Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America (24 page)

“You crushed them?”

“Absolutely,” the Colonel said. He stopped for a moment, and bit his lip. The silence in the office stretched out. Finally he lowered his voice to a confidential level. “We FUBARed them,” he hissed.

I knew the expression, but I wondered whether the Colonel could be tempted to say the words, knowing they were being recorded.

I frowned. “I… I don’t understand…”

“Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition,” Biggins said, wrapping his tongue around the words with a kind of relish. “That’s what we aimed to achieve and, by God, that’s exactly what we did.”

There was another long pause. I did and said nothing to fill the awkward silence. I was content to listen to the Colonel explain the tank tactics in his own time. He gave me a look that suggested he didn’t much like me.

“We practiced new tank formations,” the Colonel explained. “We rehearsed driving across open fields with our tank elements close together in long impact lines. It took some time, because the concept was totally foreign to every man who has ever driven a tank, but eventually we got it. Eventually we were able to take the field in long solid lines of armor that swept down on the zombies and took advantage of their greatest weakness.”

I sat up. “They have a weakness?”

“Of course,” Biggins said, then leaned across the desk and dropped his voice to a whisper again. “They’re mindless, and they’re insatiable. They can’t help themselves but attack sound and movement.”

“So what happened?”

Biggins pointed a big gnarled finger at me. “First, you need to understand that the tank tactics we used would never have succeeded without the support from artillery,” he cautioned me. “The massed bombardment we used was like nothing ever witnessed in the history of warfare before – every piece of equipment the Army had available was drawn up and opened fire in a barrage to reduce the enemy’s effectiveness. That had to happen before the tanks could roll.”

I had heard mention of artillery fire being effective against the undead before. Now this Colonel of an Armored Cavalry Regiment was reinforcing the claim. “What use was the artillery?” I asked. “Why was it so essential?”

“Casualties,” Biggins said simply. “The whole plan depended on being able to wear away at the enemy’s efficiency and effectiveness. The artillery fire killed tens of thousands of zombies. The barrage of air burst shelling ravaged the undead. And those who weren’t destroyed were severely disabled. Only when we had saturated the area around Rock Hill did I set the tanks rolling.”

“You destroyed the towns?”

“Every one of them,” Biggins was unapologetic. “We flattened every structure that lay before us. We leveled the ground – had to. The zombies infest urban areas. They congregate in numbers around the towns. I wanted a flat-earth policy. There could be nowhere for them to hide, and no obstacles in the way that would disrupt the formations of armor. It was vital.”

I rubbed at my forehead, trying to imagine the awesome power of a vast artillery bombardment, and the impact it would have on buildings and roads. “How long did your artillery fire on the area around Rock Hill?”

“Twenty four hours – solid,” the Colonel said. “Through the night, the sky was lit like the world was on fire, and the sound shook the earth under my feet.”

“And then you sent in the tanks the following day?”

“A few hours after sunrise,” he said.

“Can you tell me more about that, please? I’d like to know what tanks you used, how many… what the result was… everything actually.”

Biggins leaned forward and rested his elbows on the edge of the desk. He laced his fingers together. He stared at me.

“An Armored Brigade Combat Team like the 278
th
consists of about ninety M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, as well as ninety M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and more than one hundred M113 Armored Personnel Carriers. That’s a lot of steel, son,” Biggins explained. “And once it’s rolling, it is an unstoppable force. The Abrams weighs around sixty-seven tons. The Bradleys weigh about twenty-five. Hell, even the M113’s weigh more than twelve tons. It’s a massive amount of weight when it’s rolling. You run someone over with an Abrams, and they’re going to have a bad day, you know what I mean?”

I nodded my head. “So you used the vehicles like a battering ram?”

Biggins looked disappointed. He shook his head. “When you say it like that, you miss the importance of the tactic,” he scowled. “You miss the value of what we did, and why it worked.”

“Okay, sorry,” I said. “Then tell me what I’m missing.”

“You’re missing the combination of elements that worked together at Rock Hill to win the conflict,” the Colonel insisted. He got back out of his chair and leaned across the table like it was a wargames sand box used to explain tactics to new officers. Suddenly he became more animated, gesturing with his hands as he explained the battle.

“Our artillery pounded the area around Rock Hill for a full day while we were drawing up the Regiment, and then we rolled out through Fort F-042 which was just south of Statesville on the I77. We had a lake on our right flank, and the AFV’s were spread out in a long line with the Abrams and Bradleys in front, and the M113’s two miles behind with troops in each vehicle.” The Colonel found a couple of rulers in his desk drawer and laid them out end-to-end on his desk to simulate the line of Abrams and Bradleys.

“The fort was our Forward Operating Base and we had an LD two miles to the south. By the time we crossed that Line of Departure we were in formation and the battle really began.”

“What happened once the zombies were engaged?”

“It was like mowing the lawn,” he said suddenly. I looked up at his face. It was such a surprising analogy that I frowned. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “When we swept south towards Rock Hill, the undead were scattered and in disarray. The bombardment had been brutal. The ground was torn up and there were undead bodies thick in the grass. We mowed right over the top of them, just like when you mow your front lawn.”

I tried to imagine the similarity. I couldn’t.

“An Abrams will do close to fifty miles an hour. Imagine that,” Biggins said. “Imagine a sixty seven ton steel monster coming at you at close to fifty miles an hour. And then imagine having nowhere to run, because there is another one right beside the first one, and another Abrams right beside it. We swept the ground clean of undead and buried them in the dirt. The machine guns on every vehicle tore them to pieces, the tanks rolled right over them, and then the infantry in the M113’s, who were finishing off the remains after we had done with them, killed anything that still writhed in the dirt. Nothing could stand in our path.”

