Zournal (Book 2): Cruising The 'Poc

by R. S. Merritt

  I heard shots coming from somewhere else and figured Ginny must have found a positon somewhere to. I could not make out where she was at but didn’t really care as I heard more and more Zombies moving our way. I hauled ass towards the rounds coming from my guardian angels, who were busy wreaking havoc on the rampaging horde chasing us, intent on catching me and Reeves for some serious mauling and partial consumption.

  I did not slow down when I hit the tree line. I continued pumping my legs, crashing Reeves and myself through the high undergrowth at the edge and feeling the briars ripping at my skin. I kept going. I was having trouble sucking in enough air to stay caught up with my need for it. My heart was pounding. I was seeing black. I felt my body wanting to give out and fall to the ground. I kept running. If it had just been me I might have let myself fall to the ground but I was carrying a friend and I refused to put him down.

  Reeves yelled at me to put him down. Thank God.

  I stopped and fell to the ground. He bent down, picked me up, and started running, our positions reversed. I looked around and saw that Ann had joined us. Chrissie and Thomas were running along beside her. I could still hear gun shots in the distance. Once I had rested for a couple of minutes I told Reeves to put me down and I started jogging along with the group. I took a mental count.

  “Where’s Ginny?” I asked.

  Ann looked over. We had slowed down to a quick walk. We kept glancing back over our shoulders but so far did not see any Zombies approaching. “Ginny told me to go cover you guys, she was going to run the other way and fire some shots in the air then circle back around and join us at the clearing we camped out at last night if she doesn’t find us sooner.”

  Reeves and I both stopped. Reeves, looking pissed off, spoke first, “And you let her do that?”

  Ann gave the attitude right back to him, “I didn’t ‘let’ her do anything. She said she was doing it and then she did it. If you hadn’t lost your cool and had to decapitate that moron with an automatic weapon we wouldn’t be in this situation, now would we? Did you happen to notice the guy was already dead? You somehow think blowing his head off made a difference?”

  Reeves face turned red and he looked like he was fixing to go off on Ann. I stepped forward to keep everything under control. Then Reeves visually deflated. He looked at Ann and the rest of us as he spoke, “You’re right Ann, I’m sorry. I can’t stand that those kids died. I wish I’d found John still alive so I could have killed him slowly over and over again. I can’t scrape out the site of Carly’s arm with the Minnie Mouse watch. I’m having a hard time processing all this shit. I have no idea how you guys are still moving. I just want to lay down and go to sleep for a year or two. Nothing can happen to Ginny, or any of the rest of you. I can’t take it if something does.”

  “Hey, man.” I slapped Reeves on the back to get his attention. “Nothing to be sorry for. We can only keep moving forward and grinding it out. That’s what most of life is. Now, even more so than before all this happened. Let’s just get to the rendezvous point without being attacked by Zombies or alligators or anything else in this nastiness.”

  Reeves nodded. He gave me the manly back slapping half hug thing that guys do. Then he set out in the direction we needed to go. I felt bad about making him lead but none of the rest of us had the slightest clue where we were.

  “Romantic walk through the Florida ecosystem?” I had spotted some yellow flowers and handed a bunch of them to Ann as I asked her and reached out for her hand.

  “Cheap skate.” She said, but she was smiling, more importantly, she didn’t let go of my hand. Check me out. Apocalyptic Pimp!

  Entry 7: Rendezvous

  Ginny did not show up. We had finally found the clearing right as the sun was going down. Reeves acted like he was Daniel Boone or something but I’m thinking he just got lucky. We had seen a few Zombies in the woods on the way back to the clearing. One was an old man in a nasty looking hospital gown. He had come out from behind a tree and stumbled right into Ann. Ann had pushed him off her and I had charged him with my sword. I hit him in the neck and he had fallen to the ground where Ann had finished the job with a few whacks to the head from her trusty baseball bat.

  Most of the rest of them had been more routine. Reeves spotted a Zombie shuffling around aimlessly or contemplating the bark on a tree and clicked his Walkie for us to stop. Then two more clicks for when he wanted us to join him, either to help take out the Zombie or because he had already taken it out and it was time to keep going. I was worried Reeves would get sloppy since he was worried about Ginny. I was worried about Ginny to and knew I was probably pushing us a little faster than we needed to be with zombies all over the place. We did not stop for breaks.

  We pressed onwards, all of us hoping at any second to hear Ginny come over the radio or see her step out from behind a tree. When we got to the clearing she was not there. We had poked around looking to see if maybe she had been there and left us a sign. She had run the opposite way to lure the Zombies away but she had a real affinity for moving through the woods. I joked with her that she had deer blood in her veins. Anyway, we had settled in to wait for her, no one talking since there were Zombies all over the place now and we did not want to lure them any closer to us.

  Ann and I settled down next to a large tree with Spanish moss hanging off of it. Thomas, Reeves and Chrissie were all murmuring and looking up into the trees.

  Ann put her head next to mine and whispered in my ear, “Why are they looking in the trees?”

