Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) (25 page)

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
I'm
in between New Haven and where I'm headed right now. I left home
about an hour and a half ago, but we're stopped for a few hours while
we wait out a passing swarm of zombies. They aren't close, can't see
or hear us, but they're moving across a bridge we have to use so I've
got nothing to do but write at the moment. I'm just glad we've got
batteries for the cell transmitter so I don't have to try cranking
the thing's generator in this heat.
Something happened back
home yesterday that got me thinking. If you aren't a fan of my
occasional philosophical posts, you can skip this one if you like.
It's that kind of morning.
One of our guards died on the wall
early yesterday morning. He was killed by zombies, but it wasn't an
attack. The guard--Tim--had Othostatic Hypotension. It's basically a
condition that causes blood pressure to drop, and in rare cases can
cause Vasovagal Syncope, a very specific kind of fainting. Tim was a
rare bird in many ways: having OH in the first place at his age (his
thirties) and having a very, very rare symptom along with it. He knew
about this problem, but he tried to be super careful about the onset
of symptoms.
In life, no one ever manages a perfect score. For
some people, that means game over when the mistake comes at the wrong
time.
Tim passed out and fell right over the wall. The undead
were on him in less than a minute. There was nothing anyone could do
to save him. After the first few bites, one of the sentries ran close
and put a few arrows in him. It was, I'm told, the most merciful gift
for him.
The sheer randomness of it made my mind spin and
twirl the concept of death around for hours. I couldn't stop focusing
on it, looking at it from different angles.
Death is the
ultimate mystery, right? Or it used to be. Some folks used to
romanticize it in one way or another--sometimes through literature,
or maybe television or movies. We've seen death happen so often and
on such scale since The Fall that it's possible the event has lost
some of its sharp edges for us.
I've realized some truths that
can't be ignored. Death is ugly. It's unpleasant. It's a terrible
thing, yet as much as we hate it conceptually, we don't hesitate to
deal it out when we need to. Sometimes when we don't. It can have
meaning, can grant gifts to those left alive. I'm thinking of Mason
here, and his last hurrah out in the sandy southwest, fighting off
the zombies approaching our camp with his bare hands. Mason knew he
was dying already, and he didn't go with a whimper. He fought and
died with as much bravery as he lived with, and shouted with a lion's
roar right to his last breath.
Does that make his passing any
better than Tim's? No. No, I don't think so. Sure, there are good
ways to go out (I always imagined my own death happening during
vigorous sex with identical busty redheaded twins, but I doubt that's
really an option anymore. Oh, not because the zombie apocalypse
happened. No. Because I got married), but the more I think about it,
the more I realize we simply attach too much other meaning to the
act. All of us will die, probably a lot sooner than we thought before
the world fell apart. Many philosophers have said that the important
thing is how you live, and I agree.
My mom died in that fire.
It was an accident, it was stupid, and instead of trying to repair
the damage her loss did to me and others, I lost my shit completely.
Death is many, many things. Random, brave, dumb, cowardly, romantic,
beautiful, grotesque, meaningful, pointless. Like everything else in
our lives, it depends completely on context. It could come for us at
any time, for any reason or none.
I guess that's why I feel so
strongly that every day should be an effort to better ourselves. To
live according to principles we define for ourselves as being good or
positive. A bald eagle could fall from the sky and break my neck in
ten minutes, which would be idiotic and pointless. But if there's an
afterlife (or at least a few fleeting moments of consciousness before
I Move On) I would want to look back at that moment of change and
say, "Well, how I went was completely moronic, but 
why 
I
was in that place at that time was good. I was on my way to do the
right thing."
We fail. In the end, we all fail. Death
isn't the failure, of course. We try to be good, and at times we
widely miss the mark. We fuck up royally, give in to our tempers,
lash out when we don't mean to. We're shitty with people or reluctant
to put forth an effort when we're needed. We fail in as many ways as
there are to describe it. Maybe more, since I'm kind of bad at
math.
Any moment could be our last. Yeah, it's trite and
definitely something you've heard at every funeral you've ever been
to, but that doesn't make it any less true. Before The Fall, it could
have been a car crash, food poisoning, or any number of factors that
are much less likely now. Post-fall, it's probably going to be a
zombie or something violent. The how just isn't important to me
anymore. The why even less so.
The end of the line for all of
us is the same. We'll die. The length of the trip will vary, but it's
far more important to worry about how we spend the journey.
