Alone No More (21 page)

Zero activity on campus. Well, the parts of campus I can see here from Hall E at least. I’ve got decent views from the windows when I hobble around on my interior patrols. All quiet on the western front. I can’t imagine at this stage in the game I’ll get many wandering zombies up here. The road leading up here is pretty much cleared out with the exception of whatever’s left on Prospect Circle. I just can’t imagine there are that many free roaming undead on that street that could be a real problem for me. The past few days the more I think about it the more likely it is that the group of undead that was banging on my door was zombies from Prospect Circle that I attracted back here. I had been making enough noise to attract them for sure. No way to know really unless I check their driver’s licenses for addresses, and frankly, I don’t need to know that bad to go pick through their fucking pockets.

Isolation can be a successful strategy. Write that down Mr. Journal.

So what to talk about? Well I can recant the bullshit nothingness of the 13th and 14th if you like. Ready:

Not shit happened.

Well I’m fucking exhausted. Can’t speak for you Mr. Journal but I might need a break after that long winded affair. Might need to crack open one of those bottles of booze I have stored away. Could be an effective way to cut the pain in the leg.

I think not. Last thing I need is another sad drunken binge. No one likes the sad drunk. Debbie frigging downer.

I think I can recall back to the early days here and try and talk about some of the shit that’s happened to me. Or shit that happened to other people that I witnessed and whatnot. I remember talking about the grocery store trip. I vaguely remember talking about how the phones were caput, but the television and radio worked for awhile. I want to say the television lasted maybe 3 or 4 days after the end, and the radio maybe 10 days. Again, there isn’t much useful information to share about the media. Lots of rumor mongering, paranoia, and pointing of fingers. Even ten days after they were still unsure of whatever was going on. The internet was down almost immediately. But that stands to reason, because our internet up here on campus always fucking sucked. The side effect of being so far off the beaten path I guess. Might also explain the problem we had with phone service when the shit hit the fan. Small town phone exchange maybe got overloaded? Dunno.

It was day 12 when I decided that I should go back to Moore’s Sporting Goods and try to get more guns and ammo. That was my first real trip downtown after the world farted out a potato. The zombie potato, as it were. Campus during the first 10 or 12 days was pretty quiet. Well, at least a lot more quiet then I had expected it to be. I saw about half a dozen more zombies creeping their way along outside, and that was when I started to practice using the sword. By trade I’m more of a firearms guy, so facing off one on one in open ground definitely helped me get better using the short sword I brought from home. Thank God for not skimping out and buying shitty prop replica swords. Cassie always used to give me shit about all the money I spent on shit like swords and comic books. 

“Seriously Adrian, you really NEED an authentic, forged Celtic short sword? For what? Are you invading England or France this spring?” 

“I like the color Cass. Besides I need a nice short sword to go along with the new Timberland boots I bought. Can’t have my accessories clash babe. They have to match…”

That line got me beaten about the face at least twice. I think variants on that conversation were had at least ten times. Domestic bliss!

The worst thing that went down after the world came crashing down was the arrival of a few desperate parents. There were maybe 10 in all, and they showed up starting the day after the grocery store trip. Two, sometimes four a day for a stretch of a few days. I avoided the first couple that came on campus for fear of infection, plus one guy had a rifle, and one time the car pulled up and managed to time it just right to get attacked by one of the handful of zombies that’d wandered onto campus. The second day I just had to go down and talk to them though.

It broke my heart to see the parents crying when they couldn’t find their children. The remaining parents that came to campus were the same. Heartbroken, and there wasn’t shit I could do for them. Most of the kids they were looking for I had seen dead, or killed myself. Well, killed their shambling undead bodies, but you get the idea Mr. Journal. Those parents at least got some closure. It was the few parents whose kids I could not verify that were the ones lost. I don’t know where their kids went, but they could be anywhere. Many cars left campus that day, and there is no way of knowing who was in what cars. Many of the kids left, there’s no doubt about that.

