Amazing how fast we can get shit done.
One other really important thing that has been happening here is school. Does that sound stupid? We are at a school. Everything here could be described as being “school.”
Not what I meant clearly.
Michelle has taken on the job of becoming the first teacher at Bastion. She’s got that PhD. burning a hole in her back pocket, and she doesn’t have a lot of other usable skills. From what Kevin and Joel told me a week or so ago in conversation, she has no interest in taking up arms to help fight, and while useful with the agricultural side of things her brain is her biggest asset. Well, she’s pretty good looking too, but that doesn’t really "help" us at all. Makes it easier to talk to her for sure.
Sidetrack aside, she’s started to clean and clear the main school building to use for its original intended purpose. It’s far too cold right now to use it through the winter, and it also makes zero fucking sense to heat that building strictly for use as a classroom, but she’s still getting that ready to go. During the few days at the end of the world as we know it, the place got jacked up big time when I was clearing it of undead, and honestly, I didn’t go back and really give it a once over to clean it thoroughly.
The upstairs classrooms are still filled with .22 brass from my shooting position. There is busted drywall from gunfire on the floor, and there are some old stains of blood as well. I also know there are pieces of person on the wall as well in several places. Little bits of gray matter from head shots, more than likely. She grabbed a few of the teenage kids who could stomach it, and they’ve gotten the place in remarkably good order the past three or four days, but he has used a lot of bleach supply. She also went through all of the dorms and collected the textbooks kids had in their rooms so she could start a curriculum for every kid.
Wanna hear a really impressive fact? We have managed to accumulate ELEVEN school aged kids. I forget all the names right at this moment, but we have eleven kids here now that should be in school. Kids that are not getting any education right now whatsoever. Not acceptable, and I am stoked that Michelle is all over getting that taken care of. She’s going to need a teaching aide too, so someone will have to step up and volunteer to help. Education is an investment in our future. If this place doesn't have a future beyond us, what's the point right?
In the winter Michelle is thinking of using the common room in Hall B. It’s large enough, and there are already newborns in that building anyway, so having a teacher, a teacher’s aide, plus Melissa and Kim with their kids will turn Hall B into a daycare/school building of sorts. I couldn’t think of a better alternative, and it does sound good at the moment. Michelle said she was thinking she’d be able to start classes within ten days, give or take.
Huzzah for not raising idiots. Michelle is going around asking people what they know and could possibly teach the kids. Ollie and Ryan are sort of clear cut choices to teach agriculture. That’s a must for a course. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE needs to know how to grow a garden at the very least, and should know how to help in our fields. Martin and Blake can teach wood/metal working, as well as diesel and small engine repair.
Firearms instruction could be taught by a handful of people here now, and we have enough folks that can teach melee combat to get it done right. We also have a few folks good at math and English as subjects, and Michelle can teach history and religion. That pretty much covers everything but science, so that’s her first serious teaching dilemma. Find a science teacher, or learn how to teach it herself.
Reminds me of my brother talking about SMEE school as a SEAL. Every SEAL has to become a “subject matter expert” before they can go to the teams. Basically they need to pick up a usable language, or learn comms tech, engine repair, or get medically trained, etc. Everyone here needs to be the same. Learn something useful. Or you aren’t. Earn your food. Or don’t eat. Pretty straightforward.
Speaking of food… that reminds me I’m still pissed over the missing food. Tired now. Otis beckons. I’m hoping all goes well the next couple of days.
-Adrian
December 7th
I am sporting epic wood right now.
Major league chubber.
Why do you ask? Did I get to see some of my female acquaintances naked? Was I watching some big screen pornography? Well, no actually. I just got back from a short training session with Andy about the first few cameras that are now up and operational.
You heard it here Mr. Journal, we now have a broadcasted security system that is now somewhat operational.
Motherfucking yeah.
Alright so technologically speaking I am an enormous, useless dildo, so my explanation of how this works will suck. Bear with me. The basic idea is that we have cameras placed strategically all over the place that are all linked to laptops, that are set up somehow to broadcast their video feeds via a powerful wifi network that Andy set up. He described it essentially as a powerful LAN party, which as a bit of a gaming nerd, I can wrap my head around.
Each of the wifi transmitters broadcasts generally, and any laptop can pick up the signal if you have the proper password, just like if you had internet access before that day. Pretty slick shit. Adding even more amazing capability to this, Andy has a super powerful transmitter at the Factory that he somehow managed to link to MGR’s repeater tower or something, and I guess the signal from there bounces along a couple of wifi hot spots they put up between here and there. Long story short, we can access their video feed on their cameras, and they can access ours as well. I can watch what is happening at the Factory, right fucking now.
Andy has two central servers set up to record the streams. One here at Bastion in my room on a desktop computer he built, and one in the security room at the Factory he also built. We’ll have to purge the files every so often because they are pretty much useless, but we’ll keep the recording for awhile to make sure they aren’t needed.
