by Wood, Gareth
8:14 p.m., 26th of July
We held a brief ceremony for Dave earlier. None of us is a priest, so it was non-denominational. Heck, we didn’t even know if he went to church. We stopped by a river north of the city, stood in a circle, and I said a few words about Dave. I didn’t know him long, but he was a great guy. Funny, smart, and good to have at your back. The others said a few words too, and then we stood there and stood there. Finally we left.
The bad news is that we are down a vehicle and about half of our transportable food and water, two guns (shotgun and handgun), and one man. The only thing good I can see in this is we have the plans to the complex. Jess’ ankle swelled up pretty bad, but Sarah says nothing is broken. Michael got mad at me for letting his mom get hurt, and I nearly lost it. I could feel the strain breaking through, and rather than break down crying in front of a four year old, I walked away to sit in the van. Sarah came and talked to me after a while. Then Jess. She said that Michael didn’t understand what had happened, and she had told him, and he was sorry. He came over a few minutes later and sat on my lap, and I told him it was okay. We had a good hug, and I managed to have a laugh.
We’ve been looking over the plans now. I think we can do this. I really think we can. I just made myself a promise. If there are survivors inside the store, we will get ALL of them out alive. Every fucking one. I promise this to myself. I promise this to Dave.
July 28
We spent the last day and a half gathering supplies and making contact with the survivors in the grocery store. Most of yesterday we raided houses and vehicles much more carefully and thoroughly than we had been. We have replaced the food, mostly, and the water, but we need to purify a few more gallons before we risk this rescue. We emptied a few gas tanks into several jerry cans which are now strapped to the back of the van. The gas tank is full, and late last evening we salvaged a Ford Bronco. Darren and I got it to start, and it blew a big black cloud out of the pipe for a few seconds, and then settled into a nice purr. I drove it to the next abandoned car and we drained out the tank into the Bronco. I wanted a larger vehicle, but this will have to do. We tried a Caravan earlier, but it wouldn’t even turn over once. I think as time passes more and more vehicles won’t respond to salvage attempts.
We drove towards the shopping center this morning and stopped a few kilometers away, on a road more north of it than the one we had taken previously. We checked a city map and decided to try to find a high point to view the area from, and finally settled on a water tower on a farm just west of where we had stopped. We cleared the house and barn, finding no undead, just five really dead people, four dead horses, and a shotgun in the house. Another 12 gauge, with a box of 25 shells. It’s a double barreled breech-loading weapon, not a pump action like the one Dave was using, but a gun is a gun. Jess and I climbed the tower (Jess being careful of her ankle, still tender) while Sarah and Darren watched Michael. Once on top we looked through binoculars to see if our view of the center was good enough to serve our purposes. It was close. There were trees blocking part of the view, but we could see the roof, part of the doors and windows, and just see the tops of the zombies’ heads milling around out front. Part of the roof was blocked from us by the front facing sign, and trees made seeing the entire front of the building impossible, but the armoured cars and the trucks and vans were still there. We hoped to see survivors, but there was only the undead. We waited.
Finally, Jess had to go down and take care of Michael. Darren came up and kept me company. Around lunchtime I went down and helped make lunch and Sarah took some up to Darren and kept him company for a while. We went on trading off until about an hour ago. Sarah and Jess were up in the tower while Darren played tag with Michael in the yard, and I kept lookout. Sparkle was sitting on a fence nearby watching, and meowing once in a while. He never went far from us, even when we let him outside, and slept on Michael’s or Darren’s bed most nights. He was also a great guard cat. If an undead came within fifty feet he started hissing and ran for cover. Anyways, Sarah called down that there were three people on the roof now. I climbed up with a mirror when she came down, and found Jess peering through her scope. I looked through the binoculars, and found three people, alive and apparently healthy, on the roof of the store. They were nowhere near the edge, and I doubt the undead knew they were there. There was a young man, possibly a teenager, with longish dark hair and wearing a black Danzig shirt. There was a young woman, mid-twenties, with a severe burn scar on the side of her face, dressed all in black, dress, boots, and leather jacket. The Goth look, I guess. These two appeared to be arguing with another man, older, maybe late thirties, short military-style haircut, farmer’s tan, and wearing a Country 105 FM t-shirt. God, a country fan from Calgary! No wonder the punk guy and Goth girl were arguing with him! I lifted the mirror and flashed sunlight at them, but they didn’t appear to notice. Maybe it was a bad angle, or we were just too far away, but they didn’t see it. I didn’t care if they could see it or not at this point, I was just happy to see other living people. Eventually they stopped talking to each other and went back inside.
