Midnight (Adrian's Undead Diary)

by Chris Philbrook

  Gilbert got her calm and reasonable, and with a little prodding, we got her focused on the idea of going to find out what happened. Once she got it into her head that we were going to attempt a rescue, she was all fucking business. I think she had to get it all out first or something.

  We took twenty minutes and came up with a solid plan. We hadn’t been across town yet and we knew from the truck the STIG people had drove over here it was a fucking wreck downtown. There was no way a regular pickup like the maintenance plow would make it all that way without us losing windows, or getting the front destroyed. Shit, worst case scenario it’d get totaled, and we’d be sprinting in January to get home. We felt our immediate best alternative was the heavy rescue truck.

  We knew we were potentially rolling into a situation with casualties, so the rescue gear aspect was good. There is a door to the rear, as well as the two front cab doors. Also, it’s a heavy diesel truck, with great ground clearance, multiple rear tires, and stainless steel everywhere. We started loading it immediately.

  I got the M15, my Glock, and my little Cheetah in my ankle holster. I took the Savage as well if only for the scope. I also remembered to bring my sword this time too. I realized when I was getting shit together I had made a horrible decision the other day in giving them the Marlin and the Mossberg Tac .22. Both were .22 rifles, and as you’d expect, those were the only .22 rifles we had. Fuck me, right?

  I’m now sitting on a few thousand rounds of.22 ammo, and a single .22 pistol to push it all through. Just my luck right? I always miss some stupid little detail that winds up becoming really relevant later on. Sigh.

  I wound up grabbing two of the better 12 gauge pump shotguns and a hundred shells or so to go along with them. Abby rolled with her Beretta and every round of ammo we had for it, as well as the .22 pistol. I also grabbed the two .357 revolvers we had and put them in the truck. We had a lot of ammo for them, and it made sense to finally put it to use. For some reason I also grabbed the compound bow, and the arrows. Why not right? Not like I had to carry the thing. Gilbert arrived with his trusty .45, and I shit you not, an AK-47.

  I know Mr. Journal. I fucking knew it. Strapped across his chest he also had an old school NVA magazine bandolier filled with clips. It couldn’t have been more appropriate. Well, if he had a red bandana on, as well as a bow and a giant knife it might’ve been better, but all things considered… He didn’t say shit when he sat it down on the table, I just laughed. Abby was like “Dude.. what the FUCK?”

  Too funny.

  We already had medical gear packed into the truck, and we snagged shit like rope, a few Halligans, and other stuff we thought we’d need. I grabbed a few of the converted milk jugs I had filled with water as well as enough food to last a day or two. Lots of granola bars, candy bars, and canned shit we could eat without cooking. Never know when you’ll be back… I double checked to make sure we had enough fuel in the truck, and we were off.

  I drove, Gilbert rode shotgun, and Abby rode in the back area, moving about to keep an eye on things. STIG is on the other side of town. There are two ways to get there from campus. The first route is to go straight down Main Street and cross the length of town in the most direction fashion. The second route is to get on the side roads and move through the residential side streets. Indirect, but based on what we’ve seen ourselves, and what Brian said earlier, those streets had less undead.

  We decided the side streets were our safest bet. We drove past the burnt out husk of the gas station and headed east down Route 18. At the Main Street turn off we hung a right, and drove into the same area the grocery store is in. Across the street near there is Wyman Street. Wyman cuts up around downtown, and links to the streets that make up the grid of downtown.

  We turned onto Wyman, and that’s when things got ugly. First off, none of these roads had been plowed yet. The only “path” through the snow was the tire tracks and pushed away areas made by the STIG truck. Luckily, the heavy rescue truck is smaller than their box truck. Wyman is right after the police station, and is right where we saw the huge mob of undead congregated when we came down here before. They weren’t as packed in as they were that day, but there were quite a few. I slowed the truck down to about 15 miles an hour, and told everyone to hold on.

