11.05.202X - 13.05.202X - Bolstering the forces

20:20 11/05/202X

 

We're going to hit Rosewood HARD today. We heard distress signals on the HAM earlier, might be another survivor out there. 

 

We have to get them out ASAP.

06:40 12/05/202X

Well, we found Izzy. No idea how she's managed to hold out on her own for this long.
Eating dog food and skulking about, I assume.
Poor bastard didn't even have a weapon, so I emptied out the prison armory (after a lot of murder) and gave her an old Mossberg, with rounds to spare. 

I think we'll stay in Rosewood for a few hours, at least until the others wake up.
We've got out cars outside the burger joint, and I managed to hotwire a couple proper trucks for later loot hauling.
There's a rotating guard shift thing going, and mine just ended.

Been going house-to-house ever since, clearing out rotters.
Saw a young girl with her arm hanging on by just a couple tendons trying to bite my face off. I put her down. These things are animals, fair and square.

Killing them is a service.

Now, speaking of Muldraugh, god damn that place is a shithole. Sure, it's our shithole, but the endless trailer parks and long, straight road going through the middle just makes me sad. I wanted to stay in Louisville for my vacation, but all the rentals were so expensive it was worse than Tokyo.

So, Muldraugh it was, with the trailers and the car wrecks and the gas stations and the diners.

It feels kind of like a slice of old-timey Americana, when you'd get "chicken and waffles" for 50 cents as a blue plate special at any corner diner, but with the new road leading through, I think that town was dying even before the outbreak hit.

The nature around here is amazing, though.

Shame you can't walk in the forest for fear of a rotter biting your neck open.
I think the closest comparison I could come up with is Aokigahara. 

It's lush and desolate. 

Nature is slowly reclaiming what we once built.


-Sayori

Oh yeah, forgot to add! I put a proper ACOG scope (apparently the name for it) with a quadruple magnification thing in it, and now I'm turning into a real sniper.

Been holding my position in the upper floor of one of the houses here, watching the street for roamers, leafing through old magazines now and then just not to get bored.

Unsure if I should add the part about pissing in bottles while keeping my eyes peeled.

Christ I wish I was a guy sometimes. 

Would be much easier, just stick it in and let slip the dogs of war.
Managed to clean my pants by way of office water cooler, so it's not all bad.

You know, apart from the smell of rotting corpses, this is actually pretty comfortable. 

Off drugs at the moment, still carry my emergency stash with me. Found a bunch of opiates in a glove box and took all the morphine I could find in the clinic.

Still have my Adderall and my Prozac, as well.

Spitting out sunflower seed shells ("Semechki", Izzy told me they were called back home), walking down a deserted road with my rifle in my hand while the morning sun slowly rises...

I'm definitely getting used to this.

Oh yeah, Izzy got banged up pretty bad, so bad she needed stitches. 

Used up most my medical supplies on her, hence the pharmacy raid. She's O pos, and I managed to find a bag of fresh plasma of that exact same type.

Score. 

She's looking a little bit pale, nothing some rest won't fix, but we need to build trust as soon as possible.
Show her we're not just trying to take advantage of her. We already need all the manpower we can spare, and if we start holding down and clearing out more towns we'll need lots of warm bodies to keep our bases secure and the rotters eating lead.

Wonder what she's been through. Izzy was kinda muted when we briefly spoke, and seemed a bit... slow.
Not in a mentally deficient way, but like she'd been slowly going stir-crazy and was unused to human contact and just basic object manipulation. Couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a shotgun yet, but we have bullets and guns to spare, so that won't be a problem for long.

Just gotta get her back to Muldraugh.

Also, she apparently scored her first dead rotter today.

I could hear her laughing and celebrating.

Barring the off-chance that she's a full-on psycho (which I doubt), we might have found another one that hates these little rotten scumbags as much as we all do.

Good.

No wonder, either. Staying cooped up for so long with rotters knocking on the doors and wandering the streets is enough to kindle a fire in anyone.

Still, why didn't she contact us last time we rolled into Rosewood? I've been here a couple times on my own, and the APC definitely makes enough noise to hear halfway across town.

Maybe she heard the "Military Order 466 in effect" thing as well, and thought we were a purging squad, the shoot-first-ask-no-questions type.