So now we know there are at least three survivors. We are staying here until the light fails, and hoping someone comes out again so we can try flashing them. This farm is far enough away that if the undead swarm notices us we can flee easily, and it’s a nice house with a lot of canned foodstuffs inside. We are going to have a hot meal tonight, and if we can get this woodstove to light we’ll try to heat up water for baths.
I just noticed something. When the wind is right we can hear, dimly and distantly, the moaning and gasping of the walking dead. The noise inside the food store must be terrible, not to mention the smell on the roof, in this summer heat.
July 29
Nobody showed up on the roof today, and we’ve kept a constant lookout. Perhaps tomorrow we’ll see someone, and can get a flash off to them. All that’s needed is a way to communicate. We are close enough that radios would work, but getting one to them could be problematic, unless they have a CB. A big sheet of paper and some markers would work if they had binoculars or a telescope, but we don’t have either. Morse code? None of us know it. It’ll have to be flashes until they or we can figure something out.
The undead in this area all appear to have congregated at the shopping center. We haven’t seen any here in any direction. We think the noise has drawn them all together down there, like moths drawn to light. Sarah and I talked about the implications of the zombie we found in Can-Pro’s office. She thinks, and I agree with her, that it means that the agent that causes us to reanimate after we die is present in the environment now. It’s no longer necessary for a zombie to kill its victim via a bite or scratch. The long-term implications are scary. We probably all have this virus, or bacteria, or whatever it is. Why it hasn’t killed us yet and reanimated us, I have no idea. I would love to run these thoughts by a biologist or a geneticist to see what they think, but where I am going to meet one now, I have no idea.
Time to go. Jess and I have a dinner planned for the others, and I have to go help out. Darren is up in the tower right now, keeping watch, and Sarah is keeping Michael distracted so Jess can cook. She’s also decided to teach us all First Aid so we can be more helpful if/when we meet other survivors. First lesson is after supper.
July 30, 11:27 p.m.
We made contact about 4 p.m. The Goth girl came out onto the roof alone around 3:45 and lit up a cigarette. She stood in the center of the roof and looked away to the south for a while, until her cigarette was gone. Then she walked along the paving stones on the roof, and did this little dance thing. When she turned around I was ready with the mirror, and I flashed it three times at her. She didn’t appear to notice at first, so I did it again, and she was turning to look another way then, so I thought I’d lost that chance, but she stopped and turned back towards us. I flashed three times again, and Jess laughed as she saw the expression on Goth Girl’s face. She nearly had to pick her jaw up off the ground. She ran towar
ds the roof hatch while trying to keep an eye on our location, and nearly fell once. She reached the hatch and appeared to call down, and a minute later the country fan came up with a pair of binoculars. She pointed in our direction, and I flashed again. Country Fan trained the binoculars on us, so I waved. So did Jess. He must have seen her looking through the rifle scope at him, since he flinched, but he waved back after a second.
