Cassie (Adrian's Undead Diary Book 8) by Chris Philbrook Page A

knows.
    Anyhoo, we opted for a team I was infinitely comfortable with. Myself, Patty, Abby, Angela, Harold and Blake. We’d roll out in the deuce, and the HRT. The humvees would be left back for the QRF if needed, and Kevin’s entire team minus Hal was then still available to pull security for Bastion as well as respond as the QRF should MGR be attacked again. If that happened, we’d abandon our house clear, and head back to staff Bastion immediately. Like one of those little puzzles where you can only move one little square at a time.
    We left the campus at about noon, anticipating we’d need twenty minutes of transit, two hours of clear, and then twenty minutes back. In reality the house was closer than that, but with the snow, we figured it’d take longer.
    It did.
    The side roads the house I took us to were all still covered in about six inches of smooth, ice crusted snow. You could hear it crunching under the wheels as we went. As long as we took it slow, we were fine on the roads. What was disturbing though, was the presence of undead on the side road.
    The house was maybe two miles down a tiny road that connected two slightly more major streets in town here. One of those old cow paths that people built farms on a century ago. As time went on, less cows walked on the path and more wagons, then cars, and here it is now as a poorly paved town road with five houses on it.
    Anyway, with just five houses on it, there was little intelligent reason for there to be about fifteen undead walking up and down the road. It was also strange because the snow surface on the road was still fairly smooth, indicating that the undead hadn’t wandered there recently. Very odd.
    The first couple of undead we saw were in the road, and I simply drove the HRT right over them. The plow blade makes for a highly effective zombie smashing weapon as we've proved time and again, and it also saves us the effort and physical risk of getting out of the truck. When we got close to the house in question, I realized that we were in a bit of a pickle.
    The house was nestled in the elbow of a corner in the road. The driveway was small, and opposite the house was a twenty foot drop to a stream. We had damn little area to drive the vehicles. I parked the HRT in the curve of the road, completely blocking it, and Angela parked the deuce in the driveway. I don’t know how she managed to turn it around so smoothly and back it up perfectly, but she did, and it was awesome. Team Vagina, breaking stereotypes every day.
    Right at the house as we were parking we saw three undead. Two of them immediately started at the vehicles, trudging through the snow as fast as their disorganized, frigid bodies could move through the snow. I slid out of the HRT, walked around the front of the truck calmly, took a breath, got rid of the heart in my throat and bad memories of being shot in the head, and put the first one down. Lining up that beautiful red dot on a head makes shooting quickly so much easier. The first bodies impacted the crust on the snow, and nearly disappeared under it.
    Abby was out the other door of the HRT simultaneously, and she needed two rounds to put the second zombie down. Hers fell sideways into an overgrown hedge at the front of the house and never quite made it to the ground. It was a pretty, young woman in a thin summer dress. She looked very out of place in the cold of January. The reddish grey mist of her brains looked very strange painted across the porch behind the hedge.
    What a world.
    From the driveway behind Abby and I we heard Patty snap off a round from her AR at the third undead coming down the road. She was accurate on her first shot I can happily report, and within a minute, we were ready to breach. I remembered the layout of the house pretty accurately, and I knew it was narrow hallways, and lots of small doors. It was an old house, and if you’ve ever been in old, small houses, they are kind of claustrophobic. When we checked inside