Adrian's Undead Diary Enter the World of AUD

February 18^th.

                We have a plan.  It is without doubt risky, but if it works, we’ll be heroes.

                Kevin, Mike, Patty, Michelle and Abby went around the past couple of days and built support up for a deep incursion into the city.  I am shocked to report Mr. Journal that everyone was willing to lend whatever assistance we needed.

                Kind of shocking.  I didn’t expect everyone to be willing to help.  I mean, obviously there are people who have little to nothing to offer, but for so many to simply offer up whatever they had to help is very humbling.

                Step one of the plan is roll to the gated community and clear it.  We’re going to roll out in a large team of about ten with the deuce so we can get inside the gates, and set up camp after we clear it out.  We’re anticipating clearing out the exterior areas and a single house on day one.  We’ll batten down the hatches overnight in that house, and then we’ll start clearing houses immediately on the day following. 

                Once the entire neighborhood is clear, and we’ve assessed the situation as far as supplies and fortifications are concerned, we’ll initiate step two of the plan.

                Step two is preparation for the lure.  We need a large set of lure locations that will draw in from a wide area.  Therefore, we need it to be either very loud, or very visible, or both.  Now wherever we lure the undead to needs to be where we can kill them, preferably efficiently.  As I said a hundred times, we do not have enough bullets to do this with guns.

                Our initial idea was to lure them to the Factory, and kill them there, but quite frankly, we have no frigging way of killing hundreds let alone tens of thousands of undead there.  I mean our options at the Factory basically boiled down to throwing rocks off the roof to kill them all, or taking the HRT out for a spin, and attempting to drive over a few thousand packed in undead.

                All aboard the failboat, if you please.

                We spun through multiple ideas.  Lure them to the college basketball arena?  Wasn’t feasible.  Too many entrances and exits to seal, plus there was too high a chance that the arena became an emergency shelter that day, and was still filled with the dead.  Opening it would make our lives worse.  What about underground?  There’s a small traffic tunnel we might be able to block off one end of.  Lure them in then… what?  Besides, the tunnel had zero visibility, which was part of the plan.

                Fire?  Fuck fire.

                So we started thinking of places that we could either seal off, or allow us to use some of our existing supplies or weapons in a vastly more sufficient manner.  We’ve already learned bombs and explosives are marginally effective, see my fire comments above, and I already said we don’t have nearly enough bullets.  However…   Kevin has an ample amount of Semtex on hand from his time in England.  Semtex is plastic explosive, and plastic explosive, if used correctly, can easily bring down a building.

                Quan is the closest thing we have to a demo expert.  It also helps that Martin and Blake are technically intelligent.  These three men working together gave us the inspiration for the plan we’ve settled on.  The only way we can efficiently use the Semtex to kill undead is to create either enough shrapnel to guarantee strikes to the brain, or to create a situation with the explosives that will result in a catastrophic event, destroying the entire body, or so much of it that they won’t be a threat anymore.

                We needed this all to happen in a place that didn’t need significant clearing, and preferably was nearby the downtown area I’d be heading into.

                I thought of our time at the hospital, and immediately had the perfect solution.  I asked how much Semtex we had, and how much Semtex we’d need to bring a building down.  We had enough for a few small buildings, or one really large one.  It’d depend on whether or not we had the time to place the explosives appropriately into the load bearing supports of the structure.  We’d need a construction drill, which fortunately we had.

                I asked if we had enough explosives to bring down a parking garage.

                Turns out, we do.  Two or three easily Quan said.

                And our plan was set.  We are going to move to the parking garage at the hospital, a mere ten blocks from Cassie’s workplace, as well as the parking garage sort of near the Factory for two large apartment buildings on the edge of the city.  The hospital garage is four stories tall, and the apartment garage is four or five stories.

                On the top floor of the garage we are going to build a massive fire.  Quan says he has some ideas on pyro shit he can mix up to make the fire burn very bright, and last a good long time.  While we set up the fire on the top level, we are going to drill and load explosives into the concrete pillars on the first two levels, ensuring that when we blow the explosives, the entire garage goes down in a heap.  We’ll do this of course when the garage has drawn in a few thousand undead, hopefully ten thousand each or so.  To assist in the overall lure factor, we are going to bring some spare working car batteries, find a car in the garage with a car alarm, jury rig the car with the new battery, and set off the car alarm.  Blake has assured us he knows how to set them up to go off indefinitely. 

