The Dealer of Hope_Adrian's March_Part 1 Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS:

  Auburn Lake Preparatory Academy map

  September 2013

  September 21st

  September 22nd

  Desperation

  September 23rd

  September 30th

  October 2013

  October 2nd

  Junkyard Dogs

  October 6th

  October 8th

  October 12th

  Strange Bedfellows

  October 18th

  October 23rd

  October 26th

  October 30th

  No One’s Home

  November 2013

  November 2nd

  November 5th

  November 6th

  November 11th

  A City Laid Asunder

  November 13th

  November 17th

  November 20th

  November 21st

  One Last Hurrah

  November 25th

  November 28th

  November 30th

  Special Preview — Tesser: A Dragon Among Us

  Dedication

  Patreon Patrons

  About the Author

  Additional Online Content

  Also by Chris Philbrook

  September 2013

  September 21st

  Hey buddy. It’s been a long time, eh? I’ve been fighting the urge to sit down at this laptop and crank out something for some time now. It’s hard to find the time and the will to do it, amazingly so. So very long I sat with this little remnant of technology in front of me in the dark, in the cold, and swore and swore about how much I hated it, and all the time it took from my life, and how much of a burden it was, and all that horseshit. With everything going on in the world, I still found the time to complain about writing my thoughts down voluntarily.

  Don’t even get me started on depression, PTSD, survivor’s guilt, chafing, all in world overrun by the undead. Like how I can label my bullshit now? Adrian’s been READING. Fitting, as so many think I was the savior of mankind.

  But sitting here, putting words back on this strange, electronic white page, I feel good. A little guilty that I’m not doing the duties (ha, dooties) that have taken over my life of late, but still, I feel good.

  The woman I love, Michelle Lewis, is down in the clinic with half of Bastion there with her dealing with our baby birthing conundrum. You like that word? Conundrum. It’s fun to say out loud. Do it. Say it out loud.

  Fun, right? Like discombobulate.

  So with her down there holding onto the hand of our three pregnant girls (women really, saying girls makes it sound creepy in my head), I have been left to my own devices, and Otis the cat is poor company when it comes to keeping up his end of a conversation. Head butting like a champion, sure. Purring like a Harley Davidson, sure. Compelling conversation, not so much. He’s a fluffy cat, not a wordy one.

  It doesn’t help that pretty much everyone else here in Hall E is off doing things this evening. Things… such a descriptive word. It’s been fairly warm of late, especially as I write this, entirely unlike the first time I sat down with this laptop and started writing. Back in September of 2010. Three years ago this very night. Shit it was cold that night. Rough winter really. Rough summer and fall before that too. Remember June 23rd much? The day we here at Bastion take off to remember all those who died and rose again?

  Change of gears. Getting depressed.

  Abby’s down in the clinic. She’s about to pop out her first baby. Patty’s little girl, becoming a mom. My little girl too, kinda, if I want to be honest with myself.

  Weird right? Like, creepy weird she’s having a kid. She’s old enough. As you might imagine it (or remember it), she and our British Marine Harold hit it off right from the jump, and when all the undead dropped and took their permanent nap on March 3rd of last year after I confronted Cassie, it became a lot easier to be in love, and a lot safer to have babies. She was pregnant within months, and she’s due any minute now. She’s still blonde, still sassy, (not skinny anymore) still one of the bests shot here, and I love that young lady, and I’m so fucking proud of her.

  I should go down there. Moral support.

  Speaking of which, I sincerely hope that she has been writing in her own journal. I initially handed my laptop (this laptop) to her in the hopes she’d just take over and keep writing. Making files one after another like I did, but after a few days, she handed me the machine back and was all like, “Thanks Adrian, but I’ll use my laptop.” I caught of whiff... of arrogance. I think she’s a Mac user. Nothing against Mac users, but they frequently have an air of elitism that makes me want to fist them. You use a computer, just like I do, now get over the make and model and software and just use the damn thing. Or I get the Ben Gay.

  Funny to say, “You use a computer just like I do.”

  We... don’t really use computers. Lots and lots of writing by hand. Graph paper has become a staple here at Bastion, and anyone who returns from a loot run with it gets a round of applause. The school had droves of it piled up in storage, and we use it for everything. The only computer in regular use is the one running our security systems, and the few folks that absolutely NEED to use a computer play video games, or watch DVDs or whatnot. I wonder how many people here at Bastion are writing journals on a computer just like me? I’d bet quite a few. As I understand it, journaling has become a popular hobby with Abby telling everyone that during the entire apocalypse I kept a detailed journal.

  Which by the way, reminds me that we are officially into the post-apocalyptic phase of the world. When shit went down, it was the apocalypse. Now we’re past that, and we get a prefix. Fun, right?

  Life has changed so much since I last wrote inside you Mr. Journal (innuendo much?), and I feel like I should talk more about my feelings. Feelings.

  Things are good. Much better than when the world began to eat itself alive. More later.

  Maybe. I’m going to go be with Abby. My little girl is going through some shit right now, and I need to be near her.

