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

son, and his wife. 

I'm
allowed to say that her name is Lori, and that she lives in
Minnesota. While I'm sure that Minnesota is a lovely state, I'm
baffled as to why any human beings would choose to live there. I like
snow and winter as much as the next guy, but not when we're talking
about cold that can shatter your will to live and snow so heavy that
whole parking lots of cars can get lost under it.

Oh, well.
Thinking about that, I guess a lot of the settlers there were
originally Scandinavian, so that makes sense. Vikings for the
win.

Anyway.

So my post yesterday apparently got Lori's
attention. She and her very small group live together, far away from
other people. That's by design. Since The Fall Lori and her family
have seen a lot of bad things happen, and not all of it by the
undead. Human cruelty has been a huge driver for her and the family
in keeping away from other groups of people, reinforced by the
occasional bands of zombies wandering through.

Something about
my post yesterday, or more accurately something about the joker guard
yelling into his megaphone across the river--got Lori's attention.
She's a savvy lady from what I've gathered in the few messages we've
shared since five this morning. She's not nostalgic or easily swayed
by overly emotional bubbling (which I  may  be
guilty of from time to time).

It was, she said, the basic
humanity displayed by the guard that made her finally speak up and
communicate with the outside world. That, and the response by New
Haven in general to take the jokes as they were given, no suspicions
or fear attached. Just a funny moment.

I didn't feel like it
was a catharsis or anything, just a nice thing for the guard to do.
Most of us thought the appropriate response would be to accept it in
the spirit given. Lori, as an outside observer, sees something more
important in the exchange. She says that the fact we can open
ourselves up enough to the enemy to accept even a small gift like a
joke is important. She says that the enemy's ability to make jokes is
indicative of the deeper humanity still alive and well across the
river.

Weird, I know. I just thought it was a joke vaguely
alluding to blowjobs.

Lori is an interesting person. Though
her group is very small, just her family, their progress has
paralleled that of other much larger groups in many ways. They've got
a farm setup, they have walls around their place (smaller in area but
much taller than our own) and even a portable cell transmitter. They
monitor things going on around the country but choose not to take
part in it. They live quiet and happy lives in their secluded part of
the country.

They certainly aren't going to leave all that to
risk their lives traveling toward a large group that may or may not
give much of a shit about them. It would take a lot more than one
moment of good vibrations between people with bad blood to make that
happen. But I'll admit to walking on sunshine today, because
something I passed on to the world made someone who'd lost faith in
that world decide to speak up. It's a small thing, but to me any
positive is a great thing.

Saturday,
March 31, 2012
Punch-Drunk
    Posted
by  Josh
Guess Yesterday
morning one of our teams of Beaters (what we're calling the strike
teams that are taking out small groups of New Breed) suffered their
first fatality. Two of the ten people involved in the actual fight
went down when a section of one of the defensive constructs
collapsed. Thankfully it happened at the end of the fight, due to a
large number of zombie corpses piled on top of it. There were only a
handful of New Breed left to swarm the breech. Could have been a lot
worse. Would have been, had the failure happened at the start of the
fight.

Dave has been worried about this kind of thing
happening. The diamonds take constant abuse and damage from the
ceaseless trips out into the county as our Beaters do their best to
keep the New Breed population under control. Boards crack, metal
dents, hinges