Winchester’s face started to break. There was a twitch at the corner of one eye. The rigid façade of his features began to dissolve into something more human, more emotional.
He looked down at one of the maps spread across the table and then slowly lifted his eyes to mine. “Yes,” he said. “But that’s not for publication.”
Something dreadful and cold slithered in the pit of my guts. I nodded my head in slow agreement. “How close did America come to the use of nuclear weapons?”
“Close,” Winchester said. “The decision went all the way to the top.”
“The President?”
Winchester inclined his head.
“Is it still an option?” I had to ask. “I mean is the military still considering employing nukes against the undead now that they are barricaded in Florida?”
“Everything is still an option,” Winchester said diplomatically. “Every weapon at the nation’s disposal is constantly being considered and assessed for its viability against the zombies.” He was back to the political double-speak of just a few minutes earlier. I knew I needed to get past the recited lines if I was ever going to learn the real truth.
I doubled back. Sometimes it’s the best way to gain momentum forward again. “When the option was presented to the President,” I began, “Who actually recommended the use of nuclear weapons?”
“I did,” Winchester admitted.
I wasn’t completely surprised. I doubted the recommendation would have been treated seriously if it had come from some pencil-pushing politician in the relative safety of his Washington office. This man was the Supreme Armed Forces Commander. He would have been listened to.
“But I didn’t make it a recommendation,” Winchester hastened to add. “I presented the option to the President with several other alternatives.”
“Can you tell me what those other alternatives were?”
The General got out of his chair again. He was restless, uncomfortable. He stalked around the room. He was so tall, and the ceiling of the headquarters so low, that he almost looked stooped as he paced.
“Experimental weapons,” he said vaguely. “Lasers and the like.”
“What else?”
“Evacuation.”
“From where… to where?”
The General shrugged his shoulders and then looked down at his shoes. “From the lower forty-eight,” he said. “Maybe to Alaska, or Canada.”
I recoiled, stunned. “You mean surrendering the entire nation to the plague was an option?”
“It was,” Winchester said. “If we hadn’t been able to drive the zombies back.”
I frowned. “But you had them contained in the southern states. Why would evacuation then be necessary? Wouldn’t the worst-case scenario be that the status quo was maintained and that we conceded the loss of the southern states?”
Winchester shook his head. He didn’t agree. “The Danvers Defensive line held against the undead, and after the Battle of Four Seasons, we knew we could hold our position. But we didn’t believe we could contain the infection indefinitely,” SAFCUR II said heavily. “We didn’t have a buffer. If the virus had somehow been carried into the trenches, it would have burned across the rest of the country.”
Okay, I got that. I could see that it would be possible for the virus to somehow break out beyond the thin trench line of defenses. It only took one infected ghoul…
“But now?” I brought the interview back on course. “We have the buffer zone – the dead zone as everyone calls it. There are hundreds of miles of arid abandoned land between the original Danvers Defense Line and the containment line across the Florida peninsula. Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina – they’re all dead zone. Surely that’s an extensive buffer.”
“It is,” Winchester agreed. “But the only real assurance we will ever have that the zombie virus has been beaten, is if every one of the infected is destroyed.”
“So nuking Florida is still on the list of options.”
A ghastly transformation had overcome the General in just a few quiet minutes. He looked somehow older now, aged and wearied. It was in the hunch of his shoulders and the dull sheen of his eyes. And it was in the dry empty sound of his voice.
“Yes. Using nuclear weapons against the undead in Florida is still an option,” the words rasped in his throat. “If it ever comes to it.”
FORT F-037 NEAR SPARTA, TENNESSEE
35°55′56″N 85°28′11″W
First Sergeant Larry McMaster, 3rd Battalion 3rd Marines rolled up his sleeves and then kicked at the weeds that had grown along the length of the chain link fence, as though their presence here personally offended him.
“Relics now,” McMaster growled. I wasn’t sure what he was referring to – the weeds, or the fort itself.
“You mean the fort?”
“Yeah,” McMaster scowled. We were standing inside the perimeter of fort F-037, just south of the little town of Sparta. The fortification had long ago been abandoned after the military had pushed the undead swarms back towards the south and built new fortifications that measured the stages of the offensive. Now, these very first forts that had defined the Danvers Defense Line were rusting ugly skeletons, abandoned to time and the ghosts who haunted them.
And there were plenty of ghosts.
Fort F-037 had been attacked by the zombie hordes just a few days after the undead had tested the trench defensive system at Hendersonville. It was McMaster’s men – the troops of 3rd Battalion – who had fought off the undulating tide of dead in a battle that had raged for several hours.
