Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 6): In the Arms of Family (8 page)

I didn’t measure it exactly, but I think we got around a hundred feet of wall in the ground today. Blake was a goddamn ninja with the backhoe too, and managed to completely catch up on all the berm we’d been awkwardly doing while he was gone. He’s got some time behind the controls of those things, and he certainly showed us how it was done. He's our Picasso of the backhoe.

I do have a bit of a dilemma with Blake right now though. He’s largely back to being obsessed with getting that ram/plow blade on the front of the HRT, and while that is an admirable and good thing to be working on, we really need his efforts elsewhere now. Two reasons for that in my mind.

Firstly, Martin is a welder, and can likely get that whole project done in a quarter of the time. Plus Martin was looking at the work Blake had done so far, and casually commented that it was, “Good for a kid that ought to be wearing a helmet to school.” God bless Blake, but I’d feel a lot better if Martin was working on it.

Secondly, we really need our fuel filtered. We built the damn filtration system here quite some time ago, and it has sat idle since, waiting for Blake to take our drums of gas and diesel and get them cleaned up some. I did some quick checking, and we are TEARING through our fucking gasoline supply. Hardcore. All the extra generators we are running are really eating into it.
 

We’ll be out in a few weeks and then we’ll be forced to use the stuff that’s likely to be wet, or dirty, and that might gum up the works of either the generators, or any gas operated vehicles. We’ve got a ton of diesel still, so that’s fine and dandy, but gasoline is really important for us right now.
 

We also need to have an all hands meeting here to remind everyone that hey, electricity is a luxury, not a fucking privilege. I see some of the new people running generators during the day to make soup in a microwave, and guess what? That’s got to stop. Light a fucking fire and cook it in the can. Electricity needs to be rationed, because we get it all from gasoline, and that’s a very fucking finite resource.

I’ll be talking to Blake tomorrow about it, and hopefully he sees the light, and doesn’t pitch a fit. That’s of course if I can tear him away from the backhoe and little Adrian.

Man it’s weird to say that. Little Adrian.
 

Off to bed. Tomorrow we are heading back to MGR to take off half of the solar panels, and get the place cleaned up so we can start using the roof as an observation post. If we can get the gear from the police station and figure it out, there’s a good chance we can set up a radio repeater tower on the roof of the joint, which may or may not give us enough radio nut sack to communicate directly with Westfield. At the very least, it’ll give us enough power so that we have radio contact with campus no matter where we are in town.
 

Again though, that’s me being optimistic.

-Adrian

July 7
^th

Well. I feel gross.

We all do. Mr. Journal, we knew MGR was chock full of grossness when we did our clear of it and made the whole place safe, but we had no idea the extent of the gore and filth. The place was the literal definition of wretched. I am comfortable saying that too, because I took the time and looked up what the dictionary definition of wretched was, and it’s perfect.

Three full floors covered in a year’s worth of death and decay does not come clean easily. We have the fresh vomit to show for it too.

We rolled out in a huge party yesterday morning to get it done after I took Zach, Ryan, and Martin to the firing range area in the back of campus. I wanted to test their ability with a firearm before we took them back out anywhere, plus I want everyone able to carry a weapon carrying. It’s just safer if we’re all armed and skilled enough to be useful.

We spent two hours there starting right after dawn, and I was somewhat surprised with the results.

Martin is awful with guns. His safety is close to perfect, but he’s kind of twitchy on the trigger, and sends everything slightly wide right. Now that wouldn’t be a big deal at all but the simple fact is we are aiming for the head, and a slightly wide head shot is a wasted bullet, and a zombie still coming at you. He will need a lot more time at the range before he’s able to carry and I hate the thought of wasting ammunition while he finds his way. I thought about having him carry one of the scatterguns, but he seemed hesitant when I asked him if he’d ever fired a shotgun. Ironic that one of the biggest guys here on campus is skittish around guns. So as I said, more firing range time for Martin.

Zach is a wee bit unsafe with guns. I caught him twice slowly tilting a handgun to the side like you see in the bad gangster movies, and that shit will just not fly with me. The good sign is that when he held the gun like an adult, he shot reasonably well. I just need to break him of the bad habit. I told him if he could shoot like a big boy the next time we hit the range, he could get a gun full time.
 

