Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) Read online

  We were hit by rainstorms all day long yesterday, though it was moderately warm the entire time. Jess has doubled down on her work, getting us ready for the planting. One step she's taken that (thankfully) isn't dependent on the weather is sowing a new crop of clover. That stuff is tough, even the seeds are hardy. We're going to collect as many seeds as possible this year, but we've still got (and are still finding) tons of them around the county and beyond. Billions of little seeds.

  I spent some time working with Jess yesterday. We even went outside the walls to spread some of the clover seed in the rain. It's strange how circumstances can change a person, and how your perception of the person changes with the circumstances.

  Jess isn't a small woman, though in my mind I used to see her that way. She's tall, actually a bit taller than me, and she's very strong. My urge to call her my "little wife" is still there, because only a few short years ago Jess was meek. Quiet. So sensitive to how other saw her that she tried hard not to draw anyone's attention. So sensitive to the cold that even mild weather sent her diving into a pile of blankets to keep warm. So set in her unique brand of OCD that small changes to her routine threw her completely off her game.

  It was strange to watch her wander in the rain, oblivious to the cold drops soaking her to the skin. I watched her toss handfuls of seed out as I followed behind with weapons in hand. When a stray zombie stepped out of the woods a few yards from us, she didn't get scared or freak out. She drew its attention while I circled around to put a few pounds of hatchet in the back of its head.

  This, from the woman who ran out of the shower because a spider was up in the corner of the bathroom, yelling at me to kill it, kill it, OMG KILL IT!

  It's old news, I know. I just can't help watching her, seeing the self-confidence with which she moves and commands, and thinking about how different she is. We all are, of course, but I'm not married to all of you. I'm not in love with all of you. So I center on her.

  Honestly, in the early days of The Fall one of the things I worried about the most was how Jess would manage without someone to watch out for her. I know that sounds sexist or whatever, but at the time she was very much a modern person, never in a fight, never fired a gun. She avoided confrontation like it was herpes. She's a faster learner than I am, though. Once she got over her initial shock and saw what needed to be done, Jess set her jaw and did it.

  Now look at her. Strong, sure, and independent to a degree that most people in New Haven envy. I don't worry about how she'd manage anymore even though my current work is as dangerous as work can get inside New Haven's walls. If an accident were to happen in our experiments, Jess would be fine. Hell, I worry more about how I'd manage without her.

  When I toss and turn with worry about these experiments, she's the one soothing me. She gives me the love and support I need to deal with...everything. Before The Fall, I was the stable rock that she needed me to be. Now the situation is reversed, and I begin to realize how much she really does for me. I probably would have called it quits already with Evans and Gabby if Jess hadn't been the voice of reason.

  She gives me strength when I need it most. I can't express in words how amazing that feels. Now to hold on to that thought as I work with my test subject today. That's the challenge.

  Sunday, March 11, 2012

  Q&A

  Posted by Josh Guess

  Someone posted two very good and pertinent questions the other day, and I'd like to take this post to answer them. I've been talking out a lot of my stress and worry with people the last few days, and doing so has helped me get a grip on our experiments, my other duties, and my place in New Haven in general. I think airing out some things here might do the same.

  The first: What's the general feeling in New Haven about keeping live zombies inside the walls?

  The general feeling is apprehension. I suppose I should say, the initial feeling was. New Haven is a fairly tight-knit group, and everyone knows that their friends and neighbors will be careful for the good of the group. That being said, I don't think there's anybody here that is ecstatic with the idea that there are active zombies being held inside New Haven.

  And no matter how good the security around our test subjects is (and it is) there will always be that buzzing background awareness, a base level of discomfort and fear, that will never be entirely eliminated while the test subjects are still alive. In my opinion that's a good thing. Without a nice, healthy fear of the undead none of us would be here.

  The best thing about the citizens of New Haven is that by and large they can intellectualize their fears and reactions. Our people don't like the idea of keeping live zombies here, but overall the feedback we've had is good. No one, including Evans, Gabby, and myself, likes the things we have been doing to our captive undead. No one likes having them here at all. But most people recognize the potential for understanding and gaining an advantage this situation creates. The average citizen makes the conscious decision to deal with it, and moves on. It's really that simple.

  Of course, there are always dissenters. I place no blame on them. Some people weigh the danger against the possible information we might gather and decide the risk isn't worth it. Those folks have completely valid viewpoints. It really is a dangerous game to play, and they're right to be worried for the safety of the community.

  There isn't a right or wrong, just differing opinions. Recognizing that reality is something most people have a hard time with. We do a pretty good job here for the most part, and that makes me happy.

  The other question was: how do people feel about someone they know volunteering to turn into a zombie?

  As I typed that out, an intense flash of nostalgia hit me. For a second, I was the me I was before The Fall, just a nerd for whom the present situation was just a thought exercise. The question itself reminds me of all the times my friends and I would get into discussions about comics and ask what superpowers we'd have, and all other kinds of hypothetical situations based on whatever genre struck our fancy.

  Coming back to the present, I'm reminded that this isn't a hypothetical.

  The answer is simple: Rick made a choice. A lot of people were upset by that choice, but not in the sense that they were angry at him about it. More because they themselves would never want to reanimate, and couldn't understand why he would let it happen. That's where the ability to use logic begins to fail, the fine distinctions of a person's reason faltering against the onslaught of emotion tied to death.

  As hard as it is for people to understand Rick's decision (and I'm one of them, I don't think I could have done the same) they don't seem to have any problem accepting the fact that it was his to make. I haven't heard anyone say that it's wrong or anything. I haven't been told we're evil because we're using the resource of his body just as we use all other available resources. Rick was in pain and only likely to stay hurting until he died, and he understood the facts. He knew he wasn't going to get better by some miracle. He was going to die.

  Once we started to explain to him the trove of information we might gain by being able to observe the change as it happened, Rick connected the dots. He knew that such an opportunity might not come along again before the New Breed attacked in numbers, if ever. He saw the need, and he rose to the occasion.

  So, for the most part, people aren't freaking out about it. It's definitely weird, and I'm extremely uncomfortable working with what used to be Rick. His face is familiar, but the man he was is completely gone. Sort of like seeing a person you know have a brain injury, I guess.

  I think a huge part of why I'm able to work with him despite my discomfort is that like most of New Haven's citizens, I know Rick is gone. Whatever vital force was at work within his body, soul or Ka or whatever you want to call it, is gone. What's left behind is a shell manipulated by another living thing. It isn't him in any real sense.

  That recognition probably explains why people aren't more upset. While they don't like having zombies "alive" inside the walls and certainly don't think th
e idea of volunteering to become one is ideal, they don't see Rick's remnant as him. Or as a person at all. I'm not performing tests on someone we knew and respected. Public opinion seems centered around the idea that I'm basically doing an autopsy with an unusually mobile subject.

  I'm really trying to get away from focusing on these experiments too much, but I'm glad I did this today. It really did make me feel better (and this is my blog--I'm allowed to be a selfish bastard sometimes) and hopefully gave the current situation a little balance. I hope this post has made a difference with some of you out there who might think we're going too far. I assure you, we're still people of conscience.

  Tomorrow, I'll be back with a few pieces of news. All of them good, one of them very interesting.

  Monday, March 12, 2012

  Good News!

  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.

  Tuesday, March 13, 2012

  Ground War (Part One)

  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 anythin
g 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.