Thursday, November 15, 2012

Terracotta Army

Our scouts have yet to report in to us, but it's safe to say that if they are alive they weren't successful in driving away the huge swarm of zombies headed this way. The horde must have taken a turn at some point, because they've been filtering into the county since yesterday afternoon.

There must be four, five thousand undead out there right now. They aren't moving in--thankfully the temperatures were near freezing yesterday and are well below right now--but once they get in position they don't do much but watch. At least a fifth of them are New Breed, and they seem to be having trouble with the cold more than their old school counterparts. I'm being told that the New Breed are tearing apart their lesser brothers and eating them. Stoking the furnace before the attack is our guess.

We aren't sitting idly by. Long-range observation shows us the hunger in their faces. They're sitting in front of an all-you-can-eat buffet of delicious people, yet they aren't attacking. Whether the cold or just a desire to plan is responsible, we're still taking advantage. The undead put up a hell of a fight when our assault teams move in to thin the herd, but it doesn't incite all of them to action. Maybe that's just the basic desire not to share food surfacing, who knows. We've seen so many behavioral changes over the last year that predicting why the undead do anything is becoming impossible. All we can do is take it at face value and try to save our own asses.

The leadership made the call last night to only send out select groups to fight. The best trained and most experienced are the ones suited for this, we're told. The soldiers are first into the breach, followed by the Beaters and assault teams we've relied on for the last few months. Shields and spears have become pretty common weapons even outside of the little group we call the Spartans, and they're being used effectively.

Groups of fifty, two at a time, then replaced after thirty minutes by two more groups of fifty. They've been rotating like that for too long, now. Hand-to-hand combat with zombies is relatively slow and incredibly dangerous but so far they've been able to thread the needle and not take fatalities. Thank god or Gaia or fate or science for this cold. Even the most mobile of the zombies has a hard time focusing as the parasite inside them suffers from this weather.

Patrick and I have been trying to convince Will to let groups of archers go out with the assault teams all morning. I did it yesterday, and while having the extra people there made it a bit confusing for the melee fighters, we managed to kill more zombies than any group has done so far today.

Will keeps saying no, that the teams are handling it, and that we need to send out the minimum possible in case the swarm becomes more active and starts to move on New Haven's walls. It's a tactical decision, he says, and it's his to make. Still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Becky has been up and about for days now as she works on large-scale options for dealing with the swarm. It's a good thing instant coffee lasts pretty much forever and that I've stockpiled a supply here. I hate coffee, but it's handy in a pinch. I gave some to Becky, of course, and to Dave and Dodger, who are even now very loudly conversing in my living room. They're trying to come up with some solutions that can flatten the swarm. Everyone has a finger in the pie. The problem isn't so much that we're unable to hand the odds against us; we've fought off a lot worse, albeit with more firepower than we currently have at our disposal.

It's that with New Haven being so large geographically, any breach becomes a serious breach. We physically can't bring everyone in to Central, there just isn't enough room to house them all. Even if we could we'd still have to retake the outer sections as they're overrun. Except for West, of course, since it's so tall and impossible to climb thanks to the shipping containers that make up its walls.

Huh. That gives me an idea. Dave and Dodger will love this.

2 comments:

  1. If Haven is so much more difficult to protect when encompasses such a large area, then why don't you divide it into sections? Like a submarine- If one section is compromised, then why not seal it off like a bulkhead. I don't know the layout of Haven, and I'm a bit of a novice, so there might be a lot of unforeseen drawbacks to this suggestion. But it is just an idea...

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  2. Well, we tried to take a few of them out as they moved past us, but only succeeded in attracting some to our hiding spot. We've been holed up here for a few hours barely managing to hold the few hundred that came at us at bay. Our ammo supply is holding steady as we haven't broken out the big guns yet, but were unable to move for the time being seeing as our vehicles are currently surrounded by New Breed. We'll keep you updated on our status as much as we can, but our portable generator doesn't have a whole lot of juice left. If only we could make it to the vehicles.

    Oh well.

    Don't worry about sending anyone out this way, you have much larger problems than we do. Besides, we're kinda used to overwhelming odds.

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