Adrian's Undead Diary Enter the World of AUD

November 27^th.

                Wassup Mr. Journal?  It’s Saturday, and I’m pretty exhausted.  It was nice to have a relaxing afternoon on Turkey day, but as the old saying goes, there’s no rest for the wicked.  Going to have to take a day or two off here.  My back is starting to act up, and I’m fairly sure I sprained a thumb when I caught it on a doorframe earlier.  Sore as hell.  Still too much to do though, and that means I’m right back at it. 

                Friday was sort of a light day for me.  I wound up waking up pretty late from my venison and vegetable rufee cocktail, so I decided to just do two houses and call it a day.  I stuck with the houses on Auburn Lake Road and just did the next two in line after the farmhouse where I shot the zombie that hung himself.  I’m moving along in a geographical sense.  Instead of just doing all the houses on one side of the road, I’m doing them as I come to them.  The two I did yesterday were more or less right across the street from each other, which saved me a lot of time.

                The haul was mediocre.  Fairly good amounts of durable foods, but the biggest items of note were a brand spanking new crock pot, and a perfectly new set of pots and pans.  Doesn’t sound like much really, but crock pots are the SHIT for lazy bachelors.  You can cook almost anything with little risk of burning or overcooking, and it almost always comes out awesome.  Fucking A, crock pot.  The pots and pans are just a big upgrade over the industrial crap I’ve been using here in the dorm.  Just nice to have better crap.  Probably shouldn’t call it crap though, seems counterproductive.  Just nice to have better things.  There.  Much better.

                So that’s about it.  Oh wait that’s not true.  One of the homes I went to yesterday had a reasonably well stocked liquor cabinet.  Lots of half drank bottles of the cheap stuff, but honestly, beggars can’t be choosers.  I don’t think I’m going to drink any of it.  I’m starting to think after seeing that car that having extra of stuff, and stuff I don’t need/want is a good thing.  Barter materials.  I might need to strike a trade someday and I know there were a lot of drunk assholes in this town.  They will probably trade good and trade hard for the cheap shit.

                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.  Makes me wonder if I need to seriously consider running the generator all day as well as all night.  At least during the winter months to keep the plants warm.

                So that was yesterday.  Not exactly riveting I know, but this is a feast or famine world for entertainment.  And by feast I mean I’m frequently the meal of choice.  Today was a little… less interesting than yesterday too.

                Three more houses cleared earlier today.  Zero undead, the same as yesterday.  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.  All in all 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.

                Remember Mr. Journal; 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 loadout 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.  I guess 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, as I said before, 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 shitstorm 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 and get that 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.  So 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 just laying around is also pretty 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 a little further 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 of the street, 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 another 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 clips, 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^ndclip pretty quickly doing that and sat back down in the car and started to reload my empty clips 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.  Couldn’t really worry about it though. 

                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 clips.  I closed in and used the pistol for the first time since clearing the campus.

                Safe parking lot.  Relatively speaking.  I reloaded my clips 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 pretty 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 inside.  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.

                Not gonna lie.  Did not have a plan.  I remember being all pissed off and getting angry and shit, but after a minute or so of sulking like a bitch I got myself together.  I had already burned through too much fucking ammo in my opinion, but that just meant I was pot committed.  I couldn’t fold without seeing the river and the river was inside the store.

                I needed to kill everything inside without going inside.  I was at a busted window, and had clear lines of sight to about ten of the zombies, so I decided to treat it like a firing range.  I checked the parking lot for any zombies that might’ve wandered in behind me, saw it was clear, and started popping off the dead folk in the store.  The expression fish in a barrel is pretty appropriate here.

