Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) (12 page)

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
The
last few days have been busy ones. I can't get out of bed, both
because I'm still not allowed without help and because the clinic is
pretty full at the moment and moving around is hard. It's not that we
have an overwhelming number of injuries (though there were a fair
number from the zombie attack the other day) but because people are
coming to visit Jess in a steady stream, pretty much nonstop since
she was brought in.
Yeah, Jess is in here with me now. Her
injuries aren't severe but at least the doctors won't have to worry
about us trying to engage in painful post-surgical sexy times.
The
reason the cannons didn't fire immediately when the swarm came for
the walls is because Jess was outside New Haven with a group of kids.
They were accompanied by a small contingent of guards and were being
watched by the sentries and guards on the wall, but it was still
dangerous. Jess and the kids were pulling up clover we'd planted last
year, staying inside a designated safe zone where traps hadn't been
laid. An escape ladder was thrown over the wall as a precaution so
the people outside could shimmy up to escape any incoming zombies.
Damn good thing they were prepared.
Things can always go
wrong, though.
Jess wasn't carrying her rifle when she went
out. She's been practicing with other weapons for a long while now,
and working the earth has given her more muscle than at any point in
our marriage so far. So, she was carrying a staff. Yeah, maybe not
the best weapon with which to actually 
kill
a
zombie, but the wife made a show out of holding off several of them
with it.
She didn't have a lot of choice there. One of the
kids spooked when the sentries shouted their warning and ran outside
the safe zone. Poor kid stepped right on one of the spear traps, sent
the shaft of wood up out of the ground and right through his calf.
Jess ran to him straight away, pulled him back as far as she could
until she had no choice but to fight.
According to her, that
part of the battle lasted for an hour. According to the guards who
moved in to rescue her and the boy she fought like hell for maybe
sixty seconds. An impressive minute, make no mistake, as Jess managed
to fend off half a dozen undead while protecting a child and using
only a long stick. Desperation is a powerful tool.
She took
some nasty scratches to her upper arms and shoulders, and she's gonna
be here for observation and treatment for another day or two. The
wounds look good so far. She's got stitches that look incredibly
uncomfortable, so now we're a matched set.
I'm still doing
what I can to help by preparing medical supplies and the like while
I'm here. Today was a lazy day for me, the staff didn't wake me up
until an hour ago. When I came to, Jess and I were holding hands. Had
been doing so in our sleep, arms dangling in the space between our
cots.
I wish I could have seen it. My wife out there, savaging
the hungry enemy for the sake of a wounded child. There was a time
when I would have questioned her willingness to do that for anyone,
even me, much less a person essentially a stranger to her. In my mind
I see her as an unstoppable force, flowing between attacks and
striking with perfect grace, a warrior woman of the highest
caliber.
Then again, I've seen her trip over her own feet and
stab herself in the hand with a steak knife she was carrying 
in
the same hand 
so
my imagination is probably getting a little ahead of reality. I'm
sure she had to struggle in the fight and made mistakes. The wounds
winding up her arms and across her shoulders are testament to that.
Like everyone, she's only human.
That's what makes it so
awesome. We're imperfect in many ways, but capable of moments that
defy every expectation. My wife, the hero.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
One
of the folks from Louisville died in the night. I'm in a different
part of the clinic, so I wasn't aware of it until I woke up a few
minutes ago. Evans is going to do an autopsy, which as you can
imagine is unusual.
Somehow, whoever was on duty missed the
death at first. I've been a nurse's aide, I know it's not hard to do.
Sometimes when people are sleeping soundly and you pop your head in
to check on them, you can just make the assumption they're still
breathing. After all, they'd been breathing for years without
stopping.
In a nutshell, that means the guy on duty didn't
know he had a dead body on one of his cots for nearly four hours. A
body that had begun to mortify, which is again something unusual. The
departed in question is currently strapped to a table just in case,
but it's been at least six hours and so far has shown no signs of
reanimating into a zombie.
In fact, everything we can see
indicates that our fallen ally is just...dead.
I'm too groggy
to speculate on what this may mean. The zombie plague is a
complicated organism, but the human immune system is a powerful beast
in its own right. Maybe after a long enough time some people will
begin to build resistance to the infection, I don't know. That's
going to be something Evans will try to determine through autopsy, I
guess.
The worrying thing is that the guy didn't even get
worse. The Louisville crew that have been here for weeks have had
peaks and valleys in their illness, but last night there were no
changes. No ragged breath, no gasping for air or crackling in the
lungs. Just sleeping soundly one minute, lights out the next.
The
medical team here is worried that the easy diagnosis for the
Louisville group may have been the wrong one. Evans and Gabby sat
with me a few minutes ago so I could listen to their thoughts and
prepare notes for Will. They made some good points, though Gabby did
most of the talking. Evans is a cranky old sawbones and very good at
what he does, but Gabs spent the last few years before The Fall
studying to be a Nurse Practitioner. Combine that with her love of
medicine and endless curiosity, and you get one hell of a
diagnostician. Evans isn't a slouch by any means, but he's just not
up on the same things. His insight was extremely valuable
anyway.
