Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America (32 page)

I nodded.

The Colonel splashed scotch into both glasses and carefully screwed the cap back onto the bottle. He dropped down into his chair with a sigh and reached for his glass.

“To victory,” he said.

I picked up the other glass. “To victory.”

We drank in silence. The scotch was good. Behind the Colonel’s shoulders I could see the sky slowly darkening through a window as sunset approached. Long shadows stretched across the ground and clouds went scudding across the sky, pushed along by a strengthening breeze.

Finally I set the glass down on the edge of the desk and looked more carefully around the room. There was a vast map of old America on the side wall. It had been there for some time. There were brown water stains through the paper.

“Colonel, can you explain to me in more detail how ‘Operation Compress’ actually worked? General Tash sketched a broad outline, but it was a wide-ranging interview,” I deliberately understated my time with SAFCUR III.

Richelson set down his own glass and I noticed he had barely sipped at the alcohol. He sat up straight behind his desk and clasped his hands together in a studious pose.

“When the first wave of tanks came out through the defensive forts we formed them up into line, just as they had been at the battle of Rock Hill,” he said. “When they began the push south, I was in a Black Hawk controlling the advance.”

“And were there any problems?”

“There are always problems in battle,” the Colonel said seriously. “Good leadership requires a commander to deal with those issues.”

“So… what were the problems, and how did you resolve them?”

The Colonel looked thoughtful for a moment. He was an organized man. He had an organized mind. I felt like all the information he shared was sorted and processed. Nothing came out of his mouth that was unfiltered or thoughtless. I had a hard time believing he would be capable of spontaneous decisions during something as harrowing as a major tank battle – but clearly he was. General George Tash was no fool. He had selected this man as his second-in-command for good reason.

“Coordinating the tanks with the rolling barrage of protective artillery fire was the first obstacle,” Richelson said. “The artillery was firing at map co-ordinates in a carefully scheduled plan that was designed to keep the shelling five miles ahead of the tank line. As the tanks moved forward, so would the bombardment move. That didn’t always happen with the precision required.”

I arched an eyebrow.

“What problems did that cause?”

The Colonel shook his head. “It didn’t, but it could have – if we hadn’t stayed vigilant. We needed to keep open lines of communication with the various elements of artillery we were working with, and we had to adjust the speed of the tanks. There were a couple of times when the armor was moving through flat open ground where they got too close to the barrage. We had to slow them down.”

“Couldn’t they have just stopped?”

“No. We were in zombie territory. The first rule of our tactics was that we must be constantly on the move at a pace that is faster than the undead.”

I nodded. I should have remembered that. Maybe I needed another drink…

“Were there many undead? What casualties did the rolling column inflict?”

Colonel Richelson probably knew down to the last zombie. He was the kind of perfectionist who would probably have had other helicopters in the air counting the bodies as they fell beneath the heavy tracks of the Abrams and Bradleys.

“We estimate enemy casualties at between fifteen and twenty thousand over the first few days,” he said. “That was only from the troops and tanks under my command on the eastern flank of the offensive. Those numbers became even higher as we pushed closer to the Florida border.”

“How much higher?”

The Colonel shrugged. “Another thirty thousand,” he said with concealed pride.

I was impressed. I didn’t ask about our own casualties. Instead I asked about the lessons the Army had learned between the time of the Rock Hill engagement and the massive armored push into the southern states.

Richelson considered the question, naturally.

“We didn’t modify the concepts we had already developed,” he said at last. “The only variation was the need throughout this massive assault to keep the tanks constantly on the move. In finding the solution to the problem, we also inadvertently were able to significantly reduce the number of casualties the Army on the ground incurred.”

More careful technical speak. I was becoming accustomed to the sanitized, antiseptic answers to my questions from the men who had commanded our soldiers. At another time and in another place I might have been satisfied with the vagueness of the answer. But not this time.

“What does that mean, exactly?” I asked. “Can you explain in terms my readers will actually understand?”

If he was offended, the Colonel didn’t show it. His expression remained the same. He swung around in his chair and glanced out through the window. I saw him sweep his hand through his hair, then turn back to me.

“We advanced in long lines of closely connected tanks, and two miles behind the advance was another long line of M113 personnel carriers. We had Apache helicopters in the sky, covering the flanks of each line… all that, I suspect you have already been told.”

I nodded.

“But during the offensive, the need to constantly press at the enemy demanded a second wave of tanks be moving behind the advance in order to take up the assault when the first line of vehicles needed to refuel, and required maintenance. Now the Abrams is one of the most reliable Main Battle Tanks the world has ever seen. It proved itself in the deserts of the Middle East. It’s reliable and trustworthy, so we didn’t factor on long maintenance delays. We did factor in the need to rest the men and refuel.”

“And so you had a follow up column of more tanks?”

“Yes. They trailed the line of personnel carriers. When the first line of tanks reached the objective of its advance, the rear column of tanks moved forward and spread out to continue pressing the zombies. The first vehicles were refueled.”

“And this saved lives?”

“Yes. Undoubtedly.”

“How?”

“Because at the Battle of Rock Hill the troops in the M113’s were the last line of our attack. They were required to head-shoot any of the undead that were not eliminated by the tanks. With the rolling assault that pushed south, we had the column of tanks in the rear that meant we could deploy them in instances where the men in the M113’s were unable to deal with the vast numbers of maimed zombies requiring extermination.”

