I'm Tired of Zombies | Book 2 | Full Scale War

by Murphy, James W.

  We met mid-way in the stairwell, embraced and kissed. “Are you better?” I asked her.

  “Yes, thank you for putting up with my emotions,” she said.

  “Anytime, ma’am. I like your emotions.”

  “You’re silly.”

  “Yep, you’ve told me that on a number of occasions,” I said with a smile.

  “I love you Douglas Sutton, you know that?”

  I hugged her tighter and said, “Yes, I do know that, and I love you, too.”

  We kissed again and I went up, she downstairs and I moved material, she boiled potatoes. I was relieved she was feeling better.

  After I’d moved several of the boxes and cans of materials to their rightful places, I remembered the coffee and headed for the kitchen. The pot was ready, and I poured myself a steaming mug full. I sat at the table looking out over the valley and wondered about our future.

  The intercom rang and I almost scalded myself as I jumped out of my reverie. I picked up the receiver and said, “Joe’s Pool Hall, Eight Ball speaking, may I help you?”

  Laughing is all I heard. When she finally did speak, she said, “You’re deplorable, you know it?”

  “You know you almost scalded me to death calling? I had a hot cup of coffee in my hands when you rang, and I spilled it everywhere when I jumped. You scared the crap outta me,” I said laughing with her. “You should have seen it…you’d still be laughing.”

  “Ha! I am laughing, but sorry for interrupting,” she said still laughing.

  “What do you want, sweetie?”

  “I was calling to let you know I’m going out to the barn and get some eggs for the potato salad and wondered if you needed me to do anything else while I was out there.”

  “No, I took care of the animals earlier. Be careful and wear a handgun,” I told her and rang off. I’m glad I’d put in the intercom system. It was beneficial, but not being used to hearing a phone ring for a long, long time, it startled me. I refilled my mug and sat back down after cleaning the mess. I saw Ruth going to the barn and a sobering thought came to mind – what would my life have been like if the plague hadn’t come along? Would I have even met Ruth? Would I be married to someone else or even doing something else with my life?

  I hadn’t thought about any of those subjects and almost couldn’t remember that I wanted to be a travel writer like my parents had been. That I would have hired a cowboy to run the ranch while I was away on business trips and would have been living a much different life than the one, I was living now.

  I sipped my coffee several times over the minutes while I sat in thought. Ah, Dave and Julia were pulling in. I refilled my mug again and turned off the pot, poured out the remaining coffee and rinsed the pot.

  Back downstairs, I put two more logs on the fire as Julia, Ruth and Dave came in. Ruth and Julia went to the kitchen and Dave came over to the fireplace with me.

  “Anymore coffee?” he asked. I looked over and the pot was cold and nodded no.

  “I’ll give you half of this?” I told him.

  “Nah, I’m pretty much coffeed out, I’ll pass,” he said. “What have you been up to this morning?”

  “Took care of the animals as usual then used the ATV to take some supplies up to the Underground.”

  He looked back into the kitchen then back to me and said, “How’s Ruth? I’m worried about her.”

  “I am, too. She’s okay now. She helped me with the supplies up top and seemed to be much better helping with that.”

  “When do you want to sit down and discuss tactics and things?” Dave asked.

  “Shoot, you and I can start now if you want,” I answered. “Let them talk a while, I think that’ll do Ruth some good. Maybe she’ll open up to Julia some more and get it out of her system.”

  “Probably do Julia some good to do the same.”

  “Come on, let’s go in the library. We can start in there.”

  Dave and I went in the library and I got a pad of paper and some pencils. We began with a weapons list and added ammunition. We needed to know how many of what types of weapons we had, and how much ammunition was on hand for each caliber. I made a column for grenade types and numbers of each. We decided to load every weapon as it would give us faster reaction time if necessary. We would build rifle racks for both Underground facilities and keep loaded firearms there along with additional loaded magazines and grenades.

