all. Like snowflakes, each of us has
been uniquely shaped by the forces around us, every survivor (and
marauder, and every other convenient label you can think of) finding
some personal way to cope and some point of reference to hold on to.
We see and do many terrible things--our minds need a stable handhold
to keep us from breaking down.
Generally speaking, mine is
work. Doesn't really matter what kind of work so long as it's useful.
I've always had the attitude, even before the zombies rose up against
us, that doing a good job really is its own reward to a certain
degree. I know that sounds hackneyed, and it is, but for me it's also
true. My purpose in work was never to do anything glamorous or
ground-breaking. I took great joy in being able to provide, and to do
the absolute best I was capable of. I loved testing that boundary and
trying to expand it.
For a long time, that was true. In my
early twenties I began to see the stupidity in the world around me as
I worked for bigger and less personal companies. The more money I
made, the harder it was to make those above me understand that the
people doing the labor had good ideas. When I worked at the factory,
that meant using processes that could have been made vastly more
efficient even after explaining in excruciating detail to my bosses
how they could be improved.
After, as a nurse aide, that
aspect wasn't so bad. I really liked that job, but the physicality of
it was so brutal and damaging that I found myself in constant pain.
My back and shoulders hurt all the time, often to a point where I'd
be at work counting the minutes until I could leave. Not because I
hated the job itself or the people I took care of--I loved both. But
because I was being physically broken down. Nursing is hard
business.
I'd go home and sprawl for a long time, trying to
relax enough to get the worst of the tension out of my muscles so I
could fall asleep. Then I'd wake up and do it all over again. I loved
making those folks, my patients, smile. There's something magic about
being the person that helped them when they needed it most. I could
go on with the examples, but the short of it is this: the pain and
injuries were more than worth the satisfaction the job gave me. If I
spent energy hoping for time to speed up, it wasn't to get away from
the people I cared for on a nightly basis, but to get home so I could
rest enough to do it again.
The realization? I'm happier now
than I've ever been.
Not in the overall situation, obviously.
If I could choose between the world that is and the way things were,
it's no contest. I've lost most of my family just like everyone else
has. We've all been through hell a dozen times over. I'm saying I
wanted any of that nor would I choose the struggles we'll face down
the road.
But see, that's the thing. We 
don't 
have
a choice. I didn't ask for this world or these circumstances, but
I'll be damned if I let guilt keep me quiet. I'm happy with my life
as it is right now. I work my ass off trying to make our home a
better place for those that share it with me. I work as hard if not
harder than any time in my life, and I feel joy. Because I'm doing a
job that has clear purpose, that creates tangible and measurable
good.
I can't change the circumstances we're in. If I could
magically kill all the zombies on earth I'd do it in a heartbeat. But
I can find pride and happiness that in these awful times I'm one of
many who strive for better. There isn't much call to kill time
anymore. Instead of watching our lives tick by like we're waiting for
something better, we instead lose track of the hours in our frenzied
efforts to continuously build and improve.
This fight that's
about to happen--
that 
is
creating good, adding to the total positives in the world, just as
much as anything. Removing threats to living people in battle is
something to be lauded. It takes bravery and commitment and will give
the people of Louisville a chance to thrive. I've been in those kinds
of fights before, so I can say with absolute assurance that if I were
there waiting to charge in and kill the New Breed, I'd be looking
forward to it. Not waiting nervously for it to be over.
Just
as important? I'm completely okay with the idea that I can be happy
with my life, even as bad as things are. Much like the man who fell
over the cliff and dangled from the single strawberry plant. The
roots could not support him and were tearing away from the earth. He
couldn't climb up. He was doomed, but he smiled when he snatched that
strawberry and ate it.
An old story, one I've mentioned
before, but never more apt than now. God, it feels good to be alive.
To be 
living 
for
more purpose than simple biology. Most of us search for meaning and
some of us find it. Turns out mine was obvious and present all along.
Almost scary how blind I've been.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
The
New Breed are smart, but it's important to remember they're only
smart 
for
zombies
.
Basic problem solving is within their grasp, such as using simple
weapons and tools, but their understanding of complex situations and
objects is severely limited. When it comes to things that exist as
part of predatory behavior, the New Breed are brilliant. Good
tactical and strategic thinkers when it comes to familiar
situations.
Complete morons when faced with something new.
To
their credit, they were smart enough to keep themselves in the back
of the zoo to escape cursory inspections. When the assault team
showed up to hit them, the place looked deserted. That was an
advantage since it gave them time to set up the defenses Dodger and
Will came up with.
One thing that's actually really easy to
make is a cage. More specifically sections of cage that can be loaded
onto a truck in stacks and put together in about five minutes using
interlocking hinges held together with simple steel rods. The cage
itself was designed to be wide enough to block the front gate of the
zoo completely and tall enough to prevent any easy climb over it. The
thing has a top as well, making it practically impossible for the
undead to get to the people inside.
A door section was left
open, our folks milling about in front of it right in the danger
zone. Exposed inside the belly of the beast. Two teams of two rode
off into the zoo proper on motorbikes to get the attention of the
milling horde of New Breed in the back. As you can imagine, the
people acting as bait didn't have a hard job at all. Dangerous, but
not rocket science. A few tasty human beings represented no threat to
the vast swarm they ran into.
Those people came back to the
gate and brought the party with them.
Preparation is a big
part of every major assault. Our folks laid out some nasty surprises
before sending out the bait teams. When the swarm hit, our people
(and I mean everyone--the Louisville crew are 'our people', living
people) hit them with some weak attacks, mostly arrows and a few
bullets. They backed into the cage, the back wall of which was lined
with better weapons.
