Zournal (Book 6): The Final Countdown

by R. S. Merritt

  We had heard most of this in the past from Wilson and others but hearing it all now showed how truly evil these assholes were. Why did they bother coming to North America if they were just going to drop bombs on half of it? The dumb-asses had nuked half the country they had come to take over. It had been to get rid of the military presence over there that was going to be coming for them pretty soon but still. We figured the destruction of half of North America meant the Koreans may gather their forces in California and regroup but then be headed to South America or Europe to colonize instead.

  I wanted to hurry along the Koreans getting off my continent initiative. The Captain agreed with me. He wanted them dead. He had shot his wife and three kids when he finally found them in his home in Groton. He could barely sleep at night since he saw them every time he closed his eyes. He just wished we had more bombs to deliver.

  He finally got tired of staring at me as we ran out of things to talk about and he asked me to wake Ann up for him. He had Walker pull over and go grab another Seal to drive. Ann stared into my eyes for a minute and decided I was good enough to get some sleep. She then went back to sleep. Walker brought back one of the corpsmen to drive and check me out. He had me follow his finger with my eyes and sing the alphabet and do some math problems then had me get out of the car and do some balancing for him. I did make sure to get his name. It was Davis. He announced I was good to go.

  “His brain seems about as good as it is probably going to get from what I can tell. He can sleep now and probably not die.”

  Davis had the crappiest bedside manner ever but I loved that someone was going to let me go to sleep. Davis got into the driver’s seat and started the Hummer up. Abraham gave him directions and we got rolling. We were moving super slow as it was dark and there were all kinds of obstacles to dodge. We did not want to turn on our headlights and tell the whole world we were coming. All those things added up to why I normally opted for us to drive during the day. It was so much easier that it made itself safer through the virtue of being less complicated.

  I could care less right now though. I pulled Ann over to me to get me warm and put my head back in the uncomfortable seat and dropped into a much needed sleep.

  Entry 15: Car Shopping

  I woke up in a parking lot. My neck was killing me from the weird position I had slept in. Also, probably because I had smashed a Hummer at full speed into a solid brick wall yesterday. Ann was snoring on my shoulder still. I bumped her by accident on purpose and she woke up. When she did. She snorted. There are more embarrassing noises you could make on first waking up but that one was so random that it cracked me up. Up in the front seat Reeves was snoring away. Someone was moving around in the turret but I couldn’t tell who. Abraham and Davis were nowhere to be seen.

  The transport was parked over away from us by some old cars. I saw a bumper sticker that told us it was more fun to do it on Topaz Lake. We’d made pretty good time if we were already by the lake. I’d seen it on the map and wondered if we might need to get on a lake at some point. The virus had hit during the winter so a lot of the areas in the north that were situated around lake activities were pretty abandoned. As opposed to down South where people had been dying to get out on the water. A native Floridian was looking for their jacket when it hit the seventies but a tourist from New England would be flinging their pale bodies right into the lake.

  Ann asked me if I was doing ok. I hadn’t been shot at or had anything try to eat me in the last few hours while I slept in the back of a Hummer with the beautiful woman I loved snuggled up next to me. So far it was a good day.

  “You’re drooling on me a little bit there snorter.” Explaining all of the other thoughts in my head seemed like it would take too long and we had things to do. For all the bad ass stuff, I’d seen Ann do and how hard she tried to act she was till a girlie girl at heart. She seemed to actually care that she was drooling on me and started to wipe it off before seeing nothing was actually there. She settled for hitting me in the head instead. Then she remembered I had a concussion.

  “I’m so sorry! Are you ok?”

  “I could use a kiss.” I said. Not having to pretend too hard that the whack to the head had hurt.

  Ann gave me a kiss on the top of my head. I told her she had made me bite my lip when she hit me. She started to smile and kiss me on the lips.

  “I’m gonna puke. Please leave the damned car.”

  “Good morning Reeves.” Ann said. Then she gave me a loud smack on the lips. “You can’t be annoyed at us. These are completely medicinal kisses.”

  Reeves smiled. “In that case. I fell on my ass earlier and it’s killing me.”

  I flipped Reeves off and we got out of the car while he got situated to go back to sleep. Looking in the turret I saw Walker had made a comeback and was up there standing guard. We told him good morning and asked where everybody was.

  “A couple guys are looting that restaurant over there to see if there is anything useful. I think the Captain and Wilson are walking around looking at cars we can try to get running to give us a little more room in this caravan. Everybody else is racked out in the back of the transport or chilling on guard duty somewhere.”

  I looked around the parking lot. I spotted a group of guys walking around looking at cars so we headed in that general direction. Wilson saw us coming and waved at us. Abraham shook my hand when we finally caught up with them. It was a pretty brisk morning and our breaths were clearly visible in the air.

