Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 5): Wrath

by Chris Philbrook

  We told them we’d come back and get them tomorrow at about 3pm for the dinner. When they arrive here on campus, we’ll present them with the SUV we promised them for helping us. That way, they can drive themselves home.

  Speaking of strange and ironic drives… The way back here was wide open and clear. I think we saw something like twenty or thirty undead in the streets, which is still a lot, but compared to the morning’s drive over, that’s nothing. I don’t know if they were pulled away by something else moving or what. It’s like a giant frigging chess game. Pawns move one way, pawns move another. I hope someone is a few moves ahead of their opponent here, and I hope it’s me.

  When we got back to campus, Blake blew his top. He couldn’t wait to hear about what happened at the meeting, and if we had any news about Kim. Clearly, this was a hot issue for him as well as us. We calmed him down again, and got him to help us get settled as we explained it to him.

  We piled into Hall E and after getting our shit off and cleaned up, we started making dinner. Gilbert and Patty sat Blake down in the living room and made damn sure that he had no guns or knives. Then they gently told him that she was there, that she was carrying his kid, and that she was safe and sound.

  His response to that was predictably awesome. He was thrilled to hear he was about to be a father. Tears of joy, all that jazz. Gilbert then told him that according to the Pastor, she was a little scared of him and the risks he took, and she felt her and the baby were safer inside The Farm. Blake’s response to that was predictably not good.

  His first response was, “That guy is lying, she’d never say that.”

  Gilbert of course agreed with that line of logic, conceding that it was possible, and said that in a few days we’d be trying to meet them again for another trade, and we were going to work on seeing if she’d be willing to talk to him. I guess she’s due any minute now, so a birth might be right around the corner. However, the idea that we are on good speaking terms with The Farm now clearly alleviated his tension. Patty was awesome because she played the whole “caring mom” part. Blake will likely not be sleeping for some time. Expectant post apocalyptic father.

  So yeah. We’re getting the Edwards clan here for dinner at about 3pm. I feel like that will go well. The weather has turned nice, the leaves are green, and if things stay good at Westfield, we can focus on killing the undead in town, and continuing to try and make this damned world a better place.

  Otis is being weird. He’s sleeping in the closet on top of some of my dirty clothes. He never sleeps there. He's acting strange towards me too. Weird ass cat.

  I’ll toss an entry in tomorrow after the Edwards folks take off. I’d like to put two nice entries about two good days in this journal in a row. Wouldn’t that be swell?

  -Adrian

  May 22nd

  I have to sit here, and I have to type one last entry with my bloody fingers.

  One final goodbye if I don’t come back. They might be better off without me anyway.

  How could I possibly have been so fucking wrong?

  I’m having a hard time seeing through my tears. Everything is blurry. I am having a hard time breathing. I don’t think I’ve ever been this angry. This is beyond anger. I used the word wrath earlier, and it’s fucking appropriate. I don’t even know how I am typing, my hands are shaking, vibrating.

  My hands. They’re covered in blood. Deep under the fingernails. I’m soaked in it. I didn’t realize until just now. I’m covered in the blood of innocents. The blood of my friends.

  Larry is dead. His sweet and funny wife Candace is dead with him too. Their son Tucker took two rounds, one to the hip, and one to the leg. He’ll never walk the same again.

  Gilbert might lose an eye.

  Abby lost a finger. Blown clean off in the firefight. It was like that infection was a bull’s eye. No more middle finger from my girl. She didn’t even know her finger was gone. She was out of her mind about Gavin.

  I don’t know if Gavin will make it. He got at least two through and throughs to the lower abdomen. He was still bleeding dark blood out steadily when I sent them away in the HRT an hour ago. I hope he makes the trip to Lisa in time. I suspect the worst.

  I hope she’s a better doctor than we need.

  Melissa was wounded twice as well. She took two rounds. One to the arm that wasn’t too bad, and one to the meat of her inner thigh, which scares me. I don’t know how close to the artery it hit. I am scared for Ollie’s baby.

