Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) (9 page)

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
It's
kind of funny in hindsight that we used to have a whole day dedicated
only to messing with people. It doesn't really translate now, I
guess. Hard to play tricks on people nowadays without risking a
gunshot or a heavy blade getting accidentally put through you because
you caught someone by surprise. I guess there's the old stand-by of
telling clever lies, but somehow I don't think telling a person fake
bad news ("Your family was eaten by the undead. APRIL FOOLS!) is
a great idea.
Still, mother nature seems to be in the mood to
joke around. Yesterday was rain pretty much all day long, and this
morning isn't looking any different. It's actually a good thing,
because the landscape is vibrantly green as it soaks up the water. I
guess after such an insane winter with its fifty degree swings over a
few hours every day, the old lady decided to play a trick by giving
us exactly what we need.
It's not all good news, though. Our
remaining Louisville citizens are still here and still sick. Evans
thought they'd be getting better by now, but whatever has infiltrated
their lungs is tough and resistant to every effort to treat it.
Granted, the patients aren't much worse, but still. We wanted to see
some progress.
Which brings up another point that I know is a
growing concern with a lot of other communities out there: lack of
medical care. I know a lot of you have made yourselves into
first-rate field doctors through education and experience. Most
communities of any size have someone who can sew and treat wounds.
Trauma is something almost all of us have some kind of handle on, but
New Haven is a perfect example of how ill-equipped humanity's
survivors are to deal with the more subtle and dangerous things we
deal with.
I mean, we have two doctors and a nurse with the
equivalent skills and knowledge of one. Yet even their decades of
combined experience does us no good at all against something as
simple as the flu. We're two years into The Fall, and none of us have
had a vaccine for anything in that time, or close to it. There are
stores of medicines around the country, but time is waging a war with
them that we can't even begin to fight. Much of it is starting to go
bad or already has. The liquid stuff that needed to be refrigerated,
often some of the most potent medicines, were lost to us in the first
weeks of The Fall. Gone. The processes to make things like insulin
and the vaccine for Polio are preserved, thank god, but the material
requirements for them are way beyond us.
I guess the hours I
spend with the Louisville crew drives that point home to me. It's
easy to line up and label a lot of threats we face. Zombies we can
fight, Exiles we can avoid, food we can gather, shelter we can build.
But illness is harder to pin down. I remember working at the nursing
home, seeing people get sent out to the hospital from time to time.
X-Rays (which we actually do have though the power supply at the
clinic has its problems) were the simplest of diagnostic tools. Now
they're the best we have. It was an unavoidable element of my job to
deal with people dying, sometimes from causes bizarre and impossible
to predict or diagnose.
Now we're going to adapt to that as a
part of life in general. None of us have many illusions about it.
It's one more thing we have already put up with. The flu hit a bunch
of people over the winter, one or two people had strep throat. It
sucks ass to suffer through, it takes a lot longer to recover, and
every time someone gets really ill there's the worry that without
proper treatment they could die.
A surprising side effect of
the healthy diet forced on us by circumstance is that we're all
getting our servings of fruits and veggies. We're taking in the
nutrients we need, which boost our immune systems. Phil has argued
often that part of the reason we don't see a lot of illness is
because our people are eating the right things. As usual, I bow to
the people with superior education and experience. The fact that he's
probably right about how bad our old diet of fast food and boxed
dinners was for us doesn't for one second alter my desire for a giant
deep-dish pizza.
I mean, if it were a choice between being
well and having a pizza, I wouldn't 
choose 
to
be sick. Certainly not if it were a choice between pizza and death. I
don't want one that bad.
...probably.
Ah, way off
topic. For now, we'll continue limiting exposure to whatever it is
that has our guests sidelined. Doesn't look contagious, though that
could be because our medical staff (me included) are very cautious
about infection control. We're mostly healthy as a community, and
we're going to do our damnedest to stay that way.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Jess
has been working her ass off with the agriculture side of things for
a while. Really, she's been keeping busy (aside from recuperating
from injuries) pretty much since the onset of the zombie plague. Her
weird assortment of skills and knowledge, gained from years of being
obsessively curious about things like making chainmail and how to
make fabric from scratch, have been as invaluable to us as they are
unusual for any one person to possess.
As most of you know,
she spent a lot of time teaching other people those skills and
sharing her wide range of knowledge. It's almost like she was just
getting that out of the way so she could work on farming full-time,
because my lovely wife has found an area in which she doesn't just
shine, she burns like the sun.
Keep in mind that in the time
New Haven has existed, tracking and running all the different
elements of our farming and food supply needs in general has been a
nightmare. With Jess in charge, the system has become streamlined and
efficient. What really blew me away was learning that with just what
we can grow inside New Haven's walls (including the annex), we'll be
able to meet eighty percent of our food requirements.
That's
more than we expected. About twenty percent more. Remember that we
send out hunting parties regularly, and that the whitetail population
in this state has exploded since The Fall and continues to grow. We
expected about twenty percent of our needs to be met with wild game.
Then there's the tons upon tons of edible greens sprouting up all
over town and in the county. That was intended to make up the
difference. So, boom. Extra food.