I was writing all this down, but even as I did so, my mind was racing ahead to the next questions I wanted to ask. The Colonel’s explanation of the way the attack had been coordinated had made me more curious.

“What about at night?” I asked. “Did the attack roll on in darkness as well?”

“No,” Richelson said. “It was deemed too dangerous.”

“Too dangerous?” I frowned. “In comparison to waiting in the darkness for the zombies to attack?”

Richelson pressed his lips together. “The times when the vehicles were being refueled and repaired were always the moments fraught with the most hazard. It was always possible that stray surviving undead might break through our perimeter. Fortunately the covering Apache’s were thorough.”

“And during the night, when the advance was forced to halt. How did you handle that situation?”

“We dropped a constant curtain of artillery fire across the front,” the Colonel explained and then revealed an incredulous fact with a stab of his finger. “During the offensive south, we fired more shells than the Army has fired collectively in every other military conflict during the Twentieth Century. That includes Vietnam, Korea and the Middle East engagements.”

“And this curtain, as you called it – that kept the undead at arms length?” I asked.

“That, and the false insertions by the Black Hawks.”

I blinked. I hadn’t heard anything about false insertions. I flipped over to a new blank page. “What are false insertions?”

Colonel Richelson reached a long arm for his glass of scotch and took another prim sip. “From sunset until sunrise each day of the assault, we operated sticks of Black Hawk helicopters in zombie occupied territory, working in areas ahead of the tanks,” he explained. “The Black Hawks would fly very low level operations to draw the attention of the enemy. Because the zombies are attracted to sound, we were able to set the helicopters down and then take off again quickly in a series of manoeuvers that were designed to lead the zombies away from the tanks, and to concentrate them into areas where the armor would advance the following morning.”

I grunted my grudging respect. It was a clever tactic.

“And this helped distract the undead while the men involved in the assault were being rested?” I prodded.

Richelson nodded. “It certainly did,” he confirmed. “And it also served to maximize the enemy losses. Drawing them into clusters made the work of the armor as it advanced the following day even more devastating.”

MARIETTA, GEORGIA:

It was just a desolate nightmare landscape of grey rubble, black charred timbers and the burned out wreckage of cars. For miles in every direction the land was flat – made that way by the relentless artillery bombardment, which had preceded the Army’s rolling assault through the heartland of the south.

There was nothing to indicate that where I stood was once the thriving city of Marietta.

“We found the bodies over here,” the soldier pointed. He stepped away from the Humvee and went towards a broken pile of wreckage that had once been a large building. In the eerie silence I could hear the vehicle’s big engine popping and ticking as it cooled.

I followed the soldier over the broken ground. Steel girders had been twisted by artillery fire. The smell of smoke still seemed to hang in the air, even after so many months.

A rat scurried over my boot and disappeared into a crevice of rubble.

“When we found them, they were laying beside their weapons,” the soldier intoned, his voice hushed and respectful. “We figure they were from the Georgia State Defense Force. We found thirty-one bodies.”

I paused in mid stride. “Georgia State Defense Force? I didn’t know such a unit even existed.”

The soldier nodded his head. He was a grim-faced, serious young man who still looked too young to shave. “Yes, sir,” he said earnestly. “The State Defense Force is comprised of men and women who make up an unpaid, volunteer component of the US Defense Forces.” The soldier paused for a moment. “My father was part of the State Defense Force in Mississippi. A lot of retired veterans join.”

I was fascinated, but also curious. “And what makes you think that the bodies you recovered from this site were members of the Georgia State Defense Force?”

The soldier shrugged. “This was the Clay National Guard Center,” he said simply. “It was the unit’s Headquarters. When the Georgia National Guard was mobilized to fight the zombies, the State Defense Force was tasked with securing the buildings and equipment while they were fighting at the front. It’s one of their primary missions.”

I looked around again. I could see a bombed and cratered airstrip in the near distance. It was overgrown with weeds and littered with debris.

The soldier followed the direction of my gaze. He nodded again. “This site used to be a Naval Air Station,” he explained, “and the underground bunker we discovered is about another half-mile in that direction.”

We walked.

“As best we could figure it, there were twenty six men and five women inside the bunker,” the young soldier explained as we stumbled across the rough ground. “Each of the bodies was evacuated and returned to relatives for burial wherever possible.”

I was struggling to keep pace. I stopped for a moment and took a second look around, more to catch my breath than for any other reason because there was nothing to see. “How long ago did you discover the bodies?” I asked.

The soldier made a thoughtful face. “We found them a few weeks after the armor rolled through this part of the state,” he explained. “One of the mopping up crews in an M113 was checking the area for dreads. They reported the bunker.”

“Did they go down inside?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did they find – apart from the bodies, I mean?”

The soldier shrugged his shoulders. “A letter.”

I felt my heart skip a beat. “A letter? Written by one of the men?”

“Yes, sir.”

I paused for a moment. “What did it say?”

The soldier reached into his pocket. “Here,” he said. “The Colonel told me you would want it. You can read for yourself.”

The soldier handed me a folded piece of paper within a small clear plastic evidence bag. I realized my hands were trembling.

“Who wrote it?” I asked in a whisper.

The soldier shook his head. “It’s unsigned, sir.”

I opened the bag and carefully unfolded a single page of paper that was wrinkled and stained with spatters of dry blood and the grime of dirty fingers. I held the letter in my hands like it was a priceless relic and sank down onto my haunches to slowly read: