Cassie (Adrian's Undead Diary Book 8)

by Chris Philbrook

  Lancaster shook his head, clucking his tongue softly. "I'm not the kind of man who can keep a wife General Foster. Nor would I be suited to take care of a child. You could say I'm married to my job."

  All Foster could manage in reply was an unhappy grunt. A streak of pain moved up his spine, and over the top of his head. He twitched.

  “Cluster bombs Foster? What’s the game here?” Lancaster asked.

  The old man knew a lot if he was already aware that the planes were armed with the special bombs. Foster swallowed, finding no moisture in his mouth. “Lancaster if you read my plan, you’d know that the cities are lost. Dropping these munitions now simply allows us to have a long-term effect on the undead in the cities, disrupting them while still allowing us to task resources to securing the rest of the country and the resources we need to survive.”

  “Interesting theory. You realize that there are hundreds of thousands of people still in the cities that won’t be able to leave if you drop these bombs? Maybe millions of people? Are you aware of the amount of damage you could still do? How many people will be left for dead?”

  Foster had a pang of guilt as his heart fluttered. He felt stabbing pains shoot up and down his arms like pins and needles from heat suddenly restored to a cold limb. In the headset he wore he heard the first of the pilots call out the release of their bombs. Somewhere on the east coast. The new ringing in his ears kept the words garbled. Foster pulled the headset off with an increasingly weak hand. He noticed for the first time that his arm was emaciated, and withered. He dropped the headset on the keyboard beside him.

  “Lancaster you wouldn’t understand. I’ve been contacted by greater powers. I’ve been dreaming of all of this. I’m on a miss—… I’m on a mission…” Foster’s voice failed.

  Lancaster walked into the room and past Foster. His eyes never left the officer, watching the sweat stream down his sickly face. Lancaster picked up the headset and donned it.

  “Foster you think you’re the only person who is having dreams? I hate to break it to you, but there are a lot of folks nowadays that are seeing some particularly strange things at night. The trick is figuring out where your dreams are coming from.” Lancaster tabbed some switches on the controls and sent out curt radio communications to the bombers that had yet to drop their payloads. The pilots took their instructions without argument and turned away, heading home.

  As Lancaster did this Foster’s body continued to fail. He'd been abandoned. The sweat ran down his face in streams and his voice was gone. He struggled to keep his eyes lifted. Foster’s face was twisted into an expression of extreme pain. Lancaster had seen this all before.

  “You’re having a heart attack Foster.”

  Foster looked up at Lancaster’s face, scared and in pain.

  “You have no history of heart problems. You’re good enough, drinking plenty of fluids, and yet you’re showing extreme signs of advanced sickness. Cancer probably. Something very aggressive is eating you from within. Do you find it strange that you’re suddenly dropping dead? Leaving a corpse behind inside a government facility just a few moments after issuing orders that you claim to have received in a dream from God. Sounds like a perfect way to disrupt one of the last places that still has some semblance of control over the country.”

  Foster’s eyes were rolling up and into the back of his head as his body continued to fail on him. Lancaster sighed and reached into his pants pocket, producing a short, thick suppressor for the pistol he held. A few seconds later it was threaded onto the barrel.

  “Sorry Foster, but I think you’re playing for the wrong team, and I won’t let you die and run around turning folks here. You aren't the only one having informative dreams you know. Nice try bad guy.”

  Lancaster grabbed the arm of the swivel chair and pulled it out a few feet from the counter filled with electronics. He planted a hand firmly on Foster’s back and pushed him onto the floor, where his face hit and bounced, leaving a bloody smudge on the cheap government linoleum. Lancaster pointed the pistol at the back of Foster’s head and pulled the trigger once without further fanfare. The gun went off with a muffled thump and Foster’s head cracked into the floor, the insides of his skull leaking out the new hole in his eye socket. His body stopped moving immediately. It was an inglorious ending for the decorated General. A puppet tossed away after the play.

  Lancaster turned and surveyed the screens, trying to figure out which cities had the cluster bombs dropped on them.

  Lancaster pushed Foster’s leg out of the way and sat down in the swivel chair the general had been sitting in. He accessed the files of the video feeds from just moments prior and got exact GPS locations on the cities and streets the bombs had just fallen on. Indeed, some of the routes into and out of America's largest cities were entirely destroyed now, but other places would now just be even more dangerous to enter or exit from. It didn't look to be a total loss. The man with a lifetime of dark deeds sat back in the chair and let out a series of his now infamous tongue created clucks. He sighed deeply and rotated around to look at Foster’s body, its head still leaking blood out on the hard floor.

  “Fuck you, Foster.” Lancaster sat his pistol down on the counter and leaned back, looking at the off-white dropped tile ceiling. He wondered how far above he’d have to go find salvation for everything he'd done for what he believed in. For what he felt was the best course of action. “Well. I tried. Guess the endgame is in their hands now.”

  Lancaster stood up and left the room. He still had much to attend to. Dreams to follow.

  February 14th

  There is no way I can fit all of what I need to write in one sitting. Far too much detail to cover. A lot of it is good. Some of it is very bad. Sad. The question becomes, where do I begin? For starters, a miracle took place and the weather held. It was actually fairly nice the entire trip out and back. Solid 45 degrees during the day with sunshine, though it dipped down pretty damn abruptly when the sun settled.

  Vehicles on the run to the hospital and their passengers:

  HRT: Myself, Caleb, Abby and Hector

  Humvee One: Kevin, Amanda, Quan, Ethan

  Humvee Two: Martin, Fitz, Angela, Hal

  Deuce: Amanda, Mike, Patty

  Fifteen souls.

  Our plan worked so flawlessly for so long we felt like geniuses. We felt like we had the whole city by the balls. Our first real issue was when we stopped to plant our first noisemaker for our return trip. Remember how I said we’d leave one set up at an intersection to draw zombies off our trail? We’d managed to accumulate a small posse on our ass by then, so we knew leaving the radio was a good idea. The Deuce was best suited for putting the radios up. The bed in the back was high up, had no roof, and had space for us for when we got our loot later on, and with a small step ladder we were more than able to get the ropes up around the lights and get the radios hung. Other vehicles pulled security, and everything was fine.

  The problem when we hung that radio was not the encroaching of the dead. Kevin called out movement to the south and half of us swung our guns in that direction. I wished I had my ACOG on my weapon at that moment, but I didn’t. The AimPoint was mounted still. Several of the folks with optics said later on that they saw human movement. Faster than the undead, moving from cover to cover, watching us from a good distance away. Kevin said it was two people, one male, and one female. They never did anything threatening to us, and when we felt things were stable, and the radio was playing, we left. A few undead followed us from the radio, and we put them down after a bit. The idea was to leave as many hung up on the radio. We’d adjust our route and plan home on the move.

  After that we had smooth sailing for some time. The hospital is right beside the college campus. Same campus that Becca was at when the world shit the bed. The medical building is shaped more or less like a giant horseshoe. Inside the U are the loading docks we intended to breach the inside of the building through. The ER that we wanted to avoid is on the wing of the hospital, near
the large parking garage.

  Our initial plan was to do a full loop around what amounted to a four block area. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it’d give us a damn better idea as to whether or not getting out of the vehicles was even a good idea. While not the center of the city, we were perhaps ten blocks away from what you’d call the center. Where all the tallest buildings and the financial areas are. Downtown if you will. That area is where Cassie worked.

  Our drive in and the loops we did around the hospital showed us it was feasible. Surprisingly the amount of undead around the hospital was very low. Incredibly low in fact. Swerving the HRT back and forth slightly Caleb was able to hit and run over almost every single walker in the immediate streets. That bought us a tremendous amount of time when we hung our four other perimeter radios. Our noise beacons, if you will.

