Epicenter

Black Mesa is in the middle of a very dangerous wave of zombie activity. Though the kids and handful of adults that live here are pretty secure on their platform of rock and dirt, and the narrow strip of land that connects it to the field is easily defended, I don't think this a survivable location. Not for much longer.

They've done well with hunting and scavenging, even farming. The supplies the army left here are still holding out thanks to the forethought the people here have had to supplement them with other food. That said, the local zombies are more dangerous than any I've ever seen. In fact, my team and I have spent the last day doing nothing but working in the field in an attempt to learn as much about them as possible. What we've found is pretty grim.

Whatever mutation is allowing the local undead to eat their own is apparently spreading among them and is universal.  I've had a long talk with New Haven this morning. Evans thinks the plague organism must put out spores or something similar for the changes to spread so rapidly. Every single local we saw eating was doing it at the expense of one of their own.

It didn't even dawn on me until this morning that the zombies I saw yesterday were working together to kill their fellow undead. Add that to the list. We saw smarties out there yesterday. We saw some of the ultra-tough zombies (who I refuse to call 'toughies'. One stupid name for a type of zombies is enough for me) outside as well, and one that we think might have all of those attributes.

The last one is the one that really worries us. We're not a hundred percent sure it's one of the smart zombies, but it for sure has the ashy, thickened skin of a tough one. It definitely works in a group, and can eat other zombies. It's fast and strong, and when it saw us, it did something I've never seen undead do before.

It ran away. The damn thing saw how well armed and armored my team was, gave us a calculating look, and took off. I tend to think it's a smarty for that reason alone, though the fact that his small group followed him rather than try to eat us helps.

That group was pretty fast, pretty coordinated. It worries me to death (maybe literally...) that the locals are right at the crossroads between evolutionary leaps. This place seems to be a busy intersection for undead from different areas. That means these attributes are likely to spread.

It also means the large number of them here are going to get smaller in number as others kill them off for food, but those others are going to be smarter, stronger, faster, and much harder to kill than anything we've faced. I don't like it at all. A zombie, even a smarty, that runs from a person strikes me as a very bad sign. I've got a feeling something is brewing here, what with the plateau acting as a large dinner plate, full of succulent people.

There's some bad mojo coming, I can feel it. Fortunately, I'm not the only one. The people of Black Mesa tell me attacks have gotten more frequent and harder to repel. The council at New Haven and every other person I've talked to about this place agrees that it's likely a large swarm is going to try to get to these kids. It's what zombies do, after all. And the ones here have every possible advantage except the high ground.

So, there are two options. Fight or run. We'll be spending the next day trying to figure out which will be the better option for the people here.