“There was no surprise,” McMaster explained. “Reconnaissance satellites and choppers gave us plenty of warning – but there was still an element of shock,” the man admitted candidly. It was hard for me to imagine a Marine like the First Sergeant being shocked at anything. He was the classic cutout of a hard-nosed warrior. He had muscled forearms, thick as posts, and a huge barrel chest that stretched the fabric of his fatigues. His face was like granite – the features too hard to ever be called handsome. His eyes were black, hooded under the overhanging ridge of his brow, and his mouth was a wide thin slash beneath the beak of his nose. His demeanor bristled with confidence and a sense of disdain for anything or anyone who failed to measure up to his expectations. He would be a hard task-master, I imagined. Not a man who would tolerate fools or incompetence.
He was the kind of tough no-nonsense veteran you wanted at your shoulder in a fight.
“And so the reconnaissance warnings you were receiving – did that mean you had all your men ready as the undead advanced?”
McMaster looked at me bemused. “Advanced?” he wrenched the word from his throat and made it sound like a curse. “Son, they didn’t fucking advance. They fucking charged at the fence – hurled themselves at the wire barrier like insane berserkers. There was nothing methodical about it. There was nothing remotely civilized. Calling it an advance portrays the moment they came surging towards us as though it was part of a tactical military conflict. It fucking wasn’t.”
I flinched. The bark of the man was like a physical thing. He brooded silently for a few long moments, then rested one boot on an old jerry can and clasped his hands behind his back in the pose of some long lost military commander from the past. He stared out through the wire, narrowing his eyes as the memories came back to him of that afternoon the fort had come under attack.
“We knew to expect the fuckers,” McMaster’s voice had become subdued. “But we didn’t know what to expect. Does that make sense?”
I nodded. He nodded back. “I had my men drawn up twenty feet behind the fence line, with India and Kilo companies in the front rank, and Lima company in close reserve.”
I frowned. “That must have been awkward,” I said. “I don’t imagine that you would have practiced those kind of straight-line formations too often in previous conflicts, surely.”
McMaster grunted. “You’re right,” he said wryly. “It was totally fucking foreig
n to everything I had experienced and encountered on the field of conflict,” he said. “My men had never formed up like that – ever. We were all about our spacing, ragged formations, one man covering his buddy as we moved forward. Now we were suddenly kneeling in a line like it was the Battle of Waterloo, or a battle from the Civil War.”
“Is that really how it felt?”
McMaster nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “It was a major mental issue that we needed to overcome. The fact was that we were in no danger of incoming fire. We were under no direct threat. We couldn’t take hits. We could position ourselves out in the open like the men were on the firing range.” He shook his head like his world of warfare had been forever turned upside down and he was still not adjusted.
“That must have made it easier.”
“You would think so,” McMaster confessed. “But it didn’t.”
“Why?”
He shook his head again. “The enemy was so fierce. So utterly mindless in the way they assaulted the fence. They threw themselves onto the barbed wire. They clawed at the chain wire beyond it. They smashed themselves without any regard for their own safety against the locked gates across the road. They were furious, and that carried with it its own intimidation,” he admitted.
I was intrigued. I had imagined a tough veteran unit like the 3rd Marines would have relished the freedom of the combat – being able to reign down overwhelming firepower on a primitive enemy. McMaster’s admissions had startled me.
“How did that affect your men?”
“Initially, we were ragged,” he said.
“Ragged?”
“Undisciplined,” McMaster barked, as if he was resentful at having to explain himself. “The men were awed by the ferocity of the assault. Our first rounds were all over the place.”
“Did you have men in the observation towers?”
“Heavy machine guns,” McMaster grunted, “and the base itself was fully mobilized. We had a column of Humvee’s drawn up behind the rifle companies, pouring machine gun fire at the zombies through the wire, firing over the heads of the men.”
“The sound of the battle – ”
“Was deafening,” the First Sergeant finished the sentence I started. “It was a constant barrage of violent noise – the rip of automatic fire drowning out the howls of the enemy.”
“Was it difficult to command in such a situation?”
McMaster stood straight and went walking off along the edge of the wire fence. There were skulls and shattered fragments of white bone on the opposite side of the fence, half-buried in the swirling dust and dirt. He looked away into the distance, following the line of the road until it dropped down beyond the horizon between the saddle of a far-off hill. He didn’t move, He just stood there, staring out into the afternoon, and eventually I followed him.
The road was potholed and torn ragged along the edges. The shoulder of the blacktop was gravel, giving way eventually to long grass that was turning slowly brown with the change of season. McMaster rested his hands on the wire, fingers through the narrow links like a prison inmate dreaming of escape.
“I was wondering if it was difficult to command in a situation like that,” I repeated the question, then felt myself flinch, anticipating some kind of barked retort. McMaster turned his eyes to mine slowly. “It was impossible to command,” he said. “It was impossible even to be heard. The men fired long bursts at the undead, and over that was the endless rattle of the machine guns on the vehicles and in the towers. It became a cluster-fuck.”
“But effective, right? I mean you beat them back. There was one report I read afterwards that claimed as many as thirty-five thousand zombies had been killed.”
McMaster shrugged his broad shoulders. “I don’t write the media reports,” he grumbled, like he was indirectly contradicting the numbers the government had claimed.
