Zournal (Book 2): Cruising The 'Poc

by R. S. Merritt

  I started patting around the dead body looking for keys. I found a wallet, I flipped him over and parts of him stuck to the floor. That grossed me out but I kept searching. I came up empty. Ann poked me with her foot and pointed at the console of the boat, where the key was currently sitting in the ignition. I hopped up, slipping on the captain’s body goo a little bit, I moved over and tried turning the key. The boat coughed a few times then came to life. A beautiful, beautiful sound. I looked down the dock and saw we had one lone Zombie running towards us. I jumped up on the dock with my sword, Thomas joined me. Ann went ahead and shot the Zombie and it slid to a stop about twenty feet from us, she put a second round into its head.

  “We need to get this boat moving. No time for you two to get in extra batting practice.” Ann motioned us back onto the boat.

  Thomas jumped on the boat and I walked around tossing off the mooring lines. Chrissie had taken charge of sitting in the Captains seat and getting ready to cast off. The boat was big enough to have a decent sized cabin below decks and that is where we had shoved Reeves. He seemed to be getting better but we did not see any reason to take a chance on that if we didn’t need to. Between the engine noise and the gun shots, a parade of fast moving Zombies were now headed our way. I pulled the last line off and catching Chrissies eye I pointed North.

  Chrissie flipped us around and once again we were on our way up the river.

  Entry 12: I’m on a boat!

  This was a pretty sick boat. They had the cabin downstairs where Reeves was resting. We had found a bunch of bandages and ointments for cuts and burns in a first aid kit in the room and basically got some of the ones on my chest swapped out and the rest went on Reeves. He looked like a mummy when we were done. Chrissie was keeping us on course, her parents had a boat so she had some experience driving one around. The rest of us had zero experience driving a boat. Or, at least none of us had driven one this big and nice before.

  “We’ll need to stop before it gets dark. We can throw the anchor over and sleep out here in the boat.” Chrissie looked over to make sure I was paying attention. “If we try and go at night we may hit a sandbar or a shoal because I can barely see what’s in front of us during the day. At night, it would be impossible.”

  That made sense to me. I nodded at her and said, “As soon as visibility gets to a point you think we need to stop, I’m good with stopping.”

  I left the bridge and went below to check on Reeves. He seemed like he was getting better. I sat down on the bunk beside him and checked out the room down there. It had a fridge that everything had spoiled in but now the engine running was cooling it down again. There was a bunk that when you picked it up, it was full of bottled waters and different boxed and canned food so we were good on food. Especially chips and paper plates.

  I found a flare gun. Not too sure how useful that would be but you never knew. I remembered a Zombie movie where they shot fireworks off to distract the Zombies at night. I was thinking a flare gun may work similar to that. Otherwise, we had blankets and had discovered a bunch of men’s and women’s clothes in a couple of duffel bags.

  The best discovery had been the shower head on the back of the boat where you would typically jump off and climb on if you were swimming. No one had been super excited about it until we figured out it had a temperature selector on it. We could take hot showers! Our asses would be exposed for the whole world to see but they would be soapy clean asses for once! That was exciting. That was also the reason Thomas came down to join me in the cabin.

  “All the guys banished down here for a while?” I asked him.

  “Yep. It’s a shower party upstairs. They said they’d let us know when we could come take our turns. I’m thinking it may be awhile and ours will probably be cold. Chrissie also said to tell you the anchors down and we’re stopped for the night.”

  I guess it made sense you’d want to wait for the boat to stop before showering on the back of it. As long as the women were taking advantage of the plumbing I decided to do so as well. There was a working a toilet in here and I was pretty stoked about being able to use a real toilet that was going to flush when I was done. Grabbing a copy of a bass fisherman magazine and a packet of the ever-priceless wet wipes I closed the door behind me.

  Entry 13: Margaritaville

  The morning was gorgeous. The sun shone down on the water. ______I had slept out on the deck with a nice gentle breeze hitting me the whole night. Ann had slept right next to me. I woke up to a cup of hot coffee that Ginny had made, one for each of us. We were on a boat that probably cost more than my parents’ house. I was surrounded by friends I’d do anything for. It was surreal.

  In the middle of a massive loss of human life. Just a week before we had been forced to kill a kid we had all been trying to protect after he got infected and attacked his own brother. We’d been through hell. Every moment of our lives had been geared towards just trying to survive. Nothing could get us out here. The Zombies sucked at swimming. Even if they didn’t they appeared to be the new favorite food for the Florida alligator population.

  This day was starting awesome. Did I mention we had coffee? I’ve never tasted something so wonderful in my entire life. That includes the time I melted marshmallows, peanut butter, and chocolate together in my dad’s Wok and dipped pretzels in it and that is pretty hard to beat. I grabbed the pair of binoculars we had found below decks and took the time to scan the shores around us.

  For the most part I did not see anything. We had anchored along a stretch of wooded area. Any Zombies that did hear the boat or hear us talking or whatever pretty much just wandered into the water and drowned. Ginny asked if anyone wanted another cup of coffee. Absolutely. Everyone else agreed with me. We all waited as Ginny and Thomas went and put that together. For a guy with one useful arm he sure tried hard anytime something involved Ginny. I smiled. Ah. Young love.

