I glanced down at the old photograph I held in my hand – the photo he had given me when we had first arrived. The image showed a home like a Hollywood mansion: leafy green trees behind a high solid fence that surrounded the entire property.
He was a tall man, stooped at the shoulders as though the weight of those months surrounded by the zombie horde had crushed him. He had a long straggly beard, and was dressed in flowing robes and sandals. He looked like some ancient biblical figure who had wandered lost in the desert. His face was deeply lined, the skin burned to the color of old leather. His hair was white and hung lank to his shoulders. He scraped it away from his face with the back of his hand and lifted his eyes to mine. They were empty.
“How long did you hold out here?” I asked. My voice was soft, as though to talk too loud would break the heavy spell that seemed cast over this wasteland.
“We didn’t flee when we heard about the outbreak,” Karl Penrose answered. His voice was unusually high-pitched so that it seemed wrong for his body. “Everyone else we knew packed up their cars and ran north,” he said. “Those first few days were a madness of panic. There was looting and riots. At night I could hear the gunfire and the screech of tires. Civilization seemed to collapse. Friends turned on friends. Neighbors abandoned each other to fend for themselves. It was Armageddon. It was a horror ripped straight from the pages of an apocalypse.”
“But you didn’t flee? You and your family stayed here, on your property.”
Penrose nodded. “My daddy always told me it was best to be prepared,” he said softly. “I learned that as a small boy, and I never forgot it.” He set the little jewelry box down on the ground and sat beside me on a mound of grey rubble. “For a long time people used to look at me like I was crazy,” he confessed suddenly. “They’d watch me walking down the street, or see me in a store and laugh behind my back.” He shrugged, like he was shrugging off all that ridicule. “It never bothered me,” he said. “It bothered the wife and my children, of course. They felt like pariahs. This area was pretty close-knit. Everyone knew everyone else. It wasn’t much fun being regarded as the local ‘crazy old fool’.”
“I can imagine,” I said kindly. “But you had the last laugh, didn’t you?”
He looked at me like it was a poor choice of words. And, on reflection, it was.
“People laughed at me. I never laughed at them,” he made the point. “Folks used to call me Noah. They would torment my children, and called the compound here an ‘Ark’. The kids were social outcasts. Everyone stayed away from us. It was hard on the children and my wife. It really was.”
I noticed I had asked the man two fairly specific questions, and he hadn’t answered either one directly. I tried again.
“Why did you decide to stay here? Why didn’t you leave and head north where your safety was assured?”
Penrose smiled thinly. “I didn’t believe our safety would be assured by heading north,” he countered. “There was nothing to guarantee we would have a place to stay, and nothing to assure me that we would be able to make headway in the jams of panicked traffic. And there was no guarantee that food and water and electricity would be available.” He shook his head. “To me the danger was in fleeing. The only way I could assure my family’s safety was to stay right here.”
“Because you were prepared?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been preparing for disaster for years. At first it was because I had children. I started stockpiling drinking water and canned food. Then I looked around me one day and saw what was happening in the world around us. Terrorism, militants, food shortages… horror on every page of the newspapers and on every TV station. I knew it could only end one way.”
“What did you do?”
“I got serious about survival,” he said. “I felt it was every person’s duty to ensure the safety of their loved ones in the event of a disaster. I started researching. I learned about survival techniques, and we created a vegetable garden in the back yard of the compound. We learned to become self-sufficient. Then I began gathering weapons – even taught the children how to fire bows and cross-bows. We got ready for the inevitable.”
I had to ask the question. “What if you had been wrong? What if you had devoted so much of your life to preparing for a disaster that never came? Wouldn’t you have felt cheated?”
Karl Penrose looked hard into my eyes for long seconds. He narrowed his gaze. “I would have been thrilled,” he said. “It would have delighted me if this day had never come.”
“So you didn’t see this zombie apocalypse as some kind of vindication?”
“No,” he said flatly. “I prepared for a disaster event just like the way people take out insurance. Health insurance, life insurance… I took out my kind of insurance. I don’t regret the investment of time and energy, and I wished it had never come to this.”
We sat in silence for a few moments. I set my notebook down and we just listened to the singing of the insects. The day was warm – the kind of warm that makes the mornings inviting, and the afternoons oppressive. Karl Penrose scuffed his sandals in the dirt, as though he might uncover some small precious fragment of his old life just below the surface. He didn’t.
“When the zombies came, how did you react? Can you tell me what happened when you first saw them?”
“We had spotlights along the top of the walls overlooking the ground beyond,” he said. “And we had more spotlights around the house to light the entire compound, all powered from a generator. We knew they were coming,” he said.
“How?”
“By the panic, and then by the screaming.” He stood up, stretched his back, and then sat back down again. “At first we could hear the blood-curdling screams. They were coming from that a ways,” he pointed towards an area of destroyed rubble that might have once been a suburban street. “Then there was gunfire. Not just the occasional shot. This was a panicked fusillade. I got Milly and the kids inside and went around the compound making sure the gate was bolted and chained.”
