Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America (35 page)

He led me along the deck and through a door. We walked through narrow passageways lined with steel pipes. The air smelled faintly of stale sweat and engine grease. Murph led me to the mess deck and we sat on opposite sides of a small table. I found my notebook.

“You were saying?” I looked past the blank page. Murph leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head.

“We lobbed the flares as far inland as we could reach – that was about thirteen miles, and we set ‘em to go off high up, so the dreads would be sure to see and hear them from even further away. That went on until sunrise. Every hour or so, we’d drop some Willy Pete a little closer to the coast.

“Willy Pete?”

“Phosphorous rounds,” Murph explained. “They burn bright and long. We kept dragging the zombies towards the shore. Every time we fired we were shortening the range.”

“To lure them towards the coast, right?”

Murph nodded. “Just like a carrot on a stick.”

“And you said you kept these flares and phosphorous rounds firing until sunrise?”

Murph nodded. “By dawn all the dreads close enough to hear or see the initial cannon fire were piling up on the beach. That was when the frigates opened fire on the fuckers,” he said with sudden relish. “There were special boat units and SEALs just off shore – a little past the breakers. They were in fast boats. They were spotting groups of undead and then calling in fire missions.”

I wrote all this down as quickly as I could while Murph watched me with a curious kind of fascination. I glanced up and he was still watching me.

I blinked. “Is something wrong?” I asked.

Murph shook his head. “Just wondering how you do it,” he said.

“What?”

“Your job. Being a journalist. Is it hard?”

“It can be,” I admitted. “But not as hard as serving your country like you have done.”

Murph smiled again. The darkness seemed to drift away from his expression. I had the sense that the Navy was not just a job for this man. It was his life.

I steered the conversation back to things that mattered. My work was not one of them.

“What happened at sunrise, Murph? Did the artillery barrage continue?”

The man shook his head. “Come daybreak the carrier started launching unmanned recon drones. They flew inland at high altitude, but flew back low as possible. You see we were doing everything we could to keep the dreads moving towards us, and away from the engineers digging the trenches. Every time the drones spotted a big enough group within our range we’d shower the area with high explosive – high frag rounds. The shells were armed with mechanical time fuses so they would go off in the air and rain shrapnel.” Murph’s gaze became distant for a moment. He shifted his weight on the chair trying to make himself more comfortable. “Every once in a while the drones would catch sight of a big group way inland and one of the cruisers in the flotilla would send a missile down range.”

I flipped over to a new page and then stopped suddenly, my pen poised, as a question came to me. It was spontaneous. It just spilled from my mouth in a moment of curiosity.

“Were you scared?”

Murph looked at me like he didn’t understand. He shrugged his shoulders. “No…” he said slowly, his voice kind of guarded.

I shook my head as though I wanted to erase the question and replace it with a better one. “I mean were you scared about your own role in the bombardment? There must have been some pressure on you when it came to firing and being effective, right?”

Murph straightened suddenly, and in that moment his demeanor seemed to change. He had been a laid-back and casual since we had begun talking, but now there was a flicker of some deep and significant passion in his eyes. He stared at me.

“This was the Navy’s time,” he began, his eyes fixed and unwavering. “We hadn’t performed a major bombardment since the Vietnam War. It has always been the missile men or the flyboys for as long as I can remember.” He clenched his fist. “This was the hour of the gun.”

“So you were under pressure?”

“Of course!” Murph’s voice rose. “Just before we came on our station in the gun line, the Captain and the Gunnery Officer stopped in ’51 to make sure we were ready. As the Old Man was stepping out through the water tight door, he suddenly thrust his head back in and glared at me.”

I leaned forward a little, watching Murph’s eyes. “What did he say?” I asked, intrigued.

Murph smiled wryly. “The Old Man said, ‘gunner, if we come off our first trip up the gun line with anything other than deck hands in our deep mag, I’m going to be very disappointed in you’. Then he dogged down the hatch and we opened fire.”

“Was the Old Man disappointed afterwards?”

Murph’s smile broadened just a little. “No fear!” he said. “We sent everything we had down range that trip!”

I couldn’t help myself. I smiled. Murph’s enthusiasm and passion for the Navy was almost a tangible thing. He had such a complex personality – talking to him was like experiencing four seasons in a single day. He could drift from moody to sullen, to affable and expressive in a matter of seconds.

“How long did the bombardment last?” I asked.

He glanced up at the low ceiling as though searching his memory, and then his eyes came back to mine. “We fired half that first day, and then came off the line to onload more ammo at sea while another ship took our place. Then we stood down to rest for six hours before coming back on station to start the attack all over again. It was a long week,” Murph admitted, “but I wouldn’t have been anywhere else.”

I went back through my notes. Some of the writing was smudged, the paper I had written on tattered and grimy. But within these pages was a compelling piece of America’s fight against the zombie hordes. I thanked Murph. He got up from the table. On the way back through the maze of narrow steel passageways I had a final question.

“Did it ever bother you, Murph? Firing on the zombies, I mean.”

He stopped suddenly and folded his arms across his chest. He shook his head.

“For fifteen years my home has been a sea bag and a hull number. But my parents retired ten years ago to Ocala, in Florida. I never heard from them after the apocalypse started, and I’ll probably never know what happened to them,” his tone lowered and his voice became softer. “They might have been in those hordes of undead we fired on,” he admitted. “I tell myself sometimes at night that they were. Then, at least I can believe they are now at peace.”

