Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America (27 page)

“At first we didn’t understand – we didn’t realize the crews of those carriers had been infected,” Nichols said. “We thought it was a breach in the line between a couple of the Abrams. We turned west and flew back along the advancing line of tanks. The zombies were like ants – swarming ants thick on the ground. We could see the heavy tanks crushing them and the trails of blood and gore like… like snail trails across the grass and dirt. In the distance, to the south, we could see the troops in the M113’s mopping up. There was a cluster of the vehicles parked at crazy angles, and a tight knot of the undead around the troops. The undead were in uniform. That was when we realized the crews were being overwhelmed – infected.”

“And you opened fire?”

Nichols shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not immediately. We radioed back to command, told them what was happening to the crews of those M113’s.”

“And then…?”

“Command repeated the order to execute the attack.”

Buddy chewed his lip. He started clenching and releasing his hands. I could see unshed tears welling up in his reddened bloodshot eyes. “I gave the order to my co-pilot gunner. I told him to open fire.”

I said nothing. Nichols wrenched his mouth into a twist of pain and began to sob softly. A tear ran down the man’s cheek and he cuffed it away with the sleeve of his uniform.

“Once wasn’t enough,” the Apache pilot muttered. “If it had been, then… then maybe it would have been all right. But the zombies… the guys that had been in the M113’s kept getting up,” his voice pitched higher with the stab of his anguish. “We had to sweep over them again, and again. We fired until there was nothing left of them – nothing but mush and gore and blood.” His voice trailed off into tortured silence. He gave a long shuddering breath and his shoulders heaved as if the burden of some great weight had been lifted from him.

I reached out and shook his hand. I thanked him for his service to our country. Buddy Nichols stared at me like he was seeing right through me – seeing something else entirely.

“They were our men,” he croaked, his voice strangled by his despair. “One minute they were American soldiers… and the next…”

OUTSIDE OF ROCK HILL CITY LIMITS, SOUTH CAROLINA

As I sat and watched the man picking through the ruins of his life, I wondered if this was how it felt for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. I wondered if it might be the same overwhelming flood of emotions that swept over those who had lost their home in a forest fire, or any other terrible natural disaster.

It was a wrenching experience.

The house that had kept him and his family safe was gone now, destroyed in the battle and the relentless bombardment of artillery that had turned the surrounding farmland to cratered dirt. But even though many months had passed since the day he had been rescued by the Army, this moment was still filled with powerful emotion for him.

He knelt over a small jewelry box and lifted the lid like he was peeling open a tender wound. I heard the soft tinkle of broken music, and the man’s shoulders began to shake as he sobbed.

Karl Penrose stood slowly and clutched the tiny box tight within his hand. He turned towards me and shook his head in a silent gesture of despair. He took a couple of halting steps and then stopped again, sifting through the empty recesses of his memory.

The compound walls that surrounded the man’s home had been reduced to rubble. The wrought iron gate was a twisted mangle, and the land had become overgrown by weeds. Of the house itself, nothing remained but for the blackened burned beams that had supported the roof. Clay tiles lay like shattered pieces of glass amongst fragments of crockery – chipped cups and broken plates. Penrose’s steps through the wreckage were like the reverent footfalls of a man respectfully making his way through a cemetery. He came to where I stood at last, and let out a long anguished sigh that had been choked in the back of his throat.

“There’s nothing else,” he said. His voice was hollow. He held the jewelry box up to show me. It was a small wooden shape, covered in dust. The corners had been chipped, the timber battered. “My daughter’s…” the words drifted away and he fell silent.

I glanced down at the old photograph I held in my hand – the photo he had given me when we had first arrived. The image showed a home like a Hollywood mansion: leafy green trees behind a high solid fence that surrounded the entire property.

He was a tall man, stooped at the shoulders as though the weight of those months surrounded by the zombie horde had crushed him. He had a long straggly beard, and was dressed in flowing robes and sandals. He looked like some ancient biblical figure who had wandered lost in the desert. His face was deeply lined, the skin burned to the color of old leather. His hair was white and hung lank to his shoulders. He scraped it away from his face with the back of his hand and lifted his eyes to mine. They were empty.

“How long did you hold out here?” I asked. My voice was soft, as though to talk too loud would break the heavy spell that seemed cast over this wasteland.

“We didn’t flee when we heard about the outbreak,” Karl Penrose answered. His voice was unusually high-pitched so that it seemed wrong for his body. “Everyone else we knew packed up their cars and ran north,” he said. “Those first few days were a madness of panic. There was looting and riots. At night I could hear the gunfire and the screech of tires. Civilization seemed to collapse. Friends turned on friends. Neighbors abandoned each other to fend for themselves. It was Armageddon. It was a horror ripped straight from the pages of an apocalypse.”

“But you didn’t flee? You and your family stayed here, on your property.”

Penrose nodded. “My daddy always told me it was best to be prepared,” he said softly. “I learned that as a small boy, and I never forgot it.” He set the little jewelry box down on the ground and sat beside me on a mound of grey rubble. “For a long time people used to look at me like I was crazy,” he confessed suddenly. “They’d watch me walking down the street, or see me in a store and laugh behind my back.” He shrugged, like he was shrugging off all that ridicule. “It never bothered me,” he said. “It bothered the wife and my children, of course. They felt like pariahs. This area was pretty close-knit. Everyone knew everyone else. It wasn’t much fun being regarded as the local ‘crazy old fool’.”

“I can imagine,” I said kindly. “But you had the last laugh, didn’t you?”

