I stared again at the stark white bones that were thick on the ground. “I’d like to talk to one of your men, if that’s all right. I’d like to hear what the battle was like for one of the men in the trenches as the zombie horde crashed along the line.”
The Colonel snapped a speculative glance at me, and then slowly nodded his head. “Sure,” he said…
“It was a target rich environment,” Specialist Marcel Rodriguez said to me without relish – without any hint of pleasure. “They were thick on the ground, pressing against the barbed wire. From that range, we couldn’t miss.”
Rodriguez, one of the 82nd Airborne’s designated marksmen was posted in the middle of the line when the zombie horde spilled out across the rolling fields that fateful dawn. He remembered the battle clearly; the sights and sounds of that action still a harrowing torment to him, as it was for many of the men who stood in the trenches throughout the Battle of Four Seasons.
Rodriguez was armed with an M14, equipped with a Sage stock and with a mounted Leupold scope.
“We started firing when the dreads were five hundred yards away, and we didn’t stop firing for near eight hours,” the soldier explained. “We were pissing while we stood and shot. There just wasn’t an option. No one could be spared, so we just urinated against the wall of the trench and got on with the business at hand.”
Rodriguez was one of the men who formed the ‘chest’ of Colonel Clayton Paris’s static buffalo defense. He said the undead horde that came towards Hendersonville that morning was nothing like he had expected.
“We had seen the media stuff,” he said. “You couldn’t avoid it, but even so the reality when they came through the trees was a lot more intense than anything the television had shown.”
“What do you mean by ‘intense’?” I asked. Rodriguez was a young man, not yet twenty-five, with jet-black hair and one single eyebrow that seemed to reach right across his brow. He had flashing white teeth and Latino features.
“The sound of them,” he shook his head like it still echoed inside his mind, “was terrifying. It wasn’t a cohesive kind of battle cry – it wasn’t like a chorus of voices all calling out the same words. It was more animalistic. More raw than that. It was a wild insane sound. It was chilling.”
“How were the men around you at that point?” I asked. “The rest of the guys you must have hung out with in your unit?”
Rodriguez shrugged. “We were all pretty scared,” he admitted. “Nothing wrong with that. Everyone gets scared before going into action. The guys around me were nervous. We just looked at each other with this kind of what the fuck expression in our eyes.”
“And then you started firing, right?”
He nodded. “At five hundred yards,” he said again. “There was artillery coming in from behind our position, falling amongst the dreads once they cleared the trees. The rest of the guys sat tight, but as an SDM, it was up to guys like me to start picking off the nearest dreads before they got too close.”
“So you’re a sniper, right?”
“Like a sniper,” Rodriguez said, “but we’re not snipers – our training isn’t that specialized. Our role is to lay down accurate fire for our fire team at a range up to around eight hundred yards. Snipers work differently.”
I made a note of that.
“So tell me your recollections of the battle,” I encouraged the young soldier.
He was a shy, quiet man. He felt uncomfortable being questioned. He flicked a glance sideways and saw the Colonel standing with his staff well out of earshot. Rodriguez and I were sitting in the shade of the Black Hawk. The Colonel had wandered away down the slope, walking the battlefield while a small cluster of neatly uniformed subordinate officers shadowed his every step.
“The dreads were like a nightmare,” Rodriguez confided. “Their faces…” he shook his head. “They were covered in blood. Some of them had arms and legs missing. Some of them were horribly burned, and others had chest wounds. It didn’t matter. They threw themselves at the barbed wire like savage dogs.”
“And you and the rest of your Battalion held them off.”
“Yeah,” Rodriguez said softly, like he still didn’t believe it himself.
“Was it hard to concentrate?” I asked the impulsive question, trying to get the man to open up to me. “With all that noise, the sound of a battle raging and so many zombies trying to get through the wire to tear you to pieces – how did you keep your focus?”
“Training,” came the automatic answer. “After the first few rounds, and after the initial shock and fear of seeing so many dreads swarming towards us, we just fell back on our training, like robots,” he said.
“And that helped you concentrate?”
“No. That helped us get through the action and do our job,” he said. He paused for a moment to pluck one of the bright yellow flowers from the ground. He held it up, close to his face and studied it carefully, then glanced at me furtively. “I only shot men,” he whispered.
“Sorry?” I frowned and leaned closer. “I missed that.”
Rodriguez lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. “That day – I only shot and killed men.”
“Male zombies?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” I was intrigued.
Rodriguez shrugged his shoulders again. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “I just couldn’t… y’know…?”
“You couldn’t fire at the women and children?”
“Yeah,” he said and lowered his head.
“Even though they were zombies too?”
Rodriguez pressed his lips into a thin pale line and looked away. “The kiddies were gruesome,” he said. “Just young ones, no more than six or eight years old. They were covered in blood too, snarling just as ferociously as the rest of them, but I just couldn’t bring myself to line one up in the sights and squeeze the trigger.”
“And the women also?”
He nodded. “I know they were dreads,” he said. “And I know they would have torn my throat out if they got the chance… but they were women once, and that kinda shook me.”
