Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) (4 page)

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
I
promised you some good news yesterday, and I'm not going to
disappoint. One thing that's taking me a long time adjusting to is
that New Haven is a big place with lots of stuff going on. Not like I
didn't know that, but while we were out on the road things were often
much simpler. It was easy to focus on one or two things. Here,
there's always a ton of stuff happening, and a lot of the goings on
get missed.
I've got some interesting things on the docket, so
I'm just going to jump into them.
Getting this out of the way
first: to our surprise, we discovered in our experiments the other
day that the New Breed's reaction to extremes in temperature does
extend past their skin. The bands of thickened tissue that protect
their necks and heads, as well as the major joints, softens when
heated above a hundred and fifteen degrees. That's going to be
incredibly useful information once we figure out a way to use it,
since producing large amounts of heat is difficult for us without
electricity, and weaponizing cold pretty much impossible.
That
information does come with two caveats, however. The skin and
underlying protective bands do weaken, but they also firm back up
over time. We're still testing the range on that, but it's somewhere
in the area of ten minutes so far. The other is that zombies, being
essentially cold blooded, take a while to get hot. They aren't
starting with a body temperature near a hundred, remember. That makes
turning this information to our advantage difficult. But still, it's
great news, and I have faith in Will and Dodger to come up with
something.
In a big, nay HUGE turn of events, trade between
New Haven and the outside world has resumed. It took a while to plan
out alternate routes (and for our trade partners to feel sure the
Exiles wouldn't cross the river to attack caravans of goods) but
we're ready. Not a moment too soon, either, because there's a huge
backlog waiting to be shipped about. We've got medicines to send, and
Phil is planning on heading out with one of the trade caravans to
provide some medical care at some stops. This is due to overwhelming
demand for doctors, because there are a lot of places out there with
pregnant women. Must have been a very long winter for those
people.
Heh.
We've got a new citizen, which isn't in
and of itself strange, but how he came to be here is, a bit. His name
is Donald, though he likes to be called Don. He's middle-aged, very
personable, and he's been living on his own for the last two years.
The crazy part is that he was only about half an hour away.
Don,
you see, was living at the abandoned grounds for a local renaissance
festival. Makes sense when you think about it, given that most of the
place already had a wall built around it, the rest heavily wooded. It
was set up to be functional without electricity, and there are
different booths and buildings for him to utilize. Don used to work
there before The Fall. He's a leatherworker. Beyond knowing how to
make leather goods, he can craft armor, shoes, hats, all kinds of
things. He's passably skilled at blacksmithing and a dozen other
useful crafts. Chalk that up to thirty years of learning how to do
all those things working for renfests around the country. The guy
turned his hobby into a lifestyle, and that helped him survive.
Our
scouts found him because Jess and I realized in all the time we've
been struggling to survive, we'd never thought to scavenge the
fairground where the renfest was held. That's kind of a huge
oversight on our part. So we suggested it, and what do our scouts
find when they get there? Don, working on a pair of boots. We're the
first living people he's seen since The Fall.
All his other
skills aside, everyone here is super excited to have a cobbler.
Eventually we'll run out of scavenged shoes, and we'll want more
durable footwear. I've always fancied having a pair of knee-high
leather riding boots, myself.
There's always bad news, though,
and Don did bring some of that with him. He did a lot of hunting out
in Henry county, even ranging as far as northern Shelby county. He
swears he's seen large gatherings of New Breed zombies in that area,
possibly hundreds of them. We've begged for the remaining few people
living in Shelbyville, the ladies we rescued from Tennessee, to come
here. Most already had when the tensions with the Exiles were at
their height, but the last few have been stubborn. Don's news has
done what our pleas couldn't, and the remaining holdouts will be
heading here this afternoon.
Then we'll have to deal with
those zombies, assuming they don't catch us ferrying people from
Shelbyville.
Oh, one last bit of news, and then I've got to
get to business: Patrick is going to be a dad. Which is crazy,
because I didn't know he was even seeing anyone. All the time away
and then coming home to so much danger and work, I've kind of gotten
out of the habit of talking with my friends regularly. I'm really
happy for him. This is a dangerous, scary world to bring a child
into, but when has the world been otherwise? A kid couldn't ask for a
better dad than Pat, and no fear of zombies or human enemies should
stop us from continuing the cycle of life.
Hell, those are the
best reasons 
for 
doing
it. Cheers, brother. If it's a boy, I like Joshua as a name.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
I
went with the caravan yesterday to bring the last handful of people
from Shelbyville back here. It was an all-day affair, and there were
sixty of us. Two reasons for that: because the group of people
(mostly women) who left here to settle in the small fortress left
behind at a shopping center there had stockpiled a lot of goods that
needed transport, and because the group of zombies Don told us about
were a concern.
Given how closely the New Breed in our county
have been watching us, and considering the cleverness of their
attacks, it seemed like a good idea to take as many people as we
could manage. Good thing we did, because things got rough.
