She took several seconds to answer him. Lancaster leaned towards drunk. "Do I? I hadn't noticed. Sorry."
"Kelsie we shouldn't be tying up a line like this. There are people who will need to get in touch with the authorities. Do you need me for something? Are you okay?"
She let out a long exhale that was half sigh, half mournful wail. Lancaster wondered if something had happened to her fiancé. "Director I had to call you. I heard from… someone important. They asked me to get in touch with you."
Lancaster was a trifle confused. "Okay, continue."
"I thought you said the Vice President died?" she asked him. She sounded more than a little angry. Betrayed. She sounded betrayed.
"He did die Kelsie. Columbia South Carolina. Shot in the airport, died on the plane after resuscitation failed." Lancaster had seen the proof-of-death photos himself. He knew several of the men on the VP's team and trusted their word. He had no doubt.
"Well he spoke to me Director. He asked me to get in touch with you."
Lancaster chuckled. She had to be drunk to say that. It was entirely out of character for her to claim something so outrageous. "Now Kelsie don’t be ridiculous. It was probably someone being an asshole and pranking you."
"No."
Lancaster let her rebuttal hang in the air. She sounded resolute.
"It was him Lancaster. I've met him before, you know that. It was him. He said some strange things, but I'm sure it was him." As she spoke her cadence switched from dreamy and confused to sober and focused. She sounded very sure she'd spoken to the second in line to the Presidency.
"Why would he call you to get a message to me? If he was alive—and Kelsie, he isn’t—one of his aides has this number."
"He said you were a person who didn't follow their dreams. He said you followed orders instead."
Lancaster couldn't find words. The Vice President and he had a conversation in the late 80s before either man reached the position they were now in and the man had said exactly that. He looked out the window at the blackened neighborhoods and tried to envision a scenario that allowed this to be true. He couldn't think of anything.
"Lancaster he asked me to say some very strange things to you. I think it's a code. He knew things that don't make sense to me. Maybe you'll understand it. He had me write some stuff down. Are you ready?"
Lancaster pulled his Intrepid to the side of the road and fished a small spiral notepad out of his briefcase. He produced a government supplied lowest bidder pen and pulled the cap. He hoped it would write. "Go ahead."
"He said you would write this down," Kelsie said.
Lancaster looked at the pen and paper as he turned the dome light on. He couldn't tell if it was a joke, or a sign of insider knowledge. "Tell me Kelsie."
"He told me to tell you that he owes you for that card game in Des Moines."
That he did. The Veep swindled him in a hand of five card stud back in the 80s. Lancaster had let it slip out of friendship, and knowing that one day he could call in a favor as a result. He wasn't sure if the Vice President did it on purpose to shore up the relationship the two shared. Lancaster laughed, "Go on."
"He also said that you needed to get into the bunker because someone on the other side would be in there."
"Other side? Did he elaborate on that? Russian? Chinese? Anything? How does he know what bunker I'm headed to?" Lancaster had hunger pains for more knowledge. More intelligence.
"No, sorry Director. I got the impression from his tone that he was talking more about good guys versus bad guys. As far as knowing what bunker…" she trailed off. Clearly she had no idea how the man knew the information.
Lancaster shrugged. "Okay, continue."
"He said very distinctly and was very precise in saying that you should NOT trust people's plans. He said someone would make a plan and it would sound very good, but it would hurt people. Three people. I don't know who the three people are, but the Vice President was very clear in saying that these three people would need your help. He also said something about islands. That islands would be important."
"Roger that, three people. Don't listen to every plan people suggest. And islands are important."
"This is the weird part Director. He said you needed to pay attention to your dreams. That you needed to fight the infection that threatened us all. He also said to say that was an order. I think that might be a code," Kelsie sounded strange as she said it, like she didn't believe the words that were coming out of her own mouth.
"Pay attention to my dreams? Huh," Lancaster said as his mind scoured the litany of code phrases and innocuous sayings he knew. The dreams reference meant nothing. "Okay. I'll pay attention to my dreams. Anything else?"
"He was weird Director. Strange like he was coming in and out of consciousness."
Like you just were? "Well if he was shot, and believe me Kelsie, every report I saw indicated he was dead, which tells me he suffered a grievous wound and somehow pulled through, he's probably on some serious meds right now. It would explain the strange speech pattern."
"I… I uh. I guess so," she said. Again, Lancaster thought she sounded disconnected. Ethereal.
"Kelsie did he call you? Email? How did you get this message from him?"
Lancaster could hear her thinking on the other side of the phone. "I don't… I don’t recall Director. I think he—I’m not sure." Lancaster heard the unmistakable sound of fear and confusion in her voice.
"Kelsie did he call you?" The sound on the other side of the phone returned to the faint buzz that reminded him of a dropped phone, but he knew she was still there, waiting to say something. "Kelsie? Can you give me the number he called you from?"
Silence again.
Lancaster pulled his small phone from his ear and looked at the pixilated screen to see if the call was still active.
The screen was black.
He hit the power button and the screen came to life, showing the poor representation of a mountain scene he'd selected as the background. He hit the menu button and thumbed through to received calls.
