Zournal (Book 4): Reap What You Sow

by Merritt, R. S.

  The guy in this cab was freaking me out a little bit though. The skin around his face was pulled tight around his skull. His fingers looked like blue claws. His eyes were sunk in his head and seemed to almost be glowing red. The eyes also seemed to convey an intelligence I hadn’t seen before in them. The crazy was still there. The evil desire to rend me apart and eat the tasty bits was reflected in those eyes as well. The scary part though was that tiny glimmer of intelligence. If these things started getting smarter we were screwed. I considered killing the truck guy Zombie but decided if he couldn’t figure out how to operate the door handle he probably wasn’t going to emerge as the next Zombie Hitler.

  We finished siphoning the gas and got everything in order to keep moving down the road. I climbed into the driver’s seat since Ann was still blaming herself for almost getting us killed and refused to drive. No one else got in the Hummer. I got out and looked around. Reeves shrugged and pointed to where Ann and Ginny were still in the middle of a cry fest. No way I was getting involved in that. My mouth was getting sore from constantly having my foot shoved into it.

  I decided to kill the guy in the truck.

  I waved Reeves over.

  “Hey boss. What’s up? I wouldn’t go to the other side of the Hummer. It must be that time of month or something. Do not tell them I said that.”

  “No worries. I’m working on reducing the number of stupid things I say per day. You want to give me a hand killing this guy in the truck?”

  “Why?” Reeves stared at me. Probably amused by the conflict between me saying I was working on reducing the number of stupid things I say per day then throwing out an idea to do something stupid.

  I couldn’t really think of a good reason why. I mostly felt that I had given him enough attention for him to stand out from the background and seem more like a real person to me. A real person should be put out of this kind of misery.

  “Cool boss. I’m down. Let’s go ahead and commit some murder. How you want to do it? That truck is a little tall for our normal SOP.”

  Both of us were willing to risk our lives fighting this Zombie instead of going to try and deal with the two crying women. At least we had a decent chance of winning in a fight with the Zombie. There would be no winning if we went and tried to talk to them. I went and grabbed a long crow bar out of the Hummer.

  “I’ll climb up and bash the window in with this. Then when the Zombie comes out you bash him to the ground with your bat and I’ll finish him off when he hits the ground. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.”

  Reeves looked at me. “You ever think maybe this little apocalypse experience is changing our perspective on the world?”

  I ignored him and climbed up onto the driver’s side of the truck and got ready to bash in the window. The driver’s side being on the side away from the girls so we didn’t have to spend a lot of time explaining what we were doing to them. The driver’s side being the opposite side of where the Zombie had been banging away on the window trying to get to us. The driver’s side being the side where the fucking window was rolled down.

  I did not notice the window was rolled down. What kind of stupid ass Zombie is spending eternity in a truck because he never checked the other side of the truck to see if he could get out. I was staring at the window trying to figure out why it was so clean and lining up my swing with the crowbar when the blue moron came flying out of the window and carried me to the ground with him. I was able to flip around in the air so I landed mostly on top of him and I popped up real fast as soon as we hit the ground. I knew my wrists were going to hurt from doing that.

  Reeves hit me in the back of the head with his bat as I was popping up. My head went forward and I went back down. I almost blacked out but not quite. I did bite the shit out of my tongue. The Zombie did grab me by the hair and start trying to aggressively give me a hickie. Reeves was now on top of the Zombie pulling its head away from me and sawing away on its neck with his knife. Blood was pouring all over my face. Warm, salty, disgusting blood. I tried to throw a few punches but I was not feeling a hundred percent between the fall and Reeves treating my head like a T-ball.

  The Zombie fell off of me. Reeves got up from straddling me. His arms were dripping blood. I was wiping blood off my face. The Zombies head was barely attached to the body. Reeves had been sawing away at it to make sure the guy was good and dead. I sat up. We looked at each other and started laughing.

  Reeves pointed behind me. I turned and looked and saw Ann and Ginny had come flying around the corner of the truck with assault rifles aimed in our direction. They were both standing there now slack jawed staring at Reeves and me. Ginny mouthed WTF and Reeves and I started laughing even harder. Ginny and Ann looked at each other and shrugged. They started walking back to the Hummer. Ann yelled for us to figure out something about our clothes because we weren’t getting back in the Hummer covered in blood.

  I climbed up in the truck to see what was up there. I reached through the window and unlocked the door so I could get in without crawling through the open window area. I crawled in and pulled the curtain back on the sleeper part of the truck to see what was back there. I had my pistol out in case there was another Zombie chilling out back there waiting for the right time to pop out and give me a heart attack. No other Zombies back there. I had half-expected the decomposed and partially consumed corpse of whoever had been driving with the guy but there was no sign of another person. For a small space a Zombie had been living in for over a year it didn’t smell too bad. Probably since there had been an open window the entire time.