  Next came food items, clothing, and fire making supplies, water rations, and hygiene supplies. Then a list of things we needed to do for the animals. I told Dave that if it came to it, I’d just leave the barn open and the animals could fend for themselves. We added fuel issues to investigate as we had enough fuel on hand for everything, just needed to ensure everything was fueled and ready to go.

  That brought to mind a bug-out situation. What would we need to have loaded and ready to go if we got into a bug out scenario? How much food, water, fuel, weapons, ammunition, tools, clothing, foot ware, camping supplies and equipment would we need to haul? How many vehicles and what types? We wrote until our hands began to cramp. Ruth and Julia had come in and joined in on the discussion and I asked Ruth to take over the writing portion.

  Then Julia presented some questions none of us expected, “What if we get separated? What happens if we get into a situation where the four of us get attacked at the same time and can’t support one another, and/or had to bug out? What if you can only go one way and we can only go another. What happens afterwards? Do we try to meet up or just go our separate ways?”

  The four of us looked at each other and I said, “For my vote, we should consider a meeting place and make every attempt to rejoin there. Maybe having two or three spots pre-selected, that way we can have multiple areas to consider rejoining.”

  “I agree,” Dave said. “We can place supplies at each area for just such a contingency.”

  “Seems like a lot of work to do because we’re not absolutely sure we’re going to be attacked, right?” Ruth said. “Don’t get me wrong, I do want to rejoin somewhere if we get split up, but why move supplies around that we may need?”

  Now all four of us were in on the conversation and we talked for quite sometime. Julia was the one that called for a break in the early evening saying she was hungry. We jumped up as a group and prepared dinner, with Dave and I firing up the grill, barbequing the chicken, and Julia and Ruth mixing the potato salad.

  We ate then continued our conversation and list making in the library and the meeting went well into the late night. It was close to midnight when we chose to adjourn and reconvene the next morning with breakfast. I slept like a log and I’m sure everyone else did. Our minds, wasted by midnight, were the deciding factor when we turned in.

  The next morning, I awoke to the smell of coffee and sausages cooking. My two favorite smells in the morning. I jumped out of bed, relieved myself and took a quick shower, brushing my teeth also. I put on heavy work clothes along with long underwear, as I knew I would be outside a good portion of the day.

  Downstairs I found the other three already up and moving. I was the one that slept in. Dave had gathered all the notes from the previous day’s meeting and had cleaned up the library. Julia was helping Ruth make breakfast and we were having eggs, sausage, toast, and coffee. Ruth had put out strawberry and peach jams - decisions, decisions.

  Dave told me to sit, then, “Good dog.”

  “Funny,” I said sarcastically. “You’re not much of a comedian this early in the morning, you know.”

  “Such as I am, you accept,” he said in a Shakespearian tone and a flourish of his hands.

  “It’s going to be a long day,” I mumbled.

  Julia was placing biscuits on the table, leaned over, and said in my ear, “You don’t know the half of it, mister.”

  I look up at her and she nodded towards Dave and followed up with, “He’s been at it all morning already. Weird!”

  “That is me, Mister Weird,” Dave intoned in Shakespearian again.

/>   “Do I need to get the Thorazine out?” I said giving him a sideways look.

  He backed off a step and handed me all the papers from the night before. I looked at them, then back at him, took the pages, slowly, and said, “Behave…sit,” pointing at his chair.

  He started laughing and sat down, ending his laugh with a mischievous looking grin.

  Julia sat down and Ruth served the eggs and sausage. She handed me a full mug of coffee and I asked Dave to say the blessing as Ruth sat. He gave a nice prayer and asked God to be with us as we talked about our futures today. After he said Amen, we began to eat and the conversation around the table focused on what we would be doing today.

  “I need to take care of the animals this morning,” I said. “Afterwards, my social calendar is open until dinner time.”

  “There are a few things I need to do in the pantry and up in the Underground today,” Ruth said. “After that, I’m available for whatever we decide to do.”

