Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 6): In the Arms of Family (36 page)

I’ll sleep better tonight too because I’m fucking dead. Every part of me is sore. I’ve got blisters the size of quarters on my hands from shoveling. If I had to masturbate to save my life I’d just shoot myself and cut to the chase. Faster death that way.

Yeah just fucking dead. I don’t even know what to say, or where to begin really. This just blows. We’re gonna be cutting down trees and shoveling dirt for days to get out from under this bitch.

Nothing else to report Mr. Journal.

-Adrian

Paranoia Island

“How are the locals Ethan?” Kevin asked as the parajumper sat down in the shade, resting his weary feet on an empty box of rations.

“Sick, restless. Sick of being restless. Restless about being sick. Scared shitless we’re about to leave them. Same old bullshit.” Ethan tilted his head back as far as it could go. Kevin thought the young man’s head would just fall off.

“Sounds good. They still pissed we’re rationing out antibiotics on them?” Kevin asked as he tossed the younger airman a plastic bottle of cool water.

Ethan caught it with deft precision. “Yeah a little. Luis is doing his best to keep them calmed down, but it’s only a matter of time before they pull a village riot on our Castle Frankenstein. They’ll be at the gate with pitchforks and torches soon enough. All it’ll take is one or two sick kids and we’ll be making the decision to kill some of these people to keep them away from the bird. God forbid they figure out we’re only a part or two away from being airborne.”

Kevin sighed. They’d already been here far too fucking long in his mind. The MC130 they arrived in The Azores in was being worked on, but with no substantial maintenance crew, or spare parts on site to speak of, the repairs were going at whatever was slower than a snail’s pace. They arrived at Lajes Airfield at the end of November. Today was June 23
^rd
, 2011.

The date stunk for two reasons in Kevin’s mind. The first was that the plane they landed in was still not functioning after seven and a half months. Once, back in March they thought they had it up and running and ready to go, but on a test firing of the engine that needed the maintenance, smoke poured out like the motor was about to explode, and they had to pull the entire thing apart again, and start all over. Without all the proper diagnostics tools, and a trained maintenance team to help with the repairs, they were sitting on their thumbs as they scoured the island looking for parts they hoped would fix the issues. The locals helped them, supplying items here and there, but the closer the plane got to taking off, the closer the locals got to losing the protection the team offered them, as well as their medical expertise. The social balance on the small island was awkward at best.
 

The date also sucked in Kevin’s opinion because it marked the one year anniversary of the end of the world. Kevin was in Jerusalem when it all started. He was guarding some asshole Senator named Henke at the time, and when the Politician was on the stage, standing at the podium making his impassioned speech, terrorists struck nearby. It would’ve been fine had the dead not sat back up after dying. Kevin and his team of security professionals would’ve had the senator up and out in seconds, and safe inside the embassy before anything could’ve gotten them. Except the dead did sit back up, and watching them tear the living apart and press forward to do it again and again to both innocents and villains alike was too much to deal with. They seemed unstoppable, and never ending. Almost all of Kevin’s expert team of warriors was dead within 24 hours.

Over the next few months they had scurried from safe place to safe place, dealing with a world rotting apart. Kevin flew from Israel to England, dealt with a chopper crash in downtown London, and then a massive siege of the dead at RAF Mildenhall in the English countryside. Kevin, a team of Air Force special operators, and the flight crew of a MC130 Combat Talon stole ammunition, two humvees, fuel, food, water, weapons and the plane and left the base as it was overrun with the dead. They landed in Morocco, hoping to refuel at a clandestine Green Beret forward operating base. Sadly, the base was gone, and they landed at a local airfield.

That’s when things got weird. Before leaving Mildenhall Kevin had a dream in a white room where two of the dead men from his team spoke to him, telling him of things to come, and things to watch out for. One of the things his men told him was to watch out for the rule of three. Kevin was struck by the dream powerfully, and as they landed in Morocco, Kevin saw a trio of small flames burning nearby with two figures standing in the midst and he knew with complete, unnatural certainty that he had to find out what was at that fire. Of course a legion of the dead was amassed around the two people at that fire, but that didn’t stop Kevin. He knew he had to find out who those people were.
 

