Living With the Dead: The Bitter Seasons by Joshua Guess, Patrick Rooney, Courtney Hahn, Treesong, Aaron Moreland Read Free Book Online Page B

good news is that the number of people that are still eying him with undue suspicion are dwindling. The bad news is that Courtney is still one of them. Not in a spiteful way or anything, just that her inquiring and critical nature makes her harder to convince in the short term than most people. It's one of the qualities I love most about her, and I think this experience will do a lot to either help her trust Will, or find some evidence that he isn't trustworthy. I'm just glad he's able to move about on his own now. His leg and arm still hurt him quite a lot, but he can at least use them now.

They are leaving tomorrow. Not a lot of time to prepare, but there you have it. We are prepping several vehicles to move out, this time some hybrid cars we have managed to gather over the last few weeks. It's taken a while to get enough of them together, but it will help us save what we can of our limited supply of gas, which is becoming increasingly hard to find. We might have to start sending groups out looking for tankers and siphoning out whole parking lots of cars....

Sort of rambling now, sorry. So much going on, so much to do. If we can go the day without being pelted by hungry zombies, we will have had time to make some headway on our efforts. With that in mind, I should go. Every hand helps.
    at  9:53 AM  

Monday, September 27, 2010
Making the Best of it.
    Posted by Josh Guess
     
    Our taskforce left out a few minutes ago for Jack's compound in Michigan. It is our hope that with Will, Courtney, Steve and the others to help set up some more defenses and assist with running kill teams, we can help limit the possible casualties there. We also sent a lot of extra weapons with them, because Jack's folks don't have a lot of firearms. We're all in the south here, so guns are pretty easy to come by.

But the bulk of today's post is about the group of people we sent out to the distant factory in search of turbines. Patrick is leading that group, and with today's departure of Courtney and Steve, my list of close friends that are still in the compound has been greatly reduced.

Sorry, I think I am being whiny and self-absorbed.

Pat and the folks with him contacted us again last night, letting us know that they are ok. He reports that everyone is well, but that the vast zombie swarm that surrounded the area that the factory is located in has returned. Where they are (which I won't be sharing, by the way) is  bit warmer than it is here so there are many more active zombies, and the wind must have carried the scent of live prey to wherever it was they went.

So Pat and the others are stuck at the factory. It turns out that the reason the damn things were crowded around it in the first place is because there were, at one point, quite a few people living there. Pat says that there is a lot of canned food and some camping gear, but no sign of anyone having been there for at least a few weeks. He goes on to explain that a large area of the fencing there was knocked down at some point and raised back up, and the area around it virtually soaked with blood.

Patrick theorizes that a large number of the survivors there died in the effort to clear that area and get the fence back up, enough of them that the remainder must have decided that there weren't enough of them left to defend it properly. Leaving behind the canned food makes sense, if they had other, lighter foods to carry with them. You would be amazed at how often we find canned food abandoned places because people couldn't carry it anymore.

So for the near future our folks are gonna be camping out, spending their days loading trucks with gear we need while others keep an eye out for danger. It will take a while, because they can only work for short periods when there aren't any zombies to see them. Pat is worried that the sight of humans will drive the hoard into a frenzy and make that fence come down all over again.

But the good part of being stuck there is that they can load up a