Ann bashed her elbow into the Zombies face but it didn’t seem to care. I twisted around so I was on my back and wrapped my hands around the Zombies neck and started squeezing. It was a skinny middle aged woman who had survived being in our shooting gallery. She had a skinny neck. It didn’t take long to choke the life out of her. I held her neck in my hands when it was done. Her lifeless body held up by my shaking arms. Her eyes had bugged out in her head and her tongue hung down. She had not tried to save herself, rather continuing to scratch and claw at the three of us. She had dark hair, had probably been pretty once, someone’s girlfriend or mom or wife before all this crap. I wondered if any of those thoughts or any of that persona still circulated in this things head. Did the disease trap you in a prison controlled by instinct or did it wipe ‘you’ out completely?
We hit some sort of bump and all of us went flying in the air. I landed on Ann, Thomas went to the other side of the trailer and the woman’s corpse flopped across both of us. I shoved off the body and Ann and I jumped up. Gathering our weapons and looking around I decided to ignore the ear shattering volume of the screams and yells erupting around us and concentrate on things I could actually deal with. Ann went to her post at the front of the trailer. She was trying to keep Zombies off the tractor and away from us. Thomas was roaming from side to side with the pistol for any that got too close. I had the rear.
First thing I did was grab the boxes that had survived and push them towards the middle of the trailer. Another one had fallen off when we hit the bump it looked like. I didn’t want to lose any more if we could help it. We had not planned on the trailer being so hard to stand up in and keep stuff level in. We had not anticipated the huge number of Zombies that would be on us almost immediately.
Reeves was flooring it, so we left a fair number behind. We started cycling through our clips pretty quick just dealing with the press that threatened to board the tractor or the trailer on the sides though. The trailer was all over the place as we hit bodies and random other junk in the road. Accuracy was pretty much impossible so we settled for sticking the barrel of the gun right on whatever Zombie we were targeting and pulling the trigger. As bumpy as it was getting, we managed to miss point blank shots fairly regularly.
We were covered in gore. The ones we had shot earlier were still leaking blood and piss and other fluids I didn’t want to think about. All of that nasty sauce was bouncing around in the trailer with us. The hay absorbed a lot of it but it was getting pretty disgusting back there. If it wasn’t for the hay, we all would have been unconscious from the jarring bumps we were taking being thrown around everywhere. The world shrank. I focused on my piece of it. Acquire target, shoot target, repeat. I finally ran out of clips for the AK and pulled out my pistol. It turned out to be a lot easier to operate from a bouncing trailer.
The Zombies had surged around us and I was waiting for the trailer to stop and the swarm to come over it and kill us all. I was moving my pistol left to right, pulling the trigger every second now to keep the Zombies out. Popping out the clip, replacing and starting the motion all over again. With the screaming and all of the gunfire I could not hear anything. The density of the crowd of Zombies started to lessen on the sides of us. I continued to fire into the ones trying to jump in. We picked up additional speed and soon left them all behind.
Thomas and Ann collapsed in the middle of the trailer. I picked up each of the corpses in the trailer and threw them out the back. I noticed there were more than we had started with. It must have gotten crazy behind me at some point. When I had all the bodies out I went and sat down beside Ann and Thomas. I pulled out my Walkie and asked Ginny how her and Reeves were.
“That was nuts. Let’s not do it again. Where the hell we going anyway?”
I thought about it for a minute before hitting the talk button.
“Just keep headed North, try and get on the interstate, if you see somewhere we can freshen up our supplies, especially ammo, pull over. About half our shit went out the back of the trailer. Let’s keep on Rollin.’”
Entry 17: Room to Breathe
“We’ll be rolling for about another hour on the gas we have in this thing. I say we try finding something a little less tractor and hay mobile like to drive.”
Reeves announcement over the Walkies made sense to me. It sucked back here. It was also pretty open, which was scary. We had probably been about a minute away from not making it out of that last little town. Reeves and Ginny were riding up front in a climate controlled cabin surrounded by Plexiglas. Ginny had just rolled down her window to conveniently shoot things. Still, it did have a lot of torque and power, the wheels were pretty awesome, it had some serious stuff going for it as a ride as well.
It was loud though. It was really loud. Slow too. Not extremely slow but a lot slower than we would be in a regular truck or car. That meant we had a crap load of Zombie’s chasing us who would catch us a lot sooner if we stopped for supplies or had a breakdown or ran into other Zombies or whatever. I also felt like I’d gone a few rounds with Mike Tyson. My body hurt everywhere from being thrown around in the wagon. Thomas had fresh tear tracks from where he had been slammed down on his arm. I had seen Ann slip him some pills and figured he’d be napping in the hay pretty soon. He’d earned it, watching our backs in that last fight.
I hit talk on the Walkie. “Yeah, if you see something that looks like we can snag it I’m good with swapping out vehicles. I’d like two big trucks if we can find them. Four-wheel drive.” I was thinking of the passes in the mountains and what to do if we hit snow.
“I’ll check Edmunds.com, any specific color you’re looking for?”
