Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 6): In the Arms of Family

by Philbrook, Chris

  Someone was at the generator, and was doing something to it. He couldn’t tell if they were fixing something, or just checking on it. He stood up and walked over to the gate that separated the machine from the rest of the basement. He could see a tall man walking around, holding a flashlight in one hand, and a small container in the other. He shook the container, emptying the contents out on the floor, and the side of the gently shaking generator.

  “Hey, who’s there?” Morgan asked the obscured figure in the darkness.

  Whoever it was froze, and spun the golden flashlight beam towards Morgan’s face. Morgan squinted in the brightness, and brought his hand up to shield his eyes. As he waved his hand up to protect his eyes, he caught a whiff of a familiar scent that set his hairs on end.

  Gasoline.

  “Hey man, what’re you doing awake?” The man holding the flashlight asked in a disarming voice. He dropped the container on the basement floor with an empty plastic bonk.

  “I heard the gate open, and was wondering who was down here. Hey your voice is familiar, who are y—?” Morgan’s question was left unfinished as a small pocket knife was driven up under his ribs, perforating his left lung. Morgan felt the stab as if it were a pinch, and a suddenly hot spot spreading out and running down his side. Breathing became very difficult immediately as his abdomen began to seep blood and air. He felt the man pull the knife out, and drive it into his stomach several times quickly, sending him to the cool concrete floor, with the already dark world of the basement spinning into a darker oblivion.

  “Sorry buster. Things to be done,” the man said with a smile as he fished a box of matches out of his pocket.

  *****

  Hector was sleeping in the room he shared with LaFrenz and James Halwitz, the two remaining male Guardsman that served with Mike prior to the end. The three men were close, and sharing a room together made them even more like brothers. When Hector opened his eyes with a start that night, he sat up abruptly, and looked to the heavy door that separated his converted classroom from the hall of the school. He saw a flicker of orange light through the tiny window, and leapt to his feet. That much light could only mean fire.

  “Guys get up, get your shit. Something’s wrong,” Hector hollered as he padded over to the door in his socks. He peered out the tall and narrow window to see what was casting the orange light, and his eyes widened in horror as he realized he was watching a river of flame run down the carpeted hall of the school. It looked as if the fire was flowing down the hall, orange tendrils licking upwards toward the smoke-obscured, tiled ceiling.

  “Santo Mierda,” Hector muttered under his breath. LaFrenz and James slammed into him to look out the window over his shoulder.

  “Fuck we gotta get that fire put out. This whole school will go up in flames if we don’t,” James said.

  “Let’s roll," LaFrenz said, and he grabbed the door handle. He gave it a mighty yank to open it, and nothing happened.

  “Que pasa?” Hector asked him urgently.

  LaFrenz tugged on the door once more, but it didn’t give a millimeter. “I don’t know dude, it’s fucking locked. Who has the fucking keys to these doors? What the shit man?” LaFrenz was almost in a panic. Dying in a fire was not the way he wanted to go.

  The three men stopped suddenly, exchanged frightful looks with each other, and realized they were trapped in a burning building.

  “Fuck,” James said.

  Nothing else needed to be said.

  *****

  Mary, the lone female who served on the Westfield security force, was doing her shift on the roof of the school that night when she smelled the odor of something burning wafting up through the vents she was sitting near.

  She jumped out of her lawn chair and walked over to the mushroom shaped aluminum baffling that protected the ducting from rain. The young lady with the tightly pulled back dark hair leaned over and inhaled just as a pitch black belch of smoke came out of the vent, filling her lungs with the poisonous fumes. She gagged and began to cough uncontrollably, her eyes immediately watering up. She took a few stumbling steps backward, and tripped on a small pipe.

  Mary went down like a log, and smashed the back of her neck on the raised frame of a skylight, sending her straight into the arms of unconsciousness. Dark smoke began to come out of the cracked glass above her head.

  *****

  Mike was sitting in the cafeteria talking to Lisa that night when it all began. The two elder leaders were deeply embroiled in a conversation about how exactly Mike would approach Adrian the following day about taking some of the Westfield folks in at his increasingly fortified and desirable school. Since that night of discussion Mike had continued to call Adrian’s private school a “bastion” and the name had stuck for the two of them. They’d stopped calling it ALPA entirely, and were now referring to it consistently as Bastion.

  Neither knew quite why the name fit, or why they were using it exclusively as a name for the school, but it rolled off the tongue easily, and felt very right for the both of them.

  “I’m telling you, as long as we can prove to him and his folks that we can feed ourselves if we move there, then he’ll be all for it. Just the labor alone we provide will be worth it. Not to mention the extra guns we’ll be putting into protecting the place, and your medical skills and equipment at the clinic,” Mike said softly to her in the candle lit room.

  Lisa thought about his statement, and just as she went to respond, her nose wrinkled. She turned slightly, and took a deep sniff, testing the air. She looked back to Mike quickly, and asked “Is that smoke? Can you smell smoke?”

  Mike sniffed the air as well and immediately stood up, alarmed. “Get everyone awake. There’s a fire somewhere in the building.”