That would make sense to me, at least.

Going to continue my patrol, maybe head southwest since I remember seeing a horde that way last week or so.

Christ, the days are blending together.
This is all becoming routine now. I don't know if I feel happy or sad about it, but it is what it is.

We struggle, we overcome, we persevere.

Fort Muldraugh still stands, and we'll kill every last one of these bastards.

-Sayori Takahashi

08:20 12/05/202X 7°C

Weather's clear, no wind to speak of. Chilly outside.

Cleaned out the southwest part of town. Stumbled on a horde of rotters just begging to be shot, so I did as much. I think I'm up to 10 000 kills now. 

Jesus Christ.

I drank a beer to celebrate and I'm feeling a little tipsy, but honestly I feel like I could do this with my hands tied now.

No news on the others. Guard duty, rotating shifts, routine stuff.

Izzy's still a little pale, but she'll pull through with some rest and proper food, not that fucking disgusting dog food she's been forced to eat for longer than a month now.

That and the plasma, just in case. I loaded up the smaller truck with construction essentials in case Fort Rosewood ever becomes a thing.

I have half a mind to check out the situation at Fort Redstone, and it's only a short drive from here. I'll consult the others.

-Sayori Takahashi, destroyer of worlds.

 
:)

02:00 13/05 202X, 13°C

 

I managed to find another survivor. I took the old Oshkosh over to the ranger base to the west to pick up another proper trailer, and heard someone doing radio checks on the emergency broadcast channel.

He's a Swede, apparently. Unlike Izzy, I definitely understand how he's made it this long. Man's built like a tank and really seems to know how to handle a gun.

Apparently he's ex-military, or something like that.

He wasn't the most talkative guy, a bit gruff, but seemed almost professional in what he did. He did get banged up a bit, so I  bandaged him up. O negative, same as me, which is really good.

He mentioned working as a "private security contractor", whatever that means. 

Briefly talked about some place called "Tarkov" in Russia, and that apparently some bad stuff went down there fairly recently, in the chaotic years after the provisional government took hold. 

Apparently there were some inhuman experiments being performed, and a mercenary war, and then total anarchy ensued. 

Sounded like hell on Earth.

As you can probably guess, he managed to survive and escape, and decided to move to Kentucky with the money he'd made.

"Lay low", as he put it.

He's got a slight accent, a pretty cute one too, but I've heard him yell and swear in what I assume is Russian.
Going to have to ask him if he's read any Dostoyevsky or similar, haha.

Izzy seems stable, but the others are still clearing out Rosewood, keeping her in the clinic until she heals up.

Funny thing is, he calls himself "Harremannen" apparently Swedish for "Hash man". I like to call him Harris for short since it rolls off the tongue much easier. Anyway, I think we found ourselves a real asset this time. We managed to slaughter probably hundreds between the two of us. 

I invited him to our base, and he drove the spare APC from the ranger station back to Fort Muldraugh.

I'm still collecting scrap, and might head back to Fort Redstone after that's done. The roads are clear, and there's still so much to take there.

One thing worries me, though. Harris seems pretty unstable at times. Paranoid, maybe. While I can't blame him, he seem... different somehow.

He always gets nervous when there's a large collection of trash or debris on the side of the road. Apparently that was a common way to disguise roadside bombs in Tarkov...

Can't imagine what he's been through. I've only ever "killed" rotters, and I'm slowly getting used to it, but this guy seems almost cold at times.

I wonder if he's killed actual people before.

Also, what he mentioned about "Terragroup" makes me wonder if this outbreak is somehow linked to what happened there.
Mind's racing. Good thing I found more Valium.

Now just to keep scrapping and keep looting. We'll have a housing problem on our hands soon, and I've been thinking about building a bridge over to the trailers on the other side of the road, with similar defences.

Need to find more beds, too. Bar more windows.

I managed to put together a couple beds from the old mattresses lying around, but they're kinda shoddy, and I think everyone needs a proper bed.

Still, I'm feeling pretty hopeful. We found Izzy just a couple days ago, and now this guy. Maybe there's even more survivors out there.

-Sayori Takahashi, hopeful and ready.