Cassie (Adrian's Undead Diary Book 8) (23 page)

When it was all said and done at the small table meeting I told everyone that their help was amazing, and how much I appreciated them all as friends and family. Abby and Hal (who incidentally sat next to each other at the small dinner, and are clearly giving each other the “look”) both said they would come with me. Actually Abby said she’d go, and then Hal said, “Well if she’s going, I’m going,” and that was the end of it for that pair. Mike and Patty said they’d love to go, but they thought they’d be better off staying, and we all agreed. So that makes five. A small fire team, but one of good experience. Michelle is a little bit of a bump on the proverbial log, but for some reason I really feel that she needs to come for this. Savior of my soul that she is supposed to be.

Speaking of Michelle, once everyone cleared out and started heading either to their individual rooms here in Hall E, or back to their rooms scattered across Bastion, Michelle was the last to leave. She lingered upstairs, gathering dishes and empty glasses, picking up, and then she brought everything down to the kitchen where I was putting the small amount of leftovers we had away. We had this really awkward moment when she was done, and I was about to head upstairs. We hadn’t spoken at all since I gave her that flower, and to be honest, as elementary school as it was, I knew it was a big gesture on my part, in the wake of her drunken confession at the shindig we had. Assuming of course she even knew that I was the one that gave her the flower…

“So I had a question for you,” she says softly so that no one else on the first floor can hear her. She wasn’t quite looking at me when she spoke. I think she was still washing a cup at the time. My heart got all giddy.

I stopped doing what I was doing, leaned over near her, danger close, and said back, “Yeah? What’s the question?”

She stops, thinks for a good long moment of awkwardness, and then says back to me, “I got a small rose on my desk the other night. A silk one. A little bleached from the sun but still very pretty. Any idea who might’ve given that to me?” As soon as she finished saying that, she looked up from the sink and right into my eyes. God, Mr. Journal that woman is just captivating. Her eyes were almost, desperate to hear me say that it was me, and yet also afraid to hear the answer if it wasn't. It’s hard to explain just how much she was saying with her eyes. Or how much I was reading into her eyes.

“Well, when we were out the other day I grabbed it off a table at the hospital. I didn’t know quite why I grabbed it at the time. When we got back I figured I’d give it to you.” I was blushing. Hot faced like a motherfucker. Nervous. Had that little butterfly feeling in the pit of my stomach. Fear too maybe.

She smiled. Just a tiny, knowing smile that told me she already knew I was going to say that. “I thought as much. Does that mean we’re Valentines?” She looked at me again, this time a tiny bit more playful, smiling.

I couldn’t help but smile back at her. I said, “Well I realize you are probably more used to dating guys with Master’s degrees, and Argyle socks, but in an apocalyptic setting I felt pretty good about my chances. I have fresh water and a kitty cat, and can shoot a gun straight. Hope I wasn’t out of line giving that to you.” Go with humor. Always my first response. Well, humor or threats of violence. This seemed like a humor moment.

Michelle looked at me for a few seconds, put the cup she’d just washed in the dish drainer, and dried her hands on a towel. I was leaning against the counter next to her, trying to stay close so our voices would be low. With her newly dried hand, she reached up, gently ran her fingers around my ear in the sweetest way, making my skin prickle up, and said, “Not out of line in the least Adrian Ring. You and I can be Valentines any day,” and she leaned in and gave me a soft kiss on the cheek. One more smile later, she put her coat on, and left the dorm for her bedroom near Syl’s in Hall C.

I’m in deep shit with this woman Mr. Journal.

Deep shit indeed. I don’t want to push it down the drain though. This is the kind of shit guys like me need to get in.
 

-Adrian

February 18
^th

We have a plan. It is without doubt risky, but if it works, we’ll be heroes. Cape and all.

Kevin, Mike, Patty, Michelle and Abby went around the past couple of days and built support up with the locals for a deep incursion into the city. I am shocked to report Mr. Journal that everyone was willing to lend whatever assistance we needed.

Kind of shocking. I didn’t expect everyone to be willing to help. I mean, obviously there are people who have little to nothing to offer for a task like that, but for so many to simply offer up whatever they had to help is very humbling.
 

