Zournal (Book 4): Reap What You Sow

by Merritt, R. S.

  The end of this drive was the problem. We were headed straight at the enemy. We were a clueless missile that more than likely would not have a substantial impact on the Koreans we were launched at. We were the Nerf soft-tipped arrow shot at a charging lion. I was racking my brain to try and think of a way we could have an impact but I kept coming up empty. I had no desire to drive all the way there and throw my life away for nothing. I preferred not throwing any of our lives away as I had grown attached to them.

  “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” Ann asked, out of the blue. We had been driving along in silence for an hour or two. Each of us lost in our own thoughts.

  “I think we’re doing what needs to be done. I think when a bully punches you in the face hard enough to knock you down you owe it to yourself to get up and hit him back as hard as you can. I think for what they’ve taken from us they all deserve to die. I’m past worrying about the innocence of the individuals. A soldier can always refuse an order. A man with honor would do that. These men have no honor.”

  “That’s great honey. I just meant do you think we should be taking this road still?”

  Oh. I had to stare at the map and the passing road signs for a minute to figure out where we were. Once I had my bearings, I traced out a route that kept us going northwest. We’d cut through the bottom left corner of Missouri and then over into Kansas. Once we got into Kansas, we could just take I-70 through the Rockies and over to the West Coast. Assuming there wasn’t a lot of snow blocking the road and that we weren’t dead yet.

  Tracing the proposed route on the map with my finger and thinking back to how long it took us to get out of Florida I felt some relief. It was going to take a long time to get to the West Coast. Which meant we were going to have some time to hopefully come up with a better plan than driving west and shooting wildly until we ran out of ammo and the Koreans barbecued us. From out of nowhere, I had the thought that Koreans were the ones who ate dog meat. Probably not true, but I’d go ahead and believe anything that gave me even more reason to feel good about killing them. I’m doing all this to save Fluffy!

  We drove through great wide-open spaces. The signs of the apocalypse were much less visible here. Man had not made his mark so much out in this area. You could almost forget about the kind of world we were driving through. The only indicators were the random vehicles parked haphazardly along the road and the state of the road itself. Four-wheel drive vehicles had become a necessity in this new normal. Every road was deteriorating, since there was no longer a group of people to stand around watching the one guy with a shovel slowly work to patch up holes in the cheap concrete provided by the lowest bidder.

  In addition to holes, we’d seen whole sections of road missing from flash floods. We’d seen sections buried underneath sand and muck. These were four and eight lane highways that were already disappearing. Mother nature reclaiming the land and covering up the ugly concrete scars that crossed her body. It did not give me a lot of hope for being able to make it easily through the Rocky Mountains. I figured the main passes and highways would probably have either bandits or Koreans watching over them. Unfortunately, anything that wasn’t a major highway was probably already washed away or covered in rock slides.

  We stopped at pretty much every truck stop we passed to try and get more diesel. The exits were far apart out here but most of them had a truck stop due to the high volume of trucks traveling along this corridor. Trucks were the main traffic out here in the middle of nowhere. Anyone with any sense would take a plane to get to the other side of the country. Searching the internet for cheap tickets to Los Angeles was, unfortunately, a thing of the past. Like showers, fast food, and brushing your teeth on a regular basis. Ann insisted we could still maintain our oral hygiene but I argued that I hated wasting water. She won and I brushed my teeth at least daily. Typically, with her staring at me to make sure I did it for more than five seconds. For the supposed leader of this group, I got a surprisingly small amount of respect.

  There wasn’t a direct path to cut through the bottom corner of Missouri. They had messed that option up by having large swaths of national forests and wildlife preserves that got in the way of a nice straight highway. That meant we ended up driving due north and looking to cut over to the west once we got closer to Springfield. I wasn’t too clear on why they needed such large parks and wildlife preserves when the whole state pretty much looked chock full of nature. Nature and trailer parks. We drove past the trailer parks as fast as we dared.

  The roads held up well and we were able to make good time. Ann drove like a maniac, weaving in and out of stalled cars and barely even slowing down when debris covered the road. We just blasted right through it. Ginny stayed right behind us and seemed just as reckless. I wondered if Reeves was searching frantically for a valium as much as I was.

  The speed theory seemed to be working out well though. Ann figured since the vehicles we were driving were loud that we would be attracting Zombies as we drove along. Her approach to solving this was to just drive as fast as she thought we could and still survive. Ginny liked driving fast anyway so it was not a big deal for her to keep up. So far most of the Zombies we had encountered had been quick glimpses of them running for us through the trees or climbing out of a ditch and then we were past them before we had to worry about it.

  Until we were about thirty miles outside of Springfield on highway 60. Ann went flying over a low hill with Ginny right behind us and the sides of the road started moving. Ann was braking to a stop as she saw a big mass of Zombies moving around up ahead of us. As she slowed down and we focused on the mass of Zombies up in front of us our radio went crazy with Ginny screaming over it to turn around and get back. The Zombies in front of us did not seem like that big of an immediate threat to me.

