Zournal (Book 6): The Final Countdown

by R. S. Merritt

  Thanks to those muscle relaxers I wasn’t lying on the ground writhing in pain right now but it was getting close. I turned around to look at how far we were from the vehicles and saw a large group of Zombies come running around the other corner of the building. So much for us being quiet. It had become time to not worry about it.

  “Go to guns!” I yelled.

  Everyone in our tight little group knew what that meant. It meant we were in a situation where if we didn’t start shooting soon we were going to die. Not the possibility of death but the inevitably of it. It got everyone’s attention. Melee weapons were dropped. Pistols and rifles were pulled out. A grenade went flying towards the far corner where all the Zombies were. Time to waste some bullets.

  We all cycled through one or two clips getting ourselves back to the vehicles and climbing in. Walker got pulled to the ground at one point and we had to shoot and pry some Zombies off him. He ended up bit in a couple of places. We were no longer worried about bite turning you into a Zombie but bites were still nasty sources of all kinds of infection so we’d need to get it cleaned up as soon as possible. He’d need some bandages and stitches as well. He was screwed on any of us doing the stitches but we did have a staple gun that was made for stapling people back together. We’d make good use of that on him after cleaning him up.

  Back in the vehicles, we headed out of the lot. We could see another fifty or so Zombies heading for the corners of the building we had been behind. We would definitely not have survived. Especially knowing the gunshots would be bringing even more. We drove quickly out of the parking lot, hitting a few random pieces of trash and some speed bumps on the way. We drove until we saw a large administrative looking building that Wilson must have liked the look of because he put on his turn signal and pulled in there. The parking lot was empty for the large building. That was a good sign. Meant a ton of people had not decided to go there to try and escape Zombies or sickness.

  We parked in the back again. We waited for Zombies again. This time two Zombies limped towards us. Wilson, Walker and Davis all hopped out and took care of them. No more cowboys. We’d go the three musketeers all for one route instead from now on. We gave it another twenty minutes to be safe. No one else showed up so we decided to check out the inside of the building. Our transport and Hummer would be pretty obvious if a helicopter flew over but we were well hidden from the road by the four-story administrative building. We had to hope that we were still far enough from San Diego and helicopter pilots and helicopter fuel were still at such a premium that they would not be spending a lot of time flying around looking for us.

  The Seals made a little bit of noise getting in through the loading dock door. Once in we were happy we’d chosen this particular door. Inside was a large office space that looked like it had belonged to the IT department. There were a lot of useless, expensive looking monitors and technology scattered around the room. The best things we could see though were the stack of cots and boxes of food in one corner with a bunch of water bottles. They must have been getting ready to declare an emergency and been getting there EOC stocked up when they all died or went home or whatever.

  We started moving desks into one section of the room we could use to work on coming up with a plan. Reeves handed me a pack of cheese crackers and a can of slim fast. What the hell? It turned out the supplies included eight cases of various flavors of slim fast shakes. Evidently, they never go bad so they make the perfect survival food. Packed full of natural vitamins and minerals and other stuff that tastes bad. No wonder people got skinny when they went on slim fast. It cost so much you couldn’t afford to buy snacks and it tasted like crap so you were basically living on water. I choked down the strawberry flavored one Reeves had handed me and helped everyone get everything situated.

  Once we had our supplies in and our room setup the way we wanted it we set a guard out in the truck with a Walkie Talkie and the rest of us sat down to start planning. We’d stuck Walker out in the truck for the first portion of the planning session, promising to bring him back in to tell him what we came up with and get his input on it. We all popped open our water bottles and settled in around a whiteboard by one of the desks. Wilson started listing out our assets and writing them down.

  “We’ve got a Hummer and a transport. We have rifles and guns and people who know how to use them. We’re starting to run short on ammo so can’t afford to get in too many more firefights. We’ve got some RPGs and grenades and other fun toys in the back of the truck. Oh yeah, we also have a nuclear bomb.”

  “I would have put that first.” Chimed in Davis.

  “Don’t forget the cases of slim fast. Maybe we can poison them with the strawberry ones.” I thought I was funny. No one else seemed to. To break the silence, I asked Wilson again what he thought Abraham had planned to do.

  “Well. Here’s the deal. I told you we all knew how to set off the bomb and we do. You control the bomb with a little transmitter that is encrypted and set at the one and only frequency that will work with the bomb. It has a range of up to a few miles, longer if you set out repeaters. The problem is. We do not have that transmitter. I don’t know if it was in the other box with the other bomb or if it is still somewhere under that other base or if it is in another base entirely. No clue. All I know is we don’t have them and can’t make them.”

  “Ok.” Ann said. “Then why are we dragging the heavy ass bomb all over the West Coast if we can’t set it off?”

  “We can set it off. I don’t think Abraham talked about his plan too much because he planned on being the one to do it. You know how I told you we were trained to defuse them so we should be able to set them off?”

  “Yes.” Ann said. She had a worried look on her face. I remembered him saying something about that as well. I hadn’t thought too much about it at the time. We waited for Wilson to keep going.

