Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America (19 page)

“What if you weren’t on duty?” I asked. “I mean if you were not posted to the line that day?”

“Off rotation?”

“Yeah.”

Spinks shrugged. “It was a little better,” he admitted. We walked to the rear wall of the trench and climbed more concrete steps back out of the hole. “Behind the line were thousands of tents – temporary camps for headquarters and supplies,” he explained. He made a broad sweeping gesture that seemed to encompass as far as the eye could see. “And the Army took over the town.”

“Took over Burgaw?”

He nodded. “We made use of the town’s infrastructure and the road network for transporting supplies. Burgaw became a hub for command to co-ordinate troops. It also became a USAMRIID hospital. They were all along the line.”

“So if you weren’t standing at your post, conditions were a little more comfortable?”

“Sure,” Spinks admitted.

I had seen historical photos showing the soldiers of World War 1 enduring the grind of trench life. There were differences here, but perhaps they were only cosmetic. The Danvers trench was twenty feet wide. The trenches in the First World War had been narrow warrens that had become homes for the men who inhabited them. I got the feeling the nature of the enemy had been the difference in the way this trench had been used by the men who served. There had been no need to fear artillery fire, so the trench could be wide. And there had been no need to fear air attack or naval bombardments, so the support system could be brought close to the trench and left in the open and undefended. There was no need for concealment or fear of a counter-strike from a zombie horde.

“Do you remember the rotation system?”

Spinks looked at me. His eyes had lost some of their sparkle. They seemed glazed over. “I’ll never forget,” he admitted. He stood silently for long moments, overcome by a melancholy of more bitter memories. “The first sixty days were the worst,” he said softly at last. “Because panic ruled everything. We were vulnerable – there just weren’t enough men in the line, so we stood in the trench for nine days, and then had one day behind the lines. The infrastructure was limited; the supply routes were still being established. After the first two months it got easier. Fresh troops were pouring into the defenses, and the Army was beginning to mass our forces in preparation for ‘Operation Conquest’. We stood in the trench for a week, then were relieved for three day breaks.”

“The men knew about the second phase of the zombie war?” For some reason I was surprised by that.

“Sure,” Spinks shrugged. “Along with the rumors about the zombie horde sweeping north that were fuelled by the media, we also heard rumors about a counter-offensive.”

“How did the men feel about that?”

“We were excited,” he said. “The build up of troops behind the lines was impossible to miss. The Army was bringing in artillery and tanks. We knew they weren’t for defense. We knew there had to be an attack coming sooner or later.”

“And your men were excited?”

Danville Spinks stared at me hard and I could see some emotion pass behind his eyes. He frowned.

“Don’t misunderstand the motivation of the men who served along this line,” he said with sudden passion. “We weren’t all elite 82
nd
Airborne. There were plenty of National Guard units just like my men and me. And while the time in this trench was soul destroying, it never altered our commitment to protect this country from the zombies. We never lost our bravery or our dedication. We never wavered. What we did in this trench was endure – because America needed us to.”

“Did you ever see combat during the months in the trench? Did the zombies ever test the line this far east?”

Spinks shook his head with something like regret. “No,” he sighed. “But I wished we had seen action. It would have made the sacrifice worthwhile in a tangible way.” He lapsed back into silence and we started walking away from the trench, towards Burgaw. The ground here had been flattened and turned to earth when the Army had mobilized. Now it was overgrown with long grass and weeds and flowers.

Spinks gave me a sideways glance. “We heard about the Battle of Four Seasons at Hendersonville,” he said. “Some of my buddies were there. They saw action. When it happened, everyone was keyed up, expecting the zombie surge to come our way, but it never did,” he lamented.

There was a Humvee and a driver waiting for us under the leafy canopy a gnarled tree. Spinks pulled open his door, and then paused to take one long last look at the trench line. “Ninety eight days,” he muttered softly once again, and shook his head, “and nothing to show for our service apart from the knowledge that we did our duty. No medals, no recognition, no act of valor… just mud in our boots and a gut full of fear.”

It started to rain.

HENDERSONVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA:

THE BATTLE OF FOUR SEASONS

The ‘bone yard’, the man called it.

The Bone Yard.

I shook my head slowly – it was the most horrific sight I had ever seen. I walked through the long grass, and the undulating field was a riot of beautiful yellow flowers… littered by the bleached white bones of over one hundred thousand skeletons.

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 82
nd
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 82
nd
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 82
nd
,” he explained. “And further along the trench in both directions we had Battalions of the 14
th
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.”