Zournal: Book 3: Scorched Earth

by R. S. Merritt

  Taking full advantage of the darkness, we tried to make as much distance as we could. The ultimate goal would be to procure a vehicle and continue barreling down the road but for right now walking seemed the safest course of action. We needed to find a place to hole up and let Thomas heal up. Preferably a place with hospital equipment and drugs and beds and big ass fences surrounding it. I was thinking prison hospital scenario. Without SIRI, the finding of said prison hospital would be a serious pain in the ass. I’d settle for a CVS with those anti burglar metal gates you could pull in front of the windows. Of course, if they had those metal fence things pulled we would not be able to actually get into the store. The standard catch-22 of finding a secure location.

  We trudged. We waded through the oppressive heat, rampant swarms of gnats, and the garbage littering the road. We plodded along with the weight of the uncertainty of our future. This was life now. This constant movement into the darkness. The Tennessee cabin had reached mythical proportions by now. It was the mecca towards which we pilgrims slogged to worship at the altar of survival.

  Dawn snuck up on us. One minute we were walking through an inky darkness, the next we did not have to squint quite as hard to try and see where we were going by the dim light provided by the stars. Before we even realized it, we were walking along in the cheery sunlight of a Georgia dawn. The light illuminated a long country road. There was junk littering the highways. Mostly tree branches and pine straw drifts. Up ahead we could make out one car pulled over to the side of the road that had all of its doors opened. Not wanting to spend another night sleeping in the woods we kept going.

  We all had high hopes for the car we had seen abandoned up ahead. It had been abandoned because the people driving it had run out of gas and left it in a hurry it looked like. There was an ancient bottle of diet coke in the backseat that we knew from experience would be gross by now. Otherwise, just an empty car with a bunch of crap in it. We kept walking. Thomas was coming out of his stupor and did not seem happy about it. Ann was worried she was going to overmedicate him. Since Ann had more medical training than the rest of us, we deferred to her judgement, even though she kept saying she basically had an advanced First Aid certification. That was more than the rest of us had.

  Since she did not want to overmedicate him we got to hear him moan every time Reeves had to drag him over a branch or jiggled him the wrong way. To be fair, his arm looked really bad. I was worried about noise discipline, but was more worried suggesting a gag may end up with Ann smacking me around. It was more of a certainty than a worry really.

  We walked that endless road until about noon. We were all hot and miserable and still no civilization in sight so we made a sharp right turn into the woods. We set about making a temporary camp to rest through the hot hours of the day. Everyone contributed what they had left in the way of water and anything that could be used as a pillow or bandage over to Ann. She used that to try and make Thomas as comfortable as possible. He was turning pretty pasty and his skin was slick with sweat.

  I hobbled over to a tree after we had Thomas situated and burrowed onto a pile of pine straw Ann helped me kick into a single place. Once she had me settled in and she had checked on Thomas again she came back and rearranged me so as to make the best pillow for her. I didn’t mind. Ginny disappeared up into a tree to take first watch and the rest of us went ahead and passed out.

  Entry 11: Hay Ride

  As the sun set, we rose. Taking advantage of the cooler night air, we continued our trek towards the unknown. About an hour into our midnight stroll, Reeves ran face first into a mailbox. He literally ran face first into it. He was leaning forward dragging Thomas along and managed to smash his forehead into the metal mailbox hard enough to almost knock himself out.

  “That mailbox came out of nowhere!” Ginny threw out there because something needed to be said.

  “You’re supposed to use a baseball bat to do that, I think.” Ann threw her smart-ass comment into the ring.

  Reeves studiously ignored both of them. Rubbing his head, he signaled for me to hobble up to where he was. I did so. Ignoring the ‘special delivery’ and ‘package size’ jokes that were flying around. Reeves asked if I wanted him to run up and see where the house was the mailbox belonged to.

  “I need a car.” Reeves explained. “I love Thomas and all, but I’m getting pretty sick of dragging his ass all over the apocalypse. For a skinny, dweeby looking kid he sure weighs a lot.”

  “I’m awake.” Thomas muttered. Ann must have refrained from hooking him up with the high dosages he had been getting.

  “Dweeby means cool where he comes from.” Ann said.

  “Mr. Just Ran face first into a mailbox is really trying to say someone else is a dweeb?” Ginny kept her stand-up routine moving right along.

  “Yeah. I’m out, I’ll go check it and be right back. Hopefully, with a car or truck so we can ride in style. Also, if it’s a truck, I want those two in the back.” Reeves stormed off towards the imagined location of the house that connected up with the mailbox he had dented with his cranium.

  “He seemed pissed. Hopefully the mailbox injury gives him amnesia so he doesn’t remember how cruel we were.”

  “It’s not like it hurt his face!”

  “Good one.”

