Zournal (Book 1): It All Started

by Randall S. Merritt

“Grab those chairs, let’s barricade this door as good as we can. Anybody see other stuff we can throw in front of the door here?”

  Everyone started searching around for objects to place against the door. I figured at most it would buy us a few seconds once the Zombies broke the door down but seconds were better than nothing. I moved to stand in front of the door with my pistol in one hand and sword in the other. Reeves came over and stood easily beside me and Ann got on the other side of me. I looked around for Ginny as well hoping she had made it into the room for our final stand. Or, even better maybe she had figured out not to run into the dead-end room and was hiding somewhere out in the warehouse where she may have a chance to escape.

  I spotted Ginny standing over by the two deep sinks staring up at the ceiling. She saw me looking at her and waved me over. I ran over to where she was and looked at the little access hatch in the ceiling above the sink. I went and grabbed a chair and pushed it over and Reeves came over and helped her climb onto my shoulders on top of the chair where she was able to knock the access hatch out of the way and pull herself up into the space above it.

  “Is there room up there?” I asked Ginny.

  “I don’t know, it’s mostly pipes and conduit and stuff up here. I don’t see a way out or anything but there could be. Hand me the kids.”

  I ran over and we got the kids boosted up high enough for Ginny to grab them and drag them up there with her. I grabbed Brenda and we sent her up next then we started boosting people as quickly as we could. We had about six people total up in the little space when the door to the shower room gave out. The Zombies were struggling to get over the furniture we had put in front of the doors. Ann started to raise her shotgun.

  I put my hand on the barrel, “Let’s save our bullets for now.”

  Reeves and I move forward and began systematically beating the Zombies to death as they tried to get over the furniture. They were pushing the chairs further back into the room as they pressed forward to try and get to us. As they stepped in either Reeves or I would step up to them and hit them as hard as we could in the head with either his bat or my sword. There was brain gunk and pieces of skull and blood and all kinds of grossness all over the chairs and running off the bat and the sword. My arms were killing me. I stepped back and decided it was probably time for bullets.

  There was nothing to shoot at. Reeves had beaten one last Zombies head to pull and when it stopped flopping around no more moved in to take its place. I grabbed a chair and used it to push a couple of the corpses out of the way so I could get to he doorframe. There was a ton of yelling and screaming going on but it looked like the only group who had made it over to our area were the ten we had managed to beat down in the doorframe.

  That didn’t mean there weren’t a hundred standing around the corner where I could not see them but this may be our only chance. I thought about hiding in the fake ceiling until the Zombies all settled down and trying to sneak out but the problem would be it wasn’t just me anymore. Trying to sneak past a densely packed large group of Zombies with a bunch of people and kids in tow would turn into a deadly fiasco in the blink of an eye. I couldn’t even really count on them to be able to stay quiet up in the crawl space so that the Zombies would calm down around us.

  The Zombies were really beating on the back doors now. My radio went off.

  “Boss, it’s Barry, you guys Ok?”

  I’d totally forgotten about Barry. “Hey Barry. We’re in a rough spot out here and need to make a call on which way to run real fast. Can you tell me what it is like out there in the warehouse?”

  “Sure boss, it’s quieted down on the side I am on. The side away from the deli. I think a bunch of them are over there eating rotten meat or something. I was actually thinking of making a run for it. I just have no clue how many are still outside in the parking lot. There’s a lot of them in here though.”

  If we went right that was the way Hank and Clint had gone and was the direction of the deli. I hoped both Hank and Clint were ok but I was guessing they had gotten overrun by Zombies at the swinging doors that Hank had been so worried about. That direction wasn’t going to work for us. The loading dock was still obviously full of them as we could all hear them screaming and banging on the walls and doors back there trying to get in.

  I glanced down the hallway going left and disappearing into darkness. We could go that way and try one of the doors down there but they just let out into an alley that you couldn’t really escape from. Not to mention it sounded like the Zombies were beating on every door in the back. Left was an option just not one I felt great about.

  “Boss, they’re everywhere out here now. A bunch more just came in and I’m hearing more and more glass breaking. I’d suggest you try and make it out the back somewhere cause up here would pretty much be suicide. I’ll catch you guys later. Go with god, I’ll try and pull them this way to give you guys some extra time.”

  A few seconds later we heard the sounds of heavy TVs shattering on the floor outside in the warehouse followed by some gunshots and a huge swell of sound as the Zombies rushed the position, screaming. Barry had just sold his life to give us a chance.

  Left it was. I went back in the shower room.

  “Everybody, we have a chance right now I think to get the hell out of here. I don’t think we’ll get that chance again. It’s a risk but I think we have to do it, Reeves and Bruce, can you help get them down, Ann can you go stand guard outside. Ginny, come with me.”

  I walked past Ann who had stationed herself inside the door where she could peer out in both directions. I knew Ginny had been this way exploring already so I knew she’d be a good one to take with me to scout it out really quick. I looked over at her, she looked tired, her arms were scraped up, her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and was looking a little greasy. I had my sword in one hand and the flashlight in the other. I took off the red plastic and just started shining it down the way we were going. If something was creeping around there I wanted it to go ahead and see us so we’d know about it.

