Dead Cities: Adrian's March. Part Four (Adrian's Undead Diary Book 12) Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS:

  September 2014

  September 9th

  September 11th

  September 13th

  September 14th

  Rachel and Mara

  September 17th

  September 19th

  September 21st

  September 22nd

  September 25th

  September 28th

  October 2014

  October 1st

  October 3rd

  The Ghost in the Boiler Room

  October 5th

  October 6th

  October 7th

  October 8th

  October 11th

  October 13th

  October 14th

  October 16th

  October 17th

  October 19th

  October 22nd

  October 25th

  October 26th

  October 27th

  October 29th

  October 31st

  Fetters

  November 2014

  November 4th

  November 6th

  November 7th

  November 8th

  November 10th

  November 12th

  November 12th, (2nd entry)

  November 13th

  November 13th, (2nd entry)

  November 14th

  November 16th

  November 18th

  Sanctuary

  November 21st

  November 24th

  November 27th

  Ernest Goes for a Walk

  About the Author

  Also by Chris Philbrook

  Patreon Patrons

  Free Ebook

  September 2014

  September 9th

  It’s been about a week since we landed on the peninsula of land that is a part of Shoreham Port. We are establishing a serious foothold here to give us a base of operations to do some good, and help people, but Jesus fucking Hoo-ha is it a real bitch. The steady stream of undead to the peninsula hasn’t overwhelmed us yet, but it’s constant, and we’re using melee weapons as much as we can to conserve our ammo. We can’t afford to expend all our resources just holding onto or clearing out a pinprick on a map. And make no mistake; we’re still clearing out the area we own. There are at least a hundred buildings, some of them quite fucking large warehouses and manufacturing buildings that we’re still moving through one at a time, securing as fast and as safely as we can.

  It’s not just because the undead are faster, and… like, I guess a little more clever than we’re used to, but because what we have to do for adequate defenses against them is just that much more work. Our sailors and marines can’t just fucking slap a piece of plywood over a window frame, or a hole we shot in the walls of a building and call it good enough. There are just too many of them, and they’re too fast, and aggressive for that meager a defense to hold for long. If we’re using wood, we have to reinforce it with lumber framing, and we should use steel as much as can, when we can. The extra labor really adds up, and slows down the whole process.

  It’s not an option though.

  Lucky we threw down on the fucking intersection with a steelyard on it. Securing a concrete company and a power plant in the process, and both of those businesses are increasingly critical for our mission. There’s a large fuel-storage building on the inland side of the port too (not on the peninsula we’ve made safe, but across the water), and from what we can see, it has diesel.

  LIKE I FUCKING PLANNED THAT SHIT.

  I sort of did, but only a little. This is one of those moments when they’ll look back on it in a hundred years and someone really smart will say, “If you can disregard his obsession with pornography, anime from the early 2000s and his complete lack of decorum, or patience, his choice of landing site clearly shows Adrian Ring’s tactical brilliance.”

  A motherfucker can hope.

  So we plan. And we weld. And we shoot or stab every fucking thing that comes close to us that isn’t speaking like Austin Powers, or Gandalf the Fucking Grey, or that vampire woman from Underworld. Beckinsale.

  You know she spoke like eight languages in real life? Super smart.

  We could use her right now. I guarantee we’re gonna encounter people speaking languages I don’t know shit about. I blame the American schooling system for failing to offer me language classes at an early age when it easier to learn. For reals. What percentage of teenagers are JAZZED they need to learn a language to graduate? I scraped by with a D average in Spanish. Just enough to order at a Taco Bell drive through.

  I miss Taco Bell.

  Okay, so I need to recap the last week before I get too lost and ahead of myself. Sorry I haven’t written more the last few days, Mr. Journal, but I’ve been working such long hours, and the sleep is real shitty lately, and I just haven’t had the faculties or time to make an entry happen. At least the weather has been nice. Mostly sunny, some clouds, no rain to speak of.

  Our peninsula is pretty safe. The amount of steel that we have in that steelyard has given us a substantial amount of raw material to work with, and when that runs out, there are warehouses and ships nearby that we can dismantle for more. As long as we don’t run out of acetylene and stuff like that, we’re golden for a damn long time.

  Reuben James and Crommelin both had several sailors with cutting and welding experience (thank you US Military for providing people with educations on this kinda stuff, because you just never know when you need to spot-weld something together in a fight) and they’ve been working 16 hour days building us not only fences, but defensive emplacements, and a complex gate system for coming and going. We’re lucky these faster pricks can’t climb. Not yet at least. They are wily enough to walk along a fence until they find the end of it, so it’s imperative to keep them pulled to a safe spot as well as have a sturdy, able defensive force working to protect builders as the fence gets put up. It goes real fast when we can move shipping containers and just drop them as fifty-foot wall sections, all at once. Plenty of those kicking around here.

  We’ve discovered some… future issues as it pertains to coming and going.

