Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 5): Wrath (24 page)

Horrible work often brings people together. It’s why they make military recruits do shitty work together. They sit and stew, angry and bitching, pissed and tired until they bond together. The adage you don’t die for your country, but you’ll die the man next to you starts with that. Those shit jobs that you do to come together as a team.

The funeral pyre burns bright tonight. There are hundreds of fresh bodies back there. Hundreds and hundreds. Back breakingly large piles of mangled and broken bodies. We’re all so fucking tired. I took a handful of ibuprofen an hour ago, and the dull ache coming from my back and shoulders has finally abated enough that I think I can sleep soon. People are heavy. Especially dead people. Heard of the phrase dead weight before? It’s fucking apt.

Why did this fucking happen? Where the hell did all those undead fucking come from? How’d they get all the way up Auburn Lake Road so fucking fast? Why weren’t they carrying books, or shovels, or crocheting needles? More fucking questions. My head spins when I try and put two and two together.

The Pastor had weird dreams that told him I was an agent of evil, and I needed to be killed. He believed so strongly in these dreams he sent his entire fighting force up here to assassinate me, and if he killed everyone else in the process, so be it. That’s faith. That’s a strong belief. That’s as crazy as me thinking that my dreams of The White Room, and the dead folks in there are real.
 

But they are real. I’ve seen the dreams and the information in them come true. I know it now. I can say irrefutably that my dreams are truth.

Were the Pastor’s dreams the truth as well?

Looking at the bright side, we had to have killed at least five hundred undead here the past few days. That’s got to be a giant chunk of the undead that have been stirred up in town. I know it wasn’t all, but the fact that they were all drawn up here for whatever reason means we got to thin the herd.

Other than the ass whupping I took going down the river, no one was hurt. No one died. More positives. Everyone seemed to operate with calm, and skill, and no one panicked. We used a lot of ammunition, but we still haven’t even fired up the reloading gear yet. Plenty more where that came from.

Sigh.

I don’t know where I found the energy or patience to type this out. I’m a typing animal.
 

Where do we go from here? What’s our next step?

Everyone agreed on a single path of action. Get the remaining women back from The Farm. They’ve been alone too long, and for all we know, they’re already dead.

Get the cows, guns, ammo, supplies, and everything back here from there as well. That place is tainted, and I will have nothing to do with that land, or that building. In fact, I am seriously considering burning it to the ground.

Once that’s done, we lock campus down. Tight as possible. We’ll accumulate fencing, barriers, machine guns, whatever we can find. I’m now fixated on us taking down trees and building a wall wooden castle style. Dig some ditches, and get this shit done. We’ve been damn near overrun twice now, never mind the ambush by The Pastor.

Time to get it done.

-Adrian

May 31
^st

More dead people pisses me off. At every turn things are ugly. They aren’t much worse today than they have been, but they’re still shittier. That make any sense Mr. Journal? Probably not. I’m feeling like a rambling is coming on.

The two women we left at the farm died. Killed themselves actually. We found their bodies out in the fields face down on top of shotguns. More of that buckshot mouthwash. Maybe it was the death, maybe it was the violence. Maybe it was the fact that they were raped, and held as prisoners just to survive. Plenty of reason to end yourself. It just sucks. That’s four dead. Two moms, two kids.

Sigh. I can't even talk about it. It'd just be a hurtful rant, and to be honest, I get where they were coming from. Totally.

After we returned across town to The Farm yesterday and today we managed to get everything we wanted there back to here. It took us almost thirty hours over the two days to get it done. Labor. Hard ass labor.
 

I have silly ass blisters on my hands from shoveling. My role at The Farm was brute force labor in the fields, and with the cows. I can’t go into naming who did what where there, but we basically broke up into two groups. One assortment of us focused entirely on getting everything out of the house. The other group went to work on digging up the crops that could be moved, and getting the cows ready for transport back here.

