Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America (28 page)

He looked at me as if it was something he had never considered before. He frowned a little and stroked his fingers through the strands of his beard. “It was, actually,” he said at last. “I stayed up through the night. I kept guard at the gate. I could see them moving in the shadows, but the spotlights on the walls only reached fifty feet beyond the compound. I didn’t know what was in the night. I didn’t know until sunrise came. That was when I realized we were surrounded by hundreds of them.”

“What did you do?”

Karl Penrose shrugged. “I stayed calm,” he said. “I knew we were safe behind the walls, and we had plenty of food and water – everything we needed to last for months. We had power, fuel stored. It was all there. It was just a matter of waiting them out.”

“As simple as that?” I found it hard to believe that anyone could remain calm when hundreds of undead zombies were howling for your blood, separated by just an iron gate and a wall. “You didn’t go all Rambo, or something?”

“Shooting them all, you mean?”

I nodded. That’s exactly what I meant.

Penrose shook his head. “There was no point,” he said. The man had an inner tranquility about him that seemed utterly unshakable. “I didn’t have enough ammunition to kill them all, and I was pretty sure opening fire on them would just attract more by the sound of gunfire.”

“So you just sat tight – went about your normal daily life?”

He smiled, but there was no humor in the gesture. The expression slipped off the side of his mouth. “Daily life?” his voice became hollow and wistful. “I don’t think any of us will ever experience normal daily life again.”

“So what did you do?” I persisted. The man’s evasiveness to direct questions was becoming a little annoying. With a shave and a suit, he would have made a fine politician.

“We endured,” he said, like the words were a family motto. “We waited until the authorities got control of the outbreak and came back to free us.”

“You waited several months.”

“Yes.”

“And then you nearly got killed when the tanks rolled through.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” he said again. “We were rescued by helicopters a few days before the battle. The sky was filled with Black Hawks for forty-eight hours. They must have been sweeping the area looking for any survivors before the artillery barrage and the tank assault. They saw the sign we had painted on the roof. They lifted us to safety.”

I nodded. Karl Penrose seemed completely unshakable. “What about your family?” I lobbed the question like a grenade. “How did the months in the compound affect your wife and two children?”

Karl Penrose could have thrown himself over the grenade and smothered the impact. I would never have known the truth. But he didn’t. He looked at me with a sudden flood of compassion in his eyes, like I had at last, probed a deep wound.

“My wife – she hates me,” he admitted. “She’s gone to Canada to live with her mother, and she has taken the children with her.”

I was shocked and bewildered by the sudden admission. “I don’t understand.”

Penrose shrugged his bony shoulders and stared fixedly down into the dirt. “When the helicopters came,” he said slowly, like it was a struggle to form every word,” I… I tried to wave them off. I didn’t want them to rescue us.”

What the hell?

“What do you mean –
exactly?”
I asked with a dawning sense of horror. “Why would you do that?”

Penrose didn’t look at me. His eyes moved evasively. They focused on the small jewelry box between his feet. “I thought we were safer in the compound than we would be in the outside world,” he tried to explain himself to the dirt. “We had everything we needed here. We were self-sufficient. We had water and food, and the garden would have provided for us. We had a stockpile of fuel for the generator. It was safe and secure. It was an oasis away from the horror of the unfolding world.”

“So you refused to leave?”

He nodded at the jewelry box. “I refused to let the helicopter crew take any of us. I clung to my kids, and they had to draw their weapons on me.”

“You mean you… what? You held the kids like hostages?”

He nodded.

“And what happened?”

“One of the helicopter crew hit me and pinned me to the ground. Then they dragged me into the helicopter.”

I sat back and stared at the blue sky, stunned. Penrose sighed heavily and then turned his face until he was gazing at a pile of rubble that had once been a part of the compound wall. “I just thought we would be safer if we stayed here…” he said softly to the pile of bricks and crumbled mortar.

I guess he got tired of talking to the dirt.

FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND:

USAMRIID HEADQUARTERS

Sergeant Major Julio Moranes arrived for the interview perspiring, and out of breath.

He was a slight man, lean rather than muscled. He was wearing sweat-stained fatigues and an olive drab t-shirt. He had a towel draped around the back of his neck. He shook my hand and then used the towel to mop across his brow.

The sound of the man’s steps echoed through the big empty arena of the gymnasium, loud on the timber floor. He dropped wearily down onto a weight bench, caught a glimpse of himself in one of the wall mirrors, and then smiled ruefully.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been for a five mile run.”

I made a face. “Too much exercise can kill you,” I quipped.

He looked back at me. “So can no exercise at all.”

Touché.

I had found a plastic chair against a wall to sit on while I had waited. I reached into my bag for a notebook.

“You and the rest of your USAMRIID team were the first ones to discover the bodies at Fort Mill,” I said.

The Sergeant Major nodded. The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases troops had been the first men on the ground after the Battle of Rock Hill. “That’s correct,” Moranes said. “We were air-lifted into the area around Charlotte about a week after the battle.”

“For what reason?”

“Intelligence and information,” the Sergeant Major said. “The Army wanted a close monitor on the effects of the infection in an urban area. We figured it was part of the larger plan.”

I frowned. “So this wasn’t part of the re-occupation of the dead zone then, was it?”

“No. It was not,” Moranes said. “We were flown into the area by Black Hawks. They dropped teams of us along route I77. My men and I were lifted to Fort Mill.”

“How did you feel about that?”

