Zournal (Book 5): Feeling Lucky?

by Merritt, R. S.

  I decided there was probably a better thing for me to be doing. I went back into the woods and circled around to come out where Ann was dragging the Korean guy into the bushes. Daisy was watching the whole thing with a confused look on her face. The Korean guy was screaming and yelling in Korean. I assume it was Korean anyway. Like all red-blooded Americans, I had not bothered to learn another language as I figured the rest of the world would just accommodate me linguistically.

  The guy Ann was trying to secure was the driver of the rear vehicle in the convoy. He didn’t look important. Not that I had the slightest clue what a Korean officer or translator would look like. I knew we were short on time though if we were going to save Reeves and Ginny. I figured I could probably come up with a pretty good test quickly to see if this guy was a waste of time or not.

  I motioned for Ann to drop his leg and stop dragging him. I put my pistol on the sweating little pissed off dude’s forehead. I looked him right in the eyes.

  “Do you speak English?”

  He responded with a bunch of curses that sounded like the Chinese cooks yelling at each other in the kitchen when you ordered something and asked them not to add carrots or soy sauce or whatever. None of it sounded the slightest bit English. I shot him in the head.

  Ann jumped back and stared at me. Her eyes wide. She looked a little pissed. Probably because she had just done all that hard work to take a prisoner like I had asked for and I had walked over and shot the guy. Being pissed off was a pretty understandable reaction. We didn’t have time to worry about it though. The night air was starting to fill up with Zombie screams which could be heard in the brief moments of silence in between the rounds being fired off in the back yard.

  I ran and started squeezing my lanky self into the turret while Ann got on the steering wheel and Daisy helped her happily barking self into the front passenger seat. As soon as I was locked and loaded I banged on the roof real hard with my palm and yelled through the gap in the turret to make sure Ann heard me. She spun the back tires in the front yard muck for a second before we gained traction and went sliding around towards the back of the house. I’d thumbed the fire selector to full auto to make the need to aim not quite as important. A bullet ricocheted off the metal lip of the turret in front of me causing sparks to jump into the air. I sent about ten seconds worth of full auto in the direction of the muzzle flash. If it didn’t kill him it definitely seemed to greatly diminish the guys enthusiasm for shooting at me. I’d take that as a win.

  A shadow got up and made a run for the Hummer. Based on where the shadow had gotten up from it wasn’t Ginny or Reeves so I went ahead and sent a stream of lead at the darting shadow until it hit the ground and didn’t get back up. The Hummer started coming right at us in reverse. Ann wasn’t one you wanted to lay chicken with. She floored it and we bounded forward towards the oncoming Hummer.

  The two vehicles crashed together. I was whipped forward hard enough to bust my lip open and loosen a couple of my teeth. The lead Hummer that had tried ramming us wasn’t moving at all. I don’t know if the driver had been knocked out or what. A shape popped up with two heads and a huge body. I almost shot it because it startled me. You should never startle people who are in a combat zone and under a lot of stress and also happen to be the ones in charge of the really big guns. Something made me stop though and I figured out the shadow thing I saw was Reeves carrying a body.

  He was carrying Ginny. Ann jumped out and helped him get her into the backseat. She was squirming around and yelling a lot so I figured she was alive and just wounded in some way that was keeping her from being able to walk. All in a day’s work for us.

  Zombies had started showing up. I started popping off shots to keep them at bay. We needed to get the hell out of here though. I leaned over and yelled at Reeves to grab the driver of the other Hummer and see if he spoke English. Ann was still fussing with Ginny while I kept Zombies from getting close enough to be a threat. I figured we had another two or three minutes before we really needed to be somewhere else. Reeves came back dragging the driver of the other vehicle. I watched as he zip-tied the guy and threw him on the road the Zombies were coming in on.

  “You speak English bitch?” He kept asking the guy over and over again. When he got no response in English he gave the guy a hard kick to the ribs and leaned down and whispered in his ear. Reeves moved to jump into the car then the guy yelled something that sounded like he said he could speak English a little. Reeves jumped out, kicked the guy in the crotch, and threw him in the front passenger seat. Reeves got in the driver’s seat and started backing up. The house and clearing was starting to crawl with Zombies now. I had wanted to get back into our original Hummer to gather the supplies and consolidate them into this one but that wasn’t happening. I guess we’d have to restock on Fig Newton’s somewhere down the road.

  Entry 9: We Tried Asking You Nicely

  These Korean guys were super neat. Our old Hummer had been covered in crap and had like an inch of random dirt and Cheetos crumbs everywhere. The one we had just pillaged had boxes of ammo and supplies neatly lined up in the back. Extra fuel was stacked neatly onto a little metal cage extension that was attached to the back of the Hummer. Most importantly, you could tell Daisy had never had an accident in this one. It was completely lacking in the lingering dog deposit scent.

  We did have an extra passenger. Ann was getting him all tied up and wrapping some bandages around various pieces and parts of the guy. Giving him the illusion he might actually survive this encounter with us. Not very likely. Reeves drove us down the road until we were well away from the Zombies streaming towards the house all the gunshot noises had come from. He parked us in the middle of an empty field off the main road. We had visibility all around us so shouldn’t be surprised. I had over watch since I was already up in the turret.

