Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America

by Nicholas Ryan

  Good line!

  I wrote down everything the man said.

  “Fair enough,” I conceded. “I take your point, and I assume your identity is one of the things that needs to be protected. What about details of the mission, though? Can you tell me when Warwax took place, and what the nature of the operation was?”

  Mike Wainwright sat back on the bunk and seemed to relax a little. “On one condition,” he said with care. “Anything you write about this mission must be cleared with SOCOM public affairs before publication.”

  I agreed. “Done,” I said. We shook hands. I wanted the story. I had heard whispers about the fabled Warwax mission, and I sensed this would be the only opportunity for any of those events to be revealed.

  Wainwright took a deep breath, and started talking.

  “Mission Warwax was executed by SEAL team members just twelve days after the initial outbreak of the zombie virus. It was a rescue operation, conducted around Boynton Beach, Florida to secure several trapped civilians. The mission was a success, although we sustained some casualties while carrying out the mission.”

  I wrote Wainwright’s description down, but it was cold and clinical – almost remote. I wasn’t about to settle for the bare bones of his explanation because I sensed there was much more to be revealed.

  “You say the mission took place less than two weeks after the initial outbreak. That was when Florida was burning and the zombie hordes were rampaging across the state. It must have been a chaotic environment to infiltrate.”

  “It was,” Wainwright agreed. “We’re talking about a time before the Danvers Defensive line had even begun to take shape, when the US was first coming to terms with the horror of the infection,” Wainwright went on. “The situation in Florida was a nightmare.” He shrugged. “But we were on a tight schedule. The civilians we rescued were in real jeopardy.”

  “How many?”

  “How many what?”

  “Civilians?”

  Wainwright paused for just a second. “Eleven,” he said slowly, “and one VIP.”

  My ears pricked up. Wainwright saw the change in my expression. He held up a hand like he was stopping traffic. I opened my mouth to fire off the question and closed it again.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t tell you details,” intercepting the question before I could ask it. “All I can say is that the VIP was a powerful politician you would know. You might even vote for him one day.”

  I sighed. The journalistic instinct in me wanted to probe for details, but I sensed I would be up against a brick wall. I let it go – for the moment.

  “How did the operation come about?” I asked instead. “Was it just a matter of a radio message and then the SEALs went into action?”

  Wainwright laughed. “Before SEALs teams go anywhere, the mission must be authorized and planned,” he explained patiently. “The first we knew of it was when the unit commander issued a Warning Order.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning we were isolated and briefed. We went through the Patrol Leader’s Order, and then had twelve hours to prepare – to sort out kit and weapons.”

  I frowned. “The Patrol Leader’s Order – what exactly is that?”

  “It’s a formal briefing,” Wainwright offered. “We go over the mission in five logical steps that cover the situation, the mission, the details of the execution, how the mission will be supported and the command structure. We also had satellite imagery of the target location, and cell phone recordings from the trapped civilians.”

  I made notes then shook my head slowly. I felt I was losing the essence of the operation in military techno-speak. “So what exactly was the mission? In simple terms, what did the SEALs do on Boynton Beach?”

  Wainwright looked at me thoughtfully. “You will clear everything before publication, right?” He asked again.

  I nodded. “Scout’s honor.”

  He sighed. “We took a full platoon of sixteen SEALs to Florida, aboard this patrol boat you’re on right now. We took up station off the coast and the platoon split up into two teams of eight men to board rubber Zodiacs at oh-two hundred hours.

  “We paddled in towards the shore. Intelligence told us that the twelve civilians were holed up on one of the top floors of an apartment complex.

  “A few hundred yards off the beach, beyond the surf zone, our two scout swimmers slipped over the gunwales of the Zodiacs and swam to the shore to secure the landing. We waited. It took several minutes before we got the signal. Then we paddled through the surf and the team inserted on Boynton Beach. We dragged the boats up above the high-tide mark, and the lieutenant leading the patrol moved us off immediately towards the building.”

  “How far away from the location were you when you landed?”

  Wainwright shrugged his shoulders. “We had a hundred yards of sand and then grass,” he said. “There were buildings built right on the edge of the beach. The target location was behind the front row of buildings.” He made an open-handed gesture. “So maybe it was five hundred yards.”

  “And you had to pass beyond the first buildings?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “There were steps from the beach to the apartments. They had all been built on the edge of the sand, supported by a network of steel piers and pylons, like the ground had been reclaimed and then reinforced to take the weight of the structures and stop them sliding. The point man for the patrol went forward, and he was on edge, let me tell you!”

  The comment surprised me. Wainwright’s account had been so dry up until this moment the sudden revelation caught me off guard. “How did you know that?” I asked.

  “Because I was the point man for the patrol,” he said, his features suddenly softening a little. “I was the one out front.”

  I suddenly became more interested. “That must have been intense.”