Of course, we're sure that
the wild greens growing around town, along with a few large plots of
fruits and veggies we've spread about town, will suffer from the old
standby: zombie trample. That's something not a lot of us thought
about in the early days, but the undead are hell on things that grow.
The huge swarm that nearly wiped us out all those months ago
destroyed the crops we'd cultivated just by moving though
them.
Which brings me to the whole point of this post: Jess is
smarter and more practical than the rest of us put together. I've
been so busy with worrying about the New Breed, the Beaters, the
Exiles, the politics of trade, and the dozen other hats I wear that I
missed the fact that my pragmatic wife has managed to solve one of
the most basic needs we've got.
Remember our outpost in Bald
Knob? Yeah, in the midst of all the other things going on, a lot of
us didn't either. Jess did. Through deal-making and wheedling in her
sweet voice, and smiling with her adorable girl face, she managed to
convince the folks in charge of the different aspects of New Haven to
lend her extra people to go to Bald Knob.
This has been going
on for a while. Since a few days after we left on our trip. So, six
months as a round number. In that time, when the weather agreed,
those extra folks have been helping expand the area of farmland in
Bald knob. They've hunted down and spread seeds for clover and other
foods we can grow in the open. They spent most of the winter, during
the warmer days (which were plentiful here) preparing the ground for
new planting.
Oh, and they build a greenhouse the size of a
house. With all the clearing going on there was plenty of wood and
brush to heat it with. Thousands of seedling plants grown in trays,
just waiting to be put in the ground. How much extra food does Jess
estimate the crews at Bald Knob have or will have ready to send
here?
Enough to meet fifty percent of our needs. Just from
that one place.
So, yeah. Jess is awesome. While the rest of
us worried about other things, admittedly important things, she took
care of business. She did it with minimal staff, no official title,
and a boatload of initiative. What this massive amount of excess
edibles means is that we can bring in new people without fear of
starving ourselves out, which has several implications. Like being
able to better secure ourselves, work on the expansion, and the
like.
Tonight we're having a dinner in Jess's honor at my
house. For her work, obviously, but also simply for who she is. When
I freaked out at the report she handed me, detailing all this
information, she just shrugged. To her it's nothing special. She just
did what needed to be done to the best of her ability. I think I
married a superhero without knowing it.

Posted
by 
Josh
Guess
Before
The Fall, I hadn't spent a ton of time doing what my brother does.
Dave started in the construction business while he was still in high
school. From drywall finisher to running that business to eventually
managing the construction of hospitals. Sure, I did a little drywall
work with him (which I hated) and put in a good number of hours
helping him build his house (which I liked) but I never did it for a
living.
Still,
one thing that the last two years of working with him has given me is
an appreciation for the potential of things. Knowing that the bare
patch of ground in front of you is going to be someone's home, built
by your design and with your own hands, is pretty awesome. I got
those feel-good vibes this morning as we walked the area where the
expansion is going to be built.
Mind you, we did it with and
armed guard that took the occasional zombie down, but that only
slightly marred the experience for us. I don't know where they came
from, but there's been a sizable influx of old school zombies pelting
New Haven for the last day.
So, guard in tow, we took a walk.
The expansion is going to be big. Dave has been toying with the
layout for a long time, and I saw a lot of spray-painted rectangles
and squares on the ground where he'd begun marking off where things
would go. One major advantage in being able to build a huge section
of new housing from scratch is that you can design the thing to every
specification you want. For example, the center of the expansion is a
large building meant to house the living and office spaces of the
council and other folks who run New Haven. It will have its own wall,
enough space to hold a few hundred people in an emergency, and will
be topped with a watchtower.
Also, there will be plumbing. I
haven't been brave enough to ask Dave how that's going to work, but
he assures me there will be running water aplenty. If he's figured
out a way to have flush toilets, I'm going to name a kid after
him.
While the majority of the expansion is just in the
planning stages, work has actually begun on the new wall. Or at least
on the trench that will become the new wall. The soil around here is
heavy with clay, and since that's such an abundant resource, Dave has
some people digging a series of concentric trenches around where the
new wall will be. The material being excavated will be shaped and
baked into large bricks, which will eventually be the foundation and
structure of the wall.
So far, just holes in the ground. But
holes with 
potential
,
damn it!
The work is going to go slowly for a long while.
We're saving the fuel for the heavy machinery until we absolutely
need it, so it's hand tools for the people working. Lot of folks are
putting in an hour here and there in addition to the small crew of
dedicated workers under Dave's direction. Slowly, we'll get there.
Once we can entice more people to join us, the expansion should begin
to grow at a good pace.
As we walked along I listened to Dave
excitedly explaining his ideas to me, and I couldn't help but smile.
My brother has always been that way about his work--calculated,
efficient, but with undertones of the child he had been. The one who
loved building blocks for all the permutations they could be shaped
into.
I smiled with him, and realized that not only would we
be building something from nothing, but also something 
new. 
Not
a repurposed building from before The Fall, or a wall made of old
materials. The expansion will be something born of the adversity we
face, created by us in an era with no easy solutions. That's a hell
of a thing. It makes me proud. Proud for what we've achieved, and for
the willingness of our people to manage greater things.