The Sergeant Major seemed to think carefully before he answered. “We knew we were being placed in harm’s way,” he admitted frankly. “The Battle had been fought just a week earlier. We had been told the undead had been slaughtered and driven back towards Columbia…”

“But…?”

He shrugged. “We didn’t believe that
every
dread had been taken out,” he confessed.

“So you thought it was possible that zombies were still active in Charlotte and the surrounding towns?”

“Yes.”

“That must have been a difficult assignment,” I tried to prompt the man to open up a little. “You must have been scared.”

“Sure,” Sergeant Major Moranes said. “We were in full-faceplate biohazard outfits, and communication between each member of the team was through two-way radio. Hell, the air packs we wore weighed forty pounds. Just moving around was an effort.”

“All that biohazard gear…” I began curiously. “That was to protect against a zombie attack?”

Moranes shrugged. “It was to protect against every possible risk of infection,” he said instead. “We didn’t know what we would be walking into.”

I nodded, and then asked the sixty-four thousand dollar question. “What
did
you walk into?”

Moranes buried his face in the towel for a moment. His forearms were glistening with sweat. The air in the room was stuffy. It smelled of liniment. When he looked up and lifted his eyes to mine, his expression was bleak.

“We walked into hell,” he said softly. His eyes had a haunted hypnotic stare, the pupils like little pinpricks. He was looking directly at me, but visualizing somewhere else entirely.

“Tell me,” I said softly.

Moranes sighed. “The Black Hawks were circling in the sky, the crew chiefs at their miniguns looking for signs of zombies,” he said, “while we were on the ground, sifting through the rubble.”

“In Charlotte?”

He nodded. “There were teams in Charlotte. Most of the city had been utterly destroyed before the battle. Fort Mill was the same. The artillery and the Air Force had laid waste to just about every building. When we jumped out of the helicopter it was like stepping into some third-world war zone,” he muttered.

“Did you have other soldiers on the ground with you?”

Moranes nodded. “We landed with a Marine escort,” he said. “They shadowed us while we worked, and while the choppers kept top cover.”

“What were you looking for?” I asked. “What was the point of sending USAMRIID troops into areas like Fort Mill?”

“We were looking to measure the effectiveness of the artillery bombardment and the air bombing,” the Sergeant Major explained. “It was an intelligence gathering mission. We had biohazard bags and we went through the rubble collecting samples.”

“Samples?”

He nodded. “Pieces of zombie,” he said.

“That must have been…” my voice tailed off because I couldn’t think of any conceivable word that would be suitable.

“Gruesome,” Moranes said. “It was gruesome. We had multi-layer gloves. They were so thick we could barely grip anything, and we were foraging through the debris collecting limbs and heads – lots of heads. We bagged them all up and left them in a pile at an intersection for when the Black Hawks came back down to retrieve us.”

“And is that how you found the bodies – the civilians at Fort Mill?”

The Sergeant Major nodded. “Eventually,” he said. “We worked in teams, picking over the site. We didn’t comb through every building because we were sampling. One of the other men and myself found the dead in a basement.”

“Tell me about that moment,” I insisted in a gentle voice. “Describe to me what you saw.”

The Sergeant Major’s tone began gruff, like he was forcing the words from his throat. “The house had been blown apart by the bombing,” he said softly. “There wasn’t really anything left except piles of brick, covered in grey dust. The building must have taken a direct hit – there was rubble strewn across the lawn and pieces of the roof in a nearby tree. It was like the whole street had been torn to pieces by a twister.”

“And the people?”

He nodded. “The basement,” he said. “When we started picking through the debris we moved a pile of broken rubble. It was covering a small square door built into the floor, like a trap door. The door was broken and hanging off its hinges, so we were just staring down into a broken black hole. There were smears of blood on the wood.”

“And the people were down there?”

“There was a ladder. I climbed down.”

Moranes fell silent. I waited. He wrung his hands and then wiped them on his fatigues as though the sensation of what he had touched that day was still on his fingertips. “They were all dead, he said finally. Every one of them.”

“Were they killed by the bombing?” I prodded.

The soldier shook his head. “They had suffocated,” he said, as if it was the most remarkable and bitterly ironic moment he had ever witnessed. “There had been an air vent to the basement concealed in the back yard amongst the plants of a garden. It had been blocked off by falling debris from the shelling. The people had tried to claw their way out through the trap door, but they couldn’t shift the rubble. The basement had become their tomb.”

It was so cruel. The people in that dark hole had survived for months while the zombie plague had raged above them. Then they had been killed by the very same bombardment that would have liberated and saved them.

“How many?” I asked.

“A man, a woman and six children,” Moranes said. “They were all laying in bunks, as though they had been sleeping.”

“And you’re sure they died of suffocation?”

The man nodded. “The basement was an enormous underground kind of bunker. The people must have been preppers. They had canned foods, plenty of fresh water…”

“Just no luck,” I said.

Moranes nodded like I had uttered some deep and meaningful universal truth. “That’s right,” he said with an empty voice. “Just no luck.”

I left it at that. I closed my notebook and stuffed it back into my bag. Moranes seemed surprised that the interview had ended so abruptly. He looked up into my face, and there was a twist of puzzlement across his mouth. “Is that all you wanted to know about – that family in Fort Mill?”

I shrugged. “Is there anything else that happened on that day you wanted to talk about?”

Moranes looked blank. “I… I just thought you wanted to interview me about the heads – the zombie heads,” he said.