                Once we have a full house, semtex goes boom, pillars go kaplowie, the garage collapses, and we make zombie brie.  Worst case scenario, the explosion and collapsing garage structures will make such a tremendous racket everything in a five mile radius will come a shuffling to find out what’s going on.

                While all that’s happening, we slip into the heart of downtown, and I try to find Cassie, or at least some kind of information as to what happened to her that day.  I have a sinking suspicion that I won’t have to search too far and wide for her body.  My bet is I’ll find her crashed car nearby, or she’ll be a starved husk in her office kitchen. 

                Not sure what I’m going to do if I have to put her down.  I might need to lean on my friends to get that done for me.  I’m now very glad Kevin will be there.  If there’s anyone in this whole world I want there with me to do this, it’s him.

                We start tomorrow.  We’re packed and ready to go with the HRT, one humvee, and the Deuce to visit the gated neighborhood.  While we’re doing that, another small team is heading to the Factory to get ready for a quick recon from there of the parking garage close to them.  For the first time in a long time, we’re not worried about making too much noise.

                We’re worried we might not make enough noise.

                -Adrian

NEXT ENTRY

February 16^th.

                I’ve made the decision to go into the city to Cassie’s work.

                I have sat up the past few nights, thinking long and hard about it, and Mr. Journal, fuck it.  I need this.  I need this because I need to move on, it’s the right thing for me to do, and Michelle is right.  I’ll never be able to fall in love until I move on.

                I want to be in love again.  Not like Mallory and I’s relationship either.  That was based on lust, and desperation, and not wanting to be alone.  She and I didn’t meet under the right circumstances, and we certainly didn’t do things the right way when we were getting our ball rolling.  I don’t regret Mallory and I for the relationship.  I regret Mallory and I because of my emotional detachment, and the way my lifestyle and choices compromised her ability to trust me and love me as a person.

                Mallory if you ever read this, I’m sorry.

                This evening I asked some of my closest friends to a private dinner in the upstairs of Hall E.  There’s an open space up there that used to be a common area, and I wanted privacy and their opinions on how I could do a run into downtown in the city as safely as possible.  My initial plan was me alone, but very quickly that got shot down.

                I am part of a Trinity, and the other two insisted on going with me.  I complained and complained, but the two of them simply would not take no for an answer.  I told them I’d just slip away in the middle of the night, but both Kevin and Michelle said they’d simply follow me.  They knew where I was going anyhow, and if we didn’t roll together with a solid plan, by leaving alone I’d just be guaranteeing that they’d arrive at the same destination in a much less safe manner.

                Within ten minutes of telling them I wanted to go alone, the idea had blossomed into a full fledged, Bastion wide operation.

                I could not allow all these people to help me on this without some secondary benefit.  It was unwise, and simply retarded.  The question became what secondary benefit would be enough to make it worth it, and what secondary benefit would motivate people to help me on this?

                Nothing I could retrieve from the office building where Cassie worked would be worth it.  Stacks of white copier paper, and files on her company’s clients would do us no fucking good whatsoever.  It became apparent to us that the assistance they provided during my “quest” or the benefits gained in preparation for said “quest” would be the activity that gave us the secondary benefit.

                This would need to be done in stages to work right.  No run into the city could be done without massive front end work to draw large amounts of the dead out of the center of the city.  Putting Lady Gaga on a CD player and hanging it from a few traffic lights simply wasn’t going to cut it.  We knew from our new visitors that some areas of the city were literally shoulder to shoulder with the dead, and moving that crowd out of the way would be essential for success.  I didn’t want to die carrying this task out.

                But where to draw them to?  And what to do with them once we got them there?  We didn’t come up with a concrete answer tonight, but the next couple of days, that’s one of our braintrust problems.

