Zournal (Book 5): Feeling Lucky? Read online

  I quickly got rid of the idea of going further down the side tunnel. That way seemed to obvious a way to end up in the aforementioned cornered scenario and I wasn’t in the mood to shoot myself today. Running down the tunnel trying to figure out where the Koreans had come in at and fighting our way in with this group of twenty Koreans coming back at us in about five minutes didn’t seem very promising either. That left attacking the Koreans from behind. I had a couple of grenades on me and I was pretty sure Reeves did too. In the tight confines of the tunnels we should be able to use them to good effect.

  We had a quick planning session. I figured we had about a minute or two before they found the body and we lost our best shot at a surprise. Ann looked back at me. Face illuminated by the glow of the candle app on my phone. If I’d known I was going to be stuck for the rest of my life with this phone I’d have spent a lot more time downloading useful apps for it. I kicked myself every time I thought of the stuff I had skipped out on to save ninety-nine cents. I could tell by the expression on Ann’s face she was less than impressed by my plan.

  “So, we all jog towards the tunnel entrance where the twenty heavily armed soldiers are and when we get next to the last side tunnel before we run into them we chunk grenades and dive for cover? No one has a problem with this plan?”

  The problem was that we had like thirty seconds to get organized and start working the plan if it was going to be effective. Once the bad guys found the body of their teammate up there they’d be way more alert and probably turn around and start coming for us. Basic math said at that point they’d win. Our only chance was to catch them before they ran into their scalp less comrade. With that in mind, we all clambered out of the side tunnel and started jogging as quietly as we could in the darkness towards the enemy. Six fully armed people and a dog have minimal chance of proceeding quietly down a dark tunnel full of water and random junk.

  I hadn’t really factored our noise level into the equation. Oh well. Nothing to do now but double down on it. If they heard us jogging they’d probably hear us running too. I clicked my tongue once which meant for everyone to speed up. As we ran we started seeing a glow up ahead. We had a total of seven grenades to toss. We needed to be close enough that they did the maximum amount of damage. I couldn’t see shit except for the lights up ahead. Then I could see everything as we were illuminated by someone shining a bright ass flashlight back at us. I clicked my tongue twice.

  Reeves, Catori, Marg and I all tossed our grenades as hard as we could towards the light. Even before the grenade was out of my hand we heard the sound of gunfire. They must have found their dead buddy and then heard our out of shape asses trying to sneak up on them at full speed. Concrete was flying everywhere as we all turned and ran for the side tunnel. I watched Reeves and Catori jump into it and then I tripped over Marg who was laying on the ground cussing about something. I jumped up and grabbed Marg by the armpits and started dragging him towards the tunnel since he didn’t seem like he was moving very well.

  Ann and Ginny were shooting some random rounds in the direction of the people shooting at us. I’d found that the main part of gun fights is shooting in the direction of your enemy to keep them from being able to effectively aim. They are doing the same thing. It’s like a game only the ammo manufacturers ever win. The shooting on their side stopped after the grenades went off. They were a lot louder than I had anticipated. I was pretty sure I’d be hearing the ringing in my ears for the foreseeable future. A little ringing would be a small price to pay if this charge of the light brigade turned out different than the one in the poem.

  Silence. I poked my head out and shined Reeves mag lite down the tunnel. We’d made it a lot further down than I had thought. The entrance was only about thirty yards away from us. There were dead soldier bits and concrete dust all over the place. There was also a decent glow from the end of the tunnel which I took at first to be flashlights that had survived the grenades. As the dust settled I saw what it really was and motioned for everyone to get out of the side tunnel and start moving back the way we had originally been going.

  The entrance to the tunnel was open and I had seen the first couple of Zombies already dropping in though the cloud of dust still lingering in the air.

  Entry 34: A Madman’s Marathon

  I had Marg laid out across the ground and he didn’t look good. In the light, his face was way too pale. I moved the flashlight over his body and saw a ton of blood on his leg. As everyone was piling out of the hole and taking shots at the first Zombies to come screaming towards us Ann and I were cutting off Marg’s pants leg and trying to see how to fix him. He’d taken two shots on his left leg. One looked like it had shattered his shin and the other one was higher up and must have nicked an artery or something as it was bleeding like crazy.

  He was literally sitting in a puddle of his own blood as we jammed field dressings onto the bloody parts and started feeling around for something to make a tourniquet out of. I was pulling the shoelace out of my boot when Marg coughed and told us to leave. We told him to shut up and save his energy. I got the lace out and we wrapped it around his thigh and stuck in a piece of plastic we found on the ground and started twisting it to make the tourniquet. The blood was still seeping out through the bandages.

  We finished the tourniquet and I could tell the blood was no longer pouring out like it had been. I shined the light up on his face and saw he was pale and unmoving. His eyes were staring out vacantly. Ann checked his pulse and shook her head. She looked at me with tears in her eyes as she reached up and shut Marg’s eyes. I started stripping off all Marg’s ammo and supplies. He had a grenade on him I planned to use to good effect and to give him a decent burial. I wasn’t leaving a friend in a tunnel to be eaten by Zombies if could help it. I knew he’d have liked his last act to be one that helped his friends and more importantly helped us try to get to his wife and kid.

