Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America (16 page)

“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 1
st
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.”

I thought back over Addison’s comments. I found it ironic that the perfect stealth weapon for fighting undead ghouls was a bow and arrow – one of the most primitive weapons man had ever created.

Warfare, it seemed, had come a full circle.

There was a sudden commotion of movement behind the two veteran soldiers and I saw the crew chief again. He began unloading stores and supplies, carrying them from the chopper and stacking them in the long grass beyond the droop of the big rotor blades. He made several trips.

Noyce reached into the pocket of his multicam pants and retrieved several envelopes. He handed them to the crew chief. Then the two old soldiers got to their feet, nodded at me, and slipped out through the cargo door, back into the afternoon’s warm sunshine. I watched them go.

“What’s next for the Silverbacks?” I called out suddenly. I could see the four soldiers falling back from their outpost positions, and then heard the helicopter’s turbines slowly begin to whine. “Now the war has been won, and the undead are contained in Florida, why haven’t you pulled out – disbanded?”

Noyce took the question. He stopped walking away. He turned slowly around to face me. His voice was rasping. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” he said, quoting Thomas Jefferson. “The war may have been won, but the only way we’re going to be sure the infected don’t break from their barriers is to keep a close watch. That’s what the Silverbacks intend on doing.”

HOLLY SPRINGS, MISSISSIPPI:

“It might look quiet now,” Lieutenant Colonel Chris Bond said to me as we stood at the deserted intersection, “but for a few hours on that Sunday afternoon last year, these streets were a glimpse of hell itself.”

We had arrived in the little town of Holly Springs in a Humvee – one of the very same vehicles that had brought Chris Bond and troops from A Company, 2
nd
Battalion 75
th
Infantry Ranger Regiment face-to-face with the zombie holocaust.

I got out of the vehicle. There was a soldier manning the 50-caliber machine gun, his body tensed through the vehicle roof hatch, and the weapon traversing warily. Four other Rangers spilled out of the vehicle with their weapons ready. They took up positions at each point of the intersection.

Bond looked relaxed, betraying the heightened tension on the faces of the men who protected us. We walked to the corner of Fant Avenue and North Walthall Street, and stared up at the edifice that was the front of the Holly Springs high school. A wedge of cool shadow spilled across the side street. There were houses across the road, their lawns overgrown, trash strewn in the gutters. A bundle of old newspapers drifted on the breeze like a tumbleweed.

The old homes were pockmarked with bullet holes. Windows had been shattered, and several of the houses had burned to the ground, their roofs collapsed around the charred remains. There was an overturned tricycle in the middle of the street and dark brown stains like oil spills on the blacktop. Propped against the front of the school building were the bleached white bones of several broken bodies.

The town was eerily quiet, long ago abandoned. The breeze through the trees was like a moan, and the only sound seemed to be the singing of silence in my ears and the irregular beat of blood against my temples.

“Everyone was trapped inside the gymnasium and auditorium,” Lieutenant Colonel Bond said, pointing. “There were twenty one school kids and three teachers. They had barricaded the doors as the first of the undead had swept through the town. They were lucky to be alive.”

I walked towards the school building. Bond didn’t move. “I wouldn’t go any further if I were you,” the soldier said, his voice remarkably calm and level. “Just in case…”

I turned and looked at the man. His hair was shaved in the standard Ranger buzzcut, but somehow that just seemed to emphasize the chiseled angles of his features. He had a square jaw and a thin slice for a mouth. The line of his nose was ridged with a bump, and his eyes were deep set beneath the jutting slope of his brow. He had the face of experience – the face of a man who had seen the horrors of war and reconciled his conscience to the necessity of it.