Feeling Lucky?

by R. S. Merritt

  “I think we got two more full ones after this boss. The rest I just tied back on as we used them. Some may have a few drops in them but only the two at the bottom over here are actually still full plus this one I just emptied out.”

  I considered that. Doing some quick math in my head. “So, we’ve got an effective range of about thirteen hundred miles. Probably less considering the terrain and the need to drive like idiots every once in a while. We probably need more diesel. Of course, out here in the middle of nowhere we’ll be lucky to find water.”

  “We’re also running low on ammo and unless we find some food soon we’ll be eating nothing but Fig Newtons for the next thirteen hundred miles.” Ginny chimed in with a grin. She was the only one of us who could still stand the sight of a fig newton. I’m still not sure exactly why we’d loaded the huge box of them into the Hummer. It had seemed like a great idea at the time. A lot more fun than going back in the big dark scary warehouse store we’d just heard noises coming from. Fig Newtons it was.

  We were running low on everything, including hope. We’d barely just survived an encounter with a small force of Koreans and then almost gotten killed by a bunch of Zombies in the middle of nowhere. Exactly what were we going to do when confronted with a base full of Koreans? Plink away at them with the buckets of loose .22 rounds we had in the floor of the backseats? Maybe shoot the machine gun randomly at their base for the length of a commercial before we ran out of ammo and they came out and killed us? I was keeping these thoughts to myself so as not to completely kill morale. I was also pretty sure Ann would get pissed and try to leave on her own, Reeves would drink more, and Ginny would look at me like I was an idiot for saying stupid crap out loud. The only one I could really talk to at this point was Daisy. The worse she would do would be pee on my foot with excitement while getting her head rubbed and trying to lick me to death.

  Unfortunately, Daisy liked everyone else better than me since she spent more time in the backseat with them and they were all nicer to her than I was. I felt like we were once again at a crossroads. We needed to decide on what we were doing and start moving forward with it. I figured at some point some Koreans were going to show up if we stayed in our current positon too long. We needed to head deeper into the mountains where we were likely to run out of supplies and die in a blizzard. Or, we may get lucky and run into the Koreans for a much quicker and cleaner death. I kind of wanted to vote for giving up and heading south to try and find a nice condo by the beach and spend our last days surfing and drinking tequila.

  It was not to be though. Reeves finished dumping diesel in the tank and hopped in the backseat to start loading clips with loose ammo while surreptitiously drinking out of his not so subtle ‘water bottle’. Everyone else started climbing in as well. Ann came over and gave me a kiss and asked what was on my mind. I have a feeling I’ll look back at that moment and wished I’d asked her if she was down with the Mexican beach vacation plan. Instead, I told her nothing, kissed her back and helped her into the passenger seat. I sighed and walked around to get in the driver’s side and continue our suicide run.

  Entry 7: Shut Up and Drive

  We drove in silence into the mountains. Reeves had the map out and was working with the rest of us to try and figure out which road we were on and which way we were going. We all stared out into the dusk looking for street signs on the crossroads that would help us figure out where we were and which way to keep moving. Reeves finally broke the silence.

  “Once we figure out where we are then what’s the plan for where we are going? No offense to anybody and I want to kill the bastards too but driving straight into a hail of gunfire from a million pissed off Asians isn’t my idea of the best way to go out. What’s the plan? How are we going to hurt them?”

  Bless Reeves. The alcohol and complete disregard for what other people thought of him were helping him put the thoughts out there I was too timid to bring up. I was just glad someone was bringing it up. Someone who wasn’t me. We’d had this conversation before many times but it had seemed less real when we still had a few states between us and the bad guys with all of the guns. Pretty easy to talk about dynamite and force multipliers and ambushes when you were sitting around a fire eating pop tarts a million miles from the enemy. It was a lot different now that we were close. Now that we had encountered them and limped our hurt and broken asses away to hide in the middle of nowhere.

  Ann and Ginny were both obviously working on a response. I was busy staring at the road as I lost myself in trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. Reeves was waiting for a response and helping himself to some more ‘water’. I may need to borrow his water bottle if this got much more stressful.

  Ann started to cry. Ginny reached up and wrapped her arms around her from the backseat. I put my hand over the hump in the middle of the front seat and up against Ann’s shoulder where I awkwardly moved my hand up and down to rub her shoulder. Reeves wisely refrained from saying anything else. He started to take another swig of water from his special bottle but a look from Ginny stopped him and he sullenly turned and stared out the window at the terrain passing by. It’s a lesson everyone who drinks should learn and live by. When someone who cares about you says you are drunk you probably are. If it makes you want to argue with them about it, then you definitely are. The best course of action at that point is to hand them your car keys, thank them for pointing out whatever action you had been taking that was unacceptable and find a bottle of actual water.

  Ann looked over at me. “Well, Steve, you got anything to say? Do you agree with Reeves?”

