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

a whole. I've been told in those very same messages that
I make some readers feel doubt about some of the hard choices we all
have to make. That I make them hesitate.

If that means I've
made them think, then I say that's a great thing. In the world as it
is now, being decisive is very important. But being aware that your
actions may be a matter of choosing a lesser of two evils is equally
vital, if not more so. Like ships on the open sea, our lives need
course correction and feedback or we risk losing our way completely.
If that means I take time now and then to dissect and analyze my
actions (and usually feel bad about them) then that's what I'm going
to do.

I've said recently that the time to worry about the
awful choices we make and actions that follow is when we no longer
question them. It wasn't very far into The Fall that I started to
lose perspective on what the stakes are. Survival is paramount, but I
lost sight on what the limits of my behavior should be.

How is
this relevant to sitting in a room lit by a single lumpy homemade
candle, keeping watch over sick people? Because I believe that if I
hadn't been set straight by the people who care about me, I'd have
turned into the kind of person that would have ignored the Louisville
crew when they asked for help with their sick. Even now, a small
voice whispers that we could be using the food, water, and medicine
they're allotted for our own people. That caring for them weakens us
ever so slightly.

A small voice, but persistent. The rest of
me recognizes the inherent truth in the situation: the Louisville
team sacrificed some of their number to help us in the fight against
the New Breed. They didn't shy away from danger, and that kind of
friendship must be repaid.

I talk about the Exiles sometimes
as if they're almost a different kind of being than the rest of us.
But those few hours alone in the quiet of the night were enough to
remind me that it's not at all hard to slide into that kind of
selfish barbarism. It's the same tribe mentality we have here, but on
a smaller scale and without compassion for outsiders.

Human
beings are animals. That's not a judgment, simply fact. It's our
nature to defend our close group and to be suspicious and violent
toward others. Compassion, cooperation, gratitude, mutual aid...these
things require effort of will. They are choices. And if we fail to
assess our choices, to see the awful things as awful even as the need
to do them is clear, then eventually we'll stop making the choice to
work together. To trust.

If I bore you or miss some piece of
errata to make sure we're still questioning our motives, then I
apologize. It's necessary and I have no plans to stop.

Tuesday,
March 27, 2012
Shotgun
Tactics
    Posted
by  Josh
Guess The
sowing is being halted this morning, as the temperature has taken a
surprising turn toward freezing off the sensitive bits of every
person working in the dirt. We haven't had another frost, but it's
close. Jess doesn't want to risk putting anything else in the ground
just yet--just in case the thirty seven degree reading outside right
now is a harbinger of a deeper cold snap.

So, I find myself
with a little extra time to deal with the pile of work that's been
slowly accumulating as I've been busy with planting and working in
the clinic. One of the things about being Will's assistant is that
the papers tend to build up quickly. There are several projects and
reports that need multiple sets of eyes on them.

I've been so
busy with other things that I had no idea we were sending out groups
of people to repeat our performance with the New Breed. Not on the
same scale, of course, but no less surprising for that. The brilliant
thing about my brother's portable defenses is that you only need
three of them as a minimum to set up a working perimeter. Against
groups of twenty or thirty New Breed, three of the defensive diamonds
and ten solid fighters seem to be plenty.

The fighters are
being sent out after receiving