The Failed Coward

by Chris Philbrook

  Aside here: back in medieval ages, most folks lived and died in a few mile radius of where they were born. Long trips were too expensive, and too dangerous to undertake unless you were martially skilled, or very wealthy. You’d live in your parent’s home until they died, probably marry your neighbor, probably have a few malnourished kids with them, and they’d live in your house until you kicked off. Lather, rinse, repeat.

  That scenario sound disturbingly familiar to you Mr. Journal? Cuz long trips for us are too dangerous, and wasteful of fuel for us to undertake… We’ve regressed 800 years in nine months. Really sit back and think about that. Honestly, it’s kind of neat, and also horrifying at the same time. How fragile our society was.

  Ollie and Melissa got things in their place just so, and Ollie finished the chicken coops (coopi? Is that the plural for coop? Not a word I use a lot Mr. Journal…) and started to assess what we would be needing for fences for crops, and any cattle we’d be acquiring down the line. Ollie also did some pretty clever measuring of our needs for a campus perimeter fence. He tied a length of rope between his feet, and each stride he took was a set measurement. He counted his paces, and at the end, he had a near perfect number of feet and yards for the fences. Melissa covered him in the event they were jumped.

  He felt that fencing the cattle into a small area was stupid, as they could easily eat all the grass on campus that we would need to mow anyway, and why build a fence for the cattle, then another fence for the zombies, then another fence for the crops? One perimeter fence, then perhaps a barbed wire fence around the crops to keep the cows out of the field.

  Fart smella that Ollie.

  Everyone hit the rack early, and we woke up with the sun at about six am to start a long day of house clearing.

  There’s a small gathering of streets off of Route 18 that’s somewhat separate from the mass of downtown. If you were look at the layout of those streets on paper, there’s a central street called Hickory Road. Off of Hickory Road on both sides are loops that make it look like a 9 and a P back to back. Like a skeleton key? Mouse ears? That make sense? Anyway, the left side loop is called Adams Way, and the right side loop is called Harold Way. In total, there are seven houses on all three streets. They aren’t connected to anything else, other than Route 18, and there’s at least a few hundred yards of forest between the houses there, and anything else of note.

  It was an excellent chance for us to do a small house clearing run to work out the kinks, and see how Gavin fit in. As it turns out… it went excellent. Excellent…-ish. As excellent as anything involving me, the human unlucky anal pwnage rabbit’s foot can be.

  Gilbert’s Chevy, the plow, and the HRT were our three vehicles for the day. They gave us cargo capacity, good ground clearance, mobility, and versatility. Two houses on Hickory are near the main road, and are across from one another. We did quick loops of the roads off of Hickory, dropped a few walkers with melee weapons that were moving around free, and then returned to the two houses to start the dirty work. We really need to make a concentrated effort to conserve ammo when we can.

  Our basic system of making noise, waiting for a sufficient, intelligent response, then searching the exterior of the houses, then breaching and clearing the interior were still in effect. Gavin suggested in our prior discussions that we use the chainsaw method of clearing. During their time in Westfield when they were going door to door, apartment to apartment, they’d knock, and if they heard noise, or caught a whiff of that tell tale rotting odor, they’d bore a hole in the door or wall at head height with a chainsaw, and create a gun slot.

  They’d lure the undead inside the target home to the gun slot, and shoot them from the relative safety of the outside. Ideally this was done near a window so a spotter could see inside the house as it all went down. Once all visible zombies were cleared through the slot, they breached, and repeated the process at every interior door until the entire house was made safe. I swear I thought of this idea myself, but it’s been so long since I applied any grey matter to the idea of clearing houses I can’t remember. I’m also far too lazy to actually read this damn journal to find out if I wrote any awesome ideas down too.

  This is a slow, laborious process that wastes gasoline, but seems very safe to me. We will use this method when breaching a certain home or business is clearly unsafe. We didn’t need it today, which tells you roughly how our day went.

