Zombie War: Interviews From The Frontline

by Lambdin, Susanne

  [The trip to the top of the Peak is slow. It’s going to take two more hours to reach the top. I can see scorched patches of Earth, a few tanks left behind to rust, and imagine a battle fought against zombies. A few tourists sit in the three cars behind us.]

  How often did zombies attack the camp?

  Thankfully, the forest kept out the majority of zombies that hung out on the highway. Zombies that wandered into the forest were caught in our traps, shot by patrols, or blasted with those tanks you noticed. On top of the Peak, we had a clear view for miles in every direction. At first, we had a few Apache helicopters, but when gas became scares, we were no longer able to use them.

  Fort Carson is nearby. There is also two Air Force bases, plus NORAD. Still, it was not enough to protect Colorado Springs and the surrounding area. Why not?

  The soldiers at Fort Carson were spread thin. They went out to protect the civilians, to suppress rioting, and had all they could handle. The Army base is out in the open, but it wasn’t overrun by zombies overnight, and I'm proud to say those soldiers held out for a long time. Both Peterson and Schreiber Air Force Bases sent their jets into the air, trying to stop the horde from Kansas from reaching the Front Range. Everyone did their part, except for the folks at NORAD who merely shut their blast doors, only they didn’t know the infection was already inside. Over at the Colorado Springs Air Force Academy, they didn’t fare much better. They were overrun by civilians, seeking refuge, and then by zombies. The entire Front Range was a war zone, but some did manage to evacuate by air, but wherever they landed, I’m sure they ran into the same problem.

  Zombies.

  That’s right. Without a cure, at that time, it was impossible to stop the inevitable. There were other survivors’ camps that I later heard about. Pockets of people did survive. Those who sought refuge in the mountains, found hunting shacks or abandoned lodges to hide in, and made it out okay. The best place to hide in a zombie apocalypse is the mountains. You have plenty of places to hide, fresh water, fresh game, and you’re tucked away from other people.

  You mean scavengers.

  As I said, desperate people panic when they’re scared. And when they don’t have any water or food, they take from those who have it. All across Colorado there were roving bands of scavengers. I kept my broadcast going, they heard it, and they came to take our supplies. It’s one thing to shoot a zombie, and another to kill a human. The militia did their best. Eventually, there just weren’t enough soldiers or cops left alive to guard the fence, and we had to rely on teenagers.

  Why did the Peak fall?

  Well, I’m not going to blame it on the teenage patrol teams. It took six months to get the electric fence up, build guard towers, and secure the area. All the while, we were fighting zombies and scavengers, expending ammunition and manpower to keep the camp safe. New recruits came in almost every day, but more people at the camp meant we had to send out patrols to find supplies. We needed everything from medical supplies to canned food. Most of the local stores were already cleared out, or destroyed, and teams weren’t allowed outside the fence.

  Okay. I understand. However, you didn’t answer my question.

  I can’t wrap a bow around this package. It’s not all neat and tidy. The Captain and Mother Superior wanted to keep our camp safe. We did what we had to in order to survive. We made sacrifices, and sometimes that meant folks were turned away, and that’s what happened at the Peak. When a guy called Logan contacted Garble on the radio, I was the one who ordered him to meet with the Captain. Two hundred scavengers demanded they be allowed on the Peak, and frankly, we didn’t know whether we could trust them. Turns out, we couldn’t. Logan’s people cut a hole in the fence that wasn’t on the power grid. They let in thousands of zombies. I mean, zombies were coming in from all over the area, as if herded by someone to reach the Peak. The Captain sent out the militia to fight the scavengers, while the teenage patrols fought a battle at Crystal Lake against the zombies. Unfortunately, Mother Superior didn’t know a couple of little kids and a soldier were infected, and they were at the Top Camp. Before anyone knew what had happened, zombies attacked headquarters and the hospital. A girl named Cadence led a team up to the Peak, rescued a few folk, and then returned to the lake to fight the zombies. She’s the one who took over when the Captain didn’t make it back and led the survivors to Seven Falls.

  A new camp?

  Yes, a camp set up in a box canyon. They barricaded the entrance with vehicles, set up another fence and more guard towers, and lasted another few months.

  Did you go to Seven Falls?

  No, I was captured, along with quite a few soldiers, by the folks who took over the Academy.

  But the Air Force Academy was overwhelmed by zombies. Right?

  Wrong. Vampires.

  Come on. That’s only a rumour. You can’t seriously mean the virus created vampires, too?

  I can only tell you what I know. You asked why Fort Carson and the Air Force were unable to protect Colorado Springs, and the truth is most were killed in action, taken prisoner, or ended up drained by those bloodsuckers.

  [Lt. Nightshadow pauses to remove his ski mask. I stare in horror at his face. One side is scarred, as if someone took a bite out of it, and it’s hard not to gag.]

  Sorry. I don’t mean to stare. What happened to you?

  They found me wandering the streets. When I woke up in a tent, my face was wrapped in bandages, and I had one helluva headache. You look surprised.

