Dark Recollections (30 page)

After clearing both places Friday I came back, swapped the pots and pans out, and got my indoor garden up and running. I am starting fairly small time though. I got 10 pots filled with soil, earth, seeds, and some fertilizer. I started mint, thyme, rosemary, basil, 2 things of cherry tomatoes, 2 pots of cucumbers, and 2 things of green onions. Not sure exactly how this will work out, but they’re planted, and I am not a total moron, so I should yield something edible. Just gotta keep them warm during the day, keep them watered, and make sure they get enough light.
 

Three more houses cleared earlier today. Zero undead. Moderate foodstuffs, the same as yesterday. Monotony for the win. Biggest haul out of today was finding a full propane tank for the grill. I’m hoping sooner or later one of these houses has one of those mega backyarder grills in it too. The one I’m using is a Walmart budget special. It works, but it sucks. Probably won’t last long either. I want one of those chrome and stainless steel ones you see on display in the front of the DIY stores. That’d be nice.

So yeah, not shit today worth finding. Little bit of food, little bit of clothing that might be interesting. The definition of marginal. However, now that I’ve eaten a decent meal, I feel like talking about the past. I still have a lot to talk about when it comes to the time before I started the journal, and I think now is as good a time as ever to start that process up again. Feels like it’s been forever since I talked about it anyway.

A lot of it is a blur, I’m going to be honest. I’m sitting here struggling trying to figure out what happened on what day, and to be honest, I’m still not sure I have it right. What I can say, is that right after the shit hit the fan, I came up here. I spent that evening, and the following day killing the undead all over the damn campus. I know I found Abigail that day after, the young girl who wound up leaving for her parent’s place. I recall pretty clearly that I spent at least two days, maybe three here. I swung down to the athletics fields, found a few additional undead, and dealt with them the same as the others. I was using mostly the .22 for everything early on. I didn’t have the full confidence yet to just march across a field and hack the head off. Takes some serious stones to do shit like that. Now, I’m pretty much okay with it, but back then, no thanks.

At the early stages of all this bullshit I didn’t really know what was going on. Was it an infection? Was it a virus? Was it a biological weapon? Contagious? No idea. Half the shit that I learned from the CDC turned out to be bogus, so I wasn’t feeling 100% confident in anything yet. I’m a lot more comfortable now, but early on, I was much more cautious and afraid of doing anything. Using the .22 meant I could kill from range, and that meant I felt much better about things.

I hesitate to say I was wasting the ammo though. I did have 2,000 rounds to use, and there’s only about 8,000 people in the entire town, so I felt like it’d last a long time. Don’t forget too I had 50-60 rounds of 12 gauge then, and a few hundred 9mm’s as well. I’m lower on almost everything now, but at that point, I felt like I had enough to last.

So far, so good. Still have plenty of ammo. Plenty is assuming I don’t get assaulted by either a ton of people, or a ton of zombies. If that happens, you can burn through ammo hardcore. Standard load for ammo on patrols was 7 magazines plus one in the M4, and we routinely took far more than that for areas that we knew we were gonna get attacked in. That’s 250 rounds for a single firefight, give or take. My point is you can seriously burn through ammo when the shit gets thick. Peace through overwhelming fire superiority.

And… speaking of shit getting thick. So after my two or three day period of laying low, I made the decision that I needed to get more food. In retrospect, I probably didn’t need to go back to the grocery store, especially considering the other food resources around here. I had the gas stations, the houses all around the campus, etc. But, this is only a day or two after everything started, so my mindset at the time was grocery store = food. Typical consumer thought pattern.

I think a lot of that decision came from desperate thinking. The first couple nights I didn’t sleep at all. I was worried people were going to come to campus and try and kill me, or that I didn’t have enough food and ammo, you get the picture. Basically I was just scared shitless that I would starve. I spent a lot of those days re-thinking everything I’d done, and wishing I’d done just about everything differently. However, I couldn’t then, and still can’t change the past.