  Oh, as for a team; it was Gilbert, Gavin, Patty, Abby, and myself. Gilbert provided cover fire from the roof of the HRT, while Patty and Abby cleared left, and Gavin and I cleared right. I felt comfortable letting the girls work as a team, and I wanted to personally gauge Gavin’s abilities, attitude, and overall reaction to stress. He may be a good shot, but taking a shot at a hundred yards is a fucking shitload different than standing toe to motherfucking toe with a tango. (nice rhyme. Masturbatory high five)

  Gavin and I cleared four of the seven houses. Wanna know why we cleared more houses than Team Vagina?

  Girls. Take. Everything. Gavin and I cleared our four houses fast and dirty, and then came back through a second time to gather our spoils.

  Opinion on Gavin: He’s green in terms of combat experience, but he’s a veteran in clearing houses. I can see that it bothers him to shoot people, which is reassuring I guess, and he doesn’t seem like, fucked up by it. I think he’s just weirded out by it. His nerves are good, his tactical sense is good, and when we’re in the shit, he seems on point. I am comforted by his current skill level, and I am excited for his potential.

  The AAR for today was as such: fourteen dead zombies in houses (shot by us), three dead bodies (not undead, just regular old school vanilla dead), multiple dead pets, and I think we dropped four or five walkers on the streets during the whole day. Gilbert noted that almost all the walkers were dressed warmly. I.E heavier pants, and winter jackets.

  Put that together yet? That means those people survived at least until warm weather hit. I’m guessing they made it until at least September, and possible even into a month or two ago. There’s no way of telling. Gilbert said most of them had bite wounds, so my guess is that they were surviving, and either had their sanctuary violated, or got bitten while out scavenging like we are now. No matter how you slice it, it likely means there were survivors in this area for a few months after “that day.”

  Encouraging? Frightening?

  None of our kills were done in any real danger. Most of the shots were taken through windows, or through closed doors with the Mossberg, or we beat the undead to death with a halligan or melee weapon. The girls had a similar experience in their three houses. No injuries, no wasted ammo, and really no drama. All in all awesome.

  As for loot, it was a pretty dry hole for food. Most of the houses had been stripped bare, especially the ones with the dead bodies inside. Starvation? Suicide? No idea. I think we yielded a grand total of maybe 20 cans of food, and a few various boxes of pasta, cereal etc. Really a swing and a miss for food.

  Other supplies however were a great haul. Lots of hygiene products, toilet paper etc, as well as a few handguns, and a few rifles and shotguns. Ammunition was reasonable, clean and dry, and in usable calibers, which was nice. I’m still waiting on finding that mythical guy in town with the reloading setup. I know he’s out there… It’d be nice to get that process up and running. I haven’t done any reloading since I was a kid in my dad’s shed, but I think I can figure it out in a hurry if I had to.

  We siphoned gasoline out of the car gas tanks in the neighborhood, and found some extra gas cans, amazingly all full. We actually had to send Abby back in one of the trucks to pick up empty fuel cans so we could bring it all back. All told, I think the final tally was almost 70 gallons of gas. No new generators, but we did find a nice small woodstove. It’ll go perfect in a small building on campus, or as a second woodstove in the upper floor of a Hall. Three of us were able to load it into one of the trucks by hand, which tells you how small it was. The same house had tons of bricks and concrete bl
ocks as well as pile of dry bags of cement which will come in handy for sure down the line.

  Tools, a new axe, another chainsaw, and a slew of other items that might be useful eventually, but not so awesome that I feel like typing them all out. I’m sure I’m forgetting something.

  Other than the fact that we found almost no food considering how much real estate we cleared, today was an overwhelming success. No injuries, little waste, good experience, and overall, everyone came home with a positive attitude.

  Chalking today up as a big win.

  As for tomorrow… Well I know of one more fairly large cul de sac that’s isolated on this side of town that’s another beta test of our group before we get into more congested areas where we’ll need to be mistake free, and 100% dialed in.

  The cul de sac has six houses on it, and they’re all pretty large and old. There’s this old Victorian home that belonged to the Mayorga family. The mother died years ago, and I know the son Walter from around town. He was one of the resident kooks everyone gave a wide berth to. I bet the inside of that dilapidated old house is a wreck. They were probably hoarders, and I bet anything there are like 100 dead cats inside. That or a shitload of guns. Walter was convinced the revolution was just around the corner. Capital W Weirdo.