I sighed. I sensed there was something bugging the veteran First Sergeant. “You seem disappointed.” I threw the comment out there.
“I am,” McMaster said gruffly. “I am disappointed.”
“Why?”
He shrugged again and then let his fingers slip from the wire. He folded his arms across his chest and the muscles in his forearms coiled and rippled like pythons.
“Because it was so fucking disorganized,” he said. “It was such a heavy firefight, but without the discipline expected and required of US Marines. There was no order, there was no concentration of fire in any tactical way – everyone just blazed away until the ammunition ran out.”
“And you had expected something else?”
“I had demanded fucking discipline!” McMaster roared suddenly, and the bull sound of his voice seemed to echo around the abandoned compound. “I studied the battles of the past – the massed ranks of muskets facing a massed enemy, and the limitations of their weapons had made them disciplined.”
“Can you explain what you mean?”
McMaster scowled. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not to me,” I admitted. “But I’m a journalist, not a soldier.”
He stomped his boots in the dirt. Little devils of dust swirled around his legs. “The musket needed to be reloaded. That took time. Therefore each shot had to be controlled and weighted to achieve the maximum effect. Men listened to the barked orders – everything was regimented. The firefight here at the fort was nothing like that. We should have been fucking surgical!” McMaster hissed. “Instead we were like a panicked rabble.”
I could see how the veteran disciplinarian would take the reaction of his men as a personal offense. He was like that. He was a proud warrior with a distinguished past. He had dedicated his entire adult life to the Marines.
But the conflict against the undead was something no one had experienced prior to the outbreak. It had demanded fresh tactics, and new levels of olde worlde discipline.
At least that’s what McMaster seemed to think.
“How close did the zombies get to the fort?” I enquired with all the polite tact I could muster.
“Close,” McMaster admitted. “They were at the gate, throwing themselves against it. The barbed wire kept them off the fence, so they swarmed at the gate.”
“But it held.”
“Yeah,” the First Sergeant said grimly. “It held.” He walked over to the gate and held the old padlock in his hand. The chain was thick, the lock massive. A red dust of rust came away and dusted his palm. “When they started to pile up right here, I brought Lima Company forward and diverted the other two companies to fire at the flanks. Lima Company formed up across the road.”
“And drove the undead back?”
“Yeah,” McMaster said. “The bodies piled up. They were climbing over the corpses trying to get over the gate. There must have been a thousand of the fuckers torn apart, like a barricade of limbs and gruesome bodies… and the others were scrambling over them.”
“Was there a point where you worried that the gate might collapse, or that they might breach the fort?”
“Twice,” McMaster said. “When they first crashed against the gate I thought the whole structure might collapse. But it didn’t. We fired into a solid wall of ‘em and ripped them to pieces. The firefight was intense. The road was awash with blood and gore.”
“But they kept coming.”
“Yes, they did,” the Marine nodded his head. “They were climbing over the other undead like they were scrambling up a man-made mountain. The captain brought up some of the Humvees and we hit them with heavy machine guns to hose them off the wire. It was like riot police firing water cannon – except each time they fell, more would climb over them. They were utterly relentless.”
“How did you eventually stop them?”
The veteran Marine shook his head, like maybe he was still wondering that himself. “Once we had contact, we sent for reinforcements,” McMaster explained. “We knew a battalion – even of Marines – was not going to be able to hold them off forever. We had good lines of supply out through the back entrance
of the camp. We brought up more Humvees and heavy machine guns from further along the trench system to the west.”
“So it was weight of numbers?”
“No. It was weight of firepower,” he said. “That’s all it was. That was all that saved us – the defensive system of the fort, and the ability to bring an overwhelming amount of fire to bear.”
“What lessons do you think were learned from the battle around the fort?” I asked the Marine. “Did the conflict create any revision of tactics for future encounters of this scale?”
Larry McMaster kicked at the dirt for a few seconds. There was a tuft of weed growing like a vine up through the wire. He severed it with the tip of his boot, and then turned his back to the distant horizon and swept his gaze across the compound, maybe seeing yet again the position of his men from 3rd Battalion as they had been drawn up to fend off the assault.
“We had to change the way we communicated,” McMaster thought carefully before he answered me. “There is no doubt that overwhelming firepower won the day, and that was something we expected and planned for. But what we hadn’t anticipated were the troubles we encountered in keeping the fire directed at tactical points that demanded attention.” He paused again like he was playing the words back over in his mind to be sure they made sense. “So we began to develop a series of hand signals,” he explained. “Because in the intensity of the moment, communication lines were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the firefight. Simple hand signals became the best way to reach the troops and direct their fire.”
“Like in the battles of old?”
“Yeah,” McMaster conceded. “Just like the battle of old. Except in those days, captains and generals carried swords and they swept them down to order the troops to open fire, and used the weapon to rally their men.”
Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America Page 17