*****
I’ve never returned to Glasgow. Some days I get close, but the view I see tells me that all is lost. Fires burn out of control, slowly consuming the city just as the undead consumed its inhabitants. I haven’t seen anyone alive, the beasts are everywhere. They have reclaimed my city.
For the rest of my days I will travel this country alone. My life shall be broadcasting the locations and numbers of the horde. Until my last breath I shall keep watch in case they move en masse again.
All of my reports are one way now. I don’t know how many—or even if any—listeners I have. But I don’t care, I just need to report.
In memory of all that were lost…I will be everyone’s eyes on the ground.
Andrew Black is a writer of weird fiction, with a specialty for writing stories about his native Ohio. His influences include Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Brian Lumley, Stephen King and Max Brooks. He currently lives in central Ohio with his wife and two daughters.
holding out alone urged to seek FEMA centers nearby * EWZN *
EmbeddedReported By Andrew Black
It’s been seven days since the armored transport I was riding in flipped over, trapping me alone inside this tin can. The guys up front, the soldiers I’ve gotten to know so well over the last year or so, are either all dead or…worse. The rations in my little survival kit are gone, and I’ve maybe got another day before I die of dehydration. There are worse ways to go, or not go, as the case may be; at least I won’t end up a groaner. That’s what the soldier boys call them, “groaners”, but I’ve heard them called “shuffles”, “biters”, and the ever popular “zoms”. My one comfort is that the thick armor-plating that keeps me trapped inside here also keeps them out.
At least I have my notebook and a good supply of pens to write. There’s just enough light coming through a small gash on the side for me to see. It’s not likely anyone will ever find this, but once a journalist, always a journalist, and I just have to get my story down on paper. So, as my professors always told me, let’s start with the basics. My name is Martin Williams, or Marty for short, a reporter for Cable News Broadcasting. I’ve been embedded with the 27th Army Tactical Unit since last April, basically from the start of the containment efforts by the government. I was specifically attached to Sergeant Luke Mabry’s squad, which was made up of the sergeant, Corporal George Dudley, PFC Luther Washington, PFC Wally Gillman, and PFC Ray Knoxville. They are, or I guess were, the biggest badasses I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.
From the earliest days of the conflict, my group was almost constantly on the front line. We were stationed in Kentucky, just south of the Ohio River near Florence. My job was to use my little camera to record the action, which I then uploaded with my satellite phone every night to the head office. I wasn’t supposed to actually take part in any combat. That lasted all of about ten minutes. Groaners are indis-criminate killers, and if you don’t protect yourself, you’ll quickly join them or be lunch for a pack of them. I’ve been stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I’ve worn the flak vests and helmets for so long they’re just second nature, but never did I feel the need to carry a firearm until this. I always subscribed to the theory that my camera was my most dangerous weapon; to a groaner, a camera is just a crunchy bit on the way to the gooey center.
I got to know the guys pretty well in the first few weeks. They appreciated it when I picked up the gun and started defending both myself and them when necessary. Sergeant Mabry was a gregarious old soldier who liked to joke with the privates that if they didn’t shape up, I’d be replacing them. We’d sit around a fire at night, drinking and joking, and bonding. I’d done this sort of thing before with my other assignments, but this time, with the whole damned world going to hell, it felt stronger, more necessary. War makes all men brothers, or so they say, and I can tell you from experience that it’s true.
We spent a lot of time guarding a bridge over the river, manning a roadblock, and directing survivors to the Safe Zone camp that the military had set up about a mile south of us. The faces of those poor people as they shuffled across the concrete span were heartbreaking. If it hadn’t been for the companionship of the soldiers, I wouldn’t have had the fortitude to stay. They joked around, made crude comments, and generally kept their minds, and mine, off the horrible circumstances that brought us together.
