Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 6): In the Arms of Family (28 page)

When we returned home here to campus late yesterday, we made a lightning run down to MGR to restock them on water and food. While we were there, we increased the amount of supplies on hand in the event they are attacked. They now have a 6 day supply of both food and water, as opposed to just 3 days. Mike said that things were quiet in town, and they only saw a tiny bit of movement. He said the two Outsider wagons were still moving, but mostly far off to the east towards the STIG area of town. He hasn’t been able to nail down exactly where they are holing up over that way, but based on their general direction of movement, they are coming from the city, or one of the towns between here and there.

Silly Outsiders. I hope they keep their greedy ass hands off my town. I’d hate to show them the meaning of fire superiority again. Man that sounded vindictive. Damn near evil.
 

Be the better man Adrian. Be the person that is the good one. You need to focus on that. You are the good man in this. Be the hero, not the villain.

Deep breath.

What does bother me quite substantially is that Gilbert’s warehouse is directly in that direction. We will need to drive right through what appears to be their home territory, and that is obviously inviting trouble. We may need to switch out our approach and exit routes to give them a wide berth. What blows, is I don’t think we have much option in that regard. There’s only one or two streets/roads that get to that neck of the woods, and both pass through there. Which way we go… who knows?

I just hope we don’t wander into a fucking ambush as we drive to the warehouse, or God forbid, after the warehouse with injured and less ammo. If I were them, that’s when I’d do it. Let us do all the heavy lifting into the truck, then whack us when we're good and tired.

Today was an on campus day as we evaluated our plans, and what we wanted to do moving forward. Ollie, Martin and Blake took the day and got some assistance to get that second gate started. Essentially they are building a huge 'A' shaped gate that will point directly towards Auburn Lake Road. If someone attempts to ram the gate, they will hit the steel reinforced edges, and drive the gate into the guardrails, thus creating a wedge they can’t drive through. It’s sort of like the crumple zones in a car. Essentially if anyone rams it, they create an impassible barrier, and leave themselves open to be fired upon by our shooters inside the walls.

The rest of us focused on working with the cows, the chickens, and mending fences, and working on the wall. Every single person was working all day today, but the weather was nice, the mood was relaxed, and we had zero cares from start to finish. It was all in all, as idyllic a day as we’ve had in some time. Late in the day we took two hours and did a quick refresher course for folks wanting more trigger time.

Abby took the noobs and worked on basic firearm accuracy and I took the folks we’d identified as Grade B or better shooters, and got them some time with the M4s Mike brought. A quick inventory told us we had eight M4s in stock, and I wanted to issue out four of them eventually. For training earlier today, I simply showed them mine, and how I do what I do with it. Mag swaps, jam clears, loading unloading magazines, basic weapons maintenance, and the such. We ran out of time to do actual firing, but that’s fine. There’s always tomorrow as they say.

No word from MGR on anything bad, just their regular check in radio calls on the proper hours. No news is good news as long as they are checking in. Things are great here on campus, although I can clearly feel the tension growing as we get closer and closer to doing the actual warehouse run.
 

We still have no fucking idea who our arsonist and potential Emily murderer is. No one’s story has come up dirty yet, and there hasn’t been anything strange happening here since her death. It is starting to look more and more like she really did hang herself. As for the Westfield fire, well… That seemed pretty fucking fishy, and with the chained doors and all, we KNOW that was no good.

I just wish I knew what the hell to do. Gilbert, you listening? I could use a phone call here brother. Now would be a good time.

Otis is well. He’s gallivanting around Hall E like a prince lately, reveling in the extra attention Abby is giving him now that Patty has moved to MGR with Mike. Abby seems out of it lately. Just generally kind of morose. I know she’s struggling internally with the idea that her mom has shacked up with a new guy, and I’m sure she’s also dealing with feelings of abandonment. If my mom blindsided me with the news Patty just did to Abby, I’d be all kinds of messed up, and I don’t really like my mom.

