I turned around, numbed. “My God,” I breathed. “I had no idea.” Some of the bones were still shrouded in tattered rags of cloth. They had been picked clean by the scavengers and burned bright white by the North Carolina sun. In places the bodies had fallen in great heaps, and closer to the rusted entanglement of barbed wire, the bones were scattered so thickly that no grass had grown, no ground could be seen. It was a floor of fragmented skulls.
“You wanted to know what the Battle of Four Seasons was like,” Colonel Clayton Paris of the 82nd Airborne said. His voice was deep and made harsh. “This was the reality of it.”
He came to join me, leaving his aides by the bulky shape of the Black Hawk. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back, his shoulders straight, but his head bowed. He moved like he was stepping through a cemetery.
“One day,” the Colonel stared hard into my eyes, “I hope this battlefield will be treated with the same awed reverence as Gettysburg. It deserves it… but I doubt it will happen.”
“Why?” I asked. My voice was hushed. It didn’t need to be – the battle had been fought almost a year ago. And I hadn’t meant for my voice to be so restrained. It was perhaps, merely a reflection of the desolate, eerie surroundings.
The Colonel shook his head. He had a worn face, the granite features of his younger self abraded away by the ravages of life and the horrors he had seen. His eyes were deep and dark like fathomless pools, and the silver pelt of his moustache drooped into the corners of his mouth when he smiled.
He wasn’t smiling now.
“There will be no monuments from this war, no statues and no medals conferred,” his deep voice rumbled. “There will be no parades to remember our heroes or fallen comrades – because it wasn’t that kind of war. It wasn’t the romantic notion recorded in the history books. There were no bright uniforms and no glorious moments to be turned into song. This was a dirty war. A harsh, terrible war. A war I wish I could forget.”
When the zombie hordes had swept north and crashed against the Danvers Defense Line, Colonel Paris had been commanding the Battalion of the 82nd Airborne who had repelled the initial attack. It had happened right here – right where we were standing, early one morning as the sun had begun to rise.
Just fifty feet away, behind the coiled wire, was the length of trench where the Colonel’s men had faced down over one hundred thousand of the undead in a battle that had raged throughout the entire day, and well into the evening. I shook my head slowly.
One hundred thousand zombies – a Superbowl crowd, swarming from out of the distant fringe of dense trees and hurling themselves up the gentle rise of ground, and onto the waiting guns.
It was simply too overwhelming – too vast for me to possibly visualize.
“They came from out of those woods,” the Colonel said, pointing to the south. “We knew they were coming – we’d been preparing for twenty four hours. We had satellites, and helicopters thick in the sky, tracking their approach. We knew the storm was coming, we just didn’t know the precise point of impact.”
I followed the direction the Colonel was pointing. About three miles away I could see a dense barrier of forest. The ground ahead of the trees was strangely undulated, like grass covered sand dunes, before leveling out as it rose gradually to where we stood.
“How did you survive?” I asked. “How could so few men hold off over one hundred thousand undead? It just doesn’t seem possible.”
The Colonel said nothing for a moment, but there was a flickering shift in his eyes. “It wasn’t just my men,” he said. “The defense of Hendersonville was the culmination of a lot of careful thought and planning. It was the first time those plans had been put into practice. Thankfully, they worked. If they hadn’t… well, you can guess the rest.”
“So what were these tactics? How were they different from the standard military tactics you might have employed on any other battlefield?”
Colonel Paris rummaged into his pocket and found a cigar. He jammed it into the corner of his mouth and lit it. He inhaled deeply and the sweet aroma of the expensive tobacco carried on the breeze, enveloping me in a soft scented cloud for a moment.
“The tactics we drew up to deal with the zombies were totally different to the way we would normally go about combat,” the man said. “They had to be, because the nature of the enemy was so unlike any other we had gone to war against.”
“In what ways?”
“In every way,” Paris gruffed. “But the two most important factors that determined the way we fought them were the issues of morale, and motivation,” he said.
“Morale and motivation?” I felt I should write this down. I flipped open my notebook and started scribbling.
“You see the zombies don’t suffer from issues that affect their morale, son,” he said between puffs of hazy smoke. “You can’t demoralize them – you can’t beat them into submission. You can’t encircle them and call on them to surrender. They’re mindless. They keep on coming because of their motivation.”
“Which is?”
“To kill,” he said. “To kill no matter what. They’re driven by sound. It makes them crazy. It incenses them. They have no regard for self-preservation. The mindlessness of them makes them a brutal enemy.”
I wrote frantically. “Okay,” I said. “So how did these factors affect your tactics?”
“We had to go back to the drawing board,” Colonel Paris explained. “We had to remember our history if we were to safeguard our future. Eventually, we found the answers in the lessons of the First World War, and the Zulu warriors of Africa.”
What?
“Sorry,” I muttered. “I don’t think I heard that last part clearly. Did you say your tactics came from the Zulus of Africa?”
Paris looked kind of pleased by the dumbfounded expression I wore. He nodded. “It was where we took our inspiration from,” he clarified… without being any clearer.