  Ann and I went to join the rest of the team out in the main tunnel. I drug Marg while Ann drug Daisy. Daisy was good now around gun fights and Zombies but the dark tunnel with the grenades going off was way too much for her and she was currently freaking out. Ann ended up having to pick her up and Daisy closed her eyes and whined the whole time. Or, it could have just been the ringing in my ears.

  It looked like the team was doing a good job of keeping the random Zombie from making it to us. There was so much dust and crap in the air we could barely see but the random Zombie who came screaming at us got blown away pretty efficiently. There was no telling how many were squatted down in the dust munching on the delicacies our grenade blasts among the tight group of Koreans had left. If we had infinite ammo we may have been able to hold this spot indefinitely or even fight our way to the access hatch and get it closed again. Assuming we hadn’t disintegrated it with a grenade. Unfortunately, we did not have unlimited ammo and we really needed to get moving.

  Catori had made his way over when he saw me dragging Marg and offered to help. I don’t think he had realized Marg was dead until he grabbed his arm and helped me pull. Catori and Marg had grown up together so this had to be hurting him pretty bad. He stoically helped me drag Marg out into the tunnel. He didn’t say a word as we worked a grenade up under his arm and pulled the pin out. Now, when the Zombies got here if any of them tripped over Marg or tried to make a snack out of him they’d be blown to pieces along with Marg when the grenade came loose. This was the best I could think of to give Marg a decent sendoff.

  We turned off our lights and started moving quickly in reverse down the tunnel. About twenty seconds later a Zombie came running in between all of us screaming and flailing around. Another one did the same and took Reeves down. Reeves turned on his light and bounced up a minute later from where he’d cut the Zombies head half off. When his light came on another two Zombies came out of nowhere and one took him back down again while another got in my face.

  The one in my face was an old man. Wrinkled forehead and bearded face tinged blue by the disease. Eyes swollen hal
f-shut with that nasty gunk they get on them. The slit left in the eyes showed they were blood red. He came at me with teeth and nails. I stepped into him to avoid the nails and brought my left arm up into his forehead to keep his teeth from me awhile I slammed my knife into his stomach and chest in a desperate search for his heart. Based on the volume of the screaming I was hearing, we didn’t have time to mess around. The old guy ripped my skin loose on my forearm but fell to the ground as my blade found his heart.

  I looked up to see the team all had lights on and guns out and were back to shooting at the Zombies running down the tunnel at us. We needed to set a rear guard and get moving. I yelled for Reeves to stay with me and everyone else to keep moving and try to secure a way out for us. Reeves and I started walking backwards down the tunnel with our lights and pistols out. As Zombies came at us we shot them once in the center of mass and as long as that slowed them down we didn’t bother with any type of kill shot or double tap. A lot of them kept right on crawling or limping towards us but as long as they moved slower than we did it wasn’t worth wasting another bullet.

  We were in a nightmare scenario. No way to know if there actually was a way out. The Koreans could have come through a door that got locked behind them. I doubt they just left it open and unguarded. Especially since they obviously knew at this point that something was going on. The Zombies were coming out of the darkness at a faster rate now. It was pretty hard to walk backwards in the damp tunnel with random crap on the ground while holding a flashlight to see behind you to take out the Zombies coming in. Reeves and I were taking turns shooting to conserve ammo so we wouldn’t shoot at the same Zombies at the same time.

  I was eating through the ammo I’d stripped off of Marg at an alarming rate. I thought about seeing how Reeves felt about going melee weapon on them. I had two hatchets, a machete, and some knives on me while I knew Reeves had his bat and who knew what else hanging off him. I tried to picture how we’d walk backwards and fend off Zombies in the dark with a baseball bat and some camping hatchets and decided to keep that idea to myself until we actually ran out of ammo. A loud explosion from down the tunnel where we had come from made us both jump.

  I remembered we had booby trapped Marg and the Zombies must have finally found him. I hoped he’d be the only one of us to be left behind in this dank underground hell hole. The explosion gave us a lull in the Zombie’s and we used it to backtrack quicker. I may or may not have screamed like a little girl when I felt a hand reach out from behind and grab my shoulder. I turned around with hatchet in the air to see Ann standing there smirking at me for what may or may not have been a noise I made when she grabbed me.

  She pointed at the roof and we all saw the manhole cover with the ladder leading up to it. Hearing screaming in the distance I asked her if they had tried opening it. They had not but Catori was standing on the top of the ladder ready to try as soon as we gave him the word. As the Zombie screams were getting closer he exercised some empowerment and went ahead and started pushing the cover open. We saw his legs disappearing out into the moonlight. We sent Ginny up next, then Ann, then Reeves went with Daisy over his shoulders and I followed up right behind them all.