Some of the parents were so grief stricken they attacked me. How out of your fucking mind do you have to be to go after a guy my size that’s holding a shotgun? Far fucking out that’s for sure. I didn’t hurt anyone, but I definitely twisted some shoulders and elbows out of joint to get them to calm down. I hated having to do it, but I couldn’t risk injury, and I wasn’t about to be their fricking punching bag. I told them the same thing I told Abigail, that I was making the campus safe, and that they were welcome to stay, but no one took the offer.

It hurts to watch someone give up like that. To watch all their will just drain away. And make no mistake, there is a moment when it happens. I watched it half a dozen times the first week when I told those parents that their kid was dead. Sometimes they look down at the ground, sometimes they stare at you, other times the color just fades from them. They’re like shadows of themselves. Black and white people in a color world. Those are the real undead we’re dealing with. The people that have lost hope.

I heard a fair amount of gunfire in the distance. The first day, the day I did the majority of the cleaning out of campus I heard scattered shots. One here, one there, but nothing approaching the level of a firefight. The next few days were the same, but about a week into it, after I’d gone down to the store, there were several days of fairly heavy gunfire. Again, not exchanges of gunfire, but stretches of four or five shots here and there. I’m guessing it was people encountering zombies, or perhaps folks making a break for it after they ran out of food. Think about it Mr. Journal. How long would the food in your cupboards last you if you couldn’t go shopping? Three days? Five days? Not as long as you’d think.

 As I was saying about the trip to Moore’s it was on July 4th. I found it odd that I would be attempting to raid a gun store on America’s Independence Day. Ironic? Fitting? I’m not sure what to think about it really. I just remember it was on that day I went down there. 

I left super early that day. I thought it would give me the best chance if I got in and out right after dawn. My bet was that people would be asleep at that hour, or be awake keeping watch on their fortified homes. I guess it’s also the military history in my past to get up early. Oversleeping isn’t my nature anymore. It hasn’t been for some time.

I geared up. Pistol, knife, sword, shotgun and .22 Now I had lost my Camry in the grocery store trip, and there was no way in hell I was going to raid a gun store in a fucking Ford Focus. Not a tactical vehicle by any means. Plus If I did run over anything taller than a can of soda I risked getting the car stuck, and the last thing I wanted to do was get stuck downtown without a vehicle. This was the first and last time I opted to take a school van out. Of course in retrospect I should’ve taken one of the maintenance F150’s, but I knew where the keys were to the vans, and back then I wasn’t sure about the keys for the trucks. 

We’ve got four of the large Dodge cargo vans. They’re big and dark blue with the school logo and shaded windows. There are three rows of seats and they have really good ground clearance. Not the best vehicle by any means, but they would work for this trip. Now I’ve got two of them blocking the bridge to get onto campus, so even if they aren’t being used to drive around with, they’re still being useful.

Now Moore’s is on the opposite side of town from the school here. I had two options the way I saw it. I could drive straight through downtown and brave whatever the fuck was there, or I could skirt downtown using side roads and hopefully dodge… whatever it was that might be there. There were upsides to both ideas. Downtown is heavily populated, had a lot of businesses, and would likely be worth fighting over. Look at what happened at the grocery store already for an example of what might happen. That shit happened with a few days of it all going down. Now the side roads were mostly neighborhoods, but that meant a huge number of people. Possibly dead people. Possibly living folks.

I opted for side roads. It just seemed safer to me.

That meant driving about 5 extra miles each direction. At 20 miles an hour or so I was looking at a solid 40 minutes each way, barring unforeseen…. Dead people. I left the school all kitted up, drove down Auburn Lake Road, and hung a right onto Route 18 to head towards town. Now before I took the turn to go directly to main street, I took a side street and headed into the great unknown of... 

THE SUBURBS. DUM DUM DUM. (ominous drum sound)

It was pretty fucked up. Now in a stroke of amazing arrogance I made the assumption that because I was going to the gun store, I would be returning with additional firearms related supplies. I kept the Sig handy as I drove, and whenever I saw a zombie moving towards me, I slowed down and popped it in the brainpan. Sitting here with no 9mm ammo today, I feel like an epic moron. I easily could have just driven past the damn things, or hit them with the van if I felt I had to kill them.

