Feeling Lucky?

by R. S. Merritt

  If it was so easy for us to get through here then how come the Seals or someone had not taken out the Koreans yet? Since the last conversations we’d had with the military I had not gotten the impression that the Koreans had won. It had seemed more like the US was fighting a losing war as the Koreans slowly but inexorably advanced from the West coast of the US over to the East coast. I couldn’t imagine they’d pass up hitting a soft target like this though. We were starting to get real close to Vegas now. Time to look for a place to park the truck and go out for a sneak and peak on foot.

  I started to open the slider to let the front seat know what I was thinking but Ann was already pulling into a neighborhood. I noticed it was the same neighborhood we’d seen the fire in earlier. Ann pulled us into the driveway and shut off the engine. We all sat there, not moving or talking for about ten minutes. No Zombies attacked and we weren’t shot or anything so we were doing good. I motioned for the people in front to stay there and Reeves, Marg and I jumped out of the cab and went to the front door of the house. I tapped on the door lightly and a minute later something knocked on the door from the other side and we heard a low growling. Zombie house clearing time. I had Marg with us as I was hoping to get him up to speed on some of our techniques. It would be easier if we had time to do some actual training and mock ups for entering a house but a little OJT would work to.

  He just needed to learn quick and not make any mistakes or the consequences would be a lot worse than a failing grade. I pulled him back and explained he’d be in the middle of our group. I needed him to kick in the door and then get out of the way and follow me. Reeves would come in right behind him. I’d put Zombies on the floor and he would finish them off. It would be a bloody, dark mess but we needed to go in brutal to come out alive.

  It took him about five kicks and then he borrowed my crowbar to wedge the door out a bit before kicking it again enough for the Zombie to get his arm out of. Reeves and I waited while Marg continued to screw around with the door. To be fair, Reeves and I never really kicked down doors either. We either used a sledge hammer or broke in through a window or found another way into the house. I was pretty impressed he’d done that much damage to the sturdy looking front door. I planned to tell him there were easier ways after we got through this first round. I used my phone to record some of his kicks so we could laugh about them later. I might be a dick.

  Marg jumped out of the way as the Zombie ripped the door down and tried squeezing through the diagonal gap. I stepped forward and sunk the framing hammer into the Zombies head a couple of times. I then pulled the body out through the gap and shined my light around inside the hallway. I spun around when I heard a growl behind me and saw Reeves beating the shit out of a little kid Zombie who must have heard all the banging noises and come to investigate. I turned back around in time to see the hand that came through the gap and grabbed me by the hair.

  I was tugged towards the gap in the door by the Zombie and I lost my footing. I fell towards the door. Whacking my jaw on the door and biting my tongue hard as the Zombie kept ripping at my hair. Marg was trying to poke it with his bat to knock it off of me. I reached up with my knife and started sawing on the wrist holding my hair. Blood poured down on me as I straightened my legs out to get standing again. The Zombie was a teenage girl. She had crawled out though the opening and was trying to get her teeth on me. I held her by her hair and stabbed her in the back several times. I finally found her heart and she stopped moving. I pulled the body though the blood lubricated gap.

  Another man had wandered over that Reeves had put an end to while Marg and I had taken on the second Zombie from the house. We all crammed our way in through the door and then put the door back to its original position as well as we could. We didn’t want anything coming though the hole while we were focused on clearing the rest of the house. We cleared the first floor and took some of the furniture and stacked it in front of the door. We went out into the garage and I found the emergency release on top of the big black Range Rover sitting in the garage. I made a quick note to see if we could get it to start up as then we’d have a redundant vehicle again. Plus, leather seats and no truck bed for me to be bounced around in.

  We got the garage door up. Moving slowly to cause the least noise possible. The front door joke on Marg now seemed pretty dumb when I realized all the noise he had made banging away on the front door. We got it all the way up and I realized we’d opened the side with the Range Rover parked in it. Wow. I noticed Catori and Ginny were out of the truck beating down some other small Zombies. Must have been a family neighborhood. Sad.

  We went and opened the other side then all pushed the truck to get it parked inside the garage. As soon as we had it inside we slowly lowered the garage door. Catori was wiping at his eyes and wandered off into the house to ‘make sure it was clear’. None of us were fooled. He’d just had to beat some preteen girl Zombie to death and that had to have him thinking of his sister being held captive somewhere. Beating children to death was hard on all of us. It was just a matter of course in this new normal though. Didn’t mean we weren’t all going to end up choking on the barrels of our pistols before this was over. You could try and blow it off during the day and placate yourself with platitudes but at night, when the nightmares came, there was nothing to hide you from your own raw guilt. We were all wired to save kids, not kill them.

