The Failed Coward Page 17

  Get this. He also had a barrel dolly, and a fucking barrel jack! It’s like a pallet jack, but it only picks up barrels. Raises them up about three feet, give or take, which means we can easily lift and move full barrels of fuel. No more of this half barrel back breaking hoopla we’ve been going through. Total home run on that.

  On his roof he also has solar panels, and I'll be damned, but they are the same exact ones that are on the roof of Hall E. We can get them down, and reinstall them on campus atop Hall E, or on another dorm to spread out our solar resources.

  In other news… The house smelled like a dirty foot had been rubbed inside a sweaty armpit, then shat on, and thrown in the bottom of a porta potty that was set on fire.

  RIIIIIIIIIPPPE. Awful. Patently odiferous. Wretched even. Would’ve gagged a maggot.

  It took us every moment of sunlight yesterday to get in there, and get everything out, and then transport it back here to campus. This morning we spent two hours moving the rest of it into shelter in the buildings across campus, and as you can imagine, we lost out on house clearing time today as a result.

  We had five houses to clear on the cul de sac, and we only managed to empty four in the time we had. We were also dragging major ass today after all the shit we carted out of ole Walt’s nuthouse. Fucking Bates motel shit there Mr. Journal.

  Fair amount of undead trapped in the houses we went into today too. Tells me a lot about Walt’s mental state. He shot everything that moved in his neighborhood, but apparently never stepped foot inside any of their homes to search for food or supplies, or to put the undead to rest. What a weird bastard.

  Good news: found more food and supplies. Bad news: had to kill kids in the houses. Several of them. Many of them very small. Patty and Abby drew the short end on that deal. The kids all happened to be inside the houses they cleared. Sometimes that’s the luck of the draw. I’m betting as we move forward here we are going to encounter a lot of days like that, where we have to kill kids. What a morbid task we have on our hands. I don’t envy myself.

  When we got back to the campus and got everything unloaded, Patty brought up the issue of sanitation. We are working around dead bodies, and they are just fucking festivals of disease. The cold weather keeps a lot of it in check I’m sure, but once the bodies start to thaw, and the bacteria and viruses flare back up, we are without doubt going to get very ill. It’s not a question of whether or not we’ll get sick, it’s a question of when, and how bad? I mean shit, we’re also seeing toilets overflowing with human waste, and that’s not sanitary either. The world has literally gone to shit.

  Starting immediately we are going to go about this with that in mind. We’ve happened across a large supply of latex and nitrile gloves, and we are now going to use them when we go hands on. Don’t laugh, but when I returned to my house, I grabbed my old black baseball gloves to wear. I used to wear these fucking amazing Nomex gloves when I was in Iraq, but I gave them to Kevin forever ago, and it felt weird holding an M4 without some kind of glove on. Plus batting gloves are great for getting a good grip on something. Anyway, I plan on wearing nitrile gloves under them because somewhere along the line I had the school administration order me a case of size XXL gloves. I was worried I’d need to render first aid to a kid that had Hep or HIV or whatever.

  Never thought it would come to something like this. I should’ve seen it coming I guess. We’re going to use hand sanitizer when we come back, and we are going to use bleach liberally on surfaces that appear to be contaminated with sickness. Door handles, counters, etc.

  Something else we noticed today as we were getting ready to go was the amount of garbage inside some of the houses. We’ve discovered that the houses that sheltered survivors almost always have a huge pile of garbage in a room, or the basement, or in the yard outside a window. Those people that lasted near town here had no place to start burn piles like mine on campus. I never thought of it until now, but any house that has garbage outside it, is much more likely to have survivors or zombies in it. There also seems to be a direct correlation with garbage, and remaining food and supplies. Basically, if they made garbage, they ate the food they had, and wiped their asses with all their toilet paper.

  So from now on, garbage piles are red flags for extra caution for us.

  Speaking of disease… One thing that I distinctly recall from last summer when this all started, was the lack of maggots and flies on the undead. Being in a warzone, you are inundated with flies and maggots. They go hand in hand like Irish people and puking binges. I’m not judging.