I nodded. It was an aspect of the conflict I had not thought about before. Perhaps it made the whole apocalypse even more harrowing for those who had served.
“So you only fired at male zombies?”
Rodriguez nodded. “I did my duty,” he added quickly. “It’s not like I avoided my mission, or put any of the other guys around me at risk. I just made a choice about my targets.”
PART 2: ‘OPERATION CONQUEST’
The Interviews…
UNDEAD RESPONSE COMMAND POST, KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE:
There could be no mistaking this man. Even if you didn’t recognize his face, you could tell in an instant he was Army. It was in the way he walked, the precision of his mannerisms – and it was in the force of his presence.
“Operation Conquest was about gaining the ascendance over the zombie horde,” SAFCUR II looked up from a detailed map he was studying and said to me. “The victory we sought to achieve over the undead was a combination of military superiority, and a concerted effort to raise the hopes and faith of the rest of the nation.”
General Zachary G. Winchester was a West Point graduate and a career soldier who had led American troops on battlefields throughout the Middle East. The President, replacing ‘Tug’ Horsham after the Battle of Four Seasons, had appointed him SAFCUR.
“As I understand it, that was always the plan,” General Winchester said curtly. “When the struggle against the undead transitioned from a posture of containment into one where conquest became the priority, it was decided in Washington that a new skill set was required to lead our military. Horsham did a remarkable job. The man is an American hero for the way he pulled so many different organizations together and got them working as one for the defense of the country.” The General paused for a dramatic beat, and then said, “My skills were different.”
“In what ways?” I asked. We were in a basement – an emp
ty cavernous room below the city of Knoxville. There was no carpet, no bright paint on the walls, and no decorator pieces of furniture. It was just an empty space with a cement floor, a long table, a dozen chairs and a million maps. Every spare inch of available space was covered by empty coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays.
I had to remind myself that aggressive hostilities against the zombies had ended a couple of months ago when the barrier across Florida had been completed. And yet this dark musty space still felt very much alive with the hum of activity and the intangible sense of tension that seemed to permeate the walls.
“When I interviewed General Horsham, he said the change of SAFCUR for ‘Operation Conquest’ was like a football coach switching from defensive to offensive teams. Would you agree with that analogy?”
Winchester laughed and ran a hand through his neat thatch of short sandy brown hair. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds like a good way of putting it.” He dropped into a big leather chair and propped his feet up on the table, crossing his ankles. His shoes were black and polished like a mirror. Someone walked past us, obscurely hugging the edge of the room. Winchester snapped out a hand and caught the person on the arm. “Coffee,” he snapped, then looked at me. I nodded. “Two. Black and strong. Pronto.”
It could have been a Major, or a private. It could have been a civilian contractor. Winchester never bothered to look. He barked the order and expected it to be obeyed.
“So the Battle of Four Seasons marked the end of the containment phase. Why?”
“It didn’t mark the end of containment,” Winchester made the point. “It marked the beginning of a transition towards the conquest phase of the war.” He was like that, I discovered. He was precise in his words, clear in his explanations. He was the sort of man who left no doubt about his exact meaning, and his exact requirements of those around him.
“The Battle of Four Seasons was an indicator that the tactics we had developed were working. That conflict gave us confidence that we could repeat the same procedures at any point along the line and achieve the same result. It was a moment – just a moment – of satisfaction. It gave us a chance to pause because it signaled the end of the terror. We had drawn a line in the ground and we had been able to defend that line. We used that as a kind of launch pad into altering our stance – going from being on the back foot, to planning our first aggressive counter strike.”
“You mentioned the American people before,” I said, seizing on a thought. I had to flip back through my notes to find what I was looking for. “You said ‘Operation Conquest’ was about gaining superiority and restoring hope and faith.”
General Winchester nodded sagely. “That’s correct,” he said. “With the success of ‘Operation Containment’ we gave the people of America hope. Up until that point there was rioting in the streets. People were filled with panic. There were food shortages, fuel shortages, and the roads north as far as Canada were choked with cars. People were fleeing for their lives. Even martial law was unable to suppress the terror. But once the nation realized we had managed to stem the surge of undead, they began to settle. They began to adjust, take a breath. That was why the next phase was critical. We needed victories over the undead, and we needed the world to know about it. That’s what gave America faith.”
I nodded, while I wrote everything down. “So how did you go about gaining these victories?” I asked. “If I remember, there was quite a lull between the Battle of Four Seasons and the victory you won at Rock Hill.”
“Correct again,” General Winchester said. He was about to say more, when a young uniformed soldier came into the room carrying two Styrofoam cups of coffee. He set them on the edge of the big table and backed out of the room. “There was a pause,” the General went on again. “Because we had to learn how to beat the zombie fuckers. We needed to reinvent how we took the war to a unique enemy. That took time, and experimentation.”
“Can you tell me more about that – the tactics you developed?”
