Cassie (Adrian's Undead Diary Book 8) (15 page)

I don’t think I need to explain how badly Kevin is missing his buddy Kyle. Kyle was Kevin’s driver on their last op in Jerusalem, and he was an excellent team member before that, and since then.

Alex has shut himself away trying to get over the loss of George, his boyfriend. His husband. Michelle has been trying to talk to him to get him to come out and be with the rest of us, but he can’t sustain it. Ten or fifteen minutes of attempted socialization and he overloads with emotion, falls apart, and leaves. He just can’t take it. He and George had been together for years. All of them happy as I understand it.

Michelle shut the school down for a few days to let everyone digest the past couple day’s events. Ollie has rolled down the amount of labor he is asking of the younger people as they struggle to cope with the sudden large scale loss of life. We’re an emotional wreck right now, myself included. The less I think about what just happened, the better off I am.

Strangely enough, I don’t feel like I failed this time. So many of our bad incidents have felt to me like they were my fault, but I really feel like this time we made good decisions. If anything, I feel like our medical people underestimated the seriousness of the sickness that we’re dealing with. I’m not laying blame here Mr. Journal. Our medical people are top notch. But, we are not in a real hospital, with full diagnosis equipment, and a real lab to run real tests. It’s a lot of educated guesswork. Things like this are going to happen no matter how many precautions we take and no matter how good we are as people.

Where do we go from here?

We need more IV bags. We also need more medicine. We also know that there are no good places to find these things in town, or in Westfield. Furthermore, there are no good places to find these things in any of the small towns around here. We’ve already cannibalized the pharmacies and the local clinics.

Our last resort is the city. The same city Danielle and Diane told us were overrun with a mountain of the dead.

Our discussions about what that means will be tomorrow morning.

-Adrian

February 2
^nd

After conferring this morning, we decided we were going into the southern fringe of the city early tomorrow.

We are going to the Factory first to drop off some supplies they need, and then we are heading south down and around the city through the suburbs. Once we get a fair distance south, we’re cutting across the edge of the city and then heading north to a moderately industrial section of town near the airport. There’s a fairly large pharmacy there, as well as a small medical supplies business in an industrial park just off the airport perimeter road. There aren’t a ton of houses there either, so we’re hoping the body count is manageable.

With the snow on the ground, the undead should be slow moving, hopefully buying us time to shoot any large hordes of them efficiently and safely. We plan on raiding the pharmacy of whatever it might contain, then hit the medical supplies business nearby for the same.

If things get hairy, we bail. We’ll manage the illness without the supplies. Or we won't.

We are taking the two humvees, plus the HRT. We’re rolling with nine shooters, three per vehicle. Kevin Fitz and Quan are all rolling with M203s which will be a nice force multiplier, and Joel is rolling with a SAW, which is a huge asset for us. We’ve also got the two turret mounted SAWs on the humvees, which needless to say are going to be a big deal should things get sticky.

In an ideal world though, we’d be in and out without making any noise.

We’ll see how ideally things go. I’ll try and check in as soon as I can. After we get back Mr. Journal. Wish us luck.

-Adrian

February 4
^th

Well. It’s official. The city fucking blows.

Big time.

Any kind of clearing action into the urban areas is going to require an absurd amount of ammunition, and careful planning. I think we managed to drop somewhere around six or seven hundred undead yesterday based on the number of empty magazines we counted, and that more than likely was just the tip of the zombie iceberg.

After visiting the Factory and dropping off some ammunition, water, and some foodstuffs, we moved along due south down the side of the city, then cut east across the very southern edge. Most of the area we moved through was vanilla suburbia. Very similar to the area surrounding MGR in town. Mostly two or three story buildings strung down the main corridors, backed up by neighborhoods of varying monetary valuations. There were a few trailer parks, as well as a few five star neighborhoods. I saw one gated community off in the distance before we got into the area of the airport’s flight path and that made me wonder if that should be our next major operation. Pop the gate, secure it, clear the houses inside… and we’ve got a premade mini-Bastion to work out of, right on the edge of the city. That line of thought also led me to the realization that there could be quite a few survivors in gated communities all across the country.

Food for thought.

During the drive we passed at least a hundred undead. Because the roads were still thick with crusty snow still, we couldn’t swerve much to hit them with the HRT plow blade. We also didn’t want to shoot and make unnecessary noise, nor did we want to just drive past them. They would follow us for sure, and we didn’t want to dredge up another massive wall of the dead to drive home through.

Our solution was to slow down to a crawl, and engage them with our suppressed 9mm pistols. We are still heavily stocked with 9mm, and it was excellent shoot-on-the-move experience. I’d wager a bet and say just on the drive there we put down… eighty to a hundred undead. We wasted a fair amount of ammo on misses, but the overall level of satisfaction dropping them cowboy and Indian style from the moving stagecoach was excellent for us. Improved morale ftw.

The areas closer to the airport were far more troubling. Milling about, stuck in the snow and making their way towards us were far too many undead for comfort. At a point where we realized we would be in trouble if we kept moving without thinning the threat level, we upgraded from suppressed M9s to using our suppressed M4A1s. Far more firepower, range, accuracy, and all kinds of goodness. We were far more able to put lead downrange and we churned through another eighty or so undead I short order. It looks like a complete shitload of people went to the airport before it all went to shit. Makes sense though. Airports usually mean escape. Lots of cars on the road, crashed, pulled over, etc. Traffic was a bitch to weave through.
 

At the major intersection leading into the airport perimeter road area, leading to the industrial park where the medical supplies building was, we implemented our top secret plan. “Operation Lady in the Red Dress.” Or if you prefer, “Operation Androgynous Singer That’s Worked Before.”

