Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 9): The Dealer of Hope [Adrian's March, Part 1]

by Philbrook, Chris

  The reason I’m sitting here writing is because I can’t sleep. Remember that problem Mr. Journal? When Ambien and Lunesta were my very best friends? Back when my dreams were all fucked up?

  That’s something I actually miss, to be fucking honest. Not the meds, but dreaming. I do enjoy the fact that we no longer are restricted (read: cursed) to dream only of the dead, but I miss my dreams of The White Room. That glowing, warm place where I sat around a table with the ghosts of my fallen friends. Where Gilbert told me stories and kept me sane. Where I learned about things I wished I hadn’t.

  Now that the… divine or whatever has passed judgment on us, and seen us fit to receive our second chance, I miss that element of specialness in my life. I miss… feeling it was real. I mean, I still have my memories, and I still KNOW it all happened, but I feel different inside now. Better and worse at the same time. Like waking up after a night of heavy drinking and feeling better, but missing out on the fun.

  I think it might be that I just miss Gilbert. Curmudgeonly old fuck. I hope he and his wife are sipping Mai Tai’s on a beach somewhere in the afterlife. Of course knowing him, he might be on a range pissing through endless crates of 7.62. Could go either way. I still dream of him, but it’s not the same. These dreams are like watching old home movies projected on the living room wall. They’re amazing to experience, full of the flaws of time and colored by feelings, but they’re not interactive. I’m seeing him, but he’s not there. Not present.

  Meh. I’m tired, sort of cranky, and now that I’ve opened the can of worm that is my brain, I want to write more.

  I love watching Michelle sleep. Watching her chest rise and fall is so soothing. I love how Otis swishes his tail as he dreams when he sleeps between us. Sometimes he lets slip this little squeak of a meow too. I imagine it’s when he catches his little dream mouse, or meets a fuzz ball girl kitty to make kittens with.

  I’m also a little nervous. Tomorrow we’re heading out to the junkyard settlement to pay them our quarterly visit. We’re bringing generic trade goods, and meeting them at an open rural intersection that’s most of the way to the junkyard, but safer for all involved. No elevated firing positions nearby, clear open ground for a few hundred yards, etc. Kevin vouched for it, and as you know, we’ll have ex-PJs Ethan and Joel in the far trees with their rifles ready to take out anything that makes them nervous.

  Having gone so long without shooting anyone, or losing anyone makes me very uneasy about when my people go into harm’s way now. Call me protective, call me paranoid if you want Mr. Journal, but I’m over people dying.

  I’m also aware that people die, and there’s fuck-all I can do about it.

  So add baby crying to overactive brain and sprinkle liberally with pre-danger thoughts, and you get the perfect recipe for shitty sleep. You’d think by now I’d man up and just get used to it, but an old soldier does one thing better than anyone else:

  Bitch. That and worry. We bitch, and we worry.

  The baby is finally quiet. I’m shutting this down and curling up next to my woman. If the urge strikes me I’ll write again soon.

  -Adrian

  October 2013

  October 2nd

  So something… terrible happened at the scrap yard. Recently too I feel. No more than a week ago I’d wager. Maybe a week and a half.

  AAR time. Though no middle A. I guess if there’s no middle then there’s no need for the first A either. Unless I’m just writing a report, in which case this is just an R. After… Trip Report? ATR? Fuck it. I’ll call it my TPS report.

  I’m a fucking dolt sometimes.

  Standard rollout trip for us, shrunk by a humvee, leaving us with one, plus the HEMTT, and a box truck. I rode shotgun in the humvee with Kevin driving and Blake in the backseat. We had the SAW on the turret mount. Mike drove the HEMTT with Rich (one of the mid 20’s guy from Texas), and Eddie drove the box truck with Angela riding shotgun. Have I mentioned Angela yet? She’s doing great. Her son Danny is too. He looks more and more like his dead dad every day. It’s creepy to watch the kid develop into someone I saw killed during the end days. His dad was a good cop.