Step one of the plan is roll to the gated community and clear it. We’re going to roll out in a large team of about ten with the deuce so we can get inside the gates, and set up camp after we clear it out. We’re anticipating clearing out the exterior areas and a single house on day one. We’ll batten down the hatches overnight in that house, and then we’ll start clearing the rest of the houses in the neighborhood immediately on the day following.
 

Once the entire neighborhood is clear, and we’ve assessed the situation as far as supplies and fortifications are concerned, we’ll initiate step two of the plan.

Step two is preparation for the lure. We need a large set of lure locations that will draw in from a wide area. Therefore, we need it to be either very loud, or very visible, or both. Now wherever we lure the undead to needs to be where we can kill them, preferably efficiently. As I said a hundred times, we do not have enough bullets to do this with guns.

Our initial idea was to lure them to the Factory, and kill them there, Alamo style, but quite frankly, we have no frigging way of killing hundreds let alone tens of thousands of undead there. I mean our options at the Factory basically boiled down to throwing rocks off the roof to kill them all, or taking the HRT out for a spin, and attempting to drive over a few thousand packed in undead.

All aboard the failboat, if you please.

We spun through multiple ideas. Lure them to the college basketball arena? Wasn’t feasible. Too many entrances and exits to seal, too many levels and stairwells, plus there was too high a chance that the arena became an emergency shelter that day, and was still filled with the dead. Opening it would make our lives worse. What about underground? There’s a small traffic tunnel under a highway overpass we might be able to block off one end of. Lure them in then… what? Blow the overpass up and collapse it on top of them? Besides, the tunnel had zero visibility, which was part of the plan.

Fire? Fuck fire.

So we started thinking of places that we could either seal off, or allow us to use some of our existing supplies or weapons in a vastly more sufficient manner. We’ve already learned bombs and explosives are marginally effective, see my fire comments above, and I already said we don’t have nearly enough bullets. However… Kevin has an ample amount of Semtex on hand from his time in England. Semtex is plastic explosive, and plastic explosive, if used correctly, can easily bring down a whole building.

Quan is the closest thing we have to a demo expert. It also helps that Martin and Blake are technically intelligent. These three men working together gave us the inspiration for the plan we’ve settled on. The only way we can efficiently use the Semtex to kill undead is to create either enough shrapnel to guarantee strikes to the brain, or to create a situation with the explosives that will result in a catastrophic event, destroying the entire body, or so much of it that they won’t be a threat anymore. We need to make something really big blow up.

We needed this all to happen in a place that didn’t need significant clearing before hand, and preferably was nearby the downtown area I’d be heading into. A shorter trip to the explosion site would hopefully mean we'd catch more in it.

I thought of our time at the hospital, and the surrounding geography, and immediately had the perfect solution. Well, let's settle on calling it a good idea. I asked how much Semtex we had, and how much Semtex we’d need to bring a building down. We had enough for a few decent sized buildings, or one really large one. It’d depend on whether or not we had the time to place the explosives appropriately into the load bearing supports of the structure. We’d need a construction drill, which fortunately we had.

I asked if we had enough explosives to bring down a parking garage.

Turns out, we do. Two or three easily Quan said.

And after going over a few details, and ironing out some questions, our initial plan was in motion. We are going to move to the parking garage at the hospital, a mere ten blocks from Cassie’s workplace, as well as the parking garage sort of near the Factory for two large apartment buildings on the edge of the city. The hospital garage is four stories tall, and the apartment garage is four or five stories.

On the top floor of the garage we are going to build a massive fire. Quan says he has some ideas on pyro shit he can mix up to make the fire burn very bright, and last a good long time. I should note that he said that with a very peculiar smile on his face. While we set up the fire on the top level, we are going to drill and load explosives into the concrete pillars on the first two levels, ensuring that when we blow the explosives, the entire garage goes down in a heap. We’ll do this of course when the garage has drawn in a few thousand undead, hopefully ten thousand each or so. To assist in the overall lure factor, we are going to bring some spare working car batteries, find a car in the garage with a car alarm, jury rig the car with the new battery, and set off the car alarm. Blake has assured us he knows how to set them up to go off indefinitely.
 

