Zournal (Book 5): Feeling Lucky?

by R. S. Merritt

  Well this should be fun. We assured him we were in and he marched us into the first room then unlocked yet another door that lead to an elevator. He put in the code again and the doors to the oversized elevator opened. We all checked our weapons and walked into the small room that was going to take us down into the pit.

  Entry 41: Into the Pit

  The ride down the elevator took forever. At one point, it stopped and I thought we were going to be stuck underground forever. It hummed for a little while then we started descending again. We all stared at each other awkwardly. The elevator was pretty huge. We assumed it must be used to move supplies and gear back and forth as well as people. One of the Seals commented it must be nice to be Catori. Stuck up topside with a bunch of girls while the rest of them were on the freight express to hell.

  “As accurate as those girls were with those M-4s I think we may be safer down here.”

  Reeves joke fell flat but we all appreciated the effort. Being in an elevator full of operators was a but unnerving. These guys were the real deal and for some reason they accepted us among them. I wasn’t real sure how a cop, a reservist, a college dropout and a teenage girl with a broken hand rated this treatment. Daisy on the other hand was pretty awesome and absolutely deserved to be here. Even though she currently didn’t look so happy being squished into the elevator.

  “Ok.” Wilson broke the silence loudly to get our attention. “In case there’s any question about it I have lead on this mission.” None of us had a problem with that. It made sense for him to lead it. We all stayed quiet and I motioned for him to carry on.

  “This mission is a Hail Mary. Another team was sent over here but they never made it back. Assuming we’ll probably see what’s left of them when we hit the pit. This place is just a fancy ass underground warehouse. They didn’t do anything here except store shit that no one was supposed to know about or ever need to use. The weapons in here would have been delivered by a unit like ours. The last team had a guy who had been trained on deploying them so he had the info to get the cards made and the codes and all that. Any questions so far?”

  There were no questions so far.

  “Ok. So, when these doors open I have no idea what we’re going to see. I don’t have a floorplan. I don’t have an inventory. We’re going in blind but we are absolutely going in hot. Just remember this place has bio weapons and suitcase nukes sitting around. We don’t want to get careless with where we’re aiming. This is pretty much the last chance we have at getting our hands-on weapons that we can use to get rid of the Koreans for good.”

  He didn’t mention it would also make a large part of Southern California uninhabitable but we all knew that. None of us cared. Better radioactive than covered in Koreans. All we had to do now was find the nukes, if they existed, and battle our way down to California to set them off. The elevator stopped and my stomach did a flip. We also had the tiny issue of battling our way through the large underground warehouse to secure the nukes.

  The doors dinged and started sliding open. The Seals all had night vision goggles they were getting ready in case needed. We probably should have asked for some of those. When the elevator opened we realized we weren’t going to need them. Emergency lights in the floors and ceiling were on in a long hallway leading down to a set of double doors. Between us and the double doors were about twenty Zombies. They all perked up and started rising to their feet as the elevator doors opened wider.

  Wilson had his custom AR-15 down and looked like he was ready to start shooting as the Zombies started lumbering towards us. Before he could do anything, Ginny whispered loudly we should use hand weapons. I pulled out a hatchet and started walking towards the nearest Zombie. Behind me I heard the Seals pulling out knives and trenching shovels and machetes and the other weapons they were carrying around. Reeves went past me with his bat and started swinging for the fences.

  Ginny hung back due to the broken hand and Ann served the cleanup role of taking out the Zombies the rest of us were putting on the ground. She’d found a fire poker somewhere and that was currently her preferred dispatch weapon. I had pointed out it was pretty heavy to lug around and she’d almost instantly started making me carry it until she thought she may need it. It took a few minutes of vicious hand to hand combat but the hallway was cleared and everyone on our side was still standing.

  Ginny whispered to Wilson that if we kept quiet for now it would keep the Zombies from swarming us. We shouldn’t go to guns until we had no other choice.

  “Good call. I’m sure we’re going to have some Zombies waiting on us since even taking them out with hand weapons wasn’t super quiet but should be a lot less swarming and going crazy since we didn’t open fire yet. We’re going to move through those doors and keep advancing. We’re looking for the signs that warn about nuclear weapons. The more stuff we see saying ‘keep out’ the closer we’re getting.”

  He finished cleaning the blood off his knife and gave everyone else a minute to get their shit together and then he headed for the double doors. Something was pounding on them from the other side already. There was really no way around it so he sucked it up and pushed the door slightly open. Immediately, blue fingers pressed in through the gaps and started ripping the doors open.

  Wilson took a few steps back as the doors were ripped open and Zombies started surging through it. There was no question about hand weapons versus guns at this point. Everyone had weapons out and the front row was cycling through auto as we slowly got pushed backwards towards the elevator.