  I smiled at the banter between Ginny and Ann. Thomas had peaked with saying he was awake. We all sat down to wait on Reeves. I pulled out the Walkie and waited. We had learned the hard way not to just ask someone how they were if you couldn’t see them and they were on foot. Zombies couldn’t tell the difference between a voice coming out of a radio and a voice coming out of a regular human. Both sounds made them angry and aggressive. Which is not the best thing to make them when you ae trying to sneak past a bunch of them sleeping on the floor of a house.

  I held the button down to send Reeves a quick burst of static on his end. A few seconds later we got back a double burst. Meant he was good to go but did not want to risk talking right then. A loud engine sound came from the direction Reeves had wandered off in. Then a set of lights illuminated us as a large vehicle appeared out of the woods and headed our way. I assumed this is what Reeves had managed to find.

  As he got closer, we all slowly figured out what it was.

  “That mailbox really did give him brain damage. What the hell is he thinking, driving that loud ass thing down here?” Ann rhetorically asked the questions.

  We all knew Reeves was ready to cease all this walking forever non-sense. I just wasn’t sure a tractor hay ride setup was in our best interests. I was willing to go with it though, as this walking shit really did suck. Especially since I only had one good ankle and my vision sucked even in the day time now that I had the constant bandages over my left eye. Reeves pulled up to us. He was grinning like a two-year-old who just figured out where mommy was hiding the lollipops. The expression any American male gets when given the opportunity to drive a big ass tractor.

  Evidently, no one cared about noise discipline as much as they cared about not walking anymore, not a word was mentioned about it. Everyone just climbed into the back and lay down in the hay. Laying in the hay and moving down the road, approximately three million times better than how we had been doing it. Reeves went from mental midget to genius in my mind as I lay there. Every Zombie within fifty miles was probably hoofing it towards the noise of this monstrosity right now. I was Ok with that as long as I wasn’t walking.

  Reeves had us going at a nice clip down the road. The trailer was bouncing around a good bit as we hit random junk in the road. We were loud, I had no idea what we could do about that other than get off and walk and that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. I was pretty sure that suggesting it would lead to a mutiny on the hay ride and I may end up walking the proverbial plank. Well, painfully hopping the proverbial plank. My ankle was pulsating with painful spasms. One look over at Thomas was enough to keep me from complaining one iota though.

  Thomas looked bad. It was obvious he needed medical
attention. The best I was thinking we were going to be able to do would be a clinic or a drug store. Hopefully, they would have some first aid type books in there that may be useful. Books in drug stores had gone out of style since the first hypochondriac self-diagnosed themselves on ‘web-md’. I was hopeful though. The street we were driving down was starting to show an occasional mailbox with a little more frequency. I took that as a sign that we were approaching civilization. Civilization meant drug stores and minute clinics. Civilization also meant a denser collection of Zombies and a much higher potential of us dying. Time to get our game faces on.

  Reeves increased his speed as we got closer to town. I was pretty sure he was worried I was going to tell him we needed to get off and walk. I hit the talk button on my Walkie.

  “Yo, Reeves, we need to get off and walk. I think this thing makes too much noise and is too open. Let’s scout out where we are at and see if it’s safe. Number one priority is a clinic or drug store or something for us to hole up in and work on Thomas for a few days.”

  “You said walk, right? Dammit.” Reeves brought the tractor and trailer hay ride parade to an abrupt stop and hopped down to walk back and see us. In the distance, we heard moans and yells. Driving the big ass noisy tractor had disturbed some blue freaks beauty sleep. I did not hear anything danger close, yet.

  “Skulk and walk mode activated boss. You want me to go ahead of the group and let you know what’s up or you want me dragging the chump a lump?”

  Thomas did not manage to pull together the energy to respond to Reeves this time. We started moving him out of the hay ride when the intensity of the Zombie noises went up a few notches. Maybe abandoning this vehicle was not in our best interest. We conferred for a minute and ended up sliding Thomas back into the trailer while Reeves gleefully went and got the tractor moving again.

  The first Zombies started hitting the side of the trailer and trying to climb in a minute or two after we had made the decision to get moving again. I awkwardly poked and prodded at them with my sword as they pressed us. Ginny and Ann each took a side and bashed away at any Zombie trying to board the trailer. So far though, there were just a few here and there so no worries about being overwhelmed yet.

  They were a pain in the ass to knock off though. You could smash their fingers and they still hung on. Pain did not register for them. You had to pry them off or hit them right when they were jostling around trying to get higher onto the trailer. When they fell off, you could see them mostly just hop right back up and start sprinting towards us again. Reeves had us up in the 30 – 40 MPH range so the ones behind us were not going to be an issue, unless we had to stop for something that took long enough to give them time to catch up.

  Reeves kept us bumping down that two lane road until it turned into a four-lane road and started running through a suburb. I looked for a plaza. Seeing one, I hit Reeves on the Walkie and he slowed down and turned in so we could see what was in it. Seeing nothing useful in the first plaza we rolled back to the main road and kept going. Across the street in the corner of another little shopping plaza I saw a CVS. Reeves saw it too and headed in that direction. Pulling up in front of the CVS, he cut off the engine and jumped out to start the process of figuring out a way to break into the store. Ginny had already snagged the radio from me and run around to the back of the store to check the loading docks and other doors and see if she could find a way in.