Once we have a full house of undead moving up to the top floor of the garage, Semtex goes boom, pillars go kaplowie, the garage collapses, and we make zombie brie. Worst case scenario, the explosion and collapsing garage structures will make such a tremendous racket everything in a five mile radius will come a-shuffling to find out what’s going on.

While all that’s happening, we slip into the heart of downtown, and I try to find Cassie, or at least some kind of information as to what happened to her that day. I have a sinking suspicion that I won’t have to search too far and wide for her body. My bet is I’ll find her crashed car nearby, or she’ll be a starved husk in her office kitchen.
 

Not sure what I’m going to do if I have to put her down. I might need to lean on my friends to get that done for me. I’m now very glad Kevin will be there. If there’s anyone in this whole world I want there with me to do this, it’s him.

I know this sounds hasty, but we start tomorrow. We’re packed and ready to go with the HRT, one humvee, and the Deuce to visit the gated neighborhood. While we’re doing that, another small team is heading to the Factory to get ready for a quick recon from there of the parking garage close to them. For the first time in a long time, we’re not worried about making too much noise.

We’re worried we might not make enough noise.

-Adrian

February 20
^th

I’m writing this from Spring Meadows. Spring Meadows is the gated community that we’d been eyeing for some time, and visited yesterday. As you can clearly tell, I’m still alive, and I am happy to report that we met some survivors that didn’t shoot us. I think I might look into having them Sainted.

I’m not sure quite how we made it all the way to this phase of the planning without having the realization that there could be people living in the community, much like we ourselves wanted to. Silly in retrospect that none of us even considered the possibility that someone else was using the area already.
 

When we arrived at Spring Meadows yesterday morning we knew immediately there were probably survivors inside the walls. Spring Meadows is large, 18 houses large, all on about two acres each. It’s a central road leading into three cul de sacs arranged like a cross, or ankh. Six houses on the straight road in, then four houses arranged on the circles at the end of each of the three roads branching off. Surrounding all of this luscious, previously high valued property is an eight foot tall, two foot thick concrete wall covered in red bricks and ivy, and topped with ornamental wrought iron spikes. Looks classy from a distance, but it means fucking business.

The main gate to the community is also wrought iron looking, but is actually very sturdy steel with a coating to age it with a neat looking patina. Just outside the gate is a guard house with the controls to open the gate. When we arrived the controls were inoperative, but the gate opened with little fuss. Especially when we asked the locals politely and talked to them. Insert smiley face for avoiding violence.

Our first huge tip off to the presence of survivors was the number of dead bodies arrayed right at the gate. Not undead bodies mind you, actually dead bodies. I’d guess at twenty or thirty, all close enough to have been killed with melee weapons from through the gate. It told us someone inside had killed undead outside, and likely fairly frequently, and recently based on the condition of the corpses. Dead bodies rot pretty fast, and many of these looked mighty fresh.

So with our team in the front of the gate like that with likely survivors, we formulated a new plan: try and talk to the people.

I mean talking has gone so well for us in the past right?
 

I sent one of the humvees away and around the corner of the brick wall so it was out of sight of the main gate, and obscured by some trees, but in a spot where they had a healthy line of fire, and approach should we get shot at. Once they were set up, I got on the HRT’s loudspeaker and let out a quick holler, announcing our peaceful presence at the gate, and asking if anyone on the inside would be willing to talk to us via radio, or in person if possible.
 

As you’d suspect, we received no reply for several minutes. Long enough for them to gather their weapons, and get themselves into shooting positions at the two closest houses of course. Ethan was with us, leaning over the hood of humvee twenty feet behind me, and through his M24's scope he had their two shooters eyeballed long before they were ready to fire on us. Finally, after sending my second message out, a tall man and woman came down the straight portion of the road towards us. I was going to go out to greet them but Kevin told me to toss his salad, and he went out instead. The Warden takes his job seriously, despite his clever use of the English language.