  It actually struck me as particularly odd when I was dealing with undead over July and August that they had no maggots, and no flies buzzing around them, almost like they were… I dunno. Not suitable for maggot consumption. Tainted. Already being consumed by something evil or whatever. Now as I recall, the bodies that never animated used to get maggoty, and once I killed a given undead (i.e. blow their brains out), soon after they’d get flies on them, and then maggots would appear shortly thereafter.

  I can’t make heads or tails of it. I don’t know how this plays into the whole… mysterious dreams bullshit, and the dead coming back to life bullshit. It’s all bullshit. It makes me bullshit. I don’t have all the pieces to this giant jigsaw puzzle yet. One night I hope to have another dream that’s lucid, and I can talk to Cassie again and ask questions of her.

  I bet anything she could answer a lot of my questions about this.

  Tomorrow we are returning to the final house on that cul de sac and clearing it of shit. We ran through it and killed the zombies inside, but didn’t bother taking anything out. There was some nice stuff too, so we’re gonna hit it tomorrow. After that I know of a couple houses a few miles away on Route 18 that are rural enough that they were likely left alone. We can do two of those, then call it a day so we can get some rest. Everyone’s surprisingly ragged from this task. It’s a lot like moving out of your house, and NO ONE likes moving.

  Oh holy shit. I completely forgot to mention. We heard dogs barking in the far distance as we were leaving today. We thought we heard two dogs barking, but it might’ve been an echo of just one dog, or even more than two. We were very, very pleased when we heard that.

  Well. Everyone else was pleased. I was reminded of a large farm house, and a sharp, stabbing pain in my crotch.

  Fuck dogs. Especially large ones.

  -Adrian

  April 7th

  What a bizarre day. Genuinely fucking strange. Twilight Zone-esque even.

  Mr. Journal have you ever had that feeling right after a few things occur that there had to have been something at work for it to fall into place just so? Too many coincidences involved for it to be a random event? You know, like, you leave your apartment to go out with some friends, but just as you walk away, you realize you didn’t brush your teeth, so you go back and do it. You leave again, and because of the unexpected delay you wind up meeting glances with someone who you would not have had you just soldiered on without brushing your teeth? And that was like the ONLY day you didn’t brush teeth like that?

  Or like you notice your shoelaces are untied, so you bend down to tie them, and just as you do, something passes through the space your head was just in? One of those… wow. That was lucky moments.

  I have that feeling right now. The past few days things have been like that. Today especially.

  Remember back in the day when the first plow truck I took off campus shit the bed on me? I wound up leaving it on the side of Auburn Lake Road, and walked back until I saw the Tundra? Then I took that and used it for some time. Eventually I put dry gas in the tank of the plow when I drove by it later kinda randomly, and after some time, Charles, Patty, and the rest of the Williams people found the truck after their car died, and it started right up?

  That’s pertinent for two reasons. One; mysterious fucking circumstance that it all came together like that over time, and; Two; Gilbert’s Chevy died the same exact way today when we headed out to finish off that last h
ouse on ole Walt’s cul de sac. That was the start of our day.

  I should rewind a bit. Gavin is getting a cold or allergies. When he was making breakfast, he was sneezing and sniffling and had a runny nose that was pretty epic. Patty took his temp, said he was a little warm, and promptly sent him off to bed for the day. Because of that, Abby bailed on today’s recon mission, and Patty had a sudden surge of paranoia that Abby and Gavin would make a baby at precisely that moment, so she opted to stay home and mother them both.

  Gilbert and I left with the HRT and his truck at about 11am and figured we’d hit the one house left near Walter’s place, take our sweet ass time if it went well, and call it a day. About a half mile from Walt’s street Gilbert radioed that his truck was sputtering, and about two second after that, it died, and he drifted over into the half inch of slush in the breakdown lane.

  We couldn’t start it. Both of us are largely mechanically disinclined though, so that’s not a surprise. I immediately thought of “sweet ass Hector” and wished he was nearby. We gotta get him back here for sure to check out our vehicles.