                Like I said, I saw about ten, but wound up shooting nearly forty.  After I went through all my clips for the .22 there was still a few clambering to get though the window at me, and I stood there reloading as they slashed their own arms to ribbons reaching over the smashed glass in the frame at me.  They left wretched streaks of dark blood and bits of muscle, skin, and ligaments all over the building. Watching them mutilate themselves with no regard for their bodies still creeps me out.  They are so single minded and driven toward murder.  The smell coming from the inside was stomach turning.  After I reloaded the rifle I finished them off at ten paces like a gentleman.

                I waited a solid five minutes before I attempted to get the barricades open.  No go there.  I peeked around inside the windows and saw they had the makeshift doors padlocked and chained shut, and I would either have to blast the fuck out of the door with the shotgun, or go through the window.  I chose the window.  Right nearby was the damn blanket that someone had thrown on the body from the accident on “that day.”  Remember Mr. Journal?  The moving blanket?  I grabbed that, smashed the glass in the frame out, and threw the blanket over the frame.  I climbed up and through, and switched to the shotgun.

                Initially, I wanted to blow chunks.  The inside of the store was a motherfucking bloodbath.  It was thick as pudding on the floor for Christ’s sake.  Like I said, there were dozens of dead there by now, and some were still oozing stuff, and others clearly had oozed all their stuff at a prior date, likely just earlier that day, or perhaps a day or two ago at most.  Last stand kinda bullshit.  The grocery store Alamo.

                I slowly made my way over to the produce section and walked down the front of the store, checking each aisle for anything moving.  It wasn’t until I got to almost the very other end of the store that I saw something fucked up.  Way in the rear of the shop I could see the door to the stockroom.  Surrounding the door, scratching, clawing, pressing, was a small mob of zombies.  Three deep at least. 

                Of course you know what means by now.  Something worth eating was on the other side of the door.  Something living.  I had enough shots between the shotgun and Sig to kill all the zombies gathered at the door.  At this point though, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that.  From my cursory examination of the aisles I knew there was plenty of stuff worth taking already without adding any additional danger to this trip.  Of course my thoughts led me think I’d tip these zombies off to my presence if I tried to be sneaky, plus I just couldn’t leave these people, whoever they were, behind the door like that. 

                I crept down the aisle that was a straight line to them, and started shooting once I got to about 20 feet.  Head level shotgun blasts are flat out terrifying.  The spread of the pellets combined with the proximity makes for just a massive amount of damage.  With just the shotgun I was able to drop all the zombies before I had to start backpedaling.  Once they were all down, I drew the sword and finished the two or three that didn’t die.  To be honest, I was sort of in a panic wondering what was on the other side of the door anyway, and I wanted these fucking things dead before I had to deal with that.

                I think I’m psychic.  No sooner than I’d yanked the blade out of the ear of the last zombie the swinging doors flung open, and a huge prick jumped out with a double barrel shotgun leveled at me.  He was about five and a half feet tall, nearly as round as he was tall, and was wearing dirty bloody slacks and a button down shirt that was still buttoned and tucked in.  It was spattered with blood, but it was still tucked in.  His round belly hung over his belt sort of comically, I remember that.

                I also instantly recognized him as one of the managers of the store.  He looked scared out of his fucking mind.  He instantly started laying into me with threats at 140 decibels. 

                “Move and I’ll fucking blow you away you motherfucking prick!” I think was the first thing he said.  In response I just stayed frozen holding the sword.  I think I even shrugged a little at him.  Didn’t defuse the situation, pretty much made it worse.  He took two or three steps at me, stumbled a bit over one of the zombie bodies I’d just stabbed in the head, and started going down.  When he impacted the floor, half on a zombie, both barrels of the scattergun let loose, and he shredded a zombie torso into bits. 

                Double barrel shotgun.  Ruh roh asshole.  You’re outta bullets.

                So I forget exactly, but I think I kicked him in the face three, or maybe four times.  Not super hard, just really hard.  Hard enough that he knew I was pissed at him, and he knew I could kill him, but not so hard that it did kill him, or knock him out.  I put the sword away and grabbed his ass hard.  I pinned him up to the wall in a sitting position and got right down in his face.

