Cassie (Adrian's Undead Diary Book 8)

by Chris Philbrook

  I remember feeling flush. Michelle stood up at that point, and caressed my cheek again, holding her warm palm against the cool skin of my face, “Adrian I’m falling in love with you. Not because of some prophecy, or just because God wants it that way, but because you are a tremendous man that I want to learn more about, and to be closer to. I see you for you the man you are, and the man you can become. But until you get closure on her, and until you forgive yourself fully for what happened with Cassie, there’s simply no room in your heart for anyone, especially not me.”

  And she left.

  I don’t even know what to do about this.

  -Adrian

  February 9th

  I think Michelle was right. She’s rarely wrong. I’m not saying she was right simply because she’s rarely wrong, that should be clarified. She’s right because she’s right. I’ve never given myself closure on the whole Cassie thing.

  I need to move on. I need to forgive myself. I need to understand that despite my mistake that day, I am a person that deserves to enjoy his life. I deserve to love again. I deserve to give Cassie’s memory rest and peace if only in my own mind.

  I just don’t know how to go about doing that.

  It’s on my mind now though. On my radar like a goal for Bastion. Something I WILL achieve, not something I will discard, or put off forever.

  What does throw me for a hardcore loop is the whole “I’m supposed to fall in love with you” story Michelle gave me. Who the fuck says that? I haven’t slept good since that night, and I haven’t really seen her either. She’s been avoiding me, and I’ve been avoiding her. Feels very high school. I don’t think she ever intended to tell me about that, and in her alcohol haze it came out.

  Mind fuck, am I right? Like, serious fuck with your head bullshit. I look at her in an entirely different light now. I used to think she was pretty, and intelligent, and warm and caring and wholesome and all those things that I see as unattainable. I see her as someone that I could ruin, instead of someone that could make me a better person in the long run. I don’t see her as someone I could make happy.

  That’s how my mind works now.

  God I’m really fucked up. Like legitimate head case bullshit. As if I didn’t have enough shit to think about, now I am nearly obsessed with finding out if being with her is a possibility. It’s the first thing I’ve thought about when I open my eyes in the morning, and I think about it late into the night when I try to fall asleep. If I fall asleep at all.

  Do I have a fucking crush now? Is that what this is? Jesus. How old am I?

  I can’t let this get in the way of getting things done. As much as it would be amazing to be… intimate with her, I can’t let my physical and emotional needs get in the way of being a good leader here. I have too many people relying on me, and too many decisions to make. Too many other people to let down.

  I wonder how I’ll get closure on Cassie. Do I need to go… find her? I mean fuck. Our tiny foray into the city the other day came out way in the black, but hell, it could’ve gone really fucking south, really fucking quick. A real trip to the center of the city to the office building she worked at to try and find her would be a goddamn logistical nightmare that’d require every ounce of manpower we could bring to bear to accomplish.

  And for what?

  So I can sleep better at night and get my dick wet without having a gigantic fucking guilt trip? Yeah that’ll fly when I explain it to people here. It’ll be like a wet fart in the middle of a fucking funeral service. I’ll be walked out the back by a bunch of angry men who'll sodomize me to prove a point.

  Sigh. I need to put serious mental effort into figuring out how exactly to do that without being treated like a selfish moron.

  Can’t worry about THAT trip into the city right now. I need to worry about the trip that’s necessary at the moment. We need far more medical supplies, and the only place that we can think of is the hospital in the city. It’s near the college where Becca went, and it’s on the far side of the city. The east side. We could skirt downtown the same way we did to get to the pharmacy near the airport, and according to our people who have been there post-that day, we’ve got a fairly decent and attainable route.

  I should say that our sick folks are now much better, but it took a LOT of the fluids we obtained to get them there. We’re still what Ethan and Joel describe as being “dangerously low” on bags, and they’re being pretty insistent that we get a move on to get some more. All of our sick are now off the drips, but if we get a strong hit of that bug again, or we have some folks badly injured we’re going to be bent over and on short notice to get unfucked.

  So we’re formulating a plan to head into the hospital. Tomorrow we’re sitting down and starting to look at maps to make a planned route in, as well as setting up areas as “noise traps.” We want to use a similar idea to the radio on the traffic light to draw them out and away from the hospital. We aren’t quite sure if one will be enough, so we’re going to do some measurements on how sound carries tomorrow to see if we need to set up multiples. That’ll draw extra trouble our way though, but it might be less trouble than not setting up these traps. Plus, we can roll up to these noise areas after we’re done (assuming we aren’t running at top speed for our lives) and lay down some HEAVY lead to put the entire mob listening to whatever music we’ve got playing down for the count. Worked last time.

  Distraction and organization for more efficient removal. Now if we could figure out a way to kill them without wasting serious ammunition, that’d be great. Unfortunately, fragmentation weaponry is not that effective, nor is fire. Launching a series of grenades into the crowd will likely knock a bunch of them around but not kill them. You see shrapnel usually kills a living person by doing internal damage to organs and blood vessels. Most folks don’t die in a bombing or explosion due to head wounds. It’s either lacerations to organs, or tremendous overpressure that ruptures your shit. Zombies laugh at that crap. Kevin said they did extensive testing in England while they were there and all that's a known commodity. An explosion is useful for destroying buildings, or knocking them down, but it isn’t reliable for killing them.