Jess called down that we had contact with them, and then returned to her scope. I was watching as Country Fan handed the Goth Girl the binoculars, and she waved when she saw us too, and then started jumping about and laughing. Country Fan said something to her and started towards the access hatch, and climbed down while Goth Girl kept waving and smiling. A few minutes later people started climbing onto the roof, and Country Fan had a whiteboard and a few markers with him. Within a minute there were seven people on the roof, three women and four men. They all looked excited to see us, and waved and laughed. Country Fan wrote something on the sign and held it up. I couldn’t make it out, but Jess could. It said “We are happy to see you!” He held it there until we waved again, then took it down and wrote “One flash = YES, Two flashes = NO”, and I flashed once to show I understood. He then wrote “Are there only two of you?”
NO.
“How many are you?” I flashed five times. There was some discussion as Goth Girl relayed my answer.
“Do you have vehicles?” YES.
“Do you have a CB radio?” YES. They had a radio! This would make things so much easier. “Channel 5 in 5 minutes? Can we talk?” YES.
We rushed down, calling to Sarah to get on Channel Five right away. She ran for the van and turned the radio on, and Darren grabbed Michael and brought him along too. Jess and I made it there in a few minutes, and as we arrived we heard a man saying hello.
We talked to them for about fifteen minutes. There were seven of them, and they’d been inside the store for forty-three days. They had all ended up there at roughly the same time, and two armoured car guards had blocked the doors before a crowd of a few hundred zombies had arrived. They were Marty (whom I called Country Fan earlier) and his daughter Amanda (aka Goth Girl. Guess that makes Marty older than I thought at first), her boyfriend Adam and his cousin Christie, a little girl named Megan (about 8, and no one knew where her parents were), and Jay and Sanji Singh, brothers from Vancouver. Marty was the oldest one there. There had been nine of them, but the two armoured car security guards had left to try to find help fifteen days ago, and hadn’t been seen since. They had a rifle and a handgun, several baseball bats, and a machete between them, and that was it. The vehicles outside were all either broken down or out of gas or surrounded by walking dead, so were useless. They had plenty of food and water, and up until eight days ago the power had been on so they’d had perishables (wisely eating them first). They were secure inside, but knew they couldn’t last there, and the sheer weight of the undead would find a way in eventually. We introduced ourselves, told our story briefly, and told them our plan to get them out. There were risks involved, and getting enough transportation for all of us was going to be problematic. Sure, there were tons of cars around, but finding gas and keys and equipment was going to be a major undertaking for us. They said they could hold out long enough to let us do that, and we agreed that the situation they were in was bad. We signed off with the promise to start looking for vehicles to carry everyone, and to explore the route through the storm sewers. They would prepare a grocery list we called in, and we’d try to get as much food and supplies out as we could. Each person would carry a pack with as much dehydrated or packaged foods as they could, and we’d assume only one trip, one way. After we got to the vehicles we’d try to get as much distance between us and the swarm as we could. We could decide where to go after we had them all out.
After we signed off, we all talked about the chances we had of pulling this off. We all wanted to try, since this was the first group of any size any of us had seen since the convoy went by in Rogers Pass. That seems like ages ago now. We have all decided to get some sleep now, and we’ll start looking for vehicles in the morning. I have first watch.
July 31
I dreamed last night that I was running through fields of waist-high grass and thistles, and that I was being chased. I knew in the dream that if I stopped and turned around they would get me. I was terrified, even though it was a bright sunny day, with fluffy clouds and a bright blue sky. I had this feeling that behind me there were storm clouds, just waiting to wash over me, and in the shadow of those clouds were thousands and thousands of the walking dead. I was having trouble breathing, and I could hear a rumbling, like distant thunder, that came and went like a tide rolling in and out. I woke up with Jess snoring beside me, Sparkle purring on my chest, and bright sunlight streaming onto my face.
God, I hate dreams like that…
We got up late, Jess and I, and found everyone else awake and waiting for us. After a quick breakfast and a wash we went looking for new cars or trucks to salvage. The first five we thought might be good turned out either to not start, or have hidden problems like flat tires or no fuel. The sixth, a Dodge Caravan, started easily and had ¾ of a tank in it. We went through it and stripped out the junk we didn’t need, and Sarah took the driver’s seat with Darren along to ride shotgun. We wanted another one just to be safe, so we kept looking. By afternoon we found a Ford F350 that turned over on the second try, had ¼ of a tank of gas, and a box of ammo in the glove box that fits the hunting rifle, so we have another 50 rounds for the 30.-06, for a total of about 285. If I could find some more ammo for this Glock I’d be really happy. I’m down to 4 rounds.
