Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America

by Nicholas Ryan

  “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 call
oused, 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.”

  “Busy,” Noyce said. “They’re on a random run along the I20.”

  I nodded. I don’t know why. I had no idea what the man was talking about, but I nodded anyhow. I reached for my notebook and pen. The other man, Addison, set his bow down and reached into his pockets. He rolled a cigarette and stuffed it into the corner of his bearded mouth.

  “Just because the war ain’t going on in this part of Georgia anymore, doesn’t mean there ain’t fighting still to do,” Addison said. His face disappeared behind a blue haze of pungent tobacco smoke.

  I looked from one man to the other. Beneath the layers of grime, the filthy clothes and the weary exhaustion that was carved into their features, I could still see the dark gleam of life glinting in their eyes. They were hard men who had fought for their country and returned home wounded. Now they were at war once again as a tight band of freedom fighters.

  “Are all the Silverbacks retired veterans?” I asked.

  Noyce nodded. “I was a Sergeant in the Army,” the man said. “I did ten years, and was deployed in Iraq with the 1st Cavalry Division. I came home with a bad leg from shrapnel wounds.”

  “And the gun?” I asked. “Is that the weapon you’ve been using in your fight against the zombies?”

  Noyce nodded again. He seemed a man of few words. Everything he said was for a reason, and uttered with economy. He picked up the carbine and laid it across his lap. “It’s a Bushmaster M4,” he said. He also had a KaBar knife in a sheath strapped to his thigh. He was wearing multicam pants and shirt and combat boots, and a chest rig that was stuffed with spare magazines.

  I turned and looked towards Addison. “And you use a bow and arrows?”

  Addison nodded. “I’ve also got a Smith & Wesson double action revolver,” he started to smile slowly, “if things get messy, but I like the bow most. It’s silent and deadly. That’s important for the work we’ve been doing,” the smile on Addison’s lips became broader. “I’m too old for all the runnin’ and jumpin’ to evade the bastards when they turn nasty. It’s easier just to kill the fuckers and sneak away without them being none the wiser.”

  I looked down at the weapon. It was a compound bow with small wheels and a series of pulleys. There was some kind of a sight mounted to the shaft of the weapon. It looked more hi-tech than some of the rifles I had seen soldiers carrying.

  “Is it effective?” I asked.

  Addison took one long last drag on his cigarette and flicked the remains out through the cargo door. “Yeah,” he said in an exhalation of smoke. “Too effective.”

  I frowned. “How could it possibly be too effective?”

  Addison reached behind his back and pulled an arrow from his quiver. He showed me the point. “I used to have barbed arrowheads,” he explained, “but the bow was burying the arrow so deep into the skull of the undead fuckers, I couldn’t retrieve the arrow. Couldn’t get it back out through the head. So I had to change to blunt steep tips. Just as effective, but easier to pull out of a dead ghoul’s eye or temple.” He winked, like he had shared some hard-earned valuable piece of knowledge that would one day be useful to me. I smiled, kind of…

  “The Silverbacks are all old buddies,” Addison explained. “After we served, we became preppers. We all sensed the world was changing and that it was just a matter of time before it went to hell. So we prepared. We packed bug-out bags, we drilled with weapons at the range. We thought about escape routes and kept our survival skills. We didn’t expect the apocalypse to come through some towel-head fucking plot, but when it arrived on our doorstep, we were ready,” the man said proudly. “That’s what keeps us alive – the preparation and the skills we spent years honing.”

  Prepping was a term I had heard a lot in the preceding twelve months. America had a rich gun culture, but remarkably few people skilled in the robust arts of survival. Millions had died on the streets of Florida because they were unprepared. I imagined the nation would never be so unsuspecting again. Already the government was talking about post-apocalyptic preparedness for citizens, much of the template being drawn from the Israeli experience.

  On the inbound flight I had made a list of questions I’d wanted to ask, but now I was face to face with these men, our exchange became more of a conversation than a formal interview. I was genuinely fascinated by these retired soldiers, and their decision to stay ‘in country’ rather than flee north when the zombie infestation had first swept up from the south.

  I wanted to know why.

  Addison answered. He seemed the more affable of the two men. His voice was chirpy with an inherent kind of enthusiasm that came out in his tone and attitude.