“Thanks Reeves, the apocalypse would get boring without you providing your commentary and valuable insights.”
“No problem boss. I’ll keep an eye out. This place seems pretty redneck so hopefully we can find what you’re looking for. Assuming you want an automatic? We can always get the little girl up here to teach you how to drive a stick if need be.”
“Thanks Reeves, I’ll keep that in mind.” Ignoring the fact everyone else seemed to think Reeves was the apocalyptic Eddie Murphy, I began looking around for discarded ammo and checking which boxes had not bounced out of the trailer. We had five boxes left. One was spilt open and had spilled canned food all over the place. Most of that had apparently rolled out but I picked up a few dented cans and shoved them back in the box. I found two boxes full of medical supplies and carried those over to Ann to dig through. I hoped they were the important two boxes, I know we had started with three boxes of medical supplies.
Ann told me not to worry about it, she had split the supplies up evenly in case we lost some of the boxes. I love her. Smart and hot. It’s a really great combo.
We were wearing most of our ammo. We had all gone through our pre-loaded clips but had plenty of loose ammo still in our bandoliers and camo fanny pack belt things. It was heavy, but I didn’t like anyone moving around without having weapons and ammo, since you never knew when you were going to have to run and gun.
The last boxes had more food, water, knives, hygiene products and a bunch of t-shirts and boxes. I think the t-shirt box made it on by accident, but I was pretty stoked to have a month-long supply of fresh underwear. Medical supplies and ammo are important but a pair of fresh underwear can work wonders on your self-esteem!
Ann looked through everything and mentioned we’d lost the box that had the wet wipes in it. We’d also lost a portion of our medical supplies and one whole box that had been mostly water and vitamins. Overall, we weren’t doing too horrible. We would need to stop and get a ton of supplies for the cabin now that we were thinking we’d be snowed in for the whole winter once it snowed. Hopefully, if we were snowed in then any Zombies would be snowed out.
We’d driven the tractor out of the woods and onto the road into an industrial park area. I was watching the various textile companies and marble slab distributors roll by when I saw a sign that caught my interest. It was a Penske re
ntal place. U-Haul for rich people. They’d have trucks and diesel and all that in there. I started to hit Reeves on the Walkie but he was already turning in and pulling up to the locked front gate. Behind the gate were rows of the large twenty and twenty-four foot trucks.
I’d have announced that great minds think alike, but I didn’t want to hear the responses that would surely come from Ann and Ginny almost immediately if I threw that comment out there. People who think they’re funny are really annoying.
Entry 18: Can We Add on the Insurance?
We all got out and stared at the large locked gate separating us from the big yellow trucks. They looked perfect for blasting through the apocalypse. Big, rugged looking tires. Huge space in the back for storing crap. We could attach the car carrier to them and drag along a smaller, more maneuverable car as our escape vehicle. They’d suck up a lot of diesel but they had large tanks on the side of them. We should be in reach of Tennessee with one tank from here anyway.
“We’ve got a ton of Zombies on the way. Those ones we left behind will still be coming and we’ve probably attracted a few more with our noise so far.”
That was Ann’s subtle way of telling us to stop standing around with our thumbs in our butts staring at the fence and get busy. She was right. We needed to get this little puzzle figured out quickly or we were going to have to do it in a much more stressful environment. We had not had a single Zombie show up so far but we all knew it was only a matter of time. Going for the direct approach, I started climbing the chain link fence beside the gate.
It was a tall fence with barbed wire on the top of it. I got to the top and determined that I was an idiot. I looked down and noticed no one else had bothered trying to climb it. Reeves and Ann both looked at me with a familiar disappointment in their eyes. Thomas was looking at me with half a smile on his face, probably waiting for me to try and climb over the barbed part and start cussing in pain. Ginny was ignoring everybody and rummaging around in the trailer, looking for something to help us come up with a plan.
Ginny pulled a shot gun out of the back of the trailer and walked over to the door that kept us out of the rental office. She kept the shot gun in the crook of her arm and looked over at me where I was still hanging off the top of the fence by the coiled barbed wire.
“Hey Spider Man. Unless you can think of a way to get over the barbed wire without adding to your scar collection how about we just shoot our way in?”
Sounded like a plan to me. I was pretty sick of us always being quiet. I climbed back down the fence and we all walked over to where Ginny was standing. I noticed Thomas looked vaguely disappointed that I had not tried to make it over the barbed wire. Poor kid really missed cable. God, forbid he read a book for entertainment.
I started talking as everyone looked at Ginny.
“Ok. Once we shoot our way in we are not going to have a ton of time. Zombies are going to start coming out of the woodwork. Everyone needs to get whatever supplies they want attached to themselves now. Like always, prioritize weapons, food and shit isn’t useful if you’re dead because you ran out of ammo.”
Everyone geared up and strapped on. Reeves had grabbed our other shotgun and him and Ginny stood in front of the reinforced glass door getting ready to blast there way inside. The glass looked really thick on the door. The windows looked like regular windows to me though.