  Fire as I’ve clearly explained sucks my hairy balls for pretty much the same reason. Fire doesn’t destroy the brain nearly fast enough, and you’re left with an enormous crowd of zombies that are now on fire. A mathematician would describe that as clearly a “less than” situation. Now if we had something like a… MOAB, or even just a handful of 105mm artillery shells that we could detonate right on top of the motherfuckers, we’d be in a different boat. That’d cause enough overpressure to crack skulls, scramble brains and kill these bastards. Sadly… the collateral damage to structures nearby would be high, but it’s not like we’re going to be using these city buildings any time soon.

  I’ve got the brain trust working on a more efficient kill solution than “spray and pray with the SAWs.” Killing four or five hundred like we did the other day was outstanding, but it's a drop in the bucket when weighed against the 125,000+ people who are probably in the city and are dead and angry.

  Once we have a solid plan in place, we will put it into action, and head into the city once more to secure more medical supplies for Bastion.

  If that goes well, I’ll be far more informed about a trip to find closure.

  To find Cassie.

  In the meantime… I need to stay occupied so I stop thinking about a certain blonde woman that I am supposed to be falling in love with. Or is supposed to be falling in love with me. I'm confused.

  -Adrian

  February 11th

  Here’s the plan:

  We did noise tests, and the radios we can bring to make noise can be heard in about a fifty yard radius. That’s not that far at all. That means we need a minimum of four radios set up in a perimeter at a bare minimum of 100 yards outside our AO. That gives us a hundred yard noise buffer from where we will be, and where the radios are making noise theoretically keeping the zeds off our back. Four r
adios are ready to go, and we’ve got four CDs fully prepped up. Noisy songs that will play for a long ass time and can be set to repeat incessantly. If we can’t kill the zombies with gunfire, we will annoy the fuck out of them with 1970s disco, Swedish death metal, early 90's gangster rap, and some old yodeling music we dug up.

  Shit if I had to listen to the mix CDs we made, I’d fucking kill myself. Shotgun mouthwash just to make the pain go away. You also might ask yourself Mr. Journal why we took the time to MAKE a special mix CD for this, and to be honest, I can't give you an answer beyond; it seemed like the thing to do.

  Our road plan will be exactly the same as before to the Factory, and then we will switch to roads one or two off from our original route so as not to let anyone set up an ambush if they are anticipating us returning. From there we will continue forward, leaving behind a fifth noise maker in a major intersection that we can skirt around later on if need be. That way on our return, if we have critical injuries or just need to get the fuck out fast we can drive around any mobs of undead that might be there. Plus, it’ll help with us being followed by any undead into the city. Does that make sense? I feel very… rambly or something. Too much thinking the past few days.

  Been good about thinking about Michelle too.

  Ah fuck. Kiss of death. The Jinx Fairy works in mysterious ways.

  We are rolling with an additional vehicle on this trip, and three more shooters than last time. We’re using the same exact team from the pharmacy run (Caleb, Abby, Hector, me, Kevin, Amanda, Quan, Ethan, Martin, Fitz, Angela and Hal) plus new bodies in the form of Amanda, Mike and Patty. They’re going to be riding in the deuce and a half. We debated bringing the box truck, or the heavy duty military tow rig, but the logistics of those vehicles didn’t add up to the value the deuce gave us. They’re built to take a pounding in the worst situations you can throw at them, and they've been doing it since World War Two.

  We roll in a perimeter of the hospital on arrival, assessing the situation and if all seems well, we post our noisemakers as planned on traffic lights or street lamps, and contract in to the hospital’s rear docks to breach through the doors there. We can secure the alley/street the docks are on fairly easily, and we’ve got exits in both directions we can use. On the street map we have of the city, the alley looks like a nice defendable location for us with minimal exposure. Granted, not much of an escape route, but you can't have everything.

  We have only our memories of the inside of the hospital to go on, which is bad. We have no internet to use to try and find a floor plan of the joint. We are expecting a nightmare inside. A full on plugged tub requiring our toes to bring it to order once more. The Jinx Fairy doesn’t even need to show up for this to be a fucking disaster. We’ve got some internal breaching plans to help minimize our risk, and we’re getting the supplies ready for that now. For example, we’re anticipating the ER area of the hospital to be chock full of the dead, and the docks where we are going in are pretty far from that area of the hospital. We’re going to bar the doors that lead to that section, and attempt to simply avoid the majority of the fight going near there would bring on us.

  Downside to this plan: we are pot committed once we’re in the shit. There’s no QRF to call for help if things go south. We sink or swim on our own on this, so pretty clearly we’re shitting bricks and hoping this goes well. The alternatives will be very bad. Not only for us if we die there, but for the folks who are being left behind at Bastion here. They're going to lose a LOT of experience, and a LOT of gear if we fail.

