The Failed Coward (30 page)

Our meeting was concluded after everything was exchanged, and he got into his new truck and sped off. I don’t know where he’s going to get fuel for it, but if he refilled the gas tank after draining it, he’s got a source somewhere. We’ll see him on the 13
^th
at noon.

After that, we decided we would roll on some neighborhoods to scout them for undead contents. Our new plan was sticking with the recon to contact idea. Literally, we find trouble, and then kill it. Killing every single zombie in town is a goal, and we put a decent dent in the populace yesterday and today. Most of it was stopping just on the fringe of a large pack of them and popping them off with the .22 rifles. Once the crowd had been thinned to just one or two, we waded in with the halligans, or bats, or whatever, and we went to town face to face. We really need to conserve ammo as much as possible. Especially in light of Blake’s conservative estimate of 25 survivors in town. Could mean there are a lot of undead out there. 

Yesterday we cleared zero homes, but put down about thirty undead, and formulated our plan for today.

Now as for last night… It got ugly when we got back. Maybe ugly isn’t the right word. Animated. Spirited even.

I want to check out that farm, as does Patty and Abby. Gavin wants whatever Abby wants, but Gilbert is adamantly opposed to the idea of checking it out now. I’m concerned that we’ll leave them alone long enough to establish a strong enough powerbase that if they are indeed doing what we think they’re doing (trafficking in humans for food or slavery or whatever) when we finally go at them, they’ll be dug in like an Alabama tick. (awesome movie reference for you Mr. Journal) 

Gilbert is fully confident that when we decide to visit them, we can handle them, but we need to think on it for a few weeks, and let the idea percolate. More of town needs to be cleared out before we can just saunter over and start an intel gathering operation on what seems to be a fairly heavily armed group of people. 

Now during the heat of the moment, I disagreed rather adamantly with him, and the girls joined in. We got pretty nasty and mean to each other, and at one point I walked the fuck out. Ollie and Melissa were clearly uncomfortable. I was sitting on an old plastic lawn chair on the side deck of Hall E pissed at the world when Ollie came out to visit me. 

He patted me on the shoulder, gave me a short message, then went back inside.

He said, “Adrian, this isn’t Westfield. This town is still overflowing with the dead. For all we know, they took those children in to shelter them, and we can’t change all our plans based on what some young man saw through a rifle scope six months ago. You’ve got a responsibility to us, and gathering food and supplies, and cutting down the number of dead is the real priority for this family.”

I can’t argue with that. I just can’t.

I went back inside, apologized to everyone, quickly finalized our plans for today, and went to bed. I didn’t want my shitty attitude to be a cancer anymore that night.

Today was very awkward. Gilbert didn’t say shit to me all morning, and finally he only spoke to me after I approached him and apologized. I told him I was an ass, and he was right, and I was being hasty because I wanted to fly right over there and rescue those kids. I guess I really want to be a hero.

Gilbert nodded, and said he understood. After that, things were better.

We started on some houses nearing the more industrial area of Main Street. There are a lot of loop side streets to do, as well as some dead end streets, and a couple general neighborhoods that are somewhat isolated. I figure we’ve got the remainder of the entire month of April before we actually reach the area where the grocery store and the pharmacy are.

I will post updates as necessary, but frankly, I am guessing most of it will be the same old, same old. After we clear for a few weeks, maybe we can reassess the farm idea, or maybe I can talk Blake into sneaking over there for us, and gathering information for us.

We have a meeting with Mike and the Westfield folks on the 15
^th
as well. Hopefully we’ve got some things for them, and I hope they have some neat things for us. 

-Adrian

April 11
^th

We cleared a few houses today. I am happy to report that our new rule of observing for trash piles at houses has already paid dividends. One of us saw a house with a massive pile of garbage outside of it, and wouldn’t you know, we encountered about six undead inside of it. Without doubt that could have been a messy clear for us, but it wound up going really well due to our Westfield chainsaw tactic. Gavin continues to be useful for us. Go Gavin. 

