Zournal (Book 5): Feeling Lucky?

by R. S. Merritt

  Ann jumped in with me and we waited impatiently while Catori screwed around with knobs and dials and started to look at the checklist. I reached up and knocked the checklist out of the way.

  “Just fly!” I yelled at him.

  He looked a little offended but went ahead and did some other magical stuff and we started drifting off the ground. He looked at me for clarification on which way to go and I just yelled to fly towards Vegas. The sun was starting to come up as we rose up into the air. I looked out all the windows and finally saw the other two helicopters starting to lift off as well.

  As we rose into the sky Catori was rotating us around to get us moving along the road that lead to Vegas. We could branch off and look for a place to ditch the helicopters once we put some distance between us and the resort. When we got level with the top of the casino our windshield cracked. Catori started taking us through all kinds of evasive maneuvers as we took fire from the roof of the casino. The Koreans had finally made their way to the roof and were pissed we had gotten away after they went through all that work to corner us. Catori took us back down to the ground and flew us under the wires at a speed that had me squeezing my eyes shut while Ann held my hand and prayed out loud.

  When I opened my eyes again, we were cruising away from the casino. I heard a large explosion and spinning in my seat I could see one of our helicopters had not made it. It had hit the wires and slammed into the ground. The whole thing had caught on fire and I saw a huge fireball go up as the extra aviation fuel tanks we had stowed on it exploded from the heat. The other helicopter was still with us. Ann was frantically asking Catori to check and see who was in the other helicopter. Catori spoke in the Supai language for a few minutes. Considering there were only about two hundred people in the world who spoke that language before the apocalypse it was a pretty safe bet the transmission was secure.

  He turned to us and told us Ginny and Reeves were good. They were passengers on the other helicopter. I felt a huge sense of relief that was immediately replaced by guilt when I saw the look on Catori’s face. I tried to apologize but he just brushed it off saying that he understood and he was happy the other helicopter had made it as well. Our whole party had once again lived through a ridiculous situation. The Indians had gone into the hotel with eight braves and only two were still breathing. They had done some damage to the Koreans though.

  I just hoped we could keep these last two alive. If for no other reason than having pilots along was pretty handy and Catori was growing on me.

  Entry 17: At What Cost

  Catori whipped us along low and fast through the mountains. He was following the main road from the Hoover dam for now but we were going to need to get off it soon. If Las Vegas was really a major base for them then the roads leading to it would all be closely monitored and guarded. Based on what I knew about the Korean army they had always been pretty cash strapped so we didn’t need to worry a lot about high tech gadgetry being used against us. A guy sitting in a parking lot with a radio would work just as well to alert them we were coming as would a sophisticated system of cameras and satellite imagery.

  With that in mind, we veered off the main road and Catori took us through some random canyons and popped us over some mountains fast enough to make me start considering the puke bags attached to the back of each seat. Ann looked like she was also contemplating where to migrate the contents of her stomach. It wasn’t like we ate balanced diets any longer anyway. My last meal had been a can of corn I ate while we had been driving out to the helicopters back at the canyon. That seemed a lifetime ago now.

  Catori took us through the desert and then pulled into a hover over a subdivision.

  “This is as close as we can probably get without begin seen. We can shove the copters into the garages of these houses to hide them. The ones on the corner are pretty big and people store their boats and stuff in them so we should be able to fit these inside. Only problem I’m seeing now is that we seem to be attracting quite a crowd.”

  I looked down to see what he was talking about and saw a couple hundred Zombies standing underneath us staring up at the helicopter. More were coming down the street. It was a great sign that the Koreas had not taken up residence in this area. However, it also meant we were kind of screwed on being able to hide the helicopters and use this area as a base.

  “Yeah. That’s not going to work to well, is it? You know of any warehouses or manufacturing plants or anything off the beaten path out here?”

  Catori thought about my question then pointed the helicopter out into the desert and we flew for a few minutes before ending up following another road out to a distribution center in the middle of nowhere. There were some trucks scattered around but other than that it was just three large buildings and large open metal containers piled high with of dirt and rocks. Catori hovered over the site for a minute, letting the other helicopter catch up to us. A couple of Zombies came out of the buildings and ran around on the ground beneath us.

  I saw Ginny stick her rifle out of the window of the helicopter she was in and start popping off shots. The Zombies below gradually dwindled in number until there were none left standing. Between the rifle shots and the helicopter noise I was worried we were not far enough away from the population centers. I didn’t want to get the helicopters hidden and settle in for the night just to wake up surrounded by Zombies. The ones over in the subdivision must be home bodies though. We’d noticed some Zombies would just follow noises until they found something or were distracted by another noise. Other Zombies would follow a noise only so far and then return to their homes or settle down to wait for another noise.

