Cassie (Adrian's Undead Diary Book 8) (11 page)

Our QRF arrived maybe twenty minutes later. HRT plus two humvees in force. Roger and Joel leapt out and started to work on the two injured while the rest of the crew pulled security for it all. I went inside the duplex and removed all of my shit, throwing it in the HRT. My home away from home it seems.

We casevac’d back to Bastion after making sure MGR was safe. We high tailed it as fast as we could back to the school because we were incredibly concerned this was a feint to get our QRF out of the way for an attack. Fortunately, nothing hit us while we were dealing with us. As we learned together, there wasn’t really anyone left to hit us.

Last night I spent the entire evening in the clinic with the PJs as they stabilized the guy and patched the girl back up. She suffered a perforated intestine, and she’ll have a bitching scar from the exit wound, but she’ll survive. The guy on the other hand is probably fucked. We got a ghetto xray on his hip and it’s shattered. My round pancaked flat on the bone and just busted the fuck out of it. It looks like his hip socket got obliterated, and broke the leg bone as well, with the ball joint of the bone still in the socket. He also lost the left arm. The guys were able to save the arm from just above the elbow up, but… he lost a fucking arm. Life sucks.

We don’t really have the ability the put him back together again. According to the PJs, he needs a fully equipped orthopedic surgeon to get him rebuilt to have any quality of life. I don't think I need to bring up how dangerous the risk of infection would be with such a significantly invasive surgery either. At the moment, he’s on a morphine drip that’s powerful enough to get one of our fucking cows high as goddamn kite. We need to make a decision about him in the next day or two. If he lives through this, he’ll never walk again, and probably be in severe pain that will worsen over the years. It might be the most humane thing for us to simply give him a painless death so he doesn’t suffer.
 

I don’t want to talk to Michelle about this. Or maybe I do. Maybe I need her counsel on this. The PJs are advocating that we pull his plug. Triage. They don’t want to waste time and medical supplies on him. These supplies aren’t exactly growing on trees nowadays.

We posted guard on them all night.

This morning I woke up early, enjoyed a nice hot shower in Hall E here, and headed over to check on our patients. The woman was awake, and was talking to Doc Lindsey as she ate some breakfast. She looked ravenous.

I checked on the man, giving the woman time to see me, and assess me. Get comfortable with me and my manner. I didn’t want to just bum rush the side of her bed and intimidate her. Apparently, I can be a frightening guy. I imagine the Mohawk and tattoos might play into that. Anyhoo, I checked on our mangled man, grabbed a small cup of water from a pitcher, and headed over to say hi.

Doc Lindsey introduced me as, “Adrian, the guy who runs the show here.” I got a small laugh out of that. The young girl seemed intimidated despite my attempts to achieve the opposite, so I pulled up a seat and sat down. I also made sure to swing my M4A1 around to my back so it wasn’t in her face. The same weapon that put a bullet through her stomach didn’t need to be in her presence.

I introduced myself, explained a little bit of my background, told her a small bit about Bastion, and then dropped the bombshell about how I was the person who shot her. That got a pretty sharp raise of the eyebrows and a small recoil out of her, but less than I was expecting. I apologized, and explained how and why I pulled the trigger that day, and how we HAD to protect our people, and the places we’d made safe. We felt she and her friends were part of the group that had attacked us several times, and we couldn’t keep risking their attacks on us. At some point, enough is enough.

She cried. Quite a bit really. It was the better part of a half hour before she was able to get herself together enough to talk again. Doc Lindsey was A+ awesome as the comforting older woman. Mr. Journal, she’s right up there with Michelle in the “can ease anyone with a few words” category.

Speaking of which, Michelle also visited the clinic right about then, just as Danielle (the girl) started talking again. I should say Danielle looked about 23. Maybe 25. She had brown eyes and brown hair that was long, and needed a wash. She was fairly pretty, in that forgettable way. If that makes sense Mr. Journal.

