Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) by Joshua Guess Page B

directions has reversed course, hard. Our
course of action from here out has to be iron-clad. No Exile can
defect, we can't take the risk of one of them being an agent. Now the
general population in the fallback point will know that. And the
actions taken by their leadership sent a message to those same
people: if you have thoughts of reconciliation with New Haven, or are
starting to see them as people, or are thinking of leaving...forget
it. Those aren't survivable options.

Credit is due to our
watchers for not taking the shot they surely wanted to take. It would
have been easy to react to cold murder with one of their own, a few
ounces of pressure on a trigger. A moment of rage that would have
taken one terrible person out of the human race even as it reignited
a war.

God help me, I almost wish they'd done it.

Which
is idiotic on an intellectual level. We've got crops to grow,
projects to build, zombies of all types to defend against, and a
hundred other things to worry about. I  know  that.
But what I feel is totally different.

And I'll leave it there
before I start a war myself.

Saturday,
April 7, 2012
The
Pack
    Posted
by  Josh
Guess The
mood in New Haven in the last day has been tense. Not overtly angry,
but as if every person is clenching their fists in concert. We never
lost sight of the things the Exiles have done to us, but it was
jarring to have them give such a stark reminder. That guard dying
like that, as an example to others.

Well, that just pisses me
off. But I have been asked not to focus on that. Which only means
that cooler heads than mine realize pushing the issue, considering
how it upsets people who are already high-strung, is probably a bad
idea.

One thing that probably helped people relax a little
yesterday was Jess's solution to the massive flocks of birds going
after our crops and seeds. At first she sent people out among the
rows to bang together pie pans (which work a lot better than pieces
of firewood) but that was still inefficient and a waste of manpower.
It left the walls low on sentries and guards, so we put our brains to
coming up with something else.

Again, Jess was the one that
came up with it. We've spent a lot of time and effort to gather and
slowly breed dogs. We have to be careful of how many we have due to
food concerns, but when it comes to early-warning systems for
zombies, you don't get better than a dog's sense of smell. My own
two, Bigby and Riley, have saved my life a couple of times.

Riley
was already fixed before The Fall came, which is a real shame. For
all the destruction his over-energetic ass caused back when my
biggest concern was paying the mortgage, he's turned into a
first-rate guard dog since. He has the nearly unlimited vigor of a
growing puppy, and he fucking  hates  birds.
If he had hands instead of paws, I'd give him a fist-bump.

Bigby,
on the other hand, was not fixed. We've bred him once already, and
the puppies were awesome. Riley is half Golden Retriever and half
Great Pyrenees, and it makes me sad to know that he won't pass those
beautiful looks on. But he's also lanky and somewhat awkward, so not
ideal for what we need.

Bigby is half Chow, half Norwegian
Elkhound. He's massive and built low to the ground. Hit mate was
abandoned by one of my neighbors early in The Fall, a pure Malamute.
The puppies have grown to be meaty, strong adults.

So Riley,
Bigby, and his progeny (six of them) are spending their days under
the supervision of two people scaring the living crap out of birds. I
can't help smiling when I think about it. Watching them gambol and
play even as they put the fear of god into their prey makes my heart
a bit less heavy. It's another example of how we have to utilize
every resource we can. My ferrets and cats are great for controlling
vermin from bugs on up to rats. Our large pack of dogs are good for a
lot of tasks from guard duty to scaring birds, even acting as pack
animals from time to time.

Of course, my boys and their pack
out