Zournal (Book 4): Reap What You Sow

by Merritt, R. S.

  He was bigger than me. A lot bigger. I was woozy from the first hit. I reached for my pistol but he hit me with the baton before I could pull it. Right on the side of the head. I went down. Again. I lay there for a second watching the world spin and heard him yelling at the marine with him. He was telling him that he had seen me reach for my weapon and so responding with deadly force was required. That didn’t sound good.

  Rather than continue to be beaten while lying on the ground I pulled a switchblade out of my sleeve and stabbed him in the foot. Then the leg. Then the thigh and the other foot and anywhere else I could reach. Then I jumped up on him and kept slashing and stabbing like an enraged monkey. He was trying to hit me with the baton but I just didn’t care. I was in fight mode. He may lift weights all day but I’d spent the last two years developing my ability to kill humans efficiently.

  He was laying on the ground and I was straddling him with my knife poised to stab into his throat or his eye socket. I typically went for the throat with the Kabar since the wide blade was more likely to get stuck when I tried to pull it out of the eye socket but the switch blade was a lot narrower so should slide in and out pretty easy. He was staring at me with fear in his eyes. He was used to being the bully, not the guy laying on the ground.

  “Don’t kill him.” The marine who had walked down with him finally spoke up. “He’s an idiot, but he’s an officer idiot and if you kill him the Colonel will have to do something about it. Right now, you can both still just kind of limp away from this incident and we don’t need to ever talk about it again. Also, if you kill him I’m going to have to shoot you. So, there’s that.”

  He made an effective argument. I got off the Lieutenant and then held out a hand to help him up. Damn. I’d messed him up pretty good. His uniform was slashed open all over the place and he had blood all over him. He looked like he was thinking about lunging at me again. His assistant went ahead and grabbed him and told him to follow him and he’d get him patched up. He told me to put some ice on the side of my face and go sleep it off.

  Where the hell was I going to find ice? I went back to our room and told everyone what had happened and why we couldn’t say anything about it. Ann got me one of those ice packs you rub and they get cold and had me hold it on the side of my face where I had been punched. She was mumbling something about not even being able to let me go to the damn bathroom without it becoming a life or death situation. I kept the concussion symptoms to myself.

  Entry 35: Strategery

  We were wondering where to go the next morning as we all got up and started getting ready for the meeting with the colonel. I hurt all over from the fight the previous night but was used to waking up beat to hell at this point. As we were trying to figure out if we wanted to go walk around a bit Gunny walked in. He had a plastic bag that was weighted down with something that smelled like heaven.

  “Breakfast.” He said as he dropped the bag on the cot beside Ann. Ann immediately opened up the bag and started pulling out burritos of some sort. She handed each of us one of the burritos and then handed around water bottles that had some kind of powdered orange juice in them. I opened up my burrito and almost started crying. There were eggs in it. Eggs and either ham or bacon. God bless the military. I took back every bad thing I’d thought or said about them.

  “How’d you get eggs?” I asked, holding my burrito down on my lap. That was a major tactical error as that put the burrito within snagging range of the jaws of Daisy who went ahead and assumed that my holding it at her level meant it was a gift. Gunny had already given her what looked like most of the ham from one of the canned hams. Damn dog was a pig with fur.

  “Powdered eggs. That’s the last of our canned ham you’re wolfing down in there. We also have about three hefty bags full of random condiments we’ve been using. Now. What happened to your face?”

  I stared back at him without saying a word.

  “Ok. Fine. Keep quiet. I’ll just assume this had something to do with how messed up a certain Lieutenant is this morning. Be careful. They tend to take slicing and dicing on officers pretty seriously around here. Even officers that are dicks.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I mumbled through my bruised lips and aching jaw. “What did you and the colonel talk about yesterday? I’m hoping you told him everything so I don’t have to talk much today.”

  “He should be down here in a few minutes. He’ll tell you what he wants to tell you. I let him know the basics of what happened. He wanted you guys to be able to enjoy your breakfast before he came in and started grilling you with questions.”

  A loud cough from the doorway made us all jerk our heads around. The colonel was standing in the doorway.

  “You all enjoy the breakfast? Need anything else?” None of us said anything so he went and sat down on the cot in the corner of the room. “First things first. Nothing happened last night as far as I am concerned but let’s try and focus on who the real enemy is. Understood?”

  The colonel stared at me until I nodded. “Ok. Good. Then let’s move on. Gunny here has told me a little bit about what happened. I want to fill you all in on what our situation here is so we can see if you may be able to help us or vice versa. Either way, I know you want to hurt the Koreans and I’m right there with you. Bastards deserve to die after what they’ve done to this world.”

