Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) (27 page)

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Josh
Guess
Yeah,
this is Kincaid again. Josh is still sick, worse off than he was
yesterday. I feel kind of weird writing on here. I don't want to
intrude on his space. I've read back through the archives and it
makes me feel better knowing other people have done it before
me.
Josh talks about a lot of stuff as he tries to keep
everyone updated on life here in New Haven. I would try to do the
same thing but there isn't a lot to talk about. The heat has been
almost too much to handle lately, but the zombies outside are still
feeling it too. We're not fighting them at the moment. I can't say it
bothers me much.
I guess the most important thing happening at
the moment, or at least what's stuck in my head, is Josh not being
here. He's in the infirmary with his wife. I'm typing at his house.
The big blacksmith is sitting across the desk right now. He doesn't
like me. The eyeball-fucking I'm working under at present should come
with hazard pay.
Not being liked. Heh. Used to that.
So
many of you out there have no idea what life was like for people like
me when the world came to an end. I can't defend the things I did and
won't try. And don't get me wrong, the distrust for former marauders
isn't something we haven't earned. We have. Guess I just think
cooperation and integration would go smoother if there were more
civility. Maybe some understanding.
The question I get asked
most, at least when people aren't too afraid to ask, is why. Why did
I do the things I did as a marauder and especially as a leader of a
group? Notice that I don't say that people asked me how I could do
it. In general, stupid and naive people didn't make it through The
Fall, and it would take one of the two to have any genuine doubt that
human beings are capable of being awful in a whole spectrum of
ways.
No. 'Why' is the question. Why, knowing it was wrong on
a fundamental level. Why, when my conscience eventually pushed me to
give myself up during the amnesty. Why, a hundred varieties and
angles. Why did I do it.
Because I was fucking scared. I was
out of my mind with fear when I finally realized the military wasn't
going to stop the plague of zombies. I was a good little sheep,
herded into a big city and inside a giant ring of heavily-armed
soldiers. I was there for nearly two weeks as the soldiers fought for
us. Out of at least three thousand people, I was one of maybe twenty
survivors.
While so many of you were planning and building the
first parts of your communities, I did what the majority of people
chose to do. I ran. I hid behind others better equipped to deal with
the situation. I don't feel guilt or cowardice about it. It was a
logical and reasonable decision. Hell, I was an IT guy at a credit
card company before The Fall. I had never been in a fight, never
fired a gun. I was thirty before I had a steady girlfriend.
The
hardest thing I'd ever had to do was worry about sending my mom to a
nursing home. I thought that decision would tear me apart. Honestly,
how prepared was I mentally for what was going to happen?
I
won't lie to you. I didn't go crazy or decide that the world was
going to burn anyway and just give in to my base impulses. It's easy
to think of myself as a bad person. I've done terrible and maybe
unforgivable things. But it didn't all come at once. There were
moments of choice, hard ones that required picking the lesser evil.
Worry for those around me. The thought that keeping my people alive
was more important than anything else.
Maybe if Josh is still
too sick to write tomorrow, I'll tell you about them. I just realized
how much I've written and how much time has passed. I have work to
do.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Josh
is on the mend. He's fighting off whatever bug he caught, but I'm
back one more time to cover for him on here. Yep, it's Kincaid
again.
I should mention at the outset here that things are
going well for us at the moment. There's no news from across the
river. The Exiles have been quiet since their coup against Scar. I
didn't know the guy personally, but word travels among marauders. He
was one I wouldn't have messed with under any circumstances. Not
because he was brutal--he was--but because we heard a lot of stories
about him gathering followers. He had charisma and intelligence.
Mixed with cruelty, that makes for one of the scariest kinds of
people you can imagine.
There haven't been any zombie attacks
to speak of, either. That's kind of surprising given the cool
mornings we've had, and we're being watchful for any tricks on the
part of the New Breed, but that isn't stopping us from enjoying the
relative peace.
I said I'd talk about some of the things that
put me on the wrong path after The Fall. I thought about it a lot
last night, and I decided the rest of my bad decisions all followed
the basic pattern of my first major error. That's the really
important one. People sometimes make choices that seem like the best
of a bad situation, and subsequent decisions based on them can become
a slippery slope.
After the military encampment I was in was
overrun, I set out with a few of my fellow survivors to find a new
place to stay. Somewhere safe, secure. In those days we thought
finding a hole to hide in was a far better idea than joining up with
any established groups, or rather any groups that were trying to
become established. Didn't much help that we had no communications to
speak of, so everything we knew came from word of mouth.