  Ginny and Thomas brought us our coffee from the Keurig they had going downstairs one at a time. I smelled mine. Hazelnut, or something similar, delicious. I looked around.

  “Ok. So, I am thinking we continue North, find more gas for this boat, and go North along the coast until we get close to Virginia or something and then land and find a car and go straight across to Tennessee.” I started up the planning session.

  “I’m thinking we’ll end up shipwrecked or dead somewhere along the coast.” Chrissie said. Everyone looked over at her. “Look guys, I have sailed before. This boat requires gas though. It probably has a two to three-hundred-mile radius on one tank of fuel. That will get us pretty far but I’ve never driven the coast. GPS doesn’t work anymore. It would be really easy for us to get turned around and die. I will admit it would be nice to avoid the whole Zombie thing though.”

  Ginny spoke up, “I think we’ll eventually come out in Jacksonville harbor. If we have to go through a major city I’d think we are better off doing it in a boat, surrounded by water, then on foot. Then we just drive a hundred miles up the coast. Beach it, wander in and grab a car and off we go.”

  She had said the last part flippantly, knowing we would all get the sarcasm behind it. Nothing ever worked out that easy for us.

  Chrissie piped up, “Guys, I know how to drive this boat around while people water ski and I can find islands by my house to go skinny dip or sit around and get drunk or whatever. I’m not Christopher Columbus. I’m not in any way shape or form a real ‘sailor’. I just want to get that out there. Don’t treat me like an expert because I’m like 2% better than the rest of you at this.”

  Reeves piped up, “I’m good with the drunken skinny dip place if we can head that way!”

  “You seem better.” I said, looking over at Reeves who was grinning at everybody and enjoying the hell out of his cup of coffee. “You able to figure out those charts and maps and crap that were downstairs?”

  “Yes sir boss, the maps and charts and crap show that if we keep going with the flow of the river we’re going to float through downtown Jacksonville and then ou
t into the Atlantic Ocean. Where, according to Chrissie, we will be eaten by sea monster.”

  “I never said anything about sea monsters?” Chrissie looked around at everyone. “I just want to impart the little bit of wisdom I have about the ocean. It is the most dangerous thing on this planet. She can come up and kill you at will. Nothing is more dangerous, less merciful, more beautiful, than the ocean.”

  “The ocean may be the second most beautiful thing on this planet but I’m willing to argue there is a new threat to humanity wandering around that has beat out the ocean.” I waited for it.

  Never one to let a romantic gesture go unspoiled, Reeves said, “Steve is saying the most beautiful is his mom.”

  “I meant Ann!” I blurted out. Then realized I had fallen into his trap.

  “Your mom is ugly?” Reeves asked.

  “His mom is so ugly, even Ripley won’t believe it!” Thomas threw out.

  “She made an onion cry.” Chimed in Ann.

  “Alright, back to business.” Reeves said. “Just because his mom invented blind dates -”

  I went down to the berthing area to try and make some more coffee. Ann followed me down.

  “You really think I’m hotter than your mom?” She asked. She meant it as a joke but it put me in a shitty mood. My mom was probably dead. Ann’s mom was probably dead. Ann had watched Thomas’s mom die. Thomas had seen his mom laying there with a broken neck. It was a lot. This was all a lot to take in. It wasn’t like your granddad passing from old age. You loved the guy and you would miss the hell out of him but you expected it and were able to make sense of it. Old people die.

  My mom had not been that old. My dad either. My cousins, my ex-girlfriend, my teachers, my friends, the guys I used to work with. Everybody was dead. Or running around with giant bulging veins trying to kill everybody else.

  “Hey, sorry. What are you thinking about?” Ann asked me.

  I looked at her. I stepped up to her. I kissed the hell out of her.

  I slowly let her go and she stumbled back a few steps then smiled at me. She moved back in and wrapped her arms around me and we stood there holding one another. I told her I loved her. She told me she wasn’t going to lock the door to the cabin. I offered her money. She elbowed me and then grabbed my hand and drug me back up the ladder.

  As I climbed up on deck I heard Reeves, “A Zombie once bit Chuck Norris, after 5 days of excruciating pain, the Zombie died.”

  Wow. They had moved on to Chuck Norris jokes.

  I cleared my throat. Everyone looked over at me.

  “Ok. Let’s pull up the anchor and get moving. We can talk some more about our plan as we go. I think for now we look for more gas and cruise North. One thing we have learned is that motion is life in this new normal. Staying still normally works out a lot worse than moving.” I walked over to help Chrissie pull up the anchor so could get moving.

  Entry 14: Floaters

  Chrissie fired it up and took us up the river. Ann and I were up in the bow serving as lookouts. Chrissie had tried to explain what to look for but I had no idea how I was supposed to be able to tell shallow water from deep water without jumping into it. It all just looked like water to me. On the plus side, I was cruising on the bow of a big expensive yacht with a beautiful woman. This was about as far away from our normal grind as you could get. Actually, I would have counted this as one of my top five days ever, including everything before the disease hit.