  It was awful. Watching all the dead faces as they reached up over the hood at us was not a good experience. We’d hit them and most either got knocked down and ran over, or they hung on for a bit, clutching whatever they could. When they finally went under the truck, however they went, we just drove right over them, completely missing them. Some of them though, we ran them right over. Two bad things about running over dead people in a large truck;

  1, they crunch and pop in the most visceral and gross fashion. The first one is gross, the next ten are mind numbing, and after that, your humanity takes a serious hit. Caustic experience.

  2, they turn into huge speed bumps, and trucks suck at taking speed bumps.

  I think it was our fifth or sixth body when Abby was launched into the ceiling of the truck like a piston. She’s got a fucking egg on her grape the size of my thumb. (Shit I love making food comparisons. Maybe I’m hungry?) The shocks on that truck couldn’t deal with the damn lurching, and we had to slow down even more. Slowing down was bad. That gave the damn zombies time to reach up as we drove by, and many grabbed on to the mirrors. Once they started to grab the mirrors, many began to step on the gas tank steps, and then they were at the windows.

  We caught on to that shit storm before it fully developed though. Gilbert cracked his window and started to blast the heads off anything that made it to the point of grabbing something to hold on to. I pulled my Glock and did the same, but it was really hard to drive, shift, and shoot, so we wound up having Abby lean over my back with the .22 pistol and do the dirty work on my side herself. She was also wedged in there so tight when we drove over a dead body she couldn’t move. Plus the snap of the .22 going off was a lot more reasonable in the cab than the boom of the .45.

  Once we got the system down, and barreled through the first thousand yards of undead, it was smooth sailing. Well, smooth-ish. Don’t get me wrong, there was still a lot of toe-pushing going on. I can’t hear out of my left ear today. Abby’s .22 pistol going off over and over has beaten the eardrum into submission for awhile.

  After we turned off Wyman and started to make forward progress towards the industrial park things got noticeable better. We actually got into some open spaces where I could gun it, and we made up some good time. That little breath of air allowed us to reload all our guns as well, which was nice. I had to turn on the wipers too. We had a lot of red and black spray on the windshield from shooting the dead. Fucking nightmare.

  Moving through the side streets from there until we got back onto Main Street was fairly easy. A few scattered walking undead here and there which we either clipped with the truck, or just drove around entirely. It didn’t make sense to shoot them. I kept thinking of how I went on my drive by shooting spree the day I went to Moore’s, and blew through like a hundred rounds of 9mm. For nothing too. I mean there was no reason to do it.

  Not making that mistake again. We encountered a heavier crowd once we got onto Main Street again. The scary part was the glow in the sky coming from somewhere ahead. Shit, by then we knew it was coming from the industrial park. Remember Mr. Journal, we haven’t had nighttime electricity in almost what, seven months? There has been no familiar orange glow of downtown in the sky at night. Just black sky filled with the pinpricks of a billion stars. It’s actually one of the few things I like about the world ending. A sky filled with stars.

  After skirting downtown I had a new appreciation for the two trips the STIG people took to get to us. They were really serious about making friends with us. I mean shit, there’s a really good chance of shit going really badly on that run. Anyway. We turned onto Main Street again and had another... I don’t know, maybe a mile or two to go before we reached the turn off to the park. From the street Gilber
t and I were slack jawed. We’d been here before and from what we could see, things were very wrong.

  The entire plant portion of the building was gone except for a few of the girders that supported the walls. The ceiling supports had melted, or were melting down to the ground. The cars parked in the rear parking lot alongside the plant had been tossed aside and flipped over like a child’s toys. One was tipped up on its end and leaning against a tree. Several were stacked haphazardly on each other like matchboxes.

  The front portion of the building used to be all glass, steel and concrete. Only the very front of the building was in any kind of shape you could call “intact.” A few of the panes of glass were still there out of the hundred that made up the sides of the building. Most were shattered and blown out from some tremendous explosion. Stacked up in all directions around the building were the twisted remnants of what looked like warehouse racking. It looked to me like they might’ve built obstacles around the building with it. That was pretty smart actually.