  The colonel launched in to his story. He used a lot of military jargon but I was able to get Reeves and Ann to translate most of it into what us mere regular civilian humans speak. The entire team had been on an aircraft carrier that had managed to avoid having anyone infected. They had set out on a cruise as part of a task force about four months before the virus started spreading. Several of the other ships in their task force did have outbreaks and ended up becoming ghost ships.

  As they had become aware of what was occurring back on the mainland they had awaited orders from the chain of command as to what to do. At first, they had thought they would be sent back to try and provide resources to separate the sick from the healthy and keep the virus from spreading. That had been deemed an impossible task though due to the rapidity of the spread of the virus. The orders that had come through had been more of a retaliation policy.

  An admiral who had to shoot his granddaughter had ordered the nuclear strike on North Koreas before turning his sidearm on himself. Subsequently, it had been discovered that the Koreans had anticipated this sort of strike after what they had done and had already dispatched most of their army to North America and other parts of the world. The ship the colonel and the marine detachment were on had made steam back to the east coast of the US, narrowly missing being part of the victims of the nuclear weapon that had been unleashed on the Charleston area by the Koreans.

  After the attack on Charleston the remnants of the command structure on the shore had begun to fall apart. The highest ranking general officer, an admiral for the US Navy, had survived by being in the mountains on vacation when everything went down. He had managed to make it up to Groton and put together a command structure up there and start piecing together the remaining military pieces in the US to try and drive the Koreans off our soil. Most of the high level strategic decisions were coming from him at this point. He had requested the colonel and a group of special forces and support personnel be picked up by submarine and dropped off at an air base by Norfolk.

  From that base, they had been flown to the old airport in Denver and dropped off with orders to slow down the Koreans advancing through this area. They had been swarmed by Zombies as soon as they were dropped off and lost a few men and a lot of their supplies and ammo just making it out of the airport alive. Since then they had been staging patrols and ambushes out of this general area, moving bases about once a month to keep from being tracked down by the Koreans who were actively patrolling the area looking for them. The main emphasis of their patrols so far had been to destroy military and civilian assets the Koreans may try to use to advance further into the eastern part of the
U.S.

  They had been successful in getting rid of a large portion of the military vehicles left at the Colorado outposts as well as demolishing and burying large sections of the highway through the mountains. They estimated there were about three to four hundred Koreans still in the area actively trying to locate and destroy them in order to secure this section. The colonels mission was to delay and cause as much damage as possible to those men with the assets he had available.

  Those assets had primarily consisted of two teams of highly trained marines. One of those had been the guys who died in the park when we got overrun. The other team had not come back from their latest raid or been heard from in over a week and were assumed at this point to be casualties as well. This left the colonel with a handful of support personnel, us, and the Gunny. The support personnel numbered about thirty and included armorers, communications specialists who operated the radios, cooks, logistics specialists and a few who had been regular infantry and shore patrol.

  “But first and foremost, every marine is a rifleman. The guy who whipped up those burritos you had this morning at one point went through Paris Island and qualified as a marksman. We will continue with our mission. That is where you guys come in. The Gunny has told me you have a lot of specialized knowledge and experience from being out in the field for so long. I’d like to gather as much of that knowledge together as I can and send it back to be incorporated into training materials for other units either already in the field or getting ready to be dispatched.”

  The colonel wrapped up and sat back looking at us.

  “Hey colonel, we’re happy to help in any way we can. We’ve actually been documenting everything that has happened to us and a lot of the lessons learned from being out in this mess. I can share that with you and you can send back the parts you consider relevant to whoever may be interested in them. That will also help you understand our story and our capabilities. Our original goal had been to get to Portland and help the military there with raids against the Koreans. We’re just as happy to help out here.”

  We went back and forth on how we would best be able to help out. It basically boiled down to us training and going out with the marines that were left to continue the mission. There was a bit of a sticking point around Ginny wanting to go out with the teams since she was a young woman and no one really wanted to thrust her into a direct combat position. She wanted to help though and she pointed out that the people sitting here in this warehouse were in danger of dying at any second anyway so what was the difference really? You never wanted to get into an argument with that girl.

  There was a mission that had already been on the drawing board that the colonel was eager to get our input and assistance on. He invited us to go over to his office to continue the conversation so we all headed that way. In his office, he had maps of the area on the wall with lines all over them and different areas shaded different colors. We all stood around a table while he pulled out a map showing the Air Force base to the south.

  “The bulk of the Koreans are camping out by the Air Force base. They’ve cleared out most of the Zombies who were hanging out down there and they launch the helicopters from there to scout the area. They don’t have any attack copters but those civilian choppers can still provide them a solid view of our operations and are a serious pain in my ass. Every time we blow up helicopters they just go find more somewhere. We’re thinking while they have a huge number of machines laying around they can use, they don’t have an unlimited number of pilots and mechanics.”