  We’ll be hitting that neighborhood tomorrow, and I think for chuckles, we’ll hit the Victorian first. See how many screws that family had loose.

  As my new friend Hector would say, adios, mi amigo!

  -Adrian

  April 6th

  At first I was like wtf?

  And then I lol’d.

  Walter Mayorga was absolutely bat shit crazy. Fuck showing up a sandwich short, he showed up to the fucking picnic with no pik-a-nik basket. Not only was he not the sharpest tool in the shed, he prolly tried to hammer in nails with marshmellows. Wow. Fucking crazy.

  I am very, very happy we didn’t run into him before he died, because his home was a goddamn charnel house. His neighborhood was covered with the undead. I drove point in the plow truck and just on the initial drive through the loop I hit at least twenty undead. We wound up dragging them back to the main road where we set up a firing line using the trucks as support. All told our body count was 63 undead just on the cul de sac. Now as far as Walt’s house... Wow.

  Let me set the scene for you.

  The cul de sac is a straight road in, with the loop at the end. Walt’s grey, piece of shit Victorian was set in the far left hand end of the loop. There were three houses in the loop, and three houses along the straight shot in. Around Walt’s home standing almost 7 feet high (in places) was the remnant of a very sturdy stockade fence. The fence had been smashed apart in what Gilbert supposed was a series of small explosions. He was thinking gas bomb, or perhaps something like a stick of low grade dynamite.

  Parked in his driveway was his trademark giant fucking yellow pickup truck, covered in old bloodstains and chunks of gore. The shit was caked on so thick and brown it had lasted through all the snow melt and rain we’ve had. Three of his tires were punctured, but he had runflats, so the vehicle still moved. On the ground in every direction for a solid fifty yards were bodies. It took me the better part of an hour to push the bodies off the road so we could work safely to give you an idea of how thick it was.

  Most, as in 90% of the bodies in the cul de sac were decapitated by head shots, or had clear gunshot trauma to the nugget. Pretty obvious to all of us that these zombies had been put down by a shooter, and over time, the shooter had continued to draw them in, eventually surrounding himself with far too many to deal with effectively.

  We honked, yelled, and cleared the interior of Walt’s fenced in yard using extra caution. On one side of his yard there was the burnt out frame of what looked to be a garage, or large workshop. The concrete floor was scorched black as oil in one corner, and we guessed there was some kind of explosion. Later on Abby pointed out there was a giant gas cylinder end down, impaling through a car across the street. The shit was like the Saturday morning ACME Warner Brothers Wile E Coyote bullshit. I was waiting for Walt to come out with a burnt cigar in his mouth and his face covered in black scorch marks, while the “waaa waaa waaa” music played in the background.

  We cleared the exterior for danger, set up a perimeter, and Gavin and I breached the home. We entered moving inches at a time, looking for anything dangerous that might blow us up. I desperately wanted silly string to check for tripwires, but in the post apocalyptic environment, silly string’s availability has dropped dramatically.

  What we found inside shocked us. For starters, directly inside the door, sitting in the middle of the foyer next to the grand staircase of the old Victorian was poor old fucked up Walt, sitting in an old ass wheelchair. It was one of the old wooden ones with the creepy high back. His left leg was rotted straight off at the ankle, he smelled like fresh gross asshole, he was dead as disco, and he was fixing to sit up and bite us. Gavin walked in he froze solid, mouthed a “what the fuck?” at me, and dropped the butt of the M4 right through ole Walt’s temple. Walt went limp right off, crumbled out of the wheelchair and onto the floor with a wet thud, and our town was down one village idiot.

  Fortunately, I am still here, carrying the torch.

  Walt’s body was still very swollen from decaying, which reminded me of when a body is still fresh. You see, when we rot, there’s a period where we bloat and get all Michelin man meets Freddy Krueger. It’s horrid. After awhile though, the gas dissipates, and we shrink back down to a fairly normal size. Walt must've died real slow from gangrene and managed to rot before he died. Walt couldn’t have been dead more than a week or two at most.