  Lindsey lost one of her girls today. Maddison took a round to the head. There wasn’t anything left of her face. I had to send Lindsey and little Andrea to Westfield. I feel bad for Doug. I promised him I’d keep his family safe. One more broken promise. Quite the collection I’ve built.

  Five new arrivals here too. People from town. Just came back I guess. I nearly killed them. Their timing could not have been much worse. I don’t know how or why they arrived when they did. One more question with no answer.

  We are not combat effective anymore. We are maimed, mauled, and hurt. Only Blake and I are fully able to fight. Abby could fight minus her finger, but she should be with Gavin, and she’s not in her right mind. None of us are.

  Love is a bitch.

  I don’t fucking care anymore. It doesn’t matter. I cannot abide that my lack of wisdom has allowed harm to come for those I care for.

  I may not be able to rewind time and undo what happened to us today, but I can see to it that the last thing I do is righteously smite those who would do harm to me and my people from the face of this Earth.

  I make this promise;

  In a moment, I will stand up and leave this place. I will kill every last one of those motherfuckers, or I will not return at all.

  I am done with trying to be the nice guy.

  Goodbye.

  -Adrian

  May 23rd

  I am having a very hard time organizing my mind.

  My hands are no longer shaking. I can breathe again. I murdered men and women last night. The same men and women who killed and hurt my people. I don’t have the ability to go into detail as to what happened at The Farm just now. I have something profoundly more bothering on my mind.

  I feel less safe now with them dead. Why Mr. Journal? Because when I put the barrel of my Glock in that fat, bible holding fuck’s face I made him tell me every detail about the dreams he’s been having.

  The night after he met Gilbert and Patty, he said he had a dream. A vision. Similar to all the other dreams that led him to the pregnant women. He told me he dreamt of the vast void of God’s loneliness.

  A large, cold, dark, empty space that he felt was meant to resemble the void left when God turned away from humanity, and set loose the dead upon us. He said the air in the room tasted of blood, and he could feel the chill straight through to his soul. A word has come to mind for this and I don’t know why. The word fits. I can’t explain it. I am now calling the place in his dream, The Lacuna.

  In The Lacuna he was visited by the dead, much in the same way as I have been visited in The White Room. The dead came to him with messages from God, and if he truly believed, and did God’s will without question, they reaped the bounty. You can look at the fucking place they had to see they reaped the shit out of those dreams.

  After Patty and Gilbert met with him he had another dream, and in it, he was warned about me. He said God spoke to him, and told him that I was an agent of evil, and in order for light and good to prevail, I had to die.

  Me. Adrian Ring specifically. I had to die.

  I told him he was wrong. I told him he had no right to listen to the dead of The Lacuna. Because I knew he was wrong. I know it with more certainty than I’ve ever known anything.

  Faith.

  I told him about The White Room. I told him about the books, and the table, and the sword. I told him about how I was doing everything I could to save lives, and bring peace and safety, and justice back to this fucked up world. I told him I could not abide a man who kept
women as breeding stock, and attacked and killed innocent children unprovoked.

  He looked at me, straight over the sights of my Glock and right up into my eye, and told me, “Son, you’ve been led astray. Your White Room is the Devil’s creation. Lies hidden within truths. Your people are the fruit of your poisonous tree, and by killing them, I have done God’s will. I shall stand by his side in Heaven for all time, knowing forever that I have served the Lord.”

  I shook my head at him, and said one last thing, “Pastor, I hope you’re right.”

  I pulled the trigger once, and that was the end of Pastor Adams.

  The rest of The Farm prior to that went down with a hell of a fight. I’ll go into more detail about that tomorrow, or the day after. When I get to it.

  We didn’t save all the pregnant women. Some of them did not want rescuing. Those that were willing participants in the Pastor’s ideology raised weapons against us, and as much as it will keep me up at night for the rest of my life, we killed them. Unborn children as well.