  The colonel looked around to make sure we were all following him and there were no questions so far.

  “Ok. So, we lost all of our explosives experts. Gunny here has some amateur type knowledge on the subject. We do have some explosives left. Our plan was to blow giant holes in the fences and barracks around there and then leave it to the Zombies to show up and go in through the gaps and do our job for us. This would reduce our risk of attacking them directly and take advantage of the Zombies rolling around everywhere. Hopefully, they’d kill the Koreans while the Koreans would do us the favor of helping to thin them out.”

  Ginny had been listening carefully to the plan and once the colonel completed his portion of the briefing she was the first of us to speak up. The look of surprise on the colonel’s face amused us all since we were pretty much used to Ginny being the most adept at military strategy and tactics in our group thanks to all the training she had been getting since she was a precocious toddler.

  “The main issue I see is getting enough Zombies there to do the kind of damage we’re looking for. They must have cleared out most of the ones in the area or every time a helicopter took off they would be overrun. The strike force would need to pied piper a large mass of them in that general direction. The big problems with that being in order to do it covertly they’d need to do it at night and try to be quiet. The best way to get a bunch of Zombies to follow you is to make a bunch of noise and you’re more likely to get more of them during the day. During the day, the bad guys are going to see us coming. Not to mention hearing us coming if we’re stopping to set off fireworks or shoot up into the air to keep the Zombies interested in chasing us.”

  Ann spoke up. “We could stage them close to the base then they’d come when we started blowing holes in the fence. Like, we get that big horde of them over by the park to follow us on four-wheelers or motorcycles to about two or three miles from the base. Then we leave them in that area and go set off those charges. The Zombies should head in that direction. We’d have to get a lot of Zombies to survive two or three hundred Koreans shooting at them for long enough to do any damage though. Be even better if we staged groups of Zombies all around the base. Are there large population centers on every side of that air base that we may be able to pull from?”

  We went back and forth for a while on the tactical approach to this. The final plan ended up being built on Ann’s idea of staging Zombies around the base. We had a box of C-4 and timers we could use so Gunny was going to spend the rest of the day training us on those. We would sneak in at night with some of the marines and put the explosives where we wanted them and hope they were not found by the Korean sentries. We were going for having the explosives go off right at dawn. The Zombies we would work on staging around the place would still be active and would start moving in that direction. The darkness would help the maximum number of them avoid being shot before they were close enough to engage with the Koreans.

  I thought it was a decent plan, given what resources we had and the fact that the enemy outnumbered us by at least ten to one. We wrapped it up and Reeves and I went off with Gunny to learn how to blow shit up. We were going to be the lucky ones to set the explosives. Ginny and Ann were going to lead small groups of marines to lure groups of Zombies closer to the base and try to time it so they would be staged to move at the correct time when the explosives went off. After listening to Ginny in the planning session today no one had brought up her age again. She was obviously a natural at this stuff.

  Entry 36: The Best Laid Plans

  It didn’t take a whole lot of time for Gunny to pass on all his knowledge around C-4 to us. Not because we were fast learners but because he didn’t have a whole lot of knowledge to pass on. He pulled out the plastic wrapped packs of C-4 we would be carrying and showed us that it was safe to squeeze into whatever shape we needed. Then he showed us to how to stick in the detonators and how to set the time on them so they’d go off. Not too complex really.

  The livelier part of the training was trying to decide the best places to put the explosives. Gunny had been out there before to blow up helicopters and planes so had an idea on the layout of the base. The place was surrounded by a chain link fence with barbed wire on the top of it. We needed to blow holes through the perimeter in multiple sections to let the Zombies have easy access to the Koreans within. We also wanted to sow panic and confusion around the ranks of the Koreans as this was all happening so they did not have a lot of time to get organized
to repulse the Zombies.

  To get that done one of us needed to go inside the fence and plant some charges in places that were going to freak out the people inside the wire. Gunny volunteered himself to do it since he thought both Reeves and I were too dumb to do it right. We let him have it because why not.

  Ann and Ginny had wandered back in by this point and they wanted to know what we had learned and what the plan was. We showed them the C-4 piece of it and they were unimpressed.

  “Really.” Ann said. “You’ve been sitting down here for three hours to talk about shoving putty into a shape then sticking in this egg timer thing? We thought you were actually being trained on something hard.”

  Reeves and I immediately launched into an explanation of why it was way harder than she was making it sound. We couldn’t make ourselves believe it either so we gave up and asked if they had given any thoughts to how the pied piper piece of this operation should work. We started talking more about the base and the best approach for it. In addition to the fence, there were sentries we’d need to deal with. The place was pretty huge and the number of sentries needed to effectively guard the whole base were not available. They mostly patrolled around the remaining helicopters and such since those had been the targets of the local special forces so far.