Zournal (Book 6): The Final Countdown

by R. S. Merritt

  It was a three hour wait before we finally saw headlights coming towards us. Wilson tapped his ear to let us know he was back in communication with Ginny. I was tempted to grab the earpiece from him. I restrained myself since I could see the headlights coming towards us and knew it would only be a few more minutes. A huge sense of relief washed over me. I’d been freaking out all the way here that we’d sent a young girl off with a great deal of responsibility into a world where failure meant death. Where even good decisions could have horrible consequences. A world where the old rules no longer applied.

  We’d sent the right girl. As the transports rolled up to us I could see from the number of hands waving that Ginny had done a way better job than us at keeping her people alive. Of course, we hadn’t been trying to keep our people alive as much as we’d been trying to bring some pain to the Koreans. We didn’t have an official damage assessment but based on that flash of light and the big ass boom I assumed we’d done some serious damage. The transports stopped in front of us and Ginny hopped out and ran over to us. Everyone else stayed in the transports. She had her people trained.

  Ginny bounded over to us. She had on hiking boots, camo pants, a black sweater and an Orioles baseball hat. A holster held a colt on her hip and she had an AK-47 flung over her shoulder on a webbed strap. The pockets on her pants were bulging with stuff and I counted three visible knives. I counted all that before she almost knocked me over with a hug before moving on to Ann and Reeves. My eyes were tearing up a little as were everyone else’s. Tears of excitement or joy or relief. I wasn’t even sure what they were.

  Ginny was looking around into the woods around us and at first, I thought she was checking for Zombies. Then I realized when we’d left her we’d had a lot more people with us. Trained military men who were used to going in and getting it done. She looked at me and cocked her head. Leaving the obvious question unsaid. I shook my head very slightly to indicate this was all of us now. Her eyes went a little wide then she hid that behind a smile.

  “Ok cool. I did have a warehouse to invite you to but that’s pretty much blown now. Did you get some?”

  “We got some.” Reeves answered. “Big old fungus cloud right in San Diego harbor. Worked like a charm. I’m feeling a little exposed out here though. What say we find a place a few more miles away from that giant horde that is still wandering around here somewhere looking for lunch?”

  Everyone thought that was a pretty great suggestion. It beat the hell out of standing in the middle of road until we were eaten. Ginny waved to the transport she’d popped out of and asked Walker if he’d like to go get in the back of the second transport. One of the women in the back had been a pediatrician and it would probably be a good idea to go get his hand looked at. Walker said thanks and grabbed his stuff to head that way after getting a nod from Wilson. When he was out of earshot Ginny confided that the woman had actually failed out of medical school but had wanted to become a pediatrician so Ginny had granted her an honorary degree. She was easily the most knowledgeable of everyone around medicine and we were all excited to hear we had someone now with that kind of knowledge. Ann especially looked relieved that playing doctor would not fall squarely on her shoulders any more.

  Wilson, Ann and Ginny all got in the cab of the truck leaving Reeves and myself to hop up in the truck bed again. I was just getting used to it at this point so didn’t bother complaining. It beat the hell out of walking at least. Wilson started up the truck and Ginny started giving him directions on how to take the back roads to get out to an old farm that had been turned into a Bed and Breakfast and should hold us all.

  “How’d you end up surrounded in that warehouse?” Ann asked.

  “It was the perfect place for food and shelter really. Just like the one you were holed up in when we met you. I figured it would hold out for a lot longer than other places. We’d have probably been fine if they hadn’t had rats.” Ginny paused dramatically to allow us all to wonder why rats mattered. “Ellen, one of the women I trust with a gun, or used to trust anyway, was on guard duty and a rat ran towards her. Ellen does not like rats. Ellen is deathly afraid of rats. Ellen had an M-16 in her hand and she blew through half a clip before she figured out what she was doing and stopped. It was too late by then. We battened down the hatches to survive the inevitable Zombie storm and have been sitting there a few days like that until you showed up.”

  “Any problems getting here?” Wilson asked her.

  “Nothing we couldn’t handle. You left me with a bunch of hands and they were all very motivated to get away from the Koreans. We mostly just took it slow and stayed on backroads and didn’t do anything to attract attention. Our first real slip-up was that gun fight with the scary rodent. Woman survives Zombie attacks and is in the middle of an apocalypse and a freakin rat flips her out?”