  “Hey Ginny. Switch with me.” I said as I slid down the outside of the Hummer and awkwardly climbed off the side of it. She gave me a look but went ahead and got up on the roof with her rifle dangling from one hand and a two liter of warm Mountain Dew from the back of the Hummer in the other. I had thought about it and realized I didn’t think she needed to be involved in the whole torture process. She was still a young woman and I still had some level of morality. She was smart though and I didn’t want to cut her out of the entire process so I handed her up a notebook from the front seat that had a pen attached to it. It was currently covered in all kinds of weird looking writing and junk but there were blank pages behind it.

  “If you want to make up a list of questions we should ask him we can throw those into the mix.” I told her as I handed her the notebook.

  She grabbed the notebook from me and started flipping through it. I went around to the front of the Hummer where Reeves had the guy tied to the grill. He was tied spread eagled and resembled an oversized starfish. Ann and Reeves were standing in front of him. I was thinking good cop bad cop kind of deal. They both took turns wailing on the guy in between questions so I guessed they had not decided who had to be the good cop. I decided it could be me.

  I stepped in and got in the middle of them using the guy like a piñata. I looked down at his swollen face that had blood spattered in different places around it. One eye was looking pretty much screwed.

  “Hey man. You speak English?” I leaned in and asked him. He just stared back at me. I kept going. “If you do I’d suggest speaking up pretty soon before these two beat you to death. We’re willing to trade info for your freedom. We’d just have to leave you tied up somewhere and you’d have to figure out how to escape but at least you’d have a chance.”

  The guy looked at me.

  “I’m Kyung. I’m translator to help survivors. We gather survivors and bring them back to help them.” Kyung tried to give me a heartfelt smile. I moved to the side and let Ann step in with a pair of plyers she had found in the toolkit in the Hummer. She started to rip some of the guys teeth out but I shook my head and coughed. He already had such a thick acce
nt, no way was I understanding him if she started ripping out parts from his mouth. She took the plyers lower. Reeves and I both looked away. Ouch!

  After the guy had screamed for about forty seconds straight I walked back over and Ann got out of the way. I looked at the guy again. Sweat was now mixing with the blood and his one eye looked freaked out pretty bad.

  “Kyung, how about not lying to me. It will not work out well for you. These two standing behind me. You guys killed their families. They have no mercy. They will rip you apart piece by piece. I can make a deal though. I understand we’ll get more out of this if we make it win-win. You want to tell the truth now or should I let her play with the other tools she found in the car?”

  “What you need know? We come out to capture and question people in Hummer who attacked convoy. We give base location and sent out.” I was able to make out the words through his thick accent and heavy breathing.

  We’d broken him. That hadn’t been too hard. I started in on the questions.

  “Where were you sent from to catch us?”

  “Airport. La Beta. To the south.”

  I saw Ann writing down the info. Seemed legit. I had no idea where that airport was but they did seem to like setting up at airports. I kept up the interrogation and found out there were a few hundred soldiers at the airport. It sounded like there were a few hundred more at a place called Fort Garland. The main bulk of the forces were back in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. This guy had been in the rear until recently with the rest of his group of translator soldiers. They were kept away from the other soldiers typically as knowing English was considered unclean by many of them.

  He had come over on a Chinese Aircraft carrier crewed by Koreans. He did not have any clue that his government was the one who had unleashed the Zombie virus. He thought they were on rescue missions to try and find men and women who would want to join forces with the Koreans. If they did not want to join forces then they were part of the enemy forces. They had a lot of civilians back in LA. Las Vegas had been mostly military last time he was there but he had been in the Fort area for at least six months interviewing people who had been captured. He had not killed anyone who wasn’t a Zombie. He kept repeating that part.

  Once we had all the info out of him, including the questions Ginny gave us, I stepped away from him. He looked at me with his one good eye and begged for his life. His face was covered in tears and snot and crusted up blood. He looked like he was only about twenty years old. He kept asking where was I going to tie him up and leave him. He asked if there was anything else he could tell us.

  I didn’t want Ann to have to do it and Reeves was already a walking poster child for PTSD and AA so I pulled out my knife and cut the zip ties holding his hands up. His hands had gone numb and started turning blue during the interview. When I cut off the zip ties he fell forward onto his face. I put a knee down in his back and kneeled on him. I pulled out my nine and shot him twice in the back of the head. I saw Ann jerk her body on the first shot and when I stood up I saw she had tears rolling down her face.

  I felt tears rolling down mine as well. We hugged for a minute then I borrowed Reeves water bottle before he could drain it and took a long swig of that liquid therapist before climbing into the passenger seat of the Hummer. We all got situated and Reeves drove us out of the field and back towards the highway. We left Kyung laying in the middle of a field in a land that had been nothing but hostile to him. I hoped whatever gods the Koreans prayed to would forgive him and open the gates to paradise to him. I knew none of us had room in our hearts to forgive any of them yet.