Like
I said, just some thoughts.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Well,
I'm in a bit of a pickle here. Let me explain some background on the
community we're trying to help and their problem. That should
help.
I'm just going to call the place Clinton, because that's
one of the most common names for a town in the US. Can't give away
too much about it, but the crux of the problem is that Clinton is
very, very secure because of its location. The community is located
at the top of a large hill (I can say that because lots of places
have those), but in a huge, shallow depression in that hill. Big
enough to house hundreds of people and some farmland to boot. Think
about some of the river valleys you've seen, or distant plateaus as
you've driven down the highway and you'll get an idea of the scope.
Clinton is pretty big.
And because it's at the top of that big
ass chain of hills, and the hills are covered in trees, and the town
itself is basically fifteen feet below where the hilltop should
be...well, Clinton is invisible from the road. You could walk around
the hills and wouldn't know it was there until you were on it.
The
people there do a lot of mining. There's not a lot to be had in the
rocks there, but a few natural caverns and a lot of broken rock gives
them a ton of extra cool storage space and room to work metal without
being seen or heard. Not too far away from Clinton is a cluster of
abandoned factories and a good-size town where they regularly search
for and gather materials of all kinds. Good number of zombies passing
through there, though nothing like the numbers we deal with. The
important factors to understand:
The people of Clinton have
been creating caches of things in the town to more easily transport
them back when needed. They're very careful about not drawing any
undead from the town back to the community itself, and because of its
location and geography, zombies almost never come across the hidden
town in the hills.
The problem is simple. One-word simple.
Marauders.
I can write about this now without too much fear
that the marauders in question will read this and figure something
out. I've been watching them from a distance all morning, and this
band of bad guys don't seem to have any mobile communications
technology. There aren't any functional cell towers around here, and
they don't have a transmitter.
But the marauders definitely do
know that people live around here. They've found several supply
caches so far and have added them to their own plentiful supplies.
More, they've begun a systematic search of the area for the people
who left those caches sitting around, correctly guessing that they
are recent rather than being left over from before The Fall.
It's
pretty clear why I was asked to do this. The marauders have been
poking around this area for a few days. Eventually they'll exhaust
all the obvious places and start looking at the less likely choices.
They'll go into the hills and lead zombies that way, and chances are
good they'll find Clinton.
There are no walls to protect these
people. They've got weapons and they can fight, having learned the
hard way on supply runs into town. But they don't have defenses like
we do or a barrier other than the terrain to slow down enemies.
Building a wall where they are would be too obvious and noticeable.
Leaving their hidden home right now is also too big a risk--what if
someone saw them do it? Game over.
They're trapped and in
danger and can't do anything about it without exposing themselves.
That alone is enough to get me to help. But it's the things they've
been making in those caves, out of sight from the world above, that
makes the place a vitally important resource we have to save if
possible.
But that's another post entirely.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
You'd
think that being outnumbered ten to one (at least) by the marauders
would make it so stressful and busy here that I wouldn't have time to
think about other things. You'd be wrong. Hell, even I thought there
was a good chance I would put other concerns to the back of my mind
given the enormity of the job at hand. Not that I could simply forget
that Jess and the other people in my house are ill, but that I could
at least save the worry for moments when I'm not in mortal
danger.
Nah.
Turns out my two teammates and I couldn't
forget or ignore the stuff going on at home. Instead of being a
professional and gaining some kind of laser focus like a hero in a
story, I found myself planning the best way to drive off or kill the
marauders without wasting any more time than necessary. The idea was
a simple one we've used many times: gather up a big trail of zombies
and lead them right to the enemy.
It seemed like a good idea
at the time. The plan had the advantage of being tried and true,
relatively easy to pull off, and minimally risky for us. Plus it
wouldn't take a lot of time to engineer, so we could get back home
quickly.
Of course, we weren't going to actually have the
zombies chase us. We didn't want to expose our presence any more than
Clinton does. So my teammates went one way and I the other, and we
started spraying small bursts of ammonia up and down the nearest
highway where a number of zombies could be found. We brought a wide
variety of stuff with us, packed tight into the back of our truck,
since we had no game plan when we left New Haven.
The ammonia
wasn't super thick, just a dab here and there to corral the undead in
the direction we wanted. I moved a bit faster than the others and
brought my sprays closer to the road itself. By the time the zombies
reached the town near Clinton, the passage they would be moving
through was narrow and pointed right at the bad guys. Ammonia is
wonderful stuff, and my teammates did an excellent job following the
horde and spraying behind them to keep the stampede going.
