Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America (13 page)

“So you went to Atlanta.”

“We tried,” Mrs. Kingsman said. She dropped the butt of her cigarette in the grass and crushed it under the heel of her shoe. “We didn’t get more than a few miles. The roads were impossible – abandoned cars and trucks, people panicking, fights on the streets. There were gunshots. Cars were on fire and there was looting. It was anarchy. It took us almost a week to get to Atlanta, sleeping in abandoned cars or under trees while Larry kept watch with his rifle during the nights.”

“It must have been a frightening ordeal.”

“It was,” Mrs. Kingsman lit another cigarette and inhaled anxiously. “The screams in the night were terrifying – blood-curdling cries that went on and on.”

“From the undead? Were they pursuing you?”

“No,” she shook her head. “It was from all the looting and killing. People were insane with panic and desperation. Larry saw one man shot by a young woman who stole his bicycle.” She shook her head like it was still something she couldn’t come to terms with. “For a bicycle!”

Even a year after the event, those days filled with terror had left deep emotional scars.

Maybe ones that would never heal.

“You mentioned Larry, your husband,” I began delicately, already sensing there was no good news to come. “Was he the man that Sam Grear and his crew rescued that day outside of Atlanta?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Kingsman said. Her voice had dropped to a hushed whisper. “He had collapsed on the road. He had been carrying our youngest for the last ten miles on his back. When we saw the helicopter come out of the sky, we all started to run. But Larry… well it was his heart. It just gave out, I guess.”

“He died?”

“No,” the woman said. “Not right then.” Tears began to well up in her eyes and her shoulders began to slowly shake. She turned her head away and I heard her sob. When she turned back to me, her cheeks were wet, her eyes huge wells of agony and sorrow. “They got him to a USAMRIID hospital in Knoxville. They thought maybe he had been infected. He died there.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. The words sounded trite.

Through her tears, Gloria Kingsman smiled suddenly. “It was like Larry knew we were safe,” she sniffed. “He knew we had made it to safety. That seemed to be all he was hanging on for.”

I looked away, gave Mrs. Kingsman time to compose herself. A young girl’s face appeared from behind the nearest tent. The kid saw me and ducked back out of sight.

“Your daughters are safe though, right?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Kingsman said. “Thanks to Sam and the other men on board his helicopter that day. They risked their lives to rescue us. It was something I’ll never forget, and never be able to repay them for.”

I jotted a few quick notes and then looked around the camp one last time. I got to my feet slowly and held out my hand. Mrs. Kingsman forced a quivering smile. “When do you return home to Grantville?” I asked.

The woman’s smile flickered for another moment, and then slid off the edges of her mouth. She shrugged her shoulders. “No time soon,” she admitted.

I frowned. “But… the undead are back behind the Florida border defensive line now. Surely you…”

Mrs. Kingsman shook her head. “The government says it will be at least another year before we’re repatriated,” she said. “The area is still official dead zone, and the damage… well apparently it’s just like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.”

She fell silent for a long moment, and it was like she was seeing the ruins of her future stretched out ahead of her like an endless road of broken ground. She lifted her face slowly, and her eyes flicked to something beyond my shoulder. She smiled wanly, then lifted a languid arm that was deathly pale. “Hi Ty,” she said.

I turned. There was a man in his thirties standing between the rows of tents with a young girl on his hip, maybe six or seven years old. Beside the man was an attractive young woman with a bob of sandy hair and a quirky smile that seemed to make her eyes sparkle behind the lenses of her glasses.

Gloria Kingsman waved the couple over. The man held out his hand.

He was tall and solidly built. He had clear, defined features and a beard that was just beginning to turn white along his lower lip. He smiled, and the expression hung from the corner of his mouth as he set the girl down on the ground beside him.

“Ty Harrison,” he said as we shook hands. “And this is my girlfriend, Sarah.”

I nodded.

“This is John Culver, Ty,” Gloria Kingsman introduced us. “He’s a journalist. He’s been interviewing me about the apocalypse.” She bit her lip, then leaned closer to me. She lowered her voice to a whisper, but it wasn’t necessary. The man and woman could hear every word she breathed. Perhaps she was just being polite. Perhaps it was just genteel manners. “Ty and Sarah were in Bradenton when the infection broke out. They barely escaped.”

I looked up at the man. He was silhouetted against the sinking sun. “Is that right?”

The man nodded. He glanced sideways at the woman beside him, and there was some silent exchange of messages, or perhaps memories.

“Care to tell me about it?” I offered. I reached for my notebook. The man sighed, and then let go of a shuddering breath as if the tension he had been holding onto had suddenly leaked from him. He dropped down into the long grass like he needed to.

For a long moment the man said nothing. He just stared down at the ground, his gaze distant, his facial expression rigid. When he finally began to retell his story, his voice seemed to come from far away.