Danielle spilled it all fast. So fast we had to stop her several times to say things again. In between nose wipes and her clutching her fresh stitches in her stomach in pain, she told a tale that I’d heard before. Remember Lindsey? Not Doc Lindsey, but Lindsey, Doug’s wife. Remember Doug? The guy who shot me in the safe house that I shot? Same Doug that visited me in a dream and led me to his wife and kids? The other Lindsey living over on Jones Road?

Lindsey’s tale of returning from the north to a safer more southern place to try and survive was recanted here. Some details were changed, but the basic idea is the same. No resources up in the mountains anymore, and the few survivors that are thriving up in that neck of the woods have had superior places to live and firepower since the jump. There’s no competing with them. No air left to breathe.

She and her small group left the north over a month ago, and headed south with the little remaining diesel and gasoline they had, and started south, returning here to the town they left back in June of the year before last. The figured they’d make it to their homes, where they at least felt safe, tough out the winter, then head really south as spring hit. Like, Florida or Georgia south. Fuck winter is the theme of their trip.

I’ll summarize. The north is being run by a few large groups of survivors that managed a modern day equivalent of a “land/resources grab.” They have it all, and fuck everyone else. Contribute to their quality of life or fuck off and die. Pretty simple really.

There was/is a mass exodus going on. Many of the folks that ran north to escape the initial explosion of undead are now starving and freezing to death this winter, and are making last ditch efforts to head south to try and find somewhere, anywhere that is better than where they were. Here where we are is better than there by the slimmest of margins. I’ll explain why in a second.

Danielle said the city was utterly and completely teeming with the dead. She said they slipped by the city going as fast as they could in their small caravan, but they saw tens of thousands of undead moving about on the city streets, doing nothing but waiting for anything alive to make its presence known so they could kill it. According to what Danielle said, they lost two people on the interstate heading south when one of their vehicles got stuck in some snow. One of the earliest snowstorms I’d wager.

She also said that without a single exception, every living person or group they encountered either attacked them, or was so defensive and standoffish they were practically hostile. No one trusts anyone anymore. When they got here and they saw lights and smoke at MGR, they avoided it as long as they could, then when things got desperate, they figured they’d attack us first before we attacked them. Diplomacy wasn’t even on their mind. Fucking sad.

Why is here only slightly better than up north? Me. Us. We’ve nearly drained every single resource from this town. The grocery stores, convenience stores, gun stores, houses, businesses, etc have all been looted by us already. There’s simply nothing left to take, and if there is something, it’s meager. Had we not killed several of their number in firefights the past few weeks or whatever, Danielle said they certainly would’ve starved anyway. It wasn't that they were so scared of us that they felt they had to attack us. They attacked us because they had no other alternatives.

99 problems Mr. Journal.

Danielle did some math for me and said that in a three house stretch on a street kind of on the very edge of town she thought there were three more people from her group surviving. One kid, a mom, and her sister. They are all alone for the most part, and will have already started to worry themselves about it.

Michelle and I agreed that we needed to go get them and hopefully bring them in. They’ll starve, freeze, or get eaten out there on their own. Of course that makes us another four mouths heavy on our already thin food requirements, but…

I gotta do the right thing here. I gotta. I feel responsible for putting them in such a shit situation, and I know it's reckless on some level to bring in more mouths to feed, but is it really any better for me to let them starve out there?

No, it isn't. I'll eat tree bark. I'll go without if that is what it means for them to survive.

We’re formulating a plan to try and visit them tomorrow. We’re also going to decide Ben’s fate. He of the busted, mangled, destroyed hip.

Sad really.

-Adrian

January 22
^nd

Our visit yesterday to the north side of town was productive, yet also momentarily horrifying. After speaking with Danielle at length and in onerous detail, we opted to mount a mission to that part of town to try and retrieve the three wayward travelers. We’d give them the option of joining us here at Bastion, or at MGR, or even potentially over at the Factory. They could also choose to remain where they were.

