Zournal
Book 3
“Scorched Earth”
R S Merritt
Text Copyright © 2016 Randall Scott Merritt
All Rights Reserved
As with all that is my life, this book is dedicated to my family and most especially to my beautiful wife.
Table of Contents
Entry 1: Death Rally
Entry 2: Ride Until You Fall
Entry 3: Taking a Dip
Entry 4: The Easy Way
Entry 5: Radioactive Parking Lot
Entry 6: Great, Something Else Trying to Kill Us
Entry 7: Last Man Standing
Entry 8: Whack a Mole
Entry 9: Laying down on the Job
Entry 10: Ants In my Pants
Entry 11: Hay Ride
Entry 12: Club Med(ical)
Entry 13: One Way on a Greyhound
Entry 14: Big Brother
Entry 15: Inventory
Entry 16: Keep Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’
Entry 17: Room to Breathe
Entry 18: Can We Add on the Insurance?
Entry 19: Convoy
Entry 20: Death and Taxes
Entry 21: Wasteland
Entry 22: Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires
Entry 23: The Walking Wounded
Entry 24: Let There Be Light
Entry 25: Checking In
Entry 26: Great, Something Else Trying to Kill Us
Entry 27: Second Wind
Entry 28: Gun Smoke
Entry 29: Battle Scarred
Entry 30: Into the Mountains
Entry 31: Moonshine Fixes Everything
Entry 32: The Irish Flu
Entry 33: Hand Grenades and Horseshoes
Entry 34: Damn the Torpedoes
Entry 35: Run Like Hell
Entry 36: You Can’t Go Home Again
Entry 37: Stocking Up
Entry 38: Field Trip
Entry 39: I Walk Through the Valley in the Shadow of Death
Entry 40: Welcome to Dollywood
Entry 41: Grief is the Price Paid for Love
Entry 42: Pyre
Entry 43: Dig Two Graves
Entry 1: Death Rally
Frank flipped his cigarette onto the blood covered body lying on a kerosene soaked pile of grocery store pallets and boxes on the sandy beach. The poor bastard laying there had been a heavy-set man with a large beard, tattoos covering his upper torso. The man’s torso was disfigured by large bites and scratches gouged into his flesh. He kind of looked like he had been attacked by Andre the Giant yielding a serrated ice cream scooper. The cigarette caught on the dead man’s waistband. The red-hot ember kissed the kerosene that drenched the body. With a loud whoosh, the body began to burn. Frank turned his back and walked towards where their bikes were sitting in a neat row by the beach access ramp.
Frank walked briskly towards the road where they had left their bikes parked. Jorge, Twitch, Meetch and Rory all followed dutifully behind him. They had started out fifty strong a few months ago. A group of friends who had met on Facebook, all were ex-military men in their late thirties to early fifties. They also were all interested in bike rallies and Harleys and also happened to mostly be gay. It was really amazing the way you could find a small subset of people using social media to make you feel less alone. Frank ruminated that just twenty years ago, there was no way he could have met these guys. Him and the rest of them would have been sure they were alone in this world.
There was no more Facebook now. They’d barely even seen any other normal, uninfected people since this all began. At the rate his people had been falling, he was beginning to wonder if any of them would make it out of Florida. They had been staying in an isolated group of cottages in the Florida Keys when everything started getting weird. Being ex-military, they had picked up on the signals earlier than a lot of people. They had no idea what the signals meant but they knew something was off.
The day the TVs started playing the emergency signal, without providing any useful information, they had blocked off the road to the cottages and settled in to wait and see what would happen. After about a week of nothing happening except the beer and food supply getting pretty low, they had sent out a couple of volunteers to go check out what was going on. One pair had gone North and one pair had gone South. The pair that headed North came back, the pair that had headed South never did return.
Meetch had been half of the team that had gone North. Being veterans they had been able to score some of the condos kept for “MWR” (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) at a reduced rate on the edge of the air base on Key West. Meetch and another guy who had been an Army Ranger before transitioning to civilian life as an angry gay biker guy, had left on foot, heading over towards the main town of Key West. They had snuck around enough to ascertain that crazy people were running all over the place trying to kill and eat normal people. This news was not well received back at the cottages.
“Like Zombies?”
“But it hasn’t been 28 days yet?”
“Just shut the fuck up.”
They all sat around the picnic area setup on the side of the cottages. Meetch was standing in front of everyone, looking pissed. He tried again.
“Look, I know it sounds like bullshit but people are all veiny and blue and running around killing and eating each other. A lot of them are starting to form a big mob that’s going back and forth around Essex Circle. We need to get out of here. I came back to let you guys know but I’m packing my shit and leaving as soon as the sun goes down.”
