The Final Countdown

by R. S. Merritt

  I wanted to scream. I needed to expel the hatred and venom in my body as I struck the Zombie from behind. It ignored me and managed to get a hand on Reeves jacket and toss him into the side of the Hummer. Reeves dropped his bat and pulled out his Kabar. I swung at the guys skull again but he was jerking around so much trying to get his teeth on Reeves that I just skimmed the side of his head. I saw Reeves punching the guy over and over again in the stomach. I was thinking those punches weren’t going to do anything until I saw all the blood spurting every time he punched. It clicked that he was stabbing away at the Zombies midsection. I kept on hitting the Zombie in the head as often and as hard as I could.

  The damn monster finally fell to the ground and Reeves and I were free to turn around and see Ann finishing off the little one that had come at her. I tried not to look too close as I assumed it was a kid she had put down. Give me a big hairy monster over a kid any day. I glanced over to make sure Wilson and Davis were doing Ok. They’d put down two Zombies over on that side. We waited. All of us breathing hard. Adrenaline pumping through our bodies. No more Zombies came. Now we just needed to break into K-Mart and hope there wasn’t a big pile of them nested inside.

  There wasn’t. No one must have wanted to come to K-Mart to die. I could see why. The aisles looked like they had been hit by looters but I was guessing this is how they’d looked the day they’d locked the doors and everyone went home for the last time. It was like the aftermath of a crazy Black Friday at a Flea Market where everyone has that cheap crap from China for sale. Hopefully we’d be able to find some stuff in here so Davis and them could figure out how to make a timer for the bomb.

  We had had an easy time breaking in this time. The loading dock door had given in to Walker picking the lock in just a few minutes of him fiddling around with it. K-Mart quality. We had gone in with half of us on machetes and swords and the other half of us backing them up with weapons on auto. I didn’t tell anybody but I almost pulled the trigger on the ton of mannequins they had standing in the back of the store. I didn’t tell anybody because then I wouldn’t have felt right about making fun of Wilson for getting his machete stuck in a K-Mart lingerie-wearing, wax model hottie mannequin.

  I needed to make fun of him for that. I spent the entire time we were clearing out the store trying to come up with the best one-liner for him. When we finally got back to the main floor Reeves had brought the mannequin over and was busy putting lipstick on it. He saw us watching him putting lipstick on the mannequin and must have realized it looked odd.

  “Just getting Sunshine here ready for her date. Hope you’re taking her somewhere nice Wilson.”

  “Been a while huh sailor?” I chipped in. Then realized how lame it sounded when I said it out loud. Dammit.

  Wilson ignored us both. Smart move. He started shining a light around the place. The only light available was coming through the dusty double doors at the front of the store. Otherwise, this place might as well have been an underground bunker for the amount of light we were getting in here. He went and drug over a table and we all helped him bring over some chairs to sit around it. A couple of cheap ones from the garden section and a nice cheap couch from the cheap furniture section. We also found piles of candy and canned food so we turned the meeting into a meal.

  Wilson and Davis were the ones spearheading this conversation. Wilson kicked it off.

  “I saw some of those inflatable rafts like you put in pools so I’m going to grab some of those and a pump in case we need to float the bomb. A couple of tarps also if we can find them to wrap around the bomb to avoid that water causing a short and killing us all thing.”

  Davis mumbled some stuff around the giant scoops of Beanie Weenies he was jamming into his mouth. I wanted to tell him it was cool and there were plenty of cans of those things left but he seemed like he was on a mission to eat the hell out of them. I assumed he was going to shop around and try to find some stuff to put together a timing mechanism like he’d talked about. More power to him. I figured Ann and I could contribute standing watch since neither of us were going to be super useful with building the electrical mechanical thing Davis was working on. I let Wilson know that Ann and I would take the front door in shifts. Reeves and Walker teamed up to take the back door and Davis and Wilson started fiddling around on paper trying to come up with a solution for the trigger mechanism.

  Ann and I grabbed some blankets and oversized dog beds and settled in by the front doors. We could see out into the parking lot but were sitting far enough back where no one should be able to easily see us. I saw a few Zombies wandering around in the parking lot but nothing to stress too much over for right now. We sat down and got comfortable. The plan was best two out of three in paper-rock-scissors to see which one of us had to take the first four-hour watch. I won and was happily settling in for a nap when Ann decided we should talk for a while.

  “Does it seem at all surreal to you that we’re in an abandoned K-Mart in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse trying to find the parts to put together a timer for a nuclear bomb we want to use on a bunch of Koreans?”

  I sighed. Sounded like she might have a full agenda for the talk during Steve’s turn to nap meeting. Honestly, I was over our lives being surreal. If we stopped to think too much about what we were doing we’d freeze up with fear. What we were doing was stupid. Wilson, Walker, Davis and even Reeves might be trained and suited for this kind of stuff but Ann and I were mostly just suited for it without the training part. Most of her Law Enforcement training had been around how to serve and protect. I don’t think they spent a lot of time on how to seek and destroy at the community college police academy.

