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

word from our scouts. When a small
enough group is located, one of three teams will head out and set up,
the undead brought to them by the scout team. So far it's working
well. It's a bit heavy on manpower and resources, but most of the
folks volunteering to do it are using their free time. I can't
imagine how tired they must be, working the earth seven hours a day
and fighting for another three or four. It's damn impressive.

This
has been going on for days. the reports are here for me to see, and I
have to say--they look good. Sure, the New Breed will adapt to the
tactic eventually or just plain realize it's better for them not to
chase down small teams of scouts because of the pointy death waiting
for them, but in four days of these kinds of raids, our people have
managed to kill another three hundred New Breed here and in
surrounding counties.

All of that without the thermite gel
bombs. We're keeping the rest of those here at home for now.
Eventually we'll make a bunch more of them, but for now our supplies
are finite. Not small, by any means, but not easily replaceable in
the very short term. We've got some good signs that we'll be able to
trade pretty quickly, and there are other varieties of thermite we
could make that wouldn't be as effective, but still. Caution is the
best way to go.

The end result is that while we'll probably
never be able to clear the New Breed out of here, we're keeping their
numbers from reaching that critical mass where they feel certain they
can defeat us. By hitting them in small, dispersed attacks we're able
to maximize damage to them while minimizing risk to us.

Which
is awesome, because we need some stability and time to heal, as well
as time to build and gather more people here. And if the pile of work
waiting for me is any indication (and seeing my brother's handwriting
on a lot of it, I'm sure it is) then I have to start looking at ways
to make those future plans workable. No time like the present.

Wednesday,
March 28, 2012
Joker
    Posted
by  Josh
Guess Remember
a short while ago, when some of our watchers saved the lives of some
Exile guards? You probably do, but a refresher: some zombies got the
jump on the guards, and our guys picked off the undead with their
rifles.

The watchers on duty last night weren't the same ones,
but the guards on the Exile side of the river were. Those fellas seem
to draw guard duty a lot, and they've become familiar faces to every
rotation of our people that man the outposts we've thrown up on our
side of the river. It's the same routine at the beginning of every
shift--the Exiles walk up to their post, get report from the men
they're relieving, then turn to face our side of the river and give a
salute to our unseen men and women. It's safe to assume they're
thanking us for saving their lives, though I'm surprised they keep up
the habit. Their superiors can't be happy about it.

Yesterday
was different. The Exiles did their normal thing for the first two
hours of their shift, but one of them started to get fidgety.
According to our people, he kept looking around across the river as
if he were trying to figure out which of the several blinds we've set
up were housing our folks.

After a few minutes, the guard got
annoyed and pulled out a megaphone. The guy turns it on, fiddles with
the controls, and puts it to his mouth. Across the river, his voice
carried very loudly. He said, and I'm going to try to get this as
close as possible:

"A man walks into a bar with an
alligator under one arm. He bets everyone in the bar he can put his
balls in the alligator's mouth and it won't bite him. If he wins, he
gets a free drink from each person. If he loses, he buys everyone a
drink.

The patrons at the bar agree. The man orders a beer,
taps the alligator on the head, and places his genitals in the
thing's mouth, which slowly closes. The man calmly drinks his beer,
and when he's done he smacks the alligator on top of the head pretty
hard. The alligator opens its