Dark Recollections Page 15

  One of the best quotes I’ve ever read goes something like this;

  “We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us."

  Fellow Veterans, American and otherwise, friend and foe, living and dead, I salute you.

  Busy day today, lots to do.

  -Adrian

  November 12th

  Greetings and such. It’s been a hellishly exhausting string of days here Mr. Journal. Getting sick of doing everything alone. The campus itself doesn’t require a ton of maintenance, but the day to day things that I have to do for myself takes up a ridiculous amount of time. I still do two patrols a day which take half an hour or more each, plus prepping three meals a day for myself, as well as moving all the fuel around for the gas generator downstairs.

  Every time I fire my weapons they get cleaned, and even if I don’t fire them, I clean them once a week anyway. I do my own laundry every couple of days here. Luckily the school had artesian wells that run on electric pumps that work as long as my generator is going. So as long as I have the generator going, I have running water, and if I wait until morning when I’m about to turn off the generator, the hot water tank has heated up, and I get a hot shower. I am so profoundly thankful for regular hot showers.

  That’s not all the work either Mr. Journal. I clean obsessively almost every day. I can’t risk vermin or the sickness they bring, and even though Otis is the fucking MAN when it comes to killing mice, I’m scared they might bring something in that’ll give me dysentery or something like that. I have no doctors to go to, and very little medicine to take, so maintaining my health is a big deal.

  I also force myself to read a lot. There’s just so much I don’t know how to do still. If my car breaks down… it’s broken. I have zero fucking mechanical skills. I am learning more about growing my own food, but when I do start growing it, I’ll have to tend it, harvest it, and more than likely, I’ll have to figure out how to can it too.

  The real frigging irony is I just described the life of a house wife during the great western expansion of the 1800’s. Too funny. I am a frontier mom now. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

  Enough bitching. I’m sure you’re sick of hearing me go on and on about how tough my life is anyway. So the last I left it with you I was planning another trip down to the gas station down the street where I went before. I think that was on the 8th or so. I spent the 9th and 10th running around campus with my 2 gallon gas cans siphoning fuel from the cars I know I’ll never use. For example, sub compacts. Their fuel efficiency doesn’t mean shit really because they can’t hold much for gear or salvage or stuff like that, and I can’t run over anything in them. I’ll share my story about running over zombies some other day. I assure you it’s amusing, and will turn you away from sub compacts in the post-apocalypse market. I highly suggest upgrading to something with decent ground clearance.

  So to make sure I wasn’t siphoning any crap out from the car gas tanks, I filtered the gas through some rags into my boy Blue. (that’s the big ass blue barrel I found) Gotta be careful with fumes though, as I really don’t want to set myself on fire. Not only are there no doctors around, but no one has picked up 911 in forever. So I’ve been extra cautious.

  So after emptying enough cars to fill Blue to about three quarters full I decided that was enough, and I drained out the Tundra I stole (read: salvaged) from that cape on my last trip. It was solid, basically brand new, and had a huge tank I could fill again. (Not to mention some serious ground clearance) I managed to siphon it down to about one eighth of a tank, which meant I’d get something like 26 gallons or so. I also emptied the 5 gas cans I have, so I can theoretically get 25 gallons or so in the truck, plus 13 gallons in the cans. Quite a bit. I’m thinking that’ll fill blue right up to the top. I wish I’d found another blue barrel so I could stockpile more up here, but that’s probably reaching considering I still have hot water. Don’t want to be too greedy right?

  So by the end of the day on the 10th my siphoning was done. After I made the early morning entry on the 11th, I couldn’t figure out a reason why I should put it off, and gathered my crap to go down. I figured the same shit I brought with me before would be good, so I grabbed the gauge, the sword, and the Sig as usual. This time I was a little more intelligent and grabbed my first aid kit too. See? I can learn!