“What happened next?”
Karl Penrose became distraught. His eyes clouded over. “Vicki Creighton suddenly appeared at the gate.”
“Vicki Creighton?”
“One of our neighbors,” Karl explained. “The lady who lived a couple of doors down the road from us. She suddenly appeared in the night, bashing against the gate and screaming for help.”
“What did you do?”
“I… I watched her,” Karl said softly.
“You didn’t let her in?”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t,” he said. “There wasn’t time. The undead were swarming over the streets. I could see them moving in the night. They were howling and hunting in packs. They were tearing at people. Literally tearing at them. The screams were the most horrible sounds I have ever heard in my life.”
“And Vicki Creighton?”
“She was covered in blood. I didn’t know if she’d already been bitten. She was bleeding from the nose, and there was blood dripping down her face from a cut she must have had on her head. There was blood all over her dress and running down her legs. She shook the gate and she was crying and screaming for help. I couldn’t take the chance…”
“You let her get killed?”
“I protected my family.”
“What happened to her?”
Penrose shook his head. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I walked slowly back towards the house. I could hear Vicki screaming at me – pleading for me to help her. Then she cried out – louder and more piercing.”
“And then?”
Penrose looked down at his sandals. “Then she was gone. She had been taken by the undead. All that was left was a pool of blood at the gate.”
“What happened next?”
Penrose seemed to lift a little, like he was relieved to change the subject. “I took Milly and the kids up onto the roof,” he said. “We had a two-story house, and I had a rooftop porch built, like an observation platform. It was o
vergrown with vines because we had incorporated it as a trellis for our vegetables. We stood on the porch and watched the unfolding horror.”
“Could you see much?”
“Enough,” Penrose said. “The power was still on in some parts of the suburb, but by then there were dozens of houses on fire. Cars too. Everything seemed to be burning. The zombies were shadows against the flames, and the sound of the terrified screaming measured their progress. They swept around the compound and spilled across the road, heading north.”
“Did you open fire?”
“No,” Penrose said. “It was pointless. What help could I have been? A few shots in the darkness at running zombies wouldn’t help anyone. I decided to save the ammunition. I figured I needed every round to protect my family.”
“But you said the zombies swept past the compound.”
He nodded. “They did – the first night.”
“So they came back?”
He nodded again. His expression became darker. He shook his head. “I don’t know if they could sense us, or if they could maybe hear us… I just don’t know. But by the following morning, the compound was surrounded by zombies.”
“That must have been terrifying.”
He looked at me as if it was something he had never considered before. He frowned a little and stroked his fingers through the strands of his beard. “It was, actually,” he said at last. “I stayed up through the night. I kept guard at the gate. I could see them moving in the shadows, but the spotlights on the walls only reached fifty feet beyond the compound. I didn’t know what was in the night. I didn’t know until sunrise came. That was when I realized we were surrounded by hundreds of them.”
“What did you do?”
Karl Penrose shrugged. “I stayed calm,” he said. “I knew we were safe behind the walls, and we had plenty of food and water – everything we needed to last for months. We had power, fuel stored. It was all there. It was just a matter of waiting them out.”
“As simple as that?” I found it hard to believe that anyone could remain calm when hundreds of undead zombies were howling for your blood, separated by just an iron gate and a wall. “You didn’t go all Rambo, or something?”
“Shooting them all, you mean?”
I nodded. That’s exactly what I meant.
Penrose shook his head. “There was no point,” he said. The man had an inner tranquility about him that seemed utterly unshakable. “I didn’t have enough ammunition to kill them all, and I was pretty sure opening fire on them would just attract more by the sound of gunfire.”
“So you just sat tight – went about your normal daily life?”
He smiled, but there was no humor in the gesture. The expression slipped off the side of his mouth. “Daily life?” his voice became hollow and wistful. “I don’t think any of us will ever experience normal daily life again.”
“So what did you do?” I persisted. The man’s evasiveness to direct questions was becoming a little annoying. With a shave and a suit, he would have made a fine politician.
“We endured,” he said, like the words were a family motto. “We waited until the authorities got control of the outbreak and came back to free us.”
“You waited several months.”
“Yes.”
“And then you nearly got killed when the tanks rolled through.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No,” he said again. “We were rescued by helicopters a few days before the battle. The sky was filled with Black Hawks for forty-eight hours. They must have been sweeping the area looking for any survivors before the artillery barrage and the tank assault. They saw the sign we had painted on the roof. They lifted us to safety.”
I nodded. Karl Penrose seemed completely unshakable. “What about your family?” I lobbed the question like a grenade. “How did the months in the compound affect your wife and two children?”
Karl Penrose could have thrown himself over the grenade and smothered the impact. I would never have known the truth. But he didn’t. He looked at me with a sudden flood of compassion in his eyes, like I had at last, probed a deep wound.