  I poked around until I found the guys shower bag and some extra shirts. I climbed down with the shower bag and T-Shirts and Reeves and I stripped off our blood-soaked shirts and used the guys wash rag and towel to clean off as good as we could. Then we sprayed on some cheap cologne and slathered on some of the dead dude’s deodorant and called it a day. The T-Shirts were both straight out of the funny redneck clearance rack.

  Reeves had a picture of a Rhinoceros and the words save the chubby unicorn. Mine said if I was a Jedi there was a hundred percent chance I would use the force inappropriately. Reeves shook his head at my shirt then read his own.

  “Poor guy must have died a virgin.”

  That set us both off on laughing again.

  Entry 18: Over It

  We walked back to the Hummer sporting our sweet new wardrobe. Ginny was up in the turret looking around and Ann was in the driver’s seat. I sat down in the passenger seat and looked over at Ann with a questioning look.

  “I felt stupid for what I did driving intro that ambush. What you just did with the open window and the random Zombie attack was like five miles past retarded though so I’m feeling much better about myself. Or, at least I’m feeling like I should probably be the one driving. I may make mistakes but you make them on a whole other level.”

  I couldn’t really argue with her. Especially not with the massive headache I had and the massive amounts of pain from the spasms in my wrists and back. She was the guardian of our best medications so I wanted to be on her good side. After the appropriate amount of groveling, she finally tossed me some muscle relaxers and pain killers that had me fast asleep in about thirty minutes. I think she may have just been sick of listening to me moan in pain.

  I woke up feeling worse than when I had passed out in the passenger seat. My neck was stiff and moving it sent waves of pain through my entire body. My head was pounding. I looked over at Ann. She was driving along with eyes constantly scanning the sides of the road as we moved. It didn’t look like she intended to drive into an ambush again any time soon. She noticed me moving around.

  “Hey there sleeping beauty. Just so you know, you are super gross when you sleep. Like you have no self-respect and just make all kinds of gross noises.”

  “Must be the Coors Light and Chef Boyardee making its way through my body. I refuse to be embarrassed by anything that happens while I’m asleep. Especially with the kind of diet we’re following. I th
ink I need more pills. I can’t move my head.”

  “Try not getting hit in the head by guys with baseball bats.” Ann was rummaging around even as she said it and pulled out another muscle relaxer and pain killer combo for me. Reeves hooked me up with a bottle of water. He was being nice and keeping quiet since the whole hitting me in the back of the head with a baseball bat thing had happened.

  I sat up and got the pills down with the bottle of water. My neck and body were so stiff. I did manage to spill a bunch of the water all over myself. Once I had the pills down and while I was waiting for them to kick in I asked Ann where we were.

  “We’re headed West now on I-44. We just started but we’re headed towards Springfield again. This time we’ll be crossing the northern part of it instead of the southern part. Hoping most of the Zombies wandered south.”

  Sounded like a solid plan to me. I told her to wake me up if we were fixing to be eaten or anything. Then I retreated from reality into a dreamless sleep for a few hours.

  Entry 19: Twelve Step Program

  I was sucking down a lot of prescription strength pain killers lately. I wondered if that was something I should be worried about. I’d woke up in pain again. Ann had tossed me over another pain killer. She’d told me I was going to be put back on Tylenol pretty soon. She was worried I might get addicted. I personally didn’t see the problem with getting addicted since there was about a ninety percent chance we’d be dead inside of two months anyway but if it made her feel better I’d switch to aspirin. On the off chance that we survived all this I’d rather not have to deal with an addiction anyway. I was probably fine since I typically didn’t like the medicine head the pills gave me anyway.

  Ann and Ginny seemed to be coping pretty well with the situation. Reeves was getting a bit substance dependent. I wasn’t trying to judge him but we were a small group of people and him being drunk or high half the time was starting to be an issue. If he’d been completely sober, he might not have hit me in the back of the head with the baseball bat. Getting hit with a bat sucked but it could just as easily have been him trying to shoot the Zombie and my head getting in the way. At some point, I should probably have a talk with him. Preferably before we all got killed.

  In the meanwhile, I sat in my seat and rode along with the Oxy buzz. Even with the muscle relaxers and the Oxy, moving my neck still hurt. I tried to focus as we got closer to the city and help look to see if we were driving into another bad situation. The greenery and nature started giving way to concrete and run down mini marts. The number of Zombies we saw wandering around started to increase substantially. So far, we didn’t see anything that made us think we were driving into a repeat of what had happened on the south side of the city. We were exercising an abundance of caution though. You really couldn’t be too careful when everything with a heartbeat outside the car wanted to kill you.

  We were starting to get closer to the city and the tension was ratcheting up in the car. Reeves had replaced Ginny in the turret. Ginny was sitting in the backseat already wearing her bug out bag in case we needed to bail. Ann’s hands were white knuckled on the steering wheel. I was having an issue getting overly concerned since I was pretty doped up but I did try my best to look around and see if anything was charging us.

  Driving over an intersection and looking down into the streets I made out what looked like thousands of Zombies surrounding one large building in the middle of downtown. There may be people stuck in there or the people may have already died and the Zombies were still hanging out. Either way, Zombies standing around over there, meant less Zombies standing around over here. Ann kept right on driving and the landscape melted away from city streets back to nature.

