Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 6): In the Arms of Family (22 page)

We’re now starting to discuss manning the gate 24 hours a day. With the people in town, it makes complete sense to have a first warning system in place.

On a personal note, I’m in a good mood. No one died the past few days, we’ve gotten stuff we want, and Mallory’s sex drive is still functioning at what seems to be a fairly normal level. Otis is attentive, and has been killing mice here inside Hall E at a decent clip, which sort of makes a case to let some of the other people take in cats. We really don’t want a vermin problem. Mice, rats and related animals frequently drag in illness, and that blows.

Speaking of related animals and humorous incidents, poor Ryan almost got sprayed by a skunk when he was out taking a walk the other night. We haven’t had skunks here at night in forever, and that’s a great sign.
 

I wonder if you can eat skunk?
 

Hm.

-Adrian

August 3
^rd

It’s a conspiracy of stupid problems. I swear it. Just… silly dumb shit always going on here that inevitably makes life unnecessarily difficult. What’s that Mr. Journal? You’re curious as to what the fuck I’m babbling about?

It’s a long story. Better sit the fuck down.

So Ollie has been finding time and enough assistance to work on a fence system to contain the cows we’re bringing over from his dad’s farm. Now that the campus wall is reaching around the north side of the terrain, he’s got a huge barrier on one side to work off of. As such, he’s gotten a large amount of fence assembled and placed. I can’t say for certain where the fucking hell he’s getting the lumber for the fence, but I’m guessing he’s taking a tree or two, here or there from the folks working on the wall.

So now that the fence is largely under construction and completed, it was time for us to start talking turkey about getting cows. Now we’ve got the fifth wheel trailer from The Farm we can use to transport the cows. Sadly, Lenny has no way of moving the cows himself.
 

Now as you may or may not know, it requires a truck with a fifth wheel attachment to haul a fifth wheel style trailer. We had one of those. As you might recall Mr. Journal, it was a diesel dualie, and the sonovabitch went up in flames at the gas station the last time we were there. So because of that one small event weeks ago, or whenever the fuck it was, we had to waste an entire day looking for trucks with a fifth wheel attachment, or a dualie that we could snatch and install the old attachment from the burnt out wreck in.

That was our priority yesterday. We sunk the entire fucking day into driving around town looking for a replacement truck.

At the end of the day, we found another diesel dualie in the backyard of a small home. We drafted Hector after our two teams returned home and after clearing the house to see if we could find the keys, he had to hotwire it. God bless the man. Shitty part of it was the fact that he had to drain the fuel tank, and put fresh diesel in it, which meant we sat around on our thumbs for a few hours while he got that done. It also needed a new battery, which we fortunately had. The undead presence in that area of town was heavier than we’d have liked, which meant using firearms while we waited, but nothing negative seems to have come from it.

Enter the jinx, right?

So we got the big truck home last night, and we knew right off the bat today’s work had to involve returning to the gas station to get the fifth wheel attachment removed and installed in the new truck. So other than our stupid truck search yesterday we kept things pretty mild. Ollie drafted some of the older kids and put them to work on the fence building. Carry a post here, dig a hole there, etc. For the first day in a long time, no progress was made on the campus wall. It seems strange to say that. Especially in the light of there being a real and present threat to us right here in town.

I guess I’m not too worried because the area of campus we are likely to be attacked from is our most fortified area. Unless they’re crafty, and can get boats to the water’s edge without us seeing. Fortunately, the trees we’ve removed clear up a great view of the water on the far edge, and we can certainly plant someone near there or with a view of there to make sure our weakest point is under guard.

Today we mounted a solid run to the gas station. We took both humvees, the new dualie, and the HRT with a full crew of folks to pull security for us, plus Martin and Blake to lend technical assistance on the fifth wheel mount removal.

While we were there, we filled up the drums we had empty. I think we had three, and loaded them into the dualie with the drum lift and the sump pump and all that bullshit.

The gas station was clear of undead on arrival. To avoid starting a fucking fire and nearly killing all of us like last time, we did all of our non fuel tasks first, and set up a wider perimeter to make sure we didn’t get nearly overrun like the time before.
 

