Fallback

I'm writing this from New Haven's expansion and fallback point. Because yeah, yesterday's attack was unexpectedly fierce. Everyone has been evacuated into the expansion. Even as I write this, teams are scouring the main section of New Haven for zombies.

Basically we were hit with a tight column of undead that slammed into a single point on the wall like a spear. The front section, the tip of the spear, was mainly composed of old school zombies pressed into attacking by the New Breed behind them. Inside the thick line of attackers were zombies carrying logs to use as ramps, just like the night before. They came in fast and way too concentrated for our people to hold off. If there hadn't been two hundred of them focusing on that one spot to overwhelm us, I'd have called it a suicide run.

A lot of them did die in the initial approach, compound bows and crossbows thrumming out arrows and bolts at the enemy with clockwork regularity. A dozen of our best defenders stood their ground against the onslaught even as the undead breasted the wall, while others rang the bells and called for a retreat.

Even running from a fight, I can't help being damn proud of our people. Able-bodied adults either moved toward the breach or oversaw the evacuation depending on their assignment. Older kids did their duty in helping the younger ones get to safety while the adults covered them. It was orderly and went mostly to plan.

It cost us lives, though. Only two of the twelve at the wall managed to pull back in time to get behind the lines of defenders that rushed in to help. Ten souls gone, just like that.

But hundreds saved. That's a big fucking deal to me. To all of us.

New Haven hasn't been totally abandoned, of course. There are still folks in the watchtowers feeding us reports by walkie-talkie every few minutes. There are still guards and sentries running the walls and using some of the individual house defensive positions. We've got eyes on the enemy, no doubt, and we've been long prepared for something like this. Caches of arrows and bolts ready to be used. I'm told someone is camping on the top of my own house, picking off the zombies still roaming around and eating the truly ancient beef jerky I made and stored on the roof for just such an occasion. My apologies to that guy's intestines.

The latest estimate has the remaining number of zombies somewhere around a hundred. We haven't been able to totally shut off the flow of them over the wall, but we've got people out in tanks dispersing large groups and mowing down smaller clusters. Our people walking the streets of New Haven itself are engaging zombies pretty much constantly, but they're being careful about it. I've got a round of that duty myself in about an hour.

We're uncomfortable, cramped, and out of sorts. But we're alive. I wanted to share my big news today, but it's going to have to wait until tomorrow at least. I want to dedicate the proper time and space to it, not leave you with a footnote and a ton of other questions.

I want to spend some time with our sick people, too. Kincaid's simple yet brilliant solution to the new plague is working, but it isn't perfect. A good number of the people who were too sick to do anything for themselves weren't allowed to do the treatment because Evans and Gabby didn't think they could survive it. Also, people are still getting ill. It's much more manageable, but still terrifying to deal with. Especially since Phil, one of our two doctors, got sick day before last. I had no idea until this morning. It's easy to minimize one problem in the face of another (or several, as the case may be) but the new plague is still here, still hurting us.

At least behind the steel walls we're in now, the New Breed can only hem us in and not actually get to us. Small comfort, but with everything going on it's one we'll happily take.