Zournal (Book 5): Feeling Lucky?
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Zournal
Book 5
“Feeling Lucky?”
R S Merritt
Text Copyright © 2017 Randall Scott Merritt
All Rights Reserved
As with all that is my life, this book is dedicated to my family, most especially to my beautiful wife.
Table of Contents
Entry 1: Nine Lives
Entry 2: A Hard Right
Entry 3: Fox and the Hound
Entry 4: Remember the Alamo
Entry 5: Running the Gauntlet
Entry 6: Tracked from Above
Entry 7: Shut Up and Drive
Entry 8: Fish in a Barrel
Entry 9: We Tried Asking You Nicely
Entry 10: Gateway to the San Luis Valley
Entry 11: Now That’s a Big Hole
Entry 12: The Havasupai
Entry 13: Flight of the Valkyries
Entry 14: Spray and Pray
Entry 15: Out of the Frying Pan…
Entry 16: Seriously?
Entry 17: At What Cost
Entry 18: By the Glow of the Neon Lights
Entry 19: Roadside Assistance
Entry 20: Recon
Entry 21: Straight Shot
Entry 22: Ricochet
Entry 23: Bat out of Hell
Entry 24: Thunderstruck
Entry 25: Motel 6
Entry 26: Counting Coup
Entry 27: Deep Blue Moat
Entry 28: Patience is a Virtue
Entry 29: Improvise, Overcome, Adapt
Entry 30: The Geneva What?
Entry 31: Ready, Fire, Aim…
Entry 32: Winging It
Entry 33: The Flood Tunnels
Entry 34: A Madman’s Marathon
Entry 35: Welcome to the Luxor
Entry 36: The Sixth Floor
Entry 37: I Miss Hitting Snooze
Entry 38: Hello?
Entry 39: Convoy
Entry 40: The Base Inside the Base
Entry 41: Into the Pit
Entry 42: The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday
Entry 43: Not Dead Yet
Entry 44: We Have a Winner!
Authors Note:
Entry 1: Nine Lives
We hit I-25 kept on cruising. All of us wordlessly snapping and strapping grenades, ammo, knives, and whatever else needed replenishing after the fight to get us out of that bottling plant back onto our bodies. How many more situations like that could we possibly make it through? Looking back on everything we have done and periodically skipping back in this journal to refresh parts of our journey in my own mind it seems crazy that we’ve made it this far. We’ve had a lot of companions fall in the fight beside us but for some reason the four of us were still chugging along. I kept waiting for the other shoe to fall. What keeps me up at night isn’t worrying about myself but fear of watching more of these people who’ve become my family get hurt.
We put the city of Pueblo in the rearview of our conscripted military Hummer and drove into the brightening desert dawn. I struggled to try and figure out how to get a machete in my backpack without ripping the zipper while Ann drove us full speed ahead. We had no clue where we were going but she was absolutely in a hurry to get there. Last time she’d driven like this, we’d ended up like the guys who chased Moses into the Red Sea once the Jews had made it across. Death crashing and smashing all around us. Somehow, we’d made it through that as well.
Reeves was asking everyone in the car if they knew where the saltines were as he used his fingers to shove Vienna sausages into his mouth. The can of sausages was doing that gross thing where all the liquid they are packed in gels up into a semi-solid, slimy, substance. It wasn’t bothering Reeves at all. He continued to shove in the sausages while holding Daisy at bay with his other hand. Daisy was busy staring at the sausages and licking her lips while trying to stand up on all the loose gear in the back seat. Every time Ann would crest one of the foothills we were driving through it would toss Daisy around but staring at the can of sausages kept her anchored in place.
Not only had we made it out of the plant, we had done so with a big ass Golden Doodle we had to carry up and down ladders and keep from barking and getting us all killed. Ginny was scratching the big dogs back while looking for more supplies to shove in her pack. I personally wished we had some more C-4 and detonators. That stuff was awesome. It was the only thing I wanted to bring to every party from now on. I totally was getting why everybody loved blowing shit up. It worked.
The more I thought about it the more I realized it wasn’t all luck that had gotten us to this point. We had turned out to be an eclectic mix of people who somehow had the right skills when put together to survive this fiasco. Reeves was our straightforward soldier type. Ann had the law enforcement background which brought a ton of valuable training and experience. Ginny had all the training she had received from her Force Recon grandfather, plus she was just a naturally precocious girl who liked to think through things before acting. I was the college dropout slacker who had somehow ended up being in charge of our little group. Mostly because none of the rest of them wanted to be. We did pretty much everything democratically but when it came down to time to make a decision they generally went with whatever I thought was best. Of course, they’d typically explained it to me and basically told me what I should think is best.