They had good reason to try to keep their spirits up. One of their jobs was to ensure no infected civilians were let across the bridge. Of course, everyone knows that one bite from a groaner and you’re infected. There is no cure. About two to four hours after you’re bitten, you’ll turn. It’s violent, painful, and probably one of the worst ways to die, because you really don’t die. You turn into a groaner and try to bite anyone around you. So the soldiers couldn’t allow anyone who’d been bitten to pass their checkpoint. That meant examining everyone. Fortunately there were five other units stationed with us, and we took turns on guard duty. Still, it was humiliating to the survivors to have to strip and be examined by the soldiers before they could be let across. It was worse if they found a bite.
About a month after I joined the unit, a little girl and her parents came across the bridge. I remember thinking they looked nervous, more than you’d expect from folks who just reached a military outpost. Corporal Dudley was in charge while the sergeant attended a meeting with the officers in the Safe Zone. He ordered the family into the examination area; a mobile office trailer that had been set up on the bridge with one door in and one door out. Inside, the family had to disrobe while Washington and Knoxville examined them. Gillman stood by the exit with his assault rifle at the ready. It was all standard operating procedure, nothing fancy, and the boys took no pleasure in having to search naked people to see if they had been bitten. As Washington once said, “The ones you want to see, you don’t, and the ones you don’t want to see, you do.”
You can probably guess what happened next. The little girl had a nice sized bite on her calf. The mother swore it was from her little brother and not from one of the walking dead, but the telltale swelling and black veining were clearly evident. The parents immediately rushed the two soldiers and told their daughter to run. Gillman came to the aid of his compatriots, but by the time they subdued the parents, the little girl had escaped the trailer. She didn’t get far; Dudley stopped her just outside the door. He aimed his pistol at her head, the bite mark on her leg easily visible.
“You can’t,” I said as I watched him thumb back the hammer. “She’s just a little girl!”
Dudley looked at me with sad eyes, and I saw a tear roll down his cheek. “No, Marty, she’s already dead.” He pulled the trigger without looking back, splattering her brains over the side of the trailer.
I stood there, horrified by what I’d seen, and yet I knew he was right. That innocent little girl would have become a monster. She was dead from the second she was bitten, it just hadn’t quite caught up to her yet. When the parents were taken out of the examination area, the father, seeing his daughter’s body being hosed with a flamethrower by one of the other soldiers, tried to break free and attack Dudley who was still standing with his pistol in hand, sobbing quietly over what he’d done. I stopped the distraught father; stepping in front of him and delivering a nice right cross to his jaw. I knew the pain he felt, knew that he blamed the soldier for his daughter’s death, but it wasn’t Dudley’s fault. I don’t know if the man ever came to understand that; they dragged him off in cuffs and ankle shackles.
Dudley was reassigned two days later. Last I heard, he was in DC at the Memorial Plaza Safe Zone being treated for posttraumatic stress disorder.
I’d like to say that’s the worst thing I ever saw. It wasn’t though. What I witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan was many times worse, if only because the atrocities were carried out by thinking, living human beings and not mindless zombies driven by an instinctual need to feed. I remember when we stormed a hospital in Kandahar and found the nursery that Al Qaeda operatives had rigged w
ith claymores. God, even now it still makes me sick to think about. Maybe the groaners have the right idea after all and humanity is too sick to survive.
Speaking of groaners, I hear them outside, scratching at the sides of the transport. The truck is completely rolled; I’m sitting on the ceiling as I write this, and it’s stuck in a swampy muck. I’m lucky only a small corner has leaked in the filthy stuff. It’s not fit to drink, I know that, but damned if I might not try it before I die. That’s what this war has done to us, made us all do whatever we have to do to survive.
I saw that philosophy first hand about four months after the bridge incident. We’d been sent to Cincinnati to help secure Paul Brown Stadium as a new Safe Zone, tentatively dubbed “Jungle Station” after the football team that used to call the stadium home. I’d never been to the Queen City, but I’d heard it was a difficult place to push the groaners back. This was mostly due to its hilly nature, coupled with narrow streets and plenty of buildings for the shuffling monsters to hide.