  “What? Run away from the biggest fight the world has ever seen?” he shook his head with incredulity. “Why would we run from that?” he asked me. “We’re capable, trained and motivated. This is our land, and Georgia is our state.” He paused for a moment like a steam train gathering momentum for the next hilly ascent. “If we had evacuated behind the Danvers line, right now we’d be holed up somewhere in rocking chairs, regretting the fact that we’d run away from a fight.” He shook his head. “No, sir. That ain’t us. And it’s why we still haven’t called it quits. It’s why we’re still running random routes – because the fight ain’t over and we intend on seeing it through until the end.”

  I frowned. “What is a random route?” I asked. “It’s the second time I’ve heard that phrase mentioned.”

  Noyce leaned forward and shuffled his boots. “It’s one of the tactics we’ve used to fight the zombies,” he explained. His voice was steady and calm. It was the voice of an airline pilot – the kind of voice you could put your trust in to get you home safely. “We have a truck with a flat bed on back, and we drive random routes looking for undead. They’re drawn to the noise. We run up and down the local roads with the horn blaring, and the undead come rushing from wherever the fuck they are hiding and chase the truck.”

  “Chase it to where?”

  “A dead end street, or a cul de sac,” Addison cut across the conversation. “We’ve got about a dozen places marked out and we lead them to the one we have picked for the ambush.”

  It sounded like risky work for the driver. Noyce went on smoothly, as though Addison had never spoken.

  “We hide in the houses at the end of the street and the truck leads the zombies towards us. When we have them gathered together, the driver high-tails it through a fence and then we open fire from every direction – with everything we have.”

  I was stunned. “And it worked?”

  “Every time,” Noyce said dryly. “In the early days – when the infected were running rampage across the south, we would draw thirty or forty at a time. We’d lead them to the ambush place and cut them down. Now, since the Army has driven the ghouls back into Florida, we’re lucky to lure a few of the bastards a week. But it’s still effective.”

  I wrote everything down as quickly as I could. Some of my notes were just hasty scratches. I’d have to interpret the mess some other time.

  “And the three Silverbacks that were killed?” I lowered my voice to a respectful tone. “Can you tell me how they lost their lives?”

  “Bravely,” Noyce said.

  Silence.

  Addison and Noyce exchanged glances, and then Addison sighed. “One of the boys was Phil’s brother, Tom,” he explained. “Tommy was with a couple of the other
guys working on the truck at a safe house we used to stay at. We were trying to fit a 50 cal machine gun onto the flat bed. The guys got trapped by a swarm of the undead fuckers and by the time the rest of us shot our way out of the house to get to them, all three of the team had been killed.”

  “I see,” I said somberly. “I’m sorry. Can you tell me their names? I’d like to mention them in the article.”

  “Bob White, Tom Noyce and Scott Horsburgh.”

  “Did the men have families?”

  “You mean wives and kids?” Addison asked. “Sure. We all have. They went north at the start of the outbreak.”

  “You must miss them.”

  Noyce shrugged his shoulder. “Sure,” he said. “But it’s worth the sacrifice. That’s what combat is about – you sacrifice the comforts and security of daily life in order to protect the freedom of others. It’s patriotism.”

  I saw the crew chief over Addison’s shoulder. He held up his wrist and tapped at his watch. Then he held up both hands. I had ten minutes left with these men, and an hour of questions I wanted to ask.

  “The ambush tactic,” I asked. “Is that the only method you used to fight the undead?”

  Addison shook his head. He tugged at the straggles of his beard for a moment. “The bow,” he said, “is the perfect stealth weapon. The zombies have acute hearing – everyone knows that – so you can’t take them on in a firefight and hope to get away every time. The problem is that the sound of gunfire just brings more of the fuckers. But the bow – well that was the perfect ‘minuteman’ weapon. I could lay in wait until one of the ghouls staggered past and take him out without revealing my position. It was like sniper fire. They never knew what hit ‘em.”

  “And so you would just lay in wait in a field… or in the bulrushes like you did when the helicopter landed?”

  “No,” Addison shook his head. “It had to be an urban situation to be worthwhile. The undead congregated in the towns, so we would go in at night and find a high building with a good escape route. Then we’d wait until daylight and pick them off as they staggered down the streets until I ran out of arrows. The guys with the guns protected the escape route.”