Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 6): In the Arms of Family

by Philbrook, Chris

  I wonder if this is part of the grand plan? I wonder if the powers that be want us to live a simpler, old fashioned life? Although if that’s the case, how do we explain our gay friends, and the amount of women who shirk the roles of the past?

  Shrug.

  Alright, so where were we Mr. Journal? Ah, right. What the fuck is going on here? Well our two most impressive recent accomplishments are the following:

  Martin is a welding fiend. We got his welding gear setup down in the maintenance garages and within 40 hours or less of starting work on the HRT’s upgrades, they are done already. Not only are they done already, but he did more shit than we asked for or could’ve even imagined.

  The front of the truck now has a spare plow blade affixed that sits about six inches off the ground. We can hit undead at full speed now, and they’ll just fly off the front of the truck like a snow drift. Very exciting.

  Keeping the weight of the vehicle in mind, Martin welded a few steel plates into the doors of the cab so if we take fire, the doors will be much more bullet resistant. He also welded small plates over the windows, as well as putting a pretty nifty lever in on the back door so once the iron bar is swung into place and latched, getting that door open will require The Hulk, or an act of fucking God.

  He also welded some bolts over the rear wheel wells that have twin matching thin steel plates that slide into place to cover the wheels. It’ll dramatically cut down on the chance of the rear wheels getting cut or blown out, and it should stop light small arms fire. I’m thinking 9mm, or .45 ACP or less will just splash off the steel. Might not make a bit of difference at all, but I know I FEEL better seeing all that shiny metal attached to the HRT.

  So… fucking awesome. Even Blake had to applaud all the shit Martin did. There was no way Blake was skilled enough to make all that happen, especially over the course of just a couple days in the shop. Blake’s been working on it in his spare time for what seems like forever, and he had nothing to show for it other than a grand plan. Martin had two days, designed everything, cut everything, mounted everything, and now tomorrow he’s back on fence duty with us. Cut and goddamn dried.

  While Martin was up to that, Blake was working on the fuel filtration I’d asked him to do. To his credit, he has been balls deep in the project, and he’s making great headway. Periodically he does need to yank someone to lend him a hand, but that’s fine. Lifting and moving the barrels is a bitch, even with the barrel dolly we have. He simply can’t move 55 gallon barrels and do all the other work and get shit done in an effective manner. Hence, we lend him some brute force labor in the form of someone else for a bit. I know Blake has been happy to get the social interaction. I also know everyone that’s gone down to the filter setup to help him is entirely fed the fuck up with hearing how awesome his little baby boy is.

  New dad, right?

  Oh shit I totally forgot to mention that Martin has an idea for a new project. Remember when we hit The Farm, and we took their horse/cow trailer? Martin is thinking with enough scrap steel/iron, and some raw materials, he can get that trailer more or less turned into a moving gun ship. We can latch it onto the dualie with no sweat, and drag the trailer slowly into heavily infested areas, and simply fire at our leisure. There’s little chance the trailer will get thrown over, and we can store food, water, ammunition, medical supplies, you name it back there.

  On paper, it seems like a rock solid idea, so I’m going to give it some thought, and if it still sounds good in a few days, we’ll look into it.

  I’m really wondering if that’ll be a huge asset on the run to Gilbert’s warehouse. A moving gun platform would be fucking sweet, and you I both know Mr. Journal that the fucking warehouse is going to be covered in undead. If the dark side knew about it through Gilbert, then it’ll know for motherfucking sure that we are going to make a run into the place. The toe pushing will be legendary, especially if we half ass it.

  Something like that gun platform would put what? Ten guns into the fight? All from a nice, reasonably safe place? Seems like a fucking dream come true to me.

  Clearly, I am overlooking some vital detail that will get me, or my friends killed. That’s why I am giving it a few more days while I think about it. We are in a hurry to get to Gilbert’s, but at the same time, we are not in a hurry. It makes little sense to rush it, despite how important the place could be to us.