I forget exactly how many rounds I wasted in the van that day but I know I burned through all my magazines, which is 45 rounds. I know at one point I was reloading the magazines from my vest pocket and I know there was more shooting after that, but the numbers escape me. I guess it doesn’t matter now, seeing as how I am sans 9mm. That’s a shitty feeling Mr. Journal. Being out of ammo. I felt invincible back then. Well, as far as ammo is concerned. I guess I should say I felt flush. 9mm hood rich.

The side neighborhoods in town were a lot like it was up here. Houses spread out in varying densities. Most of them looked to be abandoned, but there were quite a few that were boarded up and looked Alamo-ish. Almost every single house that was fortified like that had zombies around it. I mean damn near every single one. The zombies were slowly banging on the barricaded windows and doors, trying to get inside. If anything, my trip around town pulled a bunch of those undead off of the houses. The ones I didn’t shoot followed me until I left their eyesight. As it turns out, many of them followed me much further than that.

In the 15 or so miles to Moore’s I would estimate that I saw about a hundred undead. Give or take 20 or so. The majority were wandering the streets, with a strong emphasis on harassing the houses that obviously still had people holed up inside of them. Well, I don’t know there were people still inside the houses, but judging from the appearances of the houses, and the attention they were getting from the zombies, it seemed likely.

I didn’t see a single living person until I got to Moore’s itself. Moore’s from a distance looked a lot calmer than the day I had last been there. Other than a really nice Yukon, a shitty pickup truck, and an Ambulance, there was nothing else in the parking lot. Moore’s is in a largely residential area, so there were no businesses around to speak of. Quite a few houses of course. There was one zombie in the parking lot moving with some serious purpose when I finally parked.

The zombie was moving from my right to left and clearly following something I couldn’t see behind the ambulance. I got the van parked and got out of it before the thing realized I was there. It was a fairly tall middle aged guy in life. Skinny as a rail too. All I could think of was rotting beanpole when I saw him. Lol I’m such a prick.

I hopped out of the van and drew the sword. I wanted to be quiet here as much as possible. Once the rotting beanpole saw me get out of the truck whatever it was he was following became much less interesting. I could see as plain as day in the early light his arm had been bitten really badly. His right forearm had been stripped of flesh from the elbow straight to the wrist and his hand hung limply when he came at me. I took a solid backhanded swipe at his neck and took his bad hand clean off in the process. Only a few inches of the sword wound up hitting his neck, causing a fucking rugged wound across his throat that would’ve killed a living person. I could see his windpipe sticking out of the hole I’d made. The impact of the sword swing sent him into the side of the van where he smashed his head on the frame. I took the moment and finished him off with a solid down stroke to the skull.

The beanpole had been cut down to size.

I had to say that. Strictly for dramatic purposes Mr. Journal. It’s my moment of badass-ery. One of the few times I can say something like that and feel like I was legitimately kind of a badass. Now then, moving along…

I wiped the goop off the sword using his shirt and sheathed it. I went in with the shotgun raised. Noise be damned. If I saw a bunch of them, I wanted firepower. That’s when I heard someone yell out to my rear, “Freeze!”

It had come from behind me, from the back end of the ambulance. The zombie had chased whoever this person was around the far side of the ambulance, and I hadn’t seen them. They’d come around the back end of the vehicle and more or less snuck up behind me as I killed the tall dead guy. I lowered the shotgun and raised my left hand slightly. 

I said, “I’m not here to cause trouble, just wanted to see if any ammunition is left.”

The guy from behind me said back, “Holy shit, Ring?” As soon as I heard him say my name I recognized the voice. It was Officer McGreevy.

I turned and I was right, it was him. He had changed out of his uniform and into a more tactical style black jumpsuit. He had an ammo and gear vest on with POLICE in big white letters velcro’d to the front and back of it. I smiled and we exchanged a hearty handshake. God it was good to see another human, especially some form of authority figure.