Class of 2013 - 27

Chapter Twenty Seven

The next week passed – thankfully – without any grievous incident. Chien and Novik continued their guard training of the Perris High students. Sweet and Lea pitched in as well, and while Chien and Novik were teaching them basic guard duty, the Commandant and our sniperess were running them ragged with P.T., basic hand-to-hand, and basic marksmanship – back to back and right after Chien and Novik were done with them for the day. It was kind of funny to watch them the first couple of days – especially when even I was able to go through the course and pop off a couple of accurate shots. I couldn’t do the physical aspect of it as fast, but I was still able to shoot straight. Of course, when you’re a nerd and you can get away with showing up some jocks, it was always best to do so.

Now, that’s not to say that I had actually wanted to participate in that. Oh no – in fact, hell no, I didn’t want to do that at all. Of course, Sweet being in charge as he was, I ended up getting drafted into it whenever I wasn’t doing something useful. Needless to say, I quickly decided to make myself useful. How? By gathering the other P.M.A. students that were left without much to do, along with Ophelia and Emily, and making sure the two planned steam generators actually got built. It took about three days to get them built without leaks at every connection in the system of pipes – and another two to have both an acceptable amount of leaks, as well as to adjust the fire beneath the boiler to a non-dangerous, but useful level of heat output. We wanted it to be both useful and safe to operate – and when we were done we had achieved both of these.

However, I will say that the designed looked rather comical – being that we were using parts right off the school buses, as well as from the maintenance storage. The boilers were gas tanks, the pistons had been pulled right from the engines and wrapped with motor-oil soaked felt from old art supplies, the driving rods were metal legs off the school’s older adjustable desks, the wheels they connected to were the wheels right off the buses, and we had simply used the alternators from the buses themselves – as well as their belts – to finish off the generator. We’d built a couple steam-powered electrical generators out of a couple school buses, and we were proud of the fact. Well, maybe that was an overstatement – I was proud of the fact. Most of the others just want to be finished with the project. After all, the lights had only flickered a couple times in the last week. It was hard to say what that meant, but it didn’t seem to any of us to be an indication that it was going to go out.

It popped off and then right back on, and while none of us were sure why, I had a theory that it was the automated control systems being overwhelmed and then shutting off sections of the power grid that were ‘expendable’. If that was true, I was willing to bet that we would be headed for a total blackout within another week or two – and in the end, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles might be the only cities left with power running to them. Perris would be out of luck, as would all the smaller, less ‘important’ cities. Save those shining electrical oases, we would be left alone in a sea of darkness. Even this though, I mused, would have its perks.

With the lights out in so many places, we might actually get to see the starts again. As it was, we weren’t venturing out at night due to the potential dangers of doing so. We couldn’t see without flashlights or torches, and even then those didn’t help us that much. A torch only illuminated a small area, and flashlights – while bright – only illuminated the area that they were directed toward, and could make the rest harder to see by comparison. Spot lights or flood lights could have helped, but it was safer all around to perform daylight operations instead of nightly raids. As yet, we still didn’t know the habits of these creatures at night – and over the course of the week we had a few of them start gathering near the rear of the school.

Considering the amount of noise that we had made, I supposed it was about time that they started gathering around the school. James had commented at one point during the week that it was odd that we hadn’t fallen under siege from the zombies around the city. It wasn’t like there was much going on in town to be attracting them – and if we actually kicked on those generators we’d have a constant supply of noise. Not only would that have attracted attention, but the movement of the cars around town should have attracted more as well. Though, I did have a theory to explain why we hadn’t fallen under the stereotypical siege as yet.

The school was positioned in an area that made for a natural fortification – on the rear side we had a large, fairly open field with a high dirt berm (specifically, this land formed Metz Park) – this would naturally deflect and absorb sound waves. Beyond the berm were the railway tracks that lead down to the railway museum and the train station, as well as the 215 freeway, and with the combination of the concrete center divider and the incredibly long rows of cars that were – essentially – parked bumper to bumper on the freeway… something of a wall had been formed. The zombies could eventually get through, but it would take time, and they wouldn’t have much reason to try with minimal noise reaching the city from the school. On the other side of the freeway was a wall that was meant to block the sounds of the freeway from reaching the residential areas on the other side, which further diminished our noise footprint.

