Zournal (Book 4): Reap What You Sow

by Merritt, R. S.

  How could we win? I started thinking of that ‘force multiplier’ concept. We could try and gather together an army of equally pissed off survivors from across the country to attack the Koreans with us. Unfortunately, most of the people we had met so far had been in small groups and not in a mood to be very hospitable towards us. I didn’t see a path to victory by trying to knit together enough of those little groups to make a big difference. I did see about a million ways that plan could fail though.

  The more I thought about it, the more it all came back around to what Ann had indicated in the first place. Our biggest advantage was the Sat phone. That communications link back to what was left of the US military would give us the intel and support needed to possibly do some real harm to the enemy. I had visions of texting pictures of locations and drones rising up from hidden areas surrounding us, then moving in to take out the targets. All while we sipped warm bottles of Snapple and munched on stale pop tarts.

  Of course, we had to get past Memphis and see if the military actually wanted to use us as forward observers to call in air strikes first. I racked my brain for a few more hours then went and woke up Ann as the sun was starting to engage the night in that daily battle. I let Ann know it was her watch and that I was going to try and sleep until about noon then we should all meet up for lunch to talk through some ideas. She yawned her way through everything I said, disappearing in search of a place to pee.

  My mind more at ease after having dealt with some of my doubts, I lay down on the scratchy comforter and instantly fell asleep. Too tired to even think of what an ultraviolet light would probably reveal in this room.

  Entry 3: Welcome to the Hotel California

  I woke up to the smell of food. I opened my eyes and took some time to place where I was. Crappy exit plaza motel outside of Memphis. Got it. Looked like there was still a Zombie Apocalypse going on and this wasn’t all a long intricate dream. The dream would have explained the beautiful woman who bent down and kissed me and told me it was time to get up and talk. Her breath brought me back to reality.

  I sat up in the bed. We all slept with our clothes on and weapons and gear either strapped to us or close enough to grab quickly. Checking to be sure my weapons were firmly attached and ready to go had replaced taking a whiz and brushing my teeth as the first things I did when I woke up. Ann handed me a paper plate with a scoop of sweet corn from a can and a helping of Spaghettios on it. As with most of our meals, it was served room temperature.

  Everyone else had already finished their food and were staring at me impatiently as I ate. I choked down the last bit, once again wondering what the shelf life was on canned food, and then tossed my plate in the trash with the others. Ginny, Reeves, and Ann were all sitting around waiting for me to talk. Not sure exactly what kind of speech they were expecting but I hoped they were prepared for disappointment.

  “Ready to make the call?” Ann asked.

  Oh! They weren’t waiting for me to talk. They were waiting to give the Lt a call. That made a lot more sense and explained the rapt attention and deficit of any comments critical to my strategic capabilities. Wondering if I should ask about the potential for botulism from rusty cans of cream corn I pulled out the sat phone and powered it up. How sad would that be to survive this long into the apocalypse only to be taken down by a can of corn? I didn’t even like corn.

  The phone booted up. I looked around at everybody.

  “What exactly are we going to ask them? I’m leaning towards just telling them we want to help and see how they think we’d be the most useful. That sound good to everybody?”

  Everyone nodded and I went ahead and texted out a quick message to whoever was on duty at the communications center back East.

  ‘We are in Tennessee and looking for a status update on the virus and the enemy. Any information appreciated. Also, how can we assist?’

  We all sat there and stared at the phone. A message appeared pretty quickly. Unfortunately, it got us all excited for nothing.

  ‘Stand by. We will provide update. Can you send location info?’

  It was pretty much the equivalent of them telling us our call was very important to them and they would answer it in the order in which it had been received. I looked around the group, everyone pretty much shrugged, if we were going to try and work with them we probably had to let them know where we were. I didn’t feel good about it but I hit the button to send our location info to the communications center. The message being received indicator spun a few times and then their reply to the location information popped up.

  ‘Current status update. Virus seems to have run its course. Those infected continue to sicken and not die. Observations seem to indicate they have either gotten smarter or the dumb ones have died out. In your area, Memphis and Nashville are both very hot zones full of large populations of the infected. You are advised to avoid those areas. Also, be advised to avoid most major metropolitan areas if possible. Please advise on your destination?’

  There it was. The question we were waiting for. I opted to go for asking them a question versus just telling them our destination.

  ‘We plan to strike back the people who did this. We would like to send you info as we attain it. Please advise most useful location for us to head to.’

  I passed the phone around and everyone agreed it was a good message and basically said what we were looking to do. I hit send. We waited for a response. We all jumped when the phone rang. I hit answer and the speaker button. We heard the Lieutenants voice.

  “Hey Steve. What are you guys trying to do? What’s going on?”

  “Hey Lieutenant. It’s down to me, Ann, Reeves, and Ginny now. We ran into the Koreans who escaped your bombing at Dollywood and they got Thomas. We got the rest of them. We want some payback.”