  What the hell. I was going to piss in Reeves water bottle next chance I got. Now I had been drug into his mess. There was nothing I could say that wasn’t either an outright lie or would keep this from blowing up in my face. It didn’t seem like I had the option to remain silent anymore either. I would have loved that option. I squeezed Ann’s shoulder to buy myself some time and decided to just move straight into the planning phase.

  “Ok. I think we all agree the idea here is to put a hurt on the Koreans. We did a pretty good job back in Colorado Springs messing up that air base they were living on. Less than ten of us and we probably killed at least a hundred of them assuming the Zombies got in there and did the damage we think they did. We need to figure out something like that to roll with again, but even bigger. We also had a lot of help on that one. Gunny had been out to that base before and he went with us on the raid. We knew where they were and what their armament looked like. We had the advantage of time to put together a plan that was wrapped around a lot of solid intel.”

  Everyone was looking at me now. I even had Reeves attention. Great, I’d just done a wonderful job of setting up that we were completely screwed on moving forward now. Or, maybe just that we had a lot of work to do in order to carry off another effective assault. I decided to explore that avenue of thought.

  “If we’re going to be successful again then we need to lay the foundation for that success.” I felt like Tony Robbins with that line. “Anyway, we need to do a ton of recon and figure out where the enemy is, how many of them there really are, what kind of supplies and weapons do they have, and then figure out a way we can hurt them without getting ourselves killed in the process. Ideas on that?”

  Reeves must have been getting into the planning phase as he came out of his funk and leaned forward and started throwing ideas out.

  “Depending on where they are and how many of them there are we may be able to do things like blow up dams to flood them out, or blow up the buildings they are living in. We can try that trick with the Zombies again if we see an opportunity there. As far as where they are, I’d assume they have a decent sized outpost near each of the major cities. As far as how many, who knows on that one. Depends on how well they planned that out and what their plans were to get people here before we nuked them into a radioactive slab of nothing. Weapons wise, I’d assume they have all of the standard conventional weapons at their disposal. Air power an
d tank power being limited by how many people they have who can fly and drive them versus how many the USA has sitting around on bases.”

  All of that made sense. The main problem as I saw it is we just didn’t know where to go from here. We didn’t know where they were. If we did happen to find them I had no confidence in our ability to actually hurt them. I did know if we hung out in this area much longer a Korean patrol of some sort would find us. The helicopter would have reported our last known position and heading. A scout troop of some sort would have been sent out to see who we were and take care of us. That line of thought gave me my first real idea.

  “Hey guys. A lightbulb just went off.” I kept talking fast before the inevitable jokes about the dimness of the light would start bubbling up. “That helicopter followed us a good way into the desert. We shot up the Korean Hummer out on the highway pretty good. I’m thinking they will probably send someone out to try and attack us. I’d assume they’ll be here pretty soon. So. What if we park the Hummer beside a house and do a half ass job of hiding it so it looks hidden but the people they send to look for us can still find it. Then we hide out across the street in a different house or barn or wherever with a nice clear line of sight. Maybe we even go with two man teams so we can hit them from multiple angles. Pull the big gun off the Hummer and set that up as a nest to boost our firepower.”

  The three of them all looked at me and nodded.

  Ginny spoke up first, “That plan doesn’t totally suck. As long as they show up during the day and they fall for the Hummer trick and they get out of their vehicles to go in the house where we can conveniently shoot them. Also, as long as they don’t show up with a small army. We’re assuming quite a few things here. The obvious one is that they sent anyone at all out to look for us. They may be resource strapped and we’re considered a low priority.”

  “I think the boss here may be on to something. It’s not like we have a better plan anyway. I think it’s worth a shot. Hopefully, we can take one or two of them alive and hope they speak English. Then you guys can leave me alone with them for an hour or so and then we’ll hopefully have the intel we need for our next steps. If nobody shows up to try and find us then we can just count this as a nice long break.”

  I hadn’t even thought of the intel gathering idea. That made my plan look even better. Ann looked like she was going to say something and then she stopped and visibly choked down the thought. My guess is she wasn’t cool with the idea of torturing the Koreans to give us info. I assumed she had followed that thought logically through which is why she didn’t say anything. Whether we tortured them or not all the Koreans we were able to ambush were going to end up dead. I think she had been going to argue against torture as a knee jerk reaction based on how she felt about things in her former life. In this new normal, it was going to be just another day.

  “Anybody got anything else?” I asked. No one answered so I suggested we start looking for a good place to stage the ambush and settle in for what could be a long wait. Assuming anything happened at all.

  Entry 8: Fish in a Barrel

  We didn’t end up having a long wait. We could have actually used some more time to get settled in. We had chosen a large home at the end of a dirt road. We’d left obvious tracks turning off the road and going to the house. Then we had parked the Hummer around back and balanced a torn apart old trampoline on top of it to make it look like we were hiding it from helicopters. We even set the Zombies who attacked us in the yard while we were busy staging everything around the table inside the house to make it look like we were in there enjoying our Sunday meal. That was pretty surreal.