  I came out of the man hole in the middle of a concrete courtyard with picnic tables and armed Koreans. They had everyone laid out on their stomachs on the ground except for Daisy who was growling at them while standing on top of Ann. Two of the soldiers had guns pressed up into various parts of my anatomy and were busy flinging me out of the hole and on the ground in the same line as everyone else. I had only seen a handful of them up here and figuring they were just going to shoot me in the back of the head after some torture anyway I waited for them to fling me on the ground. As soon as they let go of me I rolled over with my pistol in hand and started blasting away.

  Entry 35: Welcome to the Luxor

  I didn’t blast away for very long as I only had two bullets left in the clip but it was long enough to give everyone else the same idea. Reeves, Ann, Ginny and Catori all pulled weapons from wherever they had them shoved in pockets and rolled over to join in the fight. The Korean guards who had pulled us out of the hole were caught completely flat footed. They’d pulled our rifles from us as they threw us on the ground but had obviously not expected us to go violent at a hundred miles per hour.

  They had also been concerned with trying to close the manhole since the last person they’d pulled out had been a Zombie. The Zombie had latched onto the two guys who had reached down and plunked him out the same way they did me. I hadn’t treated their wrists like bologna sandwiches though. Based on the results, I probably needed to include that in my repertoire of resisting being taken prisoner.

  My random shots had knocked one guard on his ass holding onto his shoulder, the Zombie had two of the guards all messed up and the remaining guard became the target for my five freaked out comrades. The Korean I shot in the shoulder raised his rifle and a blonde blur raced into him. Teeth gnashing and hackles raised Daisy was happy to be out of the hole and back to work taking out enemies on the surface. I hurried over to help her out before the Korean could figure out what the furry thing biting him was and shoot her.

  I kicked him in the head as hard as I could and gave Daisy a quick rub while the other two guards were getting munched on by a couple more zombies who had shown up from out of the hole. I saw more hands coming out and decided it was probably time for us to leave. I had no desire to close the man hole since I saw the Zombies as an ally at the moment. An ally that would eat us just as quick as the Koreans but beggars can’t be choosers and looking horses in the mouth and all that.

  At some point in the frivolity Ginny had gotten shot in the hand and now she was whining about that. Ann wrapped a bandage around her hand while we covered her and started walking towards the giant pyramid shaped casino. I fully expected to be cut down by automatic weapons fire at any second. No one was more surprised than me when we made it all the way down the trail and to the side doors of the casino. We could hear the Zombies yelling like crazy on the other sides of the tall fences that shielded the courtyard. If we had time or C-4 I would have tried to figure out a way to bring the fences down.

  As it was, we needed to figure out a way into the casino. The large glass doors were not magically opening when we walked towards them. The other doors were locked from the inside. Ann was staring through the glass trying to see what she could see when she told us to all hide in the bushes. With zero hesitation, all of us ran and dove into the bushes on either side of the large doors. I looked back towards the manhole cover and saw a decent number of Zombies were milling around now while little pockets of them were kneeling and wolfing down the dead soldier entrée.

  The dark glass doors opened and a force of about thirty soldiers thundered past us. They setup about twenty feet away from us to form a firing line as the Zombies started running towards them. In a normal situation, they would have easily shot the ones coming at them and then gone and shut the entrance while killing any more of the Zombies coming out and probably dropping a few grenades down in the hole as well. I couldn’t believe our luck. When I was pretty sure no one else was coming out the door and the Koreans started firing at the Zombies I stood up and started shooting them in the back.

  Reeves and Catori joined in as Ann ran to hold the door open and Ginny fumbled around with her left hand since her right one had a hole in it. The Koreans didn’t figure out anything was wrong until we’d shot most of them in the back. I’d been worried the body armor looking stuff they had on would stop bullets but it must just be intended to just stop Zombie bites because it did not give our bullets much of an issue. The three of us kept up a steady fire into the Koreans backs and the few who managed to turn around got the honor of being shot in the front instead of the back. They’d done a good job of shooting the Zombies so we took a few seconds to run and snag the boxes of ammos they had brought out with them. Very nice of them to take care of us like that. If only they had brought some sandwiches and lemona
de I would have counted it as a good day.

  Looking over my shoulder I saw more Zombies coming and they seemed to be building up some steam. I grabbed a dead Korean and started dragging him for the doors. I motioned for Catori and Reeves to do the same. They looked at me like I was crazy but went ahead and did it. I needed the doors to the Luxor to stay open so we could get a nice big force of Zombies running around inside to help us sneak in. I figured if the Koreans were busy killing Zombies they wouldn’t have as much time to search for us. The only thing I could think of off the top of my head to keep the doors from closing was the dead Korean soldiers. We setup the Korean cadaver doorstops and moved into the casino as quickly and quietly as we could.

  The place was cold and dank. I guessed they had not had the HVAC up and running for very long. The slot machines had all been turned off. I guessed they figured those weren’t worth the noise and electricity to keep them on. There was evidence of gunfire sporadically through the bottom floor as we moved between rows and worked our way deeper into the building. We occasionally heard Zombie screams and gunfire coming back from the direction of the main entrance. Whatever was going on down there it was giving us a nice distraction. We just had no idea what to do with the extra time it was affording us.