  Both leaders bolted for the cafeteria exit. They knew instinctively they had little time to get people awake before the smoke started taking its toll in human life.

  Not long after that the dead would begin to take their pound of flesh as well.

  *****

  Mallory’s dream of dancing in a nightclub to a heavy rock beat was stopped with an abrupt cough. The smoke machine in her dream was churning out plumes of pure white party fun, but when she took a deep inhale of it, the chemical fume was strong enough to shake her out of the grinding music running in her mind. She sat up on her small bed in the classroom she’d turned into a hair salon and realized the smoke in her dream wasn’t entirely in her head.

  Clinging to the ceiling of her room was a dark, noxious cloud of smoke. Mallory sat up as fast as she could, slipped her flip flops on her tiny feet and grabbed the maglite her boyfriend Adrian had given her. She thumbed the rubber button and pointed the powerful white beam at the bottom of the steel classroom door. The black smoke was coming under it like a thin ribbon of soot that crept up the face of the door, obscuring the tall, narrow window.

  “Holy shit. We’re on fire,” Mallory muttered. She was alone in the small classroom, and normally she enjoyed the privacy, but suddenly she wished she had someone with her. She wished she had Adrian there. He’d know what to do. He always knew what to do.

  Mallory scanned the room with the flashlight as she noticed the warmth coming from the other side of the door. It was as if the rectangular door had been transformed into a radiator, and the room into an oven. She suddenly felt like a fish baking. Mallory leapt up and snagged the large duffel bag she’d appropriated from one of the stores downtown after the end of the world, and began to stuff all her belongings into it. She grabbed clothing, her personal effects, and the handgun she’d learned how to use just recently.

  Her backpack was right nearby, and into that she put all her hair cutting supplies. Inside it she put shears, trimmers, cords, and various bottles of the ever dwindling supply of chemicals that she used to look good. Once all of the most important possessions were safely packed away, she went to the window of the classroom, and hefted the steel chair she had her “customers” sit in. With a grunt and a heave she sent it straight
through the first floor window with a tremendous crash.

  She was not expecting the sudden change to the environment. The fire on the other side of the door ate the fresh oxygen hungrily from the space at the floor, and she heard it roar in anger. It was as if she’d opened the cage of an evil beast right behind her, and it was nipping at her heels. Mallory tossed the two bags out of the window as far as she could, and cleared the broken glass from the frame with a broom as the smoke just a few thin inches above her head started to pour out of the broken window. She looked back over her shoulder one time at the room that gave her purpose for so long, and climbed out, jumping the five feet to the ground. She rolled adeptly, and came up on her feet in the damp grass.

  Mallory survived once more.

  *****

  Mike moved in a crouch on the tiled floor of the school hallway, slowly waddling under the thick black smoke clinging like evil smog to the ceiling. The Army veteran looked up at the nebulous smoke and his blood ran cold, despite the heat. It looked like brimstone straight from Hell. He made his way to the door of a classroom that was nearest the stairs that led down to the basement, where the smoke was clearly coming from. The combat veteran reached up and grabbed the metal handle of the door, and gave it a twist. Thankfully it was cool to the touch, and turned easily.

  “Everyone inside needs to get the fuck ou—!” Mike was bowled over as the heavy metal door to the room formally used for teaching was shoved open into his chest. He fell on his ass and skidded a few feet backwards, nearly hitting his head on the row of lockers against the opposite wall.

  The door of the room was brushed open as multiple staggering dead people pressed their way out into the dark hall. They were clearly gone to Mike. All five figures were walking fully upright, entirely oblivious to the fact that they were enshrouded by pitch black smoke from the shoulders up. There was no way a living being could survive even a single breath of that filth without coughing and gagging.

  Mike pushed himself down the hallway on his back using the heels of his combat boots. As he skidded on the tile he reached down and drew his M9 handgun from his hip, and started to fire up into the smoke at where he thought the heads of the walking dead would be. The gunfire was incredibly loud, and the bangs echoed painfully up and down the passage. His third shot hit home in the black smoke, dropping one of the women in the crowd. As she fell to her knees and finally her face, Mike realized all the figures were women. That suddenly made sense. That room was normally filled with the women who worked in the kitchen.

  “Goddamn it!” Mike blurted as he snapped off more 9mm rounds into the smoke, dropping two more of the undead women. These were people he knew. People he cared about. Killing undead strangers was easy. Killing your friends was not. Mike emptied the pistol's magazine quickly, sending whistling bullets into the air, finally finding the skulls of his targets, and bringing the threat to a quick end.

  He’d just put down five of his friends, and before the night was over, he would have to put down more. Mike changed the magazine in his pistol, and got to his feet, keeping his head under the poisonous cloud above.

  *****

  The tall man walked around the exterior of the school carrying an armload of chain and a large padlock. He couldn’t find quite enough chain to lock all the exterior doors, but he knew if he could lock just one, it would mean at least ten people would die from the fumes and smoke. Ten more dead would be just the right death total for what he needed to achieve tonight.