  I don’t know how I am going to reconcile killing four pregnant women. Perhaps I can repeat over and over in my head when it eats at me that Blake was right all along, and everything Pastor Adams said was a lie. Kim wanted to leave the whole time to be with Blake.

  They’re together now I guess. High price to pay.

  I haven’t heard anything from Westfield yet, so tomorrow I am going there to check on my people. I don’t know if Gavin is still alive. He’s young, and healthy, but those were serious wounds.

  Abby might break on me if he dies. I’m not sure how I’ll handle that.

  I’m not sure where to go from here. Clearly, things are not what we thought. I can deal with undead. I can kill zombies until my Mohawk goes grey.

  I can’t fight an idea. And if others like the Pastor are dreaming of The Lacuna, then we will most certainly be encountering more of them. Killing people is terrible business. It isn’t what we need now. It wasn’t ever what humanity needed.

  Why are we being pitted against one another?

  Why do I feel like I am right in the middle of all of this?

  -Adrian

  May 25th

  Blake, Gilbert and I took The Farm. Gilbert’s left eye is useless, but he wouldn’t let us go in just the two of us. Old soldier. Hard as nails.

  We made our plan in a few minutes, and executed it as best we could. It wasn’t the best plan, but my rage dictated that we moved that night together, or I did it alone. Our first concern was to not kill the pregnant women. Obviously I already said that we killed some, so you know that part of the plan fell through in a big way. We didn’t anticipate some of the women fighting us though. We all expected them to be hostages, or unwilling participants in the Pastor’s grand schemes. We were wrong. We had to defend ourselves from everyone that night, and have mercy on me, but I shot and killed women pregnant with child.

  Our plan to breach was meant to get folks out of the house, or get them moving around inside to the point where we could fire accurately into the windows. If they went outside of the structure, we could pick them off easily. We debated driving a vehicle straight into the farm house, but we knew that sucked because they’d hear us coming, their fence is really sturdy, and we couldn’t risk them hitting the engine block of a vehicle leaving one or more of us stranded out in the open, taking fire.

  We immediately thought of pepper spray, or tear gas, but we didn’t have enough of it to effectively flood the whole house. A few handheld personal defense cans of pepper spray wouldn’t be effective enough to flush out all those people. At best they might get itchy runny eyes and crack a window, which wasn’t worth the effort.

  Fire wouldn’t work on the house either. We can’t control fire, and it kills people indiscriminately. Last thing we wanted was another Waco incident where everyone burns up in flames. So fire was out on the farmhouse.

  Fire was an option on the barn though. Gilbert and I were taking a scorched earth policy. If we kill the fucking cows in a fire, so what. We didn’t have cows at the start of that day, so burning a few up in a fire didn’t change anything for us at the end of the day. Plus we knew that if we torched the barn, they might come out and try to stop it. Worst case, they’d move to the windows, and we might get some clean shots to thin the crowd inside before we went in and took the house manually.

  We parked in the woods on the logging trail late. Near midnight I think. Blake and I were loaded for bear. M4, Enfield, shotguns for each of us, handguns, shit loads of ammo for everything… body armor… I felt strong. I felt mean. I was angry.

  Gilbert waddled his ass around to the back end of The Farm in between the rounds of the single guard. It was a hike and took him some time, but he made it to the position with no issues. Gilbert unlatched the side barn door and used some lighter fluid to start the fire. With the door unlatched, as soon as the fire took in the dry barn, the cows were able to burst right outside, saving them all.

  I was set up across the road from the farm stand in the ditch. Blake was set up at the edge of the fence in some cover to my left, and Gilbert remained at the corner of the barn near the side door, which was to my right. We were in a quasi triangle, which wasn’t perfect, but the huge fucking fence made things difficult to get close to The Farm.

  The fire engulfed the barn in seconds. Gilbert must’ve used the whole fucking container of lighter fluid. The single guard instinctively ran right to the fucking building, and started to open the front barn door. Our plan was for Gilbert to take the guard when he responded, and Blake and I would take the house once he was taken care of. If we saw anyone with a weapon moving in the windows, we took the shot.