“I owned a comic book store,” Ty Harrison said. “We had just opened that week.”

I raised an eyebrow. “A comic book store? What was it called?”

He smiled wryly. “Tytan Comics,” he said. “The store was on US41 in Bradenton.”

I frowned at that. I wasn’t instantly familiar with the town. He must have caught the curious wrinkle in my expression. “Bradenton is an hour south of Tampa Bay,” the man explained. “We had just renovated the store and opened for business.”

I made a note, then looked back at the man. The young woman with him was standing close by his side. The little girl clung to the woman’s hand.

Ty Harrison lifted his eyes to mine. “At first I… I thought it was all an elaborate hoax,” he confessed. “The store had just opened for business, and I thought Sarah had organized some kind of extravagant promotion to let the locals know, and maybe attract a little bit of publicity.” He shook his head. “I saw these people running down the street. They were covered in blood. Some of the wounds… they were ghastly.”

“And you thought it was a stunt?”

He nodded again. “I studied special effects make-up,” Ty explained. “I thought it was all a Hollywood-type event.”

He sighed, then glanced away and stared into the empty distance.

“When did you realize it was the real thing?”

“When the first body came crashing through the glass windows at the front of the store,” he said.

“What?”

He nodded. “A young woman came running down the sidewalk. She was dressed in blood-soaked tatters. Shreds of cloth were just hanging from her. She stood outside the window and stared in through the glass. She was swaying from side to side. She slapped her palm against the window and it left a smear of blood.”

“So you did what? Started to run?”

“No,” Ty Harrison said. “I actually went towards the door to open it for the zombie.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He shook his head. “I was calling out to Sarah. She and my daughter were at the store that day to help with the grand opening. They were out back, unpacking the car. I was calling out to her about how cool the whole thing was, and asking her how much of the advertising budget she had blown.”

I made a face. I could imagine the scene. The man was walking towards his death. “What happened?”

“Sarah saved my life,” he said. “She came into the store and saw the zombie hammering its fist against the glass. Sarah screamed. I mean really screamed. The kind of terrified cry you hear in all those horror films. It turned my blood to ice. I froze. Then a car went crashing through a shop front across the street from the comic book shop. It just crashed through the building and caught on fire. The zombie turned at the sound, then turned back and snarled at me.”

“And then you started to run, right?”

“No,” Ty Harrison said. “I had a baseball bat in a glass cabinet. It was a display piece that we wanted to use in the store. But as I went towards it, the fucking zombie woman just hurled herself through the goddamned window! That’s when I started to run.”

“And not a second too soon,” the woman standing beside him muttered. I glanced up at her. She had a serene, graceful aura; she radiated a sense of calm that I had rarely encountered before. She was smiling fondly down at the young girl. “Ty only just escaped,” she said.

The man sighed again. “We got into the store room and slammed the door shut. I could hear the zombie pounding its fists on the door. I could hear it snarling. There were sirens wailing in the background and other screams started to fill the air. It was like a scene from a riot. Chaos.”

“But you escaped?”

Ty Harrison took a deep breath. “My car was parked out the back of the store. We were still unpacking boxes of comics. We managed to get into the car and drove about three blocks before the road was filled with crashed cars. Some of them were on fire. There were dead bodies lying on the road and undead zombies crouched over them, tearing at their flesh. There were thick spreading stains of blood on the blacktop, and corpses still trapped in a couple of the vehicles. The street was filled with running, screaming people. I don’t know how many were human and how many were…. were zombies. It was just one horrifying nightmare.”

“How did you escape?” I asked. Despite myself, I found I was leaning towards the man, drawn in by the tale of horror.

“A guy in a school bus!” Ty Harrison said, and his voice rose an octave at the incredulity of it. “There was a guy driving a school bus. He came crashing around a corner on two wheels, driving like a lunatic. He looked like Rambo. He had a gun thrust out through the side window and he was driving with one hand. The bus clipped the front of our car, and then stopped. I could see the guy shouting at us. I looked at Sarah, and made a snap decision. We leaped from the car and jumped aboard the bus.”

“Were there other survivors?”

“About ten,” Ty Harrison said. “They were mostly women and children, shaking and crying. We climbed aboard, and the bus went right through the tangled wreckage of cars and exploded out through the other side.”

“To freedom.”

“To freedom,” Ty Harrison agreed. “Eventually.”

I sensed there was much more to the story of this family’s escape. But it was quickly getting dark. “How long are you here in Kansas?” I asked. “Have the authorities told you anything?”

“We’re some of the lucky ones,” he admitted. “I have family in North Carolina, behind the old Danvers Defense Line. “My father is retired military. We’re being moved next week.”