  Entry 10: Gateway to the San Luis Valley

  We pulled over a few miles up the road. We’d made the decision to head towards the air base and hope we could get on the highway towards Fort Garland before they sent another group out to check on the group we had just wiped out. I figured the second group would probably be more cautious than the first group so our little ambush trick would need to be amped up to work again.

  Killing Kyung was weighing pretty heavy on me. When it came down to it he was just some guy who had been forced into an army based on where he was born. He wasn’t inherently evil just because he was Korean. There was no way to justify killing him specifically. The only justification to any of this was to think big picture and kill them all. Kill them because they would have no problem killing us. Kill them so we could focus on killing all the diseased blue freaks running around who also wanted to kill us.

  According to the map it looked like we needed to cross over a lot of bridges. Or, at least there were a lot of little blue lines that intersected the road we were currently cruising south down. I figured we were ok because the two Hummers that had brought the Koreans out to attack us would have had to come from this direction. Unless, they had gone way out of the way but that didn’t make a ton of sense based on how fast they had found us.

  We talked about taking a quick detour to cause some havoc at the airport Kyung had indicated was being used as a base but decided the wiser course of action was to get past it as quickly as we could. With that in mind, Reeves had the hammer down and we were driving through the desert night at a pretty good clip. We didn’t see any working radios in this Hummer but that didn’t mean the other one didn’t have something in it used to communicate back to base. Either way, the Hummers would be missed within a day or two and we wanted to be long gone by then.

  Which is how come we were willing to risk driving at night. We had the high beams on to make sure we weren’t going to hit anything. Periodically, Reeves would need to slow down to maneuver past some sort of obstacle in the road. Typically, this was a stalled car or a crash or a dead animal laying there. Twice, he had to go around Zombies who had come out of nowhere. Probably attracted to the headlights. They may have even been chasing the Koreans we had killed earlier. We went around them as they grabbed for the Hummer. They turned and slowly started lumbering after us as we continued on down the road.

  We stopped once to top off the diesel and let Daisy and everyone else heed the call of nature. None of us wanted Daisy to be stuck in the car with us if she had anything lingering in her bladder or bowels. This newly acquired Hummer had a nice clean smell we’d forgotten existed having lived in the other Hummer for so long. We were not ready for that experience to end so Daisy got to spend as much time as she wanted roaming around the desert looking for the absolutely perfect spot to take a dump.

  When we finally reached highway 160 it was pretty anticlimactic. We’d been half expecting a roadblock or something to be setup there. We’d been ready to bet on them thinking we were the Koreans from the patrol coming back to let us get close enough to shoot them. It had worked for us a few times already and we couldn’t think of anything better. As long as the one trick worked we might as well stick with the one trick pony routine. Since no one was there we turned right and headed towards Fort Garland. The tourist maps we found in the Hummer told us the town used to be a fort but was now just a wide space in the Highway with a museum.

  Reeves pointed out the reason the Koreans had probably made it a base was it was the first settlement once you made it over the first major mountain range. They were probably using it to fuel up the vehicles before sending them out in the rest of the country to fight. Our own fuel situation seemed decent. We had six of those big red jugs strapped on to the back of the hummer. That gave us a pretty wide operating range. I’d always be happy with more diesel and bullets but we had a decent amount of both for the moment.

  What we needed was some crates of stuff that went boom! Either dynamite or C-4 or whatever but we needed something we could use to hurt the Koreans without us necessarily still needing to be there when the hurt started. None of us had ever bothered researching how to make fertilizer bombs prior to losing access to Google so we were pretty much on our own. We knew there were ways to do it but I figured if we broke into a home depot and snagged a bunch of bags of dried up cow crap it probably did not have directions on the back of the bag
for how to blow stuff up.

  We needed obvious stuff. If we could find a National Guard armory Reeves was pretty confident we might be able to snag some cool stuff from one of those. When I thought of what we could do with some RPGs it made my mouth water. I loved the idea of blowing up stuff from far away. If there’s one thing I hate it’s a fair fight. I’ve learned to prefer sneaking up behind someone and shoving a knife though their spine from behind. Fair fights mean you have a chance of losing? Why would anyone want that?

  We started heading through the mountains. We had the headlights turned down to normal and were driving slower now. Taking turns driving and sitting in the front seat keeping watch. We let Reeves sleep next to the turret in the back since he was the best of us on the big gun. Ginny, Ann and I rotated though with two of us watching and driving while one of us slept in a four-hour rotation. That meant I was asleep when the sun finally came up and we crested a particularly long slope up the side of the mountain.

  Ginny happened to be driving with Ann riding shotgun. Ann yelled for everyone to wake up which made me snap my eyes open. Reeves started slithering up into the turret. I blinked away the fog of sleep and started checking myself to make sure all my normal strapped on weapons were in the places I needed them. We were passing a sign that said we were at a scenic overlook. I looked up at the scenic overlook to see what Ann had woke us up for and saw that there was a troop carrier and a large civilian jeep pulled into the overlook. Koreans were strolling around checking out the view and taking pictures. Some in military garb and a few in business suits and long coats.