  The weather has been kind of fucked up. Feels like winter is coming a little early. We had a straight up wintry typhoon blow through here the other day. Sleet, snow, freezing rain, you name it and it fell from the sky. Dropped down to 20F the last few nights too, which has formed up some pretty good ice on the smooth surfaces that the sun doesn’t hit during the day. It’s made my morning patrols a little treacherous. Almost ate shit several times on the sidewalk.

  Anyway before I left I bundled myself up a little heavier than I did the time prior. One thing I forgot to grab in my rush on “that day” was a heavier jacket for cold weather. Heaviest thing I brought from home that day was a hoodie. Not exactly survival gear. Lucky for me, Dr. Potter’s winter jacket was in his staff closet, and once I gave it a good wash it was close enough in size to fit me. I’m not anywhere near as fat as he was, but I am a pretty big guy. Shoulders wise it has always been a bitch to find shirts that aren’t stretched on me funny. My sleeves are always too short. I was fortunate Dr. Potter had the coat in his closet. Sucked that it was covered in goop from the shootout in the classroom, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  I bundled up, grabbed my shit, and headed down the road. There was way more trees down in the road this time. So many down in fact I had to turn back and get the little chainsaw from the grounds keeping shed. As much as I absolutely loathe making noise, it was needed to get through. I had to stop three times to cut trees out of the way in just the few miles from school to the station. I didn’t see any activity anywhere during my stops, and I didn’t pass any zombies that I saw on the drive either.

  So I crept up to the stop sign just like last time, and scoped the joint out. I could see from where I was the body of the young dad near the gas pumps as well as the feet of the dead mechanic I saw before. I waited a solid minute or two before I decided it was safe, and pulled the truck up to the pumps again. This time I pulled the truck in the right way so I didn’t have to park it twice.

  Same place, same methods. I cleared the garage first, made sure it was empty, and then cleared the store again. Once again, all clear. I did a quick visual inspection and saw pretty much all the stuff that I left there was still there. There were some missing items, like the baby food jars, but I knew the guy had taken some stuff that day. Then I pumped my gas. Truck first, then the small cans. I paid extra special attention to the road this time in the event a car came, but none did. I also was a clever bastard and took the manual crank off the pump. No one would be able to access the gas without it. Heh.

  So after that I slipped back into the store and gathered up everything else that I could. Most of it was total shit. However, on the outside chance I needed car fresheners, I figured it was better to be safe than sorry. The biggest haul I got out of there was beer. I didn’t grab any on my first trip, so I grabbed ALL of it this time. I like beer. I just need to make sure I don’t get sad some night and drink it all and streak through campus butt nekkid and get eaten alive. Moderation, right? Oh! I also grabbed motor oil, WD40 and some things of dry gas.

  I did however decide to check the back room where I found the locked door last time. I had assumed that it led upstairs to an office or apartment, and I wasn’t interested in checking it out last time so I left it be. Now was as good a time as any to check it out.

  Turns out it was locked, and locked pretty damn good at that. Solid deadbolt on a solid door. Luckily I brought the 12 gauge master key. I leveled the Mossberg at the spot where the deadbolt would’ve met the frame and squeezed a round off. Ka boom! Loud as hell inside that closet. My ears were ringing so bad I thought I’d shot a church bell not a door. The deadbolt did g
ive way to the shotgun round though, which was to be expected. However, I nearly shit myself when the door swung open and a fucking zombie fell down the stairs on the other side and on top of me.

  Fortunately the shotgun blast must’ve gotten him a little bit through the door, because once the door opened, he went down in a pile and only fell on me by happenstance. He smelled horrible. It was an old man, and even in my struggle to crawl and kick him off I instantly recognized him as the guy who owned the station. His momentum falling on top of me sent his rotting body sidewise so we were lying in sort of a t shape with him across my legs. I kicked him so that he was off me and I pinned his neck to the metal racking in the closet with my foot. I put the shotgun right to his face as he wordlessly tried to chew at my shoe. I looked away and pulled the trigger. His head was vaporized by the blast but his body twitched for a few seconds more.