I guess I should be happy for the end of the world. I would never have realized my potential in the old world. I would never have hooked up with a girl like Ann or had people in my life like Ginny and Reeves who were a brother and sister to me. A shame it took all this to get me motivated to get off the couch. The proof was in the pudding on this one. I was alive and on the offensive while the majority of people on the planet were running around trying to eat people. The ones not trying to eat people were mostly dead.
The mission we had set for ourselves had a fairly high certainty of ending in our deaths anyway. We had about as much chance of taking out the North Korean army as Daisy had of learning Latin. Considering the damn dog barely knew her own name I didn’t see her speaking any new languages any time soon. You could yell her name until you were hoarse but she’d ignore you like she had gone deaf while she took her time sniffing every object within view of the Hummer. Move a little piece of plastic around that sounded even vaguely like a cookie wrapper and that bitch was all up on you though. Maybe we should just change her name to whatever sound a cookie wrapper makes?
We had discussed force multipliers and linking up with the military and trying to find other survivors to join us. None of these ideas had panned out and we’d pretty much stopped considering them. As far as force multipliers went we had used up the last of our explosives escaping from the bottling plant. We did have the Humvee with the mounted fifty caliber machine gun that gave us an edge in a firefight but the enemy had a ton of them as well. We’d met up with another group of military guys and once again we’d mixed in with them as well as oil does with vinegar. I still had a large bruise on the side of my face from the baton one of their officers had used to beat me with before I sliced him up with my switchblade.
As far as gathering survivors. Everyone we met up with who joined up with us ended up dead. The last guy we had adopted into the group, Tim, had been surviving the apocalypse and living in style until we showed up. He hadn’t even seen a Zombie until a few hundred of them crashed our party at his place and chased us out into the night. Tim hadn’t survived but his dog, Daisy, had not only survived but managed to save our lives a few times already. If we could just get her to stop barking when we needed to be quiet and to control her bodily functions better when she got scared she’d fit right in.
So here we are. Bar
reling down the highway in the desert with the sun blazing down and the windows letting through a chilly breeze. A band of brothers and sisters forged by the crucible of the apocalypse into a force that absolutely believed it could bring crushing defeat to any enemy. I had a feeling we’d be testing out that perception in the near future. We’d intended to get to the enemy in Southern California by going up to Oregon, syncing with US Forces there and then heading south as scouts. Instead, we were just rushing straight at them with our hair on fire and weapons locked and loaded. That was more our style anyway. That scouting and sneaking stuff sounded like it would take forever and be a lot of work. Patience was none of our strong suits.
Entry 2: A Hard Right
“I think we’ve gone far enough south. We go much further the Zombies will be speaking Spanish.”
Everyone looked up at my announcement. Ann looked over at me from where she was busy practicing to become a Nascar driver.
“How come now? I was thinking if we kept going we could cut into Mexico and come up through Baja at the bastards.”
That idea did have some merit. I’d been thinking about it though and realized it didn’t really matter which direction we approached from. The North Koreans were a militarized people and would know to keep guards and armaments posted all around them. They’d survived constant threats and an uneasy truce with the US for well over half a century at this point. You didn’t manage that without being at least a little bit badass and a lot paranoid.
Ginny decided to chime in while Reeves was busy trying to keep Daisy from licking his face. “The angle of attack should be focused on where we can do the greatest damage with the minimum resources. We have the minimum resources piece down. Seriously, I don’t think you could get much more minimal. I’m thinking they have an established and fortified beachhead set up by now. If that’s right then they are pushing out into new territory and trying to deal with Zombies and survivors in the new areas as they spread out. Contrary to popular military wisdom the weakest and most confused area might end up being along their front. Their flanks are going to be in secured areas. The front is where we can probably cause the most havoc. The louder the havoc the more Zombies will come to the party to help out as well.”
I liked that. Her explanation of what I was planning on having us do sounded way better the way she said it. ‘Angle of attack’ sounded way smarter than ‘suicidal bum rush’. Smart or not though, we were only a couple of states away from an untold number of the enemy. That didn’t even count the Zombies that were going to be wandering around. We were in a sparsely populated area now with the only real dangerous places being the cities and suburbs we drove through. California was going to be different.
We needed to be prepared when we came out of the mountains since the golden state had been overpopulated like crazy. It would be crawling with Zombies, assuming the Koreans had not figured out a way to take out the bulk of the blue population. Considering what they had decided to unleash on the world you’d think part of the plan would have been to put the virus back in a box once it had done what they needed it to do. I said that out loud and Reeves jumped into the conversation after firmly clamping the dogs mouth shut with one hand and pushing her away from him. Maybe if he’d stop spilling meat by products all over himself she’d stop trying to lick him all the time.