We
were on the way back this direction, taking a back road to skirt
US-60, thinking that if we were going to be attacked it would
probably be on the highway we use most often to get between the two
places. That, plus the fact that the ladies from Shelbyville had set
up a few emergency retreats along that back road. My brother had a
hand in that--while the team and I were away, he helped our
neighbors. Dave used to live on the very road we used to avoid the
highway, after all.
For the first few minutes after leaving we
saw no sign of zombies. None of us put our weapons away and assumed
all was well, of course, because we're all a little paranoid and we
aren't idiots. We were only going fifteen, twenty miles an hour to
keep the engine noise from our vehicles as low as possible. If the
New Breed swarm really wasn't watching us, we didn't want to give
them any more reason to notice us than we could help.
Turns
out, we couldn't help it.
Halfway down Dave's old road, we'd
passed two of the three emergency shelters he and the ladies had set
up. We were about half a mile from the last one, and after that it
would have been damned hard to turn around and get to it. Call it a
point of no return.
Luckily, our lookouts had a nice dollop of
fear working through their veins yesterday, and two of them caught
sight of zombies from their perches atop our trucks at almost the
same time. Two knocks on the roof--our signal for 'look right' or
'enemy to the right' was all the warning we needed. The caravan sped
up, heading toward the last shelter.
It wasn't anything I'd
want to stay in long-term, but with some hard work and innovative
ideas, Dave and the ladies from Shelbyville managed to turn a big
corn silo into a decent defensive position. The silo itself is
concrete, with a ground-level door. Just one, because why the hell
would you need more than one door in a silo?
Dave and the
ladies gutted the place, put in ladders and platforms, knocked a few
small holes in the curving wall for archers or riflemen to fire from.
The door itself was heavy steel, the area just outside it semicircle
of raised earth six feet high with wooden breastworks rising another
five feet. The whole area sloped gently down toward the silo itself,
meaning men could walk to easily up the rise without too much effort.
The entire defensive position wasn't more than forty feet across. A
tight fit for so many fighters.
We abandoned the trucks a few
dozen feet from the breastworks. We had a few minutes on the New
Breed, enough time to get everyone where they needed to be. All but
one of the stragglers from Shelbyville were pregnant, and they
weren't happy that we wouldn't let them fight. Those ladies
freaking 
stay 
pregnant,
and like old-fashioned settlers they don't stop working until they
absolutely have to.
Instead we gave them bows and told them to
man the arrowslits. They were happy to comply.
About half my
people had shields of one kind or another, most of them made from old
stop signs. You can't beat a stop sign for strength, weight, and ease
of use as a weapon itself. Patrick makes sure the bottom edge of
every one of them is sharpened, and reinforcing strips added to keep
them from bending when cutting through a neck.
Those with
shields took the front, forming a loose wall leaning up against the
wooden portion of the breastworks. Every man held a short
weapon--hatchet, hammer, most commonly machetes made for us by the
good people of North Jackson. Behind them, the women who had
volunteered for guard duty held spears. Most of the women from New
Haven have had some spear training with the little group we call our
Spartans. Not to be confused with the people of Sparta, who provide
much needed fuel.
Well, shit. I've used up all the time I've
set aside to write this. Looks like I'll have to continue this
tomorrow.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
We
stood ready, waiting for the zombie swarm to show up in force. From
the breastwork it was difficult to tell how many there were, but the
lookouts higher up in the silo shouted out estimates. As I stood in
my place on a far side of the raised circle of earth, I wondered if
it would have been better to try to run. We could definitely have
gone faster than the undead in our vehicles, but that brought its own
set of risks. One mistake and an overturned vehicle could block the
road. That would have been a death sentence.
I was tucked in
one of the corners where the silo and the breastwork met. As the
zombies coming from the direction of Shelbyville grew closer, a
second group came over a hill from the direction we'd been heading.
Damn. The New Breed had split their forces, left an ambush
waiting.
The main force got close enough for the ladies
manning the arrowslits to see things the undead were trying to hide.
I heard one of them yell out that the approaching swarm--appearing to
be at least a hundred and fifty strong--was dragging several large
logs with it. I'd seen that tactic before.
The smart thing to
do, the cautious thing, would have been to wait for the enemy to
close and fight them from as strong a defensive position as possible.
We would figure out a way to neutralize the logs, which would surely
be raised vertical and then dropped over the breastwork to make a
breach and an easy path upward.
We totally didn't do
that.
Whoever was leading the center unit called for
firebombs, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a dozen small flames
come to life. Disposable lighters are a survivor's best friend. The
firebombs, small glass spheres filled with a homemade napalm Becky
created, are delicate. They're kept in small bags lined with bubble
wrap. No one is allowed to carry more than two. Not that we we've
been able to make a lot of them, since we have to make them ourselves
and glass-blowing is hard.