  Nothing attacked us and I figured it had been enough time for everyone to get out of the ceiling so we jogged back towards the group. I saw a Zombie running towards the open shower room door and then saw Reeves and Ann both step out and put it down with a one – two whack to the head. The body flopped around a bit and Ann was busy trying to clean off her arm with a packet of baby wipes she had pulled out from somewhere.

  I got in the room in time to watch Brenda drop herself out of the ceiling and get caught by Reeves. Might be my imagination but it looked like something may be going on there.

  “Ok.” I said, standing in the middle of the room and raising my voice a little bit to be heard. “We need to go now. We’re going out of this room and turning left and going that way parallel with the back of the building until we get to the last door out that we can find and then we’re going to open it up and see what happens. Any questions or better ideas?”

  I waited a few seconds and everyone just kept staring at me so I went on, “Ann and I will lead, Reeves and John, you guys bring up the back and act as rear guard. Thomas and Brenda, I want you in the middle with the kids. Everyone needs a weapon in their hand. You see a Zombie; you step up and hit it in the head as hard as you can and keep hitting it until it’s laying on the ground. Don’t miss. Let’s go.”

  I led the group out of the shower room. As soon as we were about halfway out of the room we heard screams and looked up to see a small group of Zombies coming straight at us. Ann and I joined Reeves and John to form a skirmish line backed by the rest of the team holding hammers, crowbars, and really long screwdrivers in some cases. I stepped forward and swung my sword at an older looking lady running in bare feet with a slip on that was covered in what looked and smelled like rancid meat. Her eyes were solid red and dripping some kind of yellowish pus. She went down hard when my sword dented in the side of her head with a cracking sound coming from her skull.

  I followed through on the swing, foc
using on the fact that she was down for the count, then stepped back and looked around with my sword up in a defensive position. I saw Ann jam her bat into a very fat Zombies face pushing him backwards while he tried to het his hands on her. I stepped in and swung at his head, feeling the skull crack open and the resistance finally cause me to stop the downward stroke as I struggled to pull the sword out of the guy’s brain where it had gotten stuck in his skull somehow. John stepped in and helped Ann finish off a small child Zombie that had come in quick and hard and tried to bite me while I was working on getting my sword out of the chubby corpses head.

  There did not seem to be any other imminent threats so, breathing hard, Ann and I took the lead and started jogging everyone towards the other end of the warehouse. We had our flashlights on with the red plastic covers again to try and keep the Zombies from chasing us if they saw light. I wasn’t entirely sure why red was better than regular light but it seemed to be the nighttime color of choice in the military movies and such so I went with it.

  Jogging forward, I almost got taken out by a quick moving Zombie who seemed to come out of nowhere. The only reason I didn’t get drug to the ground and bitten was because Thomas yelled for me to look out. The yell had me spinning around and bringing the sword up in a motion that happened to come around just right to whack the Zombie in the teeth and drive it backwards a step. I tried to take a step backwards to get my balance, when my momentum from the jogging caused me to start falling. One of the women in the line behind me, Glenda I think, swung her hammer like she was Thor, embedding the generic claw hammer in the head of the Zombie. The Zombie dropped like a rock and Glenda left the hammer right there, turned to the side and started puking. To her credit, when she was done puking she did walk over and pull the hammer out and was ready to keep moving.

  We kept going. Then we hit the wall. Looking around I saw that there was an external door we could open about ten feet back from the end of the wall. We could hear the beating on the garage door all the way down here and there was no way to tell if opening this door was going to drop us into the middle of a huge mob or if we’d be able to skirt the mob and get the hell out of there.

  I gathered everybody around. “Ok, I’m going to open this door real slow and we’re going to try and see if there is anything out there as I open it. Reeves will have his fingers shoved in it to help me pull it closed if it turns out there are Zombies on the other side who do not want us to close the door again. If there’s Zombies out there we can try and hide in here for 24 hours, then try it again when they have maybe calmed down or wandered away. Of course, they could have all wandered to this end of the store by then and we’d be screwed. Let’s all hope and pray that I’ll crack this door open and we’ll see a clear path to salvation. Once we open it, no lights, no talking, put your hand on the person in front of you and follow them lie we’re doing a conga line through a haunted house. One hand should be on the person in front of you, the other hand needs to be holding your weapon. Brenda, Thomas, Ginny, you guys are in charge of the kids. Make sure they stay safe and very quiet. Ann and I will lead and Reeves and John are rear guard again.”

  A scream drifted down from somewhere in the darkness about halfway between us and the shower room we had just vacated. Taking that as our cue I flipped off my flashlight, as did everyone else, and moved to put my hands on the emergency bar release part of the door. I slowly began to exert pressure on the door handle pushing on it slowly but steadily. Every tiny noise the door made sounded like a siren going off to me but I knew in the grand scheme of things the noises were probably not loud enough to even be heard. I continued slowly pushing the door outwards.

