Zournal (Book 5): Feeling Lucky?

by R. S. Merritt

  “Ladies first.” I offered up the rope to him.

  “You’re way more of a bitch than me. Besides, nothing to be scared of boss. If you slip the million starving Zombies down there will break your fall.”

  “I can’t believe all those girls went out this window and made it down there. That’s crazy.”

  Reeves and I realized we were standing around bullshitting when we should be busy jumping out a window. Reeves took the rope in hand and went out the window. He let himself down hand over hand and disappeared into the window below. It didn’t look too hard. I jumped out the window holding one of the ropes.

  Ann had wrapped the rope around the bolted bed leg to anchor it. She had tied it so it was big loop hanging down. That way you had two pieces of rope to support you since it wasn’t too thick by itself. It was also going to allow her to pull the rope down and untie it so the Koreans couldn’t use it to chase us. Everyone else had realized they needed to grab both piece of the rope. I had been preoccupied with other life-threatening type stuff and not really paid attention to the intricacies of how the stupid rope was laid out.

  Instead of going down hand over hand I went down with the rope spinning in its loop at approximately the speed of light. I reached over and tried to grab the other side of the rope and actually saw part of the skin on that hand go flying out and away. There must have been enough friction to keep me from just plummeting to my death. Instead of stopping outside the blown-out glass like everyone else I came in through it at the speed of ‘holy shit what the fuck!’

  I hit some mattresses they had put out to help others coming in and them I felt myself bounce off a wall or ceiling or something. I was travelling at a velocity inside the room that voided several of the laws of physics. Gravity had stopped applying to me. I eventually transferred all that momentum into the items I’d hit and came to a stop. My whole body hurt but all my extremities still did what It old them to so I was good to keep fighting. I just wouldn’t be using my left had anytime soon. I was rope burned down to the bone. You could actually see the bone. It was pretty awesome.

  Ann took one look at it and poured a bunch of rubbing alcohol on it. If the amount pf pain that generated could have been harnessed and converted into energy there would not have been a need to keep the Hoover dam operating. I did the only sensible thing to do and passed out.

  Entry 37: I Miss Hitting Snooze

  I woke up with Ginny and Ann both staring down at me. My hand was on fire.

  “Do you feel ok? You fainted when I poured on the alcohol.”

  “I passed out. Men don’t faint. Anything else wrong with me other than the hand?”

  “Not that we can tell by looking at you. I have no idea how you didn’t break something doing that bouncing ball thing around the room but you managed to pull it off. Your hand is pretty nasty but I wrapped it really good. Reeves has been standing over by the hole but hasn’t heard the booby trap you guys set upstairs go off yet so he thinks we’re probably still safe right here.”

  We both knew that we were never safe if we stayed in one place for too long. We’d taken probably an hour or more to evacuate everyone from the other room. We still hadn’t heard the grenade go off up there so the Koreans must be holding off on entering the room for some reason. The room we were gathered in now was a larger suite than the one we had left but it was still standing room only with all these girls. A few of them were on drugs and starting to come down so that was thrilling. I found out two of them had not made it down the rope and had disappeared into the crowd of Zombies below.

  We couldn’t stay in the room forever but we did have a few minutes to plan before we needed to start making a run for it. From talking to the girls, we were finding out there were not as many Koreans in town as we had thought. We’d been going on there being tens of thousands of troops here but it sounded more like a few thousand max. That was still more than enough to completely screw us over but explained why they weren’t crawling all over the place in here.

  More had been coming since the power got turned back on but there was still a lot of issues with food. Las Vegas was in the middle of the desert so food was more of an issue here than it was back in LA. I gathered they ate a lot of fish back on the coast which made sense considering the Koreans were a seafaring and fishing folk. We’d heard a few times that they were living on board aircraft carriers.

  If they had scored a couple of nuclear powered aircraft carriers then they could live on those indefinitely. The fuel rods in a carrier could take them around the earth a few hundred times before needing replacement. They could anchor on a small island and power the whole island from the ship. They just have needed a few guys from their Navy who understood how nuclear reactors work. Considering the US Navy plucked smart kids out of high school and had them certified to run the reactors on their ships in about a year it shouldn’t have been too hard for the Koreans to get some people that specialized knowledge. Either on American, Russian or the Chinese carriers.

  All of that was neither here nor there, except in helping us determine what were our next steps we needed to understand the threat we faced. The two main issues we had were the Koreans and the hundreds of thousands of Zombies wandering around outside this lovely property we were holed up in. We’d gained around fifty people who could help us fight. They were all young girls but that wasn’t much of a deterrent to me now that I’d been dealing with Ginny for so long. For the most part though, these girls were pretty much useless. A few of them stood out and were eager to be handed weapons and wanted to know what the next move was. The bulk of them seemed to think we had signed their death warrants by taking them out of their rooms.