  The rest of us non-mechanically inclined assholes worked on the walls the past two days. We made pretty impressive progress considering we had no Martin. He easily counts as two of the rest of us. I think we got 35 or 40 feet up both days, which was a feat.

  Oh you know, one thing that really gets my britches in a bunch is bug spray. We cleaned out all those houses so long ago, and it appears as if none of us had the goddamn sense to take any bug spray. Abby and Patty broke off yesterday morning and went back down Auburn Lake Road all the way to Route 18 and went looking strictly for bug spray.

  Thankfully, the country in this neck of the woods is chock full of mosquitoes, so they managed to find about ten cans in an hour, so our DEET needs have been met at least for the remainder of this summer. That’s good news I suppose.

  Um, what else?

  We sort of discussed the idea of staffing MGR soon. Not one person raised their hands for the job when it came up, so we’re now thinking of doing it in a rotation. Basically we’ll send two or three people down there for a two or three day rotation. They spend their time at the top, monitoring town for movement and whatnot. If we can get the repeater from the police station moved up there and powered, they’ll be able to communicate directly with us keeping us in the loop in real time. At the very least, they’ll be able to fill us in when we do shift changes every couple of days.

  I’m figuring it’ll be a largely indispensable place for us to control, and use. If we can accomplish staffing MGR, getting the repeater set up there, finishing the wall here on campus, as well as make the run and clear out Gilbert’s place and the plumbing supply store next to it, we’ll be sitting really fucking pretty.

  Now the one thing we really do need to address kind of immediately is another fuel run downtown. As I said, we’re getting really low on gasoline, and Blake only made that more apparent when he told me he was already done filtering all our gas, and was now working on diesel. If we are going to use gasoline powered generators on a regular basis, we desperately need to gas the hell up.

  In light of the sober face Blake gave me when he informed me of our fuel plight, we’re going to make a fuel run the day after tomorrow. We’ve had a little too much to drink today already, and I don’t want to make a run to a gas station hung over. Plus I guarantee two or three of us will be kissing the bottom of a toilet on their knees come dawn.

  Not to mention, we’ve got a bitch of a day on the fencing tomorrow. There’s some really rocky ground coming up, and we’ll need Blake’s assistance on the backhoe to get it done. On the plus side, we can use any boulders we dig up as roadblocks, or mobility deterrents in other areas. Blocking roads, etc. We really need to put up some staggered weave roadblocks on the road heading to the bridge so if anyone does get by the semi at Jones Road, we can light them the fuck up as they slalom through the obstacles.

  More shit to do.

  So yeah. Not much else going on. I mean shit that’s enough for sure. I’m tired just thinking about doing it all.

  Little worried too. We haven’t done a fuel run in fuck, months? Open ground, flammable fuel everywhere, we might need to bring a few rookie guns too... Seems like a pretty fucking scary proposition all in all. Tomorrow night we’ll go over the logistics of who should go, what they will bring, and how exactly we’ll get it done. I really want a zero mistake run here.

  There are still two more gas stations in town that we haven’t visited yet, plus the convenience store that we already hit once, which for the life of me I cannot recall if it still had fuel in it. I want to say yes it did, but it seems like forever ago. Old age is just destroying my damn me
mory. Good thing I’m writing all this shit down Mr. Journal.

  Headache is setting in. Gonna pop a Tylenol, down a glass of waterr and curl up in bed next to my man Otis.

  I wonder how Mallory is doing?

  -Adrian

  July 11th

  Have you ever had one of those days when you know you just should not have gotten out of bed?

  Like the kind of morning where you turn off the alarm clock, knock over the glass of water on your bed stand, then stub your toe like a motherfucker all in the span of thirty seconds? And at that point you make the game time decision to either call it a day thirty seconds in and go the fuck back to bed, or you tough it out like a fucking idiot and plod along anyway?

  I should’ve gone back to bed this morning.

  Our fuel run downtown was Grade A clusterfuck. I mean of serious soup sandwich proportions. Like, “I can’t quite figure out what’s going on right now, because my head is lodged in my upper intestines.”

