Zournal (Book 5): Feeling Lucky?

by R. S. Merritt

  I was still half in and out of the window but the Zombie ended up flying backwards with my pants and a good bit of the skin off my ankles. I considered it a good trade as I pulled myself through the remains of the shattered window with no pants on. I felt us starting to roll as Reeves fought with the steering wheel and bullets rained down on us from above. Neither of us had any idea which direction to head but we drove through the masses of Zombies still milling around on the strip and went up the first crossroads we could find. Reeves just kept the pedal down and the gears grinding as he tried to get us as far away as fast as possible.

  Entry 39: Convoy

  We had gone about four blocks when Reeves asked where we were going. That was an excellent question. One I figured we needed the answer to as soon as possible. I told Reeves to stop the truck so I could go get our remaining Seal out of the trailer. We pulled over to the side and I hopped out and went around to the back of the truck.

  Feeling slightly self-conscious in my boots and boxers I unlatched the trailer and opened up the back. Ann and Ginny gave me a funny look after taking in my outfit so I ignored them and addressed the Seal who was sitting in the back. He looked like he was only a few years older than most of the girls in the back.

  “Hey man. Thanks to you guys for being the cavalry and saving our asses. The guy you came in with didn’t make it so we were wondering if you know where we should be going and if you know how to drive a truck?”

  “Yes sir. I can drive this truck and I know where we should be headed. Is there a reason you’re not wearing pants?”

  Struggling not to crack a joke about his mom hanging out in the cab I chose to skip the question as he climbed down and headed for the cab. I figured I’d let him hang out with Reeves for a while and hopefully get us where we were going. I climbed in and we pulled the doors closed behind me. We figured out we needed someone on the outside to lock them up tight but by then we were already moving again so we settled for using my remaining shoe string to tie the door shut from the inside.

  The shoe string snapped off the first time we hit a bump and the doors started swinging around like crazy and making all kinds of noise. We were able to get them shut again and this time we secured the doors with multiple people’s shoe strings which seemed to work much better. Hopefully, we didn’t have to run anywhere anytime soon or we’d have a lot of people falling down. I dug through my backpack and figured out I did have a pair of cargo shorts crammed into the bottom so I no longer had to ride around in a trailer full of girls in my underwear.

  Ignoring multiple snide comments that were thrown my way I pulled on the shorts and sat back down to wait and see where we ended up at. Ann let me know the only things in the truck besides ourselves were a crate full of about ten M-4 rifles with a few boxes of ammo and a bunch of containers of diesel. There was one pallet of water and one box full of cans of Beefaroni as well. No can opener but I was sure I had one in my bag so that should not be an issue. We settled in for a long ride.

  Startling all of us out of our misery, we came to a stop about two hours later. Ann and Ginny worked on the shoestrings with the help of some hands from outside. A few minutes later the doors opened and a smiling Lieutenant Wilson was standing there to greet us. He helped us out and couldn’t get the grin off his face.

  “I should have known it was you guys based on the general craziness of what you were doing. Let’s get everyone situated. We can’t hang out here for too long. We’re barely out of Las Vegas and once they get the Zombie incursion figured out they’ll be sending out forces to look for us and strike back. I’d really prefer to be long gone at that point.”

  He got all of us that were wounded to head into a short bus they had that was serving as a field hospital for them. The Navy Corpsman in it was busy triaging us to figure out who he’d work on first since once the bus filled up and we got going it would be hard for him to see anyone else. I made the cut based on the ‘Holy Shit!’ that escaped him when he took the bandage off my hand to check it out. The hole through Ginny’s hand also rated her a stay on the short bus. One of the conditions of the guy patching us up was that he made us swear not to tell any short bus jokes.

  I lost all desire to joke around as the bus started bouncing up the highway again and he had my hand bent over a table while he started trying to thread a needle to give me stitches. I tried to get him to work on Ginny first but he said girls are vainer so he wanted to practice on me first. I would have thought it was a lot funnier if he wasn’t jabbing in a needle of local anesthetic into my palm. He said he kind of hated to waste it because I was probably just going to pass out from the pain anyway. I was desperately trying to come up with a short bus joke but had nothing.

  The Corpsman poked and prodded a bit then said he was going to have to do a skin graft if I wanted my palm to ever heal up. He stuck another needle in my forearm and took out a razor and shaved my arm. He was slathering everything down with some sort of cream. Then we watched while he cut skin off my forearm and stitched it into my palm. It was disgusting and hurt like a bitch. He covered it up in bandages and told me I needed to take antibiotics every day and change the dressing once a day and not use the hand for about a month. I asked if he had any pain killers and he handed me a bottle of Tylenol and told me to man up.

  He spent a lot more time on Ginny and his bedside manner was noticeably more refined. He also complimented her on whining less than I had. It was true, she totally took the pain better than I did. He repeated the procedure with her except did not need to do a graft to sew the hole shut. When he was done he put a cast on her hand to help it stay still so the bones in her hand would have a chance to heal. He gave her the same speech on not doing anything for a month.

