Zournal (Book 4): Reap What You Sow

by Merritt, R. S.

  Zournal

  Book 4

  “Reap What You Sow”

  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. Thanks for doing the covers! Sorry about the spiders and low hanging concrete!

  Table of Contents

  Entry 1: Flyover States

  Entry 2: Glass Half Full

  Entry 3: Welcome to the Hotel California

  Entry 4: Flash Mob

  Entry 5: PTSD

  Entry 6: One for the Money

  Entry 7: FUBAR

  Entry 8: My Turn

  Entry 9: Here’s Johnny!

  Entry 10: Death Race 2000

  Entry 11: Arkansas Sucks

  Entry 12: Survivors Guilt

  Entry 13: First Impressions

  Entry 14: The Ballad of Paul

  Entry 15: SSDD

  Entry 16: Hell Bent for Leather

  Entry 17: Chastised

  Entry 18: Over It

  Entry 19: Twelve Step Program

  Entry 20: Did They do that on Purpose?

  Entry 21: There’s no Place Like Home

  Entry 22: And Your Little Dog Too

  Entry 23: What? No Showtime???

  Entry 24: The Path Less Taken

  Entry 25: There’s Gold in them Thar Hills

  Entry 26: Nothing Without the Deity

  Entry 27: Run Forest, Run!

  Entry 28: Mountains Suck

  Entry 29: Through the Mountains, Take Two

  Entry 30: Swift, Silent, Deadly

  Entry 31: All Dogs go to Heaven

  Entry 32: HQ, Take Two

  Entry 33: In the Dead of the Night

  Entry 34: Little Boys Room

  Entry 35: Strategery

  Entry 36: The Best Laid Plans

  Entry 37: Good Night Chesty, Wherever You Are

  Entry 38: It Hits the Fan

  Entry 39: You Can’t go Home Again

  Entry 40: South for the Winter

  Entry 41: Chutes and Ladders

  Entry 42: Rock and A Hard Place

  Entry 43: Leap of Faith

  Entry 44: Viva Las Vegas

  Authors Afterword

  Entry 1: Flyover States

  We were going west on I-40. The idea was to go west until we found some Koreans to kill. Ann was not dealing well with Thomas being killed. I was sad, I missed Thomas. I felt like maybe something was wrong with me because I wasn’t as hurt as everyone else. I was sad. They were all devastated. Reeves and Ginny would alternately laugh or cry for no apparent reason. No one wanted to talk about Thomas.

  I spent the day driving west. Ann stared straight ahead. Catatonic. Not speaking. I tried to get her to talk and she just shook her head. Her only words in the last two days of driving had been, “Not ready.” She had an almost constant stream of tears. I had known Thomas for most of a year and I missed him enough, and loved his aunt enough, that I was good to head west to kill as many of the Koreans as I could. Ann had helped her sister raise the boy from a baby. Ann had watched her sister die and now she had watched Thomas die. She was devastated. She was vengeful.

  Vengeful enough to have us all headed towards a David and Goliath match up with the Koreans. Even the David and Goliath analogy was off. It was going to be more like David versus an army of Goliaths. Ann was a trained law enforcement officer and Reeves had been in the army but we were going up against a host of trained soldiers. Men who were raised in a country that had been at war with its neighbors for forever. These soldiers had been starved and brainwashed and trained to hate all outsiders. They were trained to a deadly edge.

  North Korea had so hated the world they had chosen to unleash a viral apocalypse on it rather than suffer it to live. All I really knew about North Korea was from the news reports I had seen. The leader had been a paranoid, fat little douche bag with a stupid haircut. The son of another douche bag with an equally dorky haircut. These men, with their feelings of inadequacy, had managed to seize control over the country and drag the whole population into their warped impression of the world. Why did people follow leaders with such horrible haircuts? Seriously, even though Hitler did not come close to killing as many people as this virus did, he had still managed to take out enough to be considered by anyone with any sense as a complete monster. Yet, the Germans had followed him.

  Because of the actions of a fat douche bag on the other side of the world most of the population of the US was either dead or running around trying to eat the few who had managed to survive the plague. We’d nuked North Korea, so at least they would not be able to enjoy their homeland anytime soon. It turned out most of the ones who had survived were now over in California and spreading outwards. As soon as they released the virus, they had hunkered down to keep it from spreading among their own population. A few weeks later, they had boarded ships and got the hell out. Knowing they would not get away with their crime and fearing the might of the worlds retaliation for their atrocity.

  We were the four-horseman riding for them now. Pestilence, death and whatever the other two were. We were going to ride our pale horses across the ruins of our country and deliver wholesale whoop ass on those Asian pricks. They would pay. We just needed to figure out how to make that happen. I was hoping someone besides me was trying to come up with a plan. The best I had right now was calling in exact locations to our buddy back East at the Naval base. The one that had not been blown up. He’d be able to feed those locations to the bombing sorties they were running. He’d been the one who let us know the consensus was that the main force of Koreans had landed in San Diego and were still around that area. He’d also said if we got close to there, to radio back what we saw as quickly as possible, since we probably wouldn’t survive too long.