The front of the school bordered A Street, and across A Street was a residential area. As well, if you were facing the school from the front, on the immediate right (or left if looking across A Street from the school) there was another residential area. The residential area across the street seemed to either not have any zombies (seemingly having been evacuated while the school was suffering its outbreak), or if it had them they were probably stuck inside the homes. The residential area to the side of the school was very much the same, topped off with the fact that there was a wall built between there and the school. It was possible for zombies to be in these two locations, but even if there were some present… it wasn’t likely that there were very many. The residential areas here hadn’t been very big. They were actual homes, as opposed to apartments – thus covering more ground but providing refuge to fewer families.

The third location that immediately bordered us was an open lot on the opposite side from the residential area, and the last property was that which Rock Castle towered over, as well as playing host to a small radio tower. It was hard to say if there was anyone up there or not, but we hadn’t seen or heard anything from anyone… so it was generally assumed that they had probably tried leaving Perris during the initial mass hysteria. All these surrounding areas combined meant that we had the perfect position in Perris to begin clearing it of the zombie infestation. We were safe within its perimeter (assuming we kept security tighter from now on) and we had a large supply of weapons, ammunition, and rations.

The few zombies that had made it to the school’s perimeter had been dealt with easily, but it left me thinking about that energy problem. At the outset of this catastrophe, Chien and I had thought that the power might only last another week, or two at the max. It had done that already, or almost. We’d also hypothesized that the power could possibly last for out to a month if the grid didn’t die before then, and if Hoover Dam didn’t have a major malfunction. With the power flicking on and off like it had done, I was starting to wonder if we were now near the end of our tether as far as our luck with electricity went. It certainly didn’t look good. Of course, if the power did go out, it wasn’t going to be the second end of the world. We had our backups in place and we knew how to conserve our energy for the more important things. Of course, if the power went out all over California… there would be one problem that would be more difficult to overcome in the long run.

If the power went out completely, the water pumping stations would be gone too. Without those pumping stations, any location that wasn’t near water would need it to either be trucked in or… well, the alternatives weren’t pretty. Thankfully, we had the Lake Perris Reservoir just in case, so we could always go in convoy to get water out of there. If that had something happen to it, Lake Matthews wasn’t overly far away, and the same could be done with it. Topping that off there were many places to get water, with some thought. Water wasn’t a problem, or at least for now it didn’t seem to be. In fact, electricity, water, rations, weapons, and ammunition were all fairly taken care of. It would be a good idea to collect whatever we could as far as more of these went, but overall… our main problem was the zombies. Which… really… one would think would have been the main problem anyway.

Then there was, of course, the distrust that we were feeling toward Novik and his group. We were fairly sure that four of them were trustworthy, but the remaining eight were anything but. Christine, William, Amelia, and Johnny all seemed rather trustworthy – and while the only crack-shot in the four of them was Christine, none of them were exactly horrible with weapons either. Johnny was good, William was passable, and Amelia… well, she at least wanted to get better and didn’t have anything against shooting zombies. It was kind of funny really. Out of all the people that had survived, I had yet to encounter anyone that had a problem killing these things. The movies would have you believe that people would find it difficult to kill zombies, even if it meant forfeiting your own life. So far… that had been far from the case. Then again, none of us had really run into anyone that we cared about, either. I supposed that would be the true test – to see what would happen if and when we began running into our zombified relatives.

I have to admit, it’s a grisly thought, but we had to be ready for it. Chien and I had never really thought about it the first time that we had gone out. We hadn’t figured on our parents having even been home at the time – and we were both right. Our families had been gone when everything started. For all we knew, some of them might still be alive; our dads, most likely, if any of them survived. Chien’s dad’s job was tied to a method of transportation, so he could at least keep moving for a while. My dad had been a U.S. Marine back during Vietnam. He could survive on his own if he had to. Our moms…? Yeah, not so much; a hair stylist and a stay at home mom that had once worked in a nursing home. Simply put, they weren’t exactly trained for survival, and while my dad might have been out of shape, he at least had survival training.