  Wainwright nodded. “Pucker time,” he said softly. “It was a direct action op, and I knew I was responsible for the safety of the patrol and the civilians,” he explained. “I went forward carefully, and the night was alight with fire and filled with terrified screaming.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I went up the steps and took position by the wall of the closest building,” Wainwright said quietly. “The whole waterfront seemed to be ablaze. There were thick clouds of smoke hanging low in the air, and flames licking from the smashed windows of every apartment I looked at. I could hear the sounds of screaming, growling, snarling…. it was like a war-zone. In the distance there were security alarms going off and the far away sounds of cars and trucks. Closer, I could hear running feet – hundreds and hundreds of people running.”

  “Zombies?”

  Wainwright shook his head like he didn’t know. “Probably,” he guessed. I saw one young woman hurl herself out of a five story unit. She just crashed through the glass and her body folded over the balcony. She screamed all the way down and hit the concrete pavement about forty feet away from where I was concealed. Something moved in the shadows. It ran over to her – a big hulking shape – and it dragged her away.”

  “What did you do?”

  Wainwright shook his head. “I followed through with the mission,” he said it like it hurt, but that discipline and focus had masked his instinct for compassion. “I was carrying a military version of a twelve-gauge shotgun, loaded with rounds of double-ought buckshot. I waved the patrol forward, and as they moved, I went at a run to the far edge of the building.”

  “The back corner?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “The apartment complex the woman had fallen from faced the beach at an angle, with a concrete driveway out front. The bottom of the building was all parking garages for the residents. From where I was standing I could cover those garage doors and also see beyond the front rank of beachside apartments.”

  “Could you see your objective building – the one containing the civilians and the VIP?”

  Wainwright nodded. “There was a narrow road between the units. It ran parallel
to the beach, lined with low shrubs and ferns. I went to the edge of the road and the patrol came up behind me. The lieutenant formed us up in two squads.”

  I took a breath and tried to visualize the scene Mike Wainwright was describing to me. “How far from the road to the target building?”

  “Only fifty yards,” he guessed. “Once we crossed the road, there was lawn and concrete driveways that encircled the actual building.”

  “And how high was the building?”

  “Eight stories,” Wainwright said. “The civilians were on the sixth floor.”

  “Was it on fire?”

  He nodded. “The top floor was on fire. Flames were pouring out through several windows. It looked like it had been burning for some time. And there were other fires closer to the ground floor. The whole façade of the complex was blackened. It looked like it had been hit by bombs.”

  I wrote everything down. Now that we had reached the details of the mission, Wainwright had become more candid. The stern reserve had slipped away. I wondered how much of his story I would actually be able to publish…

  “What was the plan, now that you had reached the road?”

  “Two teams,” Wainwright explained. “One would secure the perimeter and the other would enter the building and reach the trapped civilians.”

  “What team were you a part of?”

  “I went into the building.”

  I paused and took another look at the man I was sitting across from. Physically he was in no way extraordinary. What made him an exceptional warrior was his mental discipline, his innate bravery and his commitment to his other team members and those he swore to serve.

  On the inside, Wainwright and the rest of the SEALs were giants.

  “That must have been challenging,” I said, putting it mildly.

  “The first team fanned out, covering our route back to the beach. When they were in place I got the signal from the lieutenant to go forward. We went in through the front doors. I was still on point. The doors were glass. They had been smashed. There was blood on the pavement and inside, spattered across the foyer. There was an elevator but I ignored it. The civilians had tried that route and the power was down. The stairwell was through a door at the back of the building. Everything was dark. Inside there was no light from the fires. I had NVG’s but we weren’t sure they would help against the dreads, so I’d left them on the patrol boat.

  “I had a small flashlight we take on ops. I put my foot on the bottom stair, and then suddenly the night exploded into screams and shouts of insane rage.”

  “Undead, right?”

  “In the stairwell. The first floor landing. They had heard me, or maybe sensed me – I’m not sure. Two dreads came swarming down the stairs. They were just dark screaming shapes. I could smell the blood and the stink of them. It was like they had been dug up from a coffin. They were filthy, covered in streaks of gore. One of them had an eyeball flapping against its cheek.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I fired,” Mike Wainwright said. “I had no choice but to compromise our situation and go loud. It was either that or become infected. There was no room to work with a knife, even if I had been prepared.”

  “The zombies went down?”

  “Both of them,” Wainwright said matter-of-factly. “Double-oh buckshot are pellets each the size of a bullet that spread out up to a killing range of around three hundred feet. In the confined area of the stairwell, the sound was like artillery fire,” Wainwright gestured with his hands. “The blast tore the first dread’s head off its shoulders, and the rifleman right behind me fired his M16 and took the other one down with a clean head shot.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “We lost the need for stealth,” Wainwright explained wryly. “We knew there would be other dreads in the building. We clambered over the corpses and went up the stairs at a run. It was like being back on the BUD/S training ground.”

  I sat back for a moment and went back through my notes. Mike Wainwright got up and disappeared down the passageway for a few minutes. He came back with a couple of cans of soda. He threw one to me.

