And man when it let up I let loose. I don’t think I’ve ever sworn that much. I absolutely ripped skulls off and made fresh assholes. I wanted to know how the fuck, what the fuck, who the fuck, and who I had to assfuck dry to make that never happen again. I scared the living shit out of those people, especially the new folks. I don’t think they’ve ever seen me mad, and man Mr. Journal... I haven’t been that mad in sometime.
Everyone apologized for their part in the debacle, and after fifteen minutes of being pissed and scared shitless, I went back to the salon with a frightened Mallory, and Abby and Angela went back to clearing the what, three houses left?
Fuck. We could’ve had a total party wipe there. Dwayne, Renee and Chris could’ve easily died at the door, and I was less than a foot from taking an accidental 5.56 round to the fucking gourd. Fuck. Fuck fuckity fuck fuck.
Amateur hour bullshit right there. Abby talked to me on the ride home in the HRT and took the blame for everything. I let her have it. The blame that is. If she thinks what happened today was her mistake I’m fine with that. Next time, she will NOT ALLOW something like this to happen. It may be unfair of me to make her eat the guilt for almost letting us get killed, but that kind of learning experience is far more valuable to us than keeping her feelings slightly more intact. Besides, it’s not like she’d listen to me telling her that, “It’s okay, it wasn’t your fault.”
She’d still feel responsible one way or the other. This way, she’ll try harder, and her extra vigilance is an asset to us. Hard lesson.
The rest of the houses on that road were cleared with far less fanfare. Abby was telling me on the ride home they encountered four more undead amongst those homes, and while it was a little dicey with the new folks, they did well, and no one was hurt. Actually that’s not fully true. Dwayne wound up getting a massive splinter in his right palm when they breached a door. I guess they pried it in with a halligan, and a shard of wood was sticking out. He was walking out of the house and caught it just right and bam! The shard was at least three inches in when it broke off. Renee wound up removing it in the HRT with the first aid shit. I watched her for a bit, and I am now thinking she needs to spend more time with Doc Lindsey. She’s got a knack for first aid and I think she might enjoy it. Fingers are crossed Dwayne doesn't get an infection.
The other houses had another stove we could remove, as well as a few more rifles, shotguns, and handguns. Fortunately, one of the gun safes was wide fucking open for us, so that saves Martin a smidge of work at a later date. We also yanked out a few empty drums in a backyard we can clean and retask for fuel storage, and there was a fair amount of canned food and paper supplies, etc. One thing that was kind of neat we found was a fisherman’s wet dream. One of the homes had a guy who was an avid fisherman, and he had multiple rods, reels, flies, etc. A ton of good fishing shit for us to put to good use on Auburn Lake.
So despite our near death bullshit, it was a hugely successful day. Training for a few new folks went well enough, we found several wood stoves, we got some food, toilet paper, guns, ammunition, and most importantly for me personally, we got Mallory two salon chairs, and two salon sinks.
We didn’t make it back to campus until about seven at night, so we rolled in right as dinner was being wrapped up. It’s sort of weird now because we’re breaking dinner service up into multiple places. For the longest time we were all eating together, which brought us much closer, but now there’s no place to do it other than the cafeteria, and logistically, that doesn’t make much sense. It isn’t powered so cooking there is pretty much not possible, and that means we’d have to transport the food, and that’s a huge pain in the ass.
We’ve broken up into groups eating at Hall B with Ollie and Melissa, a second group eating at Hall A, and a third group eating at the Jones Road Farm with Lindsey and little Andrea. Melissa has organized the dinners into a rotating schedule, so there’s one dinner at 4:30, one at 5:30, and a final late dinner at 7pm, give or take. It’s working, but it feels weird that we’re all eating at different times in different places.
We managed to scrape up the last remnants of the 7pm dinner in Hall A, so thankfully, there were no deaths due to starvation today.