                Something we wanted to achieve in this:  capture and fortify the gated community we saw south of the city.  It’s a second settlement we can guard effectively, as well as being very strategically positioned for us.  It’s within radio range, positioned in an altogether different cardinal direction of the city, has tall brick walls surrounding we think ten to twenty houses, and has a very sturdy iron gate that we can park a truck behind to secure.  Once we’re in the place, we can clear each of the houses at our own speed, and viola… we’ve got Bastion 2.0 in a whole new place.  Water will be a concern, but with the yards and the fact that it is gated, we can easily plan an asston of crops in the spring, and by summer’s end, have a local harvest there to sustain whoever decides to move there.

                The motivation to take over a nearly fully secured settlement will be very popular.  If only to use as a big old Plan B should this place burn to the ground, or we get overrun by Jinx Fairies.  Either way, it’ll be good.

                We can use the new settlement as a staging ground for incursions into the city as well.  We can send one group in from one location, and a second group in from a second location.  Distract the undead, all that jazz.

                Sound good so far? 

                I can’t think of much beyond the second settlement that’s worth working for.  Quite frankly, that’s huge in and of itself.  Now the second large reason to do this is simply for sheer eradication’s sake.  If we can figure out a good plan and work on it for a few days to get it rolling, we might be able to lure out a buttfuckington of zombies, and get rid of them en masse.  Kevin and Martin and all them have been working on a plan for this for over a week now, and they’ve got some good ideas that might be worth putting to work.  We simply cannot shoot them all.  We do not have a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition left, and there is simply no way we can risk trying to kill that many undead with melee weapons.  More on that later.

                When it was all said and done I told everyone that their help was amazing, and how much I appreciated these people as friends and family. Abby and Hal (who incidentally sat next to each other at the small dinner, and are *clearly* giving each other the “look”) both said they would come with me.  Actually Abby said she’d go, and then Hal said “well if she’s going, I’m going” and that was the end of it for that pair.  Mike and Patty said they’d love to go, but they thought they’d be better off staying, and we all agreed.  So that makes five.  A small fire team, but one of good experience.  Michelle is a little bit of a bump on the proverbial log, but for some reason I really feel that she needs to come for this.  Savior of my soul that she is supposed to be.

                Speaking of Michelle, once everyone cleared out and started heading either to their individual rooms here in Hall E, or back to their rooms scattered across Bastion, Michelle was the last to leave.  She lingered upstairs, gathering dishes and empty glasses, picking up, and then she brought everything down to the kitchen where I was putting the small amount of leftovers we had away.  We had this really awkward moment when she was done, and I was about to head upstairs.  We hadn’t spoken at all since I gave her that flower, and to be honest, as elementary school as it was, I knew it was a big gesture.  Assuming of course she even knew that I was the one that gave her the flower….

                “So I had a question for you,” she says softly so that no one else on the first floor can hear her.  She wasn’t quite looking at me when she asked.  I think she was still washing a cup at the time.

                I stopped, leaned over near her, danger close, and said back, “yeah?  What’s the question?”

                She stops, thinks for a good long moment of awkwardness, and then says back to me, “I got a small rose on my desk the other night.  A silk one.  A little bleached from the sun but still very pretty.  Any idea who might’ve given that to me?”  As soon as she finished saying that, she looked up from the sink and right into my eyes.  God Mr. Journal that woman is just captivating.  Her eyes were almost, desperate to hear me say that it was me, and yet also afraid to hear the answer.  It’s hard to explain just how much she was saying with her eyes.

                “Well, when we were out the other day I grabbed it off a table at the hospital.  I didn’t know quite why I grabbed it.  I figured I’d give it to you.”  I was blushing.  Nervous.  Had that little butterfly feeling in the pit of my stomach.  Fear too maybe.

                She smiled.  Just a tiny, knowing smile that told me she already knew I was going to say that.  “I thought as much.  Does that mean we’re Valentines?”  She looked at me again, this time a tiny bit more playful.

                I couldn’t help but smile back at her, “well I realize you are probably more used to dating guys with Master’s degrees, and Argyle socks, but in an apocalyptic setting I felt pretty good about my chances.  Hope I wasn’t out of line giving that to you.”  Go with humor.  Always my first response.