  Once I caught my breath I totally made a resolution: all locked doors that were going to be opened in this manner would have an additional step added to the process. One shotgun round through the door, at chest level. It’d blast any zombies back, plus make a hole for me to see what was going on inside. Reconnaissance by buckshot.

  I peeled myself off the floor, opened the door with the barrel of the shotgun, and headed up the stairs to the apartment slowly. Remember the sniff test thing? Place smelled terrible. I knew something bad had happened long before I got to the top of the stairs. I actually had to leave the stairwell and go back down into the store to get a rag to tie around my face, the smell was so bad. I headed up after that and it was still just bearable.

  The stairwell opened into a single big room at the top. To one side of the stairs was a small kitchen, and opposite that was a little living room. There were three doors all shut going off those two rooms. In the living room I could clearly see a desiccated woman’s body on the couch. Most of the head was missing, only a few clumps of grey hair left, so I felt comfortable with it being dead. Must’ve been his wife. You could clearly tell too that the stench was coming from that direction.

  The door off the kitchen was slightly ajar when I got to it, and I pushed it open with the shotgun and revealed the bathroom. Several pill bottles were on the sink counter and I saw that one of them was a sleeping pill bottle. It was empty. Bathroom was clear of danger.

  The two other doors were shut but not locked. I listened intently before opening them and they were silent. I couldn’t smell anything over the stench the rotting wife was giving off so I had to rely on just that sense. I also knocked a few times. I figured if there were undead inside they’d make noise or respond to the knocking somehow. I got nothing either time, so I just opened the doors quietly.

  Both rooms were bedrooms, one the master, the other looked like a guest room. I checked the closets as well but they were filled with closet-y kinds of things. All clear for danger.

  I snagged a suitcase from the master bedroom closet and started filling it with everything I could find that was useful. Most of it was just more of the same. There was a fair amount of canned goods, which was awesome, and they had two large tins of dry iced tea mix, which would help with the variety on drinking just water. I snagged all their pill bottles, all their cleaning supplies and soapy hygiene-y kinds of things, and I took the man’s clothing. He was close to my height so I figured something might fit. Unfortunately his shoes were too small for me. I take a 13, and all he had was an 11. It hadn’t occurred to me until right then that I eventually would need new shoes. Where the fuck am I going to go to get those? There’s no shoe store here in town. Or major retailer really. Do I go house to house looking for a dude with size 13’s in his closet? I never get a fucking break.

  OH! The total major score for the apartment was a pistol on the living room floor. It was a Colt M1911 which is one of the finer classic handguns. This one looked old, like from the war old. It shoots the .45 caliber round, which is a serious man stopper, but it only holds 7 bullets in the clip. Sort of a risk/reward situation with it. It’ll knockdown whatever I hit with it, but it needs frequent reloads. Either way I was happy to have a spare pistol finally plus the old man left his box of bullets on the end table next to the lounger. There were 6 rounds in the clip when I checked it, and 13 rounds left in the box. I know, not much, but theoretically that’s 19 dead zombies.

  I got the fuck out after that. Took my suitcase filled with loot, headed to the Tundra, and left to come back here. One thing that did strike me just as I was about to leave though were the houses all around the gas station. The last time I came down I could see movement in all the houses. There was still movement, and I was totally sure especially now that the movement was just dead people walking around inside. All of those houses potentially had more supplies I could use. I made a plan to come back down and scour them for goodies soon.

  Drive back was fine too. Well, sort of. When I turned onto the road the school is on there was a zombie hanging out at the stop sign. Pretty much just… chilling out there. I slowed down when I saw him and watched. He hung on to the road sign for about 30 seconds and did this drunken spin in my direction. He either saw me in the truck, or heard the motor running because as soon as he turned, he let go of the sign post and started in my direction.

  He was in near perfect shape. I couldn’t see a wound anywhere, and his clothing was basically spotless. It was a younger guy, about my age, maybe a little younger. Receding hairline, pasty white with a shade of bluish grey. He made pretty good time coming down the street towards me, but I had enough time to put the truck in park and get out.