  “If you’re sleepy we don’t have to talk.”

  Oh crap. I’d taken too long to respond. I’d managed to piss her off without doing anything but thinking over the question she had asked me. I started talking just to try and get myself out of trouble.

  “Oh no. I was just thinking that every moment of our lives seems surreal now. We’re doing the stuff you expect to see in an action movie or read about in books. This is not how people are supposed to live. I should be trying to get a job right now with my resume covered in lies about my academic career and job history. Maybe something in the fast food management arena. Instead, here we are, plotting to blow up San Diego.”

  Ann smiled.

  “You do get me. Ok, I’ll let you go to sleep now. Wake you up in four hours for my turn. Love you babe.”

  “Love you too. If there’s one thing I’m thankful for out of all this it’s that I never would have met you otherwise.”

  “Yeah right.” Ann said, but I fell asleep with her hand in mine and I’m pretty sure she smiled.

  Entry 22: Blue Light Bomb

  Ann woke me up about three seconds later. It was really five hours later but it seemed much sooner. Checking my watch, a fancy five figure Rolex I’d liberated from an abandoned jewelry store, I asked her why she gave me an extra hour. She mumbled something about daylight savings time and snuggled into her blankets with her back to me. It was still pretty bright outside. I saw a few Zombies wandering around but nothing to be too alarmed about. After taking a good long look out the front window I went to see how the mad scientists were doing.

  They looked pretty mad. They had the table covered in crap. They’d found some cheap toolkits in the automotive section and were using those to try and put together a timing device that would go off an hour after being set and gently press a tiny piece of metal in between two leads. They’d spent a few hours this morning sneaking out to the back of the transport truck in broad daylight to take the bomb case apart and find the board that contained the remote triggering components. That was the only part they’d been trained on since that is how they would typically stop the bomb from going off.

  They wanted to make it go off though which meant they needed to basically short out two leads of one of the Vacuum tubes soldered to the board. They’d taken a bunch of pictures of the boards on a cheap android t
ablet they’d snagged out of the electronics section. It had been turned off for the last two years so still had some juice in it. Then they’d put the bomb casing back together to come in and try to find stuff they could experiment on. There wasn’t anything with Vacuum tubes in it though. Vacuum tubes were old tech, like the triggering device on the bomb. Vacuum tubes were also less impacted by things like EMP so were still widely used in the Nuclear Navy which is how come the Seals were experts on a dead tech.

  I was completely lost. They had a contraption they’d MacGyvered together that consisted of two leads from battery testers with wire wrapped around the end of each that they could attach to the bomb capacitor leads. They had those feeding into a wind-up clock they had set up so that when the bell rang at the end instead of the metal piece on the inside of the timer slapping the bell over and over again it just stuck there which should close the circuit and make the nuke go boom.

  “How does all that work without the bomb being plugged into something?” I asked, completely naïve to the ways of electronics. Turns out it was a good question to ask.

  “Battery on the board.” Wilson said immediately.

  “The fifty-year-old board? Is it like a never dying kind of battery?” I asked. They both looked at me like I was a genius using sarcasm to get a point across. I seriously thought there may be batteries that lasted forever. They immediately began staring at the images they had taken of the board and looking around the store for batteries. I figured out that they hadn’t thought of something that I had thought of that had to do with electronics so I just sat there trying to look like I had meant to say it. While they were off searching I strolled back over to our little love nest by the front doors and sat down. Better to leave while I was ahead before I said something stupid that would wipe away how impressed they were with me for the battery thing.

  Looking outside showed there were still the same number of Zombies wandering around. I sat down and typed for a while into the Zournal. As always, I was amazed at the fact we were still alive when I typed up what we had been through. It also helped me to think through what we needed to do next. The course we were on was pretty solid. Or, at least a lot more solid than the original plan. The more I thought about it the more I realized the original plan had been a hundred percent suicidal. The plan we were working now I gave a fifty-fifty chance of working. I didn’t give us quite as high of a chance of coming out of it alive but the objective would be achieved and Ginny and the girls wouldn’t end up slaves to a bunch of Korean soldiers.

  The plan was to drive to Dana Point and snag a boat big enough for us to head out to sea in and then turn around and come back in by San Diego harbor. On the way in we’d look for lights. The carrier would be able to power a section of the city with their nuclear reactors. Our bet was if we could get the nuke close to the carriers and wherever we saw lights coming from then we’d get a solid strike. The way San Diego harbor worked we were going to need to dock to the south of it then make our way overland to a harbor inside San Diego harbor. From there we would steal another boat and take that over to where the carrier was. Otherwise, we’d be seen coming through the narrow channel.

  Once we go the bomb in position, we’d only have an hour to get back to the original boat and get the hell out of there. If we needed a distraction at any point in time we were taking all the rockets and other explosives along with us for the ride. The Seals and Reeves would be the ones going to set the bomb. Ann and I would provide a distraction via the mortars if they ended up needing it.