  He ran through the other injuries and applied bandages, splints and another cast for one of the girls who had managed to break her arm coming down through the truck. I wasn’t the only one who had lost some serious skin coming down the rope either. Two of the girls had to get skin grafts similar to mine. One of them needed them on both hands. All the while we were bouncing down the road in the short bus. A helicopter appeared at one point and a gunner on the side took some shots at us. The helicopter fire was returned with RPG and machine gun fire from our side and the helicopter turned tail and ran with a stream of black smoke following it.

  Looking through the windshield of the bus I saw two Hummers. Both had machine guns mounted on them. Looking behind us I saw the truck hauling the girls and coming up behind the truck I saw another Hummer. We were all going a little faster than was probably safe considering the state of the road and the environment we were driving through. We did have to stop occasionally to work our way around washouts in the road or to move vehicles to the side so the truck could get through. Those little detours were all handled quickly and efficiently by the Seals.

  During one of those stops a Seal came back and asked if we could go forward and ride with the Lieutenant for a little bit. We got there in time to see Wilson getting back in the Hummer after helping to roll an old pickup truck off the road. Ginny and I crowded in behind him as he got in the front passenger seat. He handed us each a bottle of water.

  “You know. We’ll all be riding horses around to kill each other in a couple of years. Regular gas is already starting to not work and diesel isn’t going to be around forever with no refineries. You may end up telling your kids about how you used to ride around in those funny looking lumps of metal they see sitting around everywhere.”

  I hadn’t thought about it but the Lieutenant was right. I’d been pretty focused on survival so had not given a ton of thought to what the world was going to look like once everything settled back down. It was never going to be the same. Too many skills had been lost. Too many people had been lost. How would we explain this world to our children? Should we even have children in a world like this?

  Wilson started laughing.

  “Sorry! I see I’ve got your hamster wheel spinning. I ‘ve just been thinking about the futur
e lately. Not that I actually expect to live long enough to see it. But it’s something that has kept my mind occupied while sitting in that room for weeks waiting for the right time to attack the Koreans. You know. We were going to wait until they’d moved in a lot more people or maybe when their supreme leader came for a visit. We were even trying to work out a way to save those girls they had prisoner. Never thought the catalyst for us to pull the trigger on the operation would be an army reservist sliding down the side of Excalibur holding onto a Golden Doodle. Never tell him I said this but we all agree that was a pretty bad ass move.”

  I started laughing too. My hand hurt like hell, I was anticipating the helicopter pilot to come back with a bunch of friends at any moment and I had no idea where we were headed but whatever. If you couldn’t find something in the world to laugh about you might as well already be dead. I asked him where we were headed.

  “Assuming we make it up this road without Korean plans flying over and bombing the shit out of us we’re on our way to Fallon Air Station. From there, we’ll be heading to a base outside Carson City that doesn’t have a name to map out our next move.”

  “What are we doing at the air base?” I asked him.

  “Searching around to see if we can find anything useful. We have some intel there could be some very useful munitions there. We’re running low since the Koreans nuked the hell out of most the east coast.”

  He let that statement sit there for a little bit. Ginny and I both leaned back and just tried to take it in. It was making a lot more sense now why the US had not struck back as hard as we had figured they would. He started talking again.

  “There are still Seals and there are still marines and there’s even still some guys like you running around kicking up shit. We haven’t given up the fight yet but it’s getting a lot harder. We need to make every bullet count and we need to deliver some big wins. Taking out that base by Colorado Springs was a pretty big win and we know we have you guys to thank for that. Those girls would have probably died in captivity or lived their lives as slaves if you hadn’t shown up and we still did some pretty serious damage to their Vegas operation. I remember you asking me how you could help when we first met. Maybe it should have been us asking you guys that question.”

  We drove in silence after that. Lost in our thoughts and our pain. Ginny and I both ignored the Tylenol the Corpsman had given us and dove into our private Oxy stashes. Pretty soon we’d made the transition from lost in our thoughts to lost in our nightmares.

  Entry 40: The Base Inside the Base

  We drove until the sun sank for the day. I woke up with Ginny snoring on my arm. I moved my arm to wake it up without waking her up. I was able to shove her the other way so she was sleeping against the door on the other side of the Hummer. I looked up to see Wilson smiling back at us with his eyes looking a little sad.

  “I used to do that with my little sister. She followed me everywhere and she’d fall asleep on me on long car rides and I’d knock her off me.”

  He didn’t say anything for a few minutes as he struggled to get control of himself. I waited for him while watching the stars go by out my window. A few minutes later he must have felt safe to talk again.