As of right this second, we only have the front gate camera, the rear gate camera, and the camera mounted on the corner of Route 18, and Auburn Lake Road. It is on a phone pole, about fifteen feet up and has a great view of the intersection. Anyone walking or driving up this road will be visible on the camera. It should give us a solid five minutes of warning if we’re attacked that way by the living, and far more time if by the dead.
So Andy said any laptop capable of connecting to the internet can connect to his network, and as I write this, I’ve got a browser window open in the background, and I can see all the camera feeds. You can set up the page he made to have four cameras running in the view, or you can set it up to cycle through all of them. Right now I’m watching the feeds from the Factory because quite frankly, I’m fucking nosy.
Incidentally, they are fairly boring people. None of the cameras are in bedrooms, so thus far, I have not seen any sex with ex-strippers. No fun for me, and certainly not the cause for my epic erection.
How does this change life for us here at Bastion? Excellent fucking question Mr. Journal.
We no longer need to have people outside pulling security. We will still post guards regularly, especially when we can expect attack or disruption, but we can now monitor all of these locations from any laptop. What we will change to is a dedicated security person whose job is to sit up and watch the cameras for a shift. I’m thinking we’ll do three eight hour shifts a day for that. We will also have an “on call” rotation of people expected to respond immediately to anything seen on the cameras. During their shift those people are expected to remain armed at all times, and able to respond immediately to any walkies sent by the person watching the cameras. If whatever incident is more serious than what they can handle, then they will “sound the alarm” and wake up or mobilize the rest of us. Right now we’re thinking the “on call” will be three people, plus the person dedicated to the cameras.
Obviously, we’ll adjust as needed.
Right now because of the human attack on MGR, I’m asking that we have at least one person still pull
ing security 24 hours a day. I want someone with a weapon walking the wall to open fire if someone gets sneaky. Imagine if you will a person or persons walking the long way through the woods to get our backside. They theoretically could get all the way to the back side of campus without being seen or heard by anything, and as terrific as our wall is, if they have time and some rope, they can get right over it. The wall was not built to keep sneaky living people out. We need more barbed or concertina wire for that. And guns. More guns would be nice.
What else is new? I feel like the addition of the cameras completely dominated my day. Oh shit, so the amazing news is that the men and women managed to get all the gear for all the camera installations by mid day today, without death or injury. Kevin said there was a bit of a hairy moment when they were inside the grocery store yesterday. I guess Andy was on a ladder getting a camera down off a ceiling beam or something, and a few of the guys were moving through the store floor, looking for anything worth taking, and somehow a zombie got into the building and started to claw at the ladder with Andy at the top of it.
Joel was nearest, and when Andy started to yell for help, he had Andy grab onto the beam for his life, and Joel ran over and smashed the zombie in the head. The ladder almost tipped over in the process, which would’ve left poor Andy dangling from the ceiling of the grocery store for a few seconds, but it didn’t tip, and everything came out okay. As you might imagine, the work to finish the camera installations is still ongoing.
I want two or three more cameras here inside Bastion, as well as at least two more on the walls. I’d like one camera pointing towards the woods on our blind side, and as dumb as it sounds, I want one more pointing towards Auburn Lake itself, on the off chance a group of crazy assholes tries to attack us from that side. Honestly, it’d be how I’d do it. Andy and Martin need to assemble something like ten more boxes/mounts for cameras to get the whole project “done for the moment” so that’s a few more days or so. I’m stoked Andy is a nerd of epic proportions. Clearly he has some serious nerd skills.
I wonder if he could teach science for Michelle at the school? I need to try and remember to get in touch with her and let her know.
What is new? No new evidence of theft. No more food has been stolen either, especially since I dropped the “Adrian is pissed” talk on folks about leaving the fucking cafeteria unlocked. Ever since that talk a few days ago, it seems as if the food is being consumed at a normal rate. I also made sure to ask Ryan to keep the gym/hydroponics building locked as well, as we don’t need anyone breaking into there to steal our shit, or to break or steal our hydroponics set up.
Something I’ve totally forgotten to mention is that while I was out, Ollie managed to prep and plant garlic for us for next year! I guess it needs to grow over the winter or whatever, and needed to be planted sometime in mid to late October. He put about ten rows of it into a nice new garden on the grounds of campus. I cannot explain to you how fucking excited I am for garlic in the spring. Fresh cloves of garlic for cooking. Oh hells yes. We’ve got so much fresh produce here from the fields as well as the stuff Ryan and Becca are churning out in the hydro set up… I think we are growing far ahead of the consumption rate, but again, with all these new mouths to feed…
We still need to figure out how to get fresh water to the folks at the Factory. We haven’t had to run them any water yet… Rain has been plentiful thankfully, and it looks like we’ll have a fair amount of snow for them to melt. I am still worried though. I don’t like having people in places where they can’t access fresh water regularly. Another downside to urban life in the apocalypse.
I am starting to simmer the stolen food thing. My rage has subsided somewhat, and with all the clear evidence of food growing plentifully all over the place, I feel like I’m getting angry over nothing. I am still bothered by the dishonesty aspect of it, but I think I’m just taking it personally because so much of the work that went into accumulating all that food was mine. Abby and Patty helped a lot too, but I feel like that was mostly my burden.