Jaden, the leader of the Air Force special operators, lost a leg in the trip after a hijacked Hilux flipped in the desert and rolled on top of him, smashing the leg to bits. Ethan, the tired PJ sitting across from him at this moment wound up doing the amputation just below the hip. He was left with a stump. Jaden wasn’t angry. He understood the risks, and in fact was pleasantly surprised to have survived to that point at all. Kevin still felt strong pangs of guilt whenever he thought of the incident, or saw Jaden's pink stump in the evenings when they were trying to relax.

Michelle was the woman in the center of the three fires. Michelle was older than Kevin by several years, and was a pure and beautiful blonde woman. She was a researcher, a Theologist and explorer, having spent her entire adult life looking into religions and cultures of the world. She exuded a confidence and wisdom that made her a calming influence unlike any Kevin had ever encountered. Oudry was the little African boy that had stood with her that night, but he was dead. Undead at first, but by the time Kevin and the men got to her in their stolen trucks, she’d killed him for good. He’d been her guide in Africa for some time, but the presence of evil had usurped his good nature, and she had to put him down.
 

Evil was real. Very real. If the presence of a world filled with the walking dead wasn’t enough proof for you, the insane dreams, and the story Michelle told them was enough to seal the deal. Michelle was in Africa in a glade at Midnight when the clock turned to June 23
^rd
. She watched as Evil entered the world, and gave un-birth to the first undead. Evil spoke to her with conviction, and told her humanity had failed entirely, and this was our last judgment. Survive this, or we as a species would be wiped off the planet.

Heavy shit.

Some of Kevin’s men were skeptical. Some of them flat out called her crazy, but when Kevin told them he had dreams like hers, and when they remembered some of the bizarre, unexplainable behaviors of the undead, it all started to make sense to everyone. Why not Evil?

Humanity certainly needed judging.

Neither Kevin nor Michelle, nor any of the other men had experienced any of the strange dreams in the mysterious White Room since they’d landed at Lajes. Everything had gone quiet on tht front. Many of the men had put two and two together, realizing that they never dreamt of each other, only of those they thought were dead. Michelle couldn’t explain it fully, but as she reminded them, in the months following last June, they had only experienced a small handful of dreams. It wasn’t that unusual for them to have gone months without any of the strange nighttime visions.

Becky Masters sat down on the crate next to Kevin as his mind raced on all the strangeness of the world and rested her head on his shoulder. Becky was the wife of Alan, one of Kevin’s men who died a year ago on that day. Kevin and the surviving members of his team made a run north into England to rescue Becky and her daughter Shelby. He’d made a promise to his man, and he kept it. Of course now, a year later, he and Becky were gradually falling into what amounted to love. Kevin felt guilty about it at first, but he knew Becky needed the support, and he knew Shelby needed a father figure, and he knew he didn’t want to be alone anymore.
 

“Ethan, how was the clinic at the terminal today?” Becky asked in her light English accent. She’d lost a lot of it in the time she’d been around all the Americans. It was too easy to learn bad habits.

“Shit show. Poor Jaden trying to deal with patients from his wheelchair. People running all over the damn place, barking in Portuguese. He’s still there now dealing with them.”

Becky nodded, understanding. Her daughter Shelby was playing around in the middle of the runway, wearing a makeshift set of butterfly wings on her back. She “flew” back and forth, a wide smile on her face. The tiny girl was the picture of childlike innocence. The scattered undead milling about at the heavy fence on the fringe of the airport were not.

Kevin wondered if that fence would fall down like the one at Mildenhall did. It seemed like only a matter of time. Or perhaps a matter of desire on the dead's part.

*****

“Luis, can you please tell this woman to stop squirming? I need to lance this abscess without her moving around like a goddamn fish out of water,” Jaden pleaded to the local official in the office-turned examination room in the airport building.