Frank stood up, “I’ll be rolling out with you. Anyone else coming?”
About half the guys there stood up, nodding and heading towards their bunks to grab their stuff and get ready. A couple of guys in shorts picked that time to come shambling towards them across the private beach. From a distance, they looked like they may be drunk, the way they were stumbling all over the place. Once they got close enough to see them the guys, distinguishable now for the blue tint to their skin, red eyes, and bulging veins, started screaming and charged towards the group of men.
Everyone except Meetch froze. Meetch calmly walked over to where they had the bikes sitting around for some maintenance, picked up a tire iron and a large hammer out of a tool box and calmly waited for the screaming men to get closer.
Meetches calm demeanor broke the trance the other men were in, they started grabbing weapons where they could find them and formed up a line to face the strange threat hurtling towards them across the short field separating them from the beach. The men were within about ten yards when Meetch yelled out to the group.
“Do not fuck around, put them down and kill them.”
With those words Meetch stepped forward and swung the tire iron, caving in the side of the man’s head who had been charging him. The man spun past Meetch, dropped to the ground and started twitching and bleeding. The other infected man charged straight for a bald older man who was staring, transfixed, at the body of the man Meetch had just put on the ground. The blue man screamed out a guttural roar and flung himself at the bald man, who made a halfhearted attempt to swing a chain at the guy. Seconds later, they were rolling around on the ground with the blue man’s head buried in the bald man’s neck and blood was spurting everywhere.
Meetch and Frank got to the man and both started trying to kick the blue man off of the bald, blood covered biker. Meetch finally had a good shot and while Frank held the man still Meetch used his hammer to bash in the guy’s skull. When the body stopped twitching, they rolled it off the bald man and could tell it was too late. The biker was missing the front part of his throat and his eyes rolled around lifelessly in their sockets.
&
nbsp; The bald man was the first one they had torched. He had a name but Frank had not known it and couldn’t remember it later. What had impacted him the most was the fact that the man had died because he had not acted quickly enough. Life was action, Frank had known that in a previous life spent in the jungles of South America, his body remembered it now.
Frank looked over at Meetch as they heard another yell coming from the beach. Two more of the crazy drunk cannibal killing machines were now sprinting towards them. Frank raised his voice so everyone could hear.
“Zombies it is then. Let’s do this thing. Let’s kill these other two, then work on getting the hell out of here.” Frank and Meetch both took up fighting stances with their chosen weapons and settled in for another hand to hand scenario.
“BAM! BAM! BAM!” Rory had produced a handgun from somewhere and taken out the two Zombies who had been charging them. Park rangers were probably not going to show up and cite him for bringing an undeclared weapon onto federal property at this point. Rory kept the weapon out and ready. Before the noise from the shots had even died out completely, they all heard numerous screams coming from all around them.
“Let’s ride!” Frank yelled, dashing for his bike and donning his spike tipped helmet. He kicked the Harley into an earth-shattering start and waited for the rest of them to do the same. Lining up behind him the other bikers formed up. Many of them now had weapons showing, in clear violation of the sign posted at the entrance to the base. Not real surprising with this crowd.
After about a minute, Frank figured that was plenty of time, especially as the yells and screaming were starting to be audible over the noise of the fifty or so bikes kicking in behind him. Frank released the clutch and started riding out through the break they had left in the road going out to the main street. It was wide enough for one bike at a time and you got whacked in the face by tree branches the whole time. Coming out the other side of the path, Frank emerged on the main highway and turned left to head North. He moved forward slowly to give the others time to make it down the path and form up on the highway.
Looking both North and South, he could see the Zombies running at them and worried they were going to get caught in the pinch before everyone was able to get onto the highway. One nice thing about all of them being military was they had jumped over the disbelief hump of ‘Zombies’ fairly quick once seeing it firsthand. They now knew what the threat was and what they needed to do to survive. Frank moved up the highway to make more room for everyone else and then pulled out his own Colt 45. Taking careful aim, to conserve ammo, he began taking out the Zombies approaching from the North. He could hear a couple of guys taking shots behind him and assumed they were taking care of the ones from the South. About twenty guys had made it out so far.
The gunshots and the roar of the bikes brought the Zombies swarming like ants to a dropped sugar cube. Frank slapped in his last clip and glanced behind him to see that his people were still coming out of the woods. The road ahead of him was starting to get thick with Zombies. Meetch yelled they needed to go!