As for the rest of the families that might be run into… we might not even recognize them, or have time to pay attention to faces. When you’re facing down a horde of the walking dead (despite how alive they really were), you didn’t exactly stop to think about who the members of it had once been. The sad fact was that now they were nothing more than mindless killing machines that wanted to rip the flesh from your bones and move on to their next meal. You were meat to them – and to you so should they be; just walking meat... predators that needed to be put down for the safety and security of those that were left unaffected by their infection. For the good of all mankind… or what was left of it.

And while on the subject of mankind, we had, along with Sweet and Novik, come up with a plan to increase our numbers and acquire some ‘force multipliers’. We had plenty of ammunition, and with all the vehicles on site we had a decent fuel supply. Weapons and transportation were taken care of – we needed some warm bodies though. The plan was simple: assemble three teams that could scout out the city for more survivors – and if any were encountered, to rescue them and bring them back to base. Every person that we could get would be one more person that we could use to fight. At this point, it didn’t even matter if they were a good person or a bad person – a cop or a gang-banger, either one would be just as good as the other all things considered.

However, before this little plan could be put into action, Sweet wanted us to have a better means of communications. Cell phones were great, so long as the cell towers kept working, but we had no idea when those would fail. It could be five weeks from now, or five minutes. The last thing that he wanted to have happen was for three teams to go out, lose all means of cross-team communications, and then not be able to call for any sort of backup. It was a very simple way for twelve people to end up all kinds of dead. To prevent this possibility from occurring, Sweet had come up with an idea – we would, simply put, be going on a preventative mission. The location…? Wal-Mart. The objective…? Grabbing as many radios, satellite phones, and batteries as we could carry. The radios would be for use in the teams, and the satellite phones would be for contacting other teams and for contacting the base.

Inmarsat would probably be the best phones to get, assuming that we could find any. We weren’t really sure what we would find there as far as the make of the phones went. Hell, I was just hoping we could find a satellite phone at all. Of course, after the meeting, Sweet would later reveal to us his real reason for wanting to acquire a sat-phone: to get in contact with Rousseau. That was something that surprised all of us, but Lea and I most of all. The two of us had our own dealings with the man for separate reasons in the past, but neither of us had ever believed Sweet would want to contact him. You see, Rousseau wasn’t exactly a villain, but he was a major pain in the ass, and he had always delighted in going precisely by the book. Lea’s time in Russia and my time in Europe had found us both making that unwelcome and poorly timed discovery.

Upon further explanation, the reason for this little personal call became clearer. He wanted to check up on Novik, see what he could find out. He explained about thinking he had been a foreign national, and about his suspicions of him. We all shared the sentiment, but I had to be the one to throw the proverbial monkey-wrench into this. We had no reason to think that Novik was anything more than a creepy bastard from an Eastern European country. There was nothing to indicate that he was guilty of any crimes, and nothing to make us think that he was up to no good. He’d been compliant with everything so far – and we were the ones that were suspicious for no real good reason.

Even so, it was generally agreed that any information we could gather on this guy would be good to have. We didn’t know anything about him, and the more that we learned the better. From what Sweet described to us about his little… gathering… from before, it seemed rather a good idea to find out about this man’s past. Of course, we were focused on the negative, but for all we knew this might calm us down – who knew, maybe this guy had just been a preacher or some such thing in Eastern Europe. I wouldn’t feel all that much better about him really, but at least that was better than the possibility that he had been some sort of war criminal. Right now, we just didn’t know, and that was what really had us worried. I suppose we just could have asked him, but who was to say that he would tell the truth?

A true sign of good things to come was the fact that Johnny, after a week of confinement and withdrawal, had finally returned to suitable health. We had been planning on letting him rest up a bit more, until he was ready to be back on duty, but Novik suggested taking him on our mission to Wal-Mart to get him back into the swing of things. We were all a bit hesitant to approve, wanting him to be ready for operations again before we took him out, but Sweet agreed with Novik after seeing the condition that Johnny was in. He had been well taken care of, and while a little more R&R might be in order, it wouldn’t kill him to go with us on this mission. After that he could have a few more days of rest before any more action.

Hell, after this mission, maybe we all could.