  The back end of the office complex portion of the building was smashed out like a giant ice cream scoop had been taken to it. A giant gouge was just gone from it. You could see the exposed floors and interior walls. Papers flew around in the wind and fires burned all over the place. Pools of flame covered the parking lot in slicks the size of backyard swimming pools. Shit, some of the trees in the other parking lots were on fire. It was like Dante’s Inferno.

  Abby had no idea what the building used to look like. The only thing she saw was the horde of undead. They had to be fifty deep and spread out over an area the size of a car dealership. They were moving about in the area like inhuman vultures picking over the giant bones of the dead building. When we finally turned into the industrial park I killed the headlights and we crept forward using the light from the fires to guide our way. Abby started sniffling, and at that point, it was pretty obvious we wouldn’t be pulling anyone out of here alive.

  We skirted the STIG area and came around the back side of the building. The undead were pressing into the “torso” of the building right where the offices met the plant. You could see them attacking something, but there were too many dead people to make anything out. I’m glad. That’s the kind of memory you wouldn’t be able to shake. I stopped the truck about a hundred feet away from the undead and had Abby hand me the Savage.

  All three of us got out of the truck and we set up a small 10 foot perimeter while I scanned the ruins for signs of life. I knew there would be nothing on the ground level alive, so I went right to the second floor. I panned across the floor, and didn’t see anything alive. I did see more undead there though. I noticed a small flash of movement from the top floor, and brought the scope up.

  It was Patty. She was sitting on a desk waving the remnants of a shirt or towel in our direction. She was clearing favoring her side as she waved, and she looked like she had been ridden hard and put up wet. That woman looked bad. However, she looked alive. I played dumb for the moment about seeing her because I didn’t want Abby to freak.

  I waved back at her, but she didn’t see me. We would have to seriously risk being noticed by the dead to communicate with her. I thought about it for a few seconds, and Gilbert caught on that I had noticed something. He quietly asked what was up, and I said there was a survivor on the third floor. He thought about it for a minute, and then I remember the bow.

  I hopped in the truck, grabbed a roll of ace bandages and found a sharpie in a case. I wrote on the bandage: “GETTING THE LADDER TRUCK TO RESCUE YOU. BACK IN 3 HOURS OR SO. CAN YOU THIN THE HERD? STAY STRONG.”

  I wrapped the message tight around the arrow and then taped it with medical tape. On the outside of that I wrote: “READ ME.” I got out of the truck and sat the Savage on the hood. I took a few seconds to scan the surroundings, and lined up my shot with a regular arrow. It was about... 200 feet maybe? Not a mile, but fuck it was easily the longest shot I’d ever taken. I let the test arrow fly, and it came up short. In fact, it landed square in the shoulder of a dead guy walking around underneath Patty. I actually had to stifle a laugh.

  I lined up a second test arrow, and this time I hit the side of the desk next to her. She turned suddenly, saw the arrow hit, and then half dove, half rolled into cover. I think she thought I was trying to kill her. I grabbed the good arrow, lined it up a little higher for the added weight of a new bandage, and let the bitch fly. It soared up into the night sky, and came down just on the fucking edge of the ripped out floor near the desk. After a minute of waiting Patty finally came out from her cover, and saw the arrow. She got the arrow unraveled, and I watched her in the scope.

  After a minute of pawing around, I saw she had the Mossberg .22 with her. I also saw her put her backpack on the desk, and if memory serves, she should’ve had that box of 500 rounds in there. About a minute later, I watched her line up a shot, and start shooting slowly into the crowd of undead beneath her. I was so absorbed with watching her I didn’t notice that the undead had realized we were there.

  Abby barked out, “GET IN THE TRUCK! GO!” And I snapped to. Abby had the .22 out and started to shoot clean and slow as she backed up. Gilbert let loose about 15 rounds at head height into the rushing mob and hightailed it (as fast as an old guy can) into the truck. I grabbed the .357 off the driver’s seat and blasted five more down as she climbed in the truck. I got the door shut when the zombies were about 15 feet away. I tossed that pig into gear, and we headed out.