  [His story is hard to believe. No one else in the media has reported anything about the Kaiser or the Shadowguard. If Nightshadow is telling the truth, the government doesn’t want it known, and I’m not sure I should continue. My source said this man might be crazy. I think it might be true.]

  All I want are the facts about what happened here, Lt. Nightshadow.

  You think I am lying to you?

  Well, I have not met anyone else who claims to have seen vampires.

  Forget it.

  [He puts on his ski mask and scoots away from me.]

  Is anything you told me the truth?

  I think someone else needs to tell the public what really happened. It may be time for Mr. Oracle to resurface to set the story straight. Don’t bother printing anything. I’ll take it from here.

  Good luck.

  [Before I can stop him, Nightshadow jumps off the train. It’s moving slow enough that he lands on his feet, but it was still a dangerous thing to do. The guy has to be crazy. He heads down the mountain, but I figure I can salvage the day by talking to a few of the tourists. Someone else must have a believable story about what happened during the zombie apocalypse.]

  “You cannot kill us” – Freetown Anthem

  COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

  Interviewer: Mick Franklin

  INTERVIEW 7:

  Police Officer Lewis Svenson sits at a table opposite me in the police station.

  No one ever thanked me for killing a child. No one ever said to me, “Thanks, man, my six year old daughter was a dangerous monster. You did the right thing by shooting her in the head.” And yet that was exactly what I was expected to do. The police started out as trying to keep law and order, then we were used to extract infected civilians from homes and drag them to the hospitals and quarantine areas. Finally, we were needed just to shoot the infected on sight. Try pulling an infected baby away from a weeping mother and tell me how popular you are. There were many times we walked out of a neighbourhood with people pelting us with rotten food and garbage. I got the scar on my forehead because I was hit with a piece of brick on one occasion.

  Any time someone became infected they wanted to stay with their family. If they didn’t have family then they wanted to stay at home in familiar surroundings. Some people opted out, killing themselves instead of letting the infection consume them. The problem is that if they didn’t destroy their brain then they just came back as a zombie. I responded to a lot of calls where a person had killed themselves in their apartment and
the neighbours had heard them scratching at the front door before calling the police.

  Remember in those early days the services broke down gradually then collapsed suddenly. No one collected the garbage anymore. You couldn’t just call an ambulance. The power stations weren’t working all the time, usually just a few nights a week. The police were down to a skeleton crew. Most of us had either died on the job or else walked out to be with our families. A handful of volunteers came forward to be deputised and assist us but the police were desperately short on manpower.

  We tried our best to contain the infection. But immediately there were problems with that –due to the Schengen agreement people could travel from Norway to Denmark without so much as having to show their passport. They just hopped on a plane and in an hour they were in another country.

  And getting bitten by a zombie wasn’t the only way of catching the infection. We found our Chinese community were some of the first to become infected. It turns out that a lot of them believed that acupuncture would cure or ward off the zombie virus. In reality there were a few acupuncturists out there who didn’t change needles between clients. As soon as they had performed acupuncture on one person who had the virus those needles then transmitted the disease to anyone else they were used on. It was a slow burn, meaning it would take much longer to show up but the eventual result was always the same.

  The same thing happened with some of the community hospitals that were set up by civilians. People would find a defendable building or just use some buses parked together and some tents to form makeshift hospitals. Nice idea, but they were always short on supplies and had to recycle most of the equipment. Unfortunately, sometimes they didn’t sterilise the needles and scalpels properly. The result is that they actually helped spread the problem.

  Another source of infection was illegal drugs. Things like heroin which could be injected were sometimes contaminated with the virus, God only knows who would do such a thing. But it was yet another means for the virus to spread. You can see now why we had so many outbreaks in what were supposedly safe zones.

  People tried isolating themselves using geography. Norway was a popular destination. It’s close. There are many fjords and cold mountains which form an excellent barrier against the armies of undead. You’re pretty safe in the mountains, as long as you can deal with anyone who dies in your group. That didn’t always happen –I heard a number of reports of zombies found locked in a cabin in the mountains, someone would die overnight, for example have a heart attack in their sleep and then get up and kill their former companions. Or as was very common people just did not have the heart to terminate the infected. People just kept on holding out, kept on believing that the government was going to announce a cure any day [he studies his coffee intensely for a full two minutes before continuing.]

  Freetown Christiania is an independent state right in the heart of Copenhagen. They act like they are defiant and rebelling against the government, instead of being wards of state which is what they really are. If it wasn’t for them being a neat little tourist attraction the police would have marched in there years ago, stamped out their cannabis stalls, and evicted them from their land, which they are illegally squatting on anyway. There was even a biker war there once with the Hell’s Angels on one side, probably due to the drug trade and illegal weapon trade that goes on there.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a walk around Freetown, it’s not a big place, but the houses look like they’ve been designed by children. There’s playground slides’ coming out of the windows. Also, there are big piles of scrap metal and junk everywhere, maybe because they expect the neighbours to find something they need there one day? I don’t know.

