Zournal (Book 4): Reap What You Sow

by Merritt, R. S.

  We were at the trucks now. No way we were going to be able to take both of them though. We were being swarmed on each side and the other truck in the next parking spot over might as well be on the moon. Constant gunfire was the only thing keeping the Zombies at bay and we did not have anything like an infinite number of bullets. I had the keys in one hand and my pistol in the other. I pressed the unlock button and the other truck lights flashed on and off. Figures.

  Keeping up the rapid sighting and firing, I held the keys up high in one hand with one finger up in the air. That was our signal to just take one truck. I didn’t have a symbol for having the wrong damn keys but hoped Reeves would figure it out from me holding up the keys and waving them around. I could have sworn I had the right ones. That will teach us to drive trucks that look the same. There is value in diversity!

  It took a valuable couple of seconds for Reeves to figure out why I was waving keys around in the air. He must have finally figured it out though since I heard the truck beep then the lights flash on and off. I reached over and opened the drivers side door so that Ginny and Ann could jump in while I covered them. Ann handed me her modified AK-47 as she hopped in and I tossed her my pistol. Reeves came up beside me with his M-16 spewing a cloud of lead into the Zombies crowding in on us from all sides. HIs weapon went silent as he went past me and jumped into the truck to get it started.

  I slammed the door shut behind him, jumping into the bed of the pickup truck. I hopped to my feet in the back and started cycling through rounds on the AK as fast as I could pull the trigger. I felt the truck start up and got knocked on my ass. Reeves backed up and executed some kind of stunt driver 180 degree turn with complete disregard for my lack of balance and the fact that I was holding and trying to shoot a live fire arm. Doing my best to not shoot myself I scrambled to a sitting position as a Zombie jumped into the bed of the truck with me. I shot several holes through him and the tailgate in a rapid burst of panicked fire. The screaming was reaching a crescendo around us and I saw hands appearing all around the rim of the bed of the truck. I started pumping rounds through the sides of the truck and into the Zombies on the other side, based on where I saw hands reaching over the side of the truck bed.

  It was turning into the worlds most twisted version of whack a mole. I ran out of bullets for the AK and ripped my Beretta out of its holster and kept on shooting. I really hoped nothing important went through the sides of a truck. I prioritized my shots based on ones whose heads were highest over the sides of the truck. I figured they’d be able to get in easier. I started trying to reload as Reeves spun the tires of the truck on the blacktop and we started fishtailing our way out of the parking lot. One of the Zombies who had been holding on to the tailgate was flipped into the truck bed with me. I aimed and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. I started kicking him in the head as I struggled to find my knife. The Zombie grabbed my leg and tugged on it hard. I found my knife and threw it at him while he tried to pull my pants off.

  My knife went flying harmlessly out into the parking lot. Crap. The Zombie stood completely up and tugged hard on my leg again. My shoe came off and the Zombie fell backwards out of the truck. Reeves swerved hard and another Zombie rolled on top of me. I started punching him as hard as I could in the head and body. The Zombie not fighting back tipped me off and I finally figured out I was attacking the one I had killed earlier.

  I sat back to try and catch my breath. I heard a screaming noise and realized it was me yelling. I shut up. My throat was killing me. I’d have to get some of those blue frozen pops my mom used to give me when I had a sore throat. Thinking of my mom made me start tearing up. I tried to wipe the blood and snot and tears off my face with the back of my hand.

  “Uh. You ok?” At some point the truck had pulled over to the side of the road and all the occupants were staring at me. Ann had opened the little window in the back to talk to me. She looked at me now with concern while I busily tried to clean up my tear and snot covered face a little bit.

  Reeves got out and walked around to the back where he opened the tailgate and drug out the dead body.

  “Hey boss. You go ride in the cab. I’ll chill back here and get some fresh air.”

  I nodded my thanks to him as he helped me out of the cab and handed me a bottle of water. I guzzled the water and noticed my hands were no longer shaking. Taking that as a positive sign I walked up to the passenger side of the truck and slid in next to Ann while Ginny hopped into the driver’s seat.

  Entry 5: PTSD

  We still didn’t have anything resembling an executable plan that had a chance of having us come out of this alive. We had a vague direction to travel in thanks to the conversation with the Lt. Of course, we were currently not moving in that direction. We were back on I-40 meandering our way through stalled traffic towards Memphis. I’d been there once before as a small child. My parents had been way too excited to see Graceland. I hadn’t seen the need to see where the “Nothin’ but a hound dog” singer guy lived. I had especially not seen the need to drive three hours out of our way to see it. Lots of velvet.

  I wasn’t too concerned that we were currently heading south when we needed to be going north. I was staring at one of the maps we’d pulled out of a box in the hotel lobby and it looked like if we wanted to cross the Mississippi without swimming we needed to go through Memphis anyway. Once we made it over the bridge, assuming it was still there, we could head towards Portland.

