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

playing with a simple puzzle, one of those twelve-piece jigsaw
ones that small kids use. In the time I was there, he didn't try
putting the thing together, but he studied it. Turned the parts over
in his hands, glanced between the pieces as if to look for clues on
how they related to one another. Studying. Learning.

I put
nothing outside the realm of possibility with the New Breed.

Tuesday,
March 6, 2012
Mad
World
    Posted
by  Josh
Guess We
went from seventy degree weather one day to raging storms the next,
and then yesterday we got about six inches of snow. It came on
suddenly and dropped in less than eight hours. Since yesterday
morning when we woke up to see the beautiful blanket draped across
the world, the temperature has dropped to the mid-twenties and stayed
there.

This morning is March the sixth, I'll remind you. Our
timetable for planting has little wiggle room, and the weather is not
being agreeable. I can't tell you how fortunate we are that my wife
has been directing her teams so efficiently. She's the reason our
agricultural efforts are as far along as they are.

The rapid
shift toward cold weather brought us one unexpected but valuable
piece of information: we now see a weakness in the New Breed. It's a
small one, but something we can exploit in the short term.

Yesterday
morning around dawn wasn't all that cold. It was just above freezing
out, causing the snow to be very wet and clingy. Thinking that we'd
have the advantage over the zombies outside the walls, we sent teams
out under guard to gather several large loads of firewood. Not
knowing if the cold snap would stay with us or not, this seemed like
a reasonable (and necessary) risk. I should add here that our teams
have encountered small groups of New Breed zombies many times over
the last week. Some have attacked our people, some have merely hung
back at the edge of any nearby woods to observe, some have feinted
toward our people only to retreat at once, testing us.

It's
becoming clear that the local New Breed are acting as one large
force. They're not just trying to figure out the weaknesses in New
Haven's defenses or deciding which of our gathering places in the
outside world might act as a convenient feeding ground in which to
kill unwary humans. There seems to be a larger push here, a guiding
principle that makes me think the New Breed are trying to get a
handle on every aspect of us, their enemy and potential food
supply.

Yeah, that's fucking scary. We've been working on the
assumption that all our worst-case scenarios are true. That the New
Breed is far more intelligent than they appear to be, and that the
game they play is currently beyond our understanding.

That's
actually a much more freeing idea than you might think. We know
they're watching us, could be preparing some move against New Haven
and our people that we can't anticipate. That narrows down the
possible responses on our part to basically two: retreat or attack.
We have nowhere to run, so....

We've armed the guards going
out to protect our teams of workers with rifles and precious bullets.
They have instructions to shoot any New Breed on sight, whether or
not they attack. These zombies are smart, and they measure us. The
last thing we can afford to be is predictable.

Yesterday
morning around ten o'clock, a cold(er) front moved in and dropped the
temperatures into the low twenties in a very short time. A team of
woodcutters had been sent out to gather lumber and firewood. They
encountered a group of New Breed waiting for them. The zombies had
been clever, seeing the snow coming and hiding themselves amid the
piles of wood during the night. Our watchers check, but it's
impossible to be perfect. The undead managed to find places to lay
low, waiting during the snowfall for our people.

Thing is,
when the New Breed sensed our people coming close and rose from the
mantle of snow covering them, they were slow. Zombies have developed
a resistance to cold during the time since the outbreak