  Abby was brilliant and wedged herself right behind me again so when we hit the mass of undead bodies she didn’t get launched into the ceiling again. We had a decision to make right then. Do we attempt to clear out undead? Do we use firearms, or attempt to grand theft auto them to death?

  I made the decision in my head almost instantaneously to just floor it. I didn’t want to fuck around with running over something and getting a flat tire doing donuts in the goddamn snow. I took a wide arc, and probably ran over about 25 undead. I don’t think they all died, but maiming them is a great benefit as well. I felt that was a good start, and we headed back to campus.

  To shake the undead following us I swung around the parking lot, essentially leading them to the rear of the building. Once I had enough back there, I swung around again and floored it, sending everyone else sliding around in the truck. I gunned it around the edge of the parking lot, back into the industrial park road, and swung back onto Main Street.

  The undead we passed on the way to the plant were in the road. They had followed us to the plant. I kept the accelerator pinned to the floor, and we plowed into the wave of undead like a battering ram. Bodies exploded on the front of the truck like they had dynamite taken to them. We smashed over and through them and cleared the heavy crowd in seconds.

  Once past that huge crowd we were in the clear. Well, it was clearer on the way back, than it was on the way there. We’d hit a lot of dead people on the way and broken a lot of legs. Most were in the road crawling and scratching their way, and we just plowed over them. The truck shook and shuddered like a bastard, but we made it through the back streets and out Wyman to the other end of Main Street in one piece, and without having to shoot from the windows much.

  The west end of Main Street out to Route 18 was pretty much empty. I gunned it as fast as I could to get some space between us and them. I didn’t want them to follow us back to the campus. During the drive after we got off of Main Street I told Abby her mom was alive. I waited until there tell her because I needed her focused for the area of greatest danger. She was beyond relieved, and just short of neurotic about hurrying up. We knew we were on a clock to get her safely back.

  When we arrived on campus we already had a plan. I drove the heavy rescue truck straight to the ladder truck and we moved everything over as fast as we could. We knew we’d need heavy firepower, and a way to either destroy the undead rapidly, or distract the shit out of them. Gilbert had the idea of taking one of the fuel barrels and simply dumping the fuel on them to set them on fire. But, that would
n’t be conclusive enough. They might not burn to death. And as I’ve gone into in depth about already a burning zombie is worse than a regular zombie. Thus, a burning mass of zombies is…

  We didn’t have enough ammunition to shoot them all either. Driving over them was an option, but that was inviting serious risk. Once when Kevin and I were on patrol in the al Mansour district our Humvee drove over a dead body and a shard of bone went right through a tire. Couldn’t afford it then, and we can’t afford it now. However, I did have an idea.

  We grabbed the shit and formulated our plan. We would set up a noisemaker on Main Street past the industrial park, and then turn around and return for our run. We’d drive in the parking lot, smash our way through it to get their attention and drive very slowly back into the street heading east, and to our noisemaker. We would hopefully leave the crowd there at the noise maker, and then slowly do a loop around a few streets there to come around behind the zombies, and hopefully slip into the STIG lot with a lot less company.

  The return trip through downtown was a little rougher than our previous exit. It was like we had a huge train of undead just wagging back and forth as we went through the urban areas. We headed east, they headed east, we went west, then they did. So we essentially returned into what amounted to a crashing wave of undead. We couldn’t go around them once we came onto the pack, so I punched it again. This crowd was deep, at least ten or twelve deep and spread out over about fifty yards. I could swerve a little, but in reality I just wanted to smash them apart.

  The ladder truck doesn’t have an open interior to the back like the rescue truck. We had two rows of seats instead. Abby was belted into the back and Gilbert and I were in the front. When we hit the bodies and started running over them it wasn’t as bad as before. We were just jostled around. I think the larger, heavier truck helped as well. Less hopping, and more crushing.