  There were hundreds of the fuckers. They were climbing over the dead bodies of their fallen brethren to get at us. Their red eyes glittering with hate and hunger. They were coming hard and fast. They had zero fear of the bullets we were hurling at them. We were almost all the way back to the elevator at this point. Wilson yelled something and the Seals stopped falling back and started advancing. They were on full auto and slamming in new clips faster than I would have thought was possible. I always fumbled around a little when I was swapping out clips. Especially in this kind of situation. These guys didn’t miss a beat.

  Then one of them did. He slipped on something while moving forward and a Zombie got its hand around his foot and yanked causing him to hit the ground hard with his head. The Zombie latched onto he guys ankle and started eating. I jumped forward and shattered the back of the Zombies skull with my hatchet. Ann and Reeves came up and pulled the Seal backwards out of danger. I fell back with my pistol and contoured to look for ways to help and cover.

  Reeves jumped into the fray with his AK. He took the spot the Seal had been covering and advanced forward with the rest of the team. We had grenades but I knew Wilson wasn’t going to let us use them. I also knew he wasn’t going to retreat. That is why they were advancing. This was a do or die mission. These guys were impressive as hell once they got going. They were crawling over the tops of the dead zombies now to get at the Zombies on the other side. I saw them getting bit and ripped at by the surviving Zombies but they shrugged it off and kept on moving forward.

  The Zombies biggest weapon was fear. Most people died because they freaked out and did stupid shit. If you kept your wits and thought through your moves there was a good chance you’d survive any Zombie encounter. After panic and fear the only other thing they could really do was corner you by chasing you until you screwed yourself with bad choices. The Seals weren’t making bad choices. They weren’t trying to panic anytime soon. They had a mission and they were going to complete it no matter what. If the Koreans hadn’t made sure to set the Zombie virus loose close to all the major military bases and we’d had a lot more guys like the Seals survive it would not have worked out so well for them.

  It still wasn’t going to work out so well for them. Seeing them advance I had little doubt we were going to make it through the Zombie wall and out the other side to get the weapons we needed. One of the Seals ran back and asked if he could grab my AK. I wasn’t able to use it thanks to my hand so I slipped it off an
d handed it to him along with a couple of clips I had on me. He disappeared back into the fight. They were practicing fire discipline to conserve ammo but there was still a lot of Zombies who needed killing.

  The shots started dying down. Finally, Wilson came crawling through the pile of dead Zombies to get us. He was covered in all kinds of fluids and I saw his hand disappear into a Zombies stomach as he crawled over them. It was pretty gross. I’ve seen a lot of gross but having your hand go into a stomach is still up there on the list of nasty. What made it worse was he waved to us to follow him as he turned around and started back through the pile of meat that used to be a bunch of people.

  It was easy going with most of the threats neutralized. There was still a Zombie here and there we had to take out but nothing like that initial surge. Right outside the double doors we’d found the remains of most of the original force that had come here. We’d looted them for more ammo and weapons. Ginny had hung back with Ann to guard the elevator. They mostly didn’t want to crawl through the pile of dead people. Ginny couldn’t because of her broken hand and Ann was just like ‘no’.

  I wished I’d thought of the hand excuse as my bandages covering the hand I was supposed to keep clean were covered in all kinds of dead person shit I had just drug myself through. I might as well stick my hand in a port-a-potty tank and swish it around. We saw signs with the radiation symbol on them and followed them to a room with another keypad. The keypad took the code we had and opened.

  Inside were shelves that contained hard copy guides to use the nukes and large lead containers holding the nukes themselves. The guides looked pretty old. Wilson confirmed the nukes we were getting our hands on had actually been built in the late sixties. The term ‘suitcase nuke’ was also very misleading. It was more like a footlocker. A really heavy footlocker that they put in a bigger footlocker made out of lead. Lead is very heavy.

  We ended up blowing another hour trying to find a forklift and drive it into the room to collect the nukes. There were two of them and Wilson wanted both. Then we had to clean the pile of dead bodies out of the hallway. I claimed hand injury issues on this. Ann just said no and Ginny waved around her cast to get out of it.

  We ended up piling dead bodies on the forklift and moving them down the hall to dump them. It took a long time and the results were pretty horrific. There was so much blood and so many random body parts it actually looked kind of fake. Like a scene out of a cheesy Halloween haunted house. We were able to drive the nukes into the elevator and get them up to the hangar without too many more issues. It took three trips to get the nukes and all of us up to the top.

  Daisy looked ecstatic to be back up topside. I felt as happy as she looked. I didn’t realize until I stepped out of the elevator and into the hangar that I’d pretty much been expecting to die down there.

  Entry 42: The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday

  We put the bombs in the back of the truck. Wilson had wanted to put one in one Hummer and one in another for redundancy. It would have also been easier to keep what we were hauling a secret from the girls. I got where the trust issues were coming from. We’d proven ourselves pretty staunch Korean haters. Some of the girls were rolling with the Munchausen thing and actually talking about how much they missed their rooms back at the Luxor. I guess rape and torture were ok as long as you got food delivered up to your room on a consistent basis.

