Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America (15 page)

“You called it a room broom, right?”

He nodded. I wanted to be sure of my facts.

“It’s a compact weapon that’s ideal for urban situations. It fires a 9mm Parabellum round,” the SEAL explained. “It’s only accurate to about a hundred feet, but it has hitting power. We had confidence the two guys would be able to defend the doorway until we came back with the civilians.”

I tilted my head to the side thoughtfully. Mike, how long did this operation take? Are we talking about hours?”

“No,” he said. “Once we breached the building’s entrance, the time until we evacuated with the civilians was less than eight minutes.”

“Were the civilians waiting for you?”

He nodded. “They were ready, inside the unit, standing on either side of the door as we kicked it in.”

“Can you tell me their condition?”

“They were frightened,” Wainwright said. “They had been holed up in that unit for over a week. The food and water had run out. There were eight women and four men, including the VIP. They were haggard and exhausted. Some of the women and a couple of the guys were sobbing. They had heard the gunfire. They knew we were on our way up to them.”

“Did the evacuation go smoothly?” I asked. “What was the procedure?”

Wainwright shook his head. “The fucking VIP started bitching the moment we came through the door. The fucker demanded to be the first one taken out. Demanded the team form some kind of a human shield around him to get him to safety.”

I was shocked. “What about the others – the rest of the people he had been in the unit with?”

“He didn’t give a shit,” Wainwright sneered. “The pompous prick thought the rescue effort was all for him.”

I sat back. “I don’t imagine your lieutenant would have been impressed.”

“None of us were,” Wainwright admitted. “The guy ended taking a tumble down a flight of stairs as we were fleeing the building.” He shrugged his shoulders eloquently, and through a wintery grin he said, “Sometimes accidents can happen, y’know.”

Fucking politicians. “What happened next?”

“The whole building was filling with noise,” Wainwright’s expression became tense. “We could hear pounding footsteps along the corridors on the floors above and below us. The lieutenant posted me and another guy to the end of the hallway and the rest of the team led the civilians back down towards the third floor.”

“Did the zombies appear?”

He nodded. “They came down the corridor. The guy next to me opened fire and as he did we started to move back, shooting and then falling back to cover each other – standard urban tactics. But the dreads were relentless. Nothing stopped them. Unless you got them cleanly in the head, they just shrugged off the hits they took. I blew the arm off one – severed it at the shoulder. The dread went down screaming and writhing, then pounced back up onto its feet and came running on. The dread had been a young guy – maybe a college student before he had become infected. There was brown gore splattering across the walls as he ran at me. I fired again and the blast obliterated the thing’s head – sprayed the insides of his skull across the passage. The corpse dropped like a bag of concrete.”

“So you and your partner got out of the building safely?”

The SEAL nodded. “We rejoined the rest of the team in the stairwell and covered the descent as tail gunners, throwing white phosphorous grenades and everything else we were carrying to keep the dreads off our backs.”

I could imagine the screaming chaos of the civilians as the elite soldiers shepherded them down the dark treacherous stairwell, and the din of weapons firing and grenades exploding as the infected ghouls threw themselves at the guns. I could imagine the terror on the people’s faces and the snarling hideous cries of the zombies that clawed at them. “Did everyone escape?”

“We got all of the civilians out of the building,” Wainwright nodded gravely, “but we lost two good men saving them. The two team members who held the third floor landing stayed at their position until we had cleared the stairs and were assembled on the ground floor foyer. We could hear them firing their M16’s. The guys had a dozen thirty round magazines between them, stowed in their load-carrying web gear. Suddenly the firing stopped.”

“Did you go back for them?”

Wainwright shook his head. “Coms went dead. We knew they had been overrun. The lieutenant told us to bug out and we went out onto the lawn. The eight man squad covering the building assembled around us.”

Something puzzled me. “How did you get everyone aboard the two Zodiacs?” I asked.

“We didn’t,” Wainwright explained. “We had to change plans. The Zodiacs were our exfiltration route if we had been able to stay covert. Once everything went loud, there was no time for subtlety.”

“So…?”

“The RTO jumped on the satcom radio and called in three slicks we had circling offshore,” Wainwright began to explain, then saw my pained, confused expression. He sighed with frustration. “RTO is the term for the radio guy, and ‘slicks’ are transport choppers,” he doubled back wearily on his story for my benefit. “We called them up and they swooped in and landed on the beach.”

“And that’s how you got the civilians and the VIP to safety.”

“After a three minute running firefight,” Wainwright added somberly. He took a long drink of his soda and then crushed the can in his fist. “We cleared the apartment complexes and four of the team secured the top of the steps. As the helicopters came in, the noise attracted the undead. They came swarming out of the burning buildings all along the shoreline. Some of them were on fire, some of them were moving on the stumps of shattered limbs. There would have been over a hundred, massing together in the courtyard of the closest apartment block and streaming down on us. We opened fire with everything we had, not trying for kills, but merely to hold them off until the civilians and the rest of the platoon could embark.

“The dread bodies were stacking up all around us. We fell back, until we had cleared the steps and were standing on the beach. The dreads came at us, pouring down the steps and launching themselves off the edge of the pier platform onto the sand. That’s when we knew we were in trouble,” Wainwright’s tone suddenly became somber. “We could no longer contain them. We lost the choke point of the steps and they were running past us towards the last remaining helicopter.

“There was four of the team still waiting for us. The civilians and the first squad had been flown off the beach in the first two choppers. The guys opened up fire from the cargo door in the hull of the third bird and we ran back through the bodies and the bullets and made it to the helicopter.”

