(Flashback) Day 225 - The First Push

It's late and I can't sleep, so I thought I would continue the story I was working on. It's good to be back online and to see things pretty much how we left them. I've even had some messages from Jaco, and he should be along soon with an update on what he's been up to. Anyway, back to our story.

We gathered everyone up and checked all of our supplies. We'd be leaving Crista on the roof during this run, working our way back to her. This is one of the only times we ever leave any one member of the group by themselves, but with no way for the zeds to get to her on the roof, it's still relatively safe. In these sorts of cleaning operations, we need all the strength we can get. This sweep was designed to start with the farthest inbound groups of zeds, and slowly clean our way back to Washington square. This first sweep is always the most dangerous, because you have no clean ground to work from.

In Boston, the closer you get to downtown, the larger the zed population centers become. This makes the decision of where to start when cleaning out an area pretty easy. By starting closest to downtown while we're still fresh and focused, we'll be more basically careful about the noise we make, and hopefully draw less attention. Also, once we finish cleaning this area up, we can then keep our eye on it during the remainder of the operation, and clean up any zeds that may wander in.

With Alec and Brian accompanying us this time, we set off on the outbound lanes of Beacon street again, and dropped down to the inbound lanes once we had passed the main concentration of zeds. The first group we ran into were 5 zeds wandering aimlessly across the tracks. We pulled our melee weapons and made quick work of the group, with Ian doubling up to grab the extra kill. We got them all before any of them could get off a moan, which we were quite thankful for.

The next group to take care of was much larger, and a bit closer in to the square itself. This group probably had between 25 and 30 zeds in it, and was pretty well spread out over the inbound lanes and T tracks. This kind of grouping requires much more care. There's no way you can take care of them all without at least some of them having enough time to realize you're there and start moaning. Add in the potential stumbling block of fighting zeds on top of train tracks, and you could have a pretty nasty mess on your hand fairly quickly.

You best weapon here is a clear head. You have to be methodical and deliberate. You have to be careful not to get put in a position you don't want to be in, and never engage more targets than you know you can handle. You also don't want to get separated from any of the other survivors your with. You have to engage groups of this size as a crew, sweeping from one side of it to the other, and never letting the zeds surround you.

We all checked out pistols, making sure they were fully loaded and the safeties were off. We try to go as long as possible without having to use firearms, so as not to draw too much attention, but sometimes you really need them. This time we only got through about 10 of the zeds before anyone had to draw.

We had made it through the first handful of zeds before any of the other ones caught on to us and started moaning. As they all turned their attention to us, we stepped up to take care of the next closest handful. It was then that Alec noticed one careening down the hill towards us, and pulled his gun to down it. He was able to pick it off with only two shots, while the rest of us were able to take care of the incoming zeds, but still, it was an unwelcome surprise so early in the game.

Having cleaned out that group, we recomposed ourselves and moved forward again toward the square itself. Some of the population at the center of the square had started moving our way, which was something we would have to change, but there were another dozen or so zeds still to take care of on this sweep, and we needed to get through those first.

This group was much more dense than the last, and we would have been risking too much to try and use melee weapons here. It just wasn't worth the risk of being grabbed. We all pulled out our pistols, and took up positions a good deal away form the group. I have to say, I consider myself lucky to be with the group of survivors I'm with at times like that. It's always encouraging to see each member of your team take one well-aimed shot and down a zed. Apparently we were all on our game today, and we took out this group with only a few misses between us.

Now it was time to make sure the main grouping of zeds in the center of the square stayed where we wanted them.

- B