Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America (31 page)

Tash glared at me and I glared right back. “It wasn’t anything like those numbers,” he snapped. “And to print that kind of bullshit is inflammatory and irresponsible.”

I shrugged my shoulders again, this time in an off-handed way, but said nothing. Tash narrowed his eyes. “Sixty-two,” he said grudgingly. “They were Marines who had been called in to work with the troops assigned to the M113’s.

“Sixty-two?”

“That’s right. By the time the men were able to react and retreat to the protection of the vehicles, they were being over-run. The surviving Marines opened fire from the cover of the troop carriers and were eventually able to reach one of the outposts that the engineers had built the day before just a few miles to the east. Black Hawks later extracted the men. One of the rescued Marines died later in a field hospital from gun shot wounds.”

“A zombie shot him?”

Tash shook his head. “He was wounded in the battle – the fog of war…” the General’s voice lowered. He clenched his hands together. “It can happen…”

I set down my notebook and rubbed my forehead. Tash and I lapsed into a respectful, but uncomfortable silence for a few minutes. I was thinking about the Marines who had become infected – their bravery and the tragic circumstances that had overwhelmed them. I was thinking about their families, and the men who were their comrades being suddenly forced to open fire on guys they knew to save their own lives.

I looked up. “What was the other incident?” I asked.

Tash looked deliberately bewildered for just an instant. Perhaps he was hoping I would forget to ask. He went back to the office window. Outside, the sun was beginning to set. “We lost a small number of men from the Arkansas National Guard… and quite a few engineers.”

“How?” I didn’t ask about the number of casualties. I wanted to know the circumstances of the incident first, in case the General tried to stonewall me for details again.

“They were men from the 1
st
Battalion 153
rd
Infantry Regiment based in Malvern. They were mopping up undead on the west flank of the front in Mississippi,” SAFCUR III said in a careful measured tone. “They were a team of soldiers in an M113. One of the men went down injured – bleeding. No one apparently saw what happened. The soldiers evacuated the man to a fortification that was being built along the I55 about fifty miles north of Jackson.”

“Had the wounded soldier been infected with the zombie virus?” I asked with a slow dawning sense of horror.

Tash nodded his head. “The M113 reached the fortification just as the man was turning. He infected everyone within the defense.”

“Everyone?”

Tash’s expression was grave. “Several more men from the 1
st
Battalion and almost one hundred engineers that were completing the fortification.”

“My God…” I breathed softly. “How did… how did you contain the outbreak?”

“Once we realized the installation was overcome with infected, we destroyed the fortification and everything – everything within the compound – using helicopters and artillery.”

I let the General wander around the office. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and prowled across the carpet with his head bowed and the burden of those soldiers’ deaths heavy on his shoulders.

“Now the zombie hordes have been pushed back into Florida and the final containment line has been built, do you feel the worst of the crisis is over? Can America begin to rebuild?”

Tash’s head snapped up. “No!” he said fiercely. “The work still isn’t finished. One day we need to take Florida back – we need to terminate every zombie and every trace of the infection. Until then, we can’t relax, we can’t rest and we must not lose our focus.”

“Is the Army still on alert?”

“Of course,” the General gave me another one of his withering glares. “We have troops all along the abbreviated Florida border in trenches and behind barbed wire, and we have armor and infantry here at Fort Benning and more at Fort Stewart. We remain on high alert. We remain ready to finish the job we started.”

“Fort Stewart?” I flicked back through my memories. I hadn’t heard the base mentioned before.

“It’s the largest military installation east of the Mississippi,” the General explained. “It’s outside of Hinesville, Georgia. A few years ago it was the staging area for American troops en route to serve during Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

“And you have more men and tanks there?”

“Plenty,” Tash declared, “with more arriving every week. Fort Stewart is close to the Florida line. It gives us the ability for rapid response and deployment if the containment line is ever broken. It was one of the last pieces of ground we recovered when we drove the undead back.”

“So you didn’t flatten the military installations the way you devastated every town and city? You didn’t bomb the buildings in case the bases were concealing zombies?”

Tash shook his head. “No, we didn’t,” he said. “We deliberately preserved Fort Benning, Fort Stewart and several other key installations because we knew they would be needed in the aftermath of the apocalypse. We needed the runways, the facilities and the equipment that had been abandoned as the troops were forced to withdraw to avoid the spread of the infection.”

“Then how did you get them back?” I asked. “How did you recover Fort Benning, for example?”

“The hard way,” Tash said. “The fucking hard way.”

“Meaning?”

The General finally stopped pacing the floor and came to lean over his desk, palms planted on the edge of the wooden tabletop. He pushed his face closer to mine – so close that I could see discolored spots of sun-blemished skin on his cheeks and across the bridge of his nose. “I sent in the Rangers,” he said. “It was the home base for a lot of those boys before the apocalypse. They knew the lay of the land. They did the job.”

“The Rangers re-took the base?”

“Yes,” he said. “They were on the ground, fighting for every yard, face-to-face with the enemy and supported by armor and helicopters.”

“That must have been one hell of a fight,” I breathed. I was fascinated. Throughout the zombie apocalypse, the Army’s leaders had gone to great lengths to place our fighting men and women behind barbed wire and in trenches, or within tanks, troop carriers and forts. This was the first time I had heard macabre news of soldiers confronting the zombie-infected hordes in direct action.

“Can you tell me about the battle?”

“No,” the General said, and then seemed to relent only a moment later. “All I can tell you is that the operation was conducted over a twenty-hour period and in that time several thousand of the enemy were destroyed. The base was re-taken by the Rangers supported by Abrams tanks which swept the area beyond the Fort.”