“No,” Winchester said, without any temper. “Because I’d be taking credit for the work of others. I can tell you this though,” he swung his legs off the desk and leaned forward suddenly, thrusting out his jaw and fixing me with his gaze. “The first thing I did when I got this job was have a long talk to an old buddy of mine, Colonel Chip Biggins. He’s the CO at the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment, headquartered right here in Knoxville. The 278th is one of only two armored cavalry regiments in the US Army. It was Chip and his men who developed the techniques we used when we came up against the undead at Rock Hill.”
I made a note of the name and the unit, and then reached into my bag for a fresh notebook. There was more I wanted to ask SAFCUR II.
“Is it wrong to claim that ‘Operation Conquest’ was more of a public relations exercise than an actual military success?”
“Fuck yes!” Winchester exploded. His face darkened with blood and his eyes glinted like the points of bayonets. He slammed the palm of his hand down hard on the tabletop. “Where the hell did you get that impression from?” he raged.
I met his stare with an expressionless face. “Well I got the impression from you,” I said openly. “You just told me that a lot of emphasis went on reassuring the public, and that victories over the zombie hordes were vital to restoring the faith of the American people.”
There was one other person in the room. It was a lieutenant. He was pouring over a filing cabinet of maps in the far corner, trying to locate something that had eluded him ever since I had arrived. General Winchester turned his eyes from me and focused his attention on the officer. “Out,” he snapped.
The lieutenant looked up, startled. He saw the General’s expression and all the color drained from the young man’s face. He left the mess of maps strewn across the bunker floor and beat a hasty retreat, closing the door very quietly behind him.
We were alone.
General Winchester stood up. He was imposingly tall, like an avalanche of attitude. He came and stood closer, then leaned in to press his face next to mine.
“Listen to me, numb-nuts,” he seethed. His jaw was clenched, his teeth gritted together. The words seemed to hiss from his snarling mouth. “Operation Conquest was a vital part in the overall plan to save America from extinction.” As if he wasn’t exerting enough influence, he prodded me in the chest with a gnarled finger. “Young men risked their lives to develop the tactics that were ultimately employed to drive the zombies back to Florida. They were young men under my command! Don’t you dare publish anything that diminishes their contribution to the effort to free this country. Don’t you fucking dare!”
We had a ten second staring competition. I could see all kinds of emotion boiling behind Winchester’s eyes.
“I’m just trying to discover the truth,” I said calmly.
The General’s eyes narrowed to slits. His face seemed to fill with wrinkles that spread out from the corners of his mouth, and across his brow. “And I’m telling it to you!” he snapped.
He pushed himself away from me and stalked a circuit of the long table, hitching up his pants and muttering to himself. When he came back to where his empty chair waited, he slammed it against the edge of the table like he wished it had been my head instead.
“Operation Conquest was a phase in the war against the undead where we developed specific tactics, and learned to co-ordinate all aspects of our capabilities in a concerted effort,” he said in a moment of brilliant double-speak. “Write that in your fucking book.”
I nodded. “I will,” I said, and recorded everything the General had just said. Then I looked up at him. I think it bothered the man that I was unruffled. He was used to quaking obedience from everyone who surrounded him. “Now, can you tell me what that bullshit means in real words?”
Winchester blinked. Something flashed across his face, and then he blinked again.
He started to chuckle.
“Wise ass,” he muttered without hostility. He rubbed his chin and slumped back down i
nto the big chair with a resigned sigh, as if all the bluster had gone from him.
He spun around and stared at a map-covered wall for a moment, then turned all the way round to face me again.
“Look, the simple truth is that we were standing in a deep pile of shit,” the General said. “We had stopped the zombies, but we had no idea how to drive them back. We thought armor was the answer but we had to re-learn how to use it, and at the same time we had to develop a way to make use of the artillery we had. That’s it. That’s what ‘Operation Conquest’ really was. It was the training and development phase of the war.”
I didn’t write that down. To me it was an off-the-record kind of confession.
“I remember seeing some news footage of the tanks rolling across the countryside of South Carolina in tight formations, like bulldozers, with the rest of the armor sweeping in lines behind them,” I said to the General. “Can you tell me what would have happened if the plans you and your officers developed using armor hadn’t worked?”
Winchester was watching me as I spoke like he could barely wait for me to finish before he replied. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything for over a minute. I sat in the strained silence and waited.
“The tank and armor tactics we developed were part of the overall operation,” he began, measuring every word like it was important. “But the plan also included the use of artillery and aircraft. That’s the first thing. You’ll obviously get the detail from Chip Biggins. As for the rest of your question… no comment.”
That surprised me. I sat back in the chair.
“You won’t tell me what other optional plans you were developing in case the armor assault wasn’t successful?”
“No.”
“Why?” I persisted. And then had a thought that sent a chill down my spine. “Was there any other plan?”
“Yes.”
“What were they?”
“No comment.”
I sighed. I set down my pen, carefully folded the cover of my notebook closed and laid it down on the edge of the table. I leaned forward, and rested my elbows on my knees. “You were going to use nukes, weren’t you?” My voice was level and subdued, but filled with a sense of foreboding. “The Army was actually considering the option of using tactical nuclear weapons against the zombies.”
Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America Page 16