Zournal (Book 6): The Final Countdown

by R. S. Merritt

  Then I lost control of the RV and we slammed into the big dirt embankment on the side of the road and flipped over onto our side. As we were experiencing zero gravity on our way to smack into the ground I realized they’d probably shot out our tires. I was the only one with a seatbelt on in the RV. I’d crashed enough cars in the last two years to know it was a good idea. Ann had unfastened hers to let her duck down and avoid being shot in the face. Everyone else on board was too macho to wear seat belts.

  They suffered for their machoism now as they tumbled all over the back of the RV. Like a toddler had thrown a bunch of GI Joe figures into the dryer. It would have been comical if I weren’t so worried about dying in the next few seconds. Walker went from sleeping to screaming in pain as he tried to use his messed-up hand to catch himself as he was thrown out of one of the bunkbeds.

  Before the RV had stopped sliding and while I was still trying to figure out my seat belt Reeves, Walker and Wilson were already gathering up weapons and working to get out of the still sliding RV. The bottom of it must be a lot tougher than the sides as we could hear bullets pinging off it but did not see any making it through. Reeves and Walker worked together to kick out the windshield then they both went out the front. Each of them was holding an assault rifle and an RPG. I finally figured out my seatbelt and as I was on the way to landing on my head after unsnapping myself in midair I heard the whoosh of rockets being released.

  As I was landing on a pissed off Ann who was busy trying to find the bag of grenades she’d had by her feet I heard a couple of explosions and then more gunfire. Ann found the bag and handed it to me then she bounced out the front of the RV and waited for me. Reeves and Wilson must have already charged the enemy as I did not see them anywhere. I went ahead and poked my head around and watched as Reeves and Wilson walked towards the burning troop transport and fired at anything that moved.

  I yelled grenade and ran up behind them to fling a grenade over the burning mess. As soon as I had it in the air I pulled another one and did the same thing with it. I kept throwing grenades until I was out then I pulled out my pistol and looked for someone to shoot at. Walker showed up behind me as him and Ann began taking shots at anything that moved. We all advanced, splitting up to envelop the enemy.

  No one shot back at us. We walked around and knifed a few that were just knocked out by the blast or wounded too bad to shoot at us. Wilson came up with the idea of trying to find one to interrogate a little too late.

  “Gonna need a medium to interrogate any of these guys. A medium who speaks Korean.” Walker said. I looked at him. His bandaged hand was covered in blood.

  “So now what do we do?” I asked. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere with no wheels. Again. “That was a significantly loud battle. I’m thinking Zombies are going to be here in less than ten minutes to make our lives even more exciting. Any ideas?”

  “Let’s grab as much shit as we can carry and start walking north.”

  With that awesome bit of sage guidance, we all turned and started moving back towards the RV. We weren’t even going to bother searching the dead Koreans since we had no way to carry anything we found anyway. We had more than enough of our own grade ‘A’ stuff to worry about.

  Digging through the junk in the RV Wilson encouraged us to load up on ammo and water. He also made each of us carry a few of the rockets until we had pretty much all of them. I crawled out of the RV and started walking north. More like plodding. I had so much stuff in my pack that the straps were already cutting into my shoulders. I was so heavy it felt like my feet were sinking into the ground with every step.

  Then Wilson gave out his next piece of loved guidance. He suggested we walk through the woods in parallel to the road so we wouldn’t be easily spotted by Zombies or any other Koreans. I was looking forward to being spotted. I wanted to shoot about thirty pounds worth of bullets at something. If walking on the road had been miserable walking through the briars and bushes on the side of the road while carrying all this crap was a nightmare. We heard the occasional scream of a Zombie in the distance but no perceptible flood of them poured into the area. Either there were none of them in earshot of all the damage we’d done or there were just less Zombies around here in general.

  “Hey guys.” I addressed the group as I tried to pull a thorn out of my pants that was struggling to draw blood. “You notice there seems to be less Zombies around lately?”

  Reeves nodded. “Yeah. I’m assuming they eventually will all die out. They don’t seem to need much food or water but they still are bound to need something. Half of them probably drowned in the ocean every time there was a thunderstorm or a loud noise out at sea. I’m thinking the smarter ones and the ones that like to hang out in one place are going to be the ones who make it the longest. But even they won’t be able to make it forever.”

  “So, there’s less of them but they’re the smarter ones who like to hide. Great.” Ann was always there to make us feel better about the situation. I had been pretty happy thinking there were a lot less of them around now. A small group of Zombies was no big deal to take on if you had friends and plenty of ammo. A large group of Zombies started to get more exciting. Dumb or not quantity has a certain quality all its own. Hopefully, they’d keep dying out until they were no longer a major threat. Especially if we found a place we liked and worked to get it cleared out.

  We kept on walking the rest of the day. It was just cool enough so that every time we stopped to rest we got the shivers but we still sweated while we hiked. I was pretty sure I’d be able to touch my shoulder blades together by the end of the day. Be a pretty neat party trick. I was getting rubbed raw in all kinds of places. I’d lost all sense of propriety in trying to alleviate the pain as well until Ann told me to stop constantly picking at my crotch. When she said it that way I could see how it would weird people out. I went back to trying to casually pick at my crotch more subtly. I was thinking I needed to try boxers and a ton of Vaseline tomorrow if we were going to keep this up.

