It took a pickup truck and a
collection of firearms not seen outside of a military convoy but Brad and his
crew have arrived and made it to the store. I wish I could say that it is all
good news but one of their members was bitten in the exodus from ACE to
Reason’s. We are all struggling on how to deal with this.
So first, the good news. Brad and his
crew made the jump early in the morning after the zombies had kind of settled
down after wandering about at night. We had the early morning light on our
side. As per our plan, we had shooters on our roof looking to cover their
escape and clear a path. Brad’s crew left a pair of chainsaws revved and locked
on at full throttle. They then took the chainsaws and dropped them inside metal
trashcans and wheeled them out in wheelbarrows outside the front of the
hardware store. That awful noise brought the zombies shuffling. Then, they took
their pickup in the opposite direction. As the chainsaws drew the attention of
the zombies in the area, they made the mad dash to the back of the store. But
now I understand their confidence in their plan… Her name is Shannon Fox.
Shannon worked as a police dispatcher
at the sheriff’s office. This means she operates the radio and tells officers
where to go and it means she was working at the ground floor level when all
this broke out. I fully intend to go through a “debriefing” with her to figure
out what happened in Langley on April 29th. But moreover, this means
shortly before her office was overrun, her and a deputy were loading up all
sorts of ammunition and weapons into her small Ford Ranger pickup. Her deputy
did not make it out of the station but Shannon did. And she saw signs of hope
at ACE Hardware in Brad and Keith so that is where she stopped. Now, thanks to
her, we have a plethora of weapons from which to defend ourselves. I am not
savvy enough to tell you exactly what all the weapons are but they are like
something you see in a Schwarzenegger movie. And the reason why we haven’t
heard their activities is that they use all sorts of items from ACE to make
silencers for all their weapons.
So Brad brought with him Jenny
Deffenbaugh (his boss and owner of the store and worked the register). He also
brought with him Shannon Fox (as mentioned above), and two customers shopping
at the time of the attacks named Kelsey Cameron and Yulonda Veloquio. The sixth member of their group was Brad’s fellow
floor worker Keith Morris. Unfortunately, between exiting the pickup and
getting inside, Keith received a bite on his leg from a zombie that was under
our scissor lift ramp that we use at the Produce dock to unload semi-trailers.
We kept the Produce roll up door
closed until the very last second and given the vantage point of our “snipers”
on the roof, no one could have spotted the thing. But now we have a serious
situation on our hands. I cannot believe that I am typing this out. We are going
to have to kill Keith…