  “I told Wilson here about what we talked about with the vehicles and how you told me you’d driven right by Korean patrols and convoys up in the mountains. We both think it is a great idea but we can’t think where we can get new vehicles at. We can’t really go back to the base up in Carson now. They’re probably searching everything in the area. We’re not going to find a military Hummer lot anywhere. As we get closer to San Diego there are military bases so we might get lucky. The problem is we kind of need it now.”

  Ann suddenly snorted again. What the hell? She looked super embarrassed but she was able to start talking anyway.

  “Sorry about that. I don’t normally snort when I get an idea.”

  “Be a horrible poker player.” Wilson broke in.

  “True.” Ann agreed. “Anyway. We don’t need new vehicles if we can’t find them. I know we’ve all kind of gotten used to just throwing old clothes to the side and picking up new ones but there is always the option of a new windshield and a paint job. We just need to find a body shop.”

  She was good. I can’t believe none of us had thought of that. She was the only woman in a group of very manly men and she was the one who wanted to work on the Hummer. I love her. Abraham looked excited. It was nice having a plan.

  “Ok. Wilson, we have anybody who knows how to do that kind of stuff?”

  “Yes sir. We just need to find a place with a windshield that will fit a Hummer. We’ll need matching paint as well. That might be a bit of a challenge.”

  I almost snorted.

  “Find me a home depot or an Ace Hardware or whatever and I can mix paint to match. While you guys were wasting your time in boot camp and college and stuff I was working my way through multiple part time jobs to support tuition and books for classes I didn’t bother going to.”

  It was about time my crap jobs and lack of direction paid off! Take that ex-girlfriend!

  “Cool.” Wilson said. “Too bad we’re in the middle of nowhere. We probably need to go somewhere with more stuff. We can poke around this place and see what we can find today then travel to the next town tonight if we don’t find anything.”

  Entry 16: Wish I’d Paid Attention in Shop Class

  We didn’t find anything. We weren’t in a town so much as a small marina to support the pleasure craft people had stored to go water skiing on the lake. Other than a few Zombies and a bunch of diesel, we found there wasn’t much to scavenge here. Abraham did not want to risk taking the vehicle on the road during the day. When visible in
the daylight it was pretty obvious the Hummer had been through some serious shit. We planned to drive at night with the headlights on and just bull our way past any patrols we ran into.

  That plan lent itself well to a day spent alternately sleeping and worrying about Ginny. We were the ones headed towards the heart of the Koreans but I was a million times more worried about Ginny than I was about us. Probably because with the three of us I had some control over what was going on. I had no control over what was going on with Ginny and no way to help her if she needed it. If something did happen to her we’d probably never even find out what it was. We’d set up some other ways to meet in case it got real weird. A 7-11 in Spokane every three months. Leave a pink shoe in front of it to meet on a Tuesday and a black shoe to meet on a Wednesday. Secret agent crap like that.

  Not having reliable cell service really sucked. I would have settled for snail mail just to be able to get some info on how she was doing. They had to go through some decent sized cities to head north and decent sized cities meant lots of Zombies. Ginny knew how to deal with Zombies and how to keep a team moving through them safely but dealing with moving three of us was a lot different from moving two busloads of gear and people. A lot of the women were still being weaned off of the drugs the Koreans had given them to keep them complacent. Many of them had physical injuries. She had the two Seals with her but both of them would have been better off in a hospital than on a bus driving through Zombieland.

  My body was really starting to hurt again too. Crashing into the wall had given me a few new sprains and reawakened a lot of my old ones. Between the physical pain and the stress, I ended up popping a couple of Nyquil to force myself to get some sleep. We’d be driving through enemy territory tonight with the lights on so I wanted to make sure I was going to be able to be alert for that. The Captain had uncovered a nicely kept big Diesel pickup truck that he planned on taking along. I guess as long as we were driving at night it should be fine. I had seen the Koreans driving mostly military vehicles but there had been some civilian pickup trucks and jeeps in the mix as well.

  We got told at dusk it was time to roll out. I moved over into the passenger seat since I’d woken up unable to move my neck. That was probably going to turn into an issue at some point. Ann passed me some muscle relaxers and Vicodin. She really was an awesome drug dealer. I tried to give her a kiss but couldn’t move my neck so it just came off looking pathetic and making her laugh at me. Call me a romantic but I’ll take a laugh or a smile off my girl anytime. Also, if you want to get drunk really quick avoid beer and liquor. Just take a bunch of Nyquil then mix it with Vicodin and whatever else Ann had handed me.

  Reeves was up in the turret and we had Walker in the back seat. He was busy rifling through all of the stuff back there trying to find snacks. He came up with a value pack of three different kinds of chips. He happily ripped into the bag and pulled out all of the little bags of Cheetos. He was a tall, gangly, white guy with a big, dark, scruffy beard. He had on the ‘I’m a cool guy who spends a lot of money on sunglasses’ shades and a solid black baseball cap. He noticed me looking at him and sheepishly asked if I wanted any Cheetos.

  “Nah, you go ahead and eat all the Cheetos man. The rest of us love barbecue and the plain ones you left in there. The ones with no flavor at all. Why do they even make those?”