I asked Danielle to hand write us a note to show them saying that she was safe and sound (minus the perforated intestine), and that we were telling the truth. Doc Lindsey handled that task admirably once again. She and the girl have formed a pretty intense bond pretty quickly. Michelle has had a hand in it as well. Both women have spent time in the clinic talking to her about the plight of their group as they survived up north and during their trip down to this part of the state. Michelle told me some of it, and I tell you what, how these people survived up to this point would make one HELL of a movie.

Their brazen, foolish attacks on us make a lot of sense when you compare their desperation versus the potential danger. It looked a lot like do or die to them.

We rolled out in a fairly standard group. HRT plus two humvees. We didn’t want to appear like we were rolling in, ready for a fight, but we also wanted to project enough force that the three would KNOW that if they started something, it would be foolish. It’s a fine line to get someone to respect the force you project versus being entirely intimidated and scared by it.

The neighborhood was almost identical to the neighborhood the duplex I held up in. The three house stretch was exactly as Danielle described, and we stopped across the street from it, parking our three vehicles about twenty yards apart. I got out of the vehicle on the passenger side (Caleb was driving with me in the HRT) and walked behind the engine block to go around the front.
 

I no sooner got to the very front of the fender of the ambulance when we heard the BOOM of a shotgun blast coming from the middle house, the one identified by Danielle as being the house the three would be in. A millisecond after the roar of the shotgun I heard and felt the pinging of the pellets crash into the door of the HRT right near me. I knew there would be a dozen or more tiny dents in the metal after. I crouched and from what I saw, we all took cover. Caleb nearly plummeted to the ground through my door to take heavier cover behind the truck. It was kind of funny to watch my brother do a forward head roll out of a tall vehicle, and smash into a pile of snow on the ground a few feet below. It’s always scary to get shot at, but you get your laughs where you can. Better that than crying about it.

I went on the comms and asked everyone to hold fire. After a full minute of quiet, I screamed as loud as I could at the house, “HELLO! WE ARE HERE TO HELP YOU! WE WERE SENT BY DANIELLE!”

Silence of course. I hollered the same exact thing again, and added that I had a note from her that explained everything. I even dug the note out and waved it around above the hood of the HRT like the white flag of surrender. Silence once more. Kevin suggested we simply wait and give them time to think, and that seemed decent. He also had Joel and Fitz running down the street and through the woods to get behind the house to ensure they weren’t running off through the back.
 

It was almost exactly when Joel said he was in position that a window in the front of the house creaked open, and a woman’s voice hollered back to me, “Who are you people?”

I explained who we were. Survivors trying to reclaim town, and survive. I also explained that we were the people they had been attacking, and that we had injured some of their folks in a fight the other day, and that we had their injured back at our place, and we were taking good care of them. I also told her we were offering to take them in. That, or at least tell them that they were welcome to stay in town, as long as they weren’t violent any more. We wanted to at least be cooperative, instead of antagonistic. I didn't use those words. In the moment I wasn't nearly as eloquent. Hard to be eloquent when you're yelling over the hood of a huge, rusty armor-plated ambulance.

The woman asked for the letter, and I stood up to walk it to her, but Caleb yanked me back down behind the HRT. He said to me, “Hell no, I got it,” and took the letter from my hand. After sliding his rifle around to his back and making sure he didn't look any more dangerous than he already did wearing body armor, he jogged pretty fearlessly through the slush and snow across the street and up the yard to the door, which opened for him. I saw the tiny glint of black gun steel poking out at him, and guessed that the woman had her scattergun leveled at him, should he do anything funny. I don’t think she realized just how many weapons were aimed at where she was standing in the dark house. If she pulled that trigger, she’d have more holes in her than the plot of a Michael Bay movie.

Lucky for her, a hand reached out of the door, took the note, and Caleb walked away cautiously, keeping his hands in very visible places. We’re fortunate I guess in the fact that Caleb is a good looking guy. It never hurts to send a reasonably attractive messenger.

It was maybe ten minutes before we heard from them again. The same female voice yelled out to me asking, “How do we know you didn’t force her to write this?”