  Our location at the end of the peninsula means there’s a single avenue of approach; from the east. That’s good. It means we can stack up the bulk of our guards in a concentrated area, filled with overlap and redundancies. We’ll never be able to fully ignore the shoreline until we get it blocked off or fenced off; they’re still washing up from when we shelled this place with the guns on Reuben James and Crommelin. Beach patrol is a bitch assignment right now. Seaweed covered zombies is some old school 80s horror movie shit. Anyway, one land approach also means we only need to build a single avenue of entrance and exit for land movement.

  But that means… we only have one way in, and one way out. And, if the undead get stacked up on us at that gate, and with the speed that this European undead dingleberries hustle at, that’s a real problem for a gateway system with a single door.

  We open the gate, they flood in, game over. Can’t open the gate because we’ll get flooded? Game over for the people stuck on the other side.

  So we need an airlock system. An inner gate that remains shut, while an outer gate allows entry and exit. We shut the outer gate, kill all the zombies from the outside of the airlock through the fencing, then we open the inner gate to let our vehicle/vehicles in.

  The mechanical science was left to the people who’re good at that, and right now they’re working on it, and doing some really clever, and imaginative shit.

  Get this: we’re anticipating having to
use school buses, or lorries to move. They’re diesel, diesel is in abundance here (there’s a fuel distributor right near our peninsula we haven’t checked yet), they’re rugged, relatively easy to fix, have good ground clearance, aren’t too big to get bogged down all the time, and we can up-armor them with our skills and supplies here. In a perfect world, we’ll steal another HRT-style vehicle, or some humvees, but that’s unlikely.

  So, they did some measurements, and designed the outer gate to be spring-loaded. Like… industrial fucking coils the size of my thigh on both sides, so when the buses/lorries are returning, they’ll drive into the gate with their front bumper, and the gate doors on each side will open (held against the side of the bus initially by men and women on opposite sides using ropes to add some tension) and then the doors will hit springs on the inside of the airlock space, and prevent the doors from being pushed in. The brainiacs assure me and Captain Rosario it’ll take two dozen zombies pushing with all their might to budge the door off the side of the bus or truck as it pulls in. Even if they do manage to push it in, it’ll give us a buffer of time to control the movement, and an automatic way for the door to try and close itself.

  If our outer door is compromised, we can leave the fucker open, and have our vehicle occupants exit out a roof hatch, and cross over the top of the fence to an elevated mezzanine using a bridge that’s being built (ala a drawbridge built on the side) and then just purge the living shit out of the airlock area until we can shut it safely. We’re using a combination of welded steel bars/rebar, and shipping containers as walls. It’s gonna be RUGGED.

  At no point, ever, will our cleared area of Shoreham Port be open to the mainland again. At least not until we get all of these damn zombies put down.

  So yeah, we have a team of smart people building the gates, mezzanine levels, defensive positions, hinges, gate doors, springs, and all that shit. Once that’s all built (they’re saying two weeks) we can start thinking about actually driving vehicles to and from here.

  But we ain’t got any. So there’s that to worry about.

  Right now we are not in dire need of supplies, or ammunition, or really anything other than ground transport. William has been vocal in our senior officer briefings that his chopper will run out of fuel sooner rather than later, especially if we start using it for sorties at all, so that’s an issue, but a secondary one to fencing/gates/and ground vehicles. I’ll say it again: William’s Seahawk isn’t an option because we’re low on fuel, and can’t risk a patrol flight deep north. No known places to land, no known source of fuel, no idea what the ground situation is like at all… lots of reasons why we need to be cautious with the bird.

  We’d like to get on-shore bedroom and living facilities set up, but supplies for that aren’t on board the ships in our little fleet, and going off the peninsula to get a fucking twin mattress is just about the dumbest fucking idea possible. Might as well wear scuba flippers that honk as we walk through downtown London. Squirt ketchup or malt vinegar all over ourselves so the British zombies can enjoy the taste of our flesh a bit more.

  So, we sleep on the boats, or in our defensive positions as needed, and we work the problem at hand; securing ground transport, and patrolling the nearby areas so we can start a real plan for heading to Croydon, where Hal’s family was.

  Maybe is, if we get lucky.

  He’s not optimistic about it at all, but neither was I about my family, and look how that turned out.

  Looking at you, Tommy. I know you’re out there somewhere.

  I came here not just to help save the world, and help the Trinity here unfuck itself, but because one way or the other, I’ll make my way to Afghanistan, and I’ll find you.

  I am not dreaming of you.

  Not here, not there, not once, not ever, and that means you’re still alive, and if you’re alive…

  I’m going to find you.

  I’m tired now. Gonna try and get some shut-eye. Will check back in with how everyone is doing, and let you know how goddamn weird my dreams have been since we entered this hot zone.

  -Adrian

  September 11th

  Still not sleeping well. Otis is… unnerved by it all. You know, back in the day when I was looting houses on Auburn Lake Road, and Jones Road, and Prospect Circle, I’d come back once in awhile, covered in blood and guts from the occasional confrontation with a zombie, and he’d avoid me like the fucking plague until I took a hot shower. Thank God for forced artesian wells and generators.

