Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America (20 page)

I nodded. And then flinched suddenly. “Jesus! You didn’t have your men storm out of the trench and through the barbed wire to outflank the zombies, did you?”

“Of course not, you damned fool!” the Colonel’s voice suddenly boomed in the silence of that tragic, monstrous graveyard. “We employed what we called the ‘static buffalo’ – a tactic that played on the predictability of the zombie behavior.”

I waited with my mouth shut. The Colonel drew deeply on his cigar and then waved it at my face. “I wanted the zombies to attack here,” he said. “Right here where my men were waiting. So we opened fire – drew them towards the sound – lured them onto the defensive line at a place we were prepared for them. That was the first step.”

“And it worked?”

The Colonel nodded. “They responded to the sound of machine gun fire. It was like a huge flock of birds, suddenly wheeling in the air and all flying towards the one point. That was when the artillery opened fire.”

“The Paladins.”

“Yeah,” Colonel Paris said, his voice gruff. “The artillery started shelling the area two miles south of here – just pounding away in a pattern. By then they were firing right amongst the zombies. It didn’t deter them. They kept raging towards the trench.”

“Were your men still firing?”

“Sporadically,” he said. “There was no point. The ghouls were well out of effective range, but I had to keep some fire up to keep ‘em interested enough to hit the wire where we wanted them.”

I ran my eyes quickly back over my notes. “Can you tell me more about the artillery?” I asked. “Conventional thinking would say that it would be ineffective against the undead swarms because of the slim chance of getting fragments to actually penetrate the brain. Was that the reality?”

The Colonel dropped what was left of his cigar in the grass and ground it down with the heel of his boot.

“That was not the case,” he said. “The artillery wasn’t meant to wipe out the zombies. Yeah, they took some of the bastards out, because the effective blast zone of each shell fired was about fifty yards. We scored some kills, but we did a hell of a lot of damage to them, slowing them down. That’s what the artillery was for – it was a backup to the barbed wire.”

I tried to look like I understood. I don’t think it worked. “Um…”

The Colonel sighed. “We were dealing with over one hundred thousand undead, maybe a hell of a lot more, and they were all enraged and charging up the slope towards the barbed wire. There was too many of them – we knew that. The artillery fire slowed them down. They fell in their thousands – arms and legs torn off – some decapitated, but thousands of them
incapacitated
,” The Colonel emphasized the word. “It meant that when they hit the line they weren’t all stormin’ and a hollerin’. Some of them were dragging themselves towards the trench. Others were thrown down and didn’t get up again.”

“Okay,” I said with a little more conviction. “And the artillery worked with the barbed wire? Is that right?”

“Yes!” Colonel Paris exclaimed. “No one in their right mind expected the zombies to hit the barbed wire and then suddenly turn back in surprise! They flung themselves at the entanglements, and became entangled.
It slowed them down
,” the man said again, talking to me like maybe I had some kind of a learning disability. “We couldn’t hold the line against so many zombies unless we could find ways to halt or delay their attack and make them easier for the troops in the trench to pick off. We wanted to stagger the onslaught – and, by God, that’s exactly what the artillery and barbed wire did.”

“And so then what?” I prompted. “How did the attack develop?”

“Quickly anyhow,” the Colonel admitted. “That’s what combat is like. It’s the endless days of boredom and anticipation, followed by a sporadic burst of gut-churning action and panic. When the zombies came within range, every man in my Battalion opened fire.”

“And the tanks? You mentioned there were tanks on the reverse side of the defensive trench.”

“They opened fire too,” the Colonel said. “That was the reason for the trench being so deep. Eight foot is higher than any man. So we built firing steps. The battalion was lined up on the steps, with just their heads and shoulders visible, and the tank-mounted heavy machine guns were able to fire over the troops and into the zombies.”

“The firepower…” I confessed, “… it must have been awesome.”

The Colonel actually smiled – a grim little twitch one corner of his mouth. “It was unlike anything I had ever experienced before,” he admitted. “Normally firefights are sporadic affairs – one guy shoots and then the other guy shoots back – that sort of thing. But this was a full Battalion of the 82
nd
Airborne opening fire with everything we had, supported by Paladin artillery and the machine gun mounts on a line of Abrams tanks. It was a sound to shake hell itself.”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw bones spread across the ground amongst the barbed wire defense. “Some of them got caught in the wire,” I said and pointed.

“A lot reached the entanglement,” the Colonel said, “but none reached the trench. Once they were ensnared in the wire, we picked them off quickly. Some of them fell and others tried to clamber over the bodies. We picked them off too. And some of them literally hurled themselves into the wire. They died where they fell.”

“So it worked?”

“Yeah,” the Colonel said.

“But still… one hundred thousand zombies… how did the line hold against the tremendous weight of numbers?”

The Colonel tapped the side of his nose and smiled slyly. “That was when the static buffalo tactic came into play,” he said. I got the sense he was enjoying himself now. Not enjoying the horror of the battle, but the elegance of the plan he was revealing. There was a sense of grim satisfaction in his voice.

“We held the line against the horde for as long as we could, but simple math made it impossible to sustain. There were just too many of the enemy pressing at the one point. When I felt we were about to be overwhelmed – everyone in the 82
nd
stopped firing.”

“They did what?”

“They stopped firing,” the Colonel said like he was relishing my surprise. “And then they stepped back down off the firing step, below the eye line of the trench. Suddenly the undead couldn’t see anyone. All they could see were the hulls of the Abrams tanks, covering the wire.”

“And then?”

“And then the Battalions on either side of my men opened fire. From the left and right of our position the 14
th
started shooting.”

“What happened?”

