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

pop. There are two carpenters who spend half their time
every day fixing the things.

But as I sat with Will and the
council, interviewing the team of Beaters that lost those people, it
became clear to everyone in the room that we need to change tactics
here. The people going out to fight are doing it on their own time.
And while everyone in New Haven is relatively fit due to the
near-impossibility of overeating and the hard work everyone has to
do, no one is conditioned for this kind of constant physical
abuse.

Will and the council asked my opinion after the
interview was over, but I'd been reading Will's notes as we talked to
the surviving team members. I know him well, how his mind works. My
point of view was exactly what Will's was, and the council's: time
for a game change.

As much as it's going to suck to pile more
work on less people, the leadership has decided that the volunteer
groups of Beaters will be phased out over the next few weeks. We
can't stop them all at once without risking an instant boom and
probably retaliation from the New Breed, but we can slow down their
missions as we work to introduce a team of full-time beaters.

We're
going to have two teams of ten men and women. They'll alternate days
for being on duty as Beaters, and on their off days they'll be
training four hours a day and working the other six. It's going to be
brutal, but that's why we're only taking volunteers. We naturally
want the people who are out there protecting New Haven with
preemptive strikes to be as prepared and safe as possible. More
practically, we  need  them
to stay alive, as our recent losses are approaching unsustainable
levels.

Dodger and I already have some basic training routines
going for the folks that have volunteered. Most of them have already
served as Beaters, so they aren't starting from scratch. Over the
next few weeks we'll be setting up more specified programs and
exercises that will make our new force of Beaters something to be
reckoned with.

Hopefully it will be enough to prevent further
casualties, or at least keep them to a bare minimum. We're trying to
take the approach that the military had  really  good
reasons for training and conditioning troops the way they did, and
follow that example.

It's already making the sowing harder,
but now that the weather has taken a very lovely (well, not frigid)
turn, we're back in the full swing of planting. Jess thinks we'll
have all the early-season crops done by Monday morning. And with the
Beaters keeping the zombie population in check, we've actually got a
good chance of keeping this crop alive until harvest.

I wish I
had the skills to put into words how thankful I am for all the people
who've risked their lives as Beaters, and to those who lost theirs
doing it. Seeing those folks sitting in front of the council, beat-up
and tired, was hard. A few of them were so exhausted that they barely
stayed conscious for the interview, two more had head injuries that
kept them from entering into the discussion much at all. That,
combined with their obvious willingness to go back out and do it
again, was what spurred this decision. Sending those folks out
injured and tired from their normal work isn't just unfair, it's
dangerous to the point of stupidity. And we're the ones who made that
call.

Better the rest of us work harder so those folks can be
well and truly rested when they go out to fight for us. I'll gladly
put in the extra hours. At the clinic, on our little farm annex,
building the new wall, whatever it takes.

Sunday,
April 1, 2012
April's
Fool
    Posted
by  Josh
Guess It's
kind of funny in hindsight that we used to have a whole day dedicated
only to messing with people. It doesn't really translate now, I
guess. Hard to play tricks on people nowadays without risking a
gunshot or a heavy blade getting accidentally put through you because
you caught someone by surprise. I guess there's the old stand-by of
telling clever lies, but somehow I don't think telling