8/5 p2

9:38pm

Excuse the blood on the page. Ah shit. Who am I kidding? No one’s ever going to see these pages. Be dead long before that. Have to take more breaks than normal. The damn pain just won’t go away.

So, how I got here. Let’s see, last time I wrote it was our plan to go through the buildings to make it to the waste treatment center. I’ll backtrack and give the lowdown.

We busted open the ceiling entrance to the office we were on top of. Guess that the law firm had been closed when the world went sideways. No one around, filing neatly stacked on the secretary’s desk. Calm and peaceful.

“As if we were just janitors late to take out the trash.” James said, whites of his eyes flitting back and forth between the offices.

Dave grunted and we kept on moving. The front door was locked on the outside, but opened noiselessly when the old man, careful of his wounded arm, gently tried it.

Before we’d hoofed it out Jimmy had tried to ask him if his left arm’s uselessness would keep him from using his shotgun. He’d just glared at us, which I took to mean it wouldn’t. Not sure how accurate he’ll be, but I guess with buckshot it won’t matter much. Good enough for horse shoes, hand grenades and crochety old veterans.

The rest of the building was locked up tight. Through carpeted hallways, past dying office plants, down darkened stairwells and out to the lobby. I took the lead through all this. Dave had always been point before this, but for obvious reasons, he believed it better to stay put in the back and watch our six. Jimmy still isn’t much use in a fight, which leaves me.

The difference between point and follower wasn’t real to me til then. When you’re in charge of where everyone goes, it’s up to you to stay hyper alert. To keep awares. To make the choice of left or right. In my mind, if anything goes wrong, the one at front’s responsible. Which is why I feel so guilty about what happened next.

I decided to head across the alleyway. At that point, none of us dared talk. No conferencing here. Just thought and action. The coast appeared clear, and honestly, it was almost completely clear. Almost. One crawler was hidden by fallen garbage, but I doubt any of us would’ve seen it, even if we’d all rubbernecked for five minutes each. Least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

We stepped out into open air and quietly, quickly ran to the side door of the office building next to us. The crawler wasn’t even close to us. The garbage it lay in was over thirty feet from us, no way in hell it could’ve reached us.

But even as James closed the door to the side of the building, it had started up it’s moaning and headed toward our door. My pulse quickened, and I looked at the other two. They knew what that meant. Moaning meant followers, followers meant a mob, and a mob meant that door was going down sooner or later.

Without a word, I turned and headed toward the opposite side of the building.

Four blocks to go. This set of offices and shops took up a full two blocks, which only left another two blocks to our destination. I remember thinking “I’ll be damned if these offices are our Waterloo. No damn way.”

As we moved, I picked up the pace. Caution thrown to the wind. We all knew that minutes from now this building would be mobbed by the dead. And none of us wanted to be there for that. As we passed from the office segment of this building into shops, I realized that our hallway was ending. We would need to step into the shops to keep moving forward. And shops mean windows.

Dammit.

We busted into the last store on the row. With my luck, of course I opened the door to a small shop filled with half a dozen moaners.