QUINCY, FLORIDA:

WEST OF THE FINAL FLORIDA CONTAINMENT LINE

“You were one of the Army Engineers that worked to create the fortifications of the final Danvers Defense Line, right?”

Sergeant Wally Bunton nodded his head. “That’s right,” he said around a mouthful of gum. “I was in one of the Engineering units assigned to closing off the western side of the Florida border.”

“The new abbreviated border, right?”

“Right,” Bunton said. “The Army drew a line from Panacea, to Tallahassee up to a little town called Havana. That way we liberated the Panhandle from the infection.”

I looked around me. We were sitting in the shade of an Army truck in the rubble and ruins of Quincy. Like every other town south of the original Danvers Defense Line, this little corner of Florida had been laid to waste by endless artillery bombardment. Naval ships stationed in the Gulf had done some of the damage. The Air Force had done the rest.

“What was it like?” I asked the generic question. “It must have been risky as all hell.”

Wally Bunton nodded his head. “I worked on the original Danvers Defense Line, digging the trenches east of Jackson in Tennessee. That was a cake-walk,” he said with a tone like fond reminiscence. “Back then we had time, we had equipment, we had structure. It wasn’t like that digging these trenches let me tell you. Down here, it was like trying to take a shit behind a tree in a crowded park full of people.”

The pen paused on the page of my notebook and I looked up suddenly. Sergeant Bunton wasn’t smiling. He was grim-faced.

“What did you say?”

He cleared his throat and spat the gum out. He repeated the analogy again and watched my face as I arched my eyebrows. “What I mean by that is to say it was an endless butt-pucker,” the man tried to explain. “We were digging furiously, excavators, heavy trucks… every piece of equipment we could beg, borrow or steal to get the trench line dug and the barbed wire laid… and at every moment we were expecting to see fucking zombies fill the skyline. We were trying to work quiet – trying not to make any noise. Like I said, it was like trying to take a shit…”

I nodded. I got it.

“Did you see any zombies? Was there ever a point when you and your men came under attack?”

Bunton shook his head. “We had the Louisiana National Guard protecting us. They had units all along the western Florida flank while we were getting the fortifications ready. They were posted a few miles inside the zombie zone… poor bastards.”

I frowned. “Why do you say that? Were they attacked?”

“I say it because it was the most nerve wracking duty a guy could draw,” he looked at me like maybe I was a visitor from another planet. “They were
inside
the zombie zone covering our ass while we threw up the fortifications.”

“So they did get attacked?”

Bunton shrugged. “Man, there was contact all along the line from St. Marys on the coast to Monticello. It couldn’t be helped. We were working right on the edge of the infection zone.”

“Deaths?”

Again, Sergeant Bunton shrugged. He rummaged around in his pocket for another stick of gum. He was a broad-shouldered brawny man with tattoos along his muscled forearms and his hair buzzed close to his skull. His uniform was covered in dust and dirt as a testament to his work. Even now, when the defensive line was established, the Army Engineer Corps were still at work maintaining and improving the hastily prepared trenches and earthworks.

“There were no deaths amongst my men,” he said. “And none that I heard about from the National Guard guys protecting us. But further east… well you hear all kinds of rumors,” he said and eyed me speculatively, as though inviting me to probe for details.

I did. It was my job. “What rumors did you hear?”

Bunton got to his feet and stretched. The sun was hot. He mopped his brow. Even in the shade the heat was sweltering. My shirt stuck to my back and I could feel beads of sweat popping up across my brow.

Bunton glanced over his shoulder. Two soldiers were repairing another truck. I could hear the clank of tools and the soft curses of their frustration. He jerked his head. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

We couldn’t see the western trench line from here – it was a few miles further to the east. Around us were heavy vehicles and some tanks. In the distance I could see the trail of dust kicked up by trucks carrying troops.

When we were away from the vehicles, standing in a pile of grey rubble, Bunton stopped and squinted up at the sun. “I heard that a whole Company of National Guard boys from Kentucky got overwhelmed by zombies further to the east,” he said. “But the Army has kept it quiet.”

I frowned. “Where further east?” I asked.

Bunton glanced at me. “Around Jasper,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

Bunton looked away warily for a moment, as though he had suddenly heard a sound carried on the air. When he turned back to me his eyes were narrowed. “That’s what I heard,” he said. “At first the rumor was that the blanket of artillery fire we were laying down close to the border had taken out the Company. But a day later I heard that it wasn’t artillery fire at all. The zombies had attacked the line and run into the National Guard. What I heard was that thousands of the undead came out of the night and overran the perimeter. They got to the trenches and were held up by the barbed wire just long enough for reserves to be called up.”

I didn’t write any of this down, but I paid careful attention. “Who told you this?” I asked.

Bunton shook his head and gave me a
‘do you think I am that dumb’
kind of look. “Check it out,” he said.

“How?” I asked. “I can’t check it out if you won’t give me your source?”

Sergeant Bunton clamped his lips tightly shut and shrugged his shoulders one final time. “Then I guess it will remain a rumor,” he muttered. “And a mystery.”

CIA HEADQUARTERS:

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency sat hunched over his desk, hands clasped together and eyes closed like he was in the attitude of prayer.

Calvin Maitland was a short, solid city-bred man who looked like an accountant. His hair was cut short and swept across his forehead to disguise a receding hairline, and his skin was darkly tanned. As I spoke the man’s face changed, his features animated as he followed every word of the question. He frowned deeply, and then a moment later he smiled.

“Good question,” he said as his eyes came slowly open and he fixed me with his gaze. “And I’m glad you asked it.”