  Here’s the real kicker; Gavin and I started to clear the interior of the house, and almost every window on the first floor had Twizzlers taped together with black electrical tape forming some weird ass rope that connected them all together. The rope was stuck into the ends of rotting hot dogs, like a fuse might be stuck into the end of a stick of dynamite.

  I think that poor delusional fuck thought hot dogs were dynamite, and the Twizzlers were det cord. How detached from reality do you need to be to make that fucking mistake? Nontheless, I am not detached from reality, and we backed out nice and slow, and I went in solo to clear the house for legitimate booby traps. After seeing the damage done to the fence outside, I didn’t want to run the risk that ole Walt actually had a real stick of TNT mixed in somewhere and we’d trip it.

  It took me almost two hours to check every door, every shelf, every step, every drawer, and every knick knack to make sure it was all clear. Once I was confident we were good to go, the place was like Walmart for the apocalypse. I cannot overstate the seriousness of that statement. Walt must’ve had a serious, serious thing about the end of the world, or the impending disaster where food and goods would be unavailable. His house was packed to the gills with awesome shit. In fact, he had so much awesome shit we needed to fetch our other truck to get it out in one day.

  For starters, he had food. Lots of food. Good food. Flats and flats of canned goods, as well as prepackaged stuff like ramen, cups of noodles, boxes of pasta, flour, freeze dried fruit, bags and bags of beef jerky, and he even had three cases of MREs packed away in a corner of his basement. Mind you, he’d eaten a lot already, and there was a pile of garbage six feet deep in his backyard outside his kitchen window to prove it, but there was still so much food left. All of the sweets he had were gone though, which was a real bummer. Judging by the plastic wrappings piled up and blown all over his yard, the man had a long term, committed relationship with Hostess cupcakes.

  As for other shit.. What’s the phrase I’m looking for? Oh yeah. OPRAH RICH. He had a locked gun case filled with good shit. I had to get the key out of his corpse’s pants pocket though, which was nasty work, but it was well worth it in the end. Anyhoo. Muzzle loaders, rifles, pistols, shotguns, you name it. He had 22 weapons in all, and at least 100 rounds of ammunition or more for each weapon. The man had a fetish for .270 Win. He had 750 r
ounds or so of it. One of the guns was a bit of a rarity too, an old Enfield .303 rifle. That is an old, and pretty rare gun in these parts. I wonder if it was an heirloom? Grampa’s old gun? He had 80 rounds for it, which is amusing as all hell to me. The rest of the guns were mid to low grade quality. Nothing I was particularly bonered over.

  Most of the guns were lever or bolt action, with pumps on the shotguns. His handguns were primarily revolvers, almost all of which were stainless steel, and two of them had pearl inlays on the grips. I don’t know if this motherfucker thought he was General Patton or he was compensating for a very tiny penis or what, but he gets points on style from me. I need to match the pearl handled six shooters up with some holsters here so I can pretend to be a flashy cowboy for Halloween next year.

  He had an ammunition reloading bench, and reloading supplies to last… a long time. I haven’t gone through it all yet, but Gilbert and I eyeballed what looked to be something like a thousand rounds or more of supplies. Gilbert says he can run the reloading gear, and show me how to do it again as well, so that’s a huge weight off our shoulders. It won’t last forever, but knowing we’ve got the gear now means if we find more of the supplies, we’ve got a leg up. Gilbert seemed enthused to work a reloading bench into his design for our new armory in the basement of Hall E.

  Tools, medicine, water, skin care items, Purell, bleach, detergent, Listerine, condoms, Jesus he had it ALL. The true score though, came in the form of a few very awesome barrels in the basement with the reloading shit. He had barrels and barrels of gas and diesel. I think it was 16 barrels of gas, and 5 barrels of diesel or something like that. He had the barrels labeled with when they were filled, where they were filled, and what grade of fuel it was. Half of the barrels were labeled premium grade, so I wonder if they’ll last longer for us because they are higher octane, and still sealed so the air and moisture hasn’t gotten at it. Dunno for sure. It’ll get used eventually.