  We landed and mercy killed the Zombies that Ginny had put on the ground without killing. Once we completed that macabre task we had a quick discussion on the best building to stick the helicopters in. We wanted to hide them but we wanted to be able to get them out of hiding and up into the air quickly if needed. I was still worried we were going to wake up in the morning swimming in a sea of blue bodies. If that happened we needed a way to escape that didn’t involve trying to push a helicopter out into the open while trying not being eaten by the aforementioned sea of blue bodies.

  In the end, we pushed the helicopters into the building that was not filled up with crates of gypsum ore. It turned out the place we were in was the distribution center for a gypsum mining operation. We were surrounded by the raw material to build a ton of drywall. I wasn’t really sure how that would help us. Reeves asked Catori if maybe he could have brought us to a gun distributor or the place where they make Rice Krispy’s instead. On the other hand, I didn’t see any reason for the Koreans to send someone out to this place to salvage. There was pretty much nothing here.

  We spent some time exploring and securing the area. Lots of large machines and storage areas. A handful of surprises as we were rushed by a few Zombies when we opened office doors and so on. It never ceased to amaze me where people decided to run to when they got infected. You’d expect places like apartment buildings, hospitals, clinics and subdivisions to be crawling with Zombies. It was really beyond me why there were any of them out here in the middle of nowhere. Why wouldn’t they have gone home? This company must have had a crappy sick leave policy. Or, Ann came up with the theory that people had come out here precisely because it was in the middle of nowhere. Probably hoping that they could escape the disease.

  It was another one of those things we were never going to know the answer to. Like the stacks of milk crates full of dead animals and jewelry we’d seen in the middle of an intersection. We’d seen a ton of weird ass stuff that really had you scratching your head. We didn’t know if it was due to people getting weird from the Zombie virus or if it was just people freaking out because of the whole end of the world thing. Whatever it was, it never ceased to amaze me. Even here, we opened a door and found a fully nude Zombie guy standing in front of a fax machine staring at it like it was a cheeseburger.

  We found a breakroom with some sodas and junk food
stocked in it. We broke open the machines and gathered all the supplies out of them. One good thing about food in a snack machine. It never goes bad. Kind of scary wondering what kind of chemicals they use to keep the food lasting this long. Some of it had melted but nothing tasted too weird. I kind of enjoyed the way the bag of gummy bears had melted and turned into a multicolored gummy work of art. It was delicious.

  We got setup in the breakroom. The helicopters got pushed in and we got a lot of supplies unloaded. There were a lot of large vehicles here that seemed like they might come in handy. A few smaller trucks sitting around as well. They had a pump out here to gas up the mining trucks and machines. If we could figure out how to make the pump work we should be good for making runs into town in big ass mining trucks that Zombies would have a hard time stopping. I wasn’t a hundred percent on how that would help us attack Vegas.

  We needed intel again. We needed to figure out what was going on in Las Vegas and then figure out a way to do something substantial enough to hurt the enemy. I also wanted to make sure we weren’t wasting our time and the Koreans had up and left Vegas already. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me that they would be there anyway. The place must be crawling with Zombies. Every major city was crawling with Zombies. You could get a lot of them to leave by pulling a pied piper kind of routine but not all of them would go. Clearing a whole city would take a while even if you had the resources of the Korean army. While they were clearing it, they would not be available to do anything else either.

  We needed to figure out what was going on. Charging in blind would incur too high of a cost. We’d been tragically reminded of that back at the hotel. While the Koreans had plenty of lives to sacrifice to reach their goal, we did not. Each life spent in our cause was the waste of an irreplaceable resource on top of it being the loss of part of our family.

  We setup the watch schedule and everyone dispersed to try and get some sleep. I’d just gotten comfortable with Ann when there was a knock on our door. I sighed, knowing she’d be fast asleep when I got back. I got up and went to the door. Reeves was standing there.

  “You guys have got to come check this out.”

  We both walked outside. In the distance, the horizon was lit by the glow from the neon lights of Las Vegas shining out into the darkness.

  Entry 18: By the Glow of the Neon Lights

  We sat around in the uncomfortable break room chairs. No one said anything for a few minutes. Reeves was, like normal, the one to break the silence.

  “Well that’s fucked up. Those bitches been living it up in suites in Las Vegas with power while the world went to hell around them. If I didn’t already want to kill them then I’d definitely want to kill them all now.”

  I had been more focused on the tactical aspects of them having power. It hadn’t occurred to me this was another log to throw on the fire of hate for the enemy. That thing was a massive bon-fire as it was so I was pretty good with the hate. I wasn’t even jealous so much as confused as to how they could be sitting there with the damn lights on.

  Ann was the next to break the silence.

  “I don’t get it. If they’re lighting up the sky like that why haven’t they been bombed to shit by now? We had carriers and air bases all over Southern California that could have pulled the job off with no problem. They might not like blowing up Las Vegas but they’d have done it.”

  Good points. I remembered from history class, well, from a movie about world war II that came on when I was home drunk one night and couldn’t find the remote. It was actually pretty interesting. The British had turned off all their lights and had black out curtains and all that so the German bombers couldn’t find them at night. It sucked being in the dark but being blown up sucked even more. I didn’t see how that would work today though. Our fighters and bombers shouldn’t need sight to lock onto a target as big as Las Vegas. Which could really only lead to one conclusion.