He looked at me like it was a poor choice of words. And, on reflection, it was.

“People laughed at me. I never laughed at them,” he made the point. “Folks used to call me Noah. They would torment my children, and called the compound here an ‘Ark’. The kids were social outcasts. Everyone stayed away from us. It was hard on the children and my wife. It really was.”

I noticed I had asked the man two fairly specific questions, and he hadn’t answered either one directly. I tried again.

“Why did you decide to stay here? Why didn’t you leave and head north where your safety was assured?”

Penrose smiled thinly. “I didn’t believe our safety would be assured by heading north,” he countered. “There was nothing to guarantee we would have a place to stay, and nothing to assure me that we would be able to make headway in the jams of panicked traffic. And there was no guarantee that food and water and electricity would be available.” He shook his head. “To me the danger was in fleeing. The only way I could assure my family’s safety was to stay right here.”

“Because you were prepared?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been preparing for disaster for years. At first it was because I had children. I started stockpiling drinking water and canned food. Then I looked around me one day and saw what was happening in the world around us. Terrorism, militants, food shortages… horror on every page of the newspapers and on every TV station. I knew it could only end one way.”

“What did you do?”

“I got serious about survival,” he said. “I felt it was every person’s duty to ensure the safety of their loved ones in the event of a disaster. I started researching. I learned about survival techniques, and we created a vegetable garden in the back yard of the compound. We learned to become self-sufficient. Then I began gathering weapons – even taught the children how to fire bows and cross-bows. We got ready for the inevitable.”

I had to ask the question. “What if you had been wrong? What if you had devoted so much of your life to preparing for a disaster that never came? Wouldn’t you have felt cheated?”

Karl Penrose looked hard into my eyes for long seconds. He narrowed his gaze. “I would have been thrilled,” he said. “It would have delighted me if this day had never come.”

“So you didn’t see this zombie apocalypse as some kind of vindication?”

“No,” he said flatly. “I prepared for a disaster event just like the way people take out insurance. Health insurance, life insurance… I took out my kind of insurance. I don’t regret the investment of time and energy, and I wished it had never come to this.”

We sat in silence for a few moments. I set my notebook down and we just listened to the singing of the insects. The day was warm – the kind of warm that makes the mornings inviting, and the afternoons oppressive. Karl Penrose scuffed his sandals in the dirt, as though he might uncover some small precious fragment of his old life just below the surface. He didn’t.

“When the zombies came, how did you react? Can you tell me what happened when you first saw them?”

“We had spotlights along the top of the walls overlooking the ground beyond,” he said. “And we had more spotlights around the house to light the entire compound, all powered from a generator. We knew they were coming,” he said.

“How?”

“By the panic, and then by the screaming.” He stood up, stretched his back, and then sat back down again. “At first we could hear the blood-curdling screams. They were coming from that a ways,” he pointed towards an area of destroyed rubble that might have once been a suburban street. “Then there was gunfire. Not just the occasional shot. This was a panicked fusillade. I got Milly and the kids inside and went around the compound making sure the gate was bolted and chained.”

“What happened next?”

Karl Penrose became distraught. His eyes clouded over. “Vicki Creighton suddenly appeared at the gate.”

“Vicki Creighton?”

“One of our neighbors,” Karl explained. “The lady who lived a couple of doors down the road from us. She suddenly appeared in the night, bashing against the gate and screaming for help.”

“What did you do?”

“I… I watched her,” Karl said softly.

“You didn’t let her in?”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t,” he said. “There wasn’t time. The undead were swarming over the streets. I could see them moving in the night. They were howling and hunting in packs. They were tearing at people. Literally tearing at them. The screams were the most horrible sounds I have ever heard in my life.”

“And Vicki Creighton?”

“She was covered in blood. I didn’t know if she’d already been bitten. She was bleeding from the nose, and there was blood dripping down her face from a cut she must have had on her head. There was blood all over her dress and running down her legs. She shook the gate and she was crying and screaming for help. I couldn’t take the chance…”

“You let her get killed?”

“I protected my family.”

“What happened to her?”

Penrose shook his head. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I walked slowly back towards the house. I could hear Vicki screaming at me – pleading for me to help her. Then she cried out – louder and more piercing.”

“And then?”

Penrose looked down at his sandals. “Then she was gone. She had been taken by the undead. All that was left was a pool of blood at the gate.”

“What happened next?”

Penrose seemed to lift a little, like he was relieved to change the subject. “I took Milly and the kids up onto the roof,” he said. “We had a two-story house, and I had a rooftop porch built, like an observation platform. It was overgrown with vines because we had incorporated it as a trellis for our vegetables. We stood on the porch and watched the unfolding horror.”

“Could you see much?”

“Enough,” Penrose said. “The power was still on in some parts of the suburb, but by then there were dozens of houses on fire. Cars too. Everything seemed to be burning. The zombies were shadows against the flames, and the sound of the terrified screaming measured their progress. They swept around the compound and spilled across the road, heading north.”

“Did you open fire?”

“No,” Penrose said. “It was pointless. What help could I have been?  A few shots in the darkness at running zombies wouldn’t help anyone. I decided to save the ammunition. I figured I needed every round to protect my family.”

“But you said the zombies swept past the compound.”

He nodded. “They did – the first night.”

“So they came back?”

He nodded again. His expression became darker. He shook his head. “I don’t know if they could sense us, or if they could maybe hear us… I just don’t know. But by the following morning, the compound was surrounded by zombies.”

“That must have been terrifying.”