While we were out, the wall crew managed to throw about 75 feet of barricade up. They also managed an injury free day, which is more than we can boast. With such a productive day under our collective belts, we have elected to plan a trip to the police station tomorrow while a follow up crew heads back to get those woodstoves, and crack that gun safe so we can get to the innards.
The day after, if tomorrow goes well and our plan for the police station pans out, we’ll actually go to the damn police station, and get the repeater tower, as well as anything that isn’t nailed down that we think we can make use of.
Tomorrow we’ve also got to figure out where exactly we can put Mallory’s salon. She needs plumbing for the sinks, and we really don’t have the patience or time to run pipes to a room without plumbing. This will require some serious thought to be done relatively easily.
Looking at the bright side though, I am pretty sure I have secured my place with Mallory as, “Most awesomest man she’s ever slept with.”
It’s not all bad I guess.
-Adrian
July 28th
Goddamn it Mr. Journal. I’m starting to feel the walls close in on me here. I’ve got a sinking suspicion luck has gone south on me, and I’m running on skill, and planning, which means I’m fucking royally bent. If anything, I need a little luck to make it through all this.
We have more injured.
Yesterday we split up into several groups. Martin and Angela broke off with a labor team and went outside the wall back to the salon road to remove the woodstoves that we found, and to cut open that gun safe to get inside it. While they were out and about frolicking and whatnot. The brain trust of myself, Hector, Mike, Patty and Abby made the plan to hit the municipal station to take down the repeater tower so it could be relocated to MGR. While we were doing that, another very small group of relatively handy people, consisting mostly of Blake, worked with Mallory and got her salon installed in the administration building near Hall A and the admissions office.
That was our, “Day off.”
You believe that shit? Unreal how much crap goes into the fucking life we live now. Otis sits around and does fuck all each and every day, and I swear even he looks tired of this shit. Speaking of Otis, he’s well, and we’ve seen a smattering of cats and kittens running about on the fringes of campus lately. There’s been some talk of taking some in as pets, but we need to make sure we are not overrun by cats. Haven’t heard any dogs lately either, other than when we are downtown.
Mallory’s salon is fully installed in the office area right next to the old Nurse’s station which is where Doc Lindsey has set up her business. I’d always secretly envisioned Lisa setting up a medical treatment area there, but I’ll take what I can get. We still need to figure out a plan to go back to Westfield to hit the clinic Mike and Lisa had set up to get all that gear back here. It’s either that, or we hike up our skirts and clear the clinic here and get it ready for regular use for x-rays and that shit. Might need to do both.
Crossing T’s and dotting I’s and all.
Martin, Angela and the remainder of their team removed not three but four woodstoves out of the homes on that road, which is one more than we saw on our first pass through. All of them came out relatively easily. The folks also managed to remove all the brick flooring and insulation for the walls, as well as the vent pipes and all that shit. We’ve got to sort out where they’re going and who is going to install them, but I think we’ll figure it out. It’s nice to have extra resources. It’s weird. It’s like having one less thing to worry about.
That’s a strange fucking concept.
Martin was able to get the safe open with minimal torch use. I’m starting to think he’s used that torch for mildly illegal activities in the past. He knew just how to access the safe i
n a hurry according to Angela. I am not complaining, let me be clear about this. Having a safecracker nearby seems like an asset. Inside the safe I guess they found three antique shotguns, two handguns (both Glocks), a handful of mags for the Glocks, a few boxes of shotgun shells, and a couple hundred rounds of ammo for the pistols. Not what I’d hoped for, but still a nice present to unwrap in July.
The brain trust came up with an actionable plan to remove the repeater tower from the municipal complex to be executed today, which was exactly what happened. I won’t lay out the plan. It’s too much fucking writing and I’m tired. I will however, go over what happened. Besides, none of our goddamn plans survive first contact anyway. There’s always some unknown variable. I chalk that up to that little bitch Fairy.