  The problem was that we were headed towards downtown Memphis. We’d been told already that it was teeming with Zombies. At the speed we were driving, we’d hit the outskirts of the city pretty soon. It was the middle of the day. The time when the Zombies were most active. It would be way too hard for us to make it through the city at nighttime though. The only alternative I could think of would be to try and find a smaller town near the river that we could find a boat in to get across at. Our luck with boats hadn’t been all that great either though.

  Ginny kept driving us through the stalled traffic as Ann used wet wipes to try and clean the gunk off of my face. I was oozing blood from some cut I had managed to get on my forehead. I stunk. I could smell myself and it wasn’t pleasant. Ginny and Ann had stuck with me and had my back through all this.

  “I love you guys!” I blurted out.

  “Did he get another concussion?” Ginny asked. Ann looked at me with concern and tried making me open my eyes wider so she could see my pupils.

  “I am not concussed! At least not as much as I have been. Anyway, seriously, with no alcohol in my system and not having been seriously concussed in a few days, I love you both.”

  “You love me too?” Reeves asked through the windows to the back of the truck. He had a big grin on his face and was trying to get his head far enough through the window to give me a big kiss.

  I slid back away from him. What had I been thinking trying to talk to these guys out loud about the bond we’d built up? It wasn’t something I had the gift to put into words. It was the bond you hear about on HBO specials. I was not going to tell Ann I felt like a band of brother buddy with her. At least not until the next time I got concussed anyway. I let her finish wiping my face and then gave her a quick kiss. Reeves puckered up and looked at me expectantly. Ginny started cracking up which made the rest of us start laughing. Then Ginny started crying and had to stop the truck. Ann held her while Reeves and I sat there like a couple of moronic mannequins. I guessed it was my fault for trying to be all touchy feely and let them know how I was feeling. I probably did have a concussion.

  Entry 6: One for the Money

  The cryfest finally concluded and I awkwardly held Ann outside the truck and patted her on the back. I kept my mouth shut so I didn’t say anything stupid. I was the leader of a gang of hardened bad asses in the middle of the Zombie apocalypse on the way to deliver hell fire to an army of invaders and I still had a hard time talking to girls. I held her until she pulled back and kissed me. I tried not to look grossed out about the teary and
snotty kiss she had delivered. I must have failed because she started cry-laughing at me.

  “Am I being stupid?” She asked me.

  I may be pretty clueless when it comes to talking to girls but even I knew that was the equivalent of her asking if her butt looked big in a certain pair of pants. I honestly had no idea what she was talking about. She stared deep into my eyes, wondering what I was thinking. Honestly, I was thinking about her butt and how it did not look too big in her jeans while telling myself over and over again not to say anything stupid.

  “I guess you don’t have to answer that.” She sobbed. “I just miss him so much and I feel like I failed him and Beth. If we stop moving I feel like I’m in quicksand and it’s dragging me down. I hate them all for him dying and I want them to pay but I don’t want us all to pay for my revenge.”

  Oh! She was talking about that. Inwardly, I breathed a sigh of relief that her hate train was running low on steam. I was fine with killing some Koreans for what they had done but I had been hoping to approach it in a less suicidal way than the path we were currently on. I hugged her and kept my silence.

  “Say something. Tell me if I’m wrong. Tell me what you think. Stop trying to keep your mouth shut and not look stupid.”

  Ok. I guess that was my cue to talk. Hoping my jaw was stretched out pretty good since I was bound to be about to insert my foot into it. I hate talking. Maybe I should just go in for another salty French kiss?

  I sighed and tried to put what I was thinking into words that were not in any way condescending or fake.

  “We all miss Thomas. He was so much a part of our family that nothing still feels right without him here. We go to do something and I keep waiting for him to pop in and do one of his cheesy, dorky teen things. I miss him. I’m not going to sit around while the people who did this traipse in and take over our land. I want them all dead. Especially the soldiers. I don’t think the regular people over there even knew what was going on. Solders have a choice though. Someone hands you a gun and says go kill innocent people you can always point that gun right back at the man who handed it to you. If you don’t do that then you’re no better than they are.”

  Reeves and Ginny had walked over for this part of the conversation, Reeves had obviously made sure the crying was done with first. He coughed so he had our attention.

  “I’m with Steve. Being a soldier is no excuse for what they did. I hate them being on our soil. I hate the idea that they may somehow win this war. No one should be able to benefit from doing what they did. I don’t want to speed up our deaths but I’d really like to cause them some pain. I just am not really seeing how we are going to do that without us ending up being the ones laying in a ditch with our throats slit.”

  “We can try going Guerilla on them.” Ginny spoke up. “I’ve been thinking about it and it probably wouldn’t work against a modern country but North Korea is pretty technically deprived since they’ve been so poor for so long. They have a large army but it’s not going to be a super technical army so we wouldn’t have to worry too much about infrared drones finding us in the bushes and then hell fires being shot at us. We could attack them while they’re sleeping. Attack them when their guard is down. We could do some damage before we got caught. Eventually though, we would get caught.”