I sat back, flexed my cramping fingers and set the notebook down on my thigh. I looked across at Wainwright and he stared back at me. During the entire retelling of Mission Warwax, the SEAL’s facial expression had hardly changed, the tone of his voice had rarely altered. Perhaps it was because the incident had taken place over a year earlier – the memories and emotions were no longer fresh.

Or perhaps it was his training – the way he dealt with the dangers that were inherent in his hazardous line of work. He was a man in control.

I reached across the cramped little ship’s cabin and we shook hands. “Thanks for the interview,” I said. I meant it. Wainwright nodded, and then a wicked gleam lit in his eyes.

“Just tell it right,” he warned me. “If I find out you fucked the story up, or embellished the facts to make the event more dramatic…
I’ll come looking for you
.” He smiled, an enigmatic grin that tugged at one corner of his mouth.

I felt a sudden chill of shock wash through me.

I had no doubt the man meant it.

THE SHORES OF LAKE OCONEE, CENTRAL GEORGIA:

33.350°N 83.157°W

The thudding monotony of the roaring Black Hawk helicopter’s rotors was a deafening drumbeat. Around me – ignoring me – sat four stone-faced soldiers, their features streaked with camouflage paint, their eyes roaming the terrain that swept by beneath us in a blur.

I heard the sudden crackle of voices through the headset. It was the pilot.

“Two minutes,” he said.

The soldiers became restless. They moved in their seats and re-checked their weapons. I felt the helicopter begin to descend, and when I glanced out through the small cabin window I saw a shimmering blue expanse of water, surrounded by a thick green canopy of forest.

The helicopter crawled across the sky and then turned in a slow circle, still descending. We touched the ground smoothly, landing in a field of long green grass that rolled gradually down to the lapping edges of Lake Oconee.

I was in hostile territory.

Six months ago this ground was swarming with zombies. Now we were in what the military termed the ‘dead zone’ a tract of land that stretched between the border of Florida and the original Danvers Defense Line.

During the second phase of the zombie war, this land had been won back by American ground forces. New forts had been built and new trenches had been dug closer to the Florida state line… but although the area had been cleared of zombies and secured, it wasn’t entirely safe.

The helicopter crew chief tugged on the door release handle and the four soldiers spilled out of the chopper at a run, taking up firing positions in a perimeter beyond the slowing blades of the chopper.

I got out of my seat and shuffled towards the open door. The crew chief planted his hand in the middle of my chest and pushed me back down. “Wait here, dickwad,” the man warned me contemptuously. “The area isn’t secure yet.”

I waited. I had been aware of the resentment the soldiers had felt towards me –it had radiated from them in the hostile look in their eyes, the sneers and their laughs as we had flown south. It seemed the helicopter crew felt the same way.

I guess I could understand.

These were fighting men who had been on the front line of the apocalypse. They had fought a hard, dirty war, seen the horrors and the gruesome gore of battles… and now they were playing nursemaid to a civilian journalist.

They hated me.

I sat and stared out through the doorway. The grass was swaying to the downdraft of the big rotor blades, and there was a ripple on the water, scuffing the surface to dark blue. On the far side of the lake I could see a solid wall of densely packed trees that reached all the way down to the water’s edge.

The whine of the turbines slowed. The rotors stopped. The crew chief stared out through the opposite window for a few seconds and then visibly relaxed. He glanced at his wristwatch.

“Okay,” he said. “The site is secure. You have thirty minutes for your interview, and then we’re out of here. Understood.”

I nodded. I got to my feet again and stood on the lip of the cargo hold, then turned back to the crew chief. It was eerily silent now. I could hear the distant cry of birds in the trees. I snatched off the headset. “What if the people I’m waiting to meet don’t turn up?”

The crew chief stared at me. “Tough shit,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

I jumped down from the helicopter.

The sun was warm on my back. I walked down to the water’s edge and stared across the lake. There was a gentle breeze rustling through the treetops. The air smelled fresh. Somehow that surprised me. I guess I had expected to see rotting corpses, bleached white bones, and circling vultures high overhead – the legacy of a war against the undead hordes that had been crushed and then driven back.  But there was none of that. Not here, at least.

I heard another trilling bird cry, and then a few seconds later a man appeared from within the bulrushes that fringed the shoreline. He trudged slowly from the muddy ground, a bow in his hand and arrows in a quiver strapped across his back. The man was dressed in ragged fatigues. He looked to be about fifty years old. He had a grey straggly beard, stained tobacco yellow around the mouth, and dark eyes. His face was a network of deeply chiseled wrinkles. He was broad shouldered and lean. He came up the muddy bank and stomped his boots in the long grass.

“Culver?”

“Addison?” I stared hard. The man turned his head and looked to his left. He waved his arm and I saw a second figure peel away from the dark shadows of a tree. The man came into the bright sunlight holding some kind of a rifle on his hip. He walked past one of the kneeling soldiers and the two men nodded to each other the way combat veterans do when they recognize one of their own.

The second man was also in his fifties. He walked with a heavy limp. He was tall and thin, the features of his face sallow and gaunt. He held out his hand. It was calloused, with half moons of dirt and grime under the fingernails.

“Noyce,” he said. “Phil Noyce.”

We shook hands, and then I led the men back to the shade of the helicopter’s cargo hold.

“You guys are the legendary ‘Silverbacks’, right?”

Noyce nodded. He looked weary with the kind of fatigue that comes from endless months of strain. He set his weapon aside.

“We’re two of ‘em,” the man said. “We started as a team of eight – all of us retired veterans. There are five of us left now.”

“Where are the others? I would have liked to meet them.”