Because we knew we were going to be down there doing labor for some time pretty well exposed, we had to bring a minimum of two groups of people. We wanted one group to focus on removing the tower, and the other group to set up a perimeter, and to provide security for the first team. Martin and Blake were our team leaders for the tower, which is noteworthy because this marked the first time Blake has left campus since little Adrian was born. They borrowed Dwayne, Hector, Chad and Alex for muscle.
Patty, Abby, Angela, Mike, Myself, and Chris provided the perimeter security force. We weren’t sure how large the tower was precisely, so we brought the semi truck down as well as both humvees and the HRT to clear the road as we went. The road down to the station was lightly littered with a few random walkers, but when we made the turn onto the road the municipal complex was on, we knew something was up. There were at least six or seven undead clustered near the old ambulance that was parked out front, and when we pulled in the parking lot to the rear, we encountered another dozen undead milling about, evidently waiting for us.
I smashed through the bulk of them in the HRT at the lead, and parked in a blocking position around the back of the building so we couldn’t be easily overrun like the time Charles busted his arm. Man that brings back memories. Ha. Charles forgetting he had a fucking handgun and deciding he was gonna Jimmy SupaFly Snooka the entire crowd of undead to death. Gotta admire brute force ignorance.
Mike and Hector parked the humvees surrounding the building, and we drove the semi straight to the back where we could load the tower once it was down. The repeater tower here in town is fairly small. Now that we’ve gotten it down, it’s maybe thirty feet tall. Really thin too. It was mounted on the roof of the station, and once we had exited the vehicles, and dealt with the threat posed by the undead in the parking lot, the second team dismounted, threw some ladders on the side of the building, and headed up to the roof.
While it was quiet, Abby and I cleared the inside of the building again, and noticed immediately it had been ransacked. Well, the fire station side had been hit, but the police station side was still fine. For whatever reason the keycard still worked, which means it’s getting power from somewhere, but despite our best efforts, we couldn’t tell where the juice was coming from. Some kind of emergency battery maybe?
We grabbed some extra shit we’d left behind before, but the majority of it was not worth mentioning. Notepads. Legal books. Pamphlets. Blah.
Things got weird and went towards the drain when we left the building. On our exit Martin and Blake had the tower unattached from its moorings on the roof. From what I’ve gathered, there were four bolts per leg of the tower, and four legs, and once undone the tower was just sitting on the blocks and connected to the building only by the wiring/cabling that ran into the station.
Not one second after we were clear of the door, a gust of wind picked up, and tossed the tower to the side, toppling it right over the side of the building, and right onto poor fucking Chris. The tower was a heavy steel structure, and had to have weighed a minimum of 500 pounds, if it weighed an ounce. He dodged fairly effectively, but went the wrong way. His left arm was clipped somehow as the tower came down, and it snapped like a fucking twig. He went down in a screaming mess as the tower rolled over him, and pinned him to the grass. Luckily he wasn’t crushed in the process.
Abby and I ran to render aid as everyone sort of took it all in. When we checked him to make sure he wasn’t being crushed, we yanked his ass out from under the tipped over tower, and dragged him to the HRT, screaming the whole time. Abby and I popped the back door open, and that’s when we heard gunfire start popping off from the front of the station. Now I knew every single person on the perimeter had either ARs or M4s, and the initial gunshot I heard was NOT a 5.56 rifle. It was throaty, and fucking clearly something heavy like a bolt action hunting rifle.
It was two seconds tops before the relative silence and shock of being fired on was ripped apart by our team. Mike and Patty were on the other side of the building, and they opened the fuck up on something. After a few seconds of Abby and I trying to calm Chris down, Mike came over the comms and said we were taking fire from a vehicle that had pulled up at the end of the street. Immediately Abby and I told Chris to deal with his arm for a minute, and we beat feet to the corner of the building to join the fight.
Maybe a hundred and fifty yards down the street at the end away from Main there were two station wagons. They were clearly Mercedes which struck me as odd initially, but now that I think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Some Mercedes are diesel. I bet those were.
