Journals of the Survivors (The Living Saga Novellas Book 1) Read online

  “This was my buddy’s house. Well, his granny’s house, at least. That’s her goose,” I said pointing at the concrete bird. “She’d dress it up for all occasions. Must have been raining the last time she dressed it,” I said when I looked closely at the melted plastic. It was still raincoat yellow in some places, but most of the plastic was blackened.

  “So,” Eric said slowing down again. “What’s your point?”

  I pointed behind the carport. Of course, the carport, along with every driveway, was empty. The cars had been used with trees and debris to make the wall. But behind the carport was a shortcut.

  “My buddy’s cousin lived in a subdivision over there. They had a path worn through the forest. It takes about twenty minutes to drive it. A good hour if you walk on the road. Or,” I said smiling, “five minutes if you take the hidden path in the woods. If they are following us, they’ll never know where we went.”

  We quickly dashed through and snaked our way into the thicket. Even though the leaves were starting to fall, there was enough cover to keep us hidden. The trees were thick, but as I’d promised, a clear path zigzagged its way through. I’d been through it myself at least a dozen times before.

  But, I didn’t know what awaited us this time. On the other side of the trail was a little neighborhood full of mobile homes. I didn’t know if they would still be standing in one piece, or if they would be burnt down. I did not expect what was there.

  “I thought you said that your buddy’s cousin lived here,” Lucas said as soon as he stepped out.

  “He did,” I said in shock.

  I could see the paddocks where the trailers and doublewides used to sit, but they were all gone. They weren’t burnt down, they were gone completely.

  “I’ve been wondering,” Collins said.

  I looked unsure for a minute. Then he continued. “There aren’t enough cars, busses, or automobiles to build the wall. Even with the downed trees and random junk they used, there wouldn’t be enough to build a wall that long and high.”

  “They’ve used the trailers in some places,” I said. I could only imagine what face I was making when I said it. I was honestly in shock. They’ve pulled up parts of the town to create the wall. “How far do you think the wall goes?”

  “No idea,” Collins said. “You’d know best. How far into the city did you go last time?”

  “A few miles,” I said. “We went to the hospital. From there, I was taken past the creek and near Crockett Springs Park, but I didn’t see any part of the wall there.”

  “Probably still in progress,” Eric said. “It’s a hell of a project. I’d be shocked if it was even done now.”

  “It looks like they’re trying to enclose the northeast part of the valley,” Collins added. We know that it’s only this side of Highway 66. I doubt they’ve included Highway 11W. Depending on how far up they’ve gone, it could easily be fifteen miles long. And five miles wide, I’d imagine.”

  “No need to speculate,” Eric said. “Besides, we need to get going. We can’t just stand out here in the open.”

  I started to try to gather a plan immediately after this. “Okay, so West Broadway is blocked off. That’s where I got stuck and cornered last time. It’s not far. It’s toward the top of the big hill. If we continue to follow this path we are on here, there’s no telling when we will hit the wall again. If the wall is enclosing Tuggle Hill, it’s probably going to go around Stevens Hill too. It’s the next one up. But there’s a huge gap before the next little mountain. I would bet the wall comes back to this side before Jarvis Hill.”

  “Good God,” Eric interrupted. “Did they name every dang mountain in this city?”

  “What can I say?” Collins responded. “People like to lay claim to their hills.”

  “Anyway,” I said as if they’d never interrupted me, “if it does come back there, then it probably circles around the middle school. That’s the most logical progression. That way they could just use Main Street to carve it out. The buildings are close enough together that they wouldn’t need as much for the walls.”

  “But why did they include the mountains at all?” Lucas asked. “It doesn’t make sense why they would. It would be easier to leave them out.”

  “Dunno,” I said. “But we need to try to get back home for today. We need a different plan. We know what we need to know for now. These guys are the shoot first ask later types.”

  “So, how do you suggest we proceed?” Eric asked looking back to me. I didn’t pay much attention at the time, but he had a mischievous grin.