I waited. Colonel Paris seemed in no particular hurry. He nudged a shattered pelvis bone, buried in the grass, with the toe of his boot.
“On the other side of that wire I had close to a thousand of the best men in the Army,” he said. “Every one of them a veteran, every one of them proud to be in the 82nd,” he explained. “And further along the trench in both directions we had Battalions of the 14th Infantry Regiment – the Golden Dragons. Together, the five miles of this line were defended by some of the very best soldiers ever to go to war. They were steady and experienced.”
“Against one hundred thousand?”
“Behind the trench, on the high ground, we had a battalion of Abrams tanks, and in fields beyond those trees way back yonder, we had massed artillery batteries of Paladins.”
“What are they?” I asked, and then added quickly, “and what good were they? I didn’t imagine artillery would make an impact on a horde of zombies. Surely the artillery wasn’t effective?”
“Paladins are 155mm self-propelled howitzers,” The Colonel said crisply, as though I was interrupting the flow of his retelling. “They’re like a tank and an artillery piece combined,” he gave me the vague dumbed-down description. “And they were effective.”
I shrugged and moved on. I decided I would come back to the artillery issue later.
“So clearly, advance warning gave you a fighting chance.”
“Absolutely,” the Colonel agreed. “Having that kind of intelligence – knowing where the enemy was massing and having some idea when they would smash against the line gave us time to organize. It gave us the opportunity to pull together the armor and artillery to support the front line troops. Without that notice, there was no way we could have activated the plan to defend Hendersonville.”
I nodded, made a note to find out more about Paladin self-propelled artillery pieces, and then looked up into the Colonel’s face.
“So what was this plan – and how did the Zulu’s inspire you?”
Colonel Paris suddenly became more animated, drawing shapes in the air with his
fingers as he spoke around the stub of his cigar. “The Zulu warriors are famous for a tactic called the ‘Buffalo Horns’,” he said. “It’s a variation of a classic flanking manoeuver where the Zulus move forward into battle with the strongest, fittest men forming the ‘chest’ of the buffalo. That’s the part that absorbs the ferocity of the attack. Then, when the enemy is engaged, the ‘horns’ of the buffalo sweep forward on either side and attack the enemy from both flanks.”
I nodded. And then flinched suddenly. “Jesus! You didn’t have your men storm out of the trench and through the barbed wire to outflank the zombies, did you?”
“Of course not, you damned fool!” the Colonel’s voice suddenly boomed in the silence of that tragic, monstrous graveyard. “We employed what we called the ‘static buffalo’ – a tactic that played on the predictability of the zombie behavior.”
I waited with my mouth shut. The Colonel drew deeply on his cigar and then waved it at my face. “I wanted the zombies to attack here,” he said. “Right here where my men were waiting. So we opened fire – drew them towards the sound – lured them onto the defensive line at a place we were prepared for them. That was the first step.”
“And it worked?”
The Colonel nodded. “They responded to the sound of machine gun fire. It was like a huge flock of birds, suddenly wheeling in the air and all flying towards the one point. That was when the artillery opened fire.”
“The Paladins.”
“Yeah,” Colonel Paris said, his voice gruff. “The artillery started shelling the area two miles south of here – just pounding away in a pattern. By then they were firing right amongst the zombies. It didn’t deter them. They kept raging towards the trench.”
“Were your men still firing?”
“Sporadically,” he said. “There was no point. The ghouls were well out of effective range, but I had to keep some fire up to keep ‘em interested enough to hit the wire where we wanted them.”
I ran my eyes quickly back over my notes. “Can you tell me more about the artillery?” I asked. “Conventional thinking would say that it would be ineffective against the undead swarms because of the slim chance of getting fragments to actually penetrate the brain. Was that the reality?”
The Colonel dropped what was left of his cigar in the grass and ground it down with the heel of his boot.
“That was not the case,” he said. “The artillery wasn’t meant to wipe out the zombies. Yeah, they took some of the bastards out, because the effective blast zone of each shell fired was about fifty yards. We scored some kills, but we did a hell of a lot of damage to them, slowing them down. That’s what the artillery was for – it was a backup to the barbed wire.”
I tried to look like I understood. I don’t think it worked. “Um…”
The Colonel sighed. “We were dealing with over one hundred thousand undead, maybe a hell of a lot more, and they were all enraged and charging up the slope towards the barbed wire. There was too many of them – we knew that. The artillery fire slowed them down. They fell in their thousands – arms and legs torn off – some decapitated, but thousands of them incapacitated,” The Colonel emphasized the word. “It meant that when they hit the line they weren’t all stormin’ and a hollerin’. Some of them were dragging themselves towards the trench. Others were thrown down and didn’t get up again.”
“Okay,” I said with a little more conviction. “And the artillery worked with the barbed wire? Is that right?”
“Yes!” Colonel Paris exclaimed. “No one in their right mind expected the zombies to hit the barbed wire and then suddenly turn back in surprise! They flung themselves at the entanglements, and became entangled. It slowed them down,” the man said again, talking to me like maybe I had some kind of a learning disability. “We couldn’t hold the line against so many zombies unless we could find ways to halt or delay their attack and make them easier for the troops in the trench to pick off. We wanted to stagger the onslaught – and, by God, that’s exactly what the artillery and barbed wire did.”