  Blake fired first. I heard the Enfield’s boom followed immediately by the tiniest sound of a shattering window pane. I aimed the M4 at the house and used my bare eyesight to scan the windows for movement. Within a second or two, I saw muzzle flashes from return fire headed at Blake inside the house. Pretty standard M4 burst pattern, and with the shape of the blossom, I knew right where the shooter was standing.

  Pop pop pop. Glass shattering, and a faint thud inside the house. After I dropped whoever that was, I heard Gilbert’s AK chatter loudly from the barn. Nice short ripping burst that told me he’d stitched that fucking guard from nuts to neck. One more crack a few seconds later and I knew he’d head shot the bastard. I won’t lie. I felt good. Vengeance. My heart was pounding like a drum. I was sweating, my eyes felt like I could see through walls, and there was so much pure adrenaline pumping through me my mouth was dry as a bone and I could feel the blood moving through my muscles like liquid fire. Everything was happening in slow motion.

  Gilbert broke radio silence. The old adage is there are no secrets in combat. You’re silent and hidden until you make noise, then it’s on. The cat is out of the fucking bag. Hearing 'frag out' doesn’t help your enemy much when you’ve just thrown a live grenade at them.

  “Guard is dead. Move on the house.”

  Our deal was for Blake to cover me as I moved. He had the better long rifle in the Enfield, and I had the better CQB weapon in the M4. I sprinted to the fence, and climbed right the fuck up and over it. I gave myself a bitch of a gash on my left hand, but I didn’t notice it until much later. Adrenaline is a marvelous thing.

  I hit the ground running after blasting the padlock off the gate with the 12 gauge pump I sawed down earlier that night. My wrist is still sore from the recoil on the gauge. I didn’t bother opening it, I just ran to the window closest to me. I did a quick sweep to check for movement, then went to the door, and put boot to wood.

  I don’t remember much inside on the first floor. It’s a collection of shadows and flashes of gunfire in my memory. It was dark, and loud, and I was halfway between shitting myself out of raw fear, and ripping anything moving in half with the M4. I know I shot at least two people on the first floor. I remember seeing their faces in the muzzle flashes as I let loose three round bursts into their chests. Aim for the neck, and let the muzzle li
ft walk the third round into the face. Training. Never leaves you.

  Once I had the first floor clear I grabbed some cover and walkied to Gilbert and Blake to move in. Blake arrived inside just a few seconds after, and Gilbert maybe a minute later. Gilbert held the downstairs, and Blake and I moved up the main staircase.

  I did the math, and knew that we’d killed at least five armed hostiles, and that didn’t leave many remaining. I didn’t account for the pregnant women fighting though.

  As we ascended the wide farm stairs I issued the only warning I was giving that night. I didn’t want anyone to know exactly where I was by talking later, so as soon as I finished yelling, that was it. I hollered out, “Anyone who does not want to die needs to come out with their hands up right now!”

  No one came out. The top of the stairs went into a long hardwood floored hallway. I could hear the grit in my boots grinding into the finish of the wood as I moved with purpose to the first door.

  Breaching a door is about violence. It’s about sending that door off its hinges like a bomb hit it, and scaring the fucking tar out of whoever is inside. Be loud. Be angry. Horrify. Violence of action. When they’re shaking, pissing themselves, they hesitate, make mistakes, and you tell them what to do. Usually it’s something simple, like “DROP THE FUCKING GUN,” or “GET THE FUCK DOWN.” Usually the word FUCK is inserted into the instruction to ensure that they understand that you do indeed plan on killing them if they fail to comply.

  The people on the other side of each door I kicked open failed to comply. The first door came entirely free of the hinges when I kicked it. Must be all the canned spinach we’ve been eating. I got really lucky. When the door was sailing inward, it spun, and the person inside let loose a blast from a scattergun, and the pellets hit the door right around the knob, and sent them in every direction but mine. I heard the snapping ticks of the shotgun’s little death beads hitting the door frame around me as I moved into the room.