  I climbed in the turret and saw Ginny executing a sharp turn to head back in the opposite direction. I heard the keen screeching of Zombies and realized the movement on the side of the roads was coming from what looked like thousands of them coming out of the ditches and woods on both sides of us. I started yelling for Ann to spin us around and get us out of there.

  She’d figured out the threat a bit before me and was already spinning us around. I hung onto the turret as she turned hard enough that the centrifugal force threatened to throw me out. I couldn’t argue with her recklessness now though. Looking around us, now was absolutely the time for some serious recklessness. I cocked the machine gun and got ready to clear a path if needed. Not that shooting into a huge crowd of Zombies did much good. If you started shooting large caliber rounds at a high velocity into a crowd of regular people they’d disperse faster than a group of Hippies threatened with a bar of soap. Zombie just didn’t give a crap. You could blow their arms off and they’d keep coming until they bled out. If I shot a whole bunch of them in front of us we still had to drive over their bodies. Pretty much the same as if they were alive except they wouldn’t be as grabby.

  The only way the gun would be useful would be in mowing them down before they could cover the road in front of us. Ginny was leading the way now. She was going at an extremely unsafe speed. I didn’t see what happened but one second she was driving and the next her pickup truck was spinning in a slow circle while moving rapidly towards the edge of the road. Ann saw it happening as well and angled us to be close to where they were going to go flying off the road and into the trees. I prayed somehow Ginny would regain control and pull out of the spin.

  They went flying off the road and into the trees. My prayers must not hold much weight. The place the truck went off the road at was a high embankment with a culvert beside it and then a bunch of brush and some old growth pine trees mixed with oak saplings. All that stuff managed to slow the truck down enough that I thought they were going to be fine until the truck started rolling. There was also a pretty large number of Zombies encroaching on the rolling truck. I saw big red jugs flying everywhere.

  Great. Ginny and Reeves were in a truck that was rolling into a
forest full of Zombies and they were flinging big jugs of highly flammable diesel fuel everywhere. Ann slammed on the brakes and I almost joined Ginny and Reeves in their travels through the woods. Ann yelled to cover her and started running down the culvert towards the truck that was now resting on its side against a bunch of brush and trees it had knocked over.

  Ann was running into the forest blasting away with her AK at the Zombies who were popping up to try and get to her and the overturned truck. I did not see any movement from the truck yet. I did see about a zillion Zombies coming towards us from the direction we’d been running from. Ann probably had about thirty seconds to run up the culvert and flip the truck by herself then pull out Ginny and Reeves and carry them back to the Hummer. In the meanwhile, I went ahead and started blasting away at the tsunami of Zombie getting ready to crash down over us.

  I might as well have been shooting bullets into the ocean for all the good it did. I finished feeding the belt of ammo through and went ahead and popped myself out of the turret and over the backseat into the driver’s seat. Ann had still not reached the overturned pickup. I floored the gas pedal and went straight down into the culvert. I collided with the dirt on the other side and got stuck. I also bounced my face off the steering wheel hard enough to make me see stars and taste blood.

  Ignoring the pain, I put the Hummer in reverse and stomped down hard on the gas pedal again. Nothing happened for a second then the wheels got some better purchase and I started going backwards. Once I was free of the dirt I put the Hummer back in drive and drove at an angle up the embankment. I got to the truck at about the same time as Ann did. I didn’t bother yelling as there was no way to be heard over the roar of the Zombies who were now only steps away from us. The front window of the Titan pickup blew outwards and I saw Reeves drag Ginny out and start moving towards us. Ann was busy using up her ammo on the Zombies right in front of her while she tried to give Reeves enough time to get Ginny in the Hummer.

  I struggled over the hump in between the seats to open the passenger door to make it easier for Ann and Reeves to jump in. A Zombie jumped in with me instead. It crawled on top of me as I pulled out my knife and started stabbing into the Zombies torso over and over again, hoping to hit something vital. I saw Reeves had shoved Ginny in the backseat and was struggling to get the door closed as a couple of Zombies were wedged into it. I didn’t see Ann anywhere. Something sat on my feet. I pushed the dead Zombie off me and did a sit-up with my pistol held in front of me.

  Ann was in my sights. I quickly dropped the pistol as she stayed sitting on my feet and gunned the engine to get us moving. The door slammed shut as the Zombies who had been standing inside of it were forcefully left behind. We started moving forward. For about five seconds. Then we slammed into a tree trunk or something that was hidden in the underbrush. Ann hit reverse and drove us into a few of the Zombies who had caught up before she drove us through the underbrush and back into the culvert.

  Instead of trying to go up the culvert and face the Zombies who were pouring down it on top of us Ann kept the Hummer in the culvert and we drove at an angle for about two hundred yards before she yanked the wheel hard to the left to get us up and out of the culvert. I yanked my feet out from under her and stuck my head over by the window to see how we were doing. It looked like we were doing much better. That Zombie tsunami was rapidly fading into the distance as we drove back the way we had come from.

