Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) (8 page)

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Remember
a short while ago, when some of our watchers saved the lives of some
Exile guards? You probably do, but a refresher: some zombies got the
jump on the guards, and our guys picked off the undead with their
rifles.
The watchers on duty last night weren't the same ones,
but the guards on the Exile side of the river were. Those fellas seem
to draw guard duty a lot, and they've become familiar faces to every
rotation of our people that man the outposts we've thrown up on our
side of the river. It's the same routine at the beginning of every
shift--the Exiles walk up to their post, get report from the men
they're relieving, then turn to face our side of the river and give a
salute to our unseen men and women. It's safe to assume they're
thanking us for saving their lives, though I'm surprised they keep up
the habit. Their superiors can't be happy about it.
Yesterday
was different. The Exiles did their normal thing for the first two
hours of their shift, but one of them started to get fidgety.
According to our people, he kept looking around across the river as
if he were trying to figure out which of the several blinds we've set
up were housing our folks.
After a few minutes, the guard got
annoyed and pulled out a megaphone. The guy turns it on, fiddles with
the controls, and puts it to his mouth. Across the river, his voice
carried very loudly. He said, and I'm going to try to get this as
close as possible:
"A man walks into a bar with an
alligator under one arm. He bets everyone in the bar he can put his
balls in the alligator's mouth and it won't bite him. If he wins, he
gets a free drink from each person. If he loses, he buys everyone a
drink.
The patrons at the bar agree. The man orders a beer,
taps the alligator on the head, and places his genitals in the
thing's mouth, which slowly closes. The man calmly drinks his beer,
and when he's done he smacks the alligator on top of the head pretty
hard. The alligator opens its mouth, and the room breaks out in
applause.
After closing up his pants, the man jumps on top of
a bar stool and points a finger around the room. 'Anyone here brave
enough to try it?' he says.
A young blond woman in the back of
the room raises her hand and says, 'Sure, but you don't have to hit
me with that bottle.'"
Try as they might, our people
couldn't help laughing. I don't know if the noise was enough for the
guard to see where they were, but they could see him smiling through
their binoculars.
The guy kept telling jokes for a while, and
people from inside the fallback point started to come out. It was
near dusk by the time someone finally pulled the guard to the side
and had words with him, and after that he was silent. But he and his
partner kept on smiling, even gave a little bow to his unseen
audience.
I don't know if this means anything. I don't know if
there was an ulterior motive, or if the guy was just bored and maybe
realized that our people were probably just as bored. Two years of
tension, fear, and mistrust has made me way more cynical than a guy
not yet thirty should be, but I find myself hoping that it was a
sincere gesture of goodwill.
Not in a large sense. The Exile
guard didn't try to broker peace with us or make new inroads to
understanding the divide between our two groups. I think that for a
little while, he just wanted to be normal. That he understood the
people watching him and his home for signs of violence were just
that--people. An enemy, sure. But human beings with hope and love and
fear and yes--even a sense of humor.
It could be that this is
some cunning plan on the part of the Exiles to put us at ease,
possibly to make us see them as less of a threat. I admit the
possibility, though I can't believe anyone would think we were
gullible to fall for something like that. The Exiles are a lot of
things, but stupid is not one of them.
I'm going to choose to
believe that this was a human moment, maybe a way to thank our people
for saving his life and that of his partner. Bringing a smile to
someone's face is a gift, especially in times like these. I say we
take it at face value and be thankful. Still careful, always
cautious, every wary...but thankful. We can all use a few laughs now
and again.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
I
think one of the most profound truths that we as survivors can
recognize is the power of human stories. That's a big part of why the
joke-telling Exile guard struck such a chord in me. The guy wasn't
doing anything superhuman or amazing. He was just trying to be funny,
to connect for a minute with people he had every reason to fear at
the least.
Most people around here had a similar reaction, and
came to some approximation of the same conclusion: people are
strange. Wonderfully so at times. Enemies can kill each other one
month and respectfully salute the other side the next. We haven't
forgotten (or forgiven) the Exiles for the horrendous deeds they've
wrought (I've wanted to use the word 'wrought' in a sentence for a
while. You're just going to have to deal with it being there now) but
that doesn't mean our attitude toward them is unbending or
unchanging.
Now we're starting to see them as individuals
instead of a group. Racism and prejudice of all kinds throughout
history has been perpetuated because of the path of least
resistance--hating groups is easy. Because you can slap all the worst
things people in it have done on the whole shebang. None of us doubt
that every person with the Exiles has had to do some awful shit, but
as I've said (a trillion times), so have we all. But not every person
in the group is likely to be at the worst percentile of the
psychopath bell curve. We know that intellectually. It just took one
guy bucking the attitude of his people, taking a risk in trying to
give our watchers a laugh, to make our hearts begin to admit that
truth.
And so, we come to this morning.
There's this
woman, see. And her husband. And their son, and his wife. 
I'm
allowed to say that her name is Lori, and that she lives in
Minnesota. While I'm sure that Minnesota is a lovely state, I'm
baffled as to why any human beings would choose to live there. I like
snow and winter as much as the next guy, but not when we're talking
about cold that can shatter your will to live and snow so heavy that
whole parking lots of cars can get lost under it.
Oh, well.
Thinking about that, I guess a lot of the settlers there were
originally Scandinavian, so that makes sense. Vikings for the
win.
Anyway.