I’m so exhausted. Genuinely tired. I am so tired that I have reached the point of being loopy. I think I’m catching the cold thing Gavin had a few days back. It might be allergies I suppose. I’m not a doctor Jim. My head is stuffy, my damn nose is periodically super runny (like, dry and fine, or complete sinus purge), and I’m fighting a bitch of a headache in my temples right after I wake up in the mornings. I’m taking a few ibuprofen here and there to stave off the worst of it. It’s irritating more than disabling though.

We’ve had amazingly good weather. I’d guess and say almost 60 to 70 during the day, and reasonably warm at night. The heat has only kicked on a few times during the night, which is awesome news. 

One of the houses we found today was burnt almost to the ground. All that remained were a few of the timber frames, and the scorched plumbing. Obviously there was nothing there today, but one strange thing was left behind. For some reason the roof of the garage on the house survived the blaze, and painted on the shingles in bright yellow paint were the words:

HELP US! WE ARE FREEZING!

When were saw that, we all stopped and took a moment to absorb it. All we see are the words now, but if you think about what was happening to the people who wrote it at the time they wrote it, it hits you. It hits me at least. The thing that I can’t escape is when it was painted on the shingles. In order for them to have written it on the roof, they would’ve had to go up on the roof before the snow, in either October or November at the latest. If they were freezing then… I can’t imagine how bad it was for them when the temperatures really dropped.

In my mind I envision that desperation drove them to start a fire, and something bad happened, and now whoever lived there is dead by their own hands. Remember when I was on the roof of the grocery store way back when? January was it? February maybe? And I saw all the house across town burnt out, and still smoking?

Morbid thinking to sit back and try and do the math to see how many people died just like this the past few months. People forced to set their furniture on fire, or run their propane stoves at night for warmth. We’ve (I’ve) found a few zombies over the cold months that had no wounds at all. No markings, no injuries, no nothing. They died through no noticeable exterior violence.

Maybe they died of a heart attack, or diabetes, or cancer, or masturbatory chafing, but I’m starting to realize that a lot of them probably froze to death. The really skinny ones, you know the kind, with the exposed ribs, bloated stomach, and bony elbows that look sharp enough to pass for a garden trowel? It’s obvious that those people starved. 

So many fucking questions are raised every time we go off campus. How did this guy die? Where did these people get three cases of air fresheners? Why did that zombie tap his watch three times that day? 

Questions upon riddles, wrapped up in feces encrusted enigmas. Yawn. I tire of trying to figure it out day after day. Gilbert sits back and just takes it all in. He works on a different level than the rest of us, seeing things that we haven’t, or won’t. I know he’s still sandbagging us on something, but I don’t know quite what it is yet, or when he’ll finally come clean to me.

I trust him, but there’s still some great secret to the old Green Beret that has yet to come out into the light. One day it will though, and I’m sure we’ll all shit bricks. I just hope it’s a good shitting of bricks, and not the bad shitting of breaks. (i.e. omfg I won the lottery, versus omfg my nana died in a S&M den dressed up as a French maid while being DP’d by a donkey and a horse)

That’d be awkward. Poor nana.

I’m still a little pissed and hurt over the farm discussion we had the other night. I’d like to say I’m over it completely, but that’d be a lie. I still feel like I’m the best decision maker here, and that might be well be true, but I need to remember that I don’t always make the best decisions. I might be right 90% of the time, but that other 10% of the time, I have this awesome knack of getting someone killed. I am the ubah.

I need to remember that 10% every time someone disagrees with me. It might be someone’s life riding on me listening to what they have to say. It’s astounding what kind of decisions are now life or death for us. 

Walking outside on campus, the safest place in town right now as far as we know, is still a potentially life or death activity. 

Let me illustrate how ludicrous my life is. Rewind life a year from right now. April of… 2010. Imagine you’re sitting on your couch, sipping on a tall glass of your favorite refreshing carbonated beverage while watching some lame sitcom because you can’t afford to go out and do the things you want to do because you’re responsible, or too old to have fun anymore. You think to yourself; “Wow, I could really go for some fucking tortillas and salsa!”