Frank held up his hand and dropped it to signal they were heading out. He accelerated forward after emptying his clip into the mass of Zombies ahead of them. Shoving the pistol into his waistband with one hand while he deftly dodged around the first Zombie to lunge at him out of the mob. It very quickly became obvious that the Zombies were going to be way too thick for all of them to make it through staying on the main road. Frank swerved into the emergency lane with a young woman hanging onto the bike of his bike and trying to claw her way up towards him. Her bare feet were dragging on the ground as he leaned back and punched her in the face with his elbow until she finally fell off.
He gunned his engine to force his way through, knowing he needed to clear the way for the rest of the gang to have any chance at all. He wanted to look behind him and see how everyone was doing but it was taking all of his focus just to keep moving forward. The Zombies throwing themselves at him and trying to grab onto any part of the bike they could with complete disregard for what it did to their own bodies. He bore on through them. Breaking their lines like a knight charging into an unarmed group of berserker peasants. With him riding the bike and his gear strapped on he was about a thousand pounds’ worth of angry biker beating his way through them.
He broke the line and continued moving down the road. Once he had a little breathing room he looked behind him. It was chaos. About twenty members of the motorcycle club had made it through and were following him. It looked like the rest of them were on the ground under piles of Zombies. As he watched, one of the bikers he thought had made it skidded to a stop as one of the Zombies managed to get their arm stuck in his tire. The man riding immediately behind him swerved to miss the toppling bike and ran right into the open arms and mouth of an obese elderly woman who rode him off his bike and down to the ground.
Frank had slowed down while watching all this happen and almost ended up dead himself because of it. A pre-teen boy came out of the ditch and leaped onto him. Frank pulled up both of his hands to keep the red eyed demon child from sinking his gnashing teeth into his face. Putting both hands up while being attacked by the boy caused him to lose control of the bike. That loss of control put him into a situation where he knew he was going over. He couldn’t do much about that without letting go of the insane boy who was squirming around violently trying to get an angle to sink his teeth into Frank.
Frank let the bike continue to slow and topple over. He grabbed the boy by the back of his head and as the bike came to a stop he jumped off and slammed the boys head into the ground. He continued slamming the kids head into the ground. The front of his head, where the kids face had been, became a hole in his skull, blood and brain matter leaking out around the bone fragments and teeth. Frank heard someone screaming and looked around quickly to see who it was before realizing it was him. A wave of five of the Zombies were running towards him when Rory pulled up beside him and motioned for him to jump on.
Riding bitch behind Rory, Frank was able to look over his shoulder more often. He was also able to keep the random leaping Zombie from toppling them over. He saw another of his leather clad friends make a small error in judging the space needed to safely pass around a Zombie get pulled off his bike. The Zombies couldn’t be judged like regular people when they were coming at you because regular people feared pain. The Zombies did not fear pain. They jumped face first into spinning tires. They sprinted towards the sound of guns being fired. They did not raise their arms to block the tire irons or hammers you swung at their heads. All they seemed to care about once they saw or heard you was sinking their teeth into your skin.
They were able to build up a bit of momentum after a couple of miles. They were down to fifteen guys at this point. That meant about thirty-eight men had died in this push to get them up to the first bridge linking two of the keys together. Men they had all known and communicated with over the years. There’s had been a tight group of enthusiast who had met out of a love for motorcycles as well as a need for someplace they could be accepted. To be decimated in numbers over such a brief time span was soul crushing to the ones who remained upright.
Entry 2: Ride Until You Fall
Frank stretched out in the luxurious king sized bed. It was hot as hell in the room he was in, even with the balcony door wide open. It felt freakin fantastic to be stretched out in a bed though, after spending the last couple of days being bounced around on Rory’s bike or alternatively spending the two days laying in the mud-covered bug infested ditch beside the road while what seemed like thousands of the Zombies shambled past them moving Southbound.
The rooms in this fancy little B&B they had ended up in were nice. Each had a large window pointing out towards the gulf or the ocean so a nice breeze was always available. The kitchen downstairs was fully stocked with enough food to probably last them a couple of months without ever having to leave. All of the windows had steel hurricane shutters on them which they had gone around securing the first
night they were here. They had lost another club member securing the shutters. He’d come back around to go through the front door and been pounced on by a little old lady. He’d picked her up and bashed her on the ground, then curb stomped her head into mush, but he’d come out of the brawl with a few scratches and a big bite mark on his shoulder.
He was sitting on the curb, beside the pathetically tiny corpse, when Frank and the others finally got to him. He was crying, the others saw the bite mark and all of them had the same thought. They were looking at a dead man. Frank told him to wait there and went inside to find a first aid kit. He came out with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a box of bandages. The man just looked up at him and croaked out.
“Thanks Frank, but I got bit, I’m going to turn.”
Zournal: Book 3: Scorched Earth Page 1