  Anyway, that meant we had a fairly small head count of seven as we headed to the podunk area of nowhere with the scrap yard dead center. We had a quick reaction force ready to go if we hit any trouble, but we’d be almost an hour away if we needed help. Not ideal, but things have been on a peaceful footing for a long time, so it felt comfortable.

  We went to our meeting place after the PJ snipers had infiltrated several hours earlier to their firing positions. After sitting in the road for several hours I got the sinking suspicion something was wrong. Call it gut instinct, but I just KNEW something was up. They had never been late before. I made the call, and we reassembled, and drove to the junkyard slowly, ready for bad-badness.

  Wilson Auto Salvage during the days before the end of the world was a home-mechanic’s dream I imagine. You could pay them a fee to walk their yard and pick over their junk to find parts, or you could pay them more to find the part for you. If you were into fixing cars and trucks yourself it was a great place to get parts dirt cheap. Granted they were used, but fuck it. Used and working is always better than used and broken.

  The place sat on the side of a country route in the center of a pair of fields on opposite sides of the road. A few trees dotted the landscape here and there, but for the most part, the yard demolished a great field for farming. Like all smart business owners Bart, (that’d be the owner,) had a ten foot tall chain link fence around the whole place and when the zombies got all bitey and shit he used a forklift to stack up all the car wrecks just inside the fence. It must’ve taken a week to accomplish, but in the end he had thousands upon thousands of pounds of car behind a sturdy fence between his family and the world. It would’ve held out an army.

  One without tanks, that is.

  Bart used a big flatbed wrecker to block off the gate. I wonder what his plan was when he ran out of fuel to move it back and forth? Anyway, the gate had been rammed down and the wrecker shoved to the side by something really big and tracked. The rear wheels of the flatbed had slid sideways the better part of about twenty feet, causing the wheels to leave curved, sideways marks in the earth. Crossing over those smears were very clear tank tracks, and then tire tracks from several heavy vehicles. Semis, or something like that.

  Clearly a forceful breach of the gate.

  Immediately on alert, Blake got into the turret and covered the compound with the SAW as we dismounted and started a search and clear of the place. Right after that on top of the flatbed truck we saw the body of the old man who ran the place. Bart, though he wasn’t a Simpson. He’d been run though multiple times with high velocity rounds, and bit it right there on the bed of the wrecker. Near his body was a spent 12 gauge shotgun shell, but no shotgun.

  There wasn’t much to search or clear. One large split level house in the center plus a large multi-bay garage, and then the maze of cars piled up in rows ten feet tall. In the field maybe a hundred yards away there was a burnt out hulk of what might’ve been a really nice house. The fire was at least a year ago, more. Had to be forty acres or more of old cars and parts and metal racking in a fenced off field. Crazy.

  Outside on the grounds we found three dead German Shepherds. Junk yard dogs clearly but not feral. They had collars, and were clean. Someone’s pets. They had been shot a couple times each with something small caliber. Pistols or maybe 5.56. Couldn’t tell. I am going on record and saying that the owners didn’t pull the trigger on them. I think if the dogs had been shot by their owner, the shots would’ve been to the head, at very close range. These shots were at distance to the torso almost without exception, and that tells me strangers shot them at range. I hate to see dead animals, even dogs. These three hadn’t bitten my crotch, so I still had some love for them. I can’t handle animals dying. Gore, and human, adult suffering; no problem. Hurt puppy or kitten, and I either fly into a rage or break down into a blubbering me
ss. Sometimes both.

  Not too far from one of the dog bodies we found old blood heading into a rear entryway of the house. The home was a split ranch built on a rise with an entry level basement in the rear. The blood ran across a small patio to the slider and got more pronounced as it got closer to the door. The slider itself was closed, and through the glass and vertical blinds Kevin and I saw the body of a woman and a man on a 70’s green shag carpet. Well, most of it was green still. A lot of it was red/brown from bleeding. A lot of it.

  Now back when the undead were a problem these two might’ve been upright and ready to kill us, teeth snapping shut over and over, dead white eye scouring the world around them for a living thing to kill… but not anymore. Now dead bodies stay dead, and we worry about the living person who made them dead. Major change of gears.

