My eye had been gouged out in a fight with a Zombie in what seemed like another life when we had been breaking into a house in Florida. I went around now without an eye patch so the pirate jokes had finally died down. That was a good thing because it turns out most pirate jokes are just really bad puns. I did have a nasty looking scar on the side of the eye and my vision was probably a solid forty percent out of that eye. If we could find a place that had good deals on Lasik I probably would consider it.
We had been planning our route to avoid going through large cities. Instead of staying on I-70 and driving through Denver we got off on a smaller highway and headed towards the mountains. We should be able to get back on I-70 if these other roads were passable. The scary thing about the smaller roads was that we weren’t guaranteed to find large truck stops on the side of the road at regular intervals. On the plus side, we were less likely to run into an enemy convoy.
Most of the towns we had passed so far had been single stoplight kind of places. A few Zombies had been visible here and there but easy to avoid. We had Tim take some shots at one of the Zombies when we had stopped for a rest break to see how well he handled a rifle. He was bad. Ann was impressed that we had found someone with worse aim than me. She told Tim he’d be better off running up to the Zombie and putting the barrel on the guys heart and then pulling the trigger. I personally considered that a solid approach that didn’t waste any ammo. You just had to do it before the Zombie got a hold on your gun, or your arm…
The highway we were on took us between Colorado Springs and Denver. We considered heading for Colorado Springs as we were pretty sure there was large Air Force base around there somewhere. We talked it out and decided to stick to our original plan though and keep moving towards Portland. Everything went great until we hit a town called Castle Rock.
Castle Rock was a much wider stop on the highway. Another Interstate moved through it going north. It was a connection between Denver and Colorado Springs. It was crawling with Zombies. We came down off a foothill and saw the town opening up in front of us. We had stopped and taken out binoculars to check it out before we drove into it. There were Zombies running all around. It looked like most of them were converging on a large brick warehouse looking building. We sat there watching and tried to decide what to do.
Going back would suck. There was a couple of other roads we could try though. While we were sitting there trying to figure it out we saw a helicopter fly in and land on the building all the Zombies seem to be focused on. We all froze. We were not very far from them if you were looking out the cockpit of a helicopter. I put the binoculars back up to my eyes. It looked like a commercial helicopter like the eyewitness news guys would fly around in to inform you that there was a major traffic jam on the highway you were currently sitting in in a giant traffic jam. I never really got the point of those guys. The guy who got out of the helicopter was absolutely Korean. By absolutely Korean, I meant he was an Asian looking guy in a camo uniform that had a red patch on the front of it.
I looked around at everyone. The guy had disappeared into the building at this point. It was cold outside and around five in the afternoon. It would be dark in a few hours. I told everyone what I had seen, wondering if there was anything we could do to go ahead and make a strike.
“I wonder what they’re doing in that building?” Ann asked once I had finished explaining that the guy had disappeared into the building.
“I could probably put a few rounds through that helicopter and they’d be stuck there.” Reeves sounded like he was planning out loud. “Or, we get close enough, wait for them to take off, then put a few rounds through them and take them out so they don’t have someone to come and rescue them. I’m thinking there are more of them at the airport or somewhere so we need to make sure they go down if we hit them.”
“Why are we shooting these guys down?” Ginny asked. “Is our strategy just to kill randomly until we get caught or do we think shooting this guy down is going to accomplish something a little more strategic?”
“It will accomplish him and whoever gets in the helicopter with him being dead. As long as we do it right there shouldn’t be much risk of backlash for us. We move in close enough to make sure Reeves can get the shots off, we shoot them down, we drive back the way we came and take a different road.” Even as Ann was saying it she didn’t seem super convinced.
Ginny brought up another point that the rest of us had missed. “If we get close enough to guarantee Reeves can shoot down the helicopter then we will be close enough to be overrun by all those Zombies. They’ll be coming at us in a swarm as soon as the first shot goes off, or sooner if they hear the Hummer pulling in. If Reeves misses the helicopter pilot will have time to get off a mayday and they’ll probably send another helicopter to investigate. There is a military base in Colorado Springs so there’s a good chance the next helicopter we see may be an Apache or something. Unless we can think of a way to take this guy out for sure I’d say we just go back the we came and take another road through the mountains. This one guy is probably not worth it.”
“I left my RPG in the other truck.” Reeves said. “I thought we were going to kill some Koreans? I see a Korean up ahead who is doing something sneaky in that building. I say we kill him. If we want to do it safe how about we hide the Hummer, wait until it gets dark, then infiltrate that building and kill them?”
“Did you bring a batman gun that we shoot over the wall then it pulls us up the side of it?” I smiled to take the sting out of my comment. “I’m starting to lean towards what Ginny said. This may be a Korean we need to leave alone. We can’t get to him, he’s got a Zombie moat around a big wall we can’t scale.”