  At the very least, to protect her from killing Hal.

  -Adrian

  September 22nd

  Abby’s still in labor. Poor kid. Her and Hal have been in our clinic with Ethan and Fletcher for… pretty much forever. I stopped in to visit her but Abby gave me the stink eye and Hal looked at me with his big brown eyes that said, “Run Adrian. Run as far and as fast as you can, you beautiful idiot.”

  He may have actually said that out loud instead of me reading that from his eyes. It’s hard to say. It’s the truth, regardless of how it went down.

  I guess sitting with your legs in stirrups doing the flying V while a fat headed kid is taking their sweet ass time leaving your womb via a stretched out cervix leaves you a little irritable. Who knew?

  Michelle kissed my cheek and politely suggested I find somewhere else to be. So like the wise man I am (read; I have self-preservation instincts), I left. Things are quiet, I was bored, so here I am. Writing again. Weird. I wonder where this urge is coming from?

  Let’s talk about logistics, supplies, and needs as we head closer to another winter. Winter scares us a lot. Scares me to death. Despite us doing very well on food and general supplies, staying warm, and ensuring that our food harvest will last keeps us up late at night no matter what. I think from here on out, for a very long time winters will be very scary. Fighting zombies for almost two years was one thing, but waging war against Mother Nature is an entirely different matter altogether. I can’t snipe vegetables onto a plate with a .22 plinker. I’m glad now we are only fighting one at a time. We have accomplished a few tasks to make our lives a lot more
tolerable though.

  Not long after my last entry in March of… 2012, and our shit visit to the city, things have settled down. The biggest change of all is the entire lack of undead anywhere. No zombies anywhere to be seen. When I put a bullet through my first true love Cassie’s head, forgive me, they all dropped to the ground, and that was it. Like a fucking switch was flipped. The whole scheme came together like our dreams had foretold. Like Gilbert told us about. I really was the representative soul of mankind, and the scribe of the end times. I really was being tested to see if humanity would get a second chance. Kevin really was the warden, the protector. Michelle really was the soul with me. My soul mate if that’s not too corny. Always sounded corny when I said it before I met her, but now I… get it. We were two peas in an apocalyptic pod. We ARE two peas in a pod. She’s Yin, I’m Yang. I’m Ernie, she’s Bert.

  It’s all very hard for me to believe, but the reality of it went down exactly like that. It happened.

  We’ve seen no undead since that day in March over a year ago, which has been a real frigging blessing. Life has gotten easier, and moving around and finding salvaged goods is now a commonplace, easy task to accomplish. The roads are all overgrown by foliage and most houses are buried under bushes and grasses, but the roads we drive on are pretty clear, and when we have time, we send out groups of kids to manage it with push powered lawn mowers and machetes. It’s crazy cool how easy it is to get a teenager to do something when you offer them a machete, just saying. The primary concern we have is how much fuel we waste if we use vehicles, making sure we have enough food, and dealing with medical issues as they arise.

  Going house to house still requires increased vigilance over what I’d describe as pre-zombie days. Not as much as when the living dead were out and about, but still more than “usual.” We’re worried about bumping into new, potentially hostile survivors, and dealing with human rot, and subsequent disease.

  Yeah, rot. I think we’re past the worst of it now, but initially in March through about late May, we were fucking overwhelmed by the quantity of dead bodies that suddenly started rotting everywhere we went. Do you remember when I said that the undead weren’t rotting? Not even the flies wanted anything to do with them. I think while animated they had some quality to them that prevented the vast majority of decay from kicking in. Like keeping your weapons oiled to prevent rust. The Devil kept ‘em fresh for us.

  I think that same property kept them from freezing solid during the cold weather. That same property also prevented the spread of disease off of their corpses as well. Remember the stories of how the second massive waves of death came from the spread of disease? Well, we were fortunate enough to dodge deaths from sickness, but I’m sure across the world others weren’t as lucky as us.

  When they all dropped dead though, shazam! Rot, decay, pestilence, you name it all came back with a motherfucking vengeance. Houses were beyond horrid. The City was entirely off limits the length of summer. A self imposed reverse quarantine. We’ve only just this week started braving the edge of it again. Our friends over at Spring Meadows on the city fringe have been huge in getting supplies gathered. Everyone over at the Factory has been a godsend as well. They’re in a far more industrial region between town and the City, and with their access to factories and raw materials that previously weren’t really an option, we’ve been able to accomplish far more in the way of technological... recovery.

  We got exceptionally lucky mid June when the Factory people encountered a trio of fellow survivors nearby. They met on friendly terms, and after a week of staying in touch, the new folks moved into a building down the street, then finally into the Factory itself. Two of the three are here at Bastion now.

  The two we have here are a husband and wife in their mid to late fifties. Fletcher and Annie Thomas. Fletcher was a veterinarian before the end, and Annie worked at a magnet company. She has a degree in electrical engineering. They were on vacation visiting some relatives in this neck of the woods when the shit hit the fan. Fletcher has added considerable experience to our medical capabilities, as well as to Ollie and Melissa’s farming ventures. Our cows will be much better off, as are our chickens, our six goats, eleven sheep, and the three horses we’ve managed to find running wild plus the six horses the Texans brought with them. They’re a very nice addition to our transportation capabilities, though I’m still too scared to ride one of them.