Then they closed the door. Secure in
their steel haven, reserve fighters on the outside of the zoo climbed
to their spots on the cage top and fired magnesium fuses into the
back of the zombie swarm. Undead that had stepped in the thermite gel
our people left for them caught fire and fell, creating a mild
barrier to the zombies in front of them. The sudden flares had the
excellent side-effect of pushing the main mass forward toward the
cage, packing them all into a relatively small space.
The
people inside the cage unloaded on the ranks before them with
handguns, then shotguns, then a variety of military-grade heavy guns.
That was just to thin the herd somewhat, easy to do since every
person behind those bars could pick and choose their shots at
will.
Up top, the artillery began to fall. Grenades were
chucked into the swarm, again at the back. I doubt they killed many
zombies outright, but the grenades caused a lot of panic and did a
good amount of damage. The idea wasn't to kill them with explosions,
but to confuse and disable as many of them as possible. I expected
them to use heavier weapons, but the tactics involved made rocket
launchers too dangerous and in the end unnecessary. By forcing the
New Breed ever forward against the bars, the whole structure butted
up against the trucks that carried it to the zoo, the killing was
actually pretty easy.
The entire task force was about fifty
people. Not many when you think about it, but each of those fifty
were calm and rational, either protected by the cage or on high
ground. Each of them could choose their targets, aim their shots, and
I'm told most shots were also kills. Even so, our folks didn't kill
them all. That wasn't the point. The idea was to destroy the ability
of that swarm to attack in numbers, the same idea we use in our
assaults on the New Breed here. There had to be enough of them left
to make any new arrivals wary of coming against human beings.
A
few dozen new breed were left to wander, hopefully spreading the fear
scent that warns other zombies not to fuck with the people in that
area, at least not without overwhelming numbers. Just as an example
to the other zombies there, our team decided to leave alone every
disabled zombie that could barely crawl. Sure, the disabled that
remained truly dangerous were killed. But there are more than a
hundred burned and dismembered undead at the zoo, moaning and vainly
thrashing as they struggle against the hunger and the damage to their
bodies.
Let a zombie come across that, and I'd bet anything
they decide to seek their dinner elsewhere.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
We've
long theorized about the zombie plague. We've studied it as much as
our limited technology will allow. It's incredibly strange to look at
on the whole, combining elements of a fungus, a bacteria, a virus,
and even complex parasites. We know it grows inside most living
people, though there have been some cases where kids and even a
couple of adults have been autopsied after death and found without a
trace of the plague. Given the rate of transmission, which seems
close to total, we're pretty sure it's airborne. Really, it would
almost have to be to spread so far and wide.
And here's an
interesting idea: not all of the mutations of the plague have been
beneficial ones. While the general trend for these lightning-fast
evolutionary leaps has been positive for the organism (New Breed,
Smarties, the development of cold resistance, etc) we've also seen
some examples of incompatibility between variations of it. The New
Breed can infect normal zombies with their strain, but it doesn't
take in all of them. Sometimes the only thing the New Breed has to do
is be near old school zombies to infect them with the more advanced
version of the disease, and sometimes they seem to need to bite to
make the infection work.
Today, we've got some pretty strong
evidence that some kind of defective version of the plague organism
is spreading around.
We thought it was pneumonia, you
see.
Four people are currently laid up in the clinic with the
same symptoms the Louisville folks we kept here had. This supports
the idea that the plague spores or whatever you want to call them are
airborne. It makes sense that they would lodge in the lungs and
spread from there, after all. The lungs are the gateway to the
bloodstream, which obviously permeates the entire body. What we
thought was pneumonia in our people appears to be another version of
the zombie plague, the first version we've seen that affects living
people directly. It causes respiratory problems--not good mojo for an
organism that takes you over. Bad to kill the host before you can
override and replace the existing version of the plague within,
right?
Evans and the other brainy medical folks have been
looking over their notes and throwing ideas around for the last few
days, trying to figure out exactly what is happening. One of the
patients has zombie wounds, but the other three don't. Two are male,
two female. One is a child, the rest adults. Whatever this thing is,
if it's really a strain of the plague that's gone off the
evolutionary rails, it's bad. We saw half the Louisville crew that
were sick die from this. A fifty percent mortality rate is terrifying
beyond rational thought.
The reason Evans is sure this is
another version of the plague is simple, by the way--he did a lung
biopsy on one of our newly ill patients. Risky as things are now, but
the patient volunteered. Under a microscope, he could see a slightly
altered version of the plague organism next to perfect examples of
the New Breed strain. Though it wasn't as interesting to watch as
mixed martial arts, Evans says the two varieties acted like a host
and disease as one tried to invade and destroy while the other
defended.
Survival is hard enough, but this changes the whole
game. My desperate hope was that the six people from Louisville that
got sick--who represented about one in ten of the people in the
Louisville group that came here--were indicative of how virulent this
thing is. If only one in ten catches it when exposed, and only half
those succumb, then we may be alright. Hurting for the losses of
those unfortunate people who might die, but secure in the knowledge
that the actual fatality rate is only five percent instead of the
apparent fifty it looks like right now.
I really hate feeling
helpless, and I've never felt more so in my life than right now. I
can fight an enemy. I can defend my home or run away. If my crops
fail I can hunt for dinner and eat wild foods. I can even handle more
abstract threats by making my home so defensible that bad people
would think it too hard a target.
We can't fight this. We can
only hope to survive. I'll be following it closely, have no doubt.