So my post yesterday apparently got Lori's
attention. She and her very small group live together, far away from
other people. That's by design. Since The Fall Lori and her family
have seen a lot of bad things happen, and not all of it by the
undead. Human cruelty has been a huge driver for her and the family
in keeping away from other groups of people, reinforced by the
occasional bands of zombies wandering through.
Something about
my post yesterday, or more accurately something about the joker guard
yelling into his megaphone across the river--got Lori's attention.
She's a savvy lady from what I've gathered in the few messages we've
shared since five this morning. She's not nostalgic or easily swayed
by overly emotional bubbling (which I 
may 
be
guilty of from time to time).
It was, she said, the basic
humanity displayed by the guard that made her finally speak up and
communicate with the outside world. That, and the response by New
Haven in general to take the jokes as they were given, no suspicions
or fear attached. Just a funny moment.
I didn't feel like it
was a catharsis or anything, just a nice thing for the guard to do.
Most of us thought the appropriate response would be to accept it in
the spirit given. Lori, as an outside observer, sees something more
important in the exchange. She says that the fact we can open
ourselves up enough to the enemy to accept even a small gift like a
joke is important. She says that the enemy's ability to make jokes is
indicative of the deeper humanity still alive and well across the
river.
Weird, I know. I just thought it was a joke vaguely
alluding to blowjobs.
Lori is an interesting person. Though
her group is very small, just her family, their progress has
paralleled that of other much larger groups in many ways. They've got
a farm setup, they have walls around their place (smaller in area but
much taller than our own) and even a portable cell transmitter. They
monitor things going on around the country but choose not to take
part in it. They live quiet and happy lives in their secluded part of
the country.
They certainly aren't going to leave all that to
risk their lives traveling toward a large group that may or may not
give much of a shit about them. It would take a lot more than one
moment of good vibrations between people with bad blood to make that
happen. But I'll admit to walking on sunshine today, because
something I passed on to the world made someone who'd lost faith in
that world decide to speak up. It's a small thing, but to me any
positive is a great thing.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Yesterday
morning one of our teams of Beaters (what we're calling the strike
teams that are taking out small groups of New Breed) suffered their
first fatality. Two of the ten people involved in the actual fight
went down when a section of one of the defensive constructs
collapsed. Thankfully it happened at the end of the fight, due to a
large number of zombie corpses piled on top of it. There were only a
handful of New Breed left to swarm the breech. Could have been a lot
worse. Would have been, had the failure happened at the start of the
fight.
Dave has been worried about this kind of thing
happening. The diamonds take constant abuse and damage from the
ceaseless trips out into the county as our Beaters do their best to
keep the New Breed population under control. Boards crack, metal
dents, hinges pop. There are two carpenters who spend half their time
every day fixing the things.
But as I sat with Will and the
council, interviewing the team of Beaters that lost those people, it
became clear to everyone in the room that we need to change tactics
here. The people going out to fight are doing it on their own time.
And while everyone in New Haven is relatively fit due to the
near-impossibility of overeating and the hard work everyone has to
do, no one is conditioned for this kind of constant physical
abuse.
Will and the council asked my opinion after the
interview was over, but I'd been reading Will's notes as we talked to
the surviving team members. I know him well, how his mind works. My
point of view was exactly what Will's was, and the council's: time
for a game change.
As much as it's going to suck to pile more
work on less people, the leadership has decided that the volunteer
groups of Beaters will be phased out over the next few weeks. We
can't stop them all at once without risking an instant boom and
probably retaliation from the New Breed, but we can slow down their
missions as we work to introduce a team of full-time beaters.
We're
going to have two teams of ten men and women. They'll alternate days
for being on duty as Beaters, and on their off days they'll be
training four hours a day and working the other six. It's going to be
brutal, but that's why we're only taking volunteers. We naturally
want the people who are out there protecting New Haven with
preemptive strikes to be as prepared and safe as possible. More
practically, we 
need 
them
to stay alive, as our recent losses are approaching unsustainable
levels.
Dodger and I already have some basic training routines
going for the folks that have volunteered. Most of them have already
served as Beaters, so they aren't starting from scratch. Over the
next few weeks we'll be setting up more specified programs and
exercises that will make our new force of Beaters something to be
reckoned with.
Hopefully it will be enough to prevent further
casualties, or at least keep them to a bare minimum. We're trying to
take the approach that the military had 
really 
good
reasons for training and conditioning troops the way they did, and
follow that example.
It's already making the sowing harder,
but now that the weather has taken a very lovely (well, not frigid)
turn, we're back in the full swing of planting. Jess thinks we'll
have all the early-season crops done by Monday morning. And with the
Beaters keeping the zombie population in check, we've actually got a
good chance of keeping this crop alive until harvest.
I wish I
had the skills to put into words how thankful I am for all the people
who've risked their lives as Beaters, and to those who lost theirs
doing it. Seeing those folks sitting in front of the council, beat-up
and tired, was hard. A few of them were so exhausted that they barely
stayed conscious for the interview, two more had head injuries that
kept them from entering into the discussion much at all. That,
combined with their obvious willingness to go back out and do it
again, was what spurred this decision. Sending those folks out
injured and tired from their normal work isn't just unfair, it's
dangerous to the point of stupidity. And we're the ones who made that
call.
Better the rest of us work harder so those folks can be
well and truly rested when they go out to fight for us. I'll gladly
put in the extra hours. At the clinic, on our little farm annex,
building the new wall, whatever it takes.