With Spring Comes the Fall (36 page)

Posted by Josh Guess at 
11:03 AM
 

We are stopped for lunch, which normally we are reluctant to do. We prefer to eat on the road, but this rest area has a cell signal and I wanted to update. Besides, we made pretty good time yesterday, only having to stop and clear areas to drive through a few times. You would think that we could get anywhere pretty quickly in our own state, but we are going through areas that have been untouched since the plague started.
Which means that there are zombies all over the place, and we have to be careful not to bash into them very quickly. An adult human weighs a lot, and enough of them over time will do a lot of damage to even an armored vehicle over time. So it goes slowly.
We did manage to get to our first location today. It had already been ransacked but there was still some good stuff there. Whoever hit it didn't have much knowledge, only taking obvious things like tape and gauze, needles and medicines. They left a good load of supplies for making casts, surgical equipment, and various other things. Got to love urgent treatment centers.
Weirdly there were about a dozen cases of ensure. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a brand name for a calorie dense drink intended to help the person drinking it gain weight. They are packed with vitamins and minerals, and make for excellent survival food. They taste like shit.
I kind of like the strawberry ones.
I want to get as many of them as possible, as well as tube feeding supplies--they are like giant ensures, and more bang for the buck.
Most of what we got from the urgent treatment center was hardware. Not much medicine left or soft supplies like bandages, but all in all it was a pretty successful haul.
Jess sent me some texts at some point last night telling me that Lieutenant Price was asking where we were going, wondering what happened to Gabby and the rest of us. No one told him anything of substance, of course, and he didn't press the issue. From what I could gather from her texts, he is growing impatient with sitting around and wants to become a part of the community, work on the wall, provide some use to the compound to make up for the food and supplies he is using up at the moment.
I wish I could be there to ask him questions. I wonder if my friends will try and discern if this is a genuine desire on his part or some act put on for his own purposes. Did anyone ask him if he wanted to simply work off his debt and go home to Richmond, or is he choosing us over them? So many things I want to ask so that I might read his expressions and mannerisms, but it will have to wait. Until I get back home, I will do my best to put Will Price out of my brain. Plenty of time to worry about him later.
Back on the road here in a minute. Going to head toward one of our larger targets, and hoping for some nice surprises. Maybe it will be untouched. Luck has been with us so far, maybe it will bless us a bit further...

Posted by Josh Guess at 
12:33 PM

We are getting ready to head out for the day. We had to camp out last night after a long and tiring day. The place we searched yesterday was a total bust, cleaned out from top to bottom. The only thing left was large equipment, nothing that we could take with us.
Looking the place over top to bottom was incredibly time consuming, and then we hit a trap on the way out. Our lead vehicle, one of the cherokees, hit some cleverly hidden spike strips and had all four of its tires shredded. So pretty much the rest of yesterday afternoon was spent wandering around in search of replacements.
We had no cell service at all, and we decided after we got the jeep up and moving that we would camp somewhere that did. All of us are tense from being away from the compound, and not having a line of communication only makes that worse. Of course, about all we had time for once we did find a spot to hunker down was to call and check in, make sure that everything was going alright, but it did make all of us feel a little better.
We have two more places on our list to check. I thought this trip would be going faster, but experience has shown me that my expectations and reality almost never coincide. So I am guessing it will be Wednesday at the earliest before we can get home, giving us a full day at each of our last two targets. We are missing several critical items on our shopping list, and my fear is that the next one will be as empty as the last.
There aren't a lot of zombies around here, and that worries me. If there is a large group somewhere near that is keeping their numbers down and using the local healthcare places for supplies, then we might have a problem.
Jess told me last night that Lt. Price is doing well and apparently trying not to rock the boat, being a good boy and doing as his doctor tells him. He isn't asking too many awkward questions, but seems to be interested in getting to know the folks around the compound. She says that he likes to sit out on the porch of the clinic and talk to folks when they walk by. Maybe he's just lonely and wants to make some friends. Jess has been going by the clinic a lot to keep an eye on him for me. It actually works out well, since he finds her attractive and lowers his guard around her.
Hey, her idea, not mine!
I'm just glad he has no way to read this. If he proves to be trustworthy, I will apologize to him as much as needed. Though, if he turns out to be one of us, a real survivor and worthy of living at the compound permanently, he won't need or want an apology. He will understand why we are so cautious and have no hard feelings.
Up and out, time to go. Hopefully we will have some type of signal later, and you will hear from me if we do. Everyone at home--we miss you.

Posted by Josh Guess at 
7:55 AM

I killed a man this morning. Not a zombie, trying to devour me from base instinct, but a living, breathing human being. And right now, all of us are split up and hiding. 

I am in a room at the hospital we were searching, under a pile of bodies. To be extra careful, I won't be posting this until we are safe. 

So let me explain. 

Yesterday's search went well. We loaded up with hundreds of pounds of supplies, the medical pavilion we were at was pristine. There was a bit of everything; syringes and medicines, surgical supplies and isolation gear. Imagine the most obscure tool needed, the most uncommon supply, and one or another of the buildings we ransacked had it. We even took apart one of those chairs women deliver babies in and took that with us. It was a portable model anyway. 

