Bubble Boy

I'm in isolation along with a lucky group of other people. It's not fun. It's not terrible, but we don't have anything to do. For the time being I don't get to do any real work or interact with people other than they small number of clinic personnel. And those folks wear isolation gear when they come in. It's kind of difficult to have serious human interaction when the person you're talking to is wearing eye shields and a face mask.

The concern is that I'm a carrier for whatever is killing the Louisville crew. There has been another death, the third. That leaves three of them alive, and their condition has basically remained the same. Time is the only way to know if they'll live or die.

I'm charging my laptop with my solar charger through the window. It takes most of each day to do it, and that leaves me a total of about five hours of battery time to work. Writing this blog takes up a chunk of that, and I spend the rest of the time communicating as best I can with the people I need to talk to. Luckily a lot of the work I was doing with my brother on the expansion is on this machine, so I can fiddle with that. Will has someone else covering my job with him. Boredom and worry are racing for first place in my brain.

I'm told that Jess is doing well and so far showing no signs of whatever it is that's killing the Louisville people. I'm hopeful that the illness was beyond the transmissible stage by the time they got to the clinic. That's not really what I'm worried about, to be honest. I try to ration my fear for things that are happening rather than things that might, which is why I'm also not as concerned for me at the moment. I don't have any symptoms.

What's rattling my cage is the zombie attacks. They're happening, and they're getting worse.

For the last day small groups of New Breed have been assaulting different parts of New Haven. None of the attacks have, by themselves, been especially dangerous. Most of the actual zombies heading for the wall are old school, forced on us through whatever coercive means the New Breed has over them. Maybe it's something to do with the plague organism, or something as simple as fear that the New Breed will eat them if they don't.

They've hit different spots each time, testing our defenses. We've seen it before. Only on one occasion has the same section of wall been assaulted twice, and that was the last time. The New Breed waits out of bow range and watches our people as they run out and reset the spear traps in the ground. Seems obvious they're trying to figure a way around them.

We were working under the assumption that the New Breed would attack us in force when the time came. Given their enhanced mental capacity, it was a foregone conclusion that they'd test the defenses for weak spots. Guess I was just hoping for it to happen at a time when I wasn't laid up and helpless.

There's no way of knowing when or if they'll hit us in earnest. Our people are on high alert but being ready is only the beginning of the fight. We've held some defenses in reserve so we can have surprises ready for them when they come, but no one feels totally confident about fighting them off. The peril of too much pride in our ability to defend ourselves is a lesson we've learned in our bones.

Funny. I saw 'we' but I can't do a goddamn thing. So it goes. The bells are coming so regularly now that I've almost developed the ability to ignore them.

Ah, there's one now.