                “What the fuck is your problem you asshat?”  Was the first thing I said to him.  At that point he pissed himself, and started talking incessantly through his busted lip and fucked up teeth.  Turned out I probably kicked him too hard in the face.  He could lose weight, but his face would be fucked up forever.

                To paraphrase his conversation, he essentially said he had “hired” local people to protect the store.  During the worst of the end of “that day” people started coming in and just stealing shit.  He offered free food, water, and money to anyone that’d help him keep the store safe.  About twenty folks joined in over the course of the day.  They kicked everyone out, fortified the place with the barricades, and had a pretty good thing going.  Late last night though, another group of locals came to get food, and a gunfight ensued.

                Best I could piece together from Chubby McSmashface was that there were heavy losses on both sides.  Most of the people died in fact.  The zombies inside here were the people that holed up with him, and the dead outside were likely the majority of those that died in the assault.  Once the first batches inside started going down… well, you can probably figure out what happened then.  Dead bodies make zombies, and zombies bite people…

                He and the single other survivor made it into the back room.  He stayed at the door, making sure they didn’t get in, and his remaining Alamo buddy went to the roof to make sure they weren’t assaulted again.  I’m guessing that was the shooter who tried to kill me on the roof.  Shitty news was that the shooter had taken all their spare guns and ammo up to the roof, and that the ladder to access it was pulled up.  Couldn’t get there from here.

                I’d heard enough by that point.  I understood his situation, even sort of agreed with his plan and whatnot, I just couldn’t give a fuck.  He just leveled a shotgun at me, and to be honest, I fucking KNEW he was going to try and kill me if he hadn’t tripped.  Thank God he was a nincompoop.  Yeah that’s old school Mr. Journal.  Trying to bring it back.  Nincompoop.  Try it out it’s fun.

                I pulled his ass to his feet, picked up his shotgun, and flung it over my shoulder towards the front of the store, and told him to get his fat ass marching.  If I so much as saw him again, he’d get all 12 gauges to the goddamn face.  I can still remember his lip quivering when he took off running.  I waited a few minutes until I heard him grunting to get out the window, making his final escape. 

                After that I checked the backroom.  By then it was mostly empty.  Usually grocery inventory was stored there, but it was long since gone.    I’m guessing they just restocked over the course of “that day” and by that point they had what they had on the shelves.  Once I knew it was safe, I went shopping.

                There was enough food in the store to fill three carts.  Most of it was total shit, but I couldn’t afford to leave anything behind.  Cans of generic beans, box after box of frigging Jello, luckily there was a few jars of peanut butter left, and there was a surprising amount of the organic aisle stuff there too.  I guess even with the apocalypse occurring people still weren’t interested in eating healthy.  Fuck em.   I’ll eat the shit.

                I realized with a sort of dim anger that the prick I’d just let go probably had a key to the padlocks holding the doors shut.  Whatever.  From the inside it was easier to hit the hinges on the doors, which I did with the shotgun.  Literally blew the doors off the hinges Mr. Journal.  Funny stuff I assure you.

                One cart at a time I sprinted across the parking lot and loaded it into my car.  First cart was no sweat, second cart was no sweat, and just as I loaded the third cart into my car, things started getting sticky.  Mr. Asshat manager was coming back.  He was running right down the middle of Main Street, full tilt, with at least 20 more zombies following him.  He didn’t make it though.  He gassed out and collapsed right on the solid yellow line and had every single last one of those undead fall on top of him.  His screams were long, and shrill.  Hearing him die was not as satisfying as I imagined it would be.  It’s not cool to go that way.

                I got my car loaded as fast as I could, but they killed him and ate what they were going to eat very fast.  It was about then that I realized that they don’t sit and eat for long.  Once whatever they’re after is dead, they seem to lose interest.  Eating is almost like a secondary thing for them, it’s just an effective weapon I think.   I don’t know exactly.  Not sure about much anymore really.