For
the record, that part of the plan worked fine. We just didn't count
on the marauders being as disciplined and responsive as they were.
I'd say there were about a hundred zombies in the train we sent
toward the rough marauder camp, but those thirty or so people reacted
like something out of 
The
Dark Tower
.
They moved into their armored vehicles with clockwork precision,
gunners popping through hatches in the roof of each, and calmly fired
round after round into the heads of the undead swarming them.
We
watched it all happen from a copse of trees. Gunners moving with
practiced fluidity across the roofs of their vehicles, safely above
the fray. Each of them made sure to regularly scan the battlefield to
make sure their friends weren't being hauled down and killed. They
watched out for each other. If they weren't so obviously marauders,
I'd have felt pride watching them.
We've got another idea, one
we wouldn't have been able to come up with had the team and I not
noticed something during the assault. It gives me chills to think
about what I'm planning, but when you're against a wall and low on
options you have to take the opportunities fate hands you.
We're
just waiting for cover of darkness now. Which is appropriate
considering the terrible thing I'm about to do.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
That's
what it was, no way around it.
The marauders went to sleep
last night, only protected by four guards keeping watch, and one of
my teammates managed to get in close. The guy is a lifelong hunter,
used to moving around silently, and the darkness gave him the edge he
needed. We didn't have to get inside the boundaries of the camp, only
up to the back of one truck.
That was where the water was
kept. Big old container of it, shared among the whole group. One of
the things we brought with us was a powerful kind of poison. It's not
something I plan on sharing with you, sorry to say. Some things have
to stay secret in order to remain advantages. Suffice it to say that
we make the stuff ourselves, it's in powder form, and it's water
soluble.
I acted as a distraction for the guards, making
noises out in the darkness, while teammate number three covered us
with a rifle from the trees. The truck with the water tank in it
wasn't being watched closely anyway, and the tank itself had its
collection funnel attached, as it was raining off and on all day
yesterday. Our man slipped in close and dumped a few cups of the
stuff in there. Not powerful enough to take a man off his feet in an
instant, but definitely capable of making you wish you were dead with
a little time to work.
Within an hour of waking up, most of
the marauders were sidelined. Half a dozen of them must have had
canteens or something, as they didn't fall ill, but the rest were
vomiting their guts out, some passed out from the severe nausea. In
the confusion, our rifleman covered while teammate number two and I
rushed the camp with our bows, firing arrows into the people still
standing. Thank god most of the sick people were too out of it to
realize that the sharp and short sounds they were hearing were
muffled screams.
The able-bodied went down first, right there
in the middle of the camp. From there we moved inside the campers and
RVs, and that was close-up work. Most of them died before they
realized we were strangers, enemies. Their murderers.
The
worst part of it is that right now, all I can think about is going
home. I feel bad that I had to do these things, I'm trying not to
remember the hot gush of blood across my hands as I held mouths shut
and swept my knife through windpipes and arteries. I got one guy
through the kidney from behind, and as I slapped my hand over his
mouth I saw the surprise on his face. He couldn't scream, though he
tried. The wound was so painful his throat constricted hard enough to
make sound impossible.
We murdered them. Coldly. Weirdly, it
doesn't make me feel any better to have seen the evidence of the
abuses they'd heaped on people. There were old chains and old stains
in those vehicles. One had a cage with human hair still jammed in
bloody clumps in the corners of the bars. Those men did terrible
things to people at one time or another. But it didn't ease my
conscience.
Not that it feels very heavy. Maybe I'm just
distancing myself from the horrible reality of it, but I don't feel
the soul-deep revulsion I expected to have. They're dead, I'm alive,
and they had it coming. They were Bad Guys, right?
Yeah, they
were. But if we're being honest, and I try to encourage that by
example...well, being bad guys was pretty much immaterial to this.
Their past deeds weren't the issue. They could have been a band of
house-building, zombie-slaying missionaries up until they showed up
near Clinton. Once they became a threat, once they started looking
with greedy eyes toward that community, their status as human beings
didn't matter. They were as much a threat to be eliminated as the
zombies themselves.
I'm not saying that's right or moral. I'm
just saying it's math. It was either kill them, all thirty of them,
or watch them come into conflict with allies and possibly threaten
many times that number. That's what I'm telling myself, anyway.
I'm
going home. Let's focus on that.