  At this point, I was thinking they may be right about the death warrant. I figured we could run out of the room with guns blazing and try to escape which would lead to our death. We could stay in the room and hide until they found us and killed us. We could take one final slide of death down into the moat of Zombies surrounding the pyramid. None of those options were very appealing. Ann had handed me a couple of little white pills to help with the pain in my hand but I hadn’t taken them yet as I wanted to be able to think straight. I decided maybe we needed some curvy thinking at this point so I went ahead and downed the pills.

  Going on our mantra that movement is life Reeves, Ann and I stacked up on the door and got ready to move out. We’d at least see what was going on outside the door. Otherwise, we were sitting in the room until the Koreans tossed in gas or grenades and then came in and killed us or took us prisoner. I looked at Ann to make sure she was ready and I reached for the door handle.

  The phone rang.

  Entry 38: Hello?

  Ann and I looked at each other. I hadn’t even recognized the noise at first since it had been so long since I heard a phone ring. Everyone had gone quiet after the initial ring. A couple of the girls had jumped or let out stifled screams at the loud noise but now everyone was just staring at the phone. I walked back down the hall and picked up the handset.

  I listened without saying anything. After about ten seconds of silence I was fixing to put the handset back in its cradle when I heard a familiar voice.

  “Hello?”

  I stared at the handset. I thought about just hanging up as I thought this may be a trick to track us down quicker. It occurred to me we were pretty much dead meat at this point without some kind of divine intervention. I crossed my fingers and hoped god was telemarketing us.

  “Hey, who is this?” I figured the direct path was the best. Ann and Reeves had wandered over and were staring at me so I pressed the speaker button and put the phone down.

  Ignoring me asking who they were the voice went on.

  “Is this the group who just went out the window and then back on another window on the side of the Luxor?”

  Something about the voice was really bugging me. Reeves solved the mystery first.

  “Holy shit. Is that you Wilson?”

  The other side of the phone stayed silent fo
r a minute. Then the voice of Lieutenant Wilson came back out.

  “Reeves? Is that you and Steve leading this dumbass prisoner rescue operation?”

  Ann looked a little offended and chose to speak up.

  “You’ve got Ann here too. You going to help or just keep making fun of us?”

  “Honestly, we were trying to figure out what we could do. We had some plans in motion we were waiting on the right time to pull the trigger for but I guess this is as right time as any. We’re supposed to get clearance but the radio just accidentally broke so I’m going to call an audible. If we can help save all those girls we’ve got to try something. We already started some bullshit on the other end of the strip in case you’re wondering why you haven’t been overrun already.”

  I guess that explained that. There was a pause while the Lieutenant considered his next piece of the plan. During the pause, there was a muffled explosion noise that Ginny confirmed seemed to have come from the room we had left earlier. Our time was running out.

  “Ok. This plan is going to seem crazy but since you people like sliding down the side of the Luxor at a million miles per hour holding Golden Doodles I think it should fit you pretty well. We’re going to blow a bunch of shit up including the doors going into a bunch of the casinos the Koreans have secured. This should make the Zombies surge into the casinos and clear out the streets a little bit. It’ll also keep the Koreans busy for a little while.”

  Here the Lieutenant paused again and we heard him talking with someone in the background.

  “Assuming the plan works and the streets clear we’re going to send over a tractor trailer for you to jump onto the roof of. We’re putting a guy in the trailer right now to start cutting out a hole in the roof so you can drop down into the trailer once you get there. He’ll stay in there to try and catch some of you guys as you drop down. Once this all starts happening you’re going to need to go out the window and slide down the side to get on the truck.”

  Oh great. I had one useful hand to my name and was going to have to do the sliding trick onto a truck that may or may not be there but either way would be surrounded by Zombies. All while Seals were blowing up shit all around us as a distraction. We should have stayed in the break room. We could be lazing around right now eating snowballs.

  Ann started working on lowering the rope. It wasn’t going to be long enough this time to do the trick she had before so we just secured it in the room and everyone would need to go hand over hand down it. Looking at these girls, I was worried we were going to lose a lot more of them trying to make this second trip down the slick surface. If we had time we could lower each one of them down. I felt like we were going to need to do that for at least the smaller ones and the ones who looked super drugged out still.

  We got the rope secured and a team of people ready to lower the first girl down. We got her secured to the rope and waited. The phone was still sitting on speaker so we had an open line to the Lieutenant who was busy coordinating the diversion. It wasn’t long before we started hearing explosions. They were muffled and far away at first but then a few rocked the Luxor. We heard the Lieutenant on the speaker phone telling us to give him another minute to make sure the truck was in place then he started yelling for us to go.

