Blood of the Damned

[DeMatt]

Re: Blood of the Damned

Well, lacking a designated comment thread, and given that the story's come to an end... I'll post my thoughts here.

Kewl. You're a good writer.

One hiccup - I think you made the transition from "Jay, Lila, and Haley fighting John" to "Jay and Lila staggering away from the compound" too short and abrupt. As far as I can tell, they're cornered by the horde and John, Jay loses his leg, Haley kills John, the zombies freeze, and then Haley starts hewing her way through them and leading Jay and Lila out. I think it would flow better if you'd actually said something about Lila tying Jay's leg off, helping him to walk as Haley left a trail of corpses for them to follow out.

Something that's always been bugging me... why don't they nuke the source sites? Collect some samples for research under level-5 (or better) quarantine, then reduce the places to radioactive glass? Not just one nuke, but dozens or hundreds, starting from the perimeter and working inwards to keep the explosions from blowing infectious crap outwards. Fallout ain't kind, but it's a lot more predictable than biological agents, right? And it's not like there's a lack of nukes under military control - one Ohio-class SSBN carries 24 Trident ICBMs, each with up to twelve (but current treaties limit that to four or so) MIRV warheads. Sure, you'd slag a lot of human history - in this story, the UK would only live on in other countries' history books. But would you rather risk nuclear winter and utterly vapourize a country, or the spread of a ridiculously dangerous disease?

 

[Sinfulwolf]

Re: Blood of the Damned

I actually do have a comment thread a few pages back, but since the story is indeed complete, it's not a big deal.

As to Jay and Lila escaping without reference to the leg being tied off, I didn't think it would work well for the flow, so I skipped it, and mentioned it in the next chapter. That was my call, and not everyone agrees with that decision, yourself included.

As to nuclear weapons, we could go into a debate about that, but as it stands, there is a lot of what happened in this version of the world's past that goes unexplained. They could very well have used nukes and it just not come up in the story. Only the UK and this island are ever really mentioned in any details, purposely leaving the rest of the world up to the reader's imagination. All of Europe could be a nuclear wasteland while mainland USA now looks like Fallout 3. It could have happened, just because I didn't mention it, didn't mean it didn't happen.

Still, you start talking about flinging nukes about, and multiple missiles for each city, you are going to fuck up the planet beyond repair, and considering no one really knows how the virus got out in the first place, its not entirely a sure proof plan to stop it.

 

[SiphonTalvesh]

Re: Blood of the Damned

First let me just say that this was awesome to read, and it's good to see this finally up here and completed, even if I would like to see more


As for nuking, another thought to consider is that possibly you may not even kill the infected or the virus with that, but rather further mutate them. I know of at least one creature on the planet capable of surviving a nuclear holocaust, one we all hate. The Cockroach can survive any nuke we can set off on them, so theoretically speaking it's possible for something else to. It sure would suck if you nuked half of say Portugal to stop the virus, only to discover you've just mutated them to be even tougher and more aggressive.