                Michelle looked at me for a few seconds, put the cup she’d just washed in the dish drainer, and dried her hands on a towel.  I was leaning against the counter next to her, trying to stay close so our voices would be low.  With her newly dried hand, she reached up, gently ran her fingers around my ear in the sweetest way, said, “not out of line in the least Adrian Ring.  You and I can be Valentines any day,” and she leaned in and gave me a soft kiss on the cheek.  One more smile later, she put her coat on, and left the dorm for her bedroom near Syl’s in Hall C.

                I’m in deep shit with this woman Mr. Journal.

                Deep shit indeed.  I don’t want to push it down the drain though.  This is the kind of shit guys like me need to get in. 

                -Adrian

NEXT ENTRY

February 14^th.

                There is no way I can fit all of what I need to write in one sitting.  Far too much detail to cover.  The question becomes, where do I begin?  For starters, the weather held.  It was actually fairly nice the entire trip out and back.  Solid 45 during the day with sunshine, though it dipped down pretty damn abruptly when the sun settled.

                Vehicles on the run to the hospital and their passengers:

                HRT: Myself, Caleb, Abby and Hector

                Humvee One: Kevin, Amanda, Quan, Ethan

                Humvee Two: Martin, Fitz, Angela, Hal

                Deuce: Amanda, Mike, Patty

                Fifteen souls.

                Our plan worked so flawlessly for so long we felt like geniuses.  We felt like we had the whole city by the balls.  Our first real issue was when we stopped to plant our first noisemaker for our return trip.  Remember how I said we’d leave one set up at an intersection to draw zombies off our trail?  We’d managed a small posse on our ass by then, so we knew leaving the radio was a good idea.  The Deuce was best suited for putting the radios up.  The bed in the back was high up, and had space for us, and with a small step ladder we were more than able to get the ropes up around the lights and get the radios hung.  Other vehicles pulled security, and everything was fine.

                The problem when we hung that radio was not the encroaching of the dead.  Kevin called out movement to the south and half of us swung our guns in that direction.  I wished I had my ACOG on my weapon at that moment, but I didn’t.  The Aimpoint was all I had.  Several of the folks with optics said later on that they saw human movement.  Faster than the undead, moving from cover to cover, watching us.  Kevin said it was two people, one male, and one female.  They never did anything threatening to us, and when we felt things were stable, and the radio was playing, we left.  We’d adjust our route and plan home on the move.

                After that we had smooth sailing for some time. The hospital is right beside the college campus.  Same campus that Becca was at when the world shit the bed.  The building is shaped more or less like a giant U.  Inside the U are the docks we intended to breach at.  The ER that we wanted to avoid is on the wing of the hospital, near the large parking garage.

                The initial plan was to do a full loop around what amounted to a four block area.  It wouldn’t be perfect, but it’d give us a damn better idea as to whether or not getting out of the vehicles was even a good idea.  While not the center of the city, we were perhaps ten blocks away from what you’d call the center.  Where all the tallest buildings and the financial areas are.  Downtown if you will.  Downtown is where Cassie worked. 

                Our drive in and the loops around the hospital showed us it was feasible.  Surprisingly the amount of undead around the hospital was very low.  Incredibly low in fact.  Swerving the HRT back and forth slightly Caleb was able to hit and run over almost every single walker in the streets.  That bought us a tremendous amount of time when we hung our perimeter radios.

                Because we wanted nothing to see us drive away from the radio hanging, we dismounted from our vehicles, and those of us with suppressed weapons engaged immediately.  As I said, there weren’t that many undead.  I think at each of our four stops we had to put down less than a dozen walkers, which by my estimation is a motherfucking miracle.  We put holes in heads, and rolled out.  Nothing new to report there.

                The alley/street that the inner portion of the hospital was on was large.  During days of regular use, it was where the hospital parked their MRI truck, and where they took deliveries of supplies.  We figured the docks would be right near the storage areas of the hospital.  It didn’t make sense that they would cart shit all over the place when they had a dock.  We were right, for the most part.

                On the alley we parked a humvee at each end for security.  We put two bodies at each end of the street as shooters.  We parked the deuce and the HRT right at the dock, and proceeded to get the operation on.