Get this Mr. Journal: it fucking worked. We didn’t get overrun (but we did have contact with undead), and we didn’t have any explosions or fires, or mysterious arm wounds, or broken toes. Our three vehicles parked about fifty yards out from the station while our three handymen went to work. Hector, Martin and Blake managed to get the fifth wheel attachment off the burnt out dualie in about two hours. I want to say that’s fast, but the expressions on their faces, and general use of profanity when describing the process led me to believe otherwise. Blake described it as a, “Real cunt of a job.” And he rarely uses the C-bomb. Must’ve been messy and hard.

That’s what she said.

After they got it removed, we stashed it in the dualie, and the three guys filled the drums we’d brought that were empty. Once they had the drums loaded, strapped in tight, and called out they were ready, we dropped the final few undead that had crept in towards us, and we rode off into the sunset with the proper shit to get the fifth wheel trailer back in gear.

Now after returning and getting everything unpacked and ready for filtering, we sat down and had the MGR staffing discussion. As I said before we’d been talking to folks on the sly to see who would be interested in staffing the place either permanently or on a rotation. Our initial idea was to have a rotation in place so folks would spend a few days there, then we’d rotate out a new batch of folks, etc. Of course that was when we had less folks here, and also before we found out we had several people who were interested in flat out just moving there permanently.

The first person who wanted to move there I think I’ve already mentioned as such. Dwayne Chilton. Dwayne is a little uncomfortable with the idea of living with so many people right nearby. I guess somewhere in his survival story he had people die on him where he was, and they in turn bit other folks, and the place quickly devolved and he had to run again. I think that’s how he arrived in Westfield. He wanted to move to MGR because it’s affiliated with us, so it’s safer, and it has far less people there, which means he’s also much less likely to have someone die and turn the situation untenable on him. It’s weird, but it makes sense.

Our second resident interested in moving is Renee Parker. She’s the hard working tall blonde that we’ve taken out before. She’s a tough nut to crack, and from what I’ve gathered is really interested in moving somewhere she’ll have more space of her own. Such as an apartment at MGR. Plus there’s a small rumor going around that she has a bit of a thing for Dwayne, which sounds… neat I guess. We do need to start making babies sooner or later here. Although they are problems in and of themselves.

The third person I believe I’ve mentioned already, and it’s Mike. Mike wants to relocate to the tower because he wants good eyes there, and doesn’t trust anyone but himself. Of course what none of us knew, and I sincerely mean what NONE of us knew, was that he wanted a place to live with the woman he’s been seeing.

Patty.

Yeah I know right, what the fuck? How did NO ONE know this was happening? I feel like such an unobservant assface. Apparently this has been happening for some time, which is sort of cool, as well as sort of fucked up. I can say this with conviction, Abby was… kind of fucked up by this news.

It wasn’t until just a bit ago that I really let that fact set in. She’s only what? A few months from the death of her father, and now her mother is seeing someone? Even if Mike is a terrific guy, he’s still a new man in her mother’s life, and that’s got to set off some kind of fucking alarm bells for her. I imagine she’s feeling like Charles is being betrayed at the very least. Or the memory of Charles I guess. I can’t fault Patty. She has needs, and Mike really is an awesome guy. I understand loneliness.

She didn’t freak out at the meeting, or make a scene, but I could see from how her body tensed up, and how her expression sort of… changed that she was not pleased. I really wonder now if that’s the first she’d heard of the whole situation. I can’t imagine Patty would blindside her own daughter with news like that, but new relationships make you do dumb shit, and it’s easy to make mistakes. God knows I have.

So when are we staffing the tower?

The fifth. Not tomorrow, but the next day. That gives us some time to gather supplies, get all the shit ready to move there, make sure there are beds and sheets and shit, and then they’ll relocate. We’re still working out the logistics of things like what vehicles to use to get there, and whether or not they’ll keep a vehicle there permanently, which I am fighting for. What if they need to leave in a hurry? The last thing we need is to have folks at MGR that need to get mobile in a hurry, and they can’t go anywhere.
 

