Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) (37 page)

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
I
admit to a fair bit of fudging the truth from time to time when it's
necessary to protect our interests. Sometimes--as in the last few
days--that comes in the form of minimizing the facts about what's
going on in New Haven. I can now say without fear that the report
Kincaid gave yesterday was true, just not the whole truth. Work
here has progressed far beyond what we've said almost completely at
the hands of the people that have migrated here so far.
For
example, the first new expansion is done. Not done as in completely
finished, but that big ass area is wholly walled in and defensible.
More defensible, in fact, than some parts of the original compound.
You wouldn't think we could have managed that in such a short time,
but it turns out Kincaid is a brilliant guy. Back in his marauder
days he kept losing people to zombie attacks from the spotty
protection their vehicles gave them. As a solution his people found
some heavy steel cable and attached a bunch of heavy stakes to it.
Then they made a rough grid around their camps, which tripped or
slowed down the undead coming for them.
We're doing the same
thing. Steel cable isn't that hard to find, and if we run out there
are always power lines. Frankfort isn't a big city, but there are
hundreds of miles of power lines we can cut down and use for just
about anything we want. Imagine constructing a forest of raised lines
around New Haven, six feet high and ten deep. There's easily enough
material to do it, and that would make it very, very hard for the
undead to get anywhere near us.
Sorry. Kind of a tangent
there. What I'm getting at is the grid of steel cables in place
around the expansion, in front of the prefab walls, is awesome. It's
two feet high and effective. Our assault teams even drove a group of
New Breed in to test it. Worked like a dream. The zombies didn't know
how to deal with it at first, and the handful of people behind the
net were able to pick them off easily.
That much was
accomplished because yesterday the first wave of settlers arrived.
I'm not talking about the relatively small groups of fifty to a
hundred here and there. This group is huge--five hundred. And nearly
half of them hopped off the huge fleet of vehicles to help pound
stakes into the ground and string up the cable. Took about four
hours, mainly because we marked off the locations for the stakes
beforehand.
The trip here from North Jackson took them nearly
thirty hours. The way between here and there is relatively safe and
definitely well-traveled, but moving so many people at once was a
logistical challenge. The solution wasn't anything terribly creative,
to be honest. Maybe a fourth of the new arrivals came in smaller
vehicles like cars, trucks, vans, and the like. Many semi-trucks came
with them, most carrying raw materials. Our migrants have known for a
long time they've been headed this way, and many of them have scoured
Michigan and surrounding areas for anything useful to bring with
them. North Jackson got first dibs on most of it, but they're very
generous allies. Lucky for all of us that the abandoned United States
is a veritable gold mine of useful things left laying around.
Most
of the first wave came in...well, for lack of a better word, trains.
Not on-the-rails trains (though we're trying to find a way to make
that happen) but rather a thrown-together set of mass transport
vehicles. They look like a very angry child smashed a bunch of toys
together, but they work. It's a hell of a thing seeing a swarm of
hundred-foot long trailers, buses, and semi-trailers filled with
tightly packed masses of people just pull up at the front door and
spill out a sea of humanity.
One of those damn things was just
three long flatbeds hooked together, the beds protected by chain link
fence. Glad it's been cool for the last two days.
The trip
took so long because they moved at a snail's pace. The makeshift mass
transit vehicles aren't the safest thing on the road, and no one
wanted any accidents. Slow and steady wins the race and all those
cliche sayings. Obviously I couldn't say anything about this group
coming until they got here, so I'm sorry about that. But this has
been a part of the plan for a while now, since the stuff with the
Louisville folks was happening. It was a consideration when we made
our choice, though not one we could talk about.
This group is
mostly adults, with only about fifty kids in it. We asked that they
weight the early big waves that way since we'll need as many
able-bodied adults to help annex new areas as quickly as
possible.
That work begins tomorrow. They did a lot yesterday,
and need today to settle in a bit. So far I haven't heard any
complaints about the accommodations but that might change once they
realize more people will be joining them and crowding their houses
soon. Hopefully my brother will have the first of the big communal
living spaces done by then to lessen the burden.
I will say
that after a fairly bleak few weeks, it's a wonderful breath of fresh
air to see so many new and happy faces around. And they brought a lot
of dogs. But that's tomorrow's post.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
I
said at the end of my post yesterday that the first big wave of
settlers brought dogs with them. A large number of them. Some of you
out there don't keep dogs in your communities owing to difficulties
in feeding them. Blessed as we are with a bounty of small furry
creatures hereabouts, that isn't such a big problem. Many of our
dogs--not the new ones, they need a few days to get used to this as
'home'--go hunting out in the wild on their own if we don't have the
spare food to feed them.
Usually
that isn't a problem. Our hunting parties bring in a lot of deer and
smaller animals. Takes a while since they're ranging pretty far to
allow the local population to recover, but we can feed a lot of
people on just a few of them. Stew. It's a win.
The spare
parts and even some whole animals get set aside for the dogs and cats
(and even my ferrets.) For us, the effort is well worth the reward,
and the additional fifty dogs that came with our new arrivals are
already paying for themselves. Some dogs, like my own, stay inside
New Haven but run around free. I've mentioned before that they're
excellent zombie alert systems, catching the smell of active undead
well before we can see them coming. Most of you know how batshit
crazy that smell makes them, clawing at the walls to try to attack
them.