  Having said that, we are super excited. This is a serious operation and will test our limits to get things done in a tactical sense. The payoff could be huge too. A hospital, even one that was in crisis when it was last open, has got to be full of good shit. We’re hoping for lots of IV bags and medication. Bandages, sterilization equipment and chemicals, surgical tools and soaps, blah blah blah. Basically anything medical that is consumable will be huge for us. This is our big game. The Championship.

  The other downside is that the hospital might be completely empty of everything we're risking so much to go there for, and we’re doing this all for nothing. What a shit moment that’d be for morale. All dressed up and nowhere to go.

  One thing I am definitely doing this for… is that if this goes well, we’ll be very informed on how the city is on the interior. I’ll know just about exactly what to expect if I want to go deeper into the city to Cassie’s work. Searching for closure and all that jazz…

  We are leaving first thing in the morning on the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow we finish gathering supplies and working on things we need to bring with us. Kevin is spending the entire day doing weapons and gear prep with Mike. Apparently I am finally getting my M203.

  Huzzah.

  -Adrian

  And the Bombs Fell

  “This keeps getting worse,” Lancaster grunted out loud. No one was even in the room to hear him, but he spoke anyway.

  Lancaster stood at a wall of streaming information deep inside and below a government building that was still safe. Whatever safe passed for now from the plague that was ripping his country apart one dead body at a time less than a hundred yards above his head. Lancaster was an old man, and tired. He’d fought in Vietnam before college, and still had a long ragged scar on his neck where a fall into a shit covered stake pit had nearly ended his life. His white hair was thin and wispy and completely gone at the very peak of his skull, where the skin was smooth and shiny. He was short and squat, with wide shoulders and hips. He wore the remnants of a suit, the jacket and tie long since discarded earlier on in the crisis. Decorum was far from important now. His white dress shirt had stains from coffee and stale donuts. They weren’t blood stains, but they certainly were the signs of a long battle he had been fighting.

  Lancaster stood with arms crossed in front of a wall of flat screen monitors. The dozen streams of images all came from military sources today. On other days he had the few tech nerds hack into traffic cameras, or security cameras in other government buildings that were still accessible to their network. Each screen today was the feed from a high altitude observation plane that kept watch on one of the cities that were to be bombed that day. American cities. American bombs.

  Lancaster reached out and punched a few keys on a keyboard, switching the image feeds from the planes to the satellites much higher above. It took nearly a minute for the computers to link up and form a strong connection for him, but they did. On almost every screen against the surface of the ground below, small clusters of shapes approached the dense urban sprawls of the cities. He could identify the different shapes easily from experience. Most of the shapes were workhorse B52 bombers, with their long wings, but some were B1 planes, and on one screen there was a pair of elite stealth B2 bombers. Those looked like flying Batman symbols. Cash and the unaffordable cost to get this done wasn’t an issue anymore. This wasn’t about the economy, or the foreign debt, or trade deficits. This was about the pure survival of the species, let alone the nation. Home of the free.

  Lancaster sipped cold coffee that tasted like soot from a cardboard cup as the planes racked up and headed in for their bombing runs on the cities. The logic behind the bombings was simple, as flawed as it sounded to him. Some American cities were already abandoned by local authorities. The police, National Guard, and local military forces were simply unable to contain the massive crowds of undead and the sickness that caused all the death. After careful deliberation, it was decided that in order to have any chance at reasserting control over these lost cities, the dead had to be put down by overwhelming force that didn't put the men and women of the military at heightened risk.

  Enter the capabilities of the vast American air power.

  Previously dominant in many a conflict across the world against conventional living targets, America’s enormous fleet of well-armed air craft and highly trained personnel were uniquely skilled at bombing runs very similar to what was needed now at home. The first runs today,
the runs Lancaster watched live right then, were intended to hit the massive crowds of undead in the urban centers and thin them so ground forces could re-enter the cities and mop up, giving them a leg up on the hordes.

  Boston was the first city where he watched the bombs fall. Not by much, Lancaster mused. Just a hop, skip and a jump away, D.C. was about to be pummeled and Charlotte as well. Lancaster watched with dry eyes as the B52s flying over one of America’s oldest cities lined up and took their final ordnance delivery corrections. Lancaster switched the Boston satellite feed to the C2 bird’s eyes just as the bombs left the bay doors of the massive bombers. The C2 plane was lower, and had a more detailed view.

  He listened to the chatter amongst the air crew and the brass leading this particular bombing run as he waited for the massive MK84 2,000 pound bombs to impact the streets below. He didn’t have to wait for long to watch the results. The massive bomb’s initial ground impact was invisible to the naked eye. The instant after they hit the ground, they exploded, sending a visible shockwave into the air like a dome of energy released from a superhero’s hands. Trailing behind it a millisecond later was the deadly shrapnel and flame that would tear bodies, buildings, and cars apart. The intensely powerful camera on the command and control plane showed tiny human bodies flying through the air, end over end, spinning so powerfully limbs came off from the centrifugal force. If you forgot that each explosion was destruction and chaos, each bomb hitting looked like the flowering of a delicate rose, spreading its petals quickly to catch the fading light.

  It was horrifying.