“And so then what?” I prompted. “How did the attack develop?”
“Quickly anyhow,” the Colonel admitted. “That’s what combat is like. It’s the endless days of boredom and anticipation, followed by a sporadic burst of gut-churning action and panic. When the zombies came within range, every man in my Battalion opened fire.”
“And the tanks? You mentioned there were tanks on the reverse side of the defensive trench.”
“They opened fire too,” the Colonel said. “That was the reason for the trench being so deep. Eight foot is higher than any man. So we built firing steps. The battalion was lined up on the steps, with just their heads and shoulders visible, and the tank-mounted heavy machine guns were able to fire over the troops and into the zombies.”
“The firepower…” I confessed, “… it must have been awesome.”
The Colonel actually smiled – a grim little twitch one corner of his mouth. “It was unlike anything I had ever experienced before,” he admitted. “Normally firefights are sporadic affairs – one guy shoots and then the other guy shoots back – that sort of thing. But this was a full Battalion of the 82nd Airborne opening fire with everything we had, supported by Paladin artillery and the machine gun mounts on a line of Abrams tanks. It was a sound to shake hell itself.”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw bones spread across the ground amongst the barbed wire defense. “Some of them got caught in the wire,” I said and pointed.
“A lot reached the entanglement,” the Colonel said, “but none reached the trench. Once they were ensnared in the wire, we picked them off quickly. Some of them fell and others tried to clamber over the bodies. We picked them off too. And some of them literally hurled themselves into the wire. They died where they fell.”
“So it worked?”
“Yeah,” the Colonel said.
“But still… one hundred thousand zombies… how did the line hold against the tremendous weight of numbers?”
The Colonel tapped the side of his nose and smiled slyly. “That was when the static buffalo tactic came into play,” he said. I got the sense he was enjoying himself now. Not enjoying the horror of the battle, but the elegance of the plan he was revealing. There was a sense of grim satisfaction in his voice.
“We held the line against the horde for as long as we could, but simple math made it impossible to sustain. There were just too many of the enemy pressing at the one point. When I felt we were about to be overwhelmed – everyone in the 82nd stopped firing.”
“They did what?”
“They stopped firing,” the Colonel said like he was relishing my surprise. “And then they stepped back down off the firing step, below the eye line of the trench. Suddenly the undead couldn’t see anyone. All they could see were the hulls of the Abrams tanks, covering the wire.”
“And then?”
“And then the Battalions on either side of my men opened fire. From the left and right of our position the 14th started shooting.”
“What happened?”
“The zombies pressing against the line were drawn to the new sound – they couldn’t help themselves. They’re like moths to a bright light if sound catches their attention. They began to spread away on either side onto the ‘static horns’ of the buffalo.”
“So it was kind of like a spillway for a dam,” I said, nodding with admiration despite myself. “When a dam is about to overflow, they let out excess water to decrease the pressure. You did the same kind of thing.”
The Colonel wrinkled his nose and then sniffed. “I prefer the buffalo analogy,” he said stoically.
“And so the 14th Infantry began drawing the undead onto their guns, right?”
Colonel Paris nodded. “We had more tanks covering their men from the reverse slope – not firing their main weapon, but merely adding the fire from their machine guns. As the undead were repelled, the Paladins opened up again, catching those who had been disabled and finishing them off.”
>
“Was there ever a point during the battle where you thought the plan would fail, or when everything suddenly went wrong?”
“No,” the Colonel said, and I believed him. “We had a twenty foot wide trench with all the ammunition we could stockpile, and the ability to bring more men from further along the defensive line in to support the troops if necessary. It was a cohesive plan tailored to the specific enemy we faced – and it worked flawlessly.”
“Did many zombies get entangled in the wire?”
“Thousands,” The Colonel said. “But very few made it beyond the first ten feet of the entanglement before they were head-shot. We left them sagging in the wire until the battle was over, and then burned the bodies with flamethrowers.”
“How long did the battle last?”
“All day,” Colonel Paris said. He folded his arms across his chest. “The Paladins stopped firing just on sunset, and by then the field was littered with the dead. More dead than I’ve ever seen. More dead than in the great Napoleonic battles. The fields were red with zombie blood and slippery with their gore. It was a charnel house.”
“I can only imagine…” I said softly, my voice muted.
The Colonel sighed. “The field of glory is never a pretty sight,” he said, like he was maybe quoting some long-forgotten General from the pages of history.
The man became somber for just a moment, and then seemed to shake the mood off like a heavy coat. “We fired flares throughout the night and kept the men standing at their posts until sunrise,” The Colonel said. “The Paladins began firing again in the middle of the night and continued firing throughout the next day.”
“Why?”
“To make sure every one of the undead sons-of-bitches was dead once and for all,” the Colonel growled with sudden passion. “There were thousands of them, mutilated in the grass. We left it to the artillery to finish them off. By then they weren’t moving much. The artillery pounded them into dust.”
Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America Page 15