A dozen arcs of flickering light
sailed over the breastworks, the resulting spread of flames
disrupting the ranks of the dead. A round of fire arrows followed as
the few archers we had focused on setting the logs aflame before the
undead could use them. A few of our braver men stood right at the
edge of the defenses, hurling their remaining firebombs at the
flaming logs.
It was luck as much as planning that saved the
day. Without their logs to use and panicked by the sudden spread of
fire among them, the main force of the New Breed lost much of their
cohesion. They came at us, but without the typical calculation that
makes them such a threat. Our people were ready, turning the edge of
the breastwork into a meat grinder.
As the main force crested
the breastwork, the spearwomen behind stepped forward, thrusting
their weapons  forward with precise motions. At least in my
section, every point met the target perfectly--through the bottom of
the chin, upward into the cranium. Our spears lack barbs, the heads
designed to pull out smoothly. Those women did their part splendidly,
helping repel the initial waves and then setting their weapons at an
angle, butt against the ground, between each man on the wall. New
Breed zombies are smart enough to recognize the danger of a pointy
stick, and avoided them. Which funneled the undead right in front of
men with shields and weapons, and the will to use them both.
All
through the initial assault, archers picked targets beyond the
breastworks. Flaming zombies were the first to take arrows, as we
couldn't allow them to set fire to the defenses. Based on the number
of arrows we recovered from the ground after, there were a fair
number of misses, but archery is difficult even under ideal
circumstances. Out of three hundred arrows fired at the main force,
we counted thirty clean headshots. One in ten. That's pretty damn
helpful, from my point of view. Fully a fifth of the attacking waves
were brought down from a distance.
Despite that, those of us
on the walls grew tired after a few minutes. We'd enraged the New
Breed by using fire, and their greater strength and speed was on full
display. It was a good thing we'd hauled rifles along with us. Bless
the troops from North Jackson for having military-issue assault
weapons. Hated to use the bullets, but really--could there have been
a better time?
Four people above fired single shots, one after
another, picking their targets. A bullet, unlike an arrow, will slow
a zombie down if it misses. It's a funny thing about the New Breed in
particular: unlike regular zombies, who ignore any damage that
doesn't incapacitate them, the New Breed will pause to reorient
themselves when they get hit with a bullet or an arrow. I imagine it
would work with anything, rocks or whatever.
With snipers and
archers pecking away at their forces, lots of the undead were
stopping for a second to face the direction the impact came from.
Hell, less than a second. That's all the time our people needed.
Surprise a zombie by hitting him in the arm or chest or leg, watch
him freeze, then put one in his brain pan. Next target.
We'd
whittled the main force down by at least half by the time the
secondary group hit us. I'd have expected them to get there sooner,
but one of the shooters told me later that they'd stopped once they
saw the fire and the ensuing mayhem. Even when they finally did
choose to attack, only half of them came forward, and they focused
exclusively on the small corner where I was stationed. The idea had
to have been to force a breach by smashing us as hard as they could
in one spot, and it worked. My section of defenders put down ten or
fifteen of them in quick succession, but the bodies formed horrible
stepping stones for the remainder to use like a ramp. Three of them
launched over the breastwork before we could reform our ranks, a
heavy push forcing us back and apart.
Those New Breed tried to
tear into the people they found standing in the middle of the
semicircle of dirt. Tried and failed.
As the defenders at the
breastworks slashed and stabbed with renewed vigor, fueled by rage
and self-preservation, as the shooters cleared more and more undead
from the field, those three zombies got the worst of it. Our reserve,
a unit of eight people held back to plug any holes in the defenses,
hit them all at once. Two held long spears, two held short ones, two
held large shields, and two had guns. I'd stepped back from the line
for a few seconds, a nasty set of claw wounds across my forearm where
a zombie struck out even as I put my hatchet into her face. As I
turned, I saw two long spears transfix undead through the chest, the
two shorter spears hit the third zombie, who was in the middle, in
the same leg. The gunmen stepped forward behind the guys with
shields, carefully firing into the heads of the undead. Three shots,
three kills.
It was so smooth I was almost embarrassed for the
enemy. Almost.
The remaining undead eventually had the idea
that backing off might do them some good. The other half of the
secondary force never did attack, just watched us from the sidelines.
I'm sure they've got a good amount of information on us, but we can't
do a thing about it. We'll just have to evolve our tactics to
match.
Of the original force that hit us, only forty or so
managed to get away. Once the retreat began our people stopped
firing. Waste not, want not and all that folksy wisdom.
We
lost no lives. Plenty of us took wounds, but quick action to clean
them and sterilize them as best we could should hopefully prevent any
serious infections. My own injury doesn't look terrible. Well, it
looks terrible because it's a set of bloody gouges, but it doesn't
look infected.
I'll be honest, I'm surprised we didn't have
any fatalities. You kind of expect them, but our people were
meticulous and steadfast, had the high ground, and fought
brilliantly. Keeping the enemy off balance was a key to our success,
and nothing throws you for a loop like having a shield bashed into
your face. We did good.