  “Our side must be down to conventional weapons and be short on pilots, planes, missiles, or aviation fuel. If the Koreans are able to sit there and own it like this then they must have the whole area pretty locked down. We probably waited too long to attack because it was American soil and by the time no one gave a shit about that anymore it was too late.”

  “Sounds about right.” Marg, the other Havasupai pilot to have made it with us, chimed in. “If you’re missing any of those things then you can’t pull off a mission. Plus, a ton of other things like flight crews and mechanics. It’s not like that scene in Independence Day where everybody jumps in an F-15 and flies to attack the aliens even though all they’ve ever flown before was crop dusters. These planes take a ton of special training. It’s one of the reasons the Koreans haven’t been flying all over the place and strafing us left and right.”

  The conversation was interesting and everything but it still didn’t solve the whole puzzle about what our next step should be. They’d managed to get power to Vegas, probably via the Hoover Dam, but what were they doing with it? How would it impact us attacking them? How could we use it to our advantage?

  “They’ve either killed a butt load of Zombies or the whole city is crawling with them. That will be neat to see how they’re handling that. I’m thinking this is a new phenomenon sine the guy we ‘interviewed’ said there was no power when he was here in Vegas and it seemed like that was probably around three months ago. Either way, we should all get some sleep. We’ll still be just as confused about what to do come tomorrow.”

  Ginny finished talking, got up and left to supposedly go back to her bed and get some sleep. None of us believed her when she said she had no idea what to do. I was pretty sure she’d already figured out a couple of scenarios for us. She was right about us needing sleep though. I had a couple thoughts as to what we needed to do next but number one on the list was get everyone some rest so we wouldn’t get sloppy. I had to keep reminding myself this was a marathon, not a sprint.

  Entry 19: Roadside Assistance

  We pulled out all the maps we could find which included a couple showing all the nearby mining sites. We took our time and got plenty of rest as I wanted the search for us to start winding down. No matter how hard they looked for us the first few days after the fight at the hotel they’d eventually move on to other things. Especially since they had seen us leaving in helicopters and we could be anywhere by now. No real reason for them to suspect that we were still headed for Vegas and intent on doing some damage. We stayed inside and kept our heads down just to be sure though.

  Catori and Marg were harder to control. Marg’s wife and daughter were out there somewhere while Catori was freaking out about his sister. We had a bunch of talks around their need to be doing something versus the groups need to rest and come up with a plan. I told them we’d only be here a few days to let the heat die down. I pointed out that we couldn’t stay much longer even if we wanted to unless we wanted to waste all of our water and food hiding out in the middle of nowhere. Marg was frantic and didn’t much care about planning. He wanted to charge in on a white horse and rescue his wife and daughter. None of us blamed him.

  Where was he going to ride into exactly though? Then how was he going to ride out with them? We were all pretty sure the women were being taken to be bred. The army hadn’t gotten out of Korea with enough women of Korean descent before one of our admirals had given the order to nuke them. The same admiral who had just watched his granddaughter turn into a Zombie and had to kill her. After he had issued the order and seen it carried out he had turned the pistol on himself. We all absolutely understood that Marg did not want to hang out in the desert with a group of strangers eating stale Cheetos while his wife and daughter were being raped to produce a new master race. Or, whatever the North Korean equivalent was for the Hitler ideal.

  The problem was that we were having a difficult time figuring out our next steps. We knew Las Vegas was going to be heavily guarded. We couldn’t just roll in and start poking around for the warehouse full of abused women. We needed to figure
out where said warehouse was assuming it even existed. We were making way too many assumptions. We couldn’t snag a vehicle and drive into Vegas without collecting a large number of Zombies following us if we drove through the suburbs. We’d also probably be seen and shot by a Korean guard post while we cruised along.

  We could send out one or two people to scout everything out and report back but we didn’t have enough food and water sitting around to support that approach. Plus, Marg and Catori were certain that time was short for their family. I didn’t say a word in reproach to them when they kept bringing it up. I knew if Ginny or Ann had been captured we’d already be rolling towards Vegas and working on a plan as we drove. I honestly couldn’t figure out why Marg and Catori were waiting on us except they were just as lost as to how to find their loved ones as we were. Maybe they thought they had a better chance to find them with us since we seemed to be miracle workers. Miracle workers as judged by still being alive after everything we’d been through.

  We finally settled on driving two of the four-wheel drive service trucks sitting in the parking lot through the desert as far as we could get before moving in at night to get as close as we could to the suburbs behind Hendersonville. From there, we’d just have to move forward on foot to see if we could figure out what was going on. We did find some nice walkie talkies in the manager’s office we could use if we opted to send out some people as scouts ahead of the rest of us. It did feel a lot more professional to not have cartoon characters staring at me as I communicated life or death messages over the walkie.