“Hey boss. I’ve been thinking about the virus and my guess is the North Koreans had it handed to them by a foreign agency. No way they developed something this complex on their own. I wouldn’t be super surprised to find out they stole it from us.”
“Why would we make something like this?” I asked. Naively still thinking the USA was the shining example of all that was good and democratic in the world.
Reeves shrugged. “We may have made it just to figure out a way to counter it. I’m thinking it could have been a byproduct of trying to come up with a drug that made soldiers not need to sleep or eat much in order to survive in the field. It was too extreme to actually use on anybody or test it but someone may have seen the monetary advantage and sold it to someone who turned around and sold it to North Korea.”
I was getting a headache. Thinking through all this was depressing and complicated and required a perspective about the world that I just did not have. Even with the virus in hand it would have been a complex and costly attack to pull off without tipping anyone off that you were doing it. Especially when you were a country like North Korea, that everyone was constantly watching because no one trusted you. They’d done it though. They’d managed to pull off an attack that brought the world to its knees. Unfortunately for them, the USA was just so vast that they hadn’t been able to wipe it all out and now the parts that were left were forming up and retaliating.
As a leader of a small group of the ’retaliators’ I needed to figure out the best way to hurt the invaders without any of my people getting killed. I was absolutely not willing to sacrifice anyone to this cause if I could help it. That meant unpopular decisions were sitting over the horizon for me. Unpopular decisions like at some point we were going to have to stop riding around in the air-conditioned Hummer and get out and walk. Walk while carrying a ton of crap. I already hated myself for having to even think about giving that order.
We made the turn towards the enemy in a small town called Walsenburg. We drove down the highway hard and fast to avoid getting shoved off the road again if the Zombies decided to surge on us. When I say we drove through fast I mean at top speed. Ann put the pedal on the floor and didn’t let go until we were all the way through town. Anything she couldn’t get around she went through. I was paralyzed with fear watching the debris and other crap on the road go flying around behind us as we raced through. I turned around to see how Reeves and Ginny were handling it and saw they both had their eyes firmly closed. Daisy had hers wide open and seemed to be enjoying the ride except for when Ann made sudden savage turns to avoid whatever and Daisy went flying around in the backseat.
I made sure my seatbelt was nice and secure and leaned back and tried to close my eyes. I just couldn’t do it. I’d seen too much at this point. Through some miracle from god or a complete suspension of the laws of physics or maybe a combination of both we made it through the town alive. As Ann slowed down to a sane speed and everyone started opening their eyes in the backseat I felt myself start breathing again.
Signs on the road up ahead were pointing us towards an exit that would take us into Lathrop State Park. I pointed out the exit as a good place for us to take a break and let Daisy out for a little bit. We could fill up the tank with diesel from one of the plastic jugs banging around on the outside of the hummer while Daisy did her thing.
We got off at the exit and followed the signs towards the visitor center. The visitor center complex was a large building with a large parking lot. The parking lot was crawling with Koreans in military clothing going in and out of the building and wandering around. Ann slammed on the brakes and started to whip the Hummer around in a one eighty.
“Slow it down a bit Ann. They may have seen us and just assume we are with them. If you turn casually we may still be ok.” I left out the part where her slamming on the brakes may have just gotten us all killed.
Ann slowed down and started turning around but was still doing so very aggressively. I started to tell her to drive more casually when Reeves announced from the backseat that a vehicle was heading out to meet us. A vehicle that looked like it had a mounted rocket launcher on it. I decided the time for casual driving was past and went ahead and yelled for Ann to get us the hell out of there.
She gave me a dirty look and yanked hard on the wheel, spinning the tires to get us moving back towards the on ramp.
Entry 3: Fox and the Hound
The terror we had all felt at Ann’s driving through the last town turned out to be the preview for the new level of underwear destroying fear she paralyzed us all with heading back for the on ramp. I had not realized the Hummer could go any faster. I definitely knew it wasn’t smart to
go this fast around these curves aimed at a very sharp turn to get us back on the highway. Everyone was trying to get their seatbelts on while Daisy was busy wedging herself into the floorboards to try and be able to stand up without being thrown out a window.
I was real close to trying to get Ann to slow down when a row of bushes to our right exploded. Chunks of rock and a wave of dirt hit us hard enough to rattle our teeth. Ann didn’t even seem to notice the fact that everything was blowing up around us. I opted to let her keep driving since based on us still being alive she must be doing a good job and it wasn’t like one of us could swap with her anyway. I thought about telling Reeves to try and get in the turret but our ammo was running low and he had zero chance of hitting anything the way Ann was driving. Plus, who brings a machine gun to a rocket battle?