                Five shooters stood in the back of the deuce, pulled away from the dock.  Nothing falling out of the dock could land in the truck, and nothing on the ground could reach up and into it.  They’d have to climb in, and as we’ve seen over and over, dead folks can’t climb for shit.  Martin bored a large hole into the metal dock doors with one of our more industrial drills, and he slipped a steel rod attached to a chain through the hole.  The chain was attached to the rear of the HRT, and with a slight push of the gas pedal, the heavy metal dock door came screaming off the tracks.  Caleb drove the truck forward, pulling the door well out of our way.

                When the door opened, we knew right then and there we were in for a long fucking day.  The door blasted away and we saw three undead standing where the door used to be.  They must’ve been drawn to the sound of us drilling the hole in the door.  I snapped two dead right off the bat, and Ethan put the other down.  They fell over the lip of the concrete dock and landed head down on the pavement.  Their necks and heads smashed into strange shapes when they landed.  There was no time to fix their fallen bodies. 

                We cleared the door off the chain, picked the chain up, and got the HRT situated out of the way of the humvees should they need to move to either end.  We left the deuce right there, away from the dock, the wall, and anything that could touch the bed, and we left Amanda in the back with a suppressed M4 to cover the center of the alley, and the docks should something slip behind us.  As I heard once before, if we lost the dock, we were fucked.  We’d have to fight our way out the front of the facility, through whatever was out there.

                So if you do the math, two shooters at each humvee plus one shooter at the dock left us with ten for the interior.  That’s a really large team for any kind of building clear, and at that point we’re looking at friendly fire problems.  It’s easy for three people to avoid shooting one another.  It’s a lot harder for ten people.

                The interior of the dock was a receiving area still largely filled with pallets.  A quick check told us the pallet contents were useless.  Inside that and to the right side was what I’d call a dirty warehouse, and then a clean warehouse.  The dirty warehouse stored linens, bed sheets, uniforms, etc.  The clean warehouse on the other hand… was a goldmine.  It was far enough inside like the medical warehouse that the temperatures stayed stable.  The doors were also heavily locked, and we needed to use halligans and a lot of muscle power to get the doors open.  There were clear signs that someone had tried to get into the rooms too.  Scratch marks on the metal frames, hack marks in the door itself, and smashed knobs.  Lucky for us, their patience ran out before the doors gave up the ghost.

                We almost filled the entire deuce in the first hour we were there.  IV bags by the case, boxes and boxes of medication, and highly valuable hospital supplies of every sort.  I cannot emphasize how large a haul that secure storage area was.  We should’ve stopped there, but we were so prepared to go deeper into the building, and we had another area to check out. 

                Right outside the “dirty” warehouse was the main hospital corridor.  Sitting on the inside of that door listening for movement was the closest thing to being on a landing boat during D-Day I can imagine.  The moment right before everyone leapt up out of the trenches to charge the enemy back in WW1.  Impending doom just inches away, and the only keeping you from it was a moment of courage.

                We opened the door once we were sure there was nothing on the other side.  Well, nothing standing right on the other side.  Ethan tugged the door open slowly with Martin as muscle behind him should we need to slam it shut fast.  The dark hallway beyond the door was cavernous.  Kevin and I were in the space of the doorway with barrels up, waiting for anything to come into view.  Nothing did, so we cracked chemlights and threw them down the hallway in each direction like light grenades.  One went about ten feet and stopped, the other skidded for quite some time.  I poked my head around into the hall and surveyed the scene.

                The shorter chemlight direction had about five undead moving our way.  I barked out contact as fast as I could and got my weapon up.  The first two or three rounds shot true, hitting faces and heads, but my next few sailed.  I stepped into the hallway further when I saw Hal and Abby moving to cover my back, and once I was in the clear in the hall, I put the others down.  Further down the hall in my direction I saw more targets, and I opened up on them as best I could.  Behind me as I engaged targets I heard Hal and Abby open up with their weapons.  Fortunately we were all equipped with suppressed guns, and our hearing wasn’t utterly demolished by firing in such a confined space.

                I turned to cover them and simply watched as they shot down body after body.  I think our headcount in that hallway alone was fifteen. 