We sat there for another minute in silence. All of us trying to think of a way we could do something to strike a blow. When none of us came up with anything I went ahead and called it. We were going to get back in the Hummer and head back to the last crossroad then go around Castle Rock and continue on into the Rockies. We all got back in the Hummer and I started it up. I started working on a three point turn on the narrow road.
Ann started tapping me on the shoulder and telling me to look behind us. I looked back in the direction of the town and saw the damned helicopter coming right at us.
Entry 27: Run Forest, Run!
It looked like the helicopter must have seen us. It was flying casually towards us. It being a civilian model helicopter it did not have any weapons systems. The pilot was just coming by to see who we were it looked like. Maybe he thought we were on his side and lost or something. He was either doing it to satisfy his own curiosity or he had already reported us and was coming to validate if we were friendly or not. Or, there was always the chance he happened to randomly be flying in this direction.
Making a split-second decision I yelled for Reeves to get in the turret and start shooting. The helicopter would be in range by the time Reeves was ready. To make us seem just as casual as the helicopter I went ahead and started driving slowly towards the approaching helicopter. The co-pilot had a pair of binoculars up to his eyes and was studying us through them. Guessing Reeves was ready to start blasting away I accelerated to get us as close as possible to the helicopter. I figured we didn’t have much time before the pilot realized we were not allies.
The loud belch of the fifty reverberated through the Hummer as Reeves went into automatic mode with the big gun. He needed to shoot that helicopter down before they had a chance to fly out of range. The helicopter started pulling up and then it jerked around a little bit and spun in a circle before slamming into the ground a little bit off the road, up and to the left of us. I went ahead and pulled us as close to the wreckage as I could get so we could confirm the pilots were dead.
One look at the wreckage was enough to convince me that no one was walking away. Reeves put a few bullets into the cockpit area just to be on the safe side. Ann poked me and reminded me that Zombies would be streaming this way pretty soon, in addition to attack helicopters and god knew what
else. We had just poked the hornet nest and now needed to run away before we got stung. I backed up and spun the wheel to get us headed towards the crossroads.
Judging by the number of Zombies that had been in the town and the noise the fifty and the helicopter crashing had made I was guessing this place would be crawling with Zombies in a few minutes. No worries, we were going to be headed the other direction towards the empty nothingness that is Eastern Colorado. I don’t understand why they didn’t give the half of a state with no mountains in it back to Kansas. Either way, we’d be going out into the nature and then turning around and coming back through another town called Silver Heights. It was written in a tiny font and had a really small dot on it on the map I was looking at so I was thinking it would be much better to drive through despite its proximity to Denver.
For now, we needed to put some distance between us and the crash. I sped away like a drunk driver who just ran over somebody’s dog. I was leaving the scene of the crime and I was doing it fast. I was planning on going back to HWY-86 and taking that north. If we did see more helicopters or anything we could pull into the woods and hide. Hopefully they wouldn’t be searching that hard. My guess was still the pilot and copilot crash of that little news chopper could be ruled an accident by the Koreans running this territory. I was also betting on them being in Colorado Springs versus being in Denver.
Colorado Springs would have given them more options for weapons and vehicles since there was the military base there. Colorado Springs was to the South so we needed to head North and get as far away from the crash site as possible. It looked like the helicopter had just gone down but if they had mentioned they were going to investigate a Hummer sitting up on the mountain before they crashed that would look suspicious. Either way, we needed to be gone. I was driving fast around a winding mountain road with Reeves, Ann, and Ginny all telling me to slow down. Tim wasn’t saying anything, probably because I had scared him into paralysis with my driving.
To be honest, my driving was scaring me a bit. These roads weren’t in the best shape and the Hummer was not really built for speed. It was built to drive down a straight road and survive running over an IED. I slowed down when we went around a curve and I bounced us off a guardrail that looked out over about a 200 foot drop straight to a fiery death. Reeves yelled for someone to hand him a new pair of underwear while Ann just hit me in the arm over and over again and screamed for me to slow down. She was not using very nice language. Ginny made the best argument though.
“We’ll get out of here a lot faster if we don’t crash our only ride. Also, you’re scaring the dog.”
I heard Daisy whimpering in the back and smelled the strong odor of dog piss. Great. Windows down, I slowed the Hummer to a speed that was only stupid instead of crazy. I thought it was a good compromise. We reached the crossroads with no more incidents and I jerked the wheel left to get us headed north towards Denver. We were now back on a large spilt highway called “Founders Road”. There were suburbs around us but no industrial complexes. Most importantly, no roadblocks or helicopters in sight.
It hurt me to do it but I didn’t stop at the exits with gas stations on them. I had become a bit OCD about stopping every time I saw a chance to get fuel. This gas guzzling SUV on steroids gave me nightmares about being stranded in the middle of this desert crap with no fuel. All I knew about the desert was that there were big snakes and spiders and you had to get water by sucking on cacti. Cacti have spikes and looked like they would be painful to try and walk past, forget trying to use them like a water fountain.