  “I’m helping her,” Julia said, pointing at Ruth.

  “I’m helping him,” Dave said pointing at me, and laughing again. I didn’t get the joke but chuckled, nonetheless. He was on a roll today. “What are we doing?” he asked.

  “I’ve got to muck the animals and clean stalls,” I explained. “I didn’t do it yesterday or the day before so today is a must. The pigs need some slop,” I looked at Ruth and she nodded, meaning she’d bring up the things beginning to get questionable from the pantry and root cellar, “and I need to ride down and check on the sheep and cattle. They probably need more hay. You,” I said pointing at Dave, “and Sam, can load four bales in the ATV and drive them around to the southeast gate and I’ll drag them in with Dusty. After that, I have a few small things in the garage to do but they won’t take long with Dave’s help.”

  The four of us broke and cleaned the breakfast dishes together then went to take care of our chores. It took Dave and me a little more than two hours to take care of all the animals and deliver hay. We met back at the barn and he helped me unsaddle Dusty and put the tack a way.

  In the garage, I was standing by the workbench when Dave backed the ATV inside and closed the door. He came back to where I was and asked what I needed to do out there.

  I looked at him and said, “How many drones do we have?”

  “I have five or six back at my place,” he answered. “How many do you have here?”

  “I’ve got five, so we may have ten or eleven.”

  “Yeah, so what are you thinking?”

  “We used a tactic from the Vietnam War the Vietnamese used and it worked very well, right?” Dave nodded affirmatively. “Why not use other tactics we learned from history?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Kamikazes…from World War Two. Remember, the Japanese used suicide pilots to fly into ships, and another example is what happened in New York City, on September Eleventh.”

  “Right, nine-one-one. I remember - no one can forget that. And I remember the World War Two thing, too. What are you thinking?”

  “What if there is a way to rig the drones we have with explosives and fly them into trucks and vehicles they use against us?” I could see the wheels were turning in Dave’s mind as he thought about that. “I’m not sure how much of a payload we could use or even if we can add any weight to them, or enough weight to do damage, but I think it’s worth looking into. They would be like a kind of portable artillery.”

  “I’m thinking, hang on,” Dave said holding up his hand. He put his elbows on the workbench and rested his head in his hands. He was in deep thought. He straightened up and got a tablet of paper and grabbed one of the many carpenter’s pencils I had lying around and began writing and drawing. I figured I’d give him some time and went and pulled one of the new drones from the locker where I kept them. I remembered I had two or three more drones in the armory, and we’d get them later.

  Taking the owner’s manual out, I looked for payload limits and found the little drone could take an additional four pounds. The booklet said things like cameras, small tools, boxes, etc. With the additional weight, the maximum altitude was fifteen hundred feet and a range of about ten miles. Perfect. We could use one drone to find the convoy or whatever, and the others to bomb with. I looked at Dave and he was still writing.

  I turned away from him to see what we could use as bombs when he looked up from his tablet and said, “I need you to go take mileage readings on the map application on the computer for these places around the valley, from your house to each…now, if you would.” He handed me a list of ten places to range.

  I nodded and turned but he had already gone back to his tablet and began writing again. He was in his own world, disturbingly like the doc had been, drawing up plans for the drones. I left out the side door and went inside. I poured myself more coffee then went into the library where the computer was and turned it on. I didn’t see Ruth and Julia and figured they were in the pantry going through foodstuffs.

  The computer booted so I brought up the map app and began mapping the mileage on places Dave needed ranges. Everything was within ten miles as the crow flew. That was a good thing. The one drone I’d read about had a range with a load of ten miles. We were in business from a range standpoint. I’d written everything down and leaving the computer up, I took off for the garage with my coffee and the list.