There was nothing there. The phone call hadn't happened. Lancaster sat the phone down in his briefcase, then the little notebook he'd scribbled the contents of the conversation in. He leaned his head back against the headrest of the car and closed his eyes, fishing for an answer to the strange event that just happened. A sudden clicking noise on the window made him jerk, and he opened his eyes with his pistol in hand.
It was daylight. A zombie—no, a dead person. It was far too early to be calling them zombies—was clawing at his window, and their blood soaked wedding ring was clinking away at the glass leaving streaks behind. They put their mouth against the window and tried to bite through the glass to get at him. Their lips pinched against their teeth and split through the flesh as if it were no more than modeling clay. Lancaster winced in sympathy.
His vehicle was in park, and the ignition off. He hadn't turned the car off. He also didn't recall parking where he was. When he took Kelsie's call he'd pulled over in a residential neighborhood, but here, now, he was parked in the parking lot of a poker room. The sign above the door read "Five Card Stud House." Over the smell of the dead person knocking at his window he could smell a strange flower that he didn't recognize. There were no flower beds nearby though. He wiped the sleep from the corner of his eyes.
Lancaster didn't recall pulling over to sleep either. He cursed the bad decision of sleeping in the open, let alone parking in the open. All of this didn't make sense. It was a puzzle missing too many pieces. He looked at the street signs around him and put together a mental map of where he was as the dead person slobbered on his window. He was only about ten minutes away from the park where the bunker was.
He looked at the notepad on top of his briefcase and saw the notes that he'd scrawled as Kelsie had spoken to him. At the bottom of the page was a single phrase he didn't recall writing. It read; "You are a white blood cell." It also wasn't in his handwriting. Lancaster turned the key on hi
s car, bringing the engine to life and slid the shifter into drive. He left the sad, dead person by the side of the road, their teeth still gnashing away, trying to eat him.
Lancaster knew he had to get inside the bunker before they locked it shut. And he knew there was someone inside he needed to look out for. Someone who was an infection possibly. But like everything he knew, he knew these things for a reason.
September 19th
I am still alive.
And that fucking Factory will be a tough nut to crack. On many levels.
Lemme lay the shit out for you.
The Factory is in a small town just north east of the city, just like I thought. I headed out from campus late in the afternoon in our trusty electric Toyota, and drove as far as I could, as fast as I could blacked out. It was pretty damn frightening knowing that I had to pass through the same bottleneck we’d pinched them in the day before. There’s little reason to think they wouldn’t hit me the same as I hit them.
I did have the added benefit of not having to take the same exit to get to their neck of the woods though. There are at least three exits leading into the city that I could take that would put me on surface streets I could take to get to them. I didn’t have to use the same approach to get to them. I made damn sure I went a different way that night to help ensure a safer infiltration. I didn’t get hit so I’ll chalk my plan up as being successful. Huzzah and shit.
I wound up parking in a small garage attached to a tiny house in a fairly crappy neighborhood about a mile and a half away from where I thought the Factory was. Turns out it was more like two full miles, which is an alarmingly frightening distance to cover in the dark, in an area you haven’t ever been in on foot. I was nervous as balls. I think it was about… maybe 10 or 11 at night. Late as hell for me. I’m an old man now, and we rarely stay up late unless we have to.
I had an old street map from one of the glove boxes in a car in the school parking lot to help guide me, and I was easily able to get to the street where the dealership was. Barry said the dealership was nearby the Factory, so I knew once I found that, I would be close. I was right.
First off, the dealership is almost identical to the one we had our impromptu ambush in the other day when we interrogated our talkative friend Barry. I’d say the parking lot is half the size of a football field, and the dealership building itself was about a hundred feet long, with a three bay garage. It was also a pertinent fact that the bays were very large. Large enough to accommodate a semi, or large diesel truck like the box truck we saw the other day. Industrial sized garage doors.
In the lot I saw 17 vehicles, and I took notes describing each one so I could identify them later on if we saw them moving. My guess is that they have at least one capable diesel mechanic on hand using the shop, otherwise they would be having a lot more trouble getting these damn things running. What’s of note here Mr. Journal is that the entire dealership is surrounded by cars made into a wall just like how Westfield had them set up. Inside that was a hastily built chain link fence, complete with small slats of plastic inserted to make the fence opaque.
They had set their automobile wall up to have three exits. Each exit was simply a chain link fence with a pair of large 4x4 pressure treated beams across it. Clearly not intended to stop a vehicle, but designed to repel the aggression of the wandering dead. Easy pickings for a quick vehicle-borne attack.
I found the Factory about a quarter of a mile down the road. It isn’t a factory at all. I can’t believe I didn’t make the connection before this. Talk about a fucking senior moment.
The Factory is a strip club. It was inside an old factory building that was renovated and turned into new businesses about ten years ago when this area was renovated and revitalized.
It’s a fucking strip club.