I shook hands with the man, and the young woman. They were indeed lucky. Many survivors like Gloria Kingsman were facing long uncertain futures in the refugee camps. At least for this couple, and one young child, there would be a new home.

ABOARD ‘
USS MONSOON’
(PC-4):

NAVAL AMPHIBIOUS BASE, LITTLE CREEK VIRGINIA

Covered in glory but shrouded in mystery, the elite US Navy SEALs are one of the most elusive and covert military organizations in the world. The men who make up the teams are private, quiet men – but also some of the most lethal combatants ever to go to war.

That covert mentality pervades all levels of the teams, and as I boarded Patrol Boat, Coastal,
‘USS Monsoon’
, at the Naval Amphibious Base at Little Creek, I was again reminded of the strict rules for interviews by a uniformed naval officer who greeted me on deck.

“Culver?”

I nodded.

“He’s waiting for you below,” the officer said with a jerk of his head, then raised a warning finger at me. “No pictures and no names – no kidding. Understand?”

I understood.

The Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek, is the largest installation of its kind anywhere in the world. It’s the major operating station for the amphibious forces of the nation’s Atlantic Fleet. Little Creek is an inlet on the southern shore of Chesapeake Bay. The base is sited at the extreme northwest corner of Virginia Beach.

I followed the man down narrow steps and through a tight maze of steel corridors to a small cabin below decks.

A man was waiting for me – just a man wearing a pair of denim jeans and a black shirt. He looked ordinary in almost every way: average height, average build, average looks.

Predatory eyes
.

We shook hands. The officer who escorted me disappeared.

“Call me Mike,” the man I came to meet said in a low rumbling voice.

“Is that your name?”

“No,” the SEAL smiled easily. “But that’s what you can call me in your article.”

I nodded. “Do you want a surname?”

He shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “How about Wainwright?”

“Is that your real surname?”

“No.”

I made a face, and shrugged. As far as interviews go, this one hadn’t started well.

There was a narrow bunk in one corner of the cabin, and bolted to the adjoining wall was a small desk beside a straight-backed chair. Mike Wainwright dropped comfortably down onto the bunk, and I scraped the chair back and sat down.

We stared at each other across the small space for several seconds. Wainwright looked to be in his late twenties. He had short dark hair and a shadow of stubble on his jaw. His gaze was disconcerting. It felt like he was sizing me up – deciding how he would kill me if he had to. I wondered if that was the kind of thought that randomly went through such a man’s mind when he walked down the street, or ate dinner at a local restaurant. Was that the way an elite soldier’s mind worked… or was there a difference in the mentality of the man who went home at night and the one who went to war?

I wasn’t about to ask.

“What can you tell me about the operation that became known as Mission Warwax?” I asked, flipping open my notebook. “It’s one of the most secretive exploits of the zombie war… in fact nobody even knew the SEALs were in action during the apocalypse until just recently.”

Mike Wainwright shrugged his shoulders in a casual gesture, but when he spoke, there was an edge of intensity and purpose in his voice.

“Operational security is something that extends well beyond when the operation is completed,” the SEAL member said. He fell silent for a moment as though measuring his next words carefully. “At least it does when special units are involved.”

“Why?”

Wainwright sighed, clasped his hands together and looked me in the eye. “A few years ago SEAL Team 6 went hunting bin Laden, and shortly afterwards our Vice President at the time made a public statement attributing the success of the operation directly to the SEALs. It was an unprecedented gaffe. It put a target on every one of the guys backs – something we didn’t appreciate,” Wainwright said gravely. “It’s not the sort of mistake that should ever have been made, especially by such a high-profile politician who should have known better… and it’s not one the Naval Special Warfare community want made ever again. Now we’re even more circumspect about what we say, and when we say it. That’s why you haven’t heard of Warwax before now.”

I looked at the man, my expression incredulous. “Surely an attack against a zombie horde is very different in terms of your operational security than a raid against a terrorist organization like al-Qaeda?”

“Sure,” the SEAL said. His smile twisted slowly and blood darkened his cheeks. “But practice doesn’t make perfect.
Perfect practice makes perfect
. And operational security is about perfect practice. The zombie war has been won – the horde has been pushed back within the borders of Florida… but there are other threats around the world looming.”

Wainwright paused again and his lips compressed into a thin line of frustration. He sprang to his feet and paced across to the cabin door then spun on his heel and came back to the bunk again. He looked like a caged lion prowling.

“On any given day, US Navy SEALs are deployed in over thirty countries around the world,” Wainwright explained carefully to be sure I understood. “Today I’m talking to you from Virginia Beach. Tomorrow I could be posted to operations in Africa, Asia, Europe or the Middle East. What makes the SEAL teams so effective is our covert nature. It’s the dark cape we drape over ourselves that allows us to operate so effectively.”