  So as we are looking under Gilbert’s hood, trying to make heads or tails of our mechanical failures as human beings, we hear a gunshot. Loud. As. Hell. It couldn’t have come from more than a mile away in the general direction of Walt’s place. Sounded pretty damn heavy, almost like a M107 going off. Not quite that heavy, but you get the idea Mr. Journal. It was a big gun. The shots weren’t fired directly at us, but that didn’t mean they weren’t just bad shots and they were sighting in on us.

  We had a live one.

  Gilbert and I ate pavement and we took cover behind the HRT. I got my rifle down from the truck cabin as Gilbert covered me. We heard two more shots spaced out over about a minute. Once it fell silent, we went over a plan, and I infil’d towards the area on foot, and Gilbert got up and into the HRT to drive slowly.

  I started to go into the woods, then I realized more than likely, I’d lose a boot in the muck, so I stuck to the very edge of the shoulder. If needed, I could dive down into the ditch there for cover. When we came to the street ole Walt’s place was on (it was on our left), there was one more loud ass shot, and it clearly came from the cul de sac. I hit the dirt and low crawled after telling Gilbert over the radio that something was up.

  Right about then Patty came over the radio back on campus and was completely farting out bricks. OMFG. I should be there. Don’t move, we’re coming, etc etc. Gilbert told her to chill and wait while we figured it out, and I kept crawling through the slush that’d formed from the light snow we had the past few days. God it was cold, and I was soaked right to the bone in just a few seconds. I came to the edge of the trees and stopped. With the ACOG scope I was able to see all the way to the end of the loop easily, and standing sort of near the center was a tall, skinny as rails guy with a ragged black hiking backpack, holding a large hunting rifle.

  He was standing at ease, scanning the area for threats, and was about to rotate to my slice of the pie, and for some unfathomable reason, I stood up. I held the M4 low so he hopefully didn’t think I was a threat, and I started to wave at him with my left hand.

  As soon as he saw me, he brought his rifle up at me, and I dove behind a tree a few feet to my left. He didn’t fire, and I kept flat, and I brought the M4 up to sight him in to see what he was doing. From behind me Gilbert watched it all play out, and he told Patty and Abby to get their shoes on.

  I thought about it for a few seconds as he slowly walked down the street at me. He was wearing a beat to hell winter jacket and dirty jeans. Long dark hair that hadn’t been cut in some time, and he had a five o’ clock shadow that was a few hours past five. He was so skinny. He looked my age, or maybe a year or two older. I started to holler out to him when he got to about 75 yards away.

  “Hey, I’m alive, please stop shooting!”

  He froze solid. I don’t mean like… he stopped and realized like, holy shit, I’m shooting at a living person. I mean he literally froze completely still. Like when prey knows it is being hunted. The look on his face through the scope was one of restrained panic, and utter confusion.

  “You okay? Are you bitten? Do you need medical assistance?” I stayed low.

  He turned around and looked behind him, almost as if he was expecting to be snuck up on while I was talking to him. Well, that or he was looking for someone else that he thought I might’ve been yelling to. After he searched the area to his 6 adequately, he turned back and lowered his rifle until it was pointed at the ground. He stood, licked his lips, and responded suddenly with a half hearted wave in my general direction. After a few seconds of that, he finally started yelling back to me.

  “Uh, hey, hi! I’m uh, sorry! I’m Blake.”

  Much better. I hollered back, “I’m Adrian. Nice to meet you sir!” I saw him smile through the scope in a really odd way. Almost… manic. Not in a scary way, but like a happy way. I think he started to hitch his breath, like he was about to cry. I guess it’s possible he had asthma too. I think he had been alone a very long time.

  “Yeah it’s nice to meet you too! Were you the people shooting here yesterday and the day before? I heard you from my hiding spot and came over to see what happened! I haven’t heard guns in a long time!” He looked behind him again. Good survival instincts. Always checking his periphery.

  “Yeah that was us. We are clearing houses of the dead, and collecting supplies and stuff.” I hollered back.