Abby loves her mom. I’m hoping this doesn’t translate later on into issues that become real problems when the shit hits the fan. Poor Abby was already dealing with the stress of Gavin dying, and the whole dreams bullshit, and now her mom moves out to a more dangerous home, and in with a guy she doesn’t know all that well… We’ll be lucky if she doesn’t take a nutter and climb a clock tower with her AR.

We’d be bent. She’s a really good shot.

Tomorrow we are finishing up that gate here on campus, and working more on the wall. I think we only have another ten or fifteen real days of work to get the back end closed, but that also raises the question of having a second exit. We need to figure out how to build a sturdy exit that can’t be breached easily. I’m sure the construction gurus here can come up with some clever idea.

Martin idly mentioned that he needs more metal to work with, so on our travels out and about, we need to be on the watch for that stuff. After tomorrow I want to start planning for a hit on the clinic here in town. If it has anything left in it, I want it. I also want to make it safe and secure it so if we need to use that clinic for more major medical procedures we can.
 

That will require a fairly in depth plan as well, but I am excited, because we need more breaching experience, and that clinic is likely to be nasty. I can just smell it now. All the sick and bitten and dead that rushed there on June 23
^rd
and 24
^th
, trying to get medical assistance for something that couldn’t be helped…

I hate to say it, but clearing that place sounds like fun to me. Grab life by the balls and yank, right Mr. Journal?

-Adrian

August 11
^th

Well, we’ve had a few days to get some stuff done, and it appears we haven’t done much of anything. It feels like we haven’t done anything at least. I hate days like this. I feel as if we need to get so much done on a regular basis that any day that goes by where we don’t get X or Y or both done was a waste.

I’m also just being a whiny, impatient bitch. Must have sand in my tampon or something. Feel free to tune me out Mr. Journal.

We came up with a finalized plan to hit the clinic a couple days ago. Well more accurately, we came up with a finalized plan to observe and examine the clinic a couple days ago. On the 10
^th
. Which is actually yesterday, which kind of sounds like I’m losing my mind.
 

Hi, I’m Adrian, I wet the bed.

No shame in admitting that.
 

All day yesterday here on campus we “relaxed” and accomplished a single project. Remember how I said we came up with a neat 'A' shaped gate idea for the opposite end of the bridge? We got that thing built yesterday, and it took all damn day, and took almost all of our free people to get done. However, it is one beefy motherfucker. Ollie has been scrounging for pressure treated lumber all over the area when he has time, and he’s been saving it for the fences and mostly for the gates. He had enough lumber to make the gate, and Martin had enough metal to build hinges and build a nice fat metal edge on the front of the gate that reinforced it, and will cut any trucks or cars ramming it straight in half.

Once we accumulate enough lumber and resources we are planning on building a set of walls that will go along the guardrails on the bridge so even if something does go around the overhang, or if something does walk across the ice, we’ve got the campus sealed from it.

Where was I? Oh yeah, we built the gate, and made the plan to scout the clinic earlier today, which was the task at hand right before I sat down to write this.

Like I’ve been saying for forever now, I really want to do a live breach and clear before the final run to the warehouse. It makes really good sense to get a large building clear under our belts before head all that way from home and go into unexplored territory. There’s also a large part of me that really wants the adrenaline rush of doing it. I don’t think Gilbert’s place will be infested with the walking dead, but there’s little sense in ignoring the possibility. Shit happens, and frequently to me and those that spend any kind of time around me.

Breaching and clearing the clinic here in town is something that’s been on my potential to-do list for a long fucking time. There might be medicine inside, as well as more generic medical supplies, and honestly the big reason to get it done is to have a largely sterile facility where we can do more significant procedures, as well a nearby place where we can go for more robust medical examination, like a heavy duty x-ray machine, or lab work, or whatever.
 

There’s all that, and the fact that I am positive that the place will be chick full of the dead, and it frankly kind of creeps me out. It’s been far too long for that empty building to be unsafe, and filled with the dead. It’s long overdue that we get it done and over with.

Long winded aren’t I? I really wanted to validate today’s activities. Maybe I need to rethink this. I shouldn’t be putting that much work into talking myself into doing stuff. It should come naturally, and be sensible.
 