  What did he know about war? Guy spends a few decades as a SEAL team member, travelling the world killing people and all of a sudden, he’s better at this than us? I got it. We were doing something extremely dangerous and stupid. There were enough remnants of the US military to be doing this that we were probably not even needed. This need for vengeance was all ours. Ann’s need to see the cold dead bodies of the people who had taken so much from her. My need to make her happy and try to put a smile back on her face. Reeves and Ginny were both on board.

  As I mentioned, the plan was pretty sketchy. The more I reviewed it in my mind the more it sounded like we were going to drive for a week or two then get shot by a group of Koreans. That plan sucked. We were driving by a little hole in the wall exit now with a crappy looking hotel and some Mexican restaurant looking places. I went ahead and put on my turn signal to alert Reeves and Ginny then pulled off at the exit. I slowed down to make sure they pulled off behind me then I headed into the parking lot of the hotel.

  The hotel was one of those three story deals with a pool in the back and a blacktop parking lot. It was covered in a layer of yellowish paint that was chipping off in places. There was a good chance that the option to rent a room for an hour here was valid. I pulled to a stop and climbed out of the truck. I walked around to Ann’s side and opened her door and helped her step down. She felt frail. The grief had made her sick. I enveloped her in a hug and tried to pass some of my resilience to her through our pressed bodies. Reeves came wandering around the side of the truck.

  “Get a room guys. But, I’d suggest somewhere else. This hotel is nasty looking. Probably got roaches the size of hamsters.”

  Ginny came around next. I noticed she had shot up about a foot it seemed. End of the world and all that but kids were still going to grow and it was still going to s
hock us adults when it happened. Yet another thing hinting at our mortality. Not that the old age even ranked in the top ten of ways I was probably going to die. Both Ginny and Reeves looked tired. We all did. Constantly running and fighting for your life while leaving a trail of dead loved ones really took it out of you. That had been our year. Now we were busy driving across the country to attack something a hundred times deadlier than anything we had dealt with so far.

  “Hamster roaches or not, I want us to stop here for a day or two and rest.” Everyone gave me sharp looks. Ann looked like she was getting ready to rip into me. I continued quickly, to get my thoughts out there before I could second guess myself. “What we’re doing right now is basically suicide. I’m good with killing, I’m good with vengeance, but I’m not good with hauling my ass to the other side of the country only to get shot dead on arrival. Let’s take a breather and come up with a plan that decrease our chances of death from 100% to 99% and then I’ll be good to get rolling again. But we need a plan.”

  “Sounds like the logical approach to me. Weird that Steve was the one to point it out.” Ginny smiled to take away the sting of that remark.

  We cleared the hotel. There were rooms with Zombies in them that we had to dispatch as a matter of course. We weren’t too worried about using weapons out here in the middle of nowhere, which made life a lot easier. We got all the keys from the front desk and cleared all the rooms on the top floor first, then worked our way down. Once that chore had been completed, we picked two adjoining rooms and beat a hole in the wall between them so we could move back and forth easily. Easily now that we had all been on the Apocalypse diet anyway. You know, eat random cans of whatever then spend the rest of the day running for your life. Really helps you drop a few pant sizes.

  Once we had transferred our stuff into our rooms and all of the necessities had been taken care of we settled into one of the rooms to talk. Ann and I were sitting on one bed with Reeves sitting on a dresser and Ginny laid out on the other bed. I hesitated to speak up as it felt like we were waiting on somebody. It finally dawned on me that I was waiting for Thomas. He had always been late to these sessions. Normally because he was trying to find something to snack on.

  I took a deep breath to settle my thoughts and get control of my emotions then I started talking.

  “We all miss Thomas. We all want to hurt the people who did this to him, to all of us and our families, friends and country. We need to do it smart though. We’ve worked and struggled and lost too much to throw our lives away pointlessly. That’s why I’m saying we need to slow our roll until we have a plan. The way I see it we currently don’t have any weapons that can do any real damage to a bunch of real soldiers. What do you guys think?”

  Reeves cleared his throat. “We need a serious force multiplier.” Ginny and Ann both nodded and seemed to agree with this statement. I waited a second for Reeves to continue, hoping I could figure out what the hell he was talking about from the context. When he didn’t say anything else I went ahead and asked him.

  “I missed the day in math class when they talked about force multipliers…”

  I got the look I was used to when I asked stupid questions. Whatever. Of course, Ginny had to answer the question. Nothing manlier than having a teen girl explain military terms to you.