  “Anybody got any Vaseline?” I asked.

  The fact that no one had a ready response to that told me that everyone was as tired as I was. We kept on hiking until we transitioned out of shrubbery and briars into overgrown lawns. Seeing a large estate type house a few hundred yards off the highway we made our way towards it. As we approached it a Zombie stood up out of the weeds to our left and started scrambling towards us. It was an older man in a pair of tattered, mud covered overalls.

  As he ran towards us his belly sloshed around in front of him. His thick white beard was covered in crud. His eyes were narrow slits of red between a massive buildup of crust and scabs. He was trying to scream and gnash his teeth at the same time as he continued trotting towards us. Reeves stepped up and hit him in the knee with his baseball bat. That put the Zombie on the ground. I stepped forward and bashed his head in with a stubby crowbar. I pulled back, wiping my hands and wrist on my pants to try and get rid of the blood and other brain juice that had splattered on me as I pummeled the guys skull.

  Breathing hard and feeling like I was going to fall over from the exertion I straightened up and kept trudging towards the manor. Manor is such an ostentatious word but it fit the bill on the place we were creeping up on. It looked like one of those fancy wineries mixed with old money. Something a Dupont or a Rockefeller may have invested in and lost money every year just to show his friends when he was over on the West Coast.

  We broke into the main part of the house and set all our stuff down. I felt like I was floating when we decoupled the backpack from my shoulders. I knew a lot of people, my dad included, who loved to put on a backpack and go strolling through the woods for days at a time. I was not one of those people. I was more of a bag of Cheetos and Netflix guy. Although, the last two years I guess I had been more of the backpack guy than the couch potato guy. My gut appreciated the apocalypse. No better fat camp exists than the end of the world.

  I collapsed on the couch in the living room. Reeves and Ann
cleared the house. Walker collapsed across from me. Wilson was helping to clear the house when he saw a barn out the back window and a couple of vehicles and other buildings. He waited on Ann and Reeves then asked Reeves to come with him and see if they could find a vehicle. We only had about an hour of sunlight left so they moved out quick. I prayed they would find something so I didn’t have to hike anymore. I happened to glance out the front window and saw a stream of about eight vehicles go by. I assumed they were Koreans and that we’d made it off the road just in time. Hopefully, they were headed south to regroup and get the hell off my continent and out of my country. I hoped they were in a hurry and wouldn’t have time to try and solve the mystery of who blew up all their buddies a few miles down the road.

  Meanwhile, Ann had sat down with Walker and taken off his bandages. She asked me to come take a look and not seeing a way to get out of it I complied. It was grotesque. He had bones sticking out of the end of his scabbed up flayed fingers. His left hand was pretty much shot. It was also turning an ugly red color. I must’ve been turning the color green because Ann told me to go back to the other couch.

  She looked at Walker and started talking in a firm voice. “Your bones are sticking out of your fingertips. I think you’re going to end up seriously infected if we don’t do something. I think we should cut the bones off where they stick out and then try to clean and cauterize the wounds then wrap them back up and start you on some major doses of antibiotics. Does that make sense to you?”

  “I’m getting off easy compared to the rest of the crew who came on this trip. Works for me. Let’s do it. Somebody go find me a bottle of anesthesia. Preferably green label but I’ll settle for anything really expensive.”

  There was a wet bar on the other side of the room. I went over and poured some stuff from a decanter into a heavy, short glass. In order to make sure it was the proper dose I went ahead and took a shot of it. Smooth. Rich people know how to party. Although, I much preferred wine with the screw top for ease of access. I filled the cup back up and started walking back towards Walker then thought twice about it and just snagged the whole bottle.

  I served as the anesthesiologist as Ann gathered the stuff she thought she would need. We had a pair of cutters the Seals used to cut through fences so that should go through his finger bones like a warm knife through butter. Ann had me sanitize them with booze and heat them up with a lighter to make sure they were clean and ready for surgery. Then she sent me out to find Wilson and Reeves and collect a cigarette lighter from a car to use to do the cauterization with. We also needed a pair of tongs and a fire pit or something to start a fire in.

  I caught up with Reeves and Wilson outside and let them know what was up including the convoy I’d seen go by earlier. We all knew we’d gotten super lucky not being on the road when those trucks rolled by. We’d barely survived surprising a single transport truck that had been broken down in the middle of the road. Reeves pointed over at an old Chevy truck on the side of the barn and said they thought they could get it to run. There were a couple more modern cars around that seemed very dead. Other than that, they had found one of those big harvester tractors. We collected what Ann needed and headed inside.

  Walker was sitting up on the couch while Ann was in front of him on the ottoman. We started a small fire on the back porch and got the cigarette lighter from the cars heated. Ann had me clip off the bones on Walkers hand while Wilson and Reeves held Walker still. Then Ann used the tongs and cauterized each finger while I helped hold his hand still. When we were done, we all had a drink of the scotch as Ann bandaged Walker back up.