  Bad.

  I don’t even know where to begin. It’s like a fucking shopping list of injuries and broken shit today. And you know what pisses me off the most?!? My fucking Glock broke.

  BROKE.

  I know I have two, but fucking A. Never break a man’s gun. NEVER. That’s like fucking with the seat and mirrors in my car and then not telling me about it later, so I sit down and simultaneously smash my knee on the steering wheel and break my back at the same time.

  Grrr. Granted, no one in specific broke it, but I feel like directing my anger at some fictional character. Pisses me off.

  After careful consideration last night we decided that we would roll out in three vehicles today. The HRT, the dualie, and the plow. The plow runs on gas, which obviously we didn’t want to use, but the dualie has less storage area in the bed than you’d think, with the fifth wheel attachment right in the middle. We needed the full dump bed of the plow to get shit done.

  All the empty drums were cleaned yesterday and loaded into the plow bed along with our hand pump, the barrel jack, our barrel dolly, and the hand operated sump pump we used before to get the gas out of the in-ground storage tanks at the gas station.

  In terms of personnel for the trip, we opted for the following people: Martin, Abby, Patty, Ryan, myself, Angela, and don’t laugh, but Danny junior. The kid can shoot, and he’s really calm and stable. We wanted him on the roof of the HRT as a lookout with the Marlin M60. Especially after I took him shooting with it last night.

  Oh yeah. Speaking of last night.

  After a really terrific day of progress on the wall work, I took Zach, Martin, and Danny Junior back out to the firing range area to see if they were workable. I knew at that point I wasn’t bringing Zach anyway, so this was partly for practice, and partly to placate the kid. Nothing more irritating than a bratty 18 year old, or however old he is.

  Martin had largely gotten over his issues of being nervous and skittish with guns, so he was pretty much all set within a dozen pulls of the trigger. For the moment I’m having him carry something that’s fairly simply to operate. One of Gilbert’s AKs. For anyone who has fired one, they are really pretty much point and shoot. Sort of idiot proof. Plus with all the 7.62 Gilbert had in those boxes, we should spread the wealth and use it up so we can preserve our 5.56. Speaking of which… we need to get back on reloading. Mike brought us a crate again on their last visit, but he said they’re down to less than a pallet of it in their basement armory, so…. Yeah.

  Zach was able to carry and fire his weapon like a big boy as well yesterday, and as a result he fired it accurately, safely, and earned the right to carry a .38 just like his hetero (still up for debate) life mate Ryan. Zach was half beaming, and half shitting his britches out of sheer terror of carrying a loaded weapon.

  As you might have suspected, Danny turned out to be a dyed in the wool sniper with that Marlin. Seriously. He managed a two inch grouping while standing at a hundred feet with no effort. That’s some pretty serious shooting, especially for a kid his age. Angela was a pretty easy sell on the idea of him accompanying us when we explained the idea that he’d be on the roof of the truck the whole time.

  Sigh. Just got angry over shit again. I don’t know why, not like today was bad. Not really bad at least. Shitty for sure, but not the end of the world by any means.

  Where was I Mr. Journal? Ah. We rolled out in the three trucks like a convoy of fucking bosses, and we headed right straight back to the same convenience store we hit a ways back. The same place downtown we hit way back when. Remember how I found all the soda behind the coolers? We’re still drinking that shit. So much carbonated awesomeness.

  So the trip downtown was fairly open and clear. Especially now that I can hit zombies with the HRT at full clip with zero fear we’ll run over one and blow out a tire. The newly affixed plow blade just sends those assholes flying to the side. I want to say I hit about ten undead in the road, and just like it was designed to, the undead just went soaring away.

  The parking lot of the gas station was a huge problem. There were maybe fifteen undead in the area, and they were bunched up conspicuously right near the lids for the in ground tanks. Almost as if on purpose. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised seeing as how EVIL is fucking with me. You know, evil. Pure evil. Worst thing ever?