  “I have no idea. Trying to find oranges?” I drug my aching body back to my feet and went over to where Reeves and crew were now all standing around the base of a large tree staring up at it.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered to him.

  Reeves took his attention off the tree long enough to whisper back, “I was thinking with all the Zombies wandering everywhere it may be safer to sleep in the trees if we are going to be sleeping out in the open. I don’t think they are coordinated enough to climb a tree since they didn’t try to come up the billboard ladder after me. Only problem is that it looks like trees would suck to sleep in. We need to find a military surplus store at some point and stock up on better equipment. If we had jungle hammocks we could tie them off in the trees and sleep in style.”

  I was glad Reeves seemed to be distracted from the twins having died and Ginny going MIA. I was getting a little worried about his mental state to be honest. Chrissie was slowly recovering but Reeves seemed to be slowly losing his grasp, it was scary. Reeves was my primary backup and our resident military guy. Other than Ginny, the rest of us knew very little about military style actions and moving around in the woods. Ann had a lot of tactical knowledge from being in Law Enforcement but it did not translate as readily as military experience did into our current situation.

  “I really miss Google and MapQuest. We can look for a surplus store as we’re moving around though. All we really need are some maps and a phone book. Assuming they still make phone books?” I paused to think of the last time I had used a phone book. It had been at a pay phone. “Crap, only place I can think of to find the yellow pages would be at a pay phone.”

  Thomas looked away from the tree at me and asked, “What’s a pay phone?”

  Reeves started in, “Back in the olden days when men were men and rode dinosaurs to work we had these things on paper called ‘books’. One of these books was full of everyone’s names and phone numbers and you could look up whatever you needed in them. This was back when an ‘app’ was what you ordered before your entrée.”

  We heard a moan off in the woods. Crap, we were being too loud.

  “Do you think we can all get up in these trees for the day and try to sleep up there without falling out?”

  “Really only one way to find out.” Ann had wandered over and added her input to the conversation.

  Have you ever tried to sleep in a tree? I assume most people haven’t cause honestly it’s a pretty stupid idea. Turns out all the
trees with branches big enough to even possibly accommodate anybody didn’t have any branches close to the ground. Thomas, who had a broken arm, came up with the idea to build a ladder by lashing sticks together. Except we didn’t see any good fallen branches or sticks to use, had nothing to lash them together with except out shoe strings, and none of us had ever done it before so figured it would probably take a while.

  We settled for letting Ann, Chrissie, and Thomas stand on our shoulders to try to get up into the tree branches. Then we had to deal with the fact that Thomas had a broken arm and couldn’t climb so that made it more fun. We had to find a tree big enough for Ann to find a big limb low enough to reach down and pull Thomas up into the tree while Reeves and I held him up by his feet and stood on our tip toes and listened for the sounds of Zombies running through the woods to tackle us.

  We must have been making a decent amount of noise trying to accomplish all this as a Zombie did come out of the woods right as Ann had finally tugged Thomas up onto the branch beside her. The small Zombie, looked like a teen girl, wearing an oversized T-shirt with a picture of Garfield on it and coated now in blood and mud and leaves, missing one ear and a bunch of hair on the right side of her head charged at us, screaming.

  Reeves reached for his bat and I grabbed my sword and we both moved in to fight and try to shut her up before she attracted more Zombies. Hearing echoing screams in the woods we decided we were screwed on the not attracting more Zombies idea. Reeves swung his bat and a minute later me and him were searching for a tree we could get up into and still see the others. There were screams coming from all around us now so we knew we did not have long to make it happen.

  We picked a tree, I put my hands together like a step and hoisted Reeves up. He sacrificed his flesh to crawl up the tree as fast as he could. Looking like a camouflaged Spider Man he went up it so fast. I tried to do the same but kept slipping back down the trunk of the tree. Reeves jumped out of the tree and put his hands together to boost me up.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you suck at climbing trees?” Reeves asked.

  Ignoring him, I went ahead and scrambled to the closest branch and tried to get out of his way. Reeves hit the trunk and just came straight up. We both move up a couple more branches then went still as first one Zombie then two more came running through the clearing, obviously looking for the source of the sounds they had heard. We wanted to try and move up more but were too afraid we might make a noise, or in my case fall out of the tree, so we stayed still and prayed.

  The Zombies kept moving through. They were coming from different directions so they must have permeated the woods pretty well between following us and the distraction Ginny had made. We all held our breaths, none of us moved, which sucked because I had managed to sit on a broken branch or tree knob or something and it was really working its way into my ass cheek. In a very painful manner, luckily, that entire leg was lowly falling asleep from lack of circulation so that helped with the pain. Of course, if I sat there much longer with my legs going numb there was a pretty good chance I’d fall out of the tree.

  All of our stuff was still on the ground. No one had any water or food other than whatever they had shoved in their pockets. I had some smooshed to hell raisin crème pies in my cargo shorts but they would make way too much noise to take out of my pocket, remove the crinkly plastic covers, and actually eat. We sat there. Miserable. Waiting for the Zombie parade to end or for the radio to click so we knew Ginny was close by. Hopefully, she didn’t say anything on the radio since that would cause the Zombies to look up, so that was one more thing to stress about.