  “A force multiplier is an advantage that lets a small group take out a much larger group. If you only have three people and you’re fighting twenty you can’t just line up in front of them and exchange rounds. You’ll lose. So, you get yourself a Gatling gun, or mortars, or setup an effective ambush. Something that gives you an advantage.”

  That made sense.

  “Ok, yeah, so let’s do that. Except we’re going to be up against thousands and all we have are a few deer rifles so we’re going to need a big ass advantage.”

  Ann pointed at my pocket. I patted my pockets until I figured out what she was talking about.

  “Yeah, the phone. That’s a force multiplier for sure. If we could get the LT to actually do anything besides mark down the locations we are going to send him. He doesn’t have much faith in us surviving this trip.”

  “Me either.” Chimed in Reeves. “I just want to go down swinging if I have to go down. I’m thinking explosives. We need to find explosives somewhere. I’m thinking a mine or a new home development site or the highway authority or somewhere like that may have some dynamite laying around.”

  “What are we going to do with the dynamite?” I asked.

  “Blow shit up.” Reeves responded quickly.

  “Well, I feel a whole lot better now that we have a plan.”

  We kept on like that for a couple of hours. Throwing plans around. Getting more far-fetched by the minute. Finding a National Guard Armory so we could all drive tanks west sounded good for about seven seconds. The National Guard armory was probably a good idea though, if we could find one of those, or a police armory, or basically anywhere to get our hands on better weapons and a lot of ammo. It was impossible to have too much ammo. The real questions started coming out towards the end. It was Ginny who spoke up, summing up our complete lack of knowledge.

  “We don’t know where the enemy is. We don’t know how many of them there are. We don’t know what they are planning on doing or how they have their defenses setup. Without doing some recon we’ll be dead really quick. We can talk and plan all day but it’s not going to do us any good until we get our eyes on the target so we can put together a real plan. We need to get together what supplies we can and then try and figure out a way to get more intel.”

  That about summed it up. We were all tired. We set the guard schedule and went to sleep. Hopefully, all that stuff would percolate in our brains overnight and we’d see clearer in the morning.

  Entry 2: Glass Half Empty

  I couldn’t sleep. I spent the night alternately snuggled up to Ann and quietly disengaging from her to pace. I finally gave up and went outside. I took over for Reeves on guard duty. He looked wiped and didn’t even try to argue. He just stumbled over to his bed and crawled under the covers. I remember back in the old days when I would have been grossed out by getting into a hotel bed like that. Now it looked pretty awesome, next to some of the other places I had been forced to sleep.

  We had made it to about halfway between Nashville and Memphis. We’d been able to get around Nashville using the bypass, to steer clear of the city. We’d need to figure out how to get past Memphis in some similar manner. Barreling straight through large population centers was not the sanest thing to do in this new normal. What were we doing anyway?

  What exactly where we going to accomplish by driving across the country and shooting a few Koreans before they ended up tracking us down and killing us? I’d been fueled by rage as much as the others, but my rage was dying down and being replaced by a deep pit of despair. I was down with kicking the invaders out and making them pay for what they did, but I had no idea how we were going to accomplish that. We either needed a lot more people or we needed to learn how to fly bomber jets with lasers on them or something.

  We’d rescued Ann out of a van, where they had been transporting her somewhere. My guess was that they had not been able to get their families out of Korea before we nuked it so now they needed women. Ann said she’d kind of gotten that impression as well. When we pressed her for details, she had to admit that she had no idea why she thought that. She didn’t speak Korean and had seen no evidence that was what they were doing. The only evidence we had was that they had put her in a van to transport her somewhere and had not killed her. Definitely on the circumstantial side.

  I went ahead and extrapolated that out to the Koreans were now going to try and take our women after having taken everything else from us. That was another solid reason to kill them. My parents would be alive if not for them, Thomas would still be alive, the East Coast would not be radioactive. Ok. So, there were plenty of reasons for us to want to kill them. The ‘how’ of it was still lost on me. Reeves had mentioned tha
t North Korea had one of the largest standing armies in the world. Something like twenty five percent of their population was in the military. A military that was on constant alert due to the aggression they showed all the countries surrounding them.

  We’d destroyed their homeland. We’d killed their women and children. There was no reason to think they’d be the slightest bit sympathetic towards us if we were caught. I assumed they’d kill me and Reeves and haul away Ann and Ginny to use as breeding stock. They’d try to haul them away anyway.

  I felt slightly better having thought everything through. What we were doing was stupid. Pretty much suicidal. Not doing anything was also stupid and suicidal. Running away and hiding would gain us some time before we were hunted down and the women taken and Reeves and I killed. What if we were able to win? I hadn’t actually thought about us winning. I guess I’m a glass half empty kind of guy when trying to think of what would happen when we finally hit the West coast and ran into an army of angry Asians.