  “What if we run away and hide?” Ann said. Sounding like she was thinking out loud. We all looked at her and she kept on going. Building up momentum as she did. “Why not try and find a good place to live and hide? A place where they’re eventually going to drive through. When they do send people through we’ll be there and waiting. We’ll hurt them and then go find another place to live until we get another chance to hurt them. We could bounce around like that for a while.”

  Either way, we needed to decide to move forward or fall back to the mountains. Since all of us were in favor of doing some damage to the Koreans, we needed to get over the Mississippi into a secured location before they got far enough to control all of the bridges. We had no idea how far they had managed to get up to now. We had run into the outpost in Pigeon Forge back in Tennessee but that may have been a forward operating base or a scouting group. Ann was pretty certain the ones we had run into back there had been a hunting party. Sent ahead to kill male survivors and send women back as slaves.

  The big cities were actually probably pretty safe from the Koreans. The high concentration of Zombies in the city would make it difficult to station a large group of people in there as lookouts. We’d seen multiple times that if as group stayed in one place long enough they’d be found. If we drove through during the day and did not run into as large group of them we should be able to get through. We would be skirting the main population centers by taking the bypass around Memphis. We had used a similar strategy to get around Nashville successfully.

  Entry 7: FUBAR

  Ginny here. I’m no writer but I have nothing better to do at the moment. It’s not like Siri is going to update Steve’s Zournal. Steve’s hurt bad, he’s passed out in a coma in the back room of this crappy rent control projects looking apartment building. This is one of the few places we’ve been where I don’t think the apocalypse has made it look much worse than it did a year ago. Armed heroin and crack dealers have just been replaced on the street by blue skinned cannibal freak gangs who wander tirelessly up and down the streets and around the block.

  We’re all scared Steve is not going to make it. Ann hasn’t slept. She’s been at his side since we picked him up off the street and shoved him in the back of the truck. The dumbass saved us all by charging straight at the truck the Koreans who had us pinned down in were standing on. It was vintage Steve. He has no military training, is a pretty average shot, and not the most athletic guy you’ll ever meet. He makes up for it in straight up balls though. He sees what needs to be done and he does it. He also takes the word ‘leader’ literally and is typically the first one charging into danger or the last one to run from it.

  He’s the big brother I never wanted but now I’m super glad I have. I’m getting ahead of myself in this entry though. I want to make sure it gets documented correctly so Steve can read it when he wakes up and realize that he does make some truly horrible life choices. He typed in that last entry while sitting in the passenger seat as we headed towards the bypass to go around Memphis to get to the bridge and go over the river. We were all thinking it was going to be just like the way we had managed to get around Nashville.

  It started out Ok. We dodged a few of the blue crazies and swerved around wrecks on the road as we headed South. Ann was driving, I was riding in the bitch seat and Reeves was in the back. Steve was typing away and when he finished that he helped keep a lookout in front of us. Nothing much happened the first thirty minutes into the drive and we were all relaxed.

  Ann went around a long curve and was slowing down to negotiate her way around a bus that had flipped over when it all went to hell. Reeves yelled to watch out as a wave of the blue crazies broke across the guardrail on the side and charged us. Ann floored it to try and get past the bus and make a break for it but ended up skidding into the side of the bus. Reeves was on full automatic in the truck bed. Standing up like some kind of skinny Rambo. Ann had bashed her head on the steering wheel when we skidded into the bus and was looking a bit groggy. Steve had his pistol out and was yelling something but I couldn’t make it out over all the noise.

  I had smacked Ann in the arm and told her to start driving again. She put her foot on the gas hard. I’m thinking she had her foot on the gas but forgot about the part where you are supposed to steer with your hands. We bounced off the bus and went in a random arcing half circle, accelerating like crazy. Ann finally remembered the need to steer and got her hands on the wheel and jerked us away from the guardrail that was currently the only thing keeping us from flying into the warehouse district headfirst. She kept it floored and we started going through Zombies like bowling pins.

  Loud ka-chunk noises were followed by the windshield getting covered in a
chunky mix of Zombie innards. It’s a good thing I was born a child of video games and Showtime and was completely desensitized to violence. I was also pretty happy not to be Reeves in the back of the truck who was getting a full-on Zombie spa treatment as the truck bed began to look like a prop for a horror movie.

  All of us were screaming and couldn’t really do anything besides sit there and hope not to die while Ann drove full speed ahead without being able to see anything through the gore coated windshield. Next time we pulled into Jiffy Lube and they asked if we wanted to pay an extra fifty dollars for the super powerful wipers I was going to jump on that offer. Did I mention the smell? We were all pretty used to the funk of the apocalypse at this point but this took it to a whole new level. Like a bully at the local farmhouse grabbing you by the back of your head and shoving your face into a pig’s ass and holding you there while it relieved itself. Like a whole new level of gross.