  “If you just head west they’re going to kill you. Once you start getting closer to California they have the roads guarded and patrols out looking for people. How set are you guys on this course?”

  Hearing out loud that our current course was a suicide mission confirmed what I had been thinking. I looked around. Ann was not deterred, Ginny and Reeves both had their jaws set as well. No one said anything. Evidently, it was only me who valued our lives over vengeance. Actually, I valued their lives more than my own. I was not scared to rush to my own death but I did not want to lose any more of the people I thought of as family.

  “We’re set on helping to inflict some serious pain on those assholes. However, we’d like to do it without dying ourselves. Can you send us a route that will get us past their patrols and we’ll see what we can do? If you have any ideas on how we could help inflict some real damage, we’re up for it.”

  “Honestly Steve, I’m not sure how much of an impact you guys can have. There’s a shitload of them on the coast. They’re setting up everywhere and moving this way. Ships keep dropping off more of them. We have no idea where they’re all coming from. It’s a cluster. They’re setting up in Long beach, Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz, Petaluma, and all over the place. We have some surprises planned for them but our satellites aren’t providing the best intel. We never really thought we’d be spying on an invading army when all this crap got setup. Realistically, if you want to just look like refugees and head for Oregon that would be useful to us for right now. Don’t get caught though. The Koreans aren’t very friendly since we nuked their homeland. We’re getting a lot of reports of them snagging women and leaving men dead in ditches. I’m sorry to hear about Thomas. But don’t let them take the rest of you down.”

  No one else had any ideas on what to say, including me. I really did not see how we were going to be super useful to the military. They probably already had Seal teams and recon marines all over the West Coast calling in sites to blow up. Why would they need us?

  “Thanks Lieutenant. We’ll head that way on the back roads and let you know what we see when we get there.”

  I finished the sentence and hit the power button to get us out of this call before it got an
y more awkward. I wasn’t sure how that could be possible. For some reason, prior to the call it had never occurred to me that the military was not sitting there waiting for our help. They wanted to use us, sure, but they were going to do it on their terms and they weren’t expecting us to provide a ton of useful intel. Oh, well, we’d just have to prove them wrong.

  Ginny had pulled back a corner of the curtain covering the big window and was looking down at the courtyard.

  “Uhh guys, looks like we’ve overstayed our welcome. There’s a bunch of Z’s moving into the parking lot.”

  We all moved quickly and quietly over to the window to take a look. Zombies were streaming into the parking lot. Ginny’s count of a ‘bunch’ appeared to be an underestimation. The quantity of Zombies was rapidly turning into a mass I would define more scientifically as a ‘lot’. No clue where they had come from but they were marching in as a mob. None of them had ventured up to the level we were on yet, but they did not appear to be going anywhere else at the moment.

  By this time, most of the Zombies were looking pretty rough. Although to be fair, most of us would look pretty rough if we spent a year wandering around outside with a sickness that made us lose out minds and turn blue. I zeroed in on one older guy who looked like he used to be fat. Now he just had big folds of dirt covered blue skin hanging down over what was left of his wranglers. He seemed to be fairly alert. Casting glances this way and that to look for whatever it was that had caused him to head over here. We had witnessed the Zombies having a herd mentality, they tended to follow any of the other Zombies that appeared to be doing something interesting. As long as the ‘something interesting’ may lead to the consumption of tasty normal human flesh the rest of them were typically down to play follow the leader.

  Entry 4: Flash Mob

  “Anybody else notice anything weird about the Zombies in the parking lot?” I asked, staring down into the parking lot. No one answered me. I looked behind me, they were all staring at me like I had grown a testicle out of my forehead. Reeves finally spoke up.

  “You mean like something weirder than a bunch of blue Zombies showing up out of nowhere to block us into our room in the middle of nowhere? Or, did you see something else? The Zombies doing the chicken dance now or something?”

  “No. I don’t know. They just seem more organized than usual. Like, they’re not running all over the place and screaming. They’re just kind of streaming in and standing around. It just seems different than usual to me.” I sighed. Something seemed different. I couldn’t quite place my finger on it though. I didn’t like it. Different was bad. I also didn’t like that I had become so fixated on the Korean menace that I’d kind of downgraded the whole Zombie apocalypse threat in my mind. Probably not a threat we could safely ignore.

  Ann nudged me out of the way so she could take a turn staring out the window. We had let the curtain fall back until there was a much smaller gap to look out of. It was doubtful a Zombie would have noticed anyone up on the third floor of the motel looking down through the slit in the curtains but why take a chance. Especially since the only reason I could think of for them showing up were the handful of gunshots we’d used to take out Zombies when we moved in. That had been over twenty-four hours ago though.

  Ann stared for a while then asked Ginny if she could take a look. I asked her what she thought and she told me to hush for a minute and let Ginny take a look. I sat impatiently on the bed, mentally cataloguing the supplies we had drug up to the rooms. Carrying three boxes of ammunition into each room had been a pain in the ass but no one had complained. We had also drug up ten gallon jugs of water and two milk crates full of canned food. We’d only been planning on staying for a day or two to heal up. We always tried to make sure we had enough supplies to get holed up for a while if need be though since that seemed to happen to us more often than not.