Ryan is a pimp. He was safe, smart, fired well, and immediately earned the right to carry a gun. I didn’t want to give him anything too heavy until I saw him in more robust situations, so I hooked him up with one of our .38 revolvers, because we’re swimming in the ammo, and spare weapons should it break. Plus it’s got low recoil, is easy to operate and clean, and if he loses it, it’s not a big deal.

After we got that all said and done, we headed out en masse with major loads of people and cleaning supplies. We really only wanted to get the upper floors cleaned out. The bottom two could wait if we didn’t get to it. We did get to it, but I sort of wished we hadn’t.

We hadn’t gotten the dead bodies out yet, so that was nasty. There were a lot of dead bodies in that fucking building. We tossed them off of the balconies and into the garbage pile in the street, or as close to it as we could get them. Some of the bodies exploded when they hit the street, which made for a pretty foul scene outside too. Speaking of foul scenes, there was a fairly steady stream of zombies coming at us all day both days.

We were never overwhelmed either day, but I want to say Abby counted a total of maybe eighty over the two days. Our second day was slightly heavier than the first, which makes sense due to us making lots of noise on day one. No injuries outside, and to be honest, it’s good to know we’re still trimming the proverbial undead hedges in town.

In addition to the dead bodies upstairs there was just a lot of blood, and shit too. Dead bodies lose control of their buttholes and poop everywhere as I’ve said before, so the apartments had chunks of turds all over the place, as well as huge smears where it fell out of their pant legs and they stepped on it or fell in it. Instead of cleaning the rugs and carpets, we cut them out, and tossed them right out the windows and balconies into the street.

Hard surfaces were purged with bleach. Fortunately we’ve been stockpiling it and we had enough to clean the areas we’ll be using regularly in the building. We also went though bottle after bottle of air freshener and Febreeze too. Anything to get the fucking smell out. The people there had died primarily during summer of last year so luckily they had their windows open at the time. Of course there’s only so much an open window can do to alleviate the smell of that much death.

We opened the few windows that weren’t already open and with the chemical bath we gave every dirty surface, by the time we were done today, most of the rooms were brought down to palatable levels. Some of them though… will never be habitable. The damn smell and aura of what happened in them is just in the walls permanently now. Like spiritual residue or something. I wonder what kinds of dreams we’d have if we slept in those rooms.

I bet they wouldn’t be of The White Room.

While we were working on all that, we managed to get half of the solar panels off the roof and loaded into the trucks for the gym. We took really careful notes, and some pictures and such so hooking them up at the school would be a lot easier. I wish some of the STIG guys were still alive to help, but that’s a huge fucking reach. There's a hole in the ground where all of them used to be.
 

Yesterday, I forgot to mention, I spoke with Blake. I said in an entry a few days ago that I needed him retasked to work on fuel stuff, and I spoke with him about it. He wasn’t pleased to hear that I thought his efforts on the HRT needed to be abandoned. He wasn’t too bad about it, just sulked a bit, but when I explained to him how bad off we were for fuel, and how important it was that we had gasoline for the generators so his woman and baby boy could have electricity, he changed his tune right the fuck off and went straight to the filtration system we built. I think he’ll be on that for a few days or more, but really, I have no fucking idea. ADD must be a motherfucker.

I do know that he’s changed since the kid was born. He is much more serious, and doesn’t have the same level of that... rambunctious energy he used to have. He also hasn’t raised his hands once to leave campus since he returned. I can understand that. New father, afraid of dying, doesn’t want to take unnecessary risks, etc. I just hope he doesn’t lose that hardened edge he developed on his own for so long out there. That Blake was a huge asset to us, and I’d hate to lose him.

Where the fuck was I?

Alternative energy sources. We are going to run out of gasoline much faster than I had anticipated. We’re going to have to start hitting the gas stations on the other side of town and flat out hope that there is some usable shit in the tanks. My gut tells me there won’t be much at all, or it won’t be usable at all. Either way, we need to find more juice.