  We sat in the trees all damn day. The Zombie parade did not slow down until dusk when they all started looking for places to get some Zombie Zzzzzzs. There was no sign of Ginny. I had been thinking through the day that she probably had moved on to our other designated rendezvous since these woods were lousy with Zombies now. All we had to do was quietly climb out of the trees and head towards the I-4 overpass with the I-95 on-ramp. Hopefully, Reeves could find that in the dark and we wouldn’t trip over any Zombies and we could gather all our crap quietly in total darkness before heading out.

  None of the things I hoped for ended up happening. We all pretty much fell out of the trees come nightfall. All of our various body parts having gone numb from trying to sit in trees for hours without making any noise. The noise we made coming down more than made up for the silence we had created over the daylight hours. I swung myself out to climb down the tree and could seriously not feel my left leg from the ass cheek down. For some reason, I still let myself dangle from the limb and drop to the ground. I’m not sure what I thought would happen but it did not really occur to me to question the process until I was about halfway to the ground. Not possessing magical or superpowers I was not able to stop myself before slamming into the ground.

  My leg went out a funny angle I assume would hurt if I ever recovered any feeling in it. I heard Reeves scrambling down the tree which was good since I was currently laid out on the ground and I heard the sounds of something coming to investigate the noise. It turned out to be a large boned (fat) Zombie we had seen shuffling around right before dark. He must not have gotten very far as he was back on us pretty quickly. If Reeves had not been there I would have been in trouble since I was laying on the ground with no weapons and no feeling in my leg. As it was, Reeves got on the ground, ran over to grab his baseball bat, sprinted back over and beat the Zombies head in when it was only about four feet from me and looked like it was trying to figure out if I counted as food or not.

  Reeves made enough noise with the head bashing that we heard more rustling coming from all around us. He rushed over and helped Ann, Thomas, and Chrissie out of their trees and they started gathering up their gear. I drug myself up to an awkward sitting positon and started rubbing the hell out of my leg. Pretty soon I felt pins and prickles in my leg which made me extremely happy as I had been wondering if my leg was a lost cause. I tried standing up on it and immediately fell on my face. Ouch.

  Meanwhile, the others had grabbed all their stuff and came over to help me. Reeves and Ann each got on one side of me and with their help I was able to stand up and hop-walk in the direction Reeves thought was correct. We started moving forward and almost immediately came face to face with a middle-aged woman covered in blue veins, dirt, and mud who opened her mouth to scream while reaching out for us.

  Reeves and Ann both let go of me. My leg seemed like it was going to hold me up for a second then gave out on me. I fell to the left and tripped up Reeves who had been moving in with his bat. I bounced off him and landed with an outstretched hand on the Zombies foot. I don’t know if she was ticklish or had some kind of foot fetish or what but my hand on her foot shut her up for a critical second as she looked down to see who the hell had just grabbed her foot. In that second Ann, had moved in and I heard her bat make a ‘ka-ching’ noise as she bounced it off the front of the Zombies skull. The Zombie stumbled and Ann hit her again. The Zombie fell on top of me. Reeves and Ann began banging away on the Zombies head which was resting on my ass. I pulled myself forward as fast as I could until the body fell off me.

  I was very unhappy with my poor excuse for a circulatory system. Once Ann had verified I was OK she seemed to think the whole thing was pretty funny. Reeves just told me to stop falling all over the place. They both picked me up and we began moving again. It had gotten dark pretty quickly. We could hear some shuffling around us but nothing seemed obviously aggressive at the moment so we just kept going.

  We’d been walking about an hour or two and had not heard anything moving around us for the last hour or so. My leg was finally fully functional again. I felt like I was covered in spider webs and my ass was wet from the blood and brains that Reeves and Ann had gotten all over me treating the Zombies head like a piñata when it was on my ass. We needed fresh clothes, supplies, water and food. We needed to get to the Rendezvous point and meet up with Ginny. I refused to let myself think she may not be the
re already. It was dark, we set down to rest.

  Reeves sat down beside me.

  “Yo Reeves, how much further to I-4?” I asked our only military trained, gifted in the woods, navigator.

  “No clue dude. I’ve been completely lost since we left those trees. I was hoping you might have a clue. It was a very small sliver of hope which you have now destroyed.”

  We both sat there in silence. Ann lay her head against my shoulder on the other side and asked what the plan was. I thought about it for a few minutes.

  “Reeves, do we wait for daylight then start moving again? You think you can figure out which way to go once we can see?”

  Reeves nodded, “Being able to see definitely should help.”

  We were all physically exhausted from siting in trees all day followed by the terrifying walk through the woods in utter darkness so sleep hit quick. I don’t think we even set a guard. The next thing I knew Reeves was poking me in the shoulder to let me know it was time to wake up. The sun looked like it had been up for a while. I had Ann drool all over my shoulder, which I made sure to show her when I woke her up. I thought she’d be embarrassed about drooling all over me but she just pointed at my nose, which was very runny due to allergies, and I realized I was way grosser than her. Whatever.