The Failed Coward (2 page)

Sigh. I’m having a hard time making heads or tails of everything right now. Based on what Patty, Abby and I talked about the other night, I know Cassie is dead. Dead but not gone apparently. I haven’t revisited my writings about my dream since I wrote them. I get the feeling a lot of emotion will hit me like a truck, and I need to stay sharp until we get through this. If we get through this.

Yesterday we made the decision to reinforce all the windows and doors with the wood I had in the basement. There wasn’t much raw material available, but we had a few 2x4s, and one sheet of plywood, and using a kitchen knife with a serrated edge, we managed to quietly score the sheet enough to snap it into smaller sheets to cover the areas we felt were most likely to get hit hard. It was a good decision. The windows in the living room downstairs were broken this morning when the undead reached them. The bodies are stacked high enough now outside that a few of them have managed to walk across the top of the pile and get to the windows. I never accounted for bodies being stacked that high. I guess that was a mistake on my part.

This is a nightmare Mr. Journal. It is the worst thing you can imagine to watch them come, one after another, over and over, reaching, clawing, and scratching. They’re trying to get inside to kill us, and either we will have enough bullets, or we won’t. I hope running away is an option if that happens. I think we have enough bullets to last though. I hope that doesn't turn into another mistake on my part.

The crowd is much thinner outside right now, but that’s not what worries me most at the moment. Dimly inside I have the strong feeling we will survive this. I don’t think this, no… that’s not what I am trying to say. I FEEL like this was not an attempt on our lives. This siege. 

I know that might sound stupid. They certainly are trying to kill us in here. Gunshot. AFK.

Patty shot one trying to climb the deck on the side of the Hall. Haven’t seen them try to climb before. I hope that’s not a new thing they’re gonna start. Fuck that noise.

At any rate, what I am trying to say, is that there is a... I don’t know, a feeling about this that I can’t shake. I just get the impression that if these things really wanted in to kill us, they would’ve done it already. Why would they wait for us to fire on them before rushing the building? Why are they all holding books? Why did it take them this long to get here? Why March 3
^rd
?

Wait a second. 

January, February, March. 

At three am on the third night of the third month I have a dream of three people sitting in a white room.

I am suddenly more afraid of that train of thought than I am of the undead outside. Someone or something is trying to send us a message. I need to get through this, and figure out what that message is, or the next time the undead come, I get the distinct impression they are not going to wait for us to fire on them first, and they WILL get in here. I am reminded suddenly of that zombie with the watch. 

Tap. Tap. Tap. 

Three taps. Motherfucker. 

Mike from Westfield will be here on the 7
^th
. We need to get this handled before his people drive onto campus and get caught up in what’s happening. Gilbert is at his house being as quiet as possible. He said over the radio that there are just a few outside his house, but they are standing outside, almost as if they are keeping guard on him. He told me through the windows he can see that there is one or two of them on each side of his house. Like they’re keeping him inside. Focusing on us here.

That’s not creepy or anything.

More fucking gunshots from downstairs. I gotta go.

-Adrian

March 7
^th

Operation: yank our asses out of the fire has been largely completed. I just woke up from the first decent sleep I’ve gotten in what feels like an eternity. I’m scared to sleep now. Genuinely apprehensive about putting head to pillow. Ever since the 3
^rd
and my “white room” dream followed by the fucking onslaught we’ve had here… I don’t know Mr. Journal. It’s like there is no forgetting about what I saw, and what has happened.

Things are different today. People are looking at me strange. Maybe it’s all in my head and I am just hallucinating that they are looking at me strange? I can’t say for sure. I guess it doesn’t matter in the short term. 

Where to start? So much bullshit has gone down here it’s hard to find a single moment or event to start with. I mean... ah fuck it. Where did I leave off last? I think it was late evening on the… 5
^th
? Yeah. So we had another surge right after I hit save and shut the laptop. The entirety of the day and evening of the 4
^th
we were at the windows of the second floor firing down into the crowd of undead pressing into Hall E more or less nonstop. 