For that reason we've shied away from bringing dogs
outside very often. Some do patrol with scouts nearby, but we've
always thought it was too dangerous for them. The pups might have a
serious hate for zombies and try to take them down, but that doesn't
mean the zombies can't hurt them.
Except the assault teams
found a group of undead, New Breed at that, huddling in terror down a
steep embankment as a much smaller group of wild dogs. We tried out
unleashing (pun completely intended) some of our own dogs on groups
of zombies, and presto!
Instant terror. The undead ran as fast
as they could, and when the dogs caught them they fought back, but
the pack of canines seriously messed up the undead in the process. We
had already asked the new arrivals to bring their dogs if they had
any. Our intention was to have them do the same for the new sections
that we have our dogs do. Patrol and warn.
Instead, we're
sending dogs out with the assault teams. Any edge we can use to scare
away the undead is something we can't ignore. It's in the early
stages right now, testing and perfecting, but eventually we hope to
have dogs along with every group that leaves New Haven for any
reason.
I should point out here that the assault teams have
been doing an excellent job. The county is getting very sparsely
populated, zombie-wise. They still drift in from different
directions, but there's only so much creativity and adaptation the
New Breed are capable of. As it turns out, a certain level of force
(mixed with a lot of training and dedication) is enough to overcome
their advantages. Slowly but surely our people are cleaning the area
of major threats, which is all we hoped for when this began. I don't
know what the long-term outlook might be, since there are likely
still tens of millions of undead out there, but this little corner of
the world is a lot safer than it was even a few weeks ago.
Frankly,
we're almost at a manageable level as far as the zombie population
goes. That is, a situation where we can deal with any new zombies
showing up (discounting vast swarms, of course) with regular heavy
patrols rather than the extended offensive campaign we're using right
now. Our hope is that including dogs in the mix, making the undead
feel primal fear, will help make this a place they want to avoid.
We've had that before, and it's awesome. If we're successful, the
expansion can accelerate.
If not, we'll figure something else
out. Whatever the case my be, things are moving forward.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Today
is a good day. Truly good. They've been hard to come by lately.
Because this is a happy day, there are some things I'm saving for my
next post. Right now I want to stay as positive as I can, while I
can.
One entire section of the expansion is fully walled and
defended. Those five hundred people can get a lot accomplished when
the end result will keep them alive. For that many workers, the
remaining tasks were small and relatively easy. Since the newcomers
brought many more segments of prefab wall than we needed to finish
out this part of the expansion, they started on the next one.
It's
hard to imagine that we've managed so much this quickly. Well, 
we 
as
in the old guard citizens of New Haven didn't actually do it. The
prefab walls were cut and bolted together by North Jackson, mostly by
the people migrating here. Most of the materials are theirs, too.
They've been the driving force behind this huge change, and it was
their ingenuity that made it possible to provide a safe place for
them to live in such a short time.
So, after so many weeks of
fighting and heartache and backbreaking labor, we're taking a day
off. The assault teams get to stay home for the whole day. All work
shifts are cut down to the bare minimum of people and changed every
two hours so no one has to work more than that. We've got fresh game
to cook up and a slew of new friends and citizens to meet and get to
know.
Basically, we're having an epic barbecue today. And it's
nice.
Sure, we've got patrols out. That's just common sense.
But this morning Will and the council decided that putting off all
other work for today was just the thing we all needed. We've made
more progress than we could have hoped for, and it just feels like
the right thing to do. The new arrivals busted ass as soon as they
got here, and then worked when they were supposed to be acclimating.
It's a good sign in new citizens, at least in my book.
In
fact, the only reason I'm even writing a post today is to keep with
my schedule. I've been a creature of habit all my life, and only the
habits have changed with the end of the world. Not writing on a day I
should be feels weird and wrong to me, like laughing during a sermon
or seeing Luke Skywalker make out with his sister in the first 
Star
Wars 
movie.
Well,
maybe that's not the only reason.
I've been feeling the
creeping edges of depression since the situation with Louisville got
out of hand. I've got a handle on it--no worries for me,
please--because I recognize the root cause. I'm very lucky that way,
because many people affected by this problem don't have that option.
They can only feel the anguish and suffer through it. I've been
there, too.
It's not guilt. I don't feel that what we did was
wrong. It's not rooted in anger, either. Just sadness at the waste of
it all. Those were good people we killed, and there are still more
good ones out there, many of them suffering and dying because their
brethren wasted the small chance we gave them.
I don't expect
the remnants of the Louisville crew to apologize, nor do I want them
to. They've paid ten times over for any harm they caused. Instead, I
want to say what's in my heart, what has been eating me up:
We
did what we had to do. It was the necessary thing, but it wasn't
the 
right 
thing.
Today is a happy day for most people in New Haven, but I can't join
them while this weighs me down.
We killed your friends and
family to protect our own. I hate that it had to happen, and if any
of you are reading this, please believe that I'm terribly sorry.
Truly, deeply, infinitely sorry. I would give almost anything to wind
back the clock and offer earlier and better help. Maybe take a larger
risk.
I don't know that we could have done any differently. I
just know that I had to say it. It hurts. Not just me, but a lot of
people. I can't express the regret I feel. And yeah, I know that I'm
probably just making myself feel better and not accomplishing any
real good. There isn't much else I can do, though.
So I'll
head back out and socialize. I'll crack open one of my brother's
questionable home-brewed beers and be thankful for a day without
zombies or marauders, and I'll toast to you. For your recovery and
well-being, for survival and better days.