                From there we had maps, and we knew where we were going.  Our main goal was the cafeteria.  We felt there had to be food inside it.

                The cafeteria was on the second floor, fortunately away from the wing of the hospital that had the ER area.  Judging from the appearance of the crashed cars and ambulances on the ER side when we were doing our perimeter sweep, we KNEW that side of the hospital was going to be bad news.

                The corridor ended in a set of double doors, turned right after that set of doors, and proceeded down the radiology department to a large emergency stairwell at the end of the building.  In all, it was maybe fifty yards of walk.  Not that far, but in a zombie infested building, you might as well be running a fucking marathon. 

                Doors doing in directions we were not heading were sealed with either chain and a padlock, or a special iron bar/hook that Martin made up for us.  It slipped through the handles on double doors preventing them from opening, yet could be removed easily by us when we needed to get through that door.  We barred all of the doors going away from us, and shut every other door that would stay shut without a human trying to open it.  That allowed us to move further into the hospital as a team, posting less sentries along the way.

                The second corridor after the double door was better than the first.  I think our headcount in that area was maybe a dozen, and the hallway was longer so they were more spread out.  By this point in the operation we were starting to get a good feeling.  I know that’s just stupid.  Literally giving the Jinx Fairy a plate at the dinner table, but dammit it felt good.  Our plan was going more or less flawlessly.

                That’s when we got radio contact from the humvees.  Caleb was the voice, “we’ve got live targets moving on us.  We’re taking sporadic inaccurate fire. We might need an additional body out here if they get closer.”

                We stopped, evaluated where we were and how we were doing, and decided to send Hal out to support them.  He was a good shot, and quite frankly, inaccurate fire can kill you just as easily as accurate fire.  Hal left us and went out to cover Caleb and Hector.

                Inside, we moved on.  The bottom floor was cleared by us in twenty minutes.  We secured the doors and entered the stairwell heading up to the cafeteria on the second floor.  The stairwell was empty of everything, so that went quickly.  A huge feather in our cap as we were about to enter the second floor hallway was the small window looking in.  It allowed us to see some of the action on the other side in the hall.  I smashed out the small window and that drew the attention of the walkers on the other side.  Kevin’s M4 had a flashlight on it, and he held his over mine, illuminating the shuffling dead.  The trick was that the door was an emergency bar door, so once they started pushing on it, the door would open.  We put two solid feet on the door, and started firing fast.

                It was mathematics at that point.  I went through a magazine and a half putting headshots through the window, never even opening the door.  Once we were reasonably sure the vast majority of the zombies were dead, we opened the door (or more accurately, let the dead bodies stacked up against the door push it open for us) and we were in the corridor that led to the cafeteria.

                Martin didn’t have to seal that doorway to the hallway.  There were stacks and stacks of tables and chairs blocking it off already.  It looked like a pretty classic last stand barricade.  There were three or four mangled zombies unable to walk, and we put them down with melee weapons.  Fortunately the cafeteria had a ton of floor to ceiling windows, spanning almost the entire room, and the natural light streaming in meant we saved batteries and chemlights.  The kitchen was wide open, and after a sweep to clear the space, we checked the kitchen and the stockroom. 

                We found nothing.  The place had been emptied.  Every single last bit of food had been eaten by the people in there.  It looked an awful lot like the people in the hospital had fallen back to the cafeteria, blocked off the entrances to the area, and lasted as long as they could.  Clearly the majority of them didn’t make it.  Some of them could’ve escaped from the stairwell we came up in, but there’s no way of knowing how many did.  Sadly, the vast majority of these people died right here.  Trapped in a hospital.

                That’s when things started going south rapidly.  Fitz was searching the body of a cop that had died in the cafeteria, taking his service pistol, handcuffs, pepper spray and all that jazz, when gunfire spidered several of the windows of the cafeteria.

                Fitz was crouched down, emptying the stuff into a small black duffel when he got broadsided by the gunfire.  He was right next to the windows, and the shooters outside must’ve seen him.  Kevin started screaming in anger, and the rest of either dived for cover, or went to the windows to find the shooter.  Ethan, Kevin, Quan and myself all moved fast into shooting positions, and we saw the shooter within seconds.