  “Why are you still staring at me? Your kind of freaking me out. I’m willing to put back two bags of Cheetos.”

  It wasn’t my excellent negotiating skills that won us those two bags of Cheetos back. It was the drugs and the fact that I couldn’t seem to make my neck want to move. It had turned around easily enough to watch him looting the back seat. I gingerly tried turning my head back the other way and a spasm of pain wracked my body. It must be some serious pain if it was cutting through my pain killer buzz. On the plus side, I wasn’t going to get stuck in the turret since I was walking wounded.

  We pulled out of the parking lot. Abraham lead the way in that big monster truck he had found. I guess we were not going for subtlety anymore. When Abraham embraced an idea he really went all in. We were still hoping to find a place we could pull in and get the Hummer fixed up a little bit at. We could always find other transportation and ditch the Hummer but it was hard to find something with a machine gun turret built into it on your average used car lot.

  Ann followed the monster truck out on onto the street that lead back to the highway. Behind us, the big transport truck pulled out and fell into place. That was the vehicle that really should cement our ability to sail past any others on the road. Who would expect the enemy to try and sneak into your encampment by driving down the main highway right towards you with a monster truck in the lead of a large transport truck. It was really our only call since at the root of the mission we still needed to figure out a way to lug around a bomb weighing several hundred pounds. We could have put it in the back of the truck or tried to find a van to put it in but ended up leaving it in the transport vehicle for now as that seemed to be the best plan. The more ‘sneaky’ we looked the more likely we’d attract attention. We were basically hoping no one would think someone would be stupid enough to try to drive into the enemy compound with the vehicles we had.

  Zombies were thin out here. The population centers had not been huge in this area to begin with. We did spot some of them wandering around and assumed there were some who would follow the sound of our vehicles for a while. This phenomenon of the Zombies wandering after vehicles driving down the road was something we’d coined the phrase of ‘Zombie Wake’ for. Typically, it wasn’t something we worried a lot about because you didn’t normally pass too many people in the night while driving. If you passed anyone it was a rare occurrence. We were heading for a major population center with enemy military vehicles leaving to carry out all kinds of missions so it was inevitable we were going to have to deal with some Zombie Wake along the road.

  We’d told the Captain about the Zombie Wake and he’d shook his head and reiterated how great it was to have people with him who’d done what we had done. He’d rather have a group of been there, done that guys with him than most of the CIA agents he’d worked with over the years. The agents always thought they knew everything from looking at pictures and reading reports. There really was no substitute for having put your boots on the ground and fought in a place or condition to truly get a feel for it.

  The easiest way to deal with the Zombie Wake issue was going to be slowing down if someone passed us. We knew anyone who passed us would be trailing Zombies behind them. The length of that string would depend on a bunch of factors but for safety’s sake we’d just have to assume it went back to wherever the people had started driving at. Zombies being like giant moths who flocked to light the ones trailing the cars that passed us would run straight for our headlights. They would come in through our windshields if we weren’t paying attention. That was a great reason for the lead vehicle to be a monster truck.

  There had been a lot of RVs back at Topaz Lake. We’d talked about commandeering a couple of those since they were large vehicles and we’d be able to fit a ton of supplies in them. Most of them also ran on diesel which was a plus now that a lot of the regular gasoline had reached its sell by date. We’d considered it but rejected the idea since we had not seen any Koreans tooling around in RVs. We didn’t want to do anything that might raise suspicions. Each RV also seemed to have a few Zombies hanging out in it. I figured that was due to older people driving cross country and not knowing what else to do when they started getting sick and everything went to hell so they’d just tried to ride it out in their RV.

  We were driving south down highway 395 and fixing to pass a little hole in the wall town named Coleville when we saw headlights coming towards us. It was much easier to drive during the day so I had hoped the Koreans had just decided to stick with driving during the day to make their lives easier. There was no way to know if these headlights were Koreans or not but they definitely meant the possibility of trouble fo
r us.

  The headlights approached and turned out to be multiple vehicles driving north. The vehicles looked like a collection of military vehicles, similar to ours but outnumbering us by a few Hummers and transports. We drove slowly and carefully past them. I think I held my breath the entire time they were driving by. Once the last one had passed us I finally exhaled.

  “Looks like our driving like we own the place plan may actually work.” I threw out there.

  “Yo. That last Hummer that ran past us looks like it is braking and turning around.” Walker made this unwelcome announcement from the back seat. I looked in the rear-view mirror to keep from having to move my neck and confirmed that did look like what was happening. I also noted that Walkers beard was a bright Cheetos color surrounding his mouth. I chose not to let him know. Love to see him try to tell Reeves he did not eat all the Cheetos when his beard was bright orange.

  Entry 17: Hold Your Fire

  We kept up our speed as the Hummer behind us navigated through a three-point turn and came rushing back towards us. Reeves stuck his head down into the cabin and asked us what he should do.