One thing they didn’t have was a generator. Kim claims the Pastor wanted a cleaner style of living for the future, and believed that they needed to live without the modern comforts to experience a tougher, more pure way of life. It was more true to him apparently. They used candles, fire, and as little electrically powered things as possible. Weird asshole.

We haven’t fully inventoried the haul there, but it was pretty impressive. I know we picked up a few AR style rifles, and I think Gilbert said they had about a hundred rounds of ammunition left. I wish they had more, but more ammo is more ammo. They also had a handful of shotguns, most of which they’ve shot at us already so we know they work. There was a large amount of shells for those, as well as some handguns, magazines, and a lot of food. Someone there knew how to can, and did just that. A lot of it.

As for the fields, I guess a lot of it is corn, which is good. A huge portion of it according to Ollie is cow corn, for feeding the cows. Now that the cows are here wandering about campus, our grass situation is handled, and we don’t need to transplant quite so much of the cow corn. At least not immediately.

In the back of the farm property there was a large cattle trailer. It was set up like one of those fifth wheeler trailers, which meant somewhere around there was a large truck to move it. We zipped around, and down the road in the opposite direction from where we had been traveling, we found it. A maroon Ford diesel dualie, complete with fifth wheel hitch in the bed. It was out of fuel, and needed some TLC, but Blake made it happen, and we were in business. It took two trips across town to get all the cows back.

Speaking of town… It’s largely empty again. I can’t imagine that all of those new undead that have arrived lately made it all the way up to campus in a single wave a few days ago, but the reality is, it probably was most of them. I mean shit Mr. Journal, we had to have killed 800 undead or more. Easily 800. Judging by the numbers we’ve been running and how many we’ve been killing on our trips out the past month or two, we have got to be getting low on things to kill. I mean... we have to be.

Right?

Downtown was largely empty. We ran over a few undead milling about in the streets, as well as a couple up near campus again. No substantial numbers to speak of. We were able to drive past them or over them as needed without issue. It would’ve been a shit idea to drive over them and get a flat tire while dragging cows in a trailer behind us. Imagine how that would play out. Tire change on a new truck with new people while being attacked by zombies, all the while the cows in the back are shitting bricks because of the violence and commotion. Fucking hilarity.

Didn’t happen though.
 

Campus is a disaster. Ollie has destroyed the playing fields (softball, baseball) that were left alone up until now to plant the stuff that Amanda and Angela brought, as well as the shit we brought back from The Farm. We also got some shit stuck in the ground over at the Jones Road farm where Lindsey is living.
 

It feels like there are a hundred people here now. In fact, I need to sort this out so I can wrap my head around it all.

Living in Hall E with me I have Abby, Patty, Blake, and Kim.

In Hall B right now we have Ollie and Melissa.

In Hall A, we have Angela, Amanda, Alan, Tabitha, and Daniel Jr.

At the Jones Road farm, we have Lindsey, and her single remaining daughter, Andrea.

Gilbert is still largely calling his own home his residence. Despite this, he is family, and I count him as being “here.”

They’re gone now, but we also had the Westfield folks here for a bit. Mallory, Mike, and Hector.
 

That gives us a stable census of 15 people here. I think that’s everyone. That’s a lot. It feels like a lot. Maybe too many. But maybe not enough at the same time. We got a LOT done with all these people around the past few days Mr. Journal. I mean it was literally amazing taking stock of everything that had been accomplished when we called it a night earlier. I felt like we’d gone to Home Depot and hired a shitload of Hector’s cousins for a few days.

Too much?
 

Oh well.
 

I’m surprised at how well everyone is getting along. Blake is an entirely new man with Kim here. He’s smiling, happy, friendly, courteous, and can’t keep a hand off her tummy. So far she seems a little distant, a little scared of the rest of us, but relieved when he’s around. I’ve caught her face lighting up a few times when he walks into the room, and I’ve got mixed feelings about it. I’m very happy she’s clearly happy, but it makes me want to go kill that old fucking pastor again for what he did to her and those women. Lying bastard.