“Another helicopter coming up the road behind us!” Ginny alerted us from the backseat. I looked in the mirror and saw the helicopter coming. It was close enough to see it was another of those civilian looking helicopters. They had to have already seen us so even if there were some trees to hide in it would be too late.
I slowed down and yelled for Reeves to get back in the turret. It wasn’t like we were going to be able to outrun them. I thought some more and barked out some more orders for Reeves. He was probably already doing this anyway but it made sense to me to repeat it.
“Get in the turret but squish down so they can’t see you and when I give the word pop up and start shooting. Shoot good. These guys are going to be more suspicious than those last guys.” I continued to slow down to a reasonable speed while we waited to see what was going to happen. Why had they sent out another generic copter to investigate? Maybe that’s all they had available.
When the copter got closer Ann asked why they were using a telescope to look at us.
“Rocket Launcher!” Reeves yelled, bouncing up into the turret and opening fire as the road beside us blew up and we went up on two wheels. We slammed back down onto the ground. Luckily, we had gone back wheels down and we were still moving so nothing super important had gotten damaged.
I looked in the mirror. The helicopter was now flying sideways towards us with the guy leaning out with the RFP getting it lined back up on us.
“Quit missing!” I yelled at Reeves.
He yelled back something about my mom. He didn’t even know my mom.
Speaking of Reeves, he was blasting away at the copter that had dropped way back now. Another missile came streaming for us and Ann yelled for me to dodge. Because dodging an RPG with this big ass Hummer was an option. Considering we were fixing to die in a giant ball of fire anyway I figured what the hell. I slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel hard to the right causing us to go into some kind of crazy spin that took us through the median and onto the other side of the road. We came to a hard stop when we drifted into an overturned school bus.
The helicopter was drifting towards us as they looked to see if we had managed to survive that evasive maneuver.
“Reeves! Now!” I yelled.
He pulled himself back onto the gun. We could all see him working through the process to focus when all he wanted to do was blackout. He pulled the trigger and started yelling. Nothing happened except he looked pretty dumb. I stored the image in my brain to laugh about later if we happened to survive. He figured out the gun wasn’t working and cleared the chamber and started shooting. The helicopter had figured out we weren’t dead yet and had retreated. The gunner was shooting back at us with what looked like a regular AK-47. He must have run out of rockets.
Reeves must have finally connected as the windshield of the chopper started cracking open. Then the chopper was out of range and still in the air. Ann yelled and pointed at the road. It looked like a convoy of camo trucks were headed towards us. That was no good. We all piled back in the Hummer and I pressed the pedal to the floor. It took me a second but then I remembered we had to put it in drive first. I did that and got us going. Ann was yelling something.
“You’re driving the wrong way! Spin around!”
Oh crap. I spun the steering wheel and got us moving in the correct direction. “How many of them are back there?” I asked.
“Looks like three of them. A troop transport looking truck and two Hummers.” Ginny responded a minute later.
We would be dead if they caught us. They might not even need to catch us if they had a rocket launcher. I stomped harder on the accelerator. We were bouncing all over the place but we were moving at a really fast clip. We made it to I-25 and I took us up the ramp to go north towards Denver. We bounced off the sides of the on-ramp a little bit since I didn’t bother slowing down to pull onto the ramp.
We heard a crashing noise behind us as we reached the top of the on-ramp and started north. I yelled to Ginny to try and see what that was. She yelled back she couldn’t see anything but it didn’t seem like the enemy had made it up the ramp yet. We kept on rolling as fast as I could get the Hummer to go. The convoy never came up the ramp behind us so they must have crashed or something. I wanted to get off the interstate before they had a chance to repair their damage and come after us.
“Where can we get off at?” I asked Ann. She was busy staring at the map.
She co
nferred with Ginny for a minute while they both pointed at the map and then started looking for signs on the side of the road. It was starting to get dark so that made it a little more difficult. Finally, they agreed on a plan of action and Ann told me to look for the Hess road exit. About ten minutes later I spotted it and we went flying down it.
“Let’s hang out under the overpass for about ten minutes.” Reeves said from out of the backseat.
“Why?” we all asked him.
“First of all, we need to clean the backseat. Steve’s driving literally scared the shit out of this dog. This very large dog. On that same note Ginny, Tim, and I need new clothes. Plus, I’m thinking the convoy may have crashed but they may have sent another helicopter to look for us. If it’s right behind us then they may miss us if we sit under the overpass. Unless they open the windows on the helicopter and smell the dog crap.”
Reeves had a point. The car really stunk. I had known it somewhere in my mind this whole time but with being shot at and everything it had not seemed overly important at the time. I realized now that my eyes had tears in them from the strong, acrid odor rolling over me from the backseat. I pulled under the overpass and shut the engine off. We all got out of the Hummer and started using wet wipes to clean up the mess. Daisy seemed humiliated at first but then started barking real loud.
Zournal (Book 4): Reap What You Sow Page 14