In good news, the neck feels great, and my overall level of soreness after activity is dropping dramatically. I should be able to move about without any kind of pain in a few days, barring injury, so that’s very exciting. I’d love to go out myself and see parts of town I haven’t been able to in a long time. I’m getting cabin fever hardcore. Oh well, it’ll happen when it happens. Until then, I will get my need to get out satisfied by watching these cameras.
Exciting!
-Adrian
December 10th
So the strangest thing happened the other night. As you might suspect, I’ve been spending a lot of my time looking at the security feeds. I got real nosy and focused more or less completely on the Factory for awhile, but as it turns out, they aren’t terribly exciting. They just get their shit done, and that’s about it. I mentioned this already, but it bore repeating.
So when I go to bed since the system was installed, I check the feeds on my laptop. The main computer recording everything is in my bedroom, so if I don’t feel like turning the monitor on, I just check it on my laptop. I’m rambling.
Anyway, so I was about to crash last night and I was looking at our feeds just to help me sleep better, and I swore to God I saw something move on the feed for the rear gate camera. I can’t quite describe it, but it looked an awful lot like a blur, or an animal running by or something. I’m sure it was nothing, maybe a deer or a bear or something, but man, I was mostly asleep, and it kinda freaked me out. I spent a good amount of time just staring at the camera trying to get whatever it was that moved to reappear, but nothing did. I was half asleep anyway, and to be honest, I’m now positive that it was just my mind playing tricks on me.
We put Hal on the job for watching the cameras on third shift. He said he was a natural night owl, and he’s ex service, and Kevin vouched for him big time, so it was a no brainer. I tracked Hal down at lunch today to ask him if he saw anything on any of the feeds last night, and he said it was all clear. That made me feel a little less crazy, and I’m thinking I’ll sleep much better tonight.
So yeah. Weirded out a bit, but overall, pretty good.
I’m fucking tired as balls right now. I feel like I was ran over by a defensive line wearing cleats. I started doing some jogging around campus the other day, and as it turns out, I’m soft again. What a pisser. I also realized that going anywhere near the rear gate makes me feel weird. I was jogging by the gate area and looked over at the top of the berm wall where I shot those five undead the other day and the pit of my stomach went to my shoes. I sped up the run for as long as I could, trying to get the fuck away. I changed the course of my lap to stay away from the gate.
PTSD much?
Fuck me, right? Last thing I need is hesitation when it counts. I think tomorrow or the next day I’ll FORCE myself to go there and get it over with. Maybe I’ll go shooting too just to get used to hearing the M4 fire again. I think I’ll talk to Kevin too. It always helps to talk to people who have been through the same shit. Folks just don’t understand what it’s like to almost die, or have your friends die unless they’ve been there, and lived it just like you.
Mm.
Headed to bed. I’ll write more in the morning when I get some rest. I’m sore as hell.
-Adrian
December 13th
Something… wrong is happening here at night, and I thought I was seeing something, but now I know for sure.
Remember how I said we had put Hal in charge of monitoring the feeds for the cameras on the late night shift? Turns out that was a good idea, because he pays attention. Remember also how I thought my mind was playing tricks on me? It wasn’t. I had seen something, and I talked myself out of checking it out because I was tired, and I think a little scared. I think the whole PTSD malarkey is affecting me. I think I was avoiding a fight, or the chance of a fight because I was scared.
Pussy.
Anyway late last night, or early this morning depending on if you’re a
dick or not, Hal comes knocking on my bedroom door. I forget exactly when it was, but it was late as hell, and I was asleep. At first I was paranoid that someone was waking me up to shoot me and take over or something, but I put two and two together after I saw the look on poor Hal’s face. He literally looked like he’d seen a ghost.
We checked the server recording, and after a bit, I saw what he saw. It was a small figure, maybe a boy, or a girl, and it was like… indistinct and gray, and weird. It literally appeared out of nowhere directly at the back gate. Immediately I thought I was seeing a ghost, and so did Hal. It only made it worse when we saw the thing run off into the woods. It… glided over the grass. Not so much running, but gliding. After holding hands and consoling one another, we went back to bed, where I didn’t sleep a fucking wink, and first thing in the morning I started to get the message out I wanted an executive all hands meeting.
I forget all the folks that were there, but you already know the lineup. Kevin, Michelle, Abby, Patty, Mike, Fitz, Hal, and I wanted Caleb there too. I pretty much wanted our combat contingent represented, our family and home people represented, and I wanted folks I trusted. I wanted witnesses to see what was on the video, and to formulate a plan on what the hell we should do.
I played the video. Most folks just straight up were like what the fuck. Some of the other folks thought Hal and I were fucking with them. Abby was the one who made it solid, and real. She immediately identified the figure in the video as the same figure she saw on Halloween when I was out. She saw this same figure running over behind Hall E, and that figure led her around the back of the Hall to the berm wall, where she saw the undead standing there.
Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 7): The Trinity Page 30