  “Can’t all be a warrior princess like you!” Reeves tried to reach through the divider to give Ginny a noogie but she ducked his hand and threatened to shut the divider and lock us out. That made Reeves stop screwing around. The last thing either of us wanted was to only have each other for company again. We’d been in the back of this old ass truck for so long that we were starting to act like an old married couple.

  “Did all the people you left with make it?” Wilson asked.

  “Yeah, we actually picked up a couple too. The more rural the area you are in the more likely you’ll run into somebody. Especially out here in the hippy part of the country. I wouldn’t be surprised if you found people who didn’t even know anything had happened. People here consider it a mark of pride to be off the grid. I think there’s a lot more people left alive than you’d think. They’re just keeping their heads down.” Ginny’s face got grave. “Wilson, I want to say thank you to you and your men for what you did. I think you took care of driving them out of here. I think that’s going to give us a chance to build a life here. Thank you.”

  “Thanks for saying that. I feel the same towards the guys we left behind on that crazy march. I have to believe they died to move everyone else forward. I don’t believe they died so we could all rot away in hovels in the mountains. We’re going to reclaim and rebuild.”

  Epilogue:

  I haven’t written in here in a while. We’ve been working hard the last few months trying to make a home somewhere sustainable. We’re currently in the suburbs of Tacoma. It’s summertime so we’re not freezing to death like we would be in the winter up here. I don’t think this is going to be where we end up settling in at but we’re giving it a try. There’s an Indian reservation outside of town where they had some gardens so we’re tending to those. The fish are basically jumping out of the rivers and bays after so many years of being overfished. If we get comfortable here it may not be a bad place to build a home. I just worry we’d have a hard time surviving the winters.

  Ann and I are living in sin in a little cottage by the lake. She’s now officially my fiancée. I spent way more than my three-month salary on her ring. I broke into a jewelry store in downtown Olympia with Reeves and ended up with a ridiculously big diamond. If we could find a preacher or a priest somewhere we were going to make it official. If we couldn’t find anyone else we’d make Wilson put his uniform on and do it. He just said he no longer had that job since he was pretty sure the Seals had been disbanded by this point. He even let Walker call him by his first name instead of saying sir all the time.

  Reeves tried to give him crap about still being an officer until he got orders saying he’d been released. Wilson gave the crap right back to him asking if he’d been released from his job at the Pizzeria yet. To which Reeves had replied:

  “No, but I just got done releasing your mama.”

  Which didn’t make sense to anybody but pissed off Wilson who chased Reeves down and gave him some kind of finger bending move until Reeves said he was sorry. Of course, then he said something about he bent Wilsons mom’s fingers and it all started over again. Such was life now.

  We still had to contend with
plenty of Zombies but we had reason to believe they were slowly starting to die out. A few of the homes we’d been in looking for supplies lately we’d found Zombies lying around the homes dead. A few other houses, we’d had the normal sphincter clinching terror of having them smash their faces into the window right in front of you while screaming their heads off. The fact that they could die while being in stasis was good news. If the ones just sitting around in houses started dying out then we should be good to go here in a couple of years. The ones who wandered around we inevitably found and killed anyway. Or, even better, they managed to get themselves killed by jumping into deep water or running off a cliff or one of the hundred other ways the Zombies managed to kill themselves.

  There were still plenty of live ones though and since we were trying to stay in one place for a while we couldn’t just blast away at the ones we found wandering around. We’d gone and spent some time breaking into a National Guard armory. They really sent the Seals to some good schools as they had all kinds of useful breaking and entering type knowledge. Thanks to those raids we were armed with mortars and RPGs and crate after crate of ammo for every gun imaginable. We collected so much ammo that it ended up having its own couple of houses in our neighborhood.

  We’d figured out a pretty decent trick for getting rid of a large number of Zombies in an area without a lot of work. We went into places like Seattle and Olympia at night and got ourselves setup on top of tall buildings. Not too tall since we discovered going up twenty flights of stairs was a horrible idea. We only needed to be about ten flights up to be able to talk and do whatever we wanted without being too worried about ending up surrounded by Zombies. Once we got setup we’d wait for daybreak then drop some mortars on the shoals and islands out in the bay. The Zombies would lemming themselves into the water by the hundreds and drown.