  “Wow, wait, we? There’s more than one of you? How many people are you?” He looked ecstatic, but also worried at the same time.

  I played the honesty card. “Seven of us. We live on the outskirts of town in a secure facility. We’re making the town as safe as we can now that spring is coming.”

  Again, the look on his face was one of excitement and fear. He looked like he had no idea how to react to that news. Enthusiastic confusion.

  I radioed Gilbert. I told him this Blake guy’s description, and that I felt he was alone, and I was gonna try and take it to the next level. Gilbert said he had my back, and do this smart. Right before I stood up, I hot keyed the radio so everyone could hear our conversation.

  “Blake, we’ve got a truck nearby, you mind if we drive it to the cul de sac here? I hate to have our people split up for too long.”

  Petrified. “You guys have a working truck still? How are you getting fuel? Most of the gas in town is total shit already.”

  Interesting eh? I wonder what the exact shelf life of gasoline is? Diesel for that matter? I wonder if all those barrels of fuel we just brought back to campus were worth a piss hole in the snow. “You having trouble with the gas in town Blake?”

  “Yeah, it’s all gummed up and has water in it. You need to filter it a bunch to get it to work right again, and there’s no safe place to do that here in town. Not since that massive explosion in the industrial park.”

  Apparently news had traveled fast about that. I bet it made a fucking mushroom cloud when it went down.

  “You okay with us bringing up the truck?” I hollered again.

  “Hell yeah!” He looked excited about the truck. Genuinely so.

  I radioed to Gilbert to pull the truck up near the street, and as soon as he did, I stood up, and tried the same slow wave. Blake matched my wave with one of his own, and I slowly walked towards him as Gilbert powered down the window of the truck and readied his AK for fire if it needed to happen. That’s an assumption. I couldn’t actually SEE Gilbert doing that, but I was betting my life on the fact that he was. After awhile, you just KNOW some folks have your back.

  Blake and I met in the middle of the street. We stopped about 10 feet apart and hung our weapons low. If something went bad, we could raise them in a hurry, but we weren’t threatening each other. I kept a smile on my face the walk up to him, and as we exchanged hellos. Here is the basic gist of what was said:

  “Hi, I’m Adrian. Nice to meet you.”

  “You’re all wet man. You fall in the snow?” He poin
ted his nose at the giant wet spot I had from neck to knees where I face planted in the slush. About then I caught a whiff of his body odor. He smelled sour and funky. He probably hadn’t had a real shower or bath in who knows how long.

  “Yeah we hit the deck when we heard you shooting. Didn’t think you were shooting at us, but we couldn’t risk it. Some folks are bad shots.” I smiled again at him.

  He nodded. “Yeah some folks are. I watched quite a few try and shoot the dead people and miss a lot. Waste of ammo.”

  “Well, shooting can be nerve wracking, and I’m sure there are a lot of folks using guns lately that have no business doing so. Looks like you’ve got some time with your weapon. What’re you carrying?”

  He lifted his rifle out to the side and immediately the pit of my stomach dropped. He had an Enfield .303, almost exactly the same as the one I’d gotten out of Walt’s place. “I’ve got my uncle’s Enfield. It’s a beast, but it’s accurate as all hell and I’ve been shooting it for years now. Running low on ammo though. Tough being alone out here.” Blake looked at his rifle lovingly. I could see he had a history with it just based on his eyes.

  I thought it was odd that he had the same gun as the one we’d just found. I thought it was odd he was almost out of ammo, and we’d just found some. I thought it was odd that Gilbert’s truck died just far enough away that we weren’t threatened by him, but could still hear him. I thought it was odd that had it not died this morning, we’d have driven right up on him. I thought it was odd that of all of us, just Gilbert and I were the first to meet him.

  We might’ve been shot, shot him, or gotten him bitten if we scared him.

  Mysterious ways.

  Jus' saying.

  “You’ve been alone all this time?” I was sincerely concerned. The more I observed him up close, the younger he appeared. With the gaunt features and long, scraggly hair, I initially placed him at 30, or even 35, but the more I watched, the more I thought he was 25 or so.