  I remember when the police had to crack down on Freetown. We’d heard reports of the distinctive zombie moan coming out of that place and knew we had to do something. A number of requests had been given to the Freetown residents telling them to turn over their dead for destruction. Instead of complying they did the exact opposite; they actually functioned as a haven for people to bring their undead relatives too, keeping them locked up there as if Freetown could somehow protect them from the authorities. What were they thinking?

  The police arrived there at the central market where Freetown sells marijuana and fried food, wonderful tourist attraction that it is. We kept it all civil, asking them politely to turn over the dead to us, and when they pretended they didn’t know what we meant we told them we knew they were hoarding ghouls and the best thing they could do now was just to cooperate. You should have seen it, there was us, a group of grizzled officers in full riot gear who had seen day after day of the horror show of what was happening to our city and opposing us you had these hippies that had lived their lives being shielded from reality.

  The residents of Freetown began arguing with us. Our patience was thin, but we had killed so many of our own people in the preceding days, and not all of them ghouls, that we really didn’t want to harm anyone else, even if they were potheads who had no clue what was really going on.

  The bottom line is that they didn’t want to turn over their dead but in the end the decision was made for them. Maybe it was all the excitement and yelling but in a shack in the central market the dead suddenly broke down the door that was holding them back. There were hundreds of them, Freetown and Copenhagen residents that had turned and were now ready to attack the living.

  I grabbed this one hippy, saying to him, “We got to get out of here, man, right now.”

  But he shook free and said, “Let go of me, you fascist!”

  The police lined up our guns ready to shoot down the ghouls but the Freetown residents stood in front of them, actually protecting them. We couldn’t shoot through the human shield, so we tried pulling the Freetown residents aside. It didn’t work. There were too many of them and we just couldn’t get them clear in time before the zombies reached them.

  I remember this one hippy being ripped apart by the ghouls and still screaming, “Save the zombies! Save the zombies!”

  Other people holding protest signs were also ripped apart, screaming as the zombies tore into them.

  There was a young dude in the market who had been sitting on a stool watching the events unfold and smoking a joint. He held it up appraising it and said, “This is good shit.”

  Finally, the Freetown idiots seemed to get the message that the zombies were not on their side and did not in any way appreciate being protected by them. The Freetown folk stood aside and let us do our job, shooting down the zombies and then making a systematic search through the rest of the village. There were a lot of sorry faces in Freetown when we were finished. We arrested them and were heavy handed about it. Fucking idiots.

  I remember that day well because it was the day my girlfriend Bethany was bitten. I got home from the Freetown massacre and found her standing in the kitchen. You know, she was always a great support for me, she really helped me deal with a lot of the things I saw as a cop. We’d been together seven years. It had mostly been good times, with a few harsh lessons thrown in, but overwhelmingly we were meant for each other. You have to understand, this is someone I shared my life with, a person I played with, had jokes with, someone who knew me better than anyone else.

  When she held up her wrist and I saw the bite mark everything changed for me. I knew better than she did what that bite meant. I had seen hundreds of people with bites in the weeks before, either in private residences or at the hospitals. The longest I’d seen anyone survive was five days. She seemed to read all that in my eyes, knowing she was doomed.

  It didn’t matter how the bite happened, only that it had happened.

  My angel, the person I needed. When I looked in her eyes I knew, on balance, the world is a good place.

  I held her close. For a long time neither one of us said anything. We were determined to make the most of the time we had left. We never talked about what would happen when she turned, or even that she would turn. Sometimes we would both look interestedly a
t her bite mark, to see how it had progressed, maybe turning black, or causing dark veins to spread from it like some kind of storm brewing under her skin.

  I always kept a neutral face when she studied her wound, as though it was such a common, everyday occurrence to be bitten by a zombie that it was not even worth mentioning. I cooked some lovely meals that week. Supplies were hard to get by then but I made do. She . . . she always relied on me to feed her.

  When the power was on we listened to old songs that we had shared when we first met. When the power was off we danced slowly together by candle light.

  We lay in the dark sometimes telling our innermost thoughts and secrets but mostly just discussing the little things, what we would like to do in the summer, small stuff from when we were children like what made us feel the most safe. For me that was a little bed made out of blankets that my grandfather made on the floor beside his bed, so I could sleep close to him and not be afraid of the dark. For Bethany it was a treehouse her father had made for her. All her friends knew it. It was a place that was protected even during the rain and which she could go to if her parents were fighting or if she’d had a bad day at school.

  When we had first met I had given Bethany the nickname Kitten, which I still sometimes used. In that final week I called her that all the time.

  I didn’t find out till weeks later how much pain a bite victim goes through, that the final change is excruciating. Bethany hid that from me. Right to the very end she was thinking of me, being strong, and holding my hand as life faded. I don’t know how we thought our lives would end, I guess we always hoped we’d both die in our sleep together or even both of us die in a car accident where no one else was hurt, but this wasn’t like that. The love of my life lay still. I was alone.

  Then her eyes opened.