Lockey vs. the Apocalypse by Meadows, Carl (love novels in english .TXT) 📗

notice. So, we need to watch both locations. I’m going to spend tomorrow scouting the area for perches and set some up that I can fire from and displace to. When we go live, you’ll be in this spot, watching what goes on here, letting me know when the QRF leave and in what strength.”

“So, what’s your plan?”

Nate placed the binoculars back to his face and stared back at the compound.

“Kill as many as I can,” he breathed.

I love the guy, but man, am I fucking glad I’m on his team.

August 19th, 2010

DOOR NUMBER NINE

Nate is a fucking one-man army. I keep saying it, but I’m glad I play for Team Carter. I would not want this wily, deadly old bastard on the opposite side of the field to me. I’m so lucky he found me, not just because he rescued me from that creepy old farmer’s rape dungeon, but because I doubt I’d have gotten this far without him. I’m forever learning new skills and modes of thinking required to survive in these rotten times, and that training really came in handy. Special Operator Locke, at your service. Oh, what a tale to tell.

I have officially entered the Badass Hall of Fame.

If Bancroft was hot with rage before, he’ll be an inferno now. Yesterday did not play out well for him. At all.

Mark’s intel of every two weeks was absolutely spot on. Yesterday they rolled out in force, and just like Nate guessed, they went back to the same familiar spot. In the two days leading up to that though, Nate and I had been hard at work.

I know the area and I walked Nate around it, listening for what he wanted and needed, and showing him a few different places, as well as routes he could take between those sites. We did some serious work too, clearing a few buildings of undead, which gave me valuable room clearance time, as well as live firing of the SA80 and the Glock I now carried. All the while, Nate teaches, patient as hell, giving me a verbal swat when my focus wobbles, and getting me back on track.

He’s a brilliant teacher, phrasing things in a manner that makes it easy to understand, rather than barraging me with military-lingo all the time. He teaches me that as well, so I can understand him in a pinch should he instinctively switch to that language in a hot situation.

So, why clear buildings?

Well, some of them are long lines of terrace houses, small independent shops, that kind of stuff. They all have joining walls and we took a sledgehammer to some of them, making holes between the buildings so Nate could displace to another location without stepping outside.

We removed some fence panels so he could then escape out back without having to struggle over obstacles, ending up out the back of a block of flats. Not massive, only three floors with four flats on each—so twelve in total—but it was the tallest building in sight of the petrol station and Nate wanted to use it. Of course, that meant having to go into that apartment block and clear it of undead. Nate couldn’t very well settle himself into a sniper perch, only to be blindsided by the dead.

Every single one of those flats had undead in them, and every single one of them was a horror story that’s going to haunt me till the end of my days. Remember how I wondered at the awful stories behind all those closed doors as we passed them by?

They’re worse than I could ever have imagined.

The ground floor residents were similar stories. The lower apartments were all populated by the elderly and they just broke my heart. Not because they were now the walking dead, but because of the terrible circumstances that led to their end.

I always saw commercials on TV about how loneliness for the elderly, going for weeks at a time with no social contact, was a rising problem. The evidence of that isolation was heart wrenching.

One old lady we found was naked and sliding around on her belly in the bathroom, the door closed when we got to it. One leg wouldn’t work and after Nate put her to permanent rest, even his hard exterior took a wobble. The poor woman must have slipped coming out of the shower and busted her hip, hence why the undead version of her couldn’t rise from its belly. Nobody came to check on her, nobody wondered why they hadn’t heard from her in a while, and this poor old lady had died a long, suffering death, in terrible pain. Cold and alone.

The fact she was taking a shower suggested the water was still running, which means she might have even died in the days before the world was cursed with the plague of undeath.

Nobody came for her. Nobody.

Fucking hell, that’s so damn sad, it hurts.

The whole bottom floor was a collection of old, lonely, isolated individuals. All of them widows or widowers, as there were black and white pictures of weddings, and later colour ones. Some of them had kids judging from the pictures, grandkids as well, so where were they? I have to hope—in some twisted way—it was because they couldn’t come, because they were already dead, victims of the undead pestilence choking the world.

Because if I think, for one minute, that they chose not to come, to leave their elderly parent to their fate and write them off as a loss, I think any faith in humanity I still have will die.

Shit, just writing this stuff depresses me. I’m just a happy-go-lucky person, and sadness—real sadness, not just, “a bit mopey,” sadness, I’m talking real tragedy—cuts me deeper than I ever knew. Nate could sense it, could see the desolation in my heart change my whole demeanour, and that big old teddy bear side of him reared itself again.

“I can do the rest, kid,” he said, his gravelled voice impossibly