I nodded, but something didn’t seem quite right to me. I wasn’t sure what it was. “But there must have still been tens of thousands of undead between your tanks and Rock Hill,” I said. “That’s a lot of bodies, and a lot of obstacles. You couldn’t have killed them all, surely.”

Biggins made a face that looked close to a snarl. “They’re tanks, not cars or trucks. They’re not wheeled vehicles, son. They’re tracked vehicles that can’t be stopped. They move faster than the undead can run, and a pile of zombie bodies thirty feet high is not an obstacle. The tanks just run right over them.”

“And then the troops in the Armored Personnel Carriers got out of their vehicles and killed the remains?”

Biggins nodded. “We had the men in hazmat gear. The 113’s were a couple of miles behind. Anything that moved got sprayed with machine gun fire, and then the troops disembarked the vehicles and head-shot anything that hadn’t been crushed.”

“Were the main guns on the Abrams firing? Can’t they fire some kind of canister shell?”

Biggins nodded, then shook his head just as abruptly. “We removed all the main ammunition from the Abrams and the Bradleys before they went into combat. Every available space inside those vehicles was used for machine gun ammunition.”

I sat back, staring at the two rulers on the desk. “But what about beyond the reach of the rulers… the tanks? At the end of the line… there are still going to be thousands of undead. Weren’t the men in the troop carriers in danger?”

The Colonel conceded the point with a curt nod of his head. “There was some risk,” he admitted, and then went back to his bizarre lawn-mowing comparison. “When you run your lawn mover over a swathe of grass, you never cut every blade down. That was why we had the M113’s to finish off zombies that somehow survived the assault. And yes – when you mow your lawn, you can only deal with the grass that the mower is wide enough to reach. But we had Apache’s in the sky, covering the left flank.”

I was starting to understand. “And so what was the purpose of the battle?”

Biggins regarded me carefully for a moment. “It wasn’t to win,” he admitted. “That wasn’t the point. What we wanted to do was to test the tactic – examine the impact of a combined assault using heavy armor and artillery… and the cover of helicopters. The Battle of Rock Hill was the testing ground. We knew we didn’t have enough armor to cut a deep path into South Carolina, but we needed to know whether the tactics were sound. Once we had established their validity, we could muster more armor and attack through several forts at once.”

“With the ultimate goal of killing the zombies?”

“No,” Biggins shook his head. “That was never possible. Our goal was to win back land. The final mission stage was called ‘Operation Compress’, not operation ‘Kill’, for a reason. We conceded that it would be impossible to wipe out the undead infestation by military conflict alone. Ultimately, this was all about an effort to drive the undead back to Florida and then quarantine the state.”

“Did you lose any men during the battle? Surely it couldn’t have gone exactly to script.”

Biggins made a face like he was trying to decide whether he wanted to answer the question. On the surface, his explanation had sounded flawless – as though everything during the battle had proceeded with text-book efficiency. I wasn’t an expert on the military, but I knew enough to realize that rarely happened. The fog of war, the unexpected… the things that could not be anticipated were often the cause of causalities and disasters.

Biggins pointed at my cell phone and frowned. I turned the record feature off.

“You sure that thing is switched off?”

“Yes.”

Biggins grunted, then leaned forward, becoming an intimidating presence. “I’ll give you a version for your article, and I’ll give you the facts. The facts have to be off the record. Deal?”

I was intrigued, but at the same time I was conflicted. Journalism was about seeking the truth. I wasn’t sure I could be comfortable with the compromise. But on the other hand I wanted to know the story… at any price.

“Okay,” I said grudgingly.

Biggins seemed to relax. The tension went from his shoulders, but his expression transformed into something dark and disturbed. I could see a troubled look shift behind his hard eyes.

“Officially, the Battle of Rock Hill was a stunning military success,” the Colonel declared. “Casualties were minimal. We lost less than a dozen men, and those were as a result of an accidental collision between two of the M113’s that were taking part in the mopping up operation behind the battle tanks. One of those vehicles overturned, and the crew and soldiers aboard were all killed.” He paused for a moment, and then said, “You can write that down for your article.”

I did. I jotted a few quick notes and then laid the notebook and my pen back down on the desk. “And what about unofficially?”

Colonel Biggins rubbed his forehead and for a moment his eyes were hidden behind his hand. “We lost seventy four men, killed by the zombies,” he said. “In turn, each of those infected men were terminated once they began to turn.”

I stared. Gaped. The Colonel scraped his hand down his face like he was trying to change his features by rubbing them into different shapes. Suddenly he looked haggard.

“Seventy four men killed?”

The Colonel nodded. He closed his eyes for a moment and when they blinked open again they were dark and vacant. “Two of the Abrams broke down during the operation,” he shrugged. “Mechanical difficulties. The vehicles were recovered after the battlefield had been cleared, but at the time, the men in those vehicles panicked. The tanks were overrun by undead. The crews radioed for help but didn’t stay in their vehicles. They tried to make a run for it. By that time the line had moved on. The tanks were isolated. The M113’s were closing, but couldn’t get there fast enough. The crews were attacked by zombies and all killed. When the M113’s arrived on the scene, they were confronted with their own comrades, turned into zombies.”

The Colonel lapsed into a long silence, and I sensed there would be nothing gained by a barrage of questions. I glanced out through the window behind the desk. Men in ACU’s – Army Combat Uniforms – were marching purposefully across the parade ground. Overhead, the sky was filling with dark storm clouds.

“It turned into a cluster-fuck,” Colonel Biggins said bluntly. “The men in the M113’s hesitated. They should have opened fire with the machine guns. They didn’t. We lost five troop carriers and all the crew and soldiers aboard those vehicles. Ultimately, Command radioed for air support and three of the Apache’s were called away from the left flank of the attack to terminate the infestation.”