Dark Recollections (32 page)

Not a happy camper today Mr. Journal. Nope. Unfucking happy Boy Scout right here. Not sure why, but I was woken bright and goddamn early by banging on the front door of Hall E. Hard banging. Intentional banging. Clearly not sexual banging.

I frigging leapt out of bed like a crackhead near a soup kitchen and snagged up the .22 near the bedroom door. I peeked out the window and saw not one, nor two, but three zombies down at the frigging door, smashing their little heads off to no end.

Gonna use the whole words here…
 
What. The. Fuck. I threw a fucking hissy fit for REAL. Once I was done with my three year old temper tantrum I threw the window open, and proceeded to shoot the dumbass walkers trying to beat down my front door. Wasn’t too pleased either because one of them was juuuuust enough around the edge of the building for me to literally yell and scream to get him to walk around the corner to get a clear shot. You want to talk about irritating. Idiot zombie wouldn’t walk into my line of fire like a good side of beef.

Not asking for much God. As if it wasn’t enough to have all these fucking dead people walking around you have to make killing them a challenge too? Do you not fucking like me? What’d I do in a past life? Cornhole a nun? Cornhole a bus filled with nuns? Fucking A.

AND IT WAS WHILE I WAS TRYING TO SLEEP. I get no fucking breaks.

Phew. End of rant.

So. Here we are with this.. awkward thing going on between the two of us Mr. Journal. You think I’m all dangerous and edgy, and I could explode into a rage at any moment. So you’re thinking to yourself, I’ll just be quiet, maybe lay low, play the listener role for a bit, let him get his anger out somewhere else. Smart call really. I could explode again. I could blow up like a Pinto’s gas tank.

I’m harmless I assure you. I haven’t shot a real person in at least a month. Probably longer than that. Shot plenty of dead ones though. Working on setting that high score.

My thumb is still really sore. Definitely sprained it the other day. When I woke up the day after it was all bright red and swollen. Hot to the touch as well. I iced it, took some ibuprofen, and kept it elevated. Within a few hours I was in pretty good shape, and decided I’d do just two houses yesterday. Need to take a little bit of a breather. That and the weather has sucked balls. Lots of sleet and cold rain. Early in the morning the sidewalks and roads have been covered in black ice. That is one of the things I do not miss about driving back and forth to work. Cold as hell.

Anyway, keeping with the plan of clearing Auburn Lake Road, I worked my way up that road and did the next two huge houses in line. Newer development style bland houses that were pushing 3,000 square feet. I won’t bore you with the details, but both houses were empty of danger. Riveting stuff right there.

I’m sure you’re interested in what I found though right? That’s almost always good news right? Well Mr. Journal, surprise! Didn’t get shit. Both houses were bare right down to the damn floor tiles. That’s an exaggeration. There was plenty of shit in both houses, but nothing worth loading into the truck and taking. To enhance positives though, I found empty doghouses at both places, which tells me they took their pets with them. Happy for that at least. It’s the little things, right?

After that I wasn’t feeling like doing much of anything, so came back here, ate a reasonable dinner of bland canned food, and decided to fire up the Playstation. Seemed like a great idea right up to the point I had to use my sprained thumb. Plan B was a bad horror movie, which just left a sour taste in my mouth considering the current events of the world, so I settled on watching The Hangover again. Good times.

This morning I awoke to my lousy ass neighbors beating on the door. Really unpleased about that. Can’t really describe how unhappy that makes me. How did they know I was in this building? All the other buildings up here are just as likely to have living people in it, so what drew them to me specifically? Did I leave some form of trail I haven’t realized yet? Did I make noise at some point that led them here? Were they led here by someone else? I’ve got so many questions, and so few answers.
 

Once I got done killing the idiots downstairs, dragging their bodies way out back to my previous body pile, cleaning the doorsteps of Hall E, and getting a bite to eat, I decided I should just go back to bed. Fuck it.

I woke up a couple hours later. Refreshed, yet with a fine layer of still pissed off about life. It’s a wonderful life I have here. Tedious toil, constant danger, shitty food, marginal living quarters, and a never ending stream of injuries to show for it. It is so much like Iraq it isn’t funny. Except the already dead people are the dangerous ones. Weird.