                I got in the Camry and started it.  I backed out as fast as I could, but I backed up a wee bit too much.  The ass end of the car plowed into the first handful of zombies that were coming my way, and the car backed up, and onto the bodies.  Here’s my ground clearance story.

                Bodies, underneath cars with low ground clearance, mean the vehicle’s wheels make little to no contact with the ground.  Wheels that aren’t on the ground cannot make a car go forward, or backward.  I was stuck, parked on top of five or six zombies, with at least a dozen more right on their heels.  So to do a quick callback to the pros and cons of ground clearance on vehicles in the post zombie apocalypse car market…. I highly suggest investing in cars with enough room underneath to drive over a dead body.  End of callback.

                I ran like a bitch.  I ran like a sissy boy in a prison shower.  I ran like the wind.  I ran like Secretariat.  I ran my ass right back into the grocery store.  Now these motherfuckers can’t run, which is one of the biggest saving graces.  They have two speeds: slow, and stop.  Sprinting back to the store gave me the time to gather my wits, make sure my guns were loaded, and start to shoot.

                Now like the moron I am, I left the shotgun, and the .22 in the front seat of my car.  All I had was the Sig, and the two spare clips.  I count my blessings here because inside earlier I managed to drop all those zombies at the back door without having to use the pistol.  How fucking clutch was that huh?  You know my being alive at this point is by the slimmest of margins, and largest piles of shit-ass luck.

                Sometimes Mr. Journal… a little luck is all you need.

                I opened fire once I got my wind back.  It took me every fucking bullet I had to drop the remaining 15 or so zombies.  In fact, when I started to run low, I switched to shooting at their knees to ensure I’d hit them and drop them.  Their legs move less than their heads when they’re walking, and I figured I’d just kill them with the sword anyway.  Which is just what I did.  Empty gun sitting in my holster, I waded carefully into the pile of half-dead undead, and did what I had to do.  Fuck my life right?

                I started back across the parking lot when I heard this super ugly thump/crunch from behind me.  I spun around and saw a twitching body right at the front of the store.  I was totally like what the fuck? Then I realized it was the shooter from the roof.  I had shot him, he had died up there, and in his IQ impaired zombie state, he walked off the edge of the roof trying to get at me.  It must’ve been a good 40 foot drop, and he was pretty well dead for good when he hit.  I got a good chuckle out of that.  It also forced me to look in that direction, and that’s when I saw the rifle he dropped earlier.

                I jogged over, saw it was busted to shit, and got pissed.  However, in some freakishly bizarre twist of coolness, the scope on the rifle was pristine.  Whatever, right?  My .22 needed a scope, so I took the rifle, emptied the shooter’s pockets of ammo (.30-06 if you’re curious, which was cool because later on I got a good rifle in that caliber) and got back to the car. 

                All of the zombies underneath it were either pinned, or dead for good.  I did need a different car though. I had to search pockets and parked cars for more than an hour until I found keys and the corresponding car.  Totally hit a homerun though.  Ford FOCUS!  BOO YA!

                World ends, free cars everywhere, and the best thing I can get is a Ford Focus?  Really God?  Really?  All I’m saying is that something, a little nicer would be pretty sweet, right?  I shouldn’t bitch.  With all the luck I’ve had so far I have zero fucking ground to stand on.

                I had to push the cars out of the way in the lot to get the Focus into the road, but I did, and got the groceries moved about.  I waved longingly and lovingly to the car that had served me so well, and I came back here.

                What a shitty ass trip Mr. Journal.  Shrug.  I did get a lot of food.  Even if it was just Spam, Beans and Jello.  Of course it took two or three weeks for my split open chin to knit shut.  Butterfly bandages and gauze and all that jazz.  Still have a pink ugly scar along my jaw line from it.

                Ta-ta for now big guy.

                -Adrian

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