  “I suspect I’ll really have to hear about it when we make it back to base. No way in hell I was letting all those girls die though. None of my men were going to either. Anyway, if I disappear for a bit when we get back you’ll know where I’m at. It won’t be the first time I’ve been on the carpet. We’re about twenty minutes out from the base. Once we get there we’re going to hide the vehicles in one of the hangars and then go see what we can find. It’s totally top-secret eyes-only kind of stuff. Let me know if you want to tag along.”

  I told him it sounded great. I kept looking as we started driving by miles of chain link fence surrounding an air field. We drove in through the gates and headed down a long road that ended up in a huge hangar. There were planes and boxes of equipment scattered everywhere. Most of it looked like it had already been pretty thoroughly looted. I looked over at Wilson.

  “Haven’t the Koreans already taken what they wanted? You sure there’s anything left?”

  He smiled at me.

  “Silly civilian. One of the reasons these bases are so expensive to build is because some of them are really two bases. This is one of those. What we’re looking for is in the other base. If the codes we have work we’ll be in there in no time.”

  Oh. Now I was completely confused. Ginny had woken up and looked intrigued.

  “Can we grab everybody else too?” She asked.

  Wilson shrugged. “I don’t care. Secrets smecrets…”

  Ginny went and got Ann and Reeves and Catori. Daisy chose to come on her own as well. The corpsman stayed behind to help out the girls and keep working on their different medical issues. A lot of the girls were coming down from the drugs the Koreans had kept them on and that was causing all kinds of drama. It was pretty cold in the hangar so Wilson ordered four of the Seals to go out to the base exchange and see if they could grab jackets and blankets. He had them take all three Hummers to give them more room to shove stuff. The truck would have been ideal but it was too tough to maneuver it around.

  We worked on getting the remaining vehicles fueled up and figured out which of the girls were up to using one of the M-4s and gave them a quick lesson on using the weapons. Only two of them seemed like they might actually hit what they aimed at but there was always something to be said for quantity when it came to a gunfight. We worked on passing around food then when everyone had something to eat we sat down with our random bags of chips and cans of food. We ate and waited for the Seals to get back with the supplies.

  About an hour later the Seals came cruising back in with Hummers full of comforters and coats. They were yelling to shut the hangar doors behind them. No one lived this long into the Zombie apocalypse without knowing when to jump do what they were told without question. I had lost track of the number of times when thinking about something for even a second or two would have ended up with me dead. With that in mind, I got up and sprinted along with the rest of my team for the hangar doors and started pushing on them.

  Wilson and the other Seals joined us and we got the hangar doors secured. I sat down against the huge door to try and catch my breath. I was wondering why we had to shut it so fast when the first Zombie started slapping up against it on the other side. The guys had gotten out of the Hummers and started distributing blankets and jackets. They seemed completely immune to the knowledge they had just drug a bunch of Zombies to block us into this hangar. Wilson headed over to talk to them and I followed him over.

  It turned out they had run into Zombies at the Exchange and taken them out with hand weapons to keep the noise down. They had to make the call to keep looting or make a run for it when more and more Zombies started showing up. They finally decided to make a run for it so they wouldn’t attract even more Zombies if they were forced to open fire. They were thinking maybe a hundred or so were outside the hangar by now. They didn’t seem too stressed about it so I chose not to worry too much either. A hundred would be a few minutes work for us at this point and with all these guns.

  We did a quick perimeter check to make sure none were going to get in from any other direction or any other doors or anything we hadn’t noticed. We volunteered Catori to stay and help defend the girls as well so we could take the rest of the Seals with us. Most of the younger Seals seemed like they’d be absolutely happy to stay and guard the girls. Hopefully we didn’t need to leave the building to go to this secret base of Wilsons.

  Once we had everything worked out and we all had flashlights and everything we walked over to the corner of the building. There was a door there that said, ‘Authorized Personnel Only’. It looked pretty locked and heavy duty to me. There was a keypad with a card reader beside it. Wilson pulled on the handle and looked disappointed when it did not open.

  “Really?” I asked.

  He grinned at me and p
ulled a plastic card out of his pocket. He pressed the keypad and it lit up. He ran the card through it and the pad turned green under the buttons. He entered a quick sequence of numbers off a notecard he had in his pocket as well and the door slid open. He looked back and the smile was wiped off his face. He looked all business now.

  “Ok. We’re going to be descending into an underground base where they stored weapons meant to be used as a last resort against nation states that wouldn’t listen to reason. This is final solution plausible deniability stuff. It’s also one of the few places we can still access where there should be a couple of suitcase nukes. There may be some bio weapons laying around but the suitcase nukes are what we want.”

  “How many people worked here?” Ginny asked.

  “Yeah. That’s the part we’re worried about. They lost contact with this base during all the confusion back when this started and never reestablished contact. Any given shift there should have been up to five or six hundred people working in here. If they got infected we’re thinking there may be a few hundred Zombies between us and the nukes. If you guys want to bail that’s fine.”