We crossed the bridge from Florence in a transport just like the one I’m stuck in now. We rumbled through the deserted streets to the stadium, where razor wire and steel fencing had already been erected. About three thousand refugees were already inside, but the place was assaulted almost every night by hordes of zombies. The fences had held so far, but something needed to be done to stem the flow of attacks. That’s where my friends came in. They were going to be sent to flush out and exterminate any “nests” of groaners in the area. It’s always been something of an oddity to me that the zombies sometimes clump together into little groups that stick together. I’ve heard it may be a vestigial sense of community, a dim understanding of safety in numbers, but whatever the cause, it made dealing with them a lot more dangerous.
The first night we were at the stadium, a group of about a hundred groaners came shuffling to the fence. My guys backed up the soldiers who had already grown weary of the constant fighting. I clearly recall Washington standing on a scissor lift, raining bullets down on the horde. For every groaner he mowed down, three more seemed to appear. Even I stepped up to the barricade and started sniping some shufflers with my semi-automatic. I went through three magazines before the damned things finally gave up and went back to their hidey-holes.
The next day, we got a map of the city from the sta-dium guards with big red circles drawn around areas suspected of being nests. There were lots of hotels nearby that made for perfect daytime hiding spots. Sergeant Mabry decided to start with the Hilton and work north. We stocked up on supplies and ammo and headed into the wasteland. The hotel was about two blocks north of the stadium, and I was walking in the center of the formation as we crept up to its entrance. It was quiet on the streets, empty and still, with the only sound coming from our boots scuffing the pavement.
We didn’t run into any trouble getting into the hotel. That wasn’t too surprising considering it was daytime and groaners typically don’t like to go out in the sunlight. They aren’t afraid of it, but I think they somehow feel themselves rotting faster in the bright light and don’t like it. They run on instinct alone, so that’s as good an explanation as any. Inside was another story; the hotel was dark as pitch. The soldiers had learned early on not to use flashlights; the beams attract groaners like moths to a flame. Instead, we all had low-light goggles clipped to our helmets. My camera had a similar feature, and I turned it on as we began searching the building.
There were definite signs that someone had been in the hotel recently. Furniture in the lobby was moved around haphazardly, and two of the stairwells were barricaded. “Might be civies in here, watch your fire,” the sergeant ordered in a whisper. We swept the lobby level, then split into two groups to check out the rest of the hotel. Sergeant Mabry, Private Washington, and I went up the unblocked stairwell to check the guest rooms. Gillman and Knoxville, along with our replacement corporal, Eugene Timmons, headed down into the convention halls and meeting rooms under the hotel.
My small group headed up the winding stairs. On every floor we found the stairwell doors locked shut with chains and padlocks. Mabry grew even more concerned that there might be survivors in the hotel, especially when we found three corpses, all with bullet holes in the head, on the landing of the twenty-first floor. We continued our long climb, going slowly and methodically. We found trip lines on the next to last floor, the thin wires attached to a collection of old tin cans hanging over the edge of the steps that would raise quite an alarm if stumbled over. We carefully stepped over the trap and made our way to the top floor.
The door to the final floor, the thirty-fifth, was not chained. Instead, a series of deadbolts had been added to the door frame, a good dozen of them, each with a flip knob to unlock them. The bolts weren’t installed very well, but it was a simple setup that would be effective considering groaners’ lack of intelligence. They’d never understand that they needed to turn all those little brass levers to open the door. Washington began carefully opening each lock, sliding the bolts back gently and silently. When the last brass bar was released, Mabry cautiously opened the door.
I didn’t initially see inside as I was standing to the side and part way down the steps. Instead, my first indication something was very wrong was the smell. You get used to the smell of death when you’re out on the lines. Groaners always stink of rot and decay, and there’s plenty of corpses around to make the stench even worse. The miasma that issued from that doorway made me want to puke my guts out. I really can’t describe it in a way that would convey the utter wrongness of it; the visceral reaction it caused nearly overwhelmed even my two battle-hardened companions. Suffice it to say, it was like nothing I had ever experienced before and never wanted to again.