  Because we wanted nothing to see us drive away from the radio hanging, we dismounted from our vehicles, and those of us with suppressed weapons engaged immediately. As I said, there weren’t that many undead. I think at each of our four stops we had to put down less than a dozen walkers, which by my estimation is another motherfucking miracle. We put holes in heads, and rolled out. Nothing new to report there.

  The alley/street that the inner portion of the hospital was on was large. During days of regular use, it was where the hospital parked their MRI truck, and where they took deliveries of supplies. We figured the docks would be right near the storage areas of the hospital. It didn’t make sense that they would cart shit all over the place when they had a dock. We were right, for the most part.

  On the alley we parked a humvee at each end for security. We put two bodies at each end of the street as shooters. We parked the deuce and the HRT right at the dock, and proceeded to get the operation on.

  Five shooters stood in the back of the deuce, pulled away from the dock. Nothing falling out of the dock could land in the truck, and nothing on the ground could reach up and into it. They’d have to climb in, and as we’ve seen over and over, dead folks can’t climb for shit. They're not smart enough, not coordinated enough, nor strong enough. Martin bored a large hole into the metal dock doors with one of our more industrial drills, and he slipped a steel rod attached to a chain through the hole. The rod-anchor's chain was attached to the rear of the HRT, and with a slight push of the gas pedal, the heavy metal dock door came screaming off the tracks. Caleb drove the truck forward, pulling the door well out of our way. Worked like a charm.

  When the door opened, we knew right then and there we were in for a long fucking day. The door blasted away and we saw three undead standing where the door used to be. They must’ve been drawn to the sound of us drilling the hole in the door. I snapped two dead right off the bat, and Ethan put the other one down. They fell over the lip of the concrete dock and landed head down on the pavement below. Their necks and heads smashed into strange shapes when they landed. There was no time to fix their fallen bodies.

  We cleared the door off the chain, picked the chain up off the ground, and got the HRT situated out of the way of the humvees should they need to move to either end. We left the deuce right there, away from the dock, the wall, and anything that could touch the bed, and we left Amanda in the back with a suppressed M4 to cover the center of the alley, and the docks should something slip behind us. Our own mobile gun platform. As I heard once before on a television show, if we lost the dock, we were fucked. We’d have to fight our way out the front of the facility, through whatever was out there.

  So if you do the math, two shooters at each humvee plus one shooter at the dock left us with ten for the interior. That’s a really large team for any kind of building clear, and at that point we’re looking at substantial risk for friendly fire problems. It’s easier for three people to avoid shooting one another. It’s a lot harder for ten people. Walls aren't always bulletproof.

  The interior of the dock was a receiving area still largely filled with supply filled pallets. A quick check told us the pallet contents were useless. Inside that and to the right side was what I’d call a dirty warehouse, and then a clean warehouse. The dirty warehouse stored linens, bed sheets, uniforms, etc. The clean warehouse on the other hand… was a goldmine. It was far enough inside like the medical warehouse we've already raided that the temperatures stayed stable. The doors were also heavily locked, and we needed to use halligans and a lot of muscle power to get the doors open. Quan campaigned heavily for us to let him blow the door, but I thought the noise would be a risk, and the explosion might destroy some of the stuff we'd come for. There were clear signs that someone had tried to get into the cleaner rooms too. Scratch marks on the metal frames, hack marks in the door itself, and smashed knobs. Lucky for us, their patience ran out before the doors gave up the ghost. Yay for strong doors.

  We almost filled the entire deuce in the first hour we were there. IV bags by the sealed case, boxes and boxes of medication, and highly valuable hospital supplies of every sort. I cannot emphasize how large a haul that single secured storage area was. We could've and should’ve stopped there, but we were prepared to go deeper into the building, and we had another area to check out.

  Right outside the “dirty” warehouse was the main hospital corridor. Sitting on the inside of that door listening for movement was the closest thing to being on a landing boat during D-Day I can imagine. Or the moment right before everyone leapt up out of the trenches to charge the enemy back in World War One. Impending doom just inches away, and the only thing keeping you from it was a moment of courage, and an inch of cover.

  We opened the door once we were sure there was nothing on the other side. Well, nothing standing right on the other side. Ethan tugged the door inward slowly with Martin as muscle behind him should we need to slam it shut fast. The dark hallway beyond the door was cavernous. Kevin and I were in the space of the doorway with barrels up, waiting for anything to come into view. Nothing did, so we cracked green chemlights and threw them down the hallway in each direction like little cylindrical light grenades. One went about ten feet and stopped, the other skidded for quite some time. I poked my head around into the hall and surveyed the scene.

  The shorter chemlight direction had about five undead moving our way. I barked out contact as fast as I could and got my weapon up. The first two or three rounds shot true, hitting faces and heads, but my next few sailed. I stepped into the hallway further when I saw Hal and Abby moving to cover my back, and once I was in the clear in the hall, I steadied myself, got calm quick and put the others down. For a moment there, my mind went to a dark place, but I rallied. Too late to be scared. Further down the hall in my direction I saw more targets, and I opened up on them as best I could in the shitty light. Behind me as I engaged targets I heard Hal and Abby open up with their weapons. Fortunately we were all equipped with suppressed guns, and our hearing wasn’t utterly demolished by firing in such a confined space.

  I turned to see in their direction and still cover them and watched as they shot down body after body. I think our headcount in that hallway alone in the first thirty seconds was fifteen. From there we had the emergency exit maps on the walls, and we knew where we were going. Our main goal was the cafeteria. We felt there had to be food inside it, or at least it was worth checking on.

  The cafeteria was on the second floor, fortunately well away from the wing of the hospital that had the ER area. Judging from the appearance of the crashed cars and ambulances on the ER side when we were doing our perimeter sweep, we KNEW that side of the hospital was going to be bad news.

  The corridor we were in ended with a set of double doors, then turned right after that set of doors, and proceeded down past the radiology department to a large emergency stairwell at the end of the building. In all, it was maybe fifty yards of walk. Not that far, but in a zombie infested building, you might as well be running a fucking marathon. You fight for every inch.

  Doors doing in directions we were not heading were sealed with either chain and a padlock, or a special iron bar/hook tha
t Martin made up for us. It slipped through the handles on double doors preventing them from opening, yet could be removed easily by us when we needed to get through that door. We barred all of the doors going away from us, and shut every other door that would stay shut without a living human trying to open it. That allowed us to move further into the hospital as a complete team, posting less sentries along the way to cover the ground we'd just passed through.

  The second corridor after the double door was better than the first. I think our headcount in that area was maybe a dozen, and the hallway was longer so they were more spread out. By this point in the operation we were starting to get a good feeling. I know that’s just stupid. Literally giving the Jinx Fairy a plate at the dinner table, but dammit it really felt good. Our plan was going more or less flawlessly.

  That’s when we got radio contact from the humvees. Caleb was the voice. He said, “We’ve got live targets moving on us. We’re taking sporadic inaccurate fire. We might need an additional body out here if they get closer or start shooting better.”

  We stopped, evaluated where we were and how we were doing, and decided to send Hal out to support them. He was a good shot, and quite frankly, inaccurate fire can kill you just as easily as accurate fire. Hal left us and went out to cover Caleb and Hector.

  Inside, we moved on. The bottom floor was cleared by us in twenty minutes. We secured the doors and entered the stairwell heading up to the cafeteria on the second floor. The stairwell was empty of everything, so that went quickly. A huge feather in our cap as we were about to enter the second floor hallway was the small, narrow window in the door allowing us to look in. It gave us a line of sight to see some of the action on the other side in the hall. I smashed out the small window with a halligan and that drew the attention of the walkers on the other side. Kevin’s M4 had a flashlight on it, and he held his rifle over mine, illuminating the shuffling dead for me. The tricky part was that the door we were at was an emergency exit door with a bar to open it. Meaning once they reached the door and started pushing on it, the door would open out straight at us. We put two solid feet on the base of the door, and started firing fast through our tiny window.