  I stayed out of it. I didn’t know what any of them had been through and saw no reason to go all self-righteous on them. The other girls tended to do a pretty good job of shutting them up without me having to say anything anyway. We worked on getting everything loaded and Wilson sent one of his guys up to the catwalk area above us to look out a window and check out the Zombie situation. We were hoping we may just be able to open the doors and drive right on out it if there was few enough of them still standing around.

  The Seal came back down a minute later and let us know that it looked like we might have a problem. There were a few thousand zombies standing around outside. They weren’t all pressing up on the hangar but they didn’t look like they were going anywhere either. More Zombies were streaming in every second. I wondered where they were all coming from. The town of Fallon wouldn’t have had more than about ten thousand people and the air base added maybe another few thousand. Maybe more had turned to Zombies and stuck around in this town than in the other places we’d gone through. I also wondered if maybe they were starting to stick together in groups better.

  A few thousand outside the door was not the answer any of us had expected or wanted. We tried to keep it quiet but the girls figured out we were surrounded and a few of them started freaking out. Ann walked around dispensing Valium out of a Pez Dispenser. She literally did that. It was like standing in the parking lot before a Grateful Dead show. Less hallucinogenic and more calming though.

  We didn’t have anywhere close to enough ammunition to take on that number of Zombies head on. Wilson was eager to get out of here with the nukes and get them to the other base. He assured us the secret base was safer than this place was. We were drawing blanks on how to get through all the Zombies though.

  We needed a distraction. An explosion on the other side of the base or a giant shiny squirrel would be nice. The back of the hangar opposite the road was much less crowded than the front. We could maybe get a few guys out the back door and they could go try to set something on fire or something down the street to spread these Zombies out. We could drive through and around spread out Zombies. We couldn’t drive through massed Zombies.

  One of the Seals got it in his head we should try and knock over the water tower. None of us had any better ideas and he had some extra C-4 on him so we rubber stamped his idea and gave him the greenlight to get it setup that night. We were thinking the Zombies would be dispersed more tonight so if he could make a crap load of noise and get them moving away from us that should do the trick.

  The Seal took off with his buddy out the back door around ten that night. The plan was for them to make the noise and us to be ready to roll at midnight. If they weren’t able to catch up with us tonight they’d rendezvous with us back at this other base by Carson City that they kept referring to. Reeves had mentioned a few times he had never heard of a base by Carson City and thought this air base was the only one in the region. Wilson had winked at him and asked him if he felt any better now about so much of our pay checks going to the government so they could build secret bases all over the place.

  Once they had snuck out we all sat around waiting for it to be midnight. About ten minutes until the expected boom we got all the girls loaded into the back of the truck with their pillows and comforters. We tried to do so as quietly as possible and we did not start any engines yet. We didn’t want anything to remind the Zombies people were in here until after the boom and the doors were open. I was sitting in a Hummer with Ann, Ginny, and Daisy. Catori and a Seal were on one hangar door with two more Seals on the other door and Wilson standing up in the cat walk to call it when it was time to fling them open and make our move.

  Ann and I were sitting in the Hummer talking about learning sign language since at this rate we were definitely going to be deaf soon. A vague rumbling off in the distance caught our attention. A few minutes later Wilson came scrambling down the catwalk and started helping the Seals at the doors get those open. Once they started moving just one person was required to keep the doors sliding. That was a good sing since if Zombies were leaning on the doors it would have been a lot harder to slide them.

  Wilson and Catori covered the guys opening the hangar. They used hand weapons to keep the noise down. They ended up having to just put down a couple of curious Zombies who came over to see why the doors were opening. Catori had started carrying around a giant fire ax for stuff like this. It seemed to work pretty well for him. I personally would have been exhausted after swinging the thing more than three or four times.

  With the doors open we all started our engines. It was like the start of a race. I
must have smiled because Ann and Ginny were both staring at me.

  “Gentlemen, start your engines!” Neither of them thought it was funny. They actually looked a little concerned when I started laughing. Probably reevaluating me driving instead of Ann. I did only have one useful hand so it would have made more sense to have her on the wheel. Too late now.

  Why wasn’t Ann driving? One of those mysteries men will never understand I guess. We were in the last Hummer that was going to roll out of here. We’d picked it since we would all be sitting down and ready to go while everyone else would be scrambling for their vehicles. We listened as the other Hummers and the short bus got started up. I was worried I hadn’t heard the truck yet when it kicked in as well. The first Hummer was already out the door and the second was right behind it. The short bus was probably the weakest link and it was third in line. I tried another attempt at humor while we waited for the truck to roll out so we could follow it.

  “With my hand hurt I thought someone else may drive but I guess you’re both more used to being passengers when there’s a short bus involved.” I deadpanned and it fell flat. Seriously, I tapped the steering wheel a few times. “Is this thing on?”

  “Shut up and drive.” Ann was pretty serious about this whole trying to survive the next five minutes thing. I supposed I might as well focus. Being in the last place in this wagon train was probably going to suck. I was hoping the people in front of us would bust through the lines and we’d just be able to follow in their wake and life would be easy. It was not to be so.