  “If we keep up this path we’re on, there’s a cutout in the trees. They ran the power cables over this mountain,” Collins said.

  “Follow that line to the wall. Hopefully, we can find a way across there,” I added.

  It was just two hours of us trotting along a fairly uneventful hike. The most excitement was a rough patch of brambles that Lucas managed to get his beard caught in. It wasn’t terribly long to begin with, maybe six inches. Without hesitation, he pulled his knife out and lopped a hunk of hair off. It kind of made him look like an unbalanced psychopath.

  Even when we got to the wall, there wasn’t much excitement. We did finally get to see the trailers as part of the wall. They had been flipped on their sides so that the roof faced the inside, toward the badlands.

  “Well, that goes on for a ways,” Lucas said. “How should we proceed? Over?”

  “Through,” Eric said.

  “Through?” Lucas asked.

  Eric then proceeded to use his machete to pry the sheet metal from the roof. After a few minutes, he had a huge section removed. He and Lucas then spent ten minutes taking turns kicking the ceiling in.

  I had a sense of vertigo climbing sideways into the ceiling and walking on the walls, but I managed. Once we were inside, we stacked furniture to get to the front door. We proceeded to climb to the top, or rather front, of the trailer. We used the metal frame of the undercarriage to climb back down to the outside.

  “See,” Eric said once we were on the other side, “through. Now, we just have to walk home.”

  It was, based on the time we got back to the high school, about a three-hour walk. It would have been much shorter, except we stayed mostly in the trees and off of the road.

  As soon as we got back, we had bad news delivered to us. Squirrel had not yet returned.

  Section 3

  From the journals of Cedric Donahue

  Copied by Dr. Harold Moore, MD.

  Upon arriving and finding that Squirrel had yet to make it back to the school, we decided to take another vehicle and look for him. It was only about three in the afternoon by this point, so we figured we had time to get back before dark. We thought he might have taken a wrong turn and just gotten lost. I didn’t know how he could have taken a wrong turn though. It was a straight shot, no turns until you turn into the parking lot.

  We used the armored Jeep Cherokee to make the run back the way we’d come. Of course, nobody volunteered to go with us. We probably couldn’t have taken anyone extra anyway.

  Of course, my family tried to get me to stay behind. All three of the other guys were single bachelors with no close relatives. Only Eric had family, and that’s who we were going after.

  I, on the other hand, had loads of family at HQ. Plus, I had a very ticked off girlfriend. This may not be the place to write this down, but for the sake of future guys out there. If the end of the world comes again, living in the same building with your family, your girlfriend, her family, and a bunch of strangers makes it really awkward to have a dating life.

  When we were prepping to leave again, Karli came to find me. She had been taking care of the younger kids and didn’t know we’d gotten back.

  “So, you were going to leave without saying goodbye?” She asked a bit angrily.

  “I never say goodbye,” I reminded her. “Only see you later. Because I will. Plus, it’s bad luck to say goodbye.”

  “You know what I mean, jerk.
” She said. “Why are you leaving again? You just got back.”

  “Squirrel’s lost.” I said.

  “Who?” She asked.

  “Eric’s boy.” I explained. I still couldn’t remember his real name.

  “Oh, right,” Karli said. “Did he not come back with you?”

  I was right in the middle of changing my boots. My first pair were soaked through from the hike. I stopped so I could look Karli in the eyes as I talked. “No. We sent him back early with the truck. The rest of us hiked a bit and walked home.”

  “Why?” She asked losing some of her temper.

  “Long story,” I said. “But listen, I’ll be back soon. Should be before dark. That gives us two and a half hours. We’ll make it. With a rabid Squirrel.”

  I finished saying see you later to Karli and I left with the guys. I knew that if I got back one-minute past sundown, she’d kill me.

  Collins drove the Jeep most of the way back to where we were earlier in the day. We stayed a bit outside of town just in case the jerk squad was looking for us. As of right then, they didn’t seem to know where we were living. We wanted to keep it that way.