  Dave was in the same position as I’d left him. I handed him the page with the mileages on it and he smiled, looking at the page and said with a bigger smile, “We have them now.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  He looked up from the pages and said, “Everything is within ten miles, the range of one of these drones. I think I have a few that will go further, but not by much, maybe twelve or fourteen miles. These have a four-pound payload capacity. Four pounds of C-4 plastic explosive is a big bang. You said you have experience with C-4, right?” I nodded. “Then we’ll rig each with a four-pound charge and several detonators so when we fly them into a truck or something, they’ll blow on contact – we need to test one first.”

  “That old truck up in Centennial - that’s only five miles at most and is a sitting duck in that pasture all by itself,” I thought aloud.

  “Perfect for a test platform,” Dave said, smiling. “We’ll experiment with the C-4. Maybe four pounds is too much. What do you think?”

  “Use the four pounds. If the others will hold more, then load them up I say; the bigger the bang, the better to take them out,” I said.

  “How much do you have?”

  “I don’t know three or four hundred pounds or so. More than enough for this project. I used a bunch of it to rig the stairwell to the Underground just in case. It’ll take out a fifteen-foot section and who ever’s coming up with it.”

  “Okay, great. I’m going to drive over to my place and get the other drones and bring them over here. We’ll get the girls and do an experiment,” he said with a smile.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said and fired up an ATV. We shot out of the garage and I drove as fast as possible in the snow. At Dave’s, we went into his underground and dug in the storeroom for the drones and found seven.

  “Let’s look in this other room down the hall. I’m not sure what all Sam had in there. Might be worth the time to look,” Dave said.

  We moved down the hall and entering the room, found it filled with boxes of materials. Dave pointed me to the right, he went left and together we looked in boxes. Many had contents written on the tops, so we didn’t need to open them all.

  Dave yelled out and I went to where he was. He’d found a stack of drones. They were larger than the ones we had and were of an industrial nature, large and strong. They had six engines.

  “Look at these things. Man, these’ll pack a punch, huh?” Dave said.

  “I’m sure. We should save a few of these for roving reconnaissance,” I suggested.

  “Maybe, come on, let’s get this stuff loaded.”

  We took the drones
out to the ATV and headed back to Paradise Valley. After we’d unloaded, we were reading the manuals on the drones Sam had and found they had a ten-pound payload capacity. Ten pounds of C-4 would be a mighty big bang. They had a range of twenty-five miles with payload. The airport was about twenty-five miles away. With these, we could begin our attack way out and would probably really confuse the doc’s troops.

  Dave said, “Lets get one of the smaller drones loaded up for a test flight. If it does well, we’ll fly it up to Centennial and blow up that truck.”

  I went to the outdoor locker I used for explosives and pulled a case of C-4 out. A case was fifty, individually plastic wrapped one-pound blocks. I took it into the garage and set it on the counter. It would need to warm up some before we tried to form it in the drone. I got four detonators from the metal cabinet I kept them locked up in and set them far away from the clay.

  Dave had pulled the drone out of the box I’d opened and sat it on the counter. He plugged in the battery pack so it could charge. Together we attached the propellers, landing gear, camera, and antennae. It was black, as were the others like it. They would be a fitting end to the black trucks and hummers. Dave and I were anxious to fly this puppy out and do the kamikaze thing to the old truck up in Centennial.

  Ruth yelled for us to come in and get some lunch. The time we spent eating would allow the batteries to charge, for the C-4 to thaw enough to form, and for us to explain to the ladies what we were planning.

  As we ate, we explained everything to Julia and Ruth. They were just as excited as we were. What was it about a large explosion that got everyone’s blood up? All four of us were excited and wanted to rush out and fly the drone out. That would probably get us killed, as we shouldn’t rush with C-4. We finished lunch and together, the four of us went out to the garage.

  The C-4 was malleable enough to form so Dave and I packed three sticks of it in the drone’s storage area. A little less than four pounds of the clay-like substance, the three sticks filled the storage box. I lifted the little drone, felt its weight, and figured we’d evened out the load satisfactorily. I took a drill, drilling four holes in the front of the container holding the explosive so we could insert the detonators. We figured the impact of a full-speed hit would set off the explosion.