  There had been something off about the house. We all walked in and found Catori sitting on the couch in the living room. The DVD player was flashing midnight on it. That’s why Ann had chosen this neighborhood. She must have been waiting to get close to our target and get to a house where there was a chance she may be able to take a hot shower. She had succeeded. We probably needed to move through the house and make sure there was nothing that was going to give us away. All the lights were either turned off or the bulbs had burnt out. We didn’t want to trial or error that until we had blankets up on the windows to block the light in case anyone was watching.

  By the time we did all that it was around four in the morning. Since dawn just a few hours away we decided to stay in the house for now and go out exploring the next night. We all worked on dragging sleeping gear downstairs. Daisy was let out into the fenced in backyard to do her thing. We setup a watch rotation and settled in to lick our wounds and get ready to try and survive another day. Although, I’d like to make the next few days less about survival and more about striking back.

  Entry 24: Thunderstruck

  Ann bounced down the stairs in a new outfit to wake me up. She saw I was already sitting up typing away on my phone and came over and gave me a quick kiss. Then she told me I needed to come upstairs and check something out. I let my hopes get up until she took me into the room we had chosen for the sentry to hang out in. Reeves was sitting in a swivel chair with the window open. We had a decent view of the skyline of the strip out the window. Nothing supercool over there. I saw a helicopter flying in between some of the buildings. Not a major concern now that we were undercover and were not planning on driving any closer.

  Unless she had brought me here to see the helicopter I didn’t get it. She put her finger to her lips and then pointed at her ears. I got that I was supposed to shut up and listen. We sat in silence for a few minutes. I looked round the room to make sure there was not a TV or something turned on. I heard a low rumble in the distance. It sounded like thunder. I looked at Reeves and Ann to let them know I heard it. As to what it was, I shrugged that off, I had no idea.

  “We let Ginny come up here and listen a little while ago. She couldn’t figure out what it was either but said she had a guess. She said we’d need to get closer to know for sure though but it would explain some things.” Ann looked at me like I’d be able to decipher those comments. I stared back at her.

  Reeves laughed. “He has no clue either. When I first heard it, I thought it was an earthquake or maybe the dam had burst and we were all fixing to drown. It started when the sun came up. Thought I was imagining shit at first
. Because what we need is some more weirdness in our world.”

  We all laughed about that for a minute. Then we just hung out. Nothing much to do and I was pretty wired from the recent fighting. I knew I’d crash at some point but for now we might as well hang out and brainstorm for a little bit. We were talking about our theories on how come the Seals had not already wiped out Las Vegas when Marg came and got us from the other side of the house.

  “You guys need to come check this out. A bunch of Koreans just rolled into the neighborhood. Looks like they’re going door to door and killing Zombies then doing something in the house.”

  We all took windows on the other side of the house to look down the street at the Koreans. They were stopping at every house like Marg had said. They spent a good twenty minutes in each house. They’d rolled up in tanks. We were not equipped to fight guys driving tanks. Why the hell were they driving around in tanks.

  Ann solved that one for us. Or, at least came up with an explanation that made sense. Her theory was that the tanks were a safe place for the Koreans to retreat to when they stirred up too many of the Zombies while breaking and entering. They could just go sit in the tank until it blew over. If it didn’t blow over, a tank was a pretty good vehicle to drive through some Zombies. It made sense. I found myself wanting a tank.

  Based on the speed they were rolling around the cul de sac they’d be at the house we were in before it got dark. That wasn’t good. We’d left dead Zombie sprinkled around the yard outside. We’d busted open the front door and blocked it up with a bunch of furniture. These were things the Koreans were bound to notice. Even if they didn’t see that they would notice if they found us all trying to hide under the bed or something. Daisy was looking out the window at the tanks as they rolled down the street.

  “I think Koreans eat dog meat.” Reeves brought up.

  Great. Now on top of shipping my girl off like a mail order bride if they caught us they were also going to eat my damn dog. Enough was enough. The way I figured it we had about an hour to figure out how to beat a group of Koreans driving around in tanks. We had no explosives. None of us knew how a tank worked or had ever seen the inside of one. On top of the tanks, they also outnumbered us by about five guys. If those five guys weren’t enough I was sure they were in radio communication back to some kind of headquarters that was supervising these sweeps.

  I looked around the room. Everyone stared back at me.

  “We could kill the ones that come to the front door then charge out and jump in the tanks and try and kill the drivers?” Catori said it like it was a question. It was a brave but mostly suicidal idea and we ripped it apart. I asked everybody to keep the ideas coming though. Even a bad idea may spark a plan that could possibly lead to a future where I wasn’t being blown up by a tank while they ate my dog.

  “What if we burned the houses down so they wouldn’t need to check them? They’d think they burnt down due to electrical failures.” Reeves looked pretty proud of this plan. I asked him where we were supposed to go while we burned the house down we were currently staying in. He deflated a little bit then came back with us running to another house while this one was burning down. We could use the house burning down as a distraction. If we did it when they were coming in the house to search it we may even kill a few of them.