But then you realize oh shit, I watched the news earlier, and I know all those crazy murderers that killed everyone in the area are outside- SOMEWHERE. I don’t know where they are, but I know if they see me, they’ll try and kill me. And I know they won’t stop trying to kill me until I’m successfully hidden, or I kill them first. Kill all of them first, of course.

So as you sit there on your couch, sipping your favorite carbonated beverage, watching your lame sitcom, lamenting that you should’ve spent more time doing your homework, and focusing on grades instead of trying to get laid, or have fun, wishing you had tortillas and salsa you ask yourself, “Am I willing to die for that tortillas and salsa?”

That’s our life right now. Seriously. Minus the lame sitcom part.

If we want to walk over to the cafeteria to get one of few remaining bags of Doritos, we need to realistically weigh the likelihood of whether or not we’ll die doing it. Granted, campus is about as close to 100% safe as anywhere can get right now, so the likelihood of one of us biting it going across the way on campus is slim, but you get the point right? Right?

Crazy shit to wrap your nugget around. Almost as crazy as hearing that your nana died while dressed as a French maid in a S&M club while being DP’d by a horse and a donkey.

Almost. Unless you kinda knew your nana was a freak to begin with. That’d change everything. Like, a lot.

I’m all over the place from this damn cold, or allergies, or whatever the hell I’ve got going on. I feel like I’ve got cotton balls packed into my skull and all the pressure inside is making me stupid. Making me more stupid. I can damn near
feel
my IQ sinking as I type this. Otis has decided to knead my stomach and shoulder as I type this. He starts at the top, and works his way down, then starts over again. Otis wants Adrian to go to bed so he can crawl up into Adrian’s taint to stay warm.

I love Otis, but man he’s fucking needy. 

I need to get laid. Cassie, I love you, and I seriously hope you understand what’s happening to my penis. It’s dying a slow, lonely death. I’m drowning it in an assortment of lubricants. My current idea of sexual variety is whether or not I use KY, or Juniper Breeze lotion to beat off with at night. I’ve done the St. Louis dry rub a few times too, just to have it a little rough, but I chafed a smidge, and frankly, penis chafing is just rotten, especially when you start to sweat the next day while clearing houses filled with the undead. The shit stings. 

I am hoping I have a dream of Cassie here shortly so I can ask her if she minds if I try and get my dick wet. I feel weird wanting to find someone to sleep with after all that’s happened, but I’ve got to get this tension out, and I desperately need to feel…

I need to feel wanted again. Wanted in that way, if only for a little bit.

Tomorrow we are clearing more houses yet again. I hope we find some decent shit, because the last couple of days have been less than stellar. Just lots and lots of houses that have already been picked over by people. We’re meeting with Blake on Walt’s street at noon on the 13
^th
, to touch base with him to see what’s new in the land of ostracized strange young men. Hopefully he shows up alive for the meeting. I say alive because let’s be honest, there’s a chance that he might still show up, and not be alive, and that’d pretty much suck.

Westfield is scheduled to visit us here on the 15
^th
. I’m thinking I might talk to Mike about maybe having one or two more people come here to live. I don’t know if that’s too soon, it probably is. I definitely think I’ll talk to Mike about whether or not he thinks I have a legit shot at hooking up with one of the girls over there. I can’t recall too many faces, but there has to be a girl over there willing to get with me. 

Once is really all I’m looking for, but a repeat offender wouldn’t be turned away.

I feel terrible for thinking about sex, but I know I need to find a way to move on. Perhaps frivolous sex is the key? I keep reminding myself of the dream I had where Cassie told me that someone else was out there for me? I wonder when it’s okay for me to listen to her?

Shrug. As I’ve already said, I’m sick of trying to figure this shit all out.

I’m off to bed before Otis chisels a hole in me. Peace out Mr. J, keep your powder dry.

-Adrian

April 13
^th