  “Well, we know where the board is that talks to that transmitter. We know how that circuit works and know that if we break the solder on the board at a certain point then the bomb would not go off. We also think if we shorted the leads on the tube on the board the reaction would start immediately and it would go boom.”

  “You think?” Ann asked. Her voice going up a few octaves. “This can’t be done from remote, can it? Your plan is to drive up to the waterfront and blow yourself up. Where do you expect us to be during this? I’m not a terrorist so not really keen on the blowing myself up. I also would prefer you didn’t blow up my boyfriend.”

  “I don’t want to blow anybody up. At least not any of us. We had a couple of guys who were good with electronics who were trying to come up with something. Those guys were eaten by Zombies a few days ago in the back of the transport. The Captain had some ideas but he’s dead now. The rest of us are not so great with electronics. If you have ideas, I am all ears. One of you guys an electronics whiz and just haven’t bothered to mention it?”

  “I got the high score at Pac Man at the arcade when I was a kid.”

  We all stared at Reeves.

  “Ok, it wasn’t the high score but it was in the top ten.”

  No one said anything.

  “Fine, it was Miss Pac Man. But that doesn’t make me gay.”

  “It makes you an idiot though.” Ann chipped in. “Why don’t you go relieve Davis for a little while and we can see what he has to say.”

  “Whatever. You just want the Asian guy in here because you’re talking about electronics. That’s totally racist. He’s as big of a dumb ass as the rest of us when it comes to that stuff. I’ll go grab him. Before I go though, I’m ok with some of us maybe going Kamikaze but I draw the line at either Ann or Steve doing it. I won’t be a part of that. They’re so cute together it makes you want to puke. A mountain of dead Koreans wouldn’t be worth seeing one of them dead to me.”

  With his ultimatum expressed Reeves grabbed some waters and headed out the door. A few minutes later Davis walked in. He confirmed that he knew how bombs worked and basic electronics like transisto
r theory and stuff like that but nothing advanced. He’d lost me when he said knew transistor theory. I felt like this mission was going sideways fast and I let that be known.

  “So, are we scrubbing this mission? Right now, you’re telling me we have a big ass bomb that we can’t set off without blowing ourselves up. That doesn’t seem super useful as I’m not big on any of us taking that on. You wouldn’t be sacrificing yourself for country or any of that patriotic, valiant stuff either since the country is pretty much gone. I’m not seeing a path forward. Can you guys help me with that?”

  “Here’s what I’m thinking.” Davis paused to look around and make sure we were listening to him. We all were because Asian people are good at this kind of stuff. He was busy reaffirming the stereotype. Hell, he may be the stereotype for all we knew. We had not seen any non-Korean Asians besides him in a really long time.

  “All we need to do is to cause a short between two of the leads when we want to detonate the bomb. We just need to build something that we can put a timer on that will touch those two leads together at the designated time. We could use something like a mechanical timer. We take it apart and make it so that when it goes off instead of ringing a bell it puts a conductor up between the leads. Then, for redundancy, we do the same thing with another timer somehow. There’s probably way better more clever ways to do it but the longer we spend trying to figure it out the more dug in the Koreans get and the less likely this attack is going to hurt them.”

  I liked that plan a lot better than the blow ourselves up plan.

  Wilson considered it.

  “Ok. If we can get something rigged up to do that then that is better than us dying. I just don’t know how we’re going to be sure it is going to go off. It’s not like we can test it. If we’re sitting there and it doesn’t go off we could always try and touch some other leads or whatever. I’m down though. Let’s go hit Walmart and find us some supplies.”

  Entry 21: Roll Back Bomb

  Wilson tried saying just him and Davis were going to Walmart. We argued they were the only two people who knew how the circuit board worked. Walker had freely admitted to not having a clue but being happy to help out if someone could show him a diagram. Wilson said he’d stay and we’d send Davis with me. Ann wanted to go if I went because I always ended up getting myself half-killed every time I went somewhere. Reeves said he wanted to go and grab some Cheetos. Wilson was the one who had made the rule that we have at least two people everywhere we go so he couldn’t stay here by himself.

  Wilson thought it was stupid for us all to go to Walmart but if we were going he wanted us to just take the Hummer to maintain a lower profile. Ann pointed out that if we left the nuke laying around kids may find it and hurt themselves with it. Reeves said he didn’t want to be squished and we needed room to put any supplies we found at Walmart. Wilson asked him how many boxes of Cheetos he planned on taking.

  “As many as they have man. As many as they have. But I’m also thinking you guys may want some gear for the water. If we keep going the way we’re going we’re going to run up on San Diego. They’re going to have checkpoints and fences. If for no other reason than to keep the Zombies out. I’m sure they don’t want zombies wandering around eating everybody. No way we make it through a checkpoint. Davis is the only one who speaks Koreans and he sounds ‘special’ when he does it. He’s not talking us through checkpoints with a Hummer and a transport full of white guys.”

  Wilson was nodding along.