  We had so much food and diesel and water and weapons tied to and shoved into the Hummer we’d taken to calling it the Sanford and Sons war machine. Well, I had taken to calling it that. Reeves found it mildly amusing, Ann ignored me when I said it, and Ginny had no clue who Sanford and Sons were. We’d thrown out a lot of stuff from the front seat after I cut open the Zombie on the upholstery. I still was surrounded by boxes of ammo, five machetes from a Home Depot we pillaged, a few pillows to help me through the inevitable concussions, two big boxes of Band-Aids and gauze, and a large box of Capris Suns. I also had about two hundred snack packs of those crackers you dip the cheese onto with the little red rectangle thing sitting on the dash in front of me.

  The rest of the car was filled with all kinds of junk. Anything any of us thought may be useful had been jammed into the Hummer or tied onto the racks on the outside of it. Diesel was mostly tied to the outside of the Hummer but there was some in the back as well. Sleeping bags, pillows, hatchets, a zillion water bottles, random canned and plastic encased foods, toilet paper, wet wipes, baseball bats, flashlights, piles of new clothes, iPods, and all kinds of junk were squirreled away inside the heavily armored vehicle.

  Our personal looks had evolved over the apocalypse too. Reeves had hunted down battery powered hair clippers so him and I were rocking the skin head looks. It was just easier to keep our heads clean and keep ourselves less itchy. From a fighting perspective, it didn’t give the enemy something to grab and jerk you around by. We’d forget to do it for a month or two and our hair would grow out until one of us would remember and then we’d shave it off again. Ann and Ginny did not shave their heads. They made fun of us for doing it. They made fun of us enough that we’d taken to wearing hats most of the time. Then they called us undercover skin heads and actually thought that was clever.

  If you’ve ever been camping you know how nice it is to take a shower after being out in the woods a few days. Think about driving cross country with three other people and constantly sweating in between getting covered in cool stuff like Zombie blood. Take into account that in order to take a shower you have to find a place with running water or a bucket near a source of fresh water or get naked and jump in a pond. Despite what you see in all the horror movies, most people are not comfortable getting naked to jump into a pond when you could get attacked at any second. So, we sponge bathed and sprayed on deodorant for the most part.

  Cleaning our clothes was not really an issue. We periodically stopped in at random stores and stocked up on new underwear and shirts and pants. When our stuff got dirty or covered in blood or whatever we just stripped and put on new stuff. Which meant that Reeves and I ended up in some really random stuff. Ginny and Ann both made attempts to find stuff that was ‘cute’ to wear. Reeves and I would actually go out of our way to find stupid looking stuff then regret it later. I was currently wearing a T-Shirt with a pack of Merida rolls on it that said ‘Nice Buns’ in big block letters while Reeves had on a bright pink button down with a huge flower on the back of it.

  We were all covered in weapons. Knowing we could get ambushed at any time and have our obvious weapons removed we also took the time to try and hide weapons all over our bodies and in our clothes. I had a small knife strapped around each ankle, a small .38 pistol in the pocket of my jacket, a Kabar in the back of my pants, a nine millimeter in a holster on my belt, ammo pouches shoved in pockets on my cargo shorts, a couple more knives shoved in different pockets, a shotgun on the floor in front of me, an M-16 I kept slung on my shoulder when I got out of the Hummer and the big iron pole I was currently using to take out Zombies. I was probably the least armed out of the four of us. I’m not even going to try and guess where the others had weapons shoved.

  We may not look like the actors in a Mad Max movie but we were Mad Max bad ass regardless. We were going to need to be if we wanted to stay true to this course we had mapped out for ourselves and have any hope of coming out the other side. All in all, now that I thought about it, a few substance dependencies probably not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. We’d have plenty of time to sober up when our bodies were cooling off in a ditch somewhere. We’d be the ones laying in a big pile of our own brass surrounded by the bodies of our enemies.

  Entry 20: Did They do that on Purpose?

&
nbsp; We pulled in at the first truck stop on the road after we made it through Springfield. We were divided in our thinking on how to proceed. We could stay on the Interstates and be pretty sure we’d find plenty of diesel and that the road would stay fairly clear and passable or we could try the smaller highways and roads to avoid the bigger cities and lower the chance of running into the Koreans. We figured the Koreans would be using the larger roads down South to move their people into place but there would still be scouting parties and others taking these other Interstates.

  We could try just driving and when we got close enough to the Koreans we could open fire. It had worked for us before. I wasn’t real keen on trying our luck out again though. Especially since we could run into a convoy of trucks or have our machine gun be up against a Hummer with a grenade launcher on it or something. I preferred the method of attack where we hid in the woods and came in at night and killed them while they were sleeping. Or, maybe we could find some dynamite and blow up the passes they needed to move trucks to this side of the country. Either way, we needed to figure out something as we were getting to the halfway point across the country and were bound to start seeing bad guys pretty soon.