  “Ok. I think he’ll be good now. As long as we keep it clean and keep him full of antibiotics.” Ann put the last bandage on and started rooting through her bag of pills for antibiotics.

  “Good. I think we need to go work on that truck and get the hell out of here. There’s way too many Koreans around for me to want to travel during the day in that clunker. At night, at least we have a chance of not being recognized. Reeves, you want to go help me try and get it started? You guys make sure we’re ready to go once we manage to get it started. If we can’t then we may be driving a big ass green tractor instead.”

  Entry 35: Needle in a Haystack

  We were saved from having to drive the big ass green tractor. They had to swap out the battery and then charge it and replace all four tires but eventually the old Chevy started up. It had been working on the farm since the 1980’s so a couple years of sitting idle wasn’t going to kill it like it did the fancy new trucks. We drug our stuff out and flung it in the bed of the truck. Then we all climbed in. Ann, Walker and Wilson got the comfortable seat up front and Reeves and I got stuck in the rust bucket back of the truck with all our stuff.

  We got out of there around two in the morning. A light rain had started to fall. Which was awesome for the two of us sitting in the back. Wilson drove with the headlights on. Not much use trying to be secretive when you’re driving down the highway. It just looks odder to have your headlights off. Plus, not seeing a Zombie or a deer or something in the road at fifty miles per hour can ruin your day real fast. We drove without any issues most of the night. It began to look like we were going to roll through Eureka first thing in the morning as the sun was coming up.

  Eureka was a pretty big city and we were all worried about rolling up into it right as the sun came up. We figured there would be Zombies everywhere and if the Koreans had a stronghold somewhere Eureka would make sense as a strategic place to have it setup. On the other hand, what the hell where we supposed to do? None of us wanted to pull over and try to sleep the day away. We all wanted to make it to Spokane and sync back up with the people we’d left behind. I knew I’d feel a lot better once I saw that Ginny was still alive. I needed to know it had been the right decision to send her away.

  We decided to just go for it. For once, it worked out for us. I’d been preparing myself for fighting off Zombies trying to get into the trucks bed with us while simultaneously being shot at by the Koreans. It turned out to be very anticlimactic. The streets were cleared pretty well. There were not a lot of Zombies wandering around. No sign of the Koreans except for the cleanliness of the streets and the lack of Zombies. I was betting the convoy we’d seen rolling through yesterday had been a group leaving Eureka. It boded well for the Koreans hopefully regrouping to get the hell out of Dodge.

  It may have just been the not being attacked constantly in the city vibe but I found Eureka to be a charming little city. Since the Koreans had done us the service of cleaning it up we may need to put it on the short list for possible long term living arrangements. If we could figure out how to fish we could live like kings. Kings who never had fresh vegetables and eventually died of scurvy but at least we’d consider ourselves kings.

  North of Eureka the roads went to hell. We spent more time driving around road jams than we did driving on the road. No one had spent anytime trying to clear this area out which meant to me that the Koreans had only gone as far north on this coast as Eureka. That meant that the next big city we hit was going to be the normal Zombie nightmare. Staring at the map we figured out the next city we were going to hit was going to be Eugene. Eugene was a decent sized city. I started staring at the map trying to find little squiggly lines that would indicate an easy way to bypass what would probably be Zombie central.

  In the good old days, we’d have been from Eugene to Spokane in about twelve hours. That would have included gas stops, lunch and dinner and driving well over the speed limit most of the time. We would not have had to deal with cars in the road, Zombies attacking us, watching out for ambushes from other survivors or Koreans, a truck that made a funny chugging noise every once in a while, portions of the road that were washed out or our chronic fatigue. I was estimating it was going to take us at least a solid two days to make Spokane. Then we still had to find Ginny.

  We drove. We drove through the rain. We drove while shooting at Zombies. We pushed the truck through mud while Zombies
screamed at us from the cars they were stuck in for eternity. We never saw another living soul on that journey. Plenty of Zombies but no normal people. That doesn’t mean they weren’t there. If you were still alive at this point you knew better than to parade around where everybody could see you. Walker slowly got better. The cauterization had worked out. Once new skin grew in he’d just have a nubby hand he could use to pick up chicks and scare kids.

  We drove. The distance to Spokane dwindling down slowly as we pressed on. We took turns driving so we could keep moving. This close, all of us felt an urgency to get there as soon as we could. I started looking for signs. The deal was we were looking for a sign with a coffee shop and a gas station on it. When we finally saw one that matched up with what we were looking for we hopped out and raced over to it. The word ‘dig’ was written on the back of the sign.

  I dropped down on my knees and took out my Kabar and started scratching away at the hard ground. A section of it was looser than the rest so I focused on that. Eventually I pulled up a Tupperware bowl with the lid on it. I opened that up and an envelope fell out. It was addressed to us. More specifically, it was addressed to Ann, Reeves, Steve or any of the Navy guys who made it back. I tore it open and started reading the letter inside.