  Heard of it before?

  So I drove the HRT right through the center of the crowd, taking out about six of them. I took the truck to the edge of the parking lot and had the other two vehicles get out of the area for a minute. After stopping, we had Danny climb onto the roof of the HRT, and let him get some practice in killing some dead folks in a pretty safe way. Abby went out on the roof with him for safety’s sake, and from the prone position and kneeling position, he dropped the entire parking lot, one steady shot at a time.

  Pretty special little shit. Once we had that accomplished, we radioed for the other trucks to come back, and we got to getting the gas up and out of the ground. Martin and Blake had discussed a way of testing the fuel, and it involved using a long, clear plastic tube that they managed to find somewhere on campus. Martin lowered it straight down into the tank, put his thumb on the end creating a vacuum, and then lifted it out. At the end of the tube, in the bottom three or four inches, you could clearly see water. I guess water sinks below the gas.

  Once we knew how much water was at the bottom of the tank, we knew exactly how far we could drain the tank to and get mostly clean gas. It’ll still need to be treated with the shit Blake has, but it’ll be a lot better than if we’d just drained the bitch dry.

  Once we were ready to go, we backed the plow up to the pumps, unloaded all the barrels, and the barrel jack, and started going to town with the sump pump.

  We had ten barrels to fill, and we were eight in when things started to go awry.

  At that point we started to have a problem with approaching undead. We had Danny trained to holler out “contact” and the direction it was coming in when he saw something and was about to shoot it. We knew we had problems when he started to pretty much yell contact one right after another. The Marlin M60 only holds 17 shots, and he was a bit of a rookie when it came to reloading it, so the rushed, fearful reloading process was a problem. To be fair, the gun is a bit of a pain to reload. Our other shooters started supporting him with their heavier guns, and by the ninth barrel of fuel in, we were firing on a constant basis.

  I was helping Martin pump and load the barrels, so our guns were out of the fight. I was trying to watch what was going on around us, but it was hard to do both things at the same time safely. We reached a tipping point thought when the firing started to abate. Thankfully, none of the undead got through our perimeter, and no one got hurt badly. We had two freak injuries though. Patty was doing a magazine change on her AR15, and when she slapped the magazine home, she somehow managed to pinch the webbing of her left hand something fierce. Literally split the web about a half inch deep. I’ve seen that injury before, but it’s pretty freak.

  Our second injury w
as Martin. When he and I were moving the barrel on the tenth and final barrel, the dolly wheel hit a fucking spent shell casing that wasn’t there earlier, and stopped cold, spilling the fucking barrel right off the dolly. The barrel comes down like a fucking flammable sledgehammer, smashing open on the pavement, and sending the dolly backwards right into Martin’s foot and gut. He at least broke one toe on his right foot, and he’s got a bruise right above his junk that looks an awful lot like he was hit with an anvil shot out of a cannon.

  That’s where it gets spicy.

  So I said the barrel smashed open right? Well, being full of fuel means that the gas started to run, and it ran right straight towards the dualie, which fortunately was unoccupied at the moment. Now just because the firing had abated, doesn’t mean it stopped entirely. I still don’t know exactly how it happened, but the most plausible causes I can think of are either a spent shell casing hitting the gas, or maybe some kind of muzzle exhaust from the guns, or maybe even the hot exhaust pipes from the dualie itself, but not one fucking second after the fuel ran underneath the fucking truck, ka-motherfucking-pow, the gas lights up. At first it was just a few moments of flaming fuel, but I saw it start to creep back our way, and it was heading right at the plow truck, which had all nine other barrels sitting in the back of it.

  I freaked my shit.

  I pointed and hollered to Martin to get the fuck out, and I jumped inside the plow, started it, threw it in reverse, and punched it. I’m gonna go with me being lucky here, because had I gone forward, the other barrels in the back would’ve fallen out. Going in reverse kept them from cascading out the ass, and we’d have lost all of it.