Monday, November 21, 2011

Third Law

Newton's third law of motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I'm a physics nerd, but I wish Newton had spent a little time studying people. Sometimes what should be equal and opposite reactions are a bit...uneven when it comes to people.

In the middle of the night, I heard that clanging of bells. From the sound of it, a few dozen of them. There's electricity here, but it's limited and not enough to power floodlights. So the people of Georgetown set up an ingenious early warning system: bells hooked up to tripwires.

We were told within the first ten minutes of being here to listen for the bells, what they meant. So when the team and I heard them, we reacted. We've been warned not to try to insert ourselves into defensive formations, for our safety as much as the people in them. We haven't drilled with them and would probably throw their rhythm off.

Fortunately, the company that built this place back before The Fall wasn't very creative with the housing they put in place for the workers. The on-site dwellings are uniform and flat-roofed, and the Georgetown natives were smart to choose to live in them and build their wall nearby. We climbed onto the roofs, the team and I, and used our bows to great effect.

From our perch on the roof closest to where zombies were coming over the wall, we could see the field. A few men had set up large, battery powered lights. New Breed zombies were moving across the land outside, repeating their trick of dragging and carrying long pieces of trees with them. Groups of them set the logs against the wall, running up them and leaping over the wicked spikes on top of the barrier in front of them. The section they'd chosen to attack had fewer defensive measures on top than others. A weak spot, one I'm sure was deliberate to invite attack at a place where the inner defenses were strongest.

My team and I, using our bows, had good luck picking off zombies as they ran toward the top of the wall. After a few minutes I noticed other groups doing the same from other rooftops. They even threw us more arrows when we started to run low.

Seeing the wall was covered, I ordered the team to start choosing targets down below. Enough zombies managed to get over the wall that the fighting had spread more than fifty feet in toward the center of town. We had to be careful, obviously. We didn't try to take down any zombies that were actively engaged with defensive groups.

At least, not until a few of the zombies started running up the backs of their counterparts and landing inside the hollow defensive squares. Then we didn't have much choice.

It was a bad night. We finally cleared them, but Georgetown lost twenty people. The survivors seem as stoic about their losses as they are about everything else. I haven't seen a tear fall yet.

It's disturbing.

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