Crude
14 Jun
2247
We had a meeting today. All nine of us attended although Laura, Danny and Annabelle did not pay attention. They were quietly playing in the corner as we talked. Dean is looking much better. I caught her up on the recent events at Hotel 23 regarding the bandits and basically gave her a rundown on everyone here and how we came to find each other.
She had a few stories of survival herself regarding the months leading up to her imprisonment at the “Tower of Charles.” She spoke of how she and little Danny had been in New Orleans and had heard the warning that the Big Easy would be a target and how they had taken off in her aircraft for the nearest safe zone. She never found it. They had spent months bouncing from airport to airport, scavenging food, water and fuel until their luck finally ran out.
Dean has become the resident grandmother around here, taking care of the kids and offering advice. She even approached me yesterday in private to tell me that she could see that Tara was fond of me. I had known this for a little while but have been too preoccupied with staying alive to do anything about it. She asked me what the purpose of survival was if I had no one to love and be loved by. I didn’t really answer that. I was in no mood for emotion. We were still in some serious trouble and I felt like I have no time for love or romance.
I asked her if she had run across any survivors in her airport-hopping campaign. She told another grisly tale in which she and Danny attempted to rescue two survivors signaling for them from a field below. They were being flanked by hundreds of undead that they could not see over an adjacent hill. Dean had tried to warn them by flying over the area where the dead were advancing. However, it was too late. By the time they realized what was going on, the dead had topped the hill. The sheer number of them picked them clean like African driver ants.
Dean had felt guilty about that incident and often wondered if they were in that field solely to signal her and Danny. I tried to comfort her by saying that they were probably already there and that she had just flown over at the right time. Odds are, she probably did draw them out into the open to signal her, but what would be the point in presenting that gruesome thought?
I have gotten into a pretty good routine of exercise lately. The undead numbers have greatly declined around the complex since the raider attack. I have installed a pull-up bar in the control room. I constructed it out of scrap, using twine to secure it to the overhead beams.
John has been monitoring the radios and has had no sign of encrypted comms, or any chatter for that matter. Dean seems to think that we could be safe here as long as we keep aware of our surroundings. I informed her that there is more than one way in and out of the complex. I will be giving her a full tour of Hotel 23 in the coming days. She is no novice with firearms and I feel that she could handle herself if need be. She is a tough old bird, a product of old-fashioned upbringing. She lost her husband to natural causes years before the undead walked. She is no stranger to death, just a stranger to death walking.
17 Jun
2106
GPS is gone. I’m sure the satellites are still up there, but without ground station intervention to regularly recalibrate them they cannot transmit properly and I cannot get a receiver lock. The internal DVD/GPS navigation system in the Land Rover is useless. Because of the loss of GPS, I was eager to test the SATphones. They worked fine. John and I went topside with them and I dialed the number imprinted on a barcode on the side of the phone John was holding. It rang through and John did the same with the phone I was carrying. Although an excellent means of communication, they could not be considered reliable. The same goes for any communication that depends on complex third-party mechanisms. I have been sleeping in the environmental control room as I have given up my living quarters to Dean and Danny.
It is a little cooler in my new quarters. There are plenty of other compartments to choose from; I just like being somewhat close to everyone else. There is even a rather large compartment with lockers and folding cots. I am sure they are probably for civilian survivors that would encounter this place during and after a nuclear exchange. I just wish I had something useful and positive to accomplish, besides staying alive.
I pulled my wallet out of my personal belongings today and looked at my Armed Forces Identification Card. The man depicted on that card didn’t look like me. Sure, it was my face, name and Social Security number, however . . . the eyes. They were different. The eyes in the photo didn’t have the same gaze as those of the man I see in the mirror now. I will keep it. Keep it as a memento of what I once was; a cog in the wheel of something greater. It has been six months to the day since the first time I saw one of them eye-to-eye. They still have the same chilling effect. I am certain they always will.