While we don't know exactly what killed the poor guy
last night, there are several important factors to keep in mind.
Evans told me about how rampant disease was back in Vietnam. There
were a lot of soldiers on our side who hadn't had vaccinations
through one error or another. Many were exposed to diseases that
there 
were 
no
vaccines for.
Which raises the alarming point that we're now
operating in pretty much the same circumstances. Most of us have been
vaccinated for various things, but that's the past. The passel of
babies here haven't had that blessing, nor is it likely they ever
will. All those crazy people who didn't give their kids vaccines and
immunizations because of corporate greed or government microchips or
whatever would just freaking 
love 
this
situation.
Too bad most of those folks never looked into
mortality rates of communities without those treatments.
Even
that is a long-term worry. The immediate fear is that the Louisville
people brought some unknown pathogen with them. If that's the case,
it doesn't seem easily vectored to other people, because none of us
are sick. I'd been working with these folks for weeks and living
among them for nonstop for more than a week. Maybe not in the same
room, but close. And I'm not sick yet.
Injuries are something
we can handle. They're quantifiable problems that have definite
solutions. Illness on any scale larger than individual is a whole
other beast. Not one easily slain, if at all.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
I
only have a minute this morning. Things are in a mad rush right now.
Will and Evans are trying to seal off the portion of the clinic the
Louisville people are in. Another of them died last night, and it was
caught quickly this time.
No one is sure exactly what's going
on with these folks, but the decision has been made to limit exposure
as much as possible. The reason I don't have much time to write is
because I'm being moved to another part of the clinic myself since I
had a lot of contact with them. It's just damage control, no worries.
They aren't going to put me to death or anything. Evans just wants to
make sure that if we've caught whatever bug it is, we don't share
it.
Jess is still laid up, but she and I won't be together
until Evans determines whether or not I'm sick. I don't feel sick,
but then it might be hard to catch with my recent surgery.
Ah.
They're coming to move me. Time to close the laptop. No worries for
now, okay? The zombies outside the walls are manageable, the Exiles
aren't making any more noise. I'll write again as soon as I can.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
I'm
in isolation along with a lucky group of other people. It's not fun.
It's not terrible, but we don't have anything to do. For the time
being I don't get to do any real work or interact with people other
than they small number of clinic personnel. And those folks wear
isolation gear when they come in. It's kind of difficult to have
serious human interaction when the person you're talking to is
wearing eye shields and a face mask.
The concern is that I'm a
carrier for whatever is killing the Louisville crew. There has been
another death, the third. That leaves three of them alive, and their
condition has basically remained the same. Time is the only way to
know if they'll live or die.
I'm charging my laptop with my
solar charger through the window. It takes most of each day to do it,
and that leaves me a total of about five hours of battery time to
work. Writing this blog takes up a chunk of that, and I spend the
rest of the time communicating as best I can with the people I need
to talk to. Luckily a lot of the work I was doing with my brother on
the expansion is on this machine, so I can fiddle with that. Will has
someone else covering my job with him. Boredom and worry are racing
for first place in my brain.
I'm told that Jess is doing well
and so far showing no signs of whatever it is that's killing the
Louisville people. I'm hopeful that the illness was beyond the
transmissible stage by the time they got to the clinic. That's not
really what I'm worried about, to be honest. I try to ration my fear
for things that are happening rather than things that might, which is
why I'm also not as concerned for me at the moment. I don't have any
symptoms.
What's rattling my cage is the zombie attacks.
They're happening, and they're getting worse.
For the last day
small groups of New Breed have been assaulting different parts of New
Haven. None of the attacks have, by themselves, been especially
dangerous. Most of the actual zombies heading for the wall are old
school, forced on us through whatever coercive means the New Breed
has over them. Maybe it's something to do with the plague organism,
or something as simple as fear that the New Breed will eat them if
they don't.
They've hit different spots each time, testing our
defenses. We've seen it before. Only on one occasion has the same
section of wall been assaulted twice, and that was the last time. The
New Breed waits out of bow range and watches our people as they run
out and reset the spear traps in the ground. Seems obvious they're
trying to figure a way around them.
We were working under the
assumption that the New Breed would attack us in force when the time
came. Given their enhanced mental capacity, it was a foregone
conclusion that they'd test the defenses for weak spots. Guess I was
just hoping for it to happen at a time when I wasn't laid up and
helpless.
There's no way of knowing when or if they'll hit us
in earnest. Our people are on high alert but being ready is only the
beginning of the fight. We've held some defenses in reserve so we can
have surprises ready for them when they come, but no one feels
totally confident about fighting them off. The peril of too much
pride in our ability to defend ourselves is a lesson we've learned in
our bones.
Funny. I saw 'we' but I can't do a goddamn thing.
So it goes. The bells are coming so regularly now that I've almost
developed the ability to ignore them.
Ah, there's one now.