  The property had an old shed which Ginny had setup a sniper hide on top of. Reeves was in position under her in the barn with the machine gun. He only had enough rounds left for a couple of bursts before he was going to switch to his rifle to fight. We were hoping a few bursts would be enough. We didn’t want to kill them if we could help it since we needed someone alive to give us information. We needed someone alive on their side who spoke English. I’d been pretty worried about that until Reeves had reminded us the rest of the world was not as backasswards as we were from a cultural perspective.

  “Hey boss. What do you call someone who can speak three languages?”

  “Trilingual.”

  “Two languages?”

  “Easy. Bilingual.”

  “One language?”

  “Unilingual? Monolingual?” I’d asked.

  “Nope. American.”

  Reeves had laughed at his own joke. The rest of us had courtesy laughed. It did remind us that the rest of the world the people did learn multiple languages to get around and English was one of the more popular ones. Ann pointed out that Korea was a backwards country with a tyrannical dictator who didn’t like his people to be very knowledgeable. If they were going to take over a country though there should be people among them who spoke the language so they could get info out of torturing us as well.

  It was just starting to get dark when we saw two Hummers turn down the road towards us. Ann and I were perched in trees about fifty yards from the house. Close enough to be effective at shooting but far enough away that they would not be able to easily find us once the shooting started. We had radios but were afraid to use them out of fear of giving ourselves away. Not sure if the Koreans had broken the encryption on the Toys R Us Walkie Talkies we had but didn’t want to risk it either. They were the GI Joe model so I was hoping that would help. We were all waiting on Ginny to take the first shot. As soon as she shot the rest of us were going to join in. We had a different angle on the house than Ginny and Reeves did without being in their line of fire.

  Daisy was muzzled and tied up in the woods about a half mile from where we were. We all loved the dog and hated leaving her like that but one bark at the wrong time could really screw up the ambush idea. We used really thin rope so if we didn’t make it back for her she should be able to chew her way through it. We knew from experience she could get the muzzle off in about an hour by rubbing it on the ground. Hopefully, we’d make it back for her, but if we didn’t at least she’d still have a chance.

  The Hummers drove slowly up to the house. They had their high beams on and were taking their time to look around as they pulled in. When they got at an angle where they were going to absolutely see the Hummer we had fake-hid under the trampoline the lead car came to a halt. Both Hummers sat in idle while men got into position on the turrets. The back doors opened and two guys got out of each Hummer and started circling towards the front of the house. The Hummers themselves started backing off and moving where they could cover the front or the rear of the house. They were all starting to get a little too spread out for my liking. I had pictured all of them getting out and standing in a nice tight group where we could shoot them all in the feet and then walk over and start the torture.

  I was contemplating all this as a shot rang out. The guy in the turret in the rear vehicle slumped forward as his brains were blown out the back of his head. Ginny was a sniper caliber shot and the distance here was very minimal. I started to pull my trigger and almost fell out of the tree when I heard barking at the base. Damn dog had already made it back.

  Ignoring the barking I started putting rounds down range. I was trying to hit the lead turret driver. I heard Reeves crank up the machine gun. He would be going for the four guys who were trying to sneakily approach the house the blue cadavers were enjoying an eternal meal in. Those four guys were not hanging out waiting to be shot. Two of them hit the dirt and started returning fire and the other two ran in different directions. I saw dirt and leaves flying in the air as the machine gun bullets started tearing through the area the two had hit the dirt in.

  The machine gun on the lead Hummer had started rolling and the guy was dialing in on where Reeves and Ginny were in hiding. I got my crosshairs on the gunner at the same time as either Ginny or Ann found the target as all I had time to do was stare as the guy’s head literally disintegrated from the hig
h velocity rounds slamming into it. I started looking for another target and saw that Ann must have taken out one of the runners as well since he was laid out in the weeds.

  Ann was running straight at the Hummer that was parked on the side of the house. The driver sitting in it looking around trying to figure out what to do next. I wasn’t really sure what her plan was. I heard single shots coming from the direction of Reeves and the guys he was in the midst of a firefight with. Ann sprinted towards the oblivious driver. I saw now that Daisy was loping right behind her. Muzzle gone and about a foot of the leash still dangling from her neck. A big dog grin on her face.

  Ann got to the Hummer. She grabbed the door handle and opened the door, reached in, grabbed the driver, pulled him out and then shot him in the leg and started taking his crap before securing him with some zip ties. I decided to stop being a peeping tom in this fight and try to see if I could copy what Ann had just pulled off. I lowered myself out of the tree and began moving towards the other Hummer. The problem being the other Hummer was much more in plain sight of the guys that Ginny and Reeves were busy trading fire with. Random bullets had already whizzed by me and as far as I knew no one was even trying to shoot at me yet.