I made the decision a day or two into the shit to head back into town, and try and get more food. I knew that people would eventually panic and want more food. I knew they’d probably panic soon, so I needed to get the food before them. I also knew that many folks would try and “ride it out” and had decent food stores. I wanted to get to the store before those people ran out of their own food. I was expecting the apocalypse. Madness, panic, zombies everywhere, fire, zombie on fire, wild dogs, high prices and inflation, and honestly, I thought I stood a pretty good chance of getting a rash. I was scared of finding… everything downtown. Wholesale evil. Worst case imaginable.

As it turns out, my fears weren’t that far off from the truth. I went back downtown in my car, a grey Toyota Camry. Man I loved that car. Mr. Journal you will note the past-tense reference. I geared up like I was ready to rock the fucking apocalypse. Had all my clips loaded, had the guns cleaned, put my vest on, got the shells loaded into it, filled all my pockets with loose ammo, grabbed water, energy bars, had pretty much everything I needed. I decided that it’d be best if I went down early-early in the morning too. I felt that going early gave me the best chance to avoid running into other people vying for the same food as me. I was wrong, but at least my logic was decent.

I left campus at the crack of dawn. The grocery store is perhaps a twenty minute drive if you drive the speed limit, which puts it at perhaps 9 to 10 miles from campus. It is east down Route 18, couple turns left and right, and shazam, you’re on Main Street, right in the middle of the retail area of town. Grocery store, hardware store, a few restaurants, plus three or four of the major manufacturers in town are in a little industrial park there. Really it’s our version of Grand Central Station.

The drive down to the grocery store was pretty normal. Most of the time my drive on this route was early in the morning when I was getting out of work. Normally at those hours the roads are pretty empty anyway, so things seemed normal. Once I got through the largely wooded area just outside downtown, things got a little weirder. I saw two houses on fire. One was already burnt out and down, and the second was still raging hardcore. Obviously that was unusual. I also saw a handful of bodies in driveways, splayed out in ditches, and generally just strewn around. Seeing bodies around is also unusual. For normal country at least. I’m pretty gracious when I call America normal, incidentally.

No zombies though. Didn’t see any of those until I got into the more urban area of Main Street. There’s a few fast food eateries, regular restaurants, a couple pharmacies, a handful of strip malls, you know the deal. Once I was in that area, there were quite a few of the walkers. They were all slowly moving in the general direction of the grocery store too, which was a bad sign that I didn’t pick up on until too late.
 

I kept my speed low. Mainly I didn’t want to drive into a mess too fast and not be able to adjust. Plus I was worried I’d hit a zombie and smash a window, thus making the relative sanctuary of the car null and void. I pulled into the parking lot doing maybe 10 miles per hour. Almost immediately I noticed things were off. There were cars parked in a chevron pattern at the two entrances to the parking lot. The way it was set up was clearly defensive. If someone rammed the two cars parked like that, they would get pushed back into two more cars parked at right angles behind them as well, pretty much guaranteeing that you’d trash your car. You’d have to hop the huge ass curbs to get into the lot, which wasn’t an option for me in the Camry.

Without saying a word, it told me people were in the grocery store. Adding fuel to that fire, there were about 20 zombies meandering around the parking lot. It was decision time. Park there, and run to the store to get what I could? Or turn and leave? Going in meant I had to deal with the dead, and likely some of the living inside as well. Leaving meant no food. In the end, my fear of starvation was greater than my fear of the zombies. I parked the car, gathered my weapons, and started to clear the parking lot.

The first few zombies I killed were the ones nearest the car. Behind me in the street were a solid half dozen that I’d driven by just a minute prior. I used the .22 and moved down the line landing my headshots pretty smooth. I think I might’ve missed one or two shots due to nerves, but all in all it was excellent marksmanship. After they were down, I swapped mags, and started shooting the shuffling dead that was heading across the lot towards me. I had more time to deal with them mostly because of the arrangement of cars as a blockade was between them and I. I emptied my 2
^nd
magazine pretty quickly doing that and sat back down in the car and started to reload my empty mags out of the pocket of ammo in my vest.

That’s when I heard the distinctive boom of a high caliber rifle. My car’s windshield spiderwebbed instantly and I actually heard the zing and the snap of the bullet going by my head. Mr. Journal, have you ever been shot at? There are three completely different ways to be shot at. This was what I refer to as a “stage three” shot.