  Per our normal luck the place was locked up tight. Reeves pulled the tractor up next to the building and climbed on top of the hay ride and jumped from there to the roof. A minute later the Walkie went off.

  “Guys, stand by, I think I can get in up here and then I’ll come around and open the back door if you want to head back to the loading dock to wait for me. “

  Wondering how Reeves was managing to access the store we all worked on getting Thomas moved as gently as possible around to the loading dock area. With my foot, I was on Zombie detail. We had started moving around the corner of the store when the first one showed up. She was a healthy looking one. Running at top speed straight towards us. She was coming from up the street so she was not one of the ones who had been chasing us. Her eyes were red, her skin a blackish blue, a large stained and filthy t-shirt fluttered around her body as she ran.

  I raised my sword to meet her charge. Being careful not to put too much weight on my screwed-up ankle I swung for her head when she was close enough. The sword hit and dented in the side of her head. My follow through spinning me around and causing me to wince in pain from the pressure that it put on my ankle. She went down hard but her momentum caused her one foot to swing straight up between my legs and give me a final send off as she bled out on the ground.

  Between my ankle and my balls, I was having a bad day. I looked around and the others were nowhere to be seen, they must have made it around the corner while I was dueling with the ball-kicking bitch from hell. I started limping myself that way, a few seconds later, Ann came jogging around the corner and came back to help me get my gimpy ass safely around to the loading dock. We all stood around the back door. Staring at it like a rabbit was going to jump out of it or something. No rabbits popped out, but about twenty seconds after us getting there, the door popped open and a smiling Reeves invited us in.

  We got the door closed as we started hearing Zombies coming around the corner in search of us. We all got in the middle of the drug store and made ourselves as comfortable as possible, to be as quiet as possible, for as long as possible. The idea being that the Zombies would hopefully just keep going if nothing got them overexcited about this place. Of course, the place was locked down pretty tight with the metal fencing around the front and all the doors locked.

  A big hole in the ceiling and a pile of ceiling tiles and insulation indicated how Reeves had gotten in. I hoped none of the Zombies were that motivated. We were actually pretty comfortable. The store had a sell going on for camping equipment on one of the aisles and they had a whole mess of dog and cat beds for sale so we were able to make ourselves a nice little nest in between two of the aisles. We got Thomas laid out and started working on his arm.

  The arm looked really bad. It was bruised and blue to the point where a Zombie would have been jealous of the perfectly bruised skin. The bone was not connected inside the skin. Thomas never once woke up while we were moving and jostling him around. He just moaned and whimpered a lot. Once we had set the bone as well as we could figure out to do. We used bandages and tape and everything else we could find to make the toughest cast / splint we could work out in there. Once that was completed, Ann headed to the pharmacy section to try and break in and get the strongest antibiotics she could find.

  It took us about two hours to break into the pharmacy. It finally came down to trying to quietly bash our way in using the metal stair pole that Thomas was always using to bash in Zombie heads. We got in though. Once in, Ann rummaged around and found a book that described what different drugs did and she finally settled on the perfect one for Thomas. We couldn’t find that one so we got a different one she looked up. We pounded it and an Oxy into powder, mixed them in with some Gatorade and forced Thomas to be coherent enough to drink it.

  The plan was to lay here and repeat that process for as long as it took for Thomas to start feeling better. If things went to hell, we had our “Hay Ride” waiting for us right outside the front door. We had shelves full of canned food, water by the pallet, a metric ton of hygiene products, and a cooler stocked with warm beer and wine. Once we had Thomas all squared away and a watch rotation picked out, the rest of us settled back with our warm beverage of choice and commenced drinking ourselves to sleep.

  Entry 12: Club Med(ical)

  We rested. We used the excessive amounts of water and hygiene products to finally get ourselves clean. The place sold boxers, so I even had clean underwear. Thomas gradually began improving. I had wraps on both my ankles and we busted open some of those hot cold packs to put on our various aches and injuries so this really was a t
ime of healing.

  When I had my chance to take a ‘shower’ I took my two bottles of water, paw patrol robe I was using for a towel and my box of soap and shampoo and stuff to the men’s room. I stripped down and was getting ready to start cleaning up when I noticed myself in the mirror. Damn! I was ripped. There was not any fat on me at all. Zombie Zumba had been good for me. Of course, I started noticing the scars too. I was literally covered in scars. Each had a unique and disturbing story behind it, normally around a situation I was still in disbelief over having actually survived.

  It hadn’t been a year yet and the person looking back at me from the mirror was unrecognizable. The last bit of the petulant child had fled; the failed college student was nowhere to be seen. The man looking back was a man I thought my dad would be proud of. A man hardened in the crucible of combat and blood. It gave one an entirely different perspective. Physically shaking myself out of the introspective state, I moved into the making myself stink less state.