“Stand down!” I whisper yelled right as Ginny and Reeves raised the shot guns to their shoulders. They both looked over at me as I grabbed the bat Reeves had sat down to free up his hands to shoot. “Hang on one second, let me try something.”
I swung the bat at the window above the shrubbery beside the reinforced glass door. It shattered pretty easy. I motioned for Ginny to come over and I had her get on Reeves shoulders and fumble around to unlatch the window. Once she had opened it, by moving the latch with her knife, she wriggled through it, falling to the ground, and disappearing from view for a minute.
Ginny appeared in the door and a couple of seconds later we were in. I looked over at the broken card table with the stacked water bottles underneath it that she had just crash landed in. Ouch.
Thomas was trying not to laugh. We all looked at him like he was nuts. Ginny just got hurt and he was trying to hold back a laugh? Ginny’s brow was getting wrinkled and a dangerous look was coming into her eye. I noticed the knife was still in her hand. Thomas pointed at the other window and we all had to chortle at least a bit. Even Ginny did. She had come through the window on the left of the door with all kinds of hard surfaces and pointy crap underneath it. The other windows we could have chosen has the blankets underneath it people use to wrap their furniture when they move.
Under normal situations, this would have been a mildly amusing footnote. For some strange reason, probably due to our current stress levels and states of mind, this was freaking hilarious. When Thomas challenged Ginny to a coin toss competition, even she had to laugh. Even though, I did notice she was bleeding some on her forearm and appeared to be limping. Neither of those things being a major concern in our current world. Anything at the band aid and Bayer aspirin level were just considered a cost of waking up.
We made a couple of trips out to the trailer and got all of our stuff into the office. On the other side of the office was a sturdy looking wooden door we were thinking led into the garages and storage rooms and out into the fenced in secure parking lot all the trucks were kept in. Reeves was standing watch over by the door and he made the shushing gesture for all of us and pointed out the door. A middle-aged man and a young girl had wandered into the parking lot by our trailer. Both of them were walking with the hanky, awkward motions we had come to associate with the Zombies. They were also both covered in filthy rags of clothes and the visible skin was black and blue. They were looking away from us at the moment, but I was certain if they turned around we would see the standard red devil eyes we were familiar with.
Without talking loudly, trying not to make too much noise, we started searching the counter space for keys. Meanwhile, Ann walked over to the wooden door and easily turned the knob, lock clicking on it, the door opened outwards. We probably should have tried opening it first. We were just so used to everything sucking that we had not even bothered. Luckily, we had two of the fairer sex with us to handle the common-sense parts of our journey. Ginny would have probably not started off looking on the counter either, if she hadn’t just crashed through a card table head first about five minutes’ prior.
We each grabbed a few of the waters and moved quietly through the wooden door. Carefully shutting it behind us, to make sure it didn’t make too much noise. Verifying that we kept it unlocked in case we needed to get out that way. We entered the large garage space used to service the big trucks.
The place was cavernous. I guessed it had to be to accommodate putting those huge trucks up on lifts and doing whatever it is truck mechanics do to large trucks. Lube and drive shafts and what not. I have no idea how cars work. Being a man, it hurts to admit that. I’ve already confessed to not being able to drive a stick though so it’s probably not a huge shocker.
The place was ripe for looting. All kinds of tools that would be perfect for bashing your way through Zombies. Plus, they would be useful as tools as well. We found a lockbox on the wall with a fancy electronic lock on it. The cover was Plexiglas so we could see it had all the truck parking spots neatly labeled on it. The electronic lock had a complex looking LED keypad to enter the code to open it. I opted for beating the crap out of the box with a sledgehammer. Damn thing was built to withstand a nuclear war. If there was a nuclear war, the only thing left would be cockroaches and this fucking box. I swear it was laughing at me and calling me a wus.
I had succeeded in knocking it onto the ground and was taking one final swing before I planned to give up and maybe let Ginny do it. Just to make sure I completely rescinded all my man points. My final swing I put everything I had into it. The front of the box went flying one way and the rest of the box went the oth
er. I dropped the sledgehammer on the ground, sat down, and asked Ann to bring me some muscle relaxers and a pain killer. I had felt something slip in my back on that last swing and I was now in a lot of pain.
Sitting there sipping a water and swallowing whatever Ann handed me, I was having a hard time thinking of next steps when my damn back was painfully pulsating. Luckily, most of my team was smarter than me and way healthier. I watched from a comfortable position I had taken on the ground while they wandered around the garage and started piling useful gear a few feet away from me.
A few of the items they brought over looked so useful I tried to get up and help. The medicine had not kicked in yet so I sat my ass back down to watch everyone else work. Ann drug over one of the most exciting finds, two large bolt cutters. In today’s world, any tool that would help us easily loot was literally a lifesaver. These ones looked like they could cut through pretty much anything. The rest of the stuff was fairly standard. Reeves wheeled over a few barrels of something. Turned out it was diesel and they had some little motorized pump for the barrels to pump it out. Thomas brought over some tire iron looking metal rods that he seemed to be evaluating against his current metal stair pole.
Zournal: Book 3: Scorched Earth Page 10