Ironically, they didn’t start attacking us initially until we started firing on them, which was odd to say the least. We know they saw us through the windows, so it’s not like they didn’t know we were in here. Almost like they were giving us time to prepare or something. Definitely fucking odd.

I may or may not have said already that we formulated a battle plan that revolved around using the .22 caliber weapons primarily. We’ve got an abundance of that ammunition here, and it made sense to use as much of that as possible before we switched to anything else. All we have for .22 weapons right now are the Browning pistol, and the Tac .22. We had some issues when we poured it on too, not surprisingly.

Firing over three or four hundred rounds in any situation is pretty bad for a gun. Wear and tear, residue builds up, the barrel and internal shit gets really hot, and can warp, there’s just a plethora of things that can go wrong. Military grade weaponry is designed for hard use, but we’re sorely lacking in that kind of stuff. Two hours into our Waco-style standoff with the horde we started having jams. Stovepipes mostly with the pistol, but not long after the rifle started to fail. These guns are simply not designed for that volume of fire.

We switched out once it was clear the guns needed to be cleaned and given a rest. Now in my infinite wisdom, I still had not taught the girls how to fully break them down and clean them, so we wound up misfiring a lot of rounds until we got new weapons to the windows to keep the rate of fire up. Gilbert kept radio’ing us every five minutes asking how we were doing, and as we could, we kept him up to date.

Our second best option for ammo was the M15 and the crate of 5.56 we’d just bartered for. However, none of the girls had fired the M15, which meant I had to clean the guns and do all the shooting myself, which wasn’t the best idea. We opted for Abby to go to town with the Beretta firing very slowly, and limiting her to 30 shots. That gave me enough time to get the .22 rifle cleaned for Patty, and get her back in the fight. I cleaned the .22 pistol while Abby waited, and then I gave it to her. I let the two women resume our firepower session and I got us fresh drinks and food so we could keep up the barrage. I also checked all the doors and windows on the first floor to ensure nothing had gotten inside, and we were good to go.

That process went on for something like ten hours. Eventually we had killed so many of them the bodies were stacking up so high the windows were in danger of being smashed, and then the zombies could find a way to get inside. About that same time the number of zombies outside began to thin, but they kept coming in waves as more and more made their way across the bridge and into the center of campus. The thinner mass of undead meant we could rest some though, and I let Patty take a break.

Abby refused to leave me alone. That girl is a worker Mr. Journal. There’s just no fucking quit in her. I watched her that day and night as she fired her little pistol down into the crowd, and she’s a machine. She lines up her shot, controls her breathing, and gently squeezes the round off. One after another. Textbook. If I had a camera, I could use her to teach other people how to shoot. It’s crazy to think she was just a normal, nerdy high school girl a year ago. Today, she’s a hardcore post apocalyptic badass bitch with a snarky sense of humor. I’m smiling just writing it. I'm so fucking proud of her.

We pissed through over a thousand rounds of .22 the past few days. I haven’t done an official count since, but we were firing a lot of bullets. The weapon jams came and went, and got better when we cleaned the guns and gave them a break to cool down. Unfortunately, while the .22’s were down resting, we switched to the M15, and the Ruger M77. We had a fair amount of .270 kicking around, and with the additional range afforded by a scope, I was able to let Patty warm up to the M15, and I hammered down a handful of the undead further out. We saved all the brass on the outside chance we find reloading gear. Sooner or later we’re bound to.

Upside: killed a lot of fucking zombies. Downside: we pissed through all but five rounds of .270, and we burned up 300 or so rounds of the 5.56mm. This was such a bitch. I mean, I can’t say I didn’t expect us to have to deal with the undead, but not all at once, and not right here on campus. What good fortune Mike brought all that ammo for the trade. Wow, right? Either I’ve got a guardian angel, or the devil takes care of his own. Shrug.