Royally effing miffed about the zombies literally knocking on my front door earlier I decided I would do a single house today, zip down to the gas station to fill up all my available gas tanks, and then come back here and throw my feet up. I’ll die of exhaustion if I don’t give myself a breather here and there.

When I hit the gas station the lower neighborhood area was devoid of signs of life. No walking dead, no black luxury cars with redheads, and no other signs of activity. The single home I cleared this afternoon was the cape that I got the Tundra from. I had a bad feeling about it, and just kinda thought it would be wise to stick with just that house today. Now if you recall I referred to the zombie family as June and Wally. The Cleaver family right? Well it’s been pissing me off since that night because Wally was the goddamn other kid. Ward was the dad. I didn’t kill Wally, I killed Ward. Attention to detail Adrian, attention to detail. Shit like that bugs me.
 

As you’ll recall from the October 13
^th
entry, I wound up taking out two adult zombies and one young undead girl at the house. Their bodies were still outside the house where I’d left them all that time ago. I’ve been keeping an eye on them as well every time I drove by. Fortunately at least the twice dead stay dead nowadays.

Their garage door was still open, and I was reasonably sure the house was devoid of the living. I didn’t bother honking or letting anyone inside know I was there. To be honest, I felt like bringing the goddamn pain anyway. After my rough start to the day I was looking for a fight.

I let myself in through the garage, and used the shotgun as my weapon. I can’t remember if I mentioned this or not, but generally I use the shotgun when house clearing. It’s just too devastating a short range weapon. The garage entrance to the house opened into the kitchen, which was to be expected. I could see into the living room and dining room from there, as well as a second family room. Very open concept in design. I could see a door that looked like it led to a basement, as well as the railing on the stairs that led inside.
 

There was a fairly large amount of blood on the floor in all of the rooms. It started out as a dribble in the kitchen, but turned into a pretty substantial bloodbath in the two family rooms. There were smears all over the walls, broken lamps, knocked over furniture, you name the sign of the struggle, and it was there. Something went terribly south in here. I cleared the first floor as quietly as I could, and slid up the stairs to clear up there.

Sniff test fail.

I was no more than 5 feet down the central hall before I got a whiff of something rank. As was the case, I couldn’t hear anything, but it was pretty obvious what was going on. There were four rooms in the upstairs. Two doors were open. One bathroom was evident, and one bedroom. The two bedroom doors that were closed had scratch marks all over them. Bloody streaks running north-south as well as a few lodged fingernails deep in the wood. It looks an awful lot like my heavy duty front door of Hall E this morning. Pretty clearly a zombie or zombies tried to get in these rooms. I wonder why. Could it be because there were living people inside?

After I checked the two open rooms and made sure they were safe, I checked the first shut door. The door knob was locked, and as soon as I rattled it, I heard shuffling on the other side, and the door got pushed forward in the frame. I stepped back and watched for a few seconds as it got pushed forward over and over insistently. Mindlessly. I thought about it for a second, then leveled the shotgun off at chest height, and blasted a dinner plate sized hole in the door.

There was a sick, wet, thump noise as something heavy got flung across the room. I took a deep breath, leaned over, and looked through my new peep hole. Ripped apart in the middle of the room, propped up against a queen sized bed was the decayed body of a young boy. Not a day over 10 years old. My shot hit him too low to finish him though, it just ripped his chest apart. What was left of his body was falling over on the floor to crawl its way back to the door, to eat me. I stifled a wretch, reached inside the hole in the door, unlocked, and pushed it open.

Honestly I’d lost my urge to fight at that point. I didn’t want to kill kids today, even the undead ones. It still turns my stomach. I drew the sword, and busted the young kid’s head open to put him down permanently. I wound up throwing up some in the sink as I wandered over to the other closed door. I don’t know if it was because I had just ripped a ten year old in half with a 12 gauge, or because I fucking had the worst feeling the other room would just the same as the first. I don’t know.