  The supplies we had worked so hard to drag up here now seemed woefully inadequate. The Zombies down there would probably not leave unless something else caught their attention and there wasn’t a lot of noise making stuff going on in the world today. We could hope for a thunderstorm or something along those lines but it was getting to be into Winter now and that made a thunderstorm a rare occurrence. I made a mental note to figure out how to setup a remote-controlled noise maker somewhere far away from us when we settled in somewhere for the night. If I could just press a button right now and an air horn would go off a mile down the road all of our problems would be over.

  Since we had not setup said remote controlled air horn contraption, we needed to figure out how to get out of here. We needed to figure it out quick too as it did not seem like the tide of Zombies pouring into the parking lot was slowing down any time soon. They were already meandering around where our trucks were parked. I looked over at the tiny pile of supplies we had left. If we started shooting from up here we may be able to kill all the Zombies currently in the lot but more would come. They’d come at us on the stairs and it would turn into a charge as soon as the first gunshot went off. We wouldn’t survive it. My brain was spinning trying to come up with a course of action that lead to us all driving out of here alive.

  “Ok. We’re going to go down quietly and wait until the last second to shoot our way to the trucks and try to get out of here. Leave everything that isn’t a weapon so you can move fast. Make sure you have the keys and let’s figure out who’s driving and opening doors and who’s shooting now. Let’s try and get the two trucks out so Ann and I in one and you guys in the other. If we can’t get both then let’s all go into the closest one.” I looked at everyone as they started loading up weapons and shoving ammo in their pockets while dropping everything that would slow them down.

  When a minute had passed and everyone was looking ready. I steeled myself up to take the lead. We lined up on the door, all of us repeating the mantra that ‘movement is life’, in our heads. I took one last look to make sure everyone was ready. I resisted the urge to ask if anyone had to pee. Just thinking it made me crack a smile though, which caused everyone to stare at me like I was crazy. I hate my brain sometimes. Also, I now had to pee.

  I ignored the pressure form my bladder and opened the door slowly. We piled out in single file as quietly as four adults with weapons dangling off of them could. We headed quickly for the stairs at the end of the walkway that ran in front of the rooms. Why had we picked rooms in the middle of the upper floor instead of on the sides? Another piece of tactical intel for me to tuck away. Although, in hindsight it seemed pretty obvious we should have stayed on one of the sides close to the stairs for a more covert escape if the need arose.

  We made it to the stairs without raising an outcry from the manic mosh pit in the courtyard below. I didn’t stop. Movement is life. I kept right on moving, taking the stairs one at a time and fully focused directly in front of me, which was my zone to cover. We’d practiced and gone through this procedure multiple times with Ann and Reeves providing insight from the training they had on the best ways to do it. Each of us knew what our fire lanes were and we’d all been hardened in combat. I had no doubt we’d be able to keep to our lanes and adjust as needed without having to worry about friendly fire. It still felt weird without Thomas in the line-up.

  Going down one floor I cleared the walkway on the second level with a quick eye sweep and then focused back on the stairs going to the ground level. I proceeded down them at an unhurried pace. There’d be plenty of time here shortly for panicking and vomit inducing fear. I planned to enjoy these last few stairs that nothing was currently trying to kill me on.

  The noise from the Zombies shifting around and randomly moaning still was not too bad at this level of the stairs. There was an odor but it really wasn’t too bad either. Kind of like dog breath if the dog is a foot or two away from you and panting hard. I expected the noises and the smells to kick up tremendously as I rounded the last bit of the stairs. My finger was already tightening on the trigger in anticipation of what we would be facing. Now, I started breathi
ng hard. Now, I went into the battle mode I’d found out I go into when rushing towards an enemy trying to kill me. My mind locked down and focused, I turned the corner on the bottom stair.

  A white-haired, blue skinned man was standing at the bottom of the stairs. A black T-Shirt clung to his wasted looking upper body. He was not wearing anything else. I aimed my pistol at his head and pulled the trigger. His head imploded and a big jet of gunk shot out onto the sidewalk as the body tumbled to the ground. There was dead silence for a second, then the throats of every Zombie within a mile seemed to open up as the hellish music they made when on the hunt started echoing in the courtyard.

  Keeping my pistol raised I lead our group into the open. I started firing on individual Zombies as they came towards us. The loud coughs of the weapons going off behind me let me know we were all still moving forward and kicking ass. I emptied the rest of my clip into a Zombie that did some kind of Bo Duke hood slide across an old Trans Am to try and get at me. The Zombie died but his momentum had the body sliding into me as I was trying to reload and another Zombie was rushing me. I went down hard enough to knock the breath out of me and fumbled for a fresh clip. I saw the barrel of an AK above me as Ann put the Zombie down who was charging me while I slammed home another clip and popped myself back up to my feet.