Where was I? So yeah the entirety of the past few days have been a shit storm. The 4
^th
, 5
^th
, and 6
^th
were all the same. Waves and waves of the cocksuckers drawn in from the noise we were creating. We did notice some weird shit. Remember how I said they were all carrying books? Well, after we started firing into the huge crowd, they tossed the books, and sort of returned to “normal.” None of the additional dead folks that came to campus had books, just the first two or three hundred or however many we had.

Gilbert was never attacked. He also never attacked the undead near his house. Here’s the weird part… the undead that were near his house never left when we started shooting, which just trashes the idea that they are all drawn to noise. I have no idea what to think about that. They were clearly watching him to make sure he didn’t leave to interfere with what was going on here. Which tells me they are either far more intelligent than we’ve been giving them credit for, or someone, somewhere, somehow, is controlling them. Not fucking cool.

Gilbert laid low with his AK and remained ready in the event we suddenly were overwhelmed. Fortunately, we never got to the point where running away was our only option. The door held, and the barricades I built for the windows cracked, but held out until our reinforcements arrived.

Speaking of which… This morning a few hours after dawn rolled in the campus apparently fully repopulated itself. A few hours prior to dawn we declared a cease fire because the campus had more or less been cleared out. We figured if we kept low, and didn’t show ourselves through the windows, we might get a few hours of rest. I’m happy to report we got about four hours of sleep.

When I poked my head up high enough to look outside, there were at least another hundred undead moving about in the area of the campus. I had this odd feeling that I was watching hound dogs sniff out their prey. I was just busted and broken, because I knew we’d have to blow through a ton of ammo to get the damn campus clear, and I knew the Westfield folks were enroute. 

We got Gilbert on the radio and went over what to do. We agreed that starting at about eleven am we’d start calling for the Westfield folks over the radio. Our radios probably had a five mile reach or maybe more, so we hoped we’d get them and alert them to the situation before they just drove in and got mauled. Gilbert made a transmission every thirty seconds or so for about half an hour until Mike finally came back.

I won’t go into the whole conversation, but between all of us, we formulated a reasonable plan that wound up working out fairly good. Mike only came with one humvee, but he had Gavin and another one of his soldiers, a kid named LaFrenz. All three had full combat loads and their M4’s, which meant they had plenty of firepower. Despite a whole bunch of crossed fingers, the Westfield armory had no up-armored humvees with .50’s in a turret. Or M109 grenade launchers. Shit that would’ve been sweet as hell. Nonetheless…

The two vans were still obstructing the bridge, so driving onto campus was out of the question. We decided that it would be best to lure some of the zombies away, and divide and conquer. Mike and company rolled into Gilbert’s place, and the four men managed to wipe out all the undead up Auburn Lake Road and around Prospect Circle in just a few minutes. Apparently there were very few still walking up the road.

Gilbert loaded his old ass into the humvee, and the men came down the remainder of Auburn Lake Road and stopped short of the bridge. They engaged the small number of undead on their side of the bridge, and proceeded to light up the undead near admissions and the staff offices. Now from our perspective we saw the undead turn and start moving instantly. They immediately went to the source of the noise, and that was our cue to start shooting. Once the crowd was halfway to the humvee or so, we started firing, and then the undead were lost as to what to do. Monkey in the middle.

Half kept moving towards the other guys, and half stopped and came back towards us. The monkey in the middle tactic bought the soldiers and Gilbert about thirty extra seconds, and they piled into the humvee and backed up fifty yards, and out of our site. They stopped, and continued firing on the advancing crowd. They had to do a retreat like that two more times, and by then, we had eliminated almost all of the zombies that had been surrounding Hall E.

I radioed to them we were all clear, and they could return, and after a handful of shots, they said they were returning. For the first time in… four days? Patty, Abby and I left Hall E. We had to go out the side door where the deck was because the front fire door where big blue was stored had bodies piled up four feet deep. The smell outside was bizarre and horrible to say the least.