Stage one: You hear a gunshot. Ka-pow. End of story.

Stage two: You hear a gunshot. Immediately afterward, you hear a “zinging” noise. Stage two shots mean the bullet came close enough to you that they are aiming in your general direction.

Stage three: You hear the bang. You hear the zing. Almost simultaneously you hear a “crack” or “pop” as well. That’s the sound of the bullet breaking the sound barrier near enough for you to hear it. That means that they are either really lucky, and you got accidentally close to the bullet’s flight path, or they are TRYING TO KILL YOU.

As a general rule of thumb, you don’t start getting really worried until you get to Stage two.

Of course the dead giveaway was the quarter sized hole punched in my windshield about 4 inches from where my face was. Evasive action! I dove flat out of the car onto the pavement and busted the shit out of my chin. Split the bitch wide fucking open. It also rang my bell like a motherfucker. That digger made me think that when I got knocked on my ass in Mrs. Goodell’s classroom I might’ve gotten a concussion.
 

I scrambled as best I could right up flush to the cars blocking the parking lot. Unlike in the classroom I didn’t drop my weapon this time. I quickly finished reloading the clips while I got shot at a couple more times. Both of the new incoming rounds hit my car again, really and thoroughly fucking up the windshield, and the hood. Big, loud PONG noise as the bullet punched into it. Good news is that meant the shooter didn’t know I was behind the car they’d arranged as a blockade.

I snuck back some, peeked up through the car interior, and saw a shape leaning over the roof of the grocery store. Pretty clearly a shooter aiming in my general direction. I set my trap. Likely the asshole was using a bolt action, or lever action rifle. The caliber sounded big, so I was pretty sure of that. That meant their first shot would be fast, and pretty accurate, but their second would suck as they chambered a new round. I took off a shoe, and tossed it about five feet to the side towards the other car in the blockade.

The shooter saw it, and let loose one loud round at it. He missed the shoe, and as I watched, he started to throw the bolt on his rifle to reload. Fucking clown shoes. Ridiculous. I leveled off at his profile, and quickly squeezed off a handful of shots. Remember how I said the .22 was great because of the low recoil? I didn’t have to jack the bolt, or swing a lever to reload. Squeeze and fire. I saw the form tumble backwards onto the roof, simultaneously dropping the rifle forward over the edge into the parking lot. I remember laughing in celebration as I got my shoe back on. I didn’t see any other shooters on the roof, so I proceeded to kill the remaining zombies that had gotten alarmingly close to me. I wound up having to drop the rifle for the last three, as I was dry on ammo in the mags. I closed in and used the pistol for the first time since clearing the campus.

Safe parking lot. Relatively speaking. I reloaded my magazines yet again, scanned the lot and the streets for zombies, and decided to cross the parking lot to get into the store. Now by this point I knew I had living people trying to shoot me. I decided moving to cover was the best option. Enough cars were left in the parking lot that I could easily move behind them, so that’s what I did. I used the slow and smooth walk, and kept the rifle aimed at the entrance to the store nearest me. I noticed then that the entrance looked somewhat boarded up.

No one shot at me again during the run across the lot. Smooth sailing so to speak. I made it to the front of the store, right near where I’d shot the very first zombie I’d seen “that day” and I took cover. The doors were boarded up solid. Someone inside had taken the time to build up some damn sturdy plywood and 4x4 barricades over the automatic glass doors. I yelled and screamed for someone to answer, but no one did. I took a quick look around the front of the building, and saw that the majority of the glass windows had been shot out. Shot out pretty severely actually. It looked like downtown Fallujah up close. Pretty clearly there had been a massive firefight in the parking lot between someone outside, and someone inside. Glass was broke in both directions, and there were dozens of the tell-tale pockmarks from bullets in the brick façade.

Bad news bears kids.

I peeked inside the store through the busted out windows and saw a goddamn mess. Most of the shelves were either bare, or tipped over and ravaged. There were a solid dozen bodies draped over the registers and carts at the main checkout and I could see at least ten or more walking zombies moving in and around the aisles. Not cool at all.