We drove back to the house we had been at before, slow and careful. Jess drove the Odyssey, I drove the F350, and Sarah took the Caravan. We were spread kind of thin between three vehicles, but we were going to be leaving two of them at a storm sewer exit. We had a late lunch, and then we siphoned the tanks of the farm truck outside into the F350, and I used the last of the case of motor oil we had to change the oil on the Caravan and Ford. The Bronco we salvaged the other day was leaking transmission fluid all over the place this morning, so we drained its tank and left it, moving the supplies from it to the other vehicles. Looking around this farm, Darren found a generator in a shed, and several lanterns in the barn. The generator would make too much noise to use, but the lanterns could come in handy.
We are all going to go and scout out the storm sewer entrances to the south of the complex. It could take a while since we have to go around the swarm and find a safe place to operate from. We are likely going to do the same as last time, but Jess and I will go in daylight this time, and hopefully not be out overnight again.
August 2
The storm sewers may pose a few problems. Access will be the biggest one, and then we have to deal with claustrophobia. We parked the van yesterday in a residential area of spread out houses and fields, where some construction appeared to have been going on before the start of this nightmare. We chose this area specifically because the houses were probably uninhabited at the time, it was fairly close to the shops without being in sight of the horde, and the storm sewer was unburied. We managed to avoid the few walking dead we saw on the way here, but had a scary moment once we arrived. The area wasn’t entirely abandoned. We parked behind a construction trailer sitting in an overgrown field, next to a large pile of concrete pipes (presumably the pieces of the sewer) and as we were getting out we saw something move near the pipe sections. Sarah and I cautiously went to check it out, and we found a re-animated construction worker pinned beneath one of the sections. He was wearing a safety vest, and a hardhat lay nearby. A section had fallen loose and crushed his legs, so he couldn’t move, and he had several old bite marks on his arms and neck. He was flailing at us and moving his mouth, but there was no way he could reach us. From the look of the weeds and debris, he had been here since this started, about two months or so. Sarah went back to the van for the fire axe, and handed it to me. I slung
the carbine and stepped closer to this unfortunate, so I was standing just out of reach of his arms. He was lifting his torso off the ground with one arm, and reaching to me with the other. I lifted the axe and brought the blade down on the top of the skull hard, and that was that. I cleaned the axe with some water and bleach while the others checked the area, and then we got down to business.
The sewer access here was blocked by a safety gate designed to keep animals and small kids out of it while it was being laid in. There was a padlock on it, and rather than search for keys we used a pry bar to snap it off. The sewer pipe had maybe an inch of water in it, and the pipe itself was about four feet across on the inside, so it would be dark and cramped and wet in there. We had the maps of the mall area, and the sewer grid was shown on one page. It appeared that this area we were in was connected, but there were several turns and rises between here and there. Darren and I took some flashlights and went in a ways. It was blacker than night in there, rocks of various sizes were littering the floor, and we could hear a faint trickle of water, but other than that it seemed doable. We got to the first turn and found the first problem. There was a pile of tree limbs blocking the way we needed to go. If it was too deep, it would be impossible to clear out. After poking and prodding the pile for a while we got a few branches out, but the great mass was stuck. We went back and told Sarah what we’d found, and decided on a plan of action. After a quick lunch I took the axe, a larger flashlight and spare batteries, and returned with Sarah this time. It took an hour of hard work in the dark, hacking the branches and mud apart, until between us we finally cleared the blockage. When it finally came loose a lot of water rushed out with it, and we both got soaked to the skin very quickly. We left it to drain, and went out the way we had come in to dry off.