  I looked into the back seat. Ginny was sitting up and Reeves was wrapping bandages around her head as she guzzled down a bottled water.

  “Everybody is present and accounted for.” I piped up for the benefit of Ann who was focused on driving.

  Ann slowed and came to a full stop. I stared at her.

  “Do you think maybe we can get the dead body out of the floorboards and try to mop up some of this grossness before we continue our retreat?”

  What does it say about me that I had been using the dead body as a foot rest and hadn’t been super concerned about disposing of it? Don’t answer that.

  I drug the body out of the Hummer and left it laying in the road. We had given up trying to dispose of bodies respectfully. There was just too many of them laying around. We’d have spent all of our time burning bodies and digging graves if we tried that. I had managed to get blood all over the place when I pscyho-knife-shower-scened the Zombie. I grabbed a t-shirt and used it to wipe up a bunch of the blood before sitting back down.

  “Think you’re done do you?” Ann asked. She pointed at my backpack. I looked down at myself. I’d basically been a sponge for the blood from the guy I had knife murdered. I ripped my clothes off and threw all the bloody stuff into the street then quickly pulled on some new clothes.

  “Can we go now or are you trying to tease the Zombies? We take much longer they’re going to be on top of us.”

  “I want you to drive.” Ann said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  She just walked around the car and got in the driver’s side. Pushing me towards the steering wheel. I handed her the map to look for a road we could use to go around Springfield and put us in drive to keep on moving.

  Entry 17: Chastised

  We drove back the way we had come for a few miles. The four of us back in the same car once again. The loss of the truck with all the diesel and other supplies in it sucked but such is life in the apocalypse. One big suck. We had jugs of diesel hung all over the Hummer as well so we were good on fuel for a while. I was still pretty OCD about pulling over and filling up the tank and topping off the jugs every time we passed an opportunity to do so though. The image in my head of us running out of gas with a mob of Zombies right behind us kept me motivated.

  Everyone was quiet. Reeves was actually asleep. Ginny was trying to sleep. Ann was sitting there staring out the window. I reached over and grabbed her hand to hold it. She looked at me and smiled.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been driving so fast. I screwed up. If we’d been going slower we wouldn’t have ended up in that mess the way we did. We’d still have the truck with all the supplies and Ginny wouldn’t be hurt.”

  I squeezed her hand. “Is that what’s bugging you? That we somehow drove into a Zombie ambush? Any of us would have done the same thing. We actually got pretty lucky since if we had been driving at night we would have never seen the ones on the side and we’d be Zombie chow by now. Which is why we don’t drive at night. Now we know we have yet another thing to worry about while driving and we know what to look for and hopefully can figure out how to avoid it. Most of what we lost was just extra stuff anyway so I think we’re good.”

  Ginny chimed in from the back seat. “I’m fine Ann. Reeves is fine. You think you screwed up? I flipped a truck full of cans of gas sideways into a forest full of Zombies. All you did was drive over a hill going pretty fast. I’m definitely thinking I win the screwed-up trophy for this one.”

  “I think you both deserve a trophy for driving us the hell out of that mess.”

  The words hung out there as Ann and Ginny both ignored me. Teach me to try and say nice things. I’ll just stick with being surly and sarcastic. It comes a lot more naturally to me.

  I stopped at the next exit to look for diesel and before we cleared the station Ann and Ginny hugged it out. I was not hugged. In the truck lot, we siphoned diesel out of a parked big rig into one of our spare canisters. We had decided to put the diesel in the canisters first and take a look at it before putting it straight into the tank. This way if something was off with the diesel we could skip using it and get some more rather than figuring it out when the Hummer broke down. That plan fell apart under close scrutiny since none of us could tell good diesel from bad diesel but whatever.

  As we were siphoning, the driver of the truck started banging on the passenger window. We’d had this happen before. Truck drivers would get sick and pull into a truck stop for a nap and wake up as Zombies. Most of them couldn’t figure out how to open the door so they were doomed to spend the rest of their li
ves in their sleeper cabs. It had been well over a year now that this guy must have been sitting in the truck. I remembered seeing incidents on the news all the time where children left inside cars died in twelve hours from the heat. Zombies seemed to be able to just keep going. We’d discussed it and the general consensus was the virus gave them the ability to go into some kind of stasis until something or someone came along that woke them up. The stasis let them save up their energy and avoid needing much in the way of subsidence. We had never seen Zombie poop so we were thinking they were very efficient machines.

  They weren’t graveyard Zombies though. They were still living, breathing people. I was thinking at some point they’d wither away and finally die but they kept lasting way past my expectations. The virus may not protect them from gunshots or stab wounds but it definitely hooked them up when it came to stuff like dehydration and that pesky need for something to eat every once in a while. We did not bother killing most of the ones we saw. For the same reason that we did not bury the dead. There was just too many of them.