The second door was locked too, and as soon as I gave the knob a twist, there was a soft ramming from the other side. Over and over and over. I rested my head against the bloody, scratched door and felt it push against my head a dozen times. Took me a long time to build up the nerve to do it, but I blasted another hole the same as the first. This shot’s elevation was more appropriate though, and I killed the little kid on the other side.
 

I can’t tell you if it was a boy or a girl. It was wearing neutral style pajamas, and was probably about 7 years old. The body itself had already been eaten substantially, and there wasn’t enough… parts left to tell one way or the other. My head shot wrecked any chance of seeing a face.
 

I am so fucking weary of this. Every day, day in, day out, more of the same. Mind numbing violence, destruction, and emotional wreckage. I tell Otis my troubles almost every day too, and as great a listener as he is, it’s just not the same. It’s days like today that make me wish I had more people to sit and talk to. At least we could bitch at God together, right? It’s the little things. Maybe I should start giving praise to some flavor of the almighty, and flip the script. Change my tune. Bite my heretical tongue.

Fat fucking chance. I have no filter. I swear all the damn time. I once told a gay guy at a poker tournament that my hand was “very homosexual.” I fucking knew he was gay too. Just didn’t occur to me to shut my face before I said it. Had no intention of hurting his feelings. Went over like a fart in church. I had to let him hit me a few times just to let him get even. True story.

At any rate, after that I checked the basement, and it was thankfully devoid of demon possessed undead children. No spinning heads, no green pea vomit, and no flesh eating monsters.

I sat down at their kitchen table and just blanked out for fifteen minutes to get my shit together. I don’t know what it is about killing kids, but it leaves me empty inside. I have no will, no motivation, no nothing after I do it. Fucked up shit. And I know I will have to kill more as time goes on. These zombie bodies don’t seem to decay at all. If they are, it’s really fucking slowly. There could be zombies around forever. There’s a scary thought Mr. Journal.

I emptied the house. It looked like they were staging their escape as shit hit the fan. Most of their food and water was already in the kitchen or the living room, so I didn’t have to lug it all around. They had a lot of really good entertainment crap, which was nice. DVDs, CDs, etc. Food wise they had a lot as well. I think all they fed their kids was canned shit and boxed macaroni and cheese. They had condensed milk, lots of sugar, and I shit you not, a full case of hot chocolate packets. It’s the little things. Oh, and Ward had a fucking A awesome flashlight. Finally, a decent fucking flashlight. Heavy duty police style Maglite.
 

There were a few other neat things as well, but I’m not gonna spend a paragraph listing the mundane, yet useful items. TP, PT, soap, bleach, blah fucking blah blah. Add nice towels to the list too. High thread count sheets. Makes me want to go get my bed again. I think I’ll put that on the list of shit to do.

Sooooo…… End of the afternoon. Came back, unloaded my shit, tended to the plants, refilled the generator gas tank, took a hot shower, fed Otis, refilled my boy Blue, cleaned the shotgun, made myself something to eat, and now I’m writing in here. And that’s an easy day.

Tomorrow… I will deal with tomorrow. Tonight I watch action movies from the 80’s.

-Adrian

p.s.
 
nincompoop.

December 2010

December 1
^st

I am in much better spirits today. I have found and focused my inner happy place Mr. Journal. Hopefully my newfound reservoir of patience and bliss lasts me. Almost held a straight face through that. Lol. Couldn’t hold it though.

It’s now Wednesday, December 1
^st
. Yippee. The Christmas season has begun for me. I’m starting to think I’m going to skip Christmas shopping this year. I think I’ll gloss over my Hanukkah obligations as well. Kwaanza seems like a waste as well. I just don’t feel like dealing with the kind of crowds I’d expect nowadays at the malls. God can you imagine how bad it is at the malls? In any of the urban areas where the populations are more dense? Christ. It’s bad enough here, and there’s less than ten thousands folks in town.

The city had over 20 times that. And that’s nothing compared to the really large places like Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Boston, or D.C. What a nightmare. Of course those cities probably had a more structured police response, so for all I know, I’m sitting out here like a fucking tool fighting all these dead guys and the cities are these peaceful utopias. Somehow I doubt that. I bet the cities were fucking slaughterhouses.