Ah fuck it. I want the place empty, and I’m spoiling for a fucking fight.

Before we rush in there’s some sense in observing the place, and that strategy will be applied to the warehouse as well. More on that plan later. It’s still very much up in the air.

Today we decided that a “recon in force” operation was a good idea. Essentially we rolled out in the warehouse team, drove directly to the clinic near the grocery store and pharmacy downtown, cleared the area around it to cut down on the danger on the final day of the breach, make another quick run to MGR, and then we came home.

That’s the super short version of what happened today.

When we rolled into the clinic area it was pretty heavily covered with a very spread out number of the dead. I was driving the HRT and frankly, they were just too damn spread out for me to make any real dent in the number with the plow blade. It just wasn’t happening. I made a single pass through, hitting maybe three or four, and then did one pass around the two story brick clinic hitting maybe two or three more before it was apparent it’d take me an hour of driving around to hit them all. Not only was that a huge waste of time, but also of fuel.

I made the command decision to set up an outer firing line with the vehicles, and we’d pick them off at range until the crowd was thinned out enough for us to wade in with melee weapons. The humvees, semi, and I in the HRT pulled back, and drove in to establish a firing position about a hundred twenty yards out.

Most of the initial firing we had the newer folks do. We had plenty of time with the distance we’d put between them and us, and there was always the simple fact that our more veteran shooters could pour it on if need be to buy us additional time. I had Abby watch our asses as we used the hoods of the humvees as fixed firing positions.

I must admit, it was a good time. It felt like a clean, safe way to get them trigger time shooting at actual moving targets. I’ve said many times over that our more experienced people when in a stable firing position are more or less one shot, one kill accurate now, and that’s still pretty much the case. In really tight spots that’s obviously not going to hold, but if we have enough time to aim, it’s nice to know that we’ve got that kind of firing efficiency.

Sadly, the new folks aren’t anywhere near that kind of accurate yet, even with the stable firing position of the humvee. I think a conservative estimate of 4 or 5 shots to net a single kill is about accurate, and I think there were maybe two people who threw that number way the fuck off. I don’t wanna name names or anything, but I watched two of our shooters waste ten shots each trying to kill two zombies. I’m really glad I had the opportunity to watch that, because I’m SURE that it was their nerves messing with them. And if they’re getting nervous here and now, they’ll shit spiked bricks covered in Thai chilies when we go to the warehouse.

Can’t have that.

So those folks are officially rotated off the shooting teams as of right now, and they’re now either off the operation entirely, or they can work on the labor team that will clear out the warehouse proper. I guess they can put some range time in to buy my confidence back, but shooting an orange piece of construction paper stuck to a tree is a lot different than shooting at a small girl in a blood-soaked sundress with her intestines dragging behind her. It isn’t apples to apples. Nothing of the such.

Once we’d taken enough down that we could safely wander around with pistols and halligans, that’s exactly what we did. It’s also very critical to get these people up close time like the clear we did in Westfield the other day. Doing that clinic and making sure people could get up close and personal with the undead is a big deal. I distinctly remember that day back in what was it, November? Back when that asshole zombie tackled me in the cafeteria and I took a fucking mental holiday shortly thereafter and locked all the campus doors. Kicking that motherfucker’s ass with my bare hands was a huge confidence booster in retrospect, and giving these people a semi-controlled environment to do the same is awesome.

As you’d expect, Martin and Blake did the most amount of melee work. It was nice to see guys like Alex and George pitch in though. They’ve been on campus doing wall work all the time, and seeing them in action dropping bad guys was nice. I must say one of the massive side effects of the wall work is physical exercise. Our people are fucking ripped now. Operating chainsaws and lifting logs and digging trenches builds muscle, and with our largely reduced diet, folks are lean for the most part. The men are strong and sexy, and the women the same. It’s crazy how attractive we all are. I’d easily say that on the standard sexy scale of 1-10, we’ve all gained at least a +1.5. Easily.