  I pulled the slider open as Kevin covered me through the glass. Once past the blinds the smell hit me in the face. Do I need to remind you Mr. Journal how much a dead body stinks? How about one in a small space? Ah… God awful.

  The man was face down on top of the woman, who was on her back and had multiple entry wounds to her stomach and legs based on the spread of blood on her clothes. At least four hits if you counted them from the blooms of blood. The guy had been done execution style. He had a single gunshot wound to the face and a notable amount of damage to the back of his head as you’d imagine. He went quick on top. She went slow on the bottom.

  I’ll slowly back away from the obvious, yet tasteless joke.

  Were I betting man, she’d been shot outside and made it into the basement whereas he’d been shot inside, and fell atop her as if he might’ve been protecting her. I didn’t need to check for pulses. There’s a certain point where you just know someone’s dead. Missing a face and brain is part of that assessment. Like, fourth or fifth on the list of things to look for.

  Kevin and I swept the silent house’s basement first, then the upper level. It had been ransacked, top to bottom, though we found no other blood or bodies. A secondary sweep showed that whoever tossed the joint took everything worth taking. I suppose there’s a chance it had been gone over twice, but very clearly whoever had been there before us left nothing.

  Even the garage was cleaned out, minus the lifts installed into the bay, and the shitty, nicotine stained wood paneling covering the walls.

  Shortly after that we searched the nearby fields for bodies or people hiding, and found nothing.

  We spent an hour searching for clues or signs to tell us more about what happened. Other than a fourth German Shepherd returning alive we found a shitload of spent 5.56mm casings in the road (a little bit of blood in the road as well), and a shitload of bullet pock marks on the wrecker and house we found zilch.

  The dog was initially angry and distrustful, but Eddie sweet talked the pooch and eventually she came over, all gentle and loving. Distressed, but calm. She had a name tag; Jazz. The other dead animals were Warrior, Hornet, and Rocket.

  NBA team names.

  Strange, but I suppose that’s more original than Fido, Spot, or Lassie.

  So pretty obviously there’s something at work here. Whoever hit these people hit them fucking hard, coordinated, with a high round count of military issue 5.56. If you’re curious, we picked up the brass for reloading. Yeah so whoever did this had a shitload of guns, many, many rounds to send through them, and to top it off…

  They have some kind of tracked vehicle.

  The genius in me has been lying since we left there saying, “They had a bulldozer Adrian. Nothing to worry about my friend. Just a good old piece of farm equipment repurposed into something aggressive for raiding jobs. Just some John Deere or Caterpillar bullshit.”

  Then I remember Kevin tossing me one of the .50 cal casings we found in the road. At that point my lying genius inside says, “No worries Adrian. Nothing to see here. It’s just some rich gun enthusiast who owns a Barrett. Nothing to see here, move along. Fight back the tears, kid.” I should make a note that at this point I’m calling the genius in my head an idiot, because a Barrett all on its own is a huge problem for anyone that isn’t surrounded by military grade vehicle armor.

  Then I remember Kevin handing me a small number of belt links clearly designed for .50 cal belt-fed ammunition. Kevin said, “I found these on the right hand shoulder. Fell off, ran down the right side of the vehicle the .50 was mounted on. Whoever these people are, they have a Ma Deuce.” Kevin shook his head and walked away, notably unhappy.

  I won’t go into the breakdown of a Browning M2 heavy machine gun beyond saying it puts really large holes in things at a fast rate, very far away. This is a very bad thing for us. Some guns when they’re fired at you are really just saying, “Seek cover. Something firm between you and me will protect you.” The M2 says, “Fuck you and your cover. In fact, I’ll fuck you WITH your cover.”

  I’m serious. This gun puts holes in airplanes and liquefies people when they’re hit by it. It’s a serious escalation of threat. It’s also an incredibly rare weapon in the private market, which means we are dealing with someone who has military issued weapons. (Made more evident by the military issue 5.56 casings we found)

  Now the question is…

  Who was the bad guy here? Was Bart the villain, or was it the person who rolled up in the tank with the Browning the bad guy? Did Han shoot first?