  “I see where you’re going with this. I’ve been thinking about it some too. Going on the intel, puts the leadership close to the ocean. If we come at them from the ocean there will be less guards, less fences and we can float the nuke versus trying to carry the damn thing while sneaking in. We’re Seals so we’ve got a little bit of training and experience around swimming in and blowing shit up and then leaving quick.”

  Not to be left out, Ann threw in something she’d obviously been mulling over as well.

  “Another thing. Zombies like noise. I assume this bomb is going to be noisy as all hell. San Diego is going to be overrun with Zombies once we set this thing off. That’s going to be bad news for them but should finish the job for us. We’re just going to have to deal with all those Zombies. Maybe we could all jump on a boat?”

  The conversation continued. Everyone’s creative juices were flowing now. The plan eventually evolved from the giant mess we’d started with to a much more refined and polished mess. Now, instead of driving to the checkpoint, having Davis do his Bruce Lee impression and them all of us being shot to death. We were going to try and steal a boat, drive into the San Diego harbor and then be shot to death. That’s what it sounded like to me anyway. Assuming we could find a boat that worked. The Seals had talked about just swimming the distance and floating the bomb on some kind of improvised raft. Ann had shut that down when she mentioned all the sharks that liked to hang out by shore now and eat the Zombies who tumbled in. Also, if a little bit of metal on the vacuum tube could set the bomb off did they really want to be sloshing it around in the open ocean?

  We had a more likely sounding plan now but we still needed to refine it and gather materials for it. Our shopping trip to Walmart was still on. We only had maybe an hour or so left before dawn so we needed to hurry if we were going to get there before the Zombies became active. We piled into the vehicles and drove quickly up the street to where Reeves said he had seen a Walmart. It was a K-Mart.

  “Dude, K-Mart looked like it was in the apocalypse before the apocalypse even hit. Did you not notice the giant yellow ‘going out of business’ banner across the front of the store?” I shook my head. Nothing for it now. The sun was coming up and the streets and parking lot were pretty bright already. Hopefully the Zombies in this town liked to sleep in. Hopefully they didn’t like to sleep inside K-Mart.

  “Marts a mart boss. Looks like we got some early risers headed our way. Thinking we go around to the back and melee them and hope it doesn’t work out as bad as last time.”

  That sounded like a plan. A really bad plan but that seemed to be the only ones we could come up with lately. I remembered reading that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I was starting to understand what that meant. If we got attacked, again, and managed to survive, again, I was going to get a bumper sticker made that said that. Maybe it sounded cooler in Latin. I drove around the corner and waited on the transport to catch up with us.

  Once we were all parked, everyone got out of their vehicles and waited for the Zombies to show up. This time we stayed close to the vehicles for an easier get a way. Just because we’re stupid doesn’t mean we don’t eventually learn our lesson. Ann and Reeves took the front positions and I pulled out the fire poker to take clean up detail. Wilson and Davis had our backs in case Zombies came around the other corner. Walker was hanging out on the big gun in case it got really crazy and we decided noise didn’t matter anymore. I hoped he didn’t have to jump in because if he did it meant we were probably screwed.

  The sun was up now. I took some deep breaths and swung the fire poker loosely in my hand. I started getting myself ready mentally. It took a lot out of you to do this over and over. Having people charge you daily who looked like regular people for the most part. They happened to be blue and bat-shit crazy and wanted to eat you alive but they were still very recognizable as fellow humans. Knowing if you screwed up or missed your footing or got overwhelmed you were going to feel teeth and nails sinking into you. I got myself worked into a killing frenzy like I normally did. I imagined one of them hurting Ann. No way was that happening while I was still able to move.

  The first couple of Zombies ran around the corner and charged right at us. One was an obese beast of a man with arms like tree trunks and a huge ZZ Top looking beard. He was covered in filth and there were bugs crawling around in the beard. He looked like he’d been sleeping inside a dumpster for most of the apocalypse. The other one was just a
skinny woman with very short hair. She was wearing a hospital gown. I idly wondered if the Zombie virus had cured her of cancer. That would explain the cropped hair.

  Ann stepped up to the woman and swung the half a pool cue she was using at the woman’s head then stepped out of the way, sticking her foot out to trip the Zombie as she did. The woman went flying into the wall teeth first. Zombies didn’t care about pain but they did get stunned when they hit things like brick walls face first at full speed. Before the Zombie could work out which way was up and manage to get back on her feet I stepped in and brought the fire poker down hard on the back of her head. It smashed her face into the ground but she was still moving so I whacked her in the back of the head twice more. She stopped moving as her skull caved in.

  I was breathing hard and my body was on fire. I was still only a day or two out from a pretty serious car accident. Not counting all the other crap I’d done to my body. I turned around to see how Reeves was doing with ZZ Top. Oh hell, Reeves was not doing good with ZZ Top. The guy was so damn big he was taking hits from Reeves baseball bat and just shrugging them off. Reeves couldn’t get the guy on the ground because he was just too solid. I saw a short little Zombie run around the corner and figured Ann could take that one. I ran towards where Reeves was slowly giving up ground as he whacked away on the big hairy Zombie trying to get its hands on him.