From the roof of the HRT I hung a large radio playing… you guessed it, Lady Gaga on a traffic light. The light was clearly too high for the undead to reach, and with the duct tape and strap I used, it wasn’t falling anytime soon either. I set it to repeat “Lovegame” and we got the hell out.

We didn’t head directly into the city airport. It isn’t a huge one, but neither is it a small one. We stuck to the perimeter road, and headed directly into the business park. The park itself was only about fifteen structures, arranged along the circular perimeter road. None of the businesses were worth raiding immediately yesterday, but we took note of what was there. It was a fluke that one of us remembered seeing the name of the business in the first place, giving us a reason to make the trip.

We saw the sign for the medical supplies business (ANJ Medical Supply Wholesalers, if you’re curious Mr. Journal) and we pulled in. We were ecstatic to see that we had tremendous visibility in all directions, and that there were so few undead in the industrial park. Before we got five feet from our vehicles, we engaged the foot mobile visible undead and secured a perimeter around the vehicles and the building. Because we brought so many people on this run, we had extra bodies.
 

Twelve made the trip. It left us a little short on home security, but we felt the risk was necessary. By vehicle we had; Caleb, Abby, Hector and myself in the HRT. In the second humvee we had Kevin, Amanda, Quan and Ethan. In the third humvee we had Martin, Fitz, Angela and Hal.
 

All in all, a great team.

We posted four outside on foot strictly for security, three at the vehicles as drivers in the event we had to leave in a serious hurry, and we took the remaining five into the building for the clear. A good sized stack. Visibility into the building was limited. The only windows were in the front, and they were intact (a good sign), and they looked into a set of offices. The warehouse where our prize awaited was obscured by a series of mundane offices.
 

The main door of the building was unlocked, and after pulling it open as if it were still open for business, we went in and made the building safe. A central hallway ran straight for twenty feet or so, then turned left for ten, then straight for twenty more, terminating in the double fire doors that opened into the reasonably small warehouse. I could easily throw a rock from one side of the warehouse to the other and hit the wall on the fly. The offices were entirely abandoned and devoid of anything dangerous. Heading into the warehouse though, was a little more frightening. With no way to get natural light into the space, Kevin and I decided to clear the entire warehouse using NVGs instead of with flashlights. A little untraditional yes, but we were reasonably sure the warehouse would be empty. After going up and down the warehouse rack aisles for nearly twenty minutes in the dark, we had the place made safe, and we got the light into the building. After opening the rear dock and getting a couple of our large lamps turned on deeper inside the giant space, we were in business.

I am happy to report that we found a LOT of usable bulk medical supplies. Syringes, bandages, first aid supplies literally out the fucking asshole, casting equipment, saline solutions of various concoctions, and all manner of things I can’t even remember today. We filled the HRT floor to ceiling, front to back with supplies, and we left a LOT behind. We took the most essential supplies only, and after securing the warehouse we moved on. While we were inside (I think about two or three hours) the team outside had to put down about seventy to a hundred more undead closing in from the airport area. They seemed to be heading from the airport itself towards the sound of the music.

Our perimeter team was equipped with suppressed weapons though, and they attracted no undue attention to the building we were in. Wrap your head around those past few statements. Our security people put down a HUNDRED undead, and I'm saying that wasn't an unduly large issue. Hilarious.
 

A relatively quick swing around the park and down another exit off the perimeter road, and we were on the street where the pharmacy was. I could see the front doors were smashed out, so we didn’t expect much on the inside. The parking lot and immediate street were peppered with undead heading our way. The density of them was bad, but not so bad that we needed to bring out the heavy guns yet. All of us with suppressed weapons firing in a coordinated fashion was enough to keep us safe.

We were pretty far and out of Lady Gaga hearing range, so we had no distraction to pull undead away from our position as we worked. The sound of our vehicles running was also a big draw so this was a much more hairy operation. The firing outside during the breach was constant, and we had to pull our vehicle people to bolster exterior security. The breaching team of five was all action the entire way through. The pharmacy was a large one with about ten aisles, and we had undead in almost every aisle. I was firing on lead or Kevin was. Our guns never stopped snapping off suppressed rounds for a solid ten minutes as we crossed the tops of the aisles, firing down the length at the undead shambling towards the registers at the front where we were. By the time we got to about the eighth aisle the undead were coming out the end of the ninth and tenth aisle, and the rest of our team had to open up to keep them off of us.

Sadly, the remainder of our team did not have suppressed weapons, and the sudden roar of their normal weapons firing was deafening in the store. Previously the loudest noise was the sound of a zombie dropping dead and knocking some shit off the shelves on the way down. The noise hurting our ears was the least of our problems though. From outside our team informed us the gunshots were just as loud, and very likely to draw in more trouble.

The pharmacy in the back mercifully was still sealed. The steel shutter had been dropped exactly like the pharmacy in town, and after repositioning the HRT in the store opening and attaching the winch to the shutters, it came down with little effort. We also were able to grab multiple plastic bins from the shelves (pretty much the only things left in the store), and we headed into the pharmacy.

Ethan had a boner a foot long. The shelves were obviously raided already (he guessed by an employee, which made sense because the gate had been shut after the theft), but at least half the medications were still present in some usable quantity. When we were half way through emptying the remnants of the pharmacy, a call for assistance came from outside. Abby and I responded.
 

Our gunfire had drawn in well over a hundred undead. When Abby and I stepped outside and took stock of it, she went left, and I went right. I had my gun up and firing almost immediately, putting the walking dead down that were closing in on us like a vice. It was practically a wall of zombies in a circle around us. The visual of so many zombies was nearly paralyzing. It squeezed the hope right out of you. After maybe two magazines of my own fire I hit my comms button and asked Hal and Hector to open up with the SAWs on the humvees. Noise wasn’t an issue anymore, and we needed some fucking help to catch up.