  Horses scare me. They remind me of big dogs. Call me a pussy. I dare you. You ever been bitten by a horse?

  Me either, and I am not in the business of collecting experiences of the kind. I’ve had just about enough bites, thankyouverymuch.

  Annie has a lot of good, basic electrical and engineering experience. She’s done a shitload of research into bio diesel for us, and we’re already several months into her building a substantial bio diesel plant in one of the staff houses in the ass end of campus. It’s not technically in the house per se, but at the house, and the house is her office. We’ve spent half our damn efforts scouring the world around us for all the materials she needs to get it going. I should also add that the word substantial is pretty relative. When you have no bio diesel, a gallon a week is substantial.

  But she assures me that by Halloween, we’ll be in production of an appreciable amount of bio diesel. The fuel truck that Kevin and company brought with them from the coast before the big Cassie confrontation has been an incredible boon, as has all the other fuel sources we’ve been able to acquire, but it’s getting lower and lower faster and faster due to our increased travels to acquire shit here and there. Especially seeing how we’re moving much further from home than ever before. I can’t even begin to describe to you how incredible it was for us to hit the City library, and pillage it for science texts.

  Reminder: winter is coming.

  Bio diesel will help solve our fuel problem for the vehicles, as well as our fuel issues for the generators for the dorms. Annie has been helpful converting the gasoline machines over into diesel as we find them. Plus, we were able to hit the DOTs in the surrounding larger towns, and get our hands on the portable work site industrial generators, which luckily enough run on diesel already. I don’t understand the science of it all but things are working out. She also has plans to build us a hydroelectric generator on the river, but that will be several years of work we haven’t begun yet. I’m excited for the future, and that has been a very long time coming.

  I guess I should say that one of the stranger things that have been going on is the steady influx of new arrivals looking for me. Me, and then Michelle and Kevin to a lesser extent. I don’t like thinking about it much, but it would appear that many, many others were visited in dreams, and the tale of our deeds had been told to them in some fashion. In a world gone dead, I have become something of a celebrity, which is half hilarious, and half sad and irritating. Wait, does that make it thirds?

  Guys like me aren’t celebrities, unless you count reality TV scumbags getting drunk and punching sluts on MTV. Which I guess makes me a celebrity…

  Back to the subject at hand. A steady flow of people have arrived on campus, creating a bit of a population problem for us. I get real itchy when I think about too many people here inside the walls, so as they arrive, we talk with them, assess skill sets, determine usefulness and what roles they could fill and are interested in filling, then we give them their option of living spaces. Everyone is welcome, conditionally, more or less.

  Bastion is full up, so random houses in town are an option as always, but we try to push them to our off-campus ‘population centers.’

  What’s that you ask Mr. Journal? Why does it have those almost quotation marks around it? Well, we have several hubs of people we’re in league with. You already know about the cleared out apartment building in town, MGR (still led by Patty and Mike, population of about 50 souls now), as well as the old strip club/fortress on the city fringe we affectionately call The Factory (now led by a Factory original named Celeste and one of our transplants Hec
tor, population of about 50 souls as well) and the gated community in the city suburbs, Spring Meadows (still run by Anders and Agnes, population of around 80). Before I forget, make a note that we are running hot at about 65% female population. Men trying to be heroes down the stretch didn’t pan out for most of ‘em.

  I think most notable of our arrivals was the Texas group. They arrived in late March right after the big Cassie confrontation in a convoy. They had a big old fuel tanker filled with fresh diesel, plus a half dozen horses, a flatbed with all kinds of good stuff, and a powerful need to help the people they were convinced helped saved the world. They were some of the first people who came seeking me out, and knew more or less what we had done for the world. This without ever having met me, or ever having met anyone who had met me.

  Go figure.

  Their leader, a dude named Adam who ran a Home Depot before that day, is a solid guy who almost died on arrival. He had a gunshot wound to his side that he’d collected somewhere in southern Virginia when they ran into a group calling themselves the ‘First Virginia Republic’ or some such shit.

  Let the whackos (wackos?) come out to play.

  Says the guy who lives in a private school turned fort named Bastion.

  Anyway, the Texans are real good people, all 12 of them that are still alive. They lost a few to the trip getting here (which if you think about it, is a herculean journey that I am simply floored by) and one more here due to illness.

  As they were the first to arrive before we filled up, they got their pick of the litter in term of living spaces, so some of them are still here. Adam and his kid Nathan relocated to Spring Meadows with Agnes and Anders and all their people, but the rest of the Texans are here in Bastion. They got this one guy, his name is Eddie, and he’s a hoot. Used to be a truck driver and talks like one. I get such a kick out of him. Kevin does too. They’re thick as thieves now. A good old boy from Longview Texas and an asshole Army Ranger from Southie in Boston. Who knew?