                I cannot stress to you how nasty we got.  All four of us dropped our sights on some motherfucker crouching down behind the trunk of a black Impala and went cyclic.  No mercy.  The suppressed weapons made no noise, but the bullets smashing through the glass made a racket.  I can’t say for certain how many rounds we sent into that car and the prick trying to hide behind it, but I know I swapped mags once and I was half out at the time, so at least 15 rounds from me.  More from the rest of the guys.

                Protip #1:  trunks do not stop 5.56. 

Protip #2: no trunk in the world can stop that much 5.56.

The man dropped to the ground bleeding out.  Ethan dragged Fitz into the middle of the cafeteria and started to administer first aid while we searched for more targets.  We were perfectly facing the area of the city where Caleb’s living targets were, and from the second floor, we had an excellent elevated vantage point to fire accurately on them.

I know I put down three.  I watched my little red dot walk across their center mass, and I felt the recoil, and I watched them fall.  I know three went to the great beyond using a ticket I punched.  I am fairly sure Quan and Kevin put one more down each, likely more. 

I called out to Quan and Kevin to go help Ethan and I pulled overwatch through the windows.  From the ground I worked with Caleb, and had them move out to check bodies and finish off the wounded as needed.  We took no more fire from living targets that day.

Ethan, Quan and Kevin were unable to save Fitz.  He took a large caliber round straight through his liver.  We can’t put a band aid on that kind of injury.  It fucking blows to lose a good person, especially for no good goddamn reason.

No survivors on the street level.

We managed to accumulate a rather large collection of good weapons and ammunition from the attackers though.  Still not sure why they attacked us.  If we head back into the city again, we’ll be damned sure to be very careful. These people had decent guns.  They weren’t that good with them, but beneficial accidents happen.

We got the fuck out.  Searching the rest of the hospital was pointless.  We wanted to get Fitz’s body back home, and get back to sort through all of our shit.  Plus, time was a factor, and the longer we were there, the worse it would be for us trying to leave.  It didn’t help either that the locals shot the joint up and made a fucking ton of noise.

The road back to Bastion was flush with the undead.  Caleb driving the HRT helped.  He’s played an awful lot of Grand Theft Auto, so he’s really good at hitting things with a car.  We completely avoided the radio we set up on the return trip.  We saw more living folks there earlier in the day, and we felt that might have been a precursor to the attacks later in the day.  Ergo, we said fuck it, and made a wide berth around that area.  In fact, with little to no snow left on the ground we even avoided the trip past the Factory, and drove straight here.

Our first order of business was putting Fitz on the fire.  Not a good scene in the least.  I won’t go into how the guys all reacted to it.  How we all reacted to it.  Michelle said some very nice words as Fitz went up in smoke.  I know this sounds bad, but she really looked beautiful as she spoke.  Just beautiful.

Fitz will be missed by all.

I already said the shit was a haul.  Meds, blah fucking blah blah.

Kevin’s been incognito and under the radar since the trip.  We’re all giving him space.  Emotionally we’re all fucking wrecked right now.  Ever since the damn clinic night we’re all beaten up, now even Kevin moreso.  It blows.

We’ve withdrawn quite a bit.  Laying low, sorting our shit and trying to be supportive of one another.  Focus has shifted back to the school and helping Michelle.  Hector, Martin and Blake are doing oil changes on our vehicles, and assessing our fuel supplies.  Low on gasoline, if you’re keeping track Mr. Journal.  We looked at some gas stations we drove by on the way in the other day and all the lids were off the tanks.  Not a good sign at all.

With the relative success we had the other day, I think we’re able to mount a small unit insertion into the city.  Deep into the city.  I don’t think I can do it alone though.  I will need some help setting up distractions.  I think I’m getting close to closure.  I think I can finally do this.  I think I can get over Cassie if I can just find her body, and put it to rest.

In the cafeteria, on the table next to where Fitz died was a small single stem vase.  It had a cheap silk rose in it.  I snagged it for whatever reason at the time when we were clearing out.  I put it on Michelle’s desk this morning.  It’s not the best gift, but it’s something.

It’s Valentine’s Day after all.

-Adrian

NEXT ENTRY