Luis moved forward and chattered out a series of requests at the woman with the large infection on her leg. She listened to the man and stopped moving her calf, letting Jaden get the small scalpel down to lance the infection. The bulbous lump on the side of her knee was the size of a grape, and when Jaden drew the scalpel across it, a white-yellow pus slipped out. Thin red ribbons of blood traced their way through the custardy mess as it ran down her leg. It reminded him of the color of the eyes of the dead. Jaden wiped the pus up as the woman spoke down at him in broken English. Her tone was frightened, and her eyes wide.

“Mister Jaden, please don’t leave us ever. We need you.” She'd practiced the phrase before. He could tell.

Jaden smiled up at her as he sopped up the mess. “Don’t worry. We’ll be here for a while.” It was a lie. He'd practiced that phrase before. As soon as they could, he and the rest of his people would leave this damn island and all the needy, paranoid people on it. To validate his feelings, the small girl in the room, the daughter of the woman with the infected knee jumped to her feet and grabbed Jaden’s single leg, pleading with him in Portuguese to stay. Jaden couldn’t understand all she said, but he knew enough. The locals were desperate for their support.

And paranoid Jaden and his people would leave them high and dry.

*****

“How far off are we from being able to test the frigging engine again?” Kate asked. She was pissed that the repairs had taken this long and hiding her displeasure was too much work.

Dale, her flight engineer and the man most able to manufacture the makeshift part they needed was covered in grease, oil, and scratches. He worked his knuckles to the bone day after day in the machine shop of the hangar they’d taken over, trying to create the part that should’ve been there in the first place. “Kate I don’t fucking know. Luis said he had the piece we needed, and he was supposed to bring it to the clinic today, but when Roger and Joel came through earlier, they said he forgot the part. Once we have the part, I can work it over, make sure it’s at spec, and if it is, then we can fire up the engine for a pre flight test. If it goes well, then we can fucking leave here. But Kate, we’re talking about a transatlantic flight here. If this part fails, we fucking crash in the ocean and swim to America.”

Kate scowled at the sense he was making. She hated this island. She hated the dirty locals who had bled them dry for months of medicine and hard labor. She hated the Portuguese language. She hated the fact that they should’ve been here for a few days, but now they’d been here for months on end. Granted, they couldn’t have flown into America during the heart of winter anyway, not knowing if the runways would be clear, but shit, they could’ve left months ago.

“Alright fine. One more day then. If Luis doesn’t show with that part tomorrow, then I am marching my ass outside the fence, and I am making his ass bring me to the fucking part. I’m done with this shit.” Kate walked off after scooping up a heavy wrench from a toolbox. She was headed to the fence to crack a few zombie skulls to let off some steam.

Dale knew she was serious. Kate didn’t threaten to do anything she wasn’t completely willing to follow through on. If anything, she was reliable like that.

Dale was frightened for poor Luis.

*****

“Jaden, you don’t understand. If they know you are leaving soon, they will stop you. They can’t afford to have you leave here. Our medical ability is gone on this island. We can’t risk ferrying over to the other islands. We don’t know how bad it will be there. Our electricity is spotty, the water doesn’t always work right, and there aren’t many guns or bullets left here either for if the dead spread like before. You are our only hope for medical care for our children. If I give you the part you are asking for, and you leave, they’ll surely kill me,” Luis said in hushed tones to the leader of the special operators, and chief physician to the locals.
 

Jaden sat quietly in the terminal of the abandoned airport, digesting the facts Luis had just laid on him. All of the day’s patients were gone, and all that remained was the chemical odor of the bleach they cleaned the rooms up with, and the sound of a clock ticking the rest of their lives away. Luis was the remnant leader of the local populace. There were a few thousand folks left on this island, which still amazed Jaden and the rest of the team he’d arrived with. How all these people had survived this long with the undead menace about befuddled him. There were almost no undead here. One here and one there, but nothing widespread like on the mainland. They were usually the old or sick dying alone in houses on the fringe of the island. Maybe it was the fact that they had a low mortality rate here naturally? Or maybe it was that there was no looting, or rioting, or violence of note yet here.