  The first girl was out the window and being lowered as soon as we heard the word go. I didn’t envy her the experience of being the first one lowered into this mess. We lowered away and a few minutes later we got a tug on the line meaning she was off and we could pull it up. I stuck my head out the window and watched as the next girl was lowered down. The truck had not been able to actually pull up to the hotel in a way where we could just lower the girls straight onto it so they’d thrown over an extension ladder after driving up as close as they could get. We lowered away and when the girl got close to the ladder she crab-walked sideways on the surface of the Luxor and then got herself on the ladder and walked across while trying to untie the rope.

  She couldn’t figure out how to get the rope untied so ended up going down in the hole where the Seal below helped her untie the rope and we pulled it back up. The process worked well until we had the tenth girl almost down to the ladder and I saw the window blow outwards. The young girl got stitched apart by automatic fire from inside the Luxor. I was staring down as a soldier stuck his head out below to look up at where the girls were coming from. Reeves knocked me out of the way and shot the guy in the face.

  The Seal in the driver’s seat of the truck had climbed out of his seat and was now standing on the roof of the cab of the truck and shooting grenades into the hole made by the soldier shooting the girl. Glass blew out all over the place, almost knocking the Seal off the cab of the truck. It left behind a big hole we’d have to navigate but should have gotten rid of any Koreans hanging out in the vicinity. We pulled the rope back up with the body of the girl still tied to it. We made sure she was dead and laid her out on the couch in the living area of the room with a sheet covering her small body.

  The next three to go down were Catori, Ann, and I. We secured the fragged-out room the soldier had shot up and stood guard over it while Reeves continued lowering girls down. It actually made it faster since now he’d just drop them down the few floors and they’d come in the room with us. Ann would untie them and we’d send them on their way across the ladder over to the truck. I had been happy to let them lower me since no way was I going to be able to climb down myself with my hand all whacked. I could stand down here with my pistol and make an annoyance of myself to any Koreans who tried to break up our party.

  We were still hearing explosions outside. The Seals were using up everything they’d brought with them and getting the hell out of dodge. That plan worked for me. I felt bad about the girls we hadn’t been able to rescue but felt we’d done a lot better than anyone would have ever expected. If we could get the bulk of these girls out of here and be a part of the Koreans getting their strongholds all screwed up I’d consider it a really good day.

  We did have a small group of soldiers engage us but they turned around and went the other way when we lit into them from the protection of the overturned couches and dressers in the room. They weren’t trying to run in the hallway entrance and get shot down and wisely chose to withdraw. I was the last one out of the room. I sent everyone else over the ladder and waited for Reeves to come down. He sent a package first.

  I cut Daisy out of the comforter he had rolled her up in to lower her down. She was freaking out. Our dog was going to end up with more PTSD than the rest of us. Reeves came bounding down a minute later. He had actually done some mountain climbing for fun in the past, which explained how he knew enough about knots to be able to tie up a petrified dog and lower her out a window in no time flat. He high fived my working hand and picked up Daisy like a baby to carry over the ladder. I stood on the ledge watching the hallway entrance to make sure there were no surprises.

  I turned around when I heard shots behind me and saw Reeves sprinting towards the truck carrying Daisy as some sparks kicked up around him. The Seal on the roof was taking shots at the original window we had come out of. That window now had some Koreans sticking their guns out of it and taking pot shots at us. Reeves slipped as he made it to the truck and went flying down on top of Daisy. Him and Daisy were both ok but he had kicked out hard as he was falling and it had knocked the ladder off the truck.

  I was still standing with my foot in between the rungs on my side of the ladder to hold it steady so I didn’t lose my only way out of there. A few of the Zombies still milling around noticed the ramp up to me and started screaming their way up it. I started to push the ladder off the ledge of the room I was in then reconsidered since I would have nowhere else to go if I did that. I looked over at the Seal on the roof of the cab who was still exchanging gunfire with the Koreans up on the sixth floor. Reeves had dropped Daisy in the hole on top of the trailer and was standing on the edge with his AK-47 in his hands. He started shooting the Zombies coming up the ladder to clear the way f
or me.

  I didn’t figure I had a whole lot of choice and I needed to act now so I started jogging down the ladder with my pistol out. I was shooting any of the Zombies who got too close to me. Reeves was laying down a lot of fire to clear a path for me. I headed for the passenger door of the big rig. I saw the Seal swinging in to get the truck moving. I got to the passenger side and climbed up to get in and the door was still locked. I looked through the window and saw the Seals body disappear out the window on the other side. He must have gotten tagged by a lucky shot from the Koreans and then snagged by the Zombies.

  I put a couple of holes through the window I was facing and drug myself through it. Which was fun with only one good hand to use. I felt something grab my ankle so I started kicking like crazy. I got hit in the face hard as someone swung into the driver’s side of the cab. I looked up and saw Reeves trying to figure out how to drive the big rig. Luckily the Seal had already gotten it started. Gears grinding like crazy in a loud grating noise Reeves pulled us out of the atrium area the truck was in way too fast.