  We turned the Jeep back the way we’d come and started back slowly, looking for any signs of Squirrel. After a mile or so, Eric said, “Woah. Stop the car.”

  He pointed to the edge of the road, just off the shoulder. There was a set of tire tracks in the mud. They were fairly new. We wouldn’t have seen them on our walk back. From the tree line on the other side of the road where we were walking, they would have been invisible.

  “Jerk or infected?” I asked.

  “Dunno,” Eric said. And he couldn’t have known. There was no way to know which of the two, or anything else, could have made Squirrel drive into the ditch. But the suspicious part was that the truck was not there anymore. Squirrel, or someone else, had clearly driven it out.

  “Maybe he got disoriented after he ran it off,” Collins suggested.

  “Maybe,” Eric agreed. “If he went off here,” he added looking around.

  “He could have taken one of those roads,” I said pointing. Ahead of us were two roads. One going east, the other west. I don’t know the name of the smaller road, but the one to the east is McKinney Chapel Road. It used to be a fairly popular road when there was still civilization. I quickly relayed that information.

  “Alright,” Eric said, “the popular one, McKinney. Let’s take it since it’s the bigger road. We’ll go a few miles and see what we see.”

  Again, we loaded back up into the Jeep. I looked out of the window at the sky. Only thirty minutes or so had passed, but it was starting to get dark outside.

  Eric must have noticed me looking to the sky. “Yeah, ‘bout to rain.”

  We followed the road for a couple of miles. It really looked like it hadn’t been touched much. Almost like the infection never reached this part of town.

  I knew it had. I knew these houses were empty. I’d scouted near here a week before. There was this old, torn down bridge that marked the boundary of where we would scout. It was really just the remains of the bridge in the river now. I really wasn’t supposed to be on this side of the river, but I had, on one or two occasions, gone down this road.

  The Holston River twisted its way through the valley, so it made a nice natural boundary line for me to avoid. We were now just on the other side of it, where we tried to avoid. This road stayed right with the river for a good ways.

  “No signs of him,” Collins said flatly. “We’ll keep going. But we can only stay on this road another ten minutes or so. It cuts back through and heads right into the middle of town again.”

  “It what?” Eric asked.

  “It heads back to town,” Collins said uncertainly.

  “How long of a drive is it from that part of town along this road to get to the spot where the truck ran off the road?” Lucas asked.

  Clearly, Eric and Lucas were on the same page. It must have been the military training because Collins and I neither one got it right off the bat.

  “Fifteen minutes total. Shorter if its clear, which it should be,” Collins answered. Then it clicked for him.

  “Ten minutes in the tax building. Five on the run back to the truck. Five to get there,” Eric said.

  “They were coming from both ends,” I said as it finally clicked together. “They were trying to sandwich us in but got Squirrel instead.”

  “I bet if they’d have stuck around on the road where Squirrel ran off, we would have seen them coming from that way too,” Lucas added.

  “So, what do we do next?” Collins asked. “We don’t know where they are hold up at. We don’t know where they could have taken him. We don’t know…”

  I could have let Collins finish telling us what he didn’t know, but I knew something they didn’t. “We do know something about it. We know roughly where they do live. Turn around. There’s a gas station near the bridge. We need to do some breaking and entering. I need a map.”

  We drove back the way we’d come and crossed the bridge again. Collins knew the place I was talking about. We followed a pretty easy procedure when we arrived. The door wasn’t locked, so Collins twisted the knob and pulled it open. I waited outside with my metal pipe held to my side, ready to swing.

  Eric had a machete and Lucas had gotten himself a crowbar from the back of the Jeep. We were ready for just about anything. Eric whistled, trying to draw anything from the building out.

  “Movement,” Lucas said.

  I didn’t even have time to register what was happening. We were too close to the door. The inside of the store was dark. The rain had started to come down. It was a frigid, drenching rain. It was nearly cold enough to snow. It was all a bad combination.

  Like a mountain lion, something sprung from the doorway and ran straight for me. The speed was unbelievable. I swung the pipe but couldn’t make contact before I was on the ground.