I used to work at strip clubs, and I can remember when this place opened. It was right when I was getting out of the bouncing gig for good to work at the school. I remember Cassie and I talking about how funny it was that another strip club was opening just a half hour’s drive from the place we worked and met at. Apparently the men of this region have a strong sex drive, and a powerful need to pay money to look at naked women they can’t fuck. Ever.
I know the two sisters who ran The Factory. I met them once when they came into the place I worked at. They were in their 40s at the time, and had that “we used to be strippers” look. You know the type. Nice hair, nice face that’s starting to show signs of age, and clothes that are about a decade too trendy and tight for a woman like that to wear. Those types of women look like they are trying… just a little too hard, especially at their age.
I remember saying hello to them, and making small talk before the club opened one day when they were waiting to talk to the owner of the place. They must’ve been there visiting checking the place out right about when they were opening their place up. Scouting the competition or working out some kind of cross promotion I imagine.
My basic recollection of them today is that they were arrogant. Smart, pretty, but definitely full of themselves. Righteous. Maybe even a little bit crazy. That explains a lot when I see and deal with the rest of the people they’ve taken in at the fucking club.
Speaking of the club, I was able to observe it from both ends of the road over the course of the night of the 16th, all day and night of the 17th, plus most of yesterday before I made my way back here to campus. I went over my findings and my photos I took with the same digital camera Blake used to take pictures of The Farm back in the day. Man that seems like forever ago.
Anyway, when it was open for normal business, The Factory had naked bitches prancing around in it, so the doors are heavy duty steel, and there are no windows. None. That’s the kind of business where window shopping is generally discouraged. Generally if you’re interested in their kind of merchandise, you go right in and start spending. There were three vehicles parked out in the street in front of the main door. One was the slightly converted box truck we saw driving the other day, one was a van, and the third was a large pickup. We must be putting a huge dent in their vehicle coffers. We’ve taken what? Five or six of them so far at least. God it has to be more than that. Ten maybe.
Heh.
Here’s the bad news. They’ve put up another set of chain link outside the business complete with the plastic slats. On the outside of that they’ve arranged more vehicles blocking the way, creating a fairly substantial wall. The fence and cars are close to the sidewalk in front of the business though, and they are RIGHT on the street, so they are not set back at all. The other bit of bad news is that there is NO WAY of seeing inside the place. Zilch. We’d have to breach and clear the hard way, and we’d kill or hurt a lot of folks that didn’t need it. Very much hesitant to do anything along those lines. Seems dangerous, and a waste of life.
We need to pull them out of that building. We need something that will pull only the bad guys out. We need something to happen that will get their attention and force them to respond in such a manner that ONLY the bad people will stick their heads out of the building. If we can get that to happen, then we can deal with the hostile remnants inside with persuasion, or something quite literally along the lines of smoking them out. Shit if we have to, I’ll spray the dozen cans of pepper spray we still have inside the joint and breach that way. It isn’t tear gas, but in a pinch, it’ll do.
It worked well on The Farm, so in theory it’ll work here too. Folks don’t like being set on fire, or pepper sprayed. Generally speaking that is.
After I returned late last night Otis was happy to see me. Possibly even more so than Mallory, which is saying something because she was REALLY happy to see me. Otis was all up in my shit for an hour. It got to the point where I had to physically remove him from my chest and face and put him on the floor so I could talk to Caleb, Abby, and Mike about a plan to hit the place, or a plan about how not to hit the place.
The obvious weakness they have is the dealership where they are getting their cars. We could ea
sily infiltrate the place at night and torch, destroy, or disable all the vehicles there to render their ability to drive largely null and void. That would either result in their leaving the Factory, allowing us to engage the hostiles in a more proactive way, or it would just make them less of a threat to us. If they can’t drive out to us here on campus, then we need not worry quite so much. It seems very much win/win-ish to us all.
We’re going to recon the place again in a day or two and get a better feel for how we can set up an ambush that’s large enough to be effective. If we can’t sneak enough guns close enough to make it worth it, then we shouldn’t bother with trying to attack them. We should just fuck with their cars and leave.
Now that obviously doesn’t address the fact that shady bullshit is going on there, and we really ought to be the better people and help the folks that are being used and abused inside that place. Seeing as how it was a den of wanton debauchery before the end of the world, I can only imagine that the sucking dick stories are remarkably accurate to what is actually going on inside now. I shudder to think what might be happening.
Oh, I should also mention that all of my time spent in that area was spent dodging far too many fucking undead for comfort. The streets weren’t filled with the dead, but it was impossible to move around in any open spaces without attracting the attention of at least one or two within a minute or less. It sucked ass. Take thirty steps, then freeze and wait to see if anything saw or heard you. I had to drag at least three or four bodies a hundred yards or more away from where I was moving to dump them in rancid old garbage dumpsters to hide them. The last thing I wanted to do was leave fresh dead bodies and spent shell casings anywhere that might be suspicious. Leave no trace.
Sadly, or perhaps fortunately, depending on how you look at it, I didn’t get to shoot any bad guys while I was out. I would’ve liked that, but the few I saw moving about weren’t a threat to me at any point, and killing them would’ve been a frivolous waste of our secret knowledge of their whereabouts.
Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 7): The Trinity Page 7