Anyway, leaning over the hood of both vehicles were two shooters, and they were slowly firing at the humvee Mike and Patty were taking cover behind. Abby and I didn’t even say a word, we just dropped into firing positions, and starting laying down suppressing fire into the cars. My first shots sailed low and blew out the tire of one wagon, but Abby’s were spot the fuck on. I watched the shooter on the wagon on the left go over backwards as one of her shots hit him in the head or chest. As soon as that asshole went down the remainder of our people switched to the other wagon, and with all that incoming fire the other shooter got into the vehicle, and made it out pronto. I have no idea how he managed to escape being shot into swiss cheese, but some crazy shit happens in firefights. Both wagons drove away.
We didn’t pursue. No fucking clue who that was yet. We checked the body in the road when we left after, and it was a Caucasian male, maybe 30 or 35, scraggly, sparse beard and fairly thin. He had a .45-70 lever action rifle, and about thirty rounds in his pockets to go with it. He had no body armor, and was dressed in fatigue pants, and a t-shirt. We also found a fresh pool of blood near where the other car was parked, and that told me we’d hit the other prick too. Go us.
Fire superiority motherfucker. Can’t dodge every fucking raindrop.
We are cutting it close with this shit. I have no idea who those people were, and if we are now dealing with hostile, mobile competition in town, then we’ve got to change tactics. I know I bitched about me being unlucky earlier, but in reality, we were wearing four leaf clovers big time to not catch lead in that firefight. How we didn’t catch a dead body befuddles me.
Chris had a bad break. Both bones in his forearm were snapped, and we put a splint on it, and got a painkiller into him until we got back to campus. Of course he had to wait while the first crew got the tower down from its half upside down location, and loaded into the semi. We also pulled the wiring, as well as the electronics inside the station that apparently boost the signal. I didn’t see what was happening, as we were extra vigilant for any kind of motion after the attack.
Hector said he could get it all hooked up at MGR within a day or two, and once we were sure we had everything, we rolled the hell out.
Doc Lindsey took good care of our goofy broken armed friend literally on arrival. We were surprised to see that while we were away, Ollie and his people had managed to get the gate up and installed. It was refreshing to see that there was no way for anything on the road to get across the bridge now. Ollie says he has an idea for additional structures, but he needs time to think it over.
Chris is in a cast now, and will be medicated for his pain for some time. Lindsey say
s the break was bad, and he’ll be a hurting unit especially while it’s warm and humid out. Dunno if she’s full of shit or not, but it seems like he’ll live, and that’s good. He’s a good kid.
So where do we go from here? We compared notes again tonight and there’s still no sign of anyone who has a guilty story as far as the Westfield fire is concerned. It blows. We’re a dead teenager heavy now, with no sign of the arsonist, or the potential murderer, assuming that Emily was killed and didn’t legitimately hang herself.
Frustrating.
After today’s downtown bullshit, we are not moving an inch tomorrow. Our wall is being worked on, and we are going to formulate a good plan to install the repeater on MGR so we can get that observation tower operational. I REALLY want eyes in the sky now that there are clearly some hostiles kicking about.
After that… well, we’ll have to see.
-Adrian
July 30th
Very much a busy set of days here on and off campus. I’ve got a lot of mundane detail to chronicle. Where to begin Mr. Journal?
Yesterday was a day of small fires that were fairly easy to put out, but irritating. Our first and largest issue was coming up with an executable plan to install the repeater tower on top of MGR. That took the majority of the day for those of us involved with that.
Ryan pulled me aside after that large meeting and made his huge plea to get more assistance on the hydroponics system in the gymnasium. He has such a good point too. We really need to hit the plumbing shop near Gilbert’s warehouse, but we’ve got other things to do first. MGR needs to get done, and the repeater tower must be installed and operational, and we’ve got to staff the damn place first. It just sucks that poor Ryan is taking it in the proverbial pants while we get our asses sorted out from our elbows on this.
Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 6): In the Arms of Family Page 15