  Thank God I was standing right next to Eric. He managed to grab the shirt collar of the infected woman and pull her up, keeping her teeth from my body.

  Lucas buried the crow’s feet end of the prybar in her head and helped to pull her off.

  The second infected human wasn’t far behind the first. Fortunately, he didn’t have the speed she did. His pant legs had been shredded away. I realized that was his original attack point. These were the bites that had infected him. There were hunks of flesh missing and the empty sockets were covered by green, mottled skin.

  Three months ago, I had seen my first infected humans. It was a dark, rainy night, but I saw more than enough to give me nightmares. Their eyes were bloodshot and the irises had a small starburst pattern on the inside. The skin showed a slight blush to it. The scabs looked like they developed an infection of their own. They were green and hard. But it was the way they moved and acted that gave them away more than anything.

  The infected were crazed. They acted like drunk people who’d taken meth. And they were like savage predators. It was frightening.

  These two infected didn’t exactly match the picture I had associated with the infected before. I hadn’t seen any infected quite like them yet. I could usually handle a few infected at a time by myself, but I nearly died this time.

  I didn’t get a good look at the first woman because of how quickly she’d run, but this guy was slow. The starburst in his eyes had spread out completely covering the entire iris and a good part of the whites. And his skin was green. Not so green that he resembled the Hulk, but more like someone had colored him with a green highlighter. He looked alien.

  Eric started helping me to my feet while Lucas walked calmly forward.

  “Watch it,” I said. “She was strong, he might be too.”

  “Right,” Lucas said.

  I wish he’d heeded my warning a bit better.

  Lucas grabbed the infected man by the hair as soon as he could. His intent was clear, he was going to ram the crowbar into the infected’s face. But the infected man grabbed Lucas’s rig
ht arm.

  I couldn’t do anything as I watched. Eric dropped me halfway in the midst of pulling me up and ran forward. Collins ran from the other direction. I fell.

  As I hit the pavement, I heard a snap. It wasn’t me though. Lucas’s arm had just shattered. He screamed out a horrid yell of pure agony.

  When I looked up, I saw both bones in his forearm sticking from the skin and his arm was so bent that it almost looked like he had a second elbow.

  He hadn’t been bitten though. Just mutilated. Collins had reached the infected from behind and swung his machete down. It cleaved the man’s skull. Eric gently grabbed the back of Lucas’s head and started trying to calm him down.

  I slowly got back to my feet. I was in a bit of shock, but I doubted as much as Lucas. I looked at Collins who was staring open-mouthed.

  After a moment, he said, “We’ve got to get him back.”

  “We still need that map,” I told him. “Let’s get it while Eric loads Lucas up.”

  Collins nodded. It didn’t take long in the store. We actually waited until Lucas was safely back in the Jeep to make sure the coast was clear. Once we were sure, it was less than a minute in the store. We made sure to note that we would come back to raid the place for goods later. Now, we just needed some maps.

  They had a maps of Cherokee Lake and Holston River, maps of Tennessee, atlases, and maps of Hawkins county. Most were for fishing and hunting, but +-they would serve their purpose. Collins just grabbed the entire spin rack and carried it to the back of the Jeep. “We might need more later. Plus, one in each car.”

  While Collins was putting the rack in the back, I jumped in the driver’s seat and cranked the engine. Luckily, we were only a few miles from Cherokee, so the drive was short. But it did not look good for Lucas. His arm was mangled and looked bad. I didn’t know how the infected managed it, but I’d never seen a break so horrible.

  Section 4

  From the journals of Ronald Young

  Copied by Dr. Harold Moore, MD.

  It was bad enough when I had to make the first drone work for a distance of four miles. That was pushing some boundaries. They came back from their rescue mission without rescuing Stanley… or whatever that boy’s name is. I honestly don’t know what it is, but he looks like a Stanley. They did come back with Lucas screaming in pain and eventually passing out. They were not having good luck on missions that day.