20 Jun
2309
It is raining very hard right now. The weather is playing hell with the closed-circuit TV, causing static and loss of v-hold. The undead in this area are pretty spread out, but I can still make them out during an intense lightning flash. Still no joy on the radios. There is no one out there, or at least no one in our range. I have been flipping through the watchman’s diary to pass the time during the storm. I sort of forgot about it due to the current events at Hotel 23.
I had gone to my old quarters last night to pick up the last of my personal effects when it resurfaced. Dean had packed my cardboard box for me and told me how nice I was for giving up my space for her and Danny. She told me that she had found my personal diary, but wouldn’t dare take a peek. I explained to her that it wasn’t mine and that it belonged to a person who was formerly posted here. I told her that I was keeping it for him. She understood and handed it to me, trying to figure out whether she had said something wrong.
I gave her a reassuring smile as I took the diary out of her hand, threw it into the box and started walking to my new quarters in the environmental control room. It wasn’t until tonight that I reopened Captain Baker’s personal log. January 10 was dog-eared, as I had remembered reading it before. I turned the page, and began reading January 11.
January 11
As suspected, according the recently received message traffic, we will not be permitted to leave for quite some time. This facility will be more than adequate for extended habitability, but staying here underground really takes a mental toll on you. Unlike myself, he is married and I am not sure how long he will remain sane if this order to stay underground continues. He is constantly daydreaming and writing letters to his wife, letters that he cannot even mail until we are cleared topside by high command.
I have received official communications involving the situation in Asia. It is above the classification of this log and will not be included.
I know we will be secure down here no matter what and that is what is important to U.S. strategic deterrence.
The only other thing on this page was a freehand doodle of a missile flying through the air over what appears to be the United States.
23 Jun
2150
I have a splitting headache. Normally I force myself to drink enough water to remain hydrated, but today I just didn’t get around to it. I have a dehydration headache and no matter how much water I drink at this point, it won’t matter. It will just have to run its course. On the morning of the twenty-first, John, Will and I went out scouting. Instead of heading in the direction of the crucifixes, we went westerly, toward the small town of Hallettsville. We didn’t take the Land Rover, as we wanted to remain quiet and avoid detection. For all we knew there were still bandits in the area.
We walked through fields and undeveloped farmland. It had been over six months since anyone was alive to maintain the land, so it wasn’t a surprise when we stumbled upon them. We had jumped yet another fence into derelict farmland when we observed the sentinel symbols of United States greed and power. There was a large refinery field and the skeletal hulks of the large ground pumps were just sitting there, unmoving. Grass was overgrown all around them and it was obvious that they had been dead for months.
I suppose the bright side to the living population being annihilated is the fact that our oil reserves should last thousands of years longer. Of course, the downside is the fact that no one is alive who knows the art of refining the crude oil, hence making it as useless as a Hadron collider. John and I have long since discussed the need for technical manuals on everything from farming to medicine to things like refining crude. The information we require would be in countless abandoned libraries throughout the United States. However, getting to the information and getting it back to Hotel 23 could prove most fatal.
Passing the second large oil pump, I made yet another macabre discovery. I suppose when the world ended back in January the pumps were still running for a while. It looks like one of those bastards was crushed by the pendulum arm of the pump and its lower torso was caught in the machinery. I couldn’t tell if it was still reanimated. I gave it no mind as I walked past. Obviously, birds had done their thing to this rotting monstrosity.
William had to force himself to look away from the creature as we passed. We kept on, seeing no signs of life. Our tactic was avoidance, as we had no suppressors or silent weapons to use. We would open fire only if our lives were in danger. We dodged three walking dead in the field before returning home. They were quite mobile, but still too slow to keep up. They would follow. However, I doubt they could ever make it over the many fences that separate our compound from this oil field. John and I have had further discussions about the need to gather some reference books, so we will be planning and executing this operation in the days to come.