  I dropped it on the floor.

  Wainwright looked at me like I wasn’t made of the right stuff.

  “Did you meet more zombies as you went up the stairwell?”

  Wainwright nodded. He sipped at the soda and then set the can down on the floor. “There was no longer a need for a point man. It was all guns. I went up the stairs shoulder to shoulder with another team member. When we reached the third floor landing a fire door exploded inwards and four dreads came bursting through the opening at us. We opened fire. Two of the dreads were thrown back against the wall. Their guts were shredded. The hail of fire had literally torn them apart. We took out the other two and then capped each of them with a single shot to the head – just to be sure.”

  “And then you pushed on to the sixth floor?”

  He shook his head. “More of the dreads came down the passageway. The firefight had sparked them up. There might have been as many as thirty of them. We could see them spilling out of open apartment doors. Two of the guys in the team had Heckler and Koch MP5 ‘room broom’ submachine guns. They covered the fire door entrance and opened up on the massing dreads. We knew there were too many to take down all at once. We left the two men there to hold back the horde and secure our exit from the building.”

  “You called it a room broom, right?”

  He nodded. I wanted to be sure of my facts.

  “It’s a compact weapon that’s ideal for urban situations. It fires a 9mm Parabellum round,” the SEAL explained. “It’s only accurate to about a hundred feet, but it has hitting power. We had confidence the two guys would be able to defend the doorway until we came back with the civilians.”

  I tilted my head to the side thoughtfully. Mike, how long did this operation take? Are we talking about hours?”

  “No,” he said. “Once we breached the building’s entrance, the time until we evacuated with the civilians was less than eight minutes.”

  “Were the civilians waiting for you?”

  He nodded. “They were ready, inside the unit, standing on either side of the door as we kicked it in.”

  “Can you tell me their condition?”

  “They were frightened,” Wainwright said. “They had been holed up in that unit for over a week. The food and water had run out. There were eight women and four men, including the VIP. They were haggard and exhausted. Some of the women and a couple of the guys were sobbing. They had heard the gunfire. They knew we were on our way up to them.”

  “Did the evacuation go smoothly?” I asked. “What was the procedure?”

  Wainwright shook his head. “The fucking VIP started bitching the moment we came through the door. The fucker demanded to be the first one taken out. Demanded the team form some kind of a human shield around him to get him to safety.”

  I was shocked. “What about the others – the rest of the people he had been in the unit with?”

  “He didn’t give a shit,” Wainwright sneered. “The pompous prick thought the rescue effort was all for him.”

  I sat back. “I don’t imagine your lieutenant would have been impressed.”

  “None of us were,” Wainwright admitted. “The guy ended taking a tumble down a flight of stairs as we were fleeing the building.” He shrugged his shoulders eloquently, and through a wintery grin he said, “Sometimes accidents can happen, y’know.”

  Fucking politicians. “What happened next?”

  “The whole building was filling with noise,” Wainwright’s expression became tense. “We could hear pounding footsteps along the corridors on the floors above and below us. The lieutenant posted me and another guy to the end of the hallway and the rest of the team led the civilians back down towards the third floor.”

  “Did the zombies appear?”

  He nodded. “They came down the corridor. The guy next to me opened fire and as he did we started to move back, s
hooting and then falling back to cover each other – standard urban tactics. But the dreads were relentless. Nothing stopped them. Unless you got them cleanly in the head, they just shrugged off the hits they took. I blew the arm off one – severed it at the shoulder. The dread went down screaming and writhing, then pounced back up onto its feet and came running on. The dread had been a young guy – maybe a college student before he had become infected. There was brown gore splattering across the walls as he ran at me. I fired again and the blast obliterated the thing’s head – sprayed the insides of his skull across the passage. The corpse dropped like a bag of concrete.”

  “So you and your partner got out of the building safely?”

  The SEAL nodded. “We rejoined the rest of the team in the stairwell and covered the descent as tail gunners, throwing white phosphorous grenades and everything else we were carrying to keep the dreads off our backs.”

  I could imagine the screaming chaos of the civilians as the elite soldiers shepherded them down the dark treacherous stairwell, and the din of weapons firing and grenades exploding as the infected ghouls threw themselves at the guns. I could imagine the terror on the people’s faces and the snarling hideous cries of the zombies that clawed at them. “Did everyone escape?”

  “We got all of the civilians out of the building,” Wainwright nodded gravely, “but we lost two good men saving them. The two team members who held the third floor landing stayed at their position until we had cleared the stairs and were assembled on the ground floor foyer. We could hear them firing their M16’s. The guys had a dozen thirty round magazines between them, stowed in their load-carrying web gear. Suddenly the firing stopped.”

  “Did you go back for them?”

  Wainwright shook his head. “Coms went dead. We knew they had been overrun. The lieutenant told us to bug out and we went out onto the lawn. The eight man squad covering the building assembled around us.”

  Something puzzled me. “How did you get everyone aboard the two Zodiacs?” I asked.