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

began, but
there is only so much a body can take--reanimated or not. Our people
had plenty of time to pull back, and thank god for the perceptiveness
of the guard captain. He ordered his people to hold their fire,
noting something different about these New Breed.

Their skin,
usually looking dense and leathery, appeared brittle. The color was
off from slate gray to a sickly blue, and even as the New Breed moved
and the snow fell away from them he could see small cracked areas
forming at the joints. Cold wasn't sending them into the hibernation
state it used to, but clearly it was still affecting parts of their
physiology.

The guard captain ordered one of his men to strike
at the first zombie with a handheld weapon, told him to aim for a
joint. The man hit the elbow of the nearest New Breed, and the result
was...awful. The skin basically sloughed away like a loos glove from
elbow to wrist. The constant contact with the and the rapid change in
temperature does things to that armored skin they grow.

Note
that I said change in temperature instead of 'drop in temperature'.
Evans and I spent yesterday afternoon testing a theory, you see. On
our captive New Breed. We used a lot of firewood to get the room we
keep him in hot enough, but we began to see it. I put on my armor,
thinking I'd sweat to death, in order to restrain our test subject.
Once I had the noose pole around his neck, the rest wasn't so
hard.

As Evans directed me through the heavy fence around the
cell, I tested the strength and resilience of our New Breed's skin.
At prolonged lower temps, their skin can crack and separate if they
move too quickly or violently before it begins to warm back up. At
higher temperatures, somewhere between ninety-five and a hundred
degrees, the skin begins to lose its toughness and become waxy. More
supple. Way easier to pierce.

Hell, I accidentally pulled off
a chunk of our captive's skin the size of a baseball just pinching it
and giving a moderate pull.

To think that yesterday I woke up
angry that this insane season had given us snow when it should be
getting t-shirt warm. The freak snowstorm and following cold front
were the best thing that could have happened, because otherwise we
might not have discovered this chink in the armor of the enemy. How
we can take advantage of that is probably going to be my main work
for the near future, but it's a job I'm happy to take on.

We
had to get some good news eventually.

Wednesday,
March 7, 2012
Fool's
Gold
    Posted
by  Josh
Guess There
are some of you out there that have been pushing for trade in weapons
lately. I've had a few messages about wanting to trade us field
artillery--that is, portable artillery weapons that we could use
against our enemies, as well as some less long-range items in case of
a zombie swarm. There was even a comment on the blog last week about
it, and with the influx of messages we've received, I feel the need
to address this where all of you can read it.

In short, the
title of this post says it all: this is fool's gold. Way more
valuable in appearance than in reality, at least for us.

While
I would love to have some rocket-propelled grenades or similar in
case a huge swarm of zombies comes at New Haven, we haven't had a lot
of luck finding any at the various military outposts we've come
across. I have to assume that the military had similar thoughts and
loaded up everything they could find. I know a lot of you out there
have large chunks of surviving soldiers embedded in your communities,
and that many of them brought such weapons to you. All of us here
appreciate your willingness to trade for them, but we have to
decline.

There are several reasons. While it would be an
advantage to have some smaller, less destructive weapons to use
against a zombie swarm, we couldn't rely on them long-term. After
all, they take ammunition, and it isn't ammo that we can make
ourselves like bullets (and even that is really damn hard to do). The
main advantage over our current