  Now, he’s avoiding me like the fucking plague most of the time. He’ll hide under the chair at my little desk in the cabin I share with Kevin until I shower, or behind the small litter box I have for him near the door. Once I’m clean, he’ll return to normal, and I’ll say this: when I wake up at night (which is often) he’s not on me, or beside me, he’s hiding again. When I’m not dreaming, I wake and he’s with me.

  It’s like…. It’s like he can sense that my dreams are fucked, and wants nothing to do with being near me while I dream.

  I am pretty sure that back in the day (which was a Wednesday, btw) when I dreamt strange dreams he’d be near me, like when he lies in the sun on a sunny day. Get to the warmth. Stay near the warmth.

  But now, it’s like my dreams are the exact opposite.

  He knows. My little fuzzball KNOWS.

  No bueno. Any of it.

  I can only dream of the dead again. But, here’s the fucked twist: I can only dream of the dead that died HERE since 2010.

  I can’t dream of my friends who died at Bastion, or in Westfield. I haven’t seen a familiar face in my dreams in… well, since we had that crazy night of storms when we were crossing the Atlantic.

  Okay, I lied; I’ve seen the faces of the few sailors and marines I know died here.

  The poor bastard who sank to the bottom of the port when we were landing… I’ve seen him a hundred times.

  Always wet, no matter where he shows up. Always sad, and disconsolate, always in the background. Never lets me get close enough to talk to him when I do recognize him, and try to take some control of my dream over. He’s always just… there. The few others I know who went down taking the port back… I see them too. They’re just as disconnected as the man who drowned. They wander in the background of whatever I’m dreaming, like they’re lost, and as soon as I become cogent, and aware of their presence and identity, they’re gone. The dreams shifts somehow, and the setting changes, or the scene twists, and they’re gone. Like a backdrop on a stage play. Here, then gone.

  I can only assume that the other people I’m seeing in my meandering dreams are the people who’ve died here. Extras from this side of the pond. In this Trinity’s territory. Makes some sense, right? We hopped the fence into the zoo, and now we’re dealing with the issues that fence kept in.

  Dreams here are meaningless. Lots of wandering in places back home, but with no context or meaning. Once in a while, I’ll get a glimmer of a moment where a scene from my past will play out, but with the wrong cast of characters. I’ll be hitting the Farm house, right after Gavin’s death, and instead of Gilbert and Blake at my side, it’s two fucking assholes I’ve never seen before. One was wearing a Lycra bike outfit and the other was wearing a military uniform that I didn’t recognize. Tall prick wearing darker camo.

  Right place, right number of people, wrong people.

  So many zombies too. I dream about them almost every night. White eyes, blood-stained faces, drawn, gray skin. And anger, so much malignant malice in their way, in their meandering, wandering, shuffling predatory movements.

  Someone once said to me that humans were the ultimate kind of predator; patience and endurance predators.

  We don’t have incredible physical power, nor can we set traps naturally. We’re not parasites either. We hunt by outlasting what we want to eat, or need to kill. For millennia we followed herds of… fucking anything for days and days until one or two of them got tired, and then we killed those tired bastards, and we ate them. When we w
ere done shitting, or drawing on the inside of the caves we dropped a deuce in, we’d get back up, and patiently stalk the next thing that couldn’t outlast us.

  Zombies, man. If we were the apex predator on the planet; most patient, highest endurance, biggest brains… They’re the very tip of the pyramid we once were the top of. Humans can’t outlast them, and we certainly can’t be more patient than a predator that NEVER tires, and NEVER gives up, so long as prey is in its sensory range.

  I am not a patience predator. I can endure a lot, though. I’m not sure where I fall on that spectrum. I once tripped on a root sticking out of the ground and ate shit while approaching a body on the ground.

  I am a shenanigan-based predator. I slaughter my enemies with buffoonery and shit luck.

  My friends on the other hand… some of them are stone-cold killers. I don’t deserve them, and yet here I am, surrounded by people I admire, and look up to. People I literally can’t live without.

  I promised a check-in about them, so I’ll itemize;

  Chris Fagan is still doing well. He has expressed many times that he misses his kids, Christopher and Natalie, but he’s keeping his head down, and staying busy. He’s gotten jacked doing so much labor, and physical activity. He volunteers to guard the workers on the fence at least one shift a day, and he’s putting his halligan to hella good work. By the time we’re done here, he’ll have the high score on undead, and you could make the case I killed most of North America myself. Hasn’t lost a second of his sense of humor, and his… horticultural skills have been appreciated by the cast and crew of Operation Unfuck Europe. He’s been working with his shirt off outside a lot, and I think he’ll be one of the first few hundred people in world history to get a tan in England.

  Joel is kicking ass and taking names. I say kicking ass, but mostly he’s just working as a medic to support the mission. As can be expected in a high-tension, heavy labor environment, we’re racking up a lot of minor injuries. Sprains, broken fingers, lacerations, deep bruises, that kind of shit. He’s working hard, right out in the second rank of it all, M4A1 slung over his back, slapping rigged-up band-aids on people, and dosing out Motrin and water like a proper medic in war does. He’s a machine man. Out there twenty hours a day some days, I swear. Never stops. Never stops telling people to hydrate.