We had gas masks, fortunately, as part of our standard gear. We all pulled the rubber devices from our packs and fitted them to our faces. The chemical canisters filtered out most of the stench, but it still lingered in my nostrils, making me ill as we walked into the hotel hallway. Light streamed in from the big skylight in the center of the tower, rendering our goggles ineffective. We flipped them up and saw the cause for the smell: bodies were piled along the edges of the curved hallway, stacked like firewood and hacked up in a similar manner. There were men, women, and children—or at least pieces of them—in the jumbled heaps. The carpet and walls were coated with dried blood and gore, and maggots crawled all over the rotting detritus, but this wasn’t the worst part. No, the true horror came when we saw that the body parts had in many cases been gnawed by human teeth. Months of dealing with zombies made us experts on what a human bite mark looked like, and the wounds on the various victims certainly weren’t the work of animals, at least not of the non-human variety. None of the bites had the swelling or black veining that came from being infected by a groaner; we knew exactly what had happened.
We found the five survivors, three men and two women, huddled together in one of the suites. Their clothing was little more than rags, their hair and nails long and wild. Their mouths and chins were caked with blood, and when we came upon them, they were feasting on the torso of a young man. The flesh was gray and molded, but the feral cannibals didn’t seem to mind. They tore at the fetid skin with yellowed teeth, their eyes rimmed red and crazed. The men attacked us, grunting like animals as they charged. I admit I didn’t wait for the sergeant to give the order to fire and neither did Washington. We cut down the men without mercy. The two women cowered in the corner, still snatching handfuls of flesh as we stepped into the room. I turned my pistol on them, but the sergeant warned me to stop.
I looked at Mabry and shook my head. Technically, I wasn’t military, and not under his direct command. I shot both of the blood-stained cannibals without remorse. The ser-geant got in my face, demanding to know what I thought I was doing.
“They were already dead,” I replied calmly. The sergeant was struck speechless. Washington didn’t say anything, but he patted me on the back in support.
Mabry silently led the way out of the room a
nd answered the radio when Timmons called to ask about the sound of the shots. “Found five groaners up here. They’re dealt with,” he lied. He looked at me, sad eyed and weary. I nodded to him and we returned to the stairwell, locking the door behind us.
We eventually flushed out a couple dozen nests during our sweeps. By the end of September, the area around the stadium for about a mile or two was clear of groaners. We even got the ball field next door secured for use as another Safe Zone, with supplies coming down the river to build a huge concrete wall around both complexes. We never again spoke about what happened at the Hilton, and in his official report, Sergeant Mabry commended my bravery in helping to deal with a small nest of zombies.
Since then, I’ve seen that sort of thing more and more often; humanity slowly sliding back into a primitive state. We found a group of men operating what amounted to a rape camp, where they sold both living and undead women to horny soldiers and survivors. Mabry and Timmons busted a cadre of gangsters who were robbing the supplies at the stadium and selling them to starving folks on their way to the Safe Zone. We heard plenty of reports of the West Coast, which had fallen completely to the groaners within a matter of weeks after the initial infection, of packs of feral children roaming about in the company of coyotes, feeding on whatever they could find. Civilization seemed to contract down to small bubbles, the Safe Zones mostly, with the rest of the world turned into a lawless wasteland.
The military outposts weren’t the only place where survivors massed. There were also the Rapture Centers, run by an ultra-conservative religious organization called the Evangelicals. They firmly believed the end of the world was at hand, and honestly I can’t blame them. However, instead of trying to save what was left of civilization, they actively encouraged the fall of mankind. Only the faithful were allowed into their camps, which were fortified as strongly as any of our government-run centers. The test for entry apparently involved a painful process where the applicant was subjected to various tortures to see if they would renounce their faith. Once inside the compounds, we had no idea how they all lived, as they were rarely seen to take in any sort of supplies and had only a limited infrastructure, which was mostly a radio broadcast from Liberty University in Virginia. The propaganda that station spewed, specifically about the government and troops, was unbelievable.
Eye Witness: Zombie Page 18