Over
a period of weeks, we gathered followers. Most of them were people we
found out on the road. We took them in and everyone shared their
supplies, and we hunted down what food and other gear we could find
in the empty city we were staying in. The streets were running over
with the undead, but we figured safety could be had if we stayed in
buildings of stone and steel, high places that offered thick walls to
protect us from the zombie swarms.
After going through the
fourth such location, we decided we were wrong. The problem was that
zombies always figured out where we were eventually, and the things
that made those places secure also made them death traps. One or two
entrances meant we got trapped indoors when the swarms came. If that
happened while we were low on food or water, we went hungry and
thirsty until the zombies gave up or we killed enough of them to
escape. The last place we tried to call home was a modern art museum
that had lots of huge glass windows at floor level. We put up lots of
plywood in layers, even had the stuff on hinges and pulleys so we
could just put a boot to them and turn them from defensive walls into
ramps leading through the broken window frames. We were so
clever.
That place we lost to fire. We might have survived
there for a while had one of us not accidentally kicked a lantern
over and set a bunch of the displays on fire. We ran like hell from
that one, the whole floor we were on went up like a tinderbox.
Everything we had except the clothes on our backs and whatever we
could grab as we ran was gone. Very little food, almost no water.
Just weapons and a powerful need to eat.
We left the city. And
on the way out we saw a caravan of people traveling down the road
toward us. They were in the distance, and one of the people with me
had a terrible idea. We had been on foot for hours by that point and
had been on half rations even before the fire. We couldn't have
farmed where we were, no way to have made a long-term home. We
deluded ourselves into thinking it was possible.
In our
hunger, our despair, and our desperation, we took a vote. The 'ayes'
had it. We set up an ambush and attacked that caravan. They were
marauders, though more genteel than others I've met. They only robbed
people. Didn't hurt them if it was avoidable, didn't rape or kill.
Our blood was up, running hot in our veins. I can't explain it to you
in a way that makes it palatable. We were in need, and we were
running on empty. It didn't occur to us to risk asking for help,
because that meant we could be turned down. The chance to go from
dire need to abundance in a few short minutes was too enticing.
We
killed them. All of them. And after that, things just kept going
downhill. Once you've slaughtered a large number of people for their
belongings, never having given them a chance to offer terms or
surrender, your capacity to make rationalizations for any kind of
behavior increases. Your moral convictions fuzz out. You convince
yourself you've done what you had to do, regardless of reality.
From
that singular moment of fiery rage at seeing people blessed with
plenty sprang every other horrible call I've ever made.
Hm. I
just read over this. I just had an idea, sort of a flash of
inspiration. I need to check a few things out, but hopefully I'm on
the right track. Yeah, that's confusing. But I don't want to mention
what it is until I know for sure that I'm right.
Might be back
tomorrow, or Josh. Either way, I'm glad I got to get some of this off
my chest. I feel better for the chance to be honest with so many of
you at one time. Not better about what I've done, really, but just to
clear the air. I'm not some smug asshole gloating at having gotten
away with my actions. They weigh on me, and I just wanted you to
know.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Hey,
all. It's Kincaid again. Josh is feeling better but decided to let me
write today's blog as a sort of victory lap. I'll explain, but I
guess the best way to sum up the last day and his reasoning for
giving me another chance to post can be summed up simply.
I
kind of cured the new plague yesterday.
Yeah, I'm just as
surprised as you are. Like I said, I've been reading the blog and
catching up on it during my stay here. While I was talking about the
fire that put my group and I on the wrong path, I remembered reading
some of Josh's posts about experimenting on his captive zombies. The
New Breed are very susceptible to heat, even just very hot days like
we've had recently.
I went back and read those posts. Then I
asked Josh if I could see his notes from the experiments.
This
was the part of his notes that made me pretty sure I was
right:
"Tissues of the New Breed subjects tend to soften
and become more pliable at temperatures above 130 degrees F. The
hotter they get, the faster the tissues weaken, and the curve looks
pretty steep."
So I talked to Josh about it, and he
talked to his brother Dave and Will. Will talked to the council. All
of that within two hours. Took Dave about twenty minutes after
getting approval from the council to set up a rough version of my
idea, which isn't an original one. People have been using them for
centuries.
Our cure is a makeshift sauna. It's not a perfect
solution because so many people are so weak, but one of the first to
volunteer for it was Jess. Josh still isn't 100% but he sat in there
with her for almost half an hour. We had to heat up stones with fire
to do it. Makes the thing inefficient, but the thermometer in the
tiny room read about 160 degrees. Sunlight and hot days helped a
lot.
Jess is better. That was all it took. My small flash of
inspiration came with another thought, which was that the people who
keep waking up totally fine are probably developing huge temperatures
while they sleep. That's why some wake up okay--the fever is caused
by the worsening new plague attacking the original zombie plague
already in their lungs, and the fever helps win the war--or they die
in their sleep. Because it was too much for their bodies.
It
was a guess. An inspired guess built on the work of other people. I
just had an idea. I'm really glad I was right, not because I want
recognition or anything. Just because it helps my people.
You
really are my people, you know. I'm not a brave guy. I still get that
weak feeling all over me and a ball of ice in my stomach when I'm in
danger. I want to live. But if I died tomorrow, nothing I could do to
stop it, I could at least take solace in the fact that I've done
something to help. Maybe it's a start toward making up for the things
I've done.
It's risky and dangerous, but so is the new plague
itself. But it's hope. Sometimes, that's all we have.
Most
times, that's enough.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Wow.
What an eventful few days it's been. This is Josh again, by the way.
I know our issues with not being able to create a login for Kincaid
and him having to use my account is a little confusing. Just wanted
to make things clear.
I'm feeling better if not at a hundred
percent yet. Mind you, I'd be happy with just about any illness at
this point given how lucky I've been. My wife is better, my fellow
citizens are slowly being treated with nothing more than hot air and
getting better because of it, and the unrelenting heatwave of the
last few days has kept our walls virtually free of zombies. On top of
that, we've had a communication from the Exile camp at the fallback
point. They want to strengthen the truce. They have new leadership
that wants to head in a new direction.
All told, it's been a
damn good week. I don't expect it to last.
I hope it does,
make no mistake. But I've seen too much betrayal, stupidity, and
human nature to have any concrete belief that everything will go the
right way. Life isn't about things going how you want. While that
would be safer, it would also be incredibly boring.
Which
reminds me, I want to tell you a story. I thought about this very
topic while I was laid up, and it seems fitting to this post.
I
once knew a girl. She was a brilliant chick, always top of her class,
always succeeding. She grew up in a family that Had Money. Not the
comfortable upper-middle to bottom-upper class money you might think
about when I say that. They had a lot of it. Enough that when she was
accepted to the school of her dreams, tuition wasn't even a blip on
her radar. She went to college, eventually accepted into a premed
program.
The point is, everything she ever did, she succeeded
at. And that made me so sad for her. At first I was a bit jealous. I
wasn't given a new car for my sixteenth birthday, or anything like
that. But I got over that crap. My mom worked her ass off for us and
my siblings and I never wanted for anything. No, it made me sad
because all her life, this girl never faced a struggle. She never
knew what it was like to be hungry, to truly fail at something.
I
bet you're thinking that I'm going to say that when The Fall
happened, she wasn't prepared and she died. You're wrong.
The
girl went to medical school. And in the first week of her residency,
she made a mistake. Someone died as a result. Tormented by that and
completely without a coping mechanism, she took her own life. This
was just before The Fall. She was only twenty-five years old. Poor
girl skipped grades, went to college early, and had a bright future
ahead of her.
It wasn't anyone's fault. Her parents only
wanted a life for her that was filled with less pain and exhausting
effort than their own had been. Should she have given up the
opportunities she had? Of course not. In the truest sense of the
word, her death was a tragedy. No blame to be found.
But there
was a reason. I think we all see it.
For all the terrible
things we've suffered, we've proven ourselves equal to the task. Not
because we are stronger than she was, or smarter, or somehow better.
We are none of those things. She slaved away night and day to learn
and to be the best. But a life of work and isolation put her in the
rare and curious position of not having any emotional callouses. No
coping mechanisms. No way to quantify and understand the agony she
was in.
She didn't have people like you. She hadn't been
through the things we've all endured. I know that over the last two
and a half years or so, I'd have gone insane a dozen times over
without Jess and without you all. We'll face hard times again and
we'll work together to make those days easier. Let's always try to
keep perspective.
We suffer, we hurt, we starve, we fail. We
make mistakes and sometimes they have consequences we can't imagine.
It's when those things happen that we have to turn to one another and
remember that together we can always work to make it better.