“My wife – she hates me,” he admitted. “She’s gone to Canada to live with her mother, and she has taken the children with her.”
I was shocked and bewildered by the sudden admission. “I don’t understand.”
Penrose shrugged his bony shoulders and stared fixedly down into the dirt. “When the helicopters came,” he said slowly, like it was a struggle to form every word,” I… I tried to wave them off. I didn’t want them to rescue us.”
What the hell?
“What do you mean – exactly?” I asked with a dawning sense of horror. “Why would you do that?”
Penrose didn’t look at me. His eyes moved evasively. They focused on the small jewelry box between his feet. “I thought we were safer in the compound than we would be in the outside world,” he tried to explain himself to the dirt. “We had everything we needed here. We were self-sufficient. We had water and food, and the garden would have provided for us. We had a stockpile of fuel for the generator. It was safe and secure. It was an oasis away from the horror of the unfolding world.”
“So you refused to leave?”
He nodded at the jewelry box. “I refused to let the helicopter crew take any of us. I clung to my kids, and they had to draw their weapons on me.”
“You mean you… what? You held the kids like hostages?”
He nodded.
“And what happened?”
“One of the helicopter crew hit me and pinned me to the ground. Then they dragged me into the helicopter.”
I sat back and stared at the blue sky, stunned. Penrose sighed heavily and then turned his face until he was gazing at a pile of rubble that had once been a part of the compound wall. “I just thought we would be safer if we stayed here…” he said softly to the pile of bricks and crumbled mortar.
I guess he got tired of talking to the dirt.
FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND:
USAMRIID HEADQUARTERS
Sergeant Major Julio Moranes arrived for the interview perspiring, and out of breath.
He was a slight man, lean rather than muscled. He was wearing sweat-stained fatigues and an olive drab t-shirt. He had a towel draped around the back of his neck. He shook my hand and then used the towel to mop across his brow.
The sound of the man’s steps echoed through the big empty arena of the gymnasium, loud on the timber floor. He dropped wearily down onto a weight bench, caught a glimpse of himself in one of the wall mirrors, and then smiled ruefully.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been for a five mile run.”
I made a face. “Too much exercise can kill you,” I quipped.
He looked back at me. “So can no exercise at all.”
Touché.
I had found a plastic chair against a wall to sit on while I had waited. I reached into my bag for a notebook.
“You and the rest of your USAMRIID team were the first ones to discover the bodies at Fort Mill,” I said.
The Sergeant Major nodded. The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases troops had been the first men on the ground after the Battle of Rock Hill. “That’s correct,” Moranes said. “We were air-lifted into the area around Charlotte about a week after the battle.”
“For what reason?”
“Intelligence and information,” the Sergeant Major said. “The Army wanted a close monitor on the effects of the infection in an urban area. We figured it was part of the larger plan.”
I frowned. “So this wasn’t part of the re-occupation of the dead zone then, was it?”
“No. It was not,” Moranes said. “We were flown into the area by Black Hawks. They dropped teams of us along route I77. My men and I were lifted to Fort Mill.”
“How did you feel about that?”
The Sergeant Major seemed to think carefully before he answered. “We knew we were being placed in har
m’s way,” he admitted frankly. “The Battle had been fought just a week earlier. We had been told the undead had been slaughtered and driven back towards Columbia…”
“But…?”
He shrugged. “We didn’t believe that every dread had been taken out,” he confessed.
“So you thought it was possible that zombies were still active in Charlotte and the surrounding towns?”
“Yes.”
“That must have been a difficult assignment,” I tried to prompt the man to open up a little. “You must have been scared.”
“Sure,” Sergeant Major Moranes said. “We were in full-faceplate biohazard outfits, and communication between each member of the team was through two-way radio. Hell, the air packs we wore weighed forty pounds. Just moving around was an effort.”
“All that biohazard gear…” I began curiously. “That was to protect against a zombie attack?”
Moranes shrugged. “It was to protect against every possible risk of infection,” he said instead. “We didn’t know what we would be walking into.”
I nodded, and then asked the sixty-four thousand dollar question. “What did you walk into?”
Moranes buried his face in the towel for a moment. His forearms were glistening with sweat. The air in the room was stuffy. It smelled of liniment. When he looked up and lifted his eyes to mine, his expression was bleak.
“We walked into hell,” he said softly. His eyes had a haunted hypnotic stare, the pupils like little pinpricks. He was looking directly at me, but visualizing somewhere else entirely.
“Tell me,” I said softly.
Moranes sighed. “The Black Hawks were circling in the sky, the crew chiefs at their miniguns looking for signs of zombies,” he said, “while we were on the ground, sifting through the rubble.”
“In Charlotte?”
He nodded. “There were teams in Charlotte. Most of the city had been utterly destroyed before the battle. Fort Mill was the same. The artillery and the Air Force had laid waste to just about every building. When we jumped out of the helicopter it was like stepping into some third-world war zone,” he muttered.
Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America Page 21