So, I guess that made us cocky. Overconfident. 

Fast forward to this morning. We were searching our last scouted location, a large hospital in eastern Kentucky. Looking here was more of a bonus than anything; we had gotten almost everything on our shopping list at the pavilion, and could have gone home. But Gabrielle decided that sticking to the original plan was a good idea, if for no other reason than to move any useful supplies we couldn't take with us to a secure location and hide them. All of us agreed. 

But during our search, we came across a group of people apparently doing the same thing we were. I was lagging behind the others a bit and heard Gabby yell through an open door. I sidled up and took a very careful look through, only to see a man with a gun pointed at her. There were others in the room that must have been with him, three or four of them, but none of them had weapons drawn. 

Gabby was trying to talk to him, trying her damnedest to compromise, but she was getting nowhere. And I could see his trigger finger getting twitchy, the sweat beading on his forehead as he tried to muster up the courage to do something, anything. 

So I drew my pistol and stepped forward, and fired three times. It should scare me how easily my feet fell into perfect position, how ingrained it was in me to give that steady and consistent pull twice in his center mass before evenly raising the barrel and letting the third round find the smaller target of his face. 

Everyone else in our group did exactly as our pre-established plans required them to do. They ran like hell. 

The other people in the room reacted slowly, only one of them able to shake off the sudden and violent death of their teammate quickly enough to fire at us. He hit Darlene, though I can't be sure how badly she is hurt. All I managed to see was her stumble after the shot rang out, looking back at her over my shoulder, and I saw her stumble. I know she didn't get caught then, but as of right now I am not sure where anyone is. I hope our vehicles are well hidden enough to keep our attackers from finding them. We're screwed if that happens. 

*Update*

Ok, the folks that attacked us are gone. I guess we just waited them out. We are back on the road, heading toward home. Darlene is hurt badly, she took the shot in one of her kidneys, and we have no idea how bad the damage is. Gabby is tending to her as we hustle back toward the compound, and I am hoping that we can make it home quickly. We need Evans and the clinic. It's the interstate for us if we can manage it, we can't afford the time that the back roads will take. 

I hope she makes it. 

I know I had no choice, but I feel bad about killing that guy, and not just because the consequences of my actions led to Darlene being hurt. He and his folks may not have been bad people, just scared and looking for stuff to keep themselves healthy, just like us. I hate that it had to be that way, and it is really bothering me. 

I feel bad about killing someone. 

I guess that's a good sign. 

Posted by Josh Guess at 
9:57 AM

Darlene is in dire straits, and our medical personnel are overworked at the moment. Evans, assisted by Gabby, started work on Darlene as soon as we got in yesterday. Pretty much all of the regular folks at the clinic took part in helping out. Even Lieutenant Price helped, wheeling around the place gathering supplies and acting as a gopher.
She's stable, but needs to be watched pretty much around the clock. That wasn't really a problem last night, but this morning we have had two moderately sized zombie attacks. The first one caught us off guard, taking a group of people coming back from the farms by surprise. Half a dozen of them were injured, and two of those bitten.
From what we know about zombie bites, it's about even odds that those two will die. The bites are an inefficient way to transmit the vile colonies of bacteria in the mouths of the dead. We know that everybody is already infected by the zombie plague, and we know that the bites aren't always fatal...but even with meds, it doesn't look good. The other four were slashed with nails and bruised from getting pummeled by the zombies. Not too bad, but still requiring a lot of effort from people that have been working nonstop to keep one of our own alive since yesterday.
Jess is glad to see us, of course, and especially me. She is still pretty pissed that she can't go out of the compound or even work sentry duty, and she is angry at me for going. Such is pregnancy, though, and she's not getting a lot of pity from me for being kept safe.
She has used her free time lately very efficiently, though. She has been keeping tabs on how much food we are producing and using, and is trying to keep accurate track of how much of what types of food we need to eat to keep healthy. There is a lot of meat around, since the population of deer around here is so high ( I think I have mentioned that before) and of course there are tons of farms that have food just sitting around waiting to be harvested. Some we trade with Jack's people up north, some we eat, and a lot of it gets preserved for when we need it.
She has also headed the effort to plant large swaths of land for another harvest if we can manage it before first frost. Her passion for having hobbies also extends to horticulture and agriculture, so she is doing a pretty good job. She's busy right now trying to gather as many seed potatoes and other seed crops as she can. It's impressive to watch a pregnant woman scare a bunch of grown men into doing what she tells them.
She did spend some time with Darlene this morning, her and Lt. Price. He volunteered to stay with our injured lady when others had to be elsewhere. It's decent of him, but Evans decided that at least one other person should be there just in case. I don't think the guy would do anything to hurt Darlene for several reasons, but realistically, he could be the most trustworthy person alive and not be fully able to help her if she needed it because of his own injuries.
Jess likes to keep an eye on him. She gets a strange vibe from him, and I think it's sort of like a loose tooth that she can't stop messing with.
I have to cut this off here. Work to do, people to talk to about some projects we need to work on. And I have to catch up with my brother about all of it. He's been doing this job without me for a week, and I am woefully behind.