Living With the Dead: This New Disease (Book 5) by Joshua Guess Page A

interesting. We've never exposed the
undead to this kind of heat in a controlled environment. The results
will hopefully help us in determining the most efficient way to
utilize our new weapon.

I've got it in a plastic bag stuffed
into one of my cargo pockets. The stuff just looks like black dust.
It's crazy to think that the amount in my khakis is enough to cut
through most of an engine block. Thousands of degrees of potential
heat. Basically stone dust, engineered by human intelligence (again,
let's give Becky the credit here) into something useful. That's nuts
to me.

I'm excited to test it out. And I need to get to it
before the meeting I have with the others later. It's going to be a
busy few days, but with any luck they'll be productive ones. And by
productive, I mean we'll be able to kill a lot of zombies with
minimal risk.

Tuesday,
March 20, 2012
Mad
Method
    Posted
by  Josh
Guess Four
this afternoon is zero hour. New Haven is now playing host to a large
contingent of volunteers from the Louisville area. Becky has been
hard at work, missing sleep and recruiting workers to make as much
thermite as possible. We've got a plan, and it's going to be
incredibly risky.

The good news is that our scouts have been
busting ass to keep tabs on the zombie swarm in Shelbyville. We know
where they are, about how many of them we'll be facing, and what the
terrain looks like. We're sending seventy people of our own, enough
to do a lot of damage when working in tandem with our guests. We're
splitting the thermite evenly between home and the folks going out.
There should be enough gel bombs for each of us to have one.

I'll
explain Becky's genius idea to weaponize the thermite tomorrow. It's
not all that complicated, but I'd rather not brag on her behalf
before we've used the stuff in the field.

Um. I'll be honest:
she told me not to. She doesn't want me to get people's hope up if
these weapons fail utterly. She hits hard, so I'm doing what she
tells me.

We've actually got a pretty good strategy worked out
for the fight. I'm not trying to sound overconfident, but I think
we've worked out a good way to engage the New Breed on open ground
without losing cohesion given that more than half our force are
people we haven't fought with before. Again, that's almost a post by
itself and I want to do it justice. Because my brother Dave worked
out the logistics of the thing, and it's beautiful. Solves a lot of
problems we'd face in dealing with the New Breed on their own
turf.

I  can  tell
you why we're confident. Becky's idea for turning the thermite into a
useful weapon is part of it. Dave's work with portable defenses is
another. But we wouldn't even be considering this move if the results
of my tests with our captive New Breed hadn't yielded shocking and
frankly amazing results.

You may remember me saying that we
would be testing direct and indirect heat on the zombies in question.
The indirect heat method turned out to be less useful than I'd have
hoped. A flare of thermite had to be within a foot of the test
subject to have a serious effect on it. That's not due to any lack of
heat--the stuff burns at something like three or four thousand
degrees--but more because it burns really fast. A flare going off
within a foot will do immediate damage to the zombie. Past that and
the zombie's reaction to the white-hot fire is quick enough and the
distance great enough that they only take minor damage. That is,
within two feet of a thermite flare, they'll lose some of the
strength to their toughened skin.

So, if we had tons of the
stuff, we'd be able to set traps around New Haven and weaken an
attacking swarm. Assuming we could set off the stuff without too much
trouble. Really not an option.

Direct heat, however, has a
much more useful and interesting effect. Basically, it well and truly
fucks a zombie up.

It was a bitch getting one of my test
subjects strapped down, but SO worth the effort. I put a very small
amount of thermite on the