We need different kinds of energy, and we need it soon. It’s that, or we find entirely new ways to live, which I suppose is the eventuality anyway. I got a sinking feeling the refineries aren’t operating anymore, and with the shelf life of gas, we will be out of it long before anyone gets a refinery up and running again.
 

If we want long term electricity, we need solar panels. Lots of them. Every roof here needs to be covered in them. Henceforth, whenever we leave campus, I’m instituting a protocol that if we see solar panels, we are stopping and removing them, or making a plan to return and get them later. Even the ones that just warm water would be good. If we could figure out how to harness the power of the river to make juice too, that’d be great. Sadly, I know fuck all about building a hydroelectric dam, and I don’t think anyone else here does either. Maybe there’s a book in the library on that esoteric subject.

RIIIIIIIIIGHT.

Bio-Diesel is an option. I know we’ve got the stuff around here to make it, I just don’t know how to do it. If we could find someone nearby with the knowledge... man that’d be great. I remember a few years ago some of the ski resorts up north switched all their grooming machines to bio-diesel, and they had the operations to do it right on site. I wonder if that asshole ski resort Lindsey and Doug ran from was one of them. If that’s the case, then those fuckers are the ones who are Oprah rich. Being able to make and sell diesel fuel in this world is an amazingly powerful position to be in, and they’ve got barter out the ass for anything. The new Arabs, as it were.

That’s the kind of thing people kill for nowadays. Not that I’m saying I’d mount a mission to take it from them, but shit. If we could make the trip north somehow to check some of the resorts and see if bio-diesel gear was still left behind… that’d be terrific. I’m also wondering if any of the farms in the region here had bio-diesel set ups. I know it was all the rage there last year, so there’s got to be one around here somewhere. Of course there are no "large" farms in town, but a few towns over in a few directions I can recall a few places that might’ve been big enough to do it.

More shit to put on the growing to-do list. This is where having more people is nice. If we can split up and do two or three things at once, it’s so much better for everyone. Unfortunately, we desperately need to secure ways to feed more people first, otherwise…

We’ll all fucking starve.

And starving sucks.

-Adrian

July 9
^th

Well. Things are going… fairly well here.

I’m feeling silly tonight. I had a couple drinks earlier outside on the porch of Hall A with some of the folks here, and despite the motherfucking mosquitoes, it was well worth it. We hadn’t really taken much time to sit down and put our feet up and get to know each other, so spending an hour or two with these folks was really nice.

Alex and George for example, our resident gay couple, are pretty awesome people. They both worked in the city before the end at a bank, and despite those skills being entirely useless now, they were both very creative people (and continue to be), and they’ve got a lot natural talent. Both of them can play a couple musical instruments each, and Alex can draw like a bastard. It was really nice to sit down and listen to the two of them play a song together. They both play guitar, and they played five or six songs for us. It’ll be nice to have some reasonably creative and talented folks around here. It seems like the bulk of us are “practical” types, who are far too no-nonsense.

Even Ollie was swayed to their side. That or he doesn’t give a rat’s ass they are gay. Who knows? I’m just happy to have everyone getting along, even if it is only for an evening.

Martin has about ten years as a welder, is pretty funny, huge, and can hold his liquor. His wife Julie is also a good sized girl. Not really fat at all, just tall. Martin is about six three or six four, and she’s gotta be at least six foot as well. She played college basketball, is pretty physical in general, and worked as a cook in a nice restaurant over in Westfield. She’s been helping Melissa make meals for us, and frankly, it’s been awesome. I know it sounds a little… what’s the word? Misogynistic? But it has been a blessing to have our meals prepared for us.

It’s like time has rewound several hundred years. All the men are out toiling, breaking our backs, working all day, risking our lives, and the women have stayed back, and are tending to all the things that don’t seem to require broad shoulders, and a penis. I know that sounds dickish, and it isn’t entirely true. Angela and Abby as well as Patty do as much labor/dangerous shit as any of the men do, if not more. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but I find it strange that our culture and day to day habits seem to have regressed so far, so fast.