  He tucked his flashlight under his armpit as he approached the double doors of the exit closest to the hall where the most people lived. They’d immediately run for that exit, and it would cost them their lives. To escape from there, they would need to cut across the entire first floor hall to the next entrance, which he’d already sprayed with gasoline, and set aflame.

  With his flashlight wobbling he wrapped the thick chain around the door handles several times, and clicked the padlock closed, damning the people he claimed as friends to a fiery, dark death.

  He hummed happily as he walked away, trying to find the perfect spot to blend in with whoever actually managed to escape the fire he’d set. The only way part two of his plan could succeed was if he managed to be believable as a survivor. There was another school he had to attend to soon.

  *****

  Lisa ran as fast as she could up the stairs. Her legs pumped like pistons propelling her up the steps to where most of the people living at the school were. They’d set up the second floor as primarily living quarters, and she knew the smoke would rise quickly from wherever it was coming from. She didn’t have much time to play around with, especially as she watching the thick black smoke curl up the ceiling like living black oil.

  As she reached the upper steps and rounded the corner, the heat of the fire started to redden the skin on her face. It hurt. Lisa winced in discomfort and stopped, ripping the sleeve of her shirt off and tying it across her mouth. The air here wasn’t fit for breathing. With her head lowered, she walked through the double doors and into the hallway.

  Flames licked all the way up to the ceiling from the center of the industrial carpet in the center of the passage. The heat was intense, and her nose caught the chemical odor of gasoline, or lighter fluid. She knew instantly that the fire was set, and not an accident. She cursed under her breath as she slid along the wall, trying to keep as far from the deathly flames as possible. Her backside was getting hotter and hotter with every passing second.

  Looking at the floor ahead while staying low kept Lisa off balance something fierce. As she almost lost her balance and plunged into the swath of flame running the length of the hall she noticed a dead body lying in the fire, smoldering and catching on fire. Just as her emotions kicked in and she realized it was the old teacher Vicky Brown, the body moved, and began to sit up. Lisa froze.

  Vicky’s dead body was burning up. Her clothing had caught fire, and she was enveloped in orange tipped flames, burning her flesh into a vomit inducing stench. Lisa held her stomach in check as she watched Vicky’s pale white eyes burst from the heat. Vicky’s body moved forward blindly, reaching out, trying to find where Lisa was standing.

  Lisa flattened herself against the wall and started to back away. Vicky’s unguided animosity moved her step after step directly through the center of the fires, causing her flesh to crisp and tighten, making her legs stiffen. Lisa stifled a heave in her stomach, and continued to back away until she felt the wall give away, and she slid into the recess of a classroom door. Vicky’s aimless body continued past her and down the hall towards the double doors. Lisa shook her head, and went in the opposite direction twice as fast as before. Now her only thought was to escape.

  As she ran down the hall the overwhelming heat of the fires to her side became so intense her clothing started to catch fire. Lisa was entirely unaware that the hair on her arm was burning from the heat as well. Her survival instincts were entirely in control, and her pain was a lost thought behind the need for escape. She reached the end of the long hallway straight from hell and burst through the set of doors at the end, and started down the stairs into the darkness towards the school exit.

  The difference in temperature combined with the relative safety of the dark hallway allowed her mind to clear. She machine gunned her feet down the stairs towards the bottom as the adrenaline and endorphins wore off. She started to feel the intense, growing pain in her arm. Her medically trained mind kicked in, and she started to assess the damage to her body, and realized she’d be in a lot of pain for a very long time.

  She was wrong.

  Lisa hit the bottom floor going what felt like a hundred miles an hour. Her momentum carried her straight into a crowd of people who had survived the upper floor, bowling them over. She herself went down in a heap on top of their cluttered bodies, sending mind numbing jolts of pain up her arm and side. She thought she’d torn some blistered skin free, and that’d complicate her healing she thought to herself.

  Suddenly, she realized
that the people she’d knocked over were silent.

  Dead silent.

  Lisa let loose a scream as they rolled over, and turned towards her with fierce, dead white eyes. She had no choice. Die here, smothered by the hungry dead, or attempt an escape to a flame filled hallway, with the burning dead upstairs.

  There was no choice left to make as she felt teeth sink into her ankle and rip a piece of her flesh free. She was doomed in every possible way now.

  *****

  Mike rested on his back in the cool, damp grass outside the school, chest heaving in an attempt to get fresh oxygen into his lungs. He had just barely escaped the front entryway of the school as a burst of flame came down the hallway. He had no idea where it came from, but his suspicion led him to believe someone had planted accelerants. Schools were designed to be resistant to fires, and the school that Mike watched burn out of control in front of him was not fighting back in the least.

  Something was amiss.

  Smashing into the ground ten yards away one after another were LaFrenz, Hector, and James, his three remaining soldiers. As they got to their feet, James remained, clutching at his leg and grunting in pain. The two other men went to him, and got him on one leg upright. They saw Mike and headed towards him, helping James hobble along. As they got closer Mike could see his foot sat at the end of his leg skewed in a strange direction, at a strange angle. Mike knew it was dislocated or broken. Possibly both.