“The zombies pressing against the line were drawn to the new sound – they couldn’t help themselves. They’re like moths to a bright light if sound catches their attention. They began to spread away on either side onto the ‘static horns’ of the buffalo.”

“So it was kind of like a spillway for a dam,” I said, nodding with admiration despite myself. “When a dam is about to overflow, they let out excess water to decrease the pressure. You did the same kind of thing.”

The Colonel wrinkled his nose and then sniffed. “I prefer the buffalo analogy,” he said stoically.

“And so the 14
th
Infantry began drawing the undead onto their guns, right?”

Colonel Paris nodded. “We had more tanks covering their men from the reverse slope – not firing their main weapon, but merely adding the fire from their machine guns. As the undead were repelled, the Paladins opened up again, catching those who had been disabled and finishing them off.”

“Was there ever a point during the battle where you thought the plan would fail, or when everything suddenly went wrong?”

“No,” the Colonel said, and I believed him. “We had a twenty foot wide trench with all the ammunition we could stockpile, and the ability to bring more men from further along the defensive line in to support the troops if necessary. It was a cohesive plan tailored to the specific enemy we faced – and it worked flawlessly.”

“Did many zombies get entangled in the wire?”

“Thousands,” The Colonel said. “But very few made it beyond the first ten feet of the entanglement before they were head-shot. We left them sagging in the wire until the battle was over, and then burned the bodies with flamethrowers.”

“How long did the battle last?”

“All day,” Colonel Paris said. He folded his arms across his chest. “The Paladins stopped firing just on sunset, and by then the field was littered with the dead. More dead than I’ve ever seen. More dead than in the great Napoleonic battles. The fields were red with zombie blood and slippery with their gore. It was a charnel house.”

“I can only imagine…” I said softly, my voice muted.

The Colonel sighed. “The field of glory is never a pretty sight,” he said, like he was maybe quoting some long-forgotten General from the pages of history.

The man became somber for just a moment, and then seemed to shake the mood off like a heavy coat. “We fired flares throughout the night and kept the men standing at their posts until sunrise,” The Colonel said. “The Paladins began firing again in the middle of the night and continued firing throughout the next day.”

“Why?”

“To make sure every one of the undead sons-of-bitches was dead once and for all,” the Colonel growled with sudden passion. “There were thousands of them, mutilated in the grass. We left it to the artillery to finish them off. By then they weren’t moving much. The artillery pounded them into dust.”

I stared again at the stark white bones that were thick on the ground. “I’d like to talk to one of your men, if that’s all right. I’d like to hear what the battle was like for one of the men in the trenches as the zombie horde crashed along the line.”

The Colonel snapped a speculative glance at me, and then slowly nodded his head. “Sure,” he said…

“It was a target rich environment,” Specialist Marcel Rodriguez said to me without relish – without any hint of pleasure. “They were thick on the ground, pressing against the barbed wire. From that range, we couldn’t miss.”

Rodriguez, one of the 82
nd
Airborne’s designated marksmen was posted in the middle of the line when the zombie horde spilled out across the rolling fields that fateful dawn. He remembered the battle clearly; the sights and sounds of that action still a harrowing torment to him, as it was for many of the men who stood in the trenches throughout the Battle of Four Seasons.

Rodriguez was armed with an M14, equipped with a Sage stock and with a mounted Leupold scope.

“We started firing when the dreads were five hundred yards away, and we didn’t stop firing for near eight hours,” the soldier explained. “We were pissing while we stood and shot. There just wasn’t an option. No one could be spared, so we just urinated against the wall of the trench and got on with the business at hand.”

Rodriguez was one of the men who formed the ‘chest’ of Colonel Clayton Paris’s static buffalo defense. He said the undead horde that came towards Hendersonville that morning was nothing like he had expected.

“We had seen the media stuff,” he said. “You couldn’t avoid it, but even so the reality when they came through the trees was a lot more intense than anything the television had shown.”

“What do you mean by ‘intense’?” I asked. Rodriguez was a young man, not yet twenty-five, with jet-black hair and one single eyebrow that seemed to reach right across his brow. He had flashing white teeth and Latino features.

“The sound of them,” he shook his head like it still echoed inside his mind, “was terrifying. It wasn’t a cohesive kind of battle cry – it wasn’t like a chorus of voices all calling out the same words. It was more animalistic. More raw than that. It was a wild insane sound. It was chilling.”

“How were the men around you at that point?” I asked. “The rest of the guys you must have hung out with in your unit?”

Rodriguez shrugged. “We were all pretty scared,” he admitted. “Nothing wrong with that. Everyone gets scared before going into action. The guys around me were nervous. We just looked at each other with this kind of
what the fuck
expression in our eyes.”

“And then you started firing, right?”

He nodded. “At five hundred yards,” he said again. “There was artillery coming in from behind our position, falling amongst the dreads once they cleared the trees. The rest of the guys sat tight, but as an SDM, it was up to guys like me to start picking off the nearest dreads before they got too close.”

“So you’re a sniper, right?”

“
Like
a sniper,” Rodriguez said, “but we’re not snipers – our training isn’t that specialized. Our role is to lay down accurate fire for our fire team at a range up to around eight hundred yards. Snipers work differently.”

I made a note of that.

“So tell me your recollections of the battle,” I encouraged the young soldier.

He was a shy, quiet man. He felt uncomfortable being questioned. He flicked a glance sideways and saw the Colonel standing with his staff well out of earshot. Rodriguez and I were sitting in the shade of the Black Hawk. The Colonel had wandered away down the slope, walking the battlefield while a small cluster of neatly uniformed subordinate officers shadowed his every step.