The kids are great. They seem amazingly happy to be at a relatively safe place. That’s a little silly to say after our recent events. Lots of blood and suffering here of late. Nonetheless, they seem happy.

Angela and Amanda are workers. It’s also not a small deal that they are both dental hygienists. Regular teeth cleaning will be pretty spectacular for us in the long run. They’re also both good with guns, which will be very helpful. I can’t even begin to describe the amount of food they brought with them as well.

Jams, jellies, canned fruits and vegetables, just a ton of really good, fresh stuff. Granted, it isn’t really fresh in the jar, but when we take it out of the jar, it tastes pretty fucking fresh. Your standards change when the undead rise and try to eat you alive. What’s just good is great, and what’s crap is still pretty damn good.
 

Ollie and Melissa are good. Melissa is having a really hard time getting around due to her leg injury, but she’s decent. No infection in her wounds so far, which is something we’re acutely afraid of with her and the baby. The less medication she takes for anything, the better off her and the baby are in the long run.

Gilbert’s eye will survive, but his eyesight might be mildly fucked. It’s arguable how good his eyesight was anyway. Somewhere during the firefight over at Hall B he caught a shard of wood from something across the upper eyelid. Perforated it right through and scratched the eyeball on the way. It looks good (read: slightly less shitty) today, and he says the vision is getting better.
 

My hand hurts from the cut I got at The Farm the night we hit it. It’s not that bad anymore, despite having worked the damn thing to death since then. The wages of violence.

So what now? Where do we go from here? We’ve killed the bad guys, cleaned up the ranch, bagged up the loot, and the raid boss is dead.
 

What fucking now?

Campus gets fully locked down. We are now devoting all our collective time and effort into building legitimate defensive structures here. We’ve discussed this heavily, and with no moveable Conex or shipping containers anywhere nearby, our best defense, sadly, is wood. Lots and lots of wood.

We are going to cut down suitable trees, and build a poor man’s wall from the logs. Gilbert has some experience building impromptu defensive structures, and a bunch of us are decent with tools. If we really focus on it, I think we can get some serious walls up in a jiffy.
 

Granted, if they get hit by a semi, they’ll shit the bed in no time flat, but with our outer vehicle defenses across the road, it’ll be highly unlikely to happen to us with no warning. Gilbert is drafting up some plans for us to build guard houses as well. Some kind of tower idea, potentially on both sides of the bridge. If we could get something like a LMG to mount in them... that’d really help out our chances of surviving another attack by living people. Heavy suppressing fire from a fixed, fortified, defensible position?

Extra hot sauce on that please.

I don’t know how long it’ll take us to get that all done, but we aren’t doing shit else unless absolutely necessary. I’m not risking getting attacked again, and this is something we’ve quarter assed for far too long. At the very least, this plan steps us up to half assed status, which is an improvement of theoretically epic proportions.

What will I talk about in the meantime?

Ideas. Dreams. Plans. Pornography. Anime. Ballistics. Quantum Theory.

I don’t know. I’ll figure it out as I go.

-Adrian

June 2011

June 2
^nd

I’m having a bad night.

I’ve had a bad night.

One of those nights when I think about the things I’ve done, and the things I’m probably going to have to do soon, and I don’t like it one bit. The more bad things that happen to me and the people around me, the more I realize that this is my role in all this. I am the sufferer. I am making good on my past misdeeds, and in order to have a clean conscience, I need to live through this. Experience it. Deal with it. Survive it.

I suffer so that others don’t have to.

But they still do.

It’s very late. Almost midnight. I went to bed early tonight because I was fucking beat from all the work around campus here. We’re cutting down trees, splitting them, digging trenches, building a back reinforcing wall of dirt, and making it all into a strong barrier, and while it feels good to make solid, significant progress, it is hard fucking labor. Prison labor. My back, shoulders, and arms feel like I’ve been lifting big ass rocks for a month, and that isn’t all that far from the truth. I wanted a lot of sleep tonight to try and heal the damaged muscles.