  Hard telling, not knowing, especially with the shitty rereleases. Team Greedo for the win.

  Buttholes are puckered, and we’re unhappy. We’ve got a trip south to the National Guard base we’re at a cordial standoff within a few days to see if they had anything to do with the junkyard hit, though I doubt it. The Guard base to the south was primarily a Civil Affairs unit as I recall, and they wouldn’t have had that kind of hardware on hand. That means we have a variable in the region that’s acting up.

  New actors in the play fuck up the script.

  Abby’s baby is cute. Sleeping better now too. Crashing.

  -Adrian

  Junkyard Dogs

  Comfortable warmth infused the sun-soaked afternoon.

  “How long until those people from the school get here?” Barton asked Jay in a wheeze. Bart’s lungs had been shit ever since they lost their house to the fire and subsequent pneumonia he caught the first winter after the dead got hungry. That had been a rough stretch.

  Bart’s son Jay had escaped the house’s inferno with his lungs intact, but he had a patch of scar tissue on his back the size of a turkey platter, and equally sized pain to match it. Jay had the good looks Bart used to have, but no women to spoil with them. Jay peeled off his Expos baseball cap in the mid-September warmth of the automotive junkyard the family owned and wiped his brow.

  “Today is the 28th, Dad. They were supposed to come back to visit and try trading on October 1st.”

  “Thirty days in September right?” Bart asked as two of the family’s six German Shepherds came running over, happily bouncing and pouncing, chasing a ratty old tennis ball through the dirt. Make it last, boys. I don’t think the tennis ball factory is in business anymore.

  “Yep,” Jay said as he took the ball from one of the dogs and hurled it past a row of salvaged automobiles. The dogs bolted after the little green ball. Selling used auto parts had been the family business prior to…

  “What am I forgetting?” Bart asked as he sat down on a stump that had been worn flat and smooth from years of customer asses taking a break from their parts searches on top of it.

  “We have two days until the people from the north come visit,” Jay said, watching the dogs race to get to projectile he’d thrown. He smiled with a sadness his father saw him try to hide.

  “I hate those people, Jason.”

  Bart’s son looked down to his dad and looked at him with eyes far older than his twenty years. The wisdom in his son’s eyes hurt the old man. “I hate them too. But there ain’t a whole lot we can do about them other than leave and go far away. That’s still an option you know,” Jay offered. “
We can find another safe place for everyone. There’s enough gas left over for us to make a hundred miles at least. We pack everyone up, mom, you, me, Sharon, and the others can stay or follow. No shame in—“

  “Stop it, Jay,” Bart said with a wave of his hand. He reached into his shirt pocket with the hole in it and fished out his pack of cigarettes. It was near his last. He lit it with an old Bic lighter that still had juice in it and took a drag on the stale thing. The process soothed him. He handed the cigarette to his son, and Jay did as his dad did.

  “Dad, they are fucking crazy people. Not like those folks from the school. I know you don’t like them, but you don’t like anyone. Those fuckers from up north though… every time they come down here they’ve got more and more demands, and the last time they came, we only barely had what they wanted. What will they want in two days Dad? And what happens when we can’t pony it up?”

  Bart took the cigarette back and looked over his shoulder where the dogs were playing, ball found. He looked beyond them and saw the burnt-down garage and house in the field. The house sat rotted away in the summer heat, skeletal and charred, a remnant of a life lost. Inside the usable structures on the junkyard land were the nine other people who lived with them. Thirteen total, family and friends all. “I can’t just leave these people. This is my home, Jay. Our home.”

  “God you’re stubborn. Dad if these people come in here, they’re gonna annex us. Take this land, and all that we fought for while the zombies were around, and leave us with nothing. Best case scenario they evict us. Worst case, they relocate us against our will like fucking refugees in a war zone.”

  “Worst case they shoot us like criminals,” Bart said, taking a drag and passing the butt back to his son.