Of course there is some sense in saying that leaving a vehicle on the street would draw unwanted attention too. If the wagon people come through they are almost guaranteed to notice a new car sitting in the street, and that would draw some unwanted attention. Of course it’s arguable they’d be able to do anything about it. The welded doors at the tower are sturdy as fuck, and Mike can rain down sniper fire on their heads that’ll pretty clearly change their will to fight.

Oh, something Martin and Julie pointed out, was the fact that the wagon folks have to be new to town. None of the MGR people here ever saw them while they were still living there, so that tells us they are either brand spanking new, or they were not mobile or in that area of town until just now.

Outsiders.
 

I dislike that word, and I dislike these people, and that means I will be using that word to describe them from now on. It sounds dirty and evil when I say it. I’m sort of hoping that we’ll meet them and make peace ala the Westfield/Sean fiasco, but I’ve got the sinking suspicion this won’t end well.

Oh well. My life has never been a fucking fairytale.

-Adrian

August 5
^th

Operation: Gilbert’s Warehouse is now officially in process. We’ve done enough bullshit for us to start sitting down and seriously working on getting it all done. It’s a multi step process we’ve designed and if we can get our dry runs of practice done safely and successfully, we should be able to pull this off.

Famous last words, right?

Frankly. I’m fairly scared. Gilbert left us a map of the industrial park/strip that his warehouse was on the end of. He drew detailed street plans as well as access and exit routes. He wrote down traffic patterns so we can expect where cars are most likely to be blocking the road, as well as the places nearby that he felt survivors could be stashed away. With all that information, we’ve got what amounts to a giant pile of raw intelligence to work with. Attention to detail Gilbert. Well done sir.

We know where to back the truck up to, which dock door unlocks the fastest, and which direction we need to go to get out the quickest. We also know that as of what? January or so? Gilbert said the place was unmarked, and untouched, which hopefully has remained true. With any luck we’ll hit the place and it’ll still be in the same condition as when he was last there.

Gilbert indicated that we will need two full semi loads to empty everything out of the warehouse. We have two semi trucks, but after talking about it, we don’t think we want to spend that much time on site. Loading one entire truck will take hours, and doubling that seems like it’s just putting us on the X for too damn long. It’s too much noise, too much movement, too many moving pieces to coordinate safely. One truck fully loaded, and gtfo. We can return at a later date to fill the second truck. If it's gone when we come back, then so be it. Someone else get a dinner on us and that's not the worst thing that could happen.

The risk of sitting there exposed for too long is worth the risk that we could lose half the warehouse. I know that sounds stupid, but the cost of life isn’t worth it. Now please keep in mind, I am not worried about killing zombies. We can do that for hours and days on end with little worry. The ram on the HRT is a pretty effective tool for leveling that playing field.

What scares me is other survivors. If we are attacked while loading the truck, any ensuing firefight could be very ugly, even if we win it. I’ll go on fucking record and say that any firefight we engage in we WILL win. That fairy can suck my fat cock. It’ll only take three or four wounded or dead for us to be burdened to the point where our resources are stretched painfully thin. It’s not like we have Lisa waiting for us back at campus, ready to patch us up. Doc Lindsey doesn’t have trauma experience like Lisa did, and she certainly doesn’t have the skills yet to deal with us dragging a handful of wounded in simultaneously. Never mind the need for blood for transfusions, which hasn’t even been talked about yet. The point is the faster we are in and out, the higher our chances of success and survival become.

Our plan as it sits for the moment is to roll in the humvees, the semi, and the HRT. The humvees will take up blocking positions in the parking lot of the warehouse using existing vehicles as cover. One truck and crew will take up firing positions in a north stance, the other the south stance. The semi will drive directly around the back of the warehouse and put itself right on the dock that opens fastest. The HRT and its team will drive around the area, ramming the undead to death as needed, checking for anything that might blow a tire out on the semi, and once that team has cleared the parking lot of threats, they will breach and clear the warehouse.