  Chrissie was holding my hand and dutifully staring ahead at the water on the lookout for ‘shoals’ or sandbars. I kind of felt like I may know what a shoal is based on old pirate books I had read. I thought they happened more in the ocean than on rivers though. Sandbars made sense, unless the sand was sticking out of the water or something though I had no idea how I was supposed to see one before we hit it. We continued staring forward though, willing ourselves to become those pirate guys who stand up in the big basket-thing at the top of the boat and yell cool stuff like ‘Land Ho!’

  One thing we did see a few of was bodies. You’d catch a glimpse of something in the water and as we got closer you’d see it was a body floating in the water. We probably saw four or five of them in the next hour. You couldn’t see them too good through the water but the fact that we were randomly seeing that many just showed how many had perished in the river.

  We came around one of the turns in the river and there was a big houseboat sitting in the middle of the river. We could see people rushing around on it and pointing towards us. We continued up the river and as we got closer we could see there was a disproportionately large number of senior citizens on the boat. The boat itself actually looked like two boats tied together now that we were closer. There was probably around twenty people moving around in it that we could see. It looked like a few of them were armed as well.

  We continued to approach and one of them yelled for us to stay away. A couple of the men behind him were carrying large caliber hunting rifles so I was good with doing whatever they said. They stared at us for a bit then the one guy waved for us to keep going. Chrissie hit the throttle and we rocketed past them. I could feel the rifles sighted in on my back as we went past. I guessed they had figured out a good way to live and did not want any outsiders showing up and getting them sick. Or, maybe they had experience with outsiders trying to rob them and no longer trusted anyone. At least they had waved us around instead of just opening fire.

  I felt much better when we made the next turn in the river and I no longer had to worry about the hunting rifle guy. We kept cruising until Chrissie and I started to notice some blocky rectangular objects jutting into the sky ahead of us.

  “I think that might be Jacksonville.” Ann said, pointing out the blocks that were slowly becoming more defined as skyscrapers. The sides of the river were also becoming more and more developed. The number of bodies we saw in the water seemed to be increasing as well. We kept moving forward, the sound of our motor seemed to be attracting some attention on the shores as Zombies began appearing, some of them jumped in the water to try and come out to us but the majority just started pacing us along the river’s edge.

  I pointed this out to Ann. She thought about it for a second and then replied, “Do you think they’re getting smarter? Or maybe just the dumber ones are being thinned out?”

  I thought about it for a minute, “Probably a little bit of both. The ones dumb enough, or vicious enough, to jump in the river and drown every time a boat goes by probably have been thinned out next to this river. It’s scary thinking they might be getting smarter. I’d like to think they’d stay dumb until they finally die. Maybe some of them are just scared of the water and some are not or maybe some are slightly less suicidal in there need to rip us apart. We’ll probably never know but I think it is something we need to watch out for. Next time we all talk let’s let everyone know to keep an eye out and see if they have noticed anything.”

  “Oh shit!” Ann jumped up and yelled at Chrissie to stop. Chrissie slowed the boat down and stared in front of us trying to figure out what Ann had seen, a couple seconds later I got thrown in to the river as the boat came to a complete stop on top of something. I hit the water feet first and yelled in pain when I only went as deep as my shoulders before hitting something. I bent my knees to absorb the shock but it still hurt. I rolled into the water and popped back up to try and see what had happened to our boat and my crew.

  Ann had managed to stay onboard, I’m thinking she had a better grip because she knew we were fixing to hit something while I had been wondering what the hell she was yelling about. I started slogging my way back over to the boat which was turned slight sideways in the water while it rested on the big metal thing we had hit that was under the water. I was thinking it had been a freighter that hit the sandbar and came to rest there and now we had come along and gotten stuck on it.

  I stopped and watched as a piece of driftwood floated by. It was an arm with a decent bit of meat left on it. Little crabs were scampering all over it as
they turned it into a floating buffet.

  Bemused, realizing this probably signaled that we were out of surreal town and back into real town, I slogged my way over to the boat. Ann waited for me on the bow.

  “You ok?” She asked.

  “I’m fine, standard aches and pains you get from being thrown from a speeding boat onto a metal deck.”

  Reeves and Thomas and the rest of the crew wandered up to the bow. I asked if anyone was hurt but everyone just had the standard aches and pains like me. Being slammed against a bulkhead was no longer a big deal in today’s world.

  “Bad news, good news boss.” Reeves had gone down into the hold to take a look. “We’re taking on some water is the bad news, but we’re pretty solid on the freighter we’ve hit so we’re not going to be sinking or going anywhere anytime soon.”

  “If we’re lucky the tide may knock us off of it. If we’re not lucky the tide may go out and hurt the boat more.” Chrissie was anxiously staring at the water around us. “I’ll grab life jackets for everybody and see if they have a raft or something we can use. Also, if you look at the shore the crash must have been pretty loud. I’ve seen a bunch of Zombie’s showing up and lining the shore so if we have to abandon ship I don’t know where we would go.”