  When I finally opened the door enough to look out of, it was bit anticlimactic. There was a large dumpster separating us from where the bulk of the Zombies were all tying to bang their way into the back of the warehouse. Opening the door more fully I let my eyes adjust to the moonlit paved area behind the store. Sword leading once again I stepped down two stairs and into the loading dock area. Ann following behind me quickly with the rest of our Congo line following along. I turned to the right and started walking briskly in that direction. Hugging the wall and keeping in the shadows as much as possible. Directly in front of me a man in soiled red boxers with a massively stained white t-shirt that did little to cover his giant gelatinous belly stumbled in the opposite direction from us. Ann tapped me twice and I let her move ahead and take him out while I covered her.

  We walked around the man’s body and continued down the alley towards the end of the plaza. The moonlight was making this a lot less scary but at the same time I knew we’d be very visible if anything bothered to look. As we continued walking I started trying to read the names printed on the doors. I made out the one we were walking past now that we were almost at the end of the alley and I held up my hand for everyone to stop.

  ‘Guns and Ammo’ read the stenciled black letters. Have two other words ever looked sweeter when separate by an ampersand? I ran up the stairs to the door and gave the handle a pull. Maybe the owner was sick that day. Maybe he turned into a Zombie and wandered out into the alley. Maybe he was the large man in the stained white t-shirt that I had just seen Ann hit in the head until a big piece of brain slid out of this ear on a snooty looking slide of who knows what. Who cares, all I knew was the freakin door opened, depositing me on my ass with a bruise that I would definitely feel later. Trying to contain my elation I waved for everyone to follow me in.

  Ann and I went first, I let Ann lead as she actually knew what she was doing and I was just trying to channel what I had seen in various movies over the years. Movies like ‘Predator, and ‘Lethal Weapon: Part 3’, probably not stuff I wanted to trust too far. Ann cleared the store while I followed her and tried not to get in the way. Salivating the whole time at all of the beautiful guns. Not just guns though, combat boots, knives, ammo and even more guns!

  “John, can you and Glenda hang out near the back door and let us know if you see anything we need to worry about. We need to ransack this place and get on our way as fast as we can.”

  They moved to take their posts and I asked Thomas to please go cover the front of the store and see what he could see out the front windows and keep anybody from shining a light that could be seen outside. Then I dropped the Jansport and shoved the stuff Ann had put in the Jansport into an Alice pack I found on the back wall. I also grabbed a pair of combat boots that looked like they would fit and tried them on. They didn’t fit but the next pair I tried did. Around me everyone else was similarly gearing up.

  I looked around for Ann and Reeves, “Guys, any ideas on what we should be grabbing here? I’m thinking we need to standardize so we can just carry as much of one kind of ammo as possible instead of all of us having different stuff we carry.”

  Reeves looked up from where he was checking out a collection of knives. “Makes sense. There’s a ton of 9MM Ammo back there and looks like at least eight or nine guns that’ll take that ammo in the locked glass case. Bullets are just stacked on the shelf behind the counter but we’re going to need to make some noise to get the pistols out. Rifles are all chained together too.”

  Ann shrugged, “At least the door was open. You can’t expect everything to just be handed to us.”

  I’d kind of thought when the door was open that we were good to go. I totally disagreed with her philosophy and would be perfectly happy if stuff started to be handed to us. On that note, I moved behind the glass counter and started raking the 9MM ammo into the Alice pack. I felt like I had won the lottery. I had gone from a clip and a half to having so many bullets that I could barely get the bag on my back. I may want to dial back the number of bullets a bit now that I thought about it. I just could not make myself part with any of them. Each one was a symbol of me not having to swing a sword at a Zombie who was feet away from biting me and ending my life. There were a lot of Zombies out there and every time you made noise by pulling the trigger you could expect a lot more to show up. But still,
the ease and safety of pulling a trigger versus bonking them in the head and hoping you killed them before they jumped on you.

  Anyway, I looked down at the glass counter. It was locked. It looked like a pretty generic little lock thing though. I was thinking I could knock it off with a few hammer whacks and we happened to have a bunch of hammers with us. I looked up at Ann, can you grab me a hammer off somebody. She turned to the woman standing right there, “Hey Lisa, can you hand over your hammer for a minute.”

  I grabbed the hammer from Lisa and swung it at the lock. I missed, chipped the side of the glass case, and hit myself dead on in the knee. I’m an idiot. I fell to the ground in pain and Ann and Lisa both came over to see how I was and to laugh at me. I’m not sure if that was the correct order of events. Either way, Lisa grabbed the hammer while Ann was trying to see how bad I had hurt myself and in a few swings Lisa had the lock hanging crazily off the case and was working on prying the flimsy particle board shelves apart. Within a few minutes she was handing out guns and everyone was loading up clips and seeing how much stuff they could shove in their bags or wear out of there.

  Entry 35: North Bound

  I continued to lead the way when we left out of the back store. However, I lead from behind Ann since I was still gimpy from hitting myself in the knee with the hammer. There were three Zombies shuffling by when we were ready to leave. It was still dark out and it looked like the Zombies were feeling it. Ann, Reeves, and myself were able to shuffle up to them and put them on the ground with minimal noise and most important, without them screaming or yelling and attracting a ton more of them. If that had happened the plan was to hide out in the Gun and Ammo store.