It wasn’t the kind of answer I wanted, but I suspected it was the best I was going to get. Besides, I was tired of dueling with this man. He was exhausting to be around. His energy was combustible.

“So the Rangers confronted the zombies and fought a kind of urban street-fight to secure the base’s buildings, while the tanks protected and crushed the undead around the perimeter?”

Tash shrugged. “You can describe it that way if you want.”

“Was that what happened?”

Tash said nothing. He stared at me defiantly. “I’ve told you all I can about the operation to re-take Fort Benning,” he said again. “The operation to re-take Fort Stewart employed similar – equally successful – tactics.”

“But you won’t tell me exactly what those tactics were?”

“Correct.”

“Then will you tell me how many soldiers died in the battle to win back the two Forts?”

“Casualties were less than we anticipated, but more than we had hoped for.”

I sat straight in the chair and arched my back. I could feel the burn of being hunched over spread across my stiff shoulders. I tilted my head from side to side to loosen the muscles in my neck.

“General,” I said calmly, “have you ever considered a career in politics?”

He knew I was being sarcastic. He narrowed his eyes.

“Have you ever served, son?”

“No, sir. I haven’t.”

Tash’s mouth curled into an ironic sneer. “Then you have no fucking idea what it is like to go into combat. You have no fucking idea what it is to lay your life on the line for your country.”

“No,” I admitted. “I can only imagine the bravery and selflessness that would require,” I said sincerely.

He shook his head. “No!” he roared suddenly. “You
can’t
imagine. You can’t possibly imagine what it is like to be so filled with fear but still do your duty. And you can’t possibly imagine what it is like to aim your weapon and fire at someone with an intent to kill them.” He pushed himself away from the desk. There was a bubble of spittle in the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.

For many minutes the General stood silently in the corner of the office, simmering. I could see the tension in the way he held himself, the clench of his fists and the rigid line of his back and shoulders. Finally, he turned around to face me.

“Every man and woman who served America during this conflict was a hero,” General George Tash said in a low rumbling voice. “They deserve to be honored. Their exploits and their efforts deserve to be celebrated and appreciated. I’ve given you everything you need in order to fulfill that obligation. Now go and fucking do it!”

FORT STEWART, GEORGIA:

EASTERN COMMAND BASE – NATIONAL UNDEAD CONTAINMENT COMMAND

“Colonel, am I right in saying that your role during ‘Operation Compress’ was to serve as second-in-command to General George Tash?”

Jeremiah Richelson nodded his head. “I was in command of the eastern flank during the push into zombie-held territory,” he carefully qualified his answer. “I oversaw our tank and troop-carrier movements through South Carolina and into the eastern parts of Georgia.”

“What was that like?”

Richelson narrowed his eyes. “What was what like? Serving under the General, or overseeing the movement of almost five hundred armored fighting vehicles across a front that was over a hundred and fifty miles wide?”

“Both,” I said. “But tell me about your time working with the General first.”

The Colonel was a dour looking man. He was taller than average with a wiry physique. He had the foppish habit of glancing at his own reflection in the windows of a nearby Humvee every time he thought I wasn’t looking. Maybe it was a vanity thing, or maybe he merely wanted to ensure he presented himself in the correct military manner at all times.

“Have you spoken to the General personally?” he asked.

I nodded. “He granted me an interview.”

The Colonel’s expression became cynical. “Then you can probably imagine what it was like.”

I could. Personally I would have thrown myself out of a helicopter. Tash had been the most demanding of all my interviews. It didn’t surprise me to know that SAFCUR III’s confrontational, abrasive attitude was something the men who served underneath him were also very aware of.

“With respect, sir – that’s not really an answer.”

Colonel Richelson conceded the point with a jerked nod of his head. He stopped suddenly and clasped his hands behind his back, straightened his stance a little and fixed me with his gaze. We had been walking around Fort Stewart in the late afternoon sun. The base was a buzz of activity, the air filled with the purposeful kind of noise that comes from men in preparation for war.

“When you work with the finest men in the military, you need to be prepared to lift your performance to meet the exemplary standards they set and expect,” The Colonel said in a monotone voice. “It has been my experience that serving under General Tash was the defining highlight of my own personal career. The man is the best we have, and he made me better for the honor of working as his second-in-command.”

His gaze flickered, to be sure I wrote everything he said down word-for-word. I did.

He relaxed a little then. I saw it in the eased set of his shoulders and the softening of his features. He gave me a speculative glance. “Do you drink, Mr. Culver?”

I nodded my head and smiled self-deprecatingly. “Colonel, I’m a journalist. We all drink. My therapist told me once that drinking alcohol was my sub conscious way of washing my mouth out.”

Colonel Richelson hesitated, processing my comment as though he analyzed everything said with great care. Finally he smiled.

“Clever,” he muttered. He turned on his heel without another word and I followed him across a vast concrete parade ground and into one of the base office blocks.

Colonel Richelson’s office didn’t come with an ornate antique desk, shelves of leather bound books or even deep comfortable chairs. The office had the feel of being temporary because it was. When the base had been re-taken from the zombies there had been no time for luxuries. The desk was standard military issue and so were the chairs. The carpet was threadbare, worn down in patches and deeply rutted where other, better furniture pieces had once sat.

The Colonel tossed his cap onto the desk, and brushed his fingers carefully through his hair. He went to the filing cabinet in the corner of the room and pulled open the top drawer. From within he produced a bottle of scotch and two small glasses. He set them on the desk and raised his eyebrows in a question.