  It wasn’t a great plan but at least it was a plan. It was still better than driving to the front gate and trying to bluff our way in until they killed us. That plan had been way worse. It didn’t even include the possibility of me getting to shoot rockets. I was pretty stoked about the shooting rockets part of this plan.

  Entry 23: Let’s Do This

  I let Ann sleep until she woke up of her own accord. It was dark outside by then. She looked at her watch and asked me what the hell. I told her we were still waiting on Bill Nye and the other guy to finish perfecting their mousetrap. She sat up and I caught her up as to the technical issues they’d run into. I told her about the whole battery thing pretty casually then let her know they were out in the back of the truck now building their contraption into the case of the weapon.

  “You totally didn’t have a clue on the battery but you tried and let them think you did, right?” Ann cut me to the quick. She laughed when I didn’t say anything. We gathered up our stuff and went towards the other exit where Reeves was hanging out. Walker was outside guarding the back of the truck while Wilson and Davis finished tweaking the trigger for the bomb. Hopefully, without accidentally setting it off. If they did mess up we’d probably never even know it since we’d be instantly vaporized.

  An hour later Walker opened the door and came in. He had fresh blood going up his left sleeve. I raised my eyebrows.

  “Zombie. Took care of it. You guys ready to roll?”

  We grabbed our stuff and walked quickly to the Hummer. Once we were in I hit the button to start warming up the Hummer then flicked it so the engine roared to life. I started to look over my shoulder to back up and a spasm made me arch my back and grunt a few times with pain. Reeves got out of the backseat and switched spots with me. He helped me get in the backseat while Ann fished out some muscle relaxers, Advil and a bottled water and handed it to me. I leaned back into the seat and closed my eyes and willed the drugs to do their job quickly.

  Reeves pulled us out of the loading dock area and around into the parking lot. The transport pulled in behind us as we started moving towards the road. A few Zombies ran for us and one even scared the crap out of me by slamming up against the window I was leaning against. We ignored them for the most part as we drove into the inky darkness.

  The first couple hours of the drive were going to be pretty boring. At least we hoped the first couple hours ended up being pretty boring. We’d be driving through the desert. There were no more towns until we got to Victorville. Once we got through Victorville we expected things to possibly get a little more exciting. We’d picked Dana Point because Walker and Wilson had both been there before and were familiar with it. They’d been to a lot of the harbors on the West Coast. This one seemed like it may be far enough from San Diego to be safe from too many Koreans being around as well as far enough from LA to be safe from the millions of Zombies who must be wandering around that city.

  A hundred Zombies was scary and could kick our ass. I had no desire to see what a wave of a million of the monsters would look like coming at us. The first part of the ride turned out to be as boring as hoped. Reeves drove us down the road with the high beams on but there was nothing to dodge. The occasional dead car pulled to the side of the road being all that we saw for about an hour. Gradually, civilization started showing back up again as we rolled into Victorville. It wasn’t a ton of civilization though which I was happy for. As quickly as we rolled into Victorville we ended up back out in the mountains again. We drove through the desolate hills until we came down into the outskirts of Riverside.

  I-15 skipped a lot of the inner-city garbage so we were able to jam along pretty good. We made it through Riverside and ended up driving through the mountains again. We saw now where there had been some massive car pileups but they had all been pushed to the side to clear the road. Skeletons littered the sides of the road also. We drove slowly through the eerie landscape. Expecting at any time to be rushed from both sides. The occasional Zombie did come out of the woods and piles of cars to slap harmlessly at us or the transport as we went by.

  We were skirting the Cleveland National Forest so the area around us was not very developed. We were going to be descending into the Laguna Hills area when we came out of the mountains then it’d be a straight shot to get to the marina. At the marina, we’d just have to hope there was a boat big enough to take us out to sea and back in by San Diego while carrying all of us plus the bomb and our other gear. We’d also
have to hope that the marina wasn’t crawling with Zombies or guarded by Koreans. It’d be nice one day to make plans based on actual intel instead of hope.

  Coming into Laguna Hills we hit out first real obstacle of the night. There was a large pack of Zombies standing in the road. It looked to be at least a hundred of them and they were just standing there. They had to have heard us coming as the Hummer and the transport were not the most silent running of vehicles. They did nothing besides stand there and stare vacantly out of there slack, emaciated faces. Reeves kept on moving and we drove through them. Literally in some cases as they did not move to get out of the way or to jump at us. Walker was freaking out up in the turret as if they did suddenly jump into actin they’d be all over him in no time flat.

  Looking out the front windshield I saw the Zombies who were standing there staring. It was like they were just empty vessels with nothing left inside them. I imagined they ‘d continue to stand there until they eventually died. We were actually hitting the occasional body on the ground as well as Reeves drove over the corpses on the ground. It kept on like that for about a mile before the road cleared back up. At any time if they’d come out of their stasis they could have easily overwhelmed us. It’s like any fight really. It doesn’t matter how long you train or how in shape you are, a large number of overweight couch potatoes can still eventually overwhelm and kick your ass.