For the first time, a flicker of surprise appeared on the warrior’s grim features.
“You were?”
“Shitty luck, huh?” he replied with a black laugh. “I wanted to make peace with you after this fuel run but had to find a way to take him down while getting his people on side. I guess that plan’s down the shitter now though, eh?” Connor’s eye twitched as another stab of pain thrust through his abdomen.
“And now?”
“Now? There’s no chance for peace now, Nate,” he said with genuine regret. “There’s only one way it ends now, marine.” He fell silent for a moment. “I know I’ve no right, but can I ask one favour of you?”
“You can ask. Can’t promise anything.”
“Fair enough. My youngest brother, Caleb. He’s seventeen, and I was trying to get him out of the life before everything went to shit. The boy wants to be a doctor, Nate; he’s not like the rest of the family. He’s a good kid, with a good heart, so when you and Jamie eventually butt heads, if you come out the other side, all I ask is you take the kid in. Don’t judge him by his family name. He’s never had a life of his own, and even in this shitty world of shitty living and shitty undead, I want that for him.”
Nate’s expression relaxed. “I’ll do my best, on that you have my word, brother.”
Connor smiled at that, fond memories of being amongst his brothers-in-arms in the sandbox.
“You know what the Fusilier motto is?” Nate shook his head. “Evil be to him who evil thinks. At least, that’s what it is when you translate it from the French.” Connor sighed, feeling himself weaken even as he spoke. “Something evil is in Jamie, Nate, and I don’t think it’s ever coming out.”
“Then I’ll make sure to put it down.”
Connor nodded, sucked in a painful breath, then looked Nate in the eye.
“I don’t fancy becoming one of those things, so if you wouldn’t mind doing the necessary?”
Nate nodded and stood, drawing the pistol from his hip.
“Good luck, Nate,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “And look after my kid brother, yeah?”
“On my honour.”
Relief swept through Connor, tugging his mouth into a faint smile of hope that Caleb would be okay, before closing his eyes.
“I’m ready.”
He never heard the gunshot.
September 7th, 2010
I’M SORRY, YOU’RE WHAT?
You know, when I copied over my first entries on to this laptop, I mourned the loss of my full English breakfast all over again. I would do questionable things for a fry up right about now.
I miss bacon. I miss eggs. I miss bread, but Norah says she can make bread if we get her the ingredients. God, I love Grandma Norah more with each passing day. She can churn butter as well, if we can procure her the stuff. And, well, if we had a cow.
We need to get a farm up and running. I mean, seriously, I would do just about anything for a bacon and egg butty right about now. I’m not built to be vegetarian and the closest thing I can be to a carnivore right now is eating spam or corned beef from a can.
Well, yesterday morning, I mentioned my carnivorous hankerings to Norah, and fuck me backwards, she dropped an absolute pearl of an idea.
There’s a National Trust place about ten miles from here, called Dunham Massey. It has a deer park, where visitors can go and see the nice big house, and deer roam in the grounds. Norah and her husband were big National Trust members, visiting all these protected grand old houses and their grounds.
Deer park. Lots of deer.
Now, I’ve never had venison. It’s not something that comes across my table, as Maccie D’s never did a McBambi burger, but I’d eat a pigeon straight off the bone if I could get my hands on one right now.
Norah and Nate chatted about it, because of course both the oldies have dressing and butchering skills—one for survival training, one because she’s a bad ass frontierswoman—so they agreed it would be a good use of time and fuel. We need salt too, and lots of it, because salt was apparently the devil to the spiritual bell ends who resided here. I mean, didn’t they know that without salt, we’ll die? The human body needs it. Not much, but some.
Anyway, if we can get salt, and a small chest freezer (because Grace and Theo didn’t bloody freeze anything, it was all made fresh), Mark’s done a thorough once over of all the electrics, consumption and all that jazz, and says if we have a small one, it shouldn’t be too great a drain on the power.
So, we could hunt meat, kill meat, skin meat, eat fresh meat, cure meat, and fricking freeze meat for later consumption.
This is officially my number one priority. Everything else can get bent. Salt, freezer, meat. Om nom nom.
Mark says Bancroft has just the one we need in his house, and we could double up the journey by uninstalling the fuel generators from Castle Bancroftstein (I like this name, get over it) and bringing them back to the lodge. Mark can wire them in as backups, but before we do that, we’re going to need to build some kind of soundproofed container for them. When they’re running, they make quite a bit of noise, so they need to be dampened before we can use them as we don’t want it pulling the undead in like a lodestone.
Shitting hell, the list of things we need and jobs we have to do is just accelerating, so I had to have the conversation with Nate.
“We need to train some more shooters, Nate,” I said. “We can’t do everything between the two of us and we need to start taking more hands out to work to gather resources. If we’re bringing extra hands, they should be active and not just have the two of us pull sentry all the time.”
Much