  I shot him in the head at 20 feet with the .45. The impact sprawled him flat out on his back as well as punched an exit wound in him the size of a coffee can. I may only have 18 bullets left for that gun, but that is gonna be 18 moments of satisfaction. Guaranteed.

  Drive back after that was fine. I stopped at the maintenance truck that died on me last time and poured one of the bottles of dry gas I just got in the tank. I figured it couldn’t hurt and it’s not like I paid for it anyway. That reminded of the cape again where I got the truck though. Right then I resolved to make a return trip there too someday soon. I remember seeing useful stuff in the garage. I don’t remember now what I saw then, but I remember thinking I should come and get it later.

  Rest of the day was more of the same really. I got all the shit inside when I got back first off. I emptied the gas cans into my boy Blue, and returned one of the spare cans to the hiding spot I had it at before. I also siphoned about half the truck’s tank into Blue too. That capped it off for the most part. I’m debating making runs until all the car gas tanks are full again. That would mean the fuel is here on site instead of down the road. It was less likely to get stolen from here than taken from down there. Even with the crank gone, I think I’d feel better. But again, that’s just a shitload to work to do. I really need more gas cans.

  I did my patrol in the afternoon and took an extra hour out of daylight to practice with the bow. I haven’t fired it in weeks I think so I knew I wanted to get some target work in. I was pretty rusty with it, but after a few dozen arrows downrange I felt pretty confident again. I also grabbed the fishing pole and tackle kit and went fishing. I should actually re-phrase that. I went and stood by the shore of the lake holding a fishing pole, and a beer for an hour. Well I held the beer for much less than that, but you get the idea. I caught nothing but fresh air, and a can of cheap American lager.

  And that leaves us here Mr. Journal. It’s almost bedtime for me, and Otis knows it. He’s down underneath the kitchen table here rubbing up on my legs like I’m made out of catnip. That’s Otis-speak for “go to bed so I can crawl up your ass.” He’s not subtle when he communicates. Tomorrow I am going to weatherize this place. I found some of the window plastic in a staff office the other day and I know somewhere in the girl’s dorm I can find a hair dryer. I’m also going to seal off a few of the rooms I don’t use and somehow block the heating vents so I’m not wasting heating oil.

  I’m thi
nking there is some sense in trying to build some kind of refrigerator outside. It’ll be cold soon, and if I can find a way to keep the food away from the bears that are out there, and keep it dry, I can make ice finally. Plus I think I’m going to try and bag a deer here soon. I know they’re out there, I’ve seen them. If I do get one I can use the cold weather to freeze the meat, and I can smoke some too. Might satisfy my meat craving! That’d be….. AMAZING.

  Until we speak again Mr. Journal, I wish you safe travels!

  -Adrian

  November 13th

  I have had too much too drink today…. I wasn’t going to whrite an hournal entry either, but I can’t sleep and I just need to get everything off my chesticle.

  I don’t know why I am doing what I’m doing anymore.

  I don’t think that’s the beer I drabnk talking anymoe either. And yes, my grammar might be bad right now, I’m somewhat drunk still. Go fuck yourself if you can’t hack a few messed up words.

  I am so lonely. I wake up alone, I am alone at breakfast, I am alone at lunch, I am alone at dinner. I write these journals all alone at this fucking kitchen table, and when I go to bed at night, I am still alone. Why the fuck do I keep doing this every Goddamn day? Why am I fighting so fucking hard to survive day in, and day out? I keep marching along the edge of the cliff like a confused Lemming, unsure of whether or not to jump over with his friends.

  Why was I such a piece of shit that day? Why the fuck didn’t I get in my car and drive to her work and save her? I just don’t get it. I’m brave. I’m courageous. Nothing scares me. Why the fuck didn’t I go? I went everywhere else that goddamn day. I even went to a motherfucking garden center. It’s inexcusable, and unforgiveable.