  We spent a few weeks doing that and it made a big impact on the number of Zombies we had to deal with more intimately. Closer to camp we could always use hand weapons or even just a small caliber rifle like a .22 to put them on the ground and then finish them off. If we did get swarmed for some reason we had a couple of buildings selected for everyone to get into which were fully stocked with weapons and food. We had multiple watch stations setup in a perimeter around us so they’d just make some noise to get the Zombies to leave. In addition to mortars, we also had fireworks and other noise makers we used. It all worked out really well.

  We’d already added another twenty people into our group. Reeves, Wilson, and Walker were all well on their way to being shacked up as well. I served as the mayor of everyone. Wilson was in charge of the militia and security. Ann was the vice mayor or whatever the title would be for that role. She made sure stuff got done. Ginny did our strategic plan and worried a lot about everything. There was no formal voting or any of that. We all just fell into the roles naturally and as new people came onboard they were told who did what and they agreed to take orders in times of crisis and otherwise we argued about everything like normal.

  Haven’t seen any Koreans so we’re thinking they got the message.

  Epilogue 2:

  I don’t know if there is a limit on the number of epilogues you can have but I plan to push that boundary. I just finished reading everything we went through again. As I read it memories popped back up that I’d thought were long gone.

  Playing battleship with Thomas.

  Shooting lessons with Reeves. Watching Ginny out shoot him after each lesson.

  First kiss with Ann.

  A couple of big things have happened since my last entry in here a year ago. Ann is pregnant! Don’t worry, we did make Wilson marry us in the end so the baby will be legit. We actually ended up with a couple of preachers joining up with us but we both wanted it to be Wilson who did it. We’d let him use the preachers when him and Brittany finally decided to tie the knot.

  We were married in a green field on top of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The waves crashed below and the field was sprinkled with some kind of purple flower. A good thing about the end of the world was you didn’t have to worry about racking up credit card debt on a wedding. We just went to where we wanted with the clothes and food and wine we had stolen. Afterwards, Reeves and Ginny helped us clear out a gorgeous cottage overlooking the ocean for us to spend our honeymoon in.

  It was absolutely the complete highlight of my life. Apocalypse or not, I was happy. Reeves and Ginny like to tell everyone that I cried at the wedding. Out loud I say that is because it made me so sad. We all know the truth though. It took me a walk-through hell to get there but I ended up with the hand of a woman beyond my wildest dreams and married her surrounded by friends who had become family. Even a Zombie Apocalypse can have a silver lining.

  Authors Note

  I hope you enjoyed reading these books. I guess you did if you’ve made it to this section. As always, if you enjoyed them please take the time to leave a review. There are a lot of Zombie books out there. I like to think this is more than just a standard Zombie series. I lived the story as I wrote it. I closed my eyes and I was on the boat with the crew when they were drifting towards the wall of washed up dead in Jacksonville. The briars ripped at me as Frank gunned his Harley trying to lead his gang out of the troubles in the Keys. I watched from on high as Ann and Steve were married in that field overlooking the ocean.

  I feel like it ended when it should have. I never plotted out the story or made an outline or any of that. I wrote it as it occurred to me. As the movie played in my head. Having reached the end of the movie now it’s with excitement and a bit of trepidation that I go in for the final edits and the photoshoot with ‘Ann’ for the cover. Who knows, enough positive reviews I may have to write an encore to tell about how they all settled in and fought for their new homes and what it is like raising a baby post apocalypse. I’m going to miss this series but am looking forward to working on the next adventure. I have some ideas what it may be about.

  You see. When I was a kid I really loved to read. Part of that may have been due to living in lighthouses up in New England. Not exactly the typical home of a young boy but I’m going to say it was one of the coolest. Especially since it was haunted. From that nucleus, I hope to take my experiences and what I heard from others and work them into a story about a young boy dealing with ghosts while simultaneously finding out he has some sort of powers. Sound interesting? Follow me on Amazon and you’ll see any new books as they are released.

  My wife has also challenged me to write a love story. So, we’ll have to see how it all plays out.

  Thank you ever so much for sticking with me this far and I hope to see you again soon for another dash though the surreal.