  We decided to try to kill any of them would be a mistake as they would notice the dead Zombies and come in hard and ready for action. The fire distraction plan seemed like a winner though. It would get rid of the evidence of us being here and had the advantage of being something that seemed to happen all the time out here once they flipped on the power. We’d lose our ride and all our supplies but we should be able to carry enough to make a difference. I would have rather executed a plan that left us with three tanks to drive and a bunch of dead Koreans but that didn’t seem to be in the cards.

  We rushed through the house gathering together our gear and essentials. We needed a day’s worth of food and water each. After that was done, everyone was working on piling weapons up to carry. Ginny was in the back of the truck with Marg gathering all the loose bullets in to some plastic bags she found in the kitchen. I took one of the gas canisters into the living room. I was fixing to start pouring it all over the place when I decided to stop and think for a minute. It was broad daylight. The tanks were pretty far down the street. To pull this off we’d need to sneak out in the broad daylight and break into another nearby house and hope they didn’t find us.

  They were probably aware people may be in the area since the crew at the hotel by the dam had been attacked. So, if a house randomly exploded near them they might do more than say oh well and keep on tanking. I put the lid back on the gas and carried it back out into the garage. Best guess, they were going into each home. They were probably just shooting any Zombies they saw and then turning the breakers off to avoid fires. They were not doing a thorough search of the homes. They weren’t spending enough time in each one to be doing that.

  If we just hid the fact that we’d been in this house then we should be ok. We could even probably all just hide in the garage under the cars or somewhere. We’d already cleaned out the bullets from the back of the pickup. A little more cleanup work and then hide everything on the side opposite the breaker box and we should be fine. I got everyone’s attention and we all gathered in the living room.

  “New plan.” I went through what the new plan was and we worked out the details and everybody got busy.

  I went with Reeves to collect the bodies from outside. Luckily the tanks were still a good distance down the street and they had not driven the whole block yet. Otherwise, we’d already have been on the way to being caught. We’d taken the time to drag the Zombies to the sides of the driveway but they were obviously still fresh kills. We drug them around to the back of the house and hid them deep in the hedges. It was disgusting, depressing and dirty work. Which is why I’d had me and Reeves do it.

  Once we had moved all the bodies we got some branches and started working on the dirt in the driveway so you couldn’t tell there had recently been a fight here and that cars had parked here recently. Catori came out to tell us the tanks were getting closer so we should come inside before they saw us. I looked at the house next to us and saw a Zombie standing by the kitchen window staring at us. Our eyes made contact and that seemed to trigger something in the Zombie. It started pounding on the small window like… Well. Like an enraged Zombie.

  That gave me an idea. I told Reeves my idea. He agreed it was stupid and crazy and that I was lucky Ann wasn’t out here to stop us. I ran inside with him to grab what we would need. Then I sent Catori to tell Ann and everyone what we were going to do. Then I ran out of the house before anyone could come try and talk some sense into me.

  Reeves and I jumped the narrow ditch separating us from the neighbors and ran around to the back of the house. There was a large sliding glass door there. Reeves started working on it with his crowbar as the Zombie family showed up to press their faces against it and try to break it down to get at us. I’d really only been considering the one guy when I came up with this plan. The kid and the wife looked like easier to capture and control though. The man was pretty bulked up. Reeves leaned on the crow bar and the whole door came out of the slider and fell forward as the Zombie family pushed their way out.

  I was on the other side of the slider and pushed it right back at them. They were winning as they all focused on me and kept pushing the slider. I saw Reeves slide in behind them and then the man’s neck erupted with steel coming out of it. Excellent. Reeves and I were operating on the same wavelength. A laundry bag went down around the woman. One of those big canvas ones you build up months’ worth of dry cleaning in before you haul the whole mess to the cleaners. The Zombie was thrashing everywhere.

  I let the slider slide to the side and jumped for the boy. He was about ten years old. I didn’t have to hurt him this time which was good. Just capture him. I pulled out my laundry bag and wrestled the kid Zombie
into it. He thrashed like crazy but Reeves and I finally got them settled into their bags and their legs taped up. We picked up the dad and threw him into the ditch and then dropped some sticks and crap on him to make it look like he’d been there for a while. A dead Zombie laying in a ditch was a pretty common sight these days and should not cause too much of an investigation.

  We carried our squirming bundles over to the house everyone was in. Ann and Ginny and Marg were all standing on the porch waving for us to hurry up. We did. My original idea had been for us all to hide in the garage. Ann and Ginny had conferred and deemed that idea to be stupid. We were going to hide in the attic instead. Blankets had been removed from windows and everything set back to rights. All the supplies had been hidden and moved around the garage so they didn’t look too out of place. The front door was kind of screwed up but we were going to just hope they didn’t notice that. Catori was in the process of trying to put some screws into it so it would stand up by itself.