I sat back, staring at the two rulers on the desk. “But what about beyond the reach of the rulers… the tanks? At the end of the line… there are still going to be thousands of undead. Weren’t the men in the troop carriers in danger?”
The Colonel conceded the point with a curt nod of his head. “There was some risk,” he admitted, and then went back to his bizarre lawn-mowing comparison. “When you run your lawn mover over a swathe of grass, you never cut every blade down. That was why we had the M113’s to finish off zombies that somehow survived the assault. And yes – when you mow your lawn, you can only deal with the grass that the mower is wide enough to reach. But we had Apache’s in the sky, covering the left flank.”
I was starting to understand. “And so what was the purpose of the battle?”
Biggins regarded me carefully for a moment. “It wasn’t to win,” he admitted. “That wasn’t the point. What we wanted to do was to test the tactic – examine the impact of a combined assault using heavy armor and artillery… and the cover of helicopters. The Battle of Rock Hill was the testing ground. We knew we didn’t have enough armor to cut a deep path into South Carolina, but we needed to know whether the tactics were sound. Once we had established their validity, we could muster more armor and attack through several forts at once.”
“With the ultimate goal of killing the zombies?”
“No,” Biggins shook his head. “That was never possible. Our goal was to win back land. The final mission stage was called ‘Operation Compress’, not operation ‘Kill’, for a reason. We conceded that it would be impossible to wipe out the undead infestation by military conflict alone. Ultimately, this was all about an effort to drive the undead back to Florida and then quarantine the state.”
“Did you lose any men during the battle? Surely it couldn’t have gone exactly to script.”
Biggins made a face like he was trying to decide whether he wanted to answer the question. On the surface, his explanation had sounded flawless – as though everything during the battle had proceeded with text-book efficiency. I wasn’t an expert on the military, but I knew enough to realize that rarely happened. The fog of war, the unexpected… the things that could not be anticipated were often the cause of causalities and disasters.
Biggins pointed at my cell phone and frowned. I turned the record feature off.
“You sure that thing is switched off?”
“Yes.”
Biggins grunted, then leaned forward, becoming an intimidating presence. “I’ll give you a version for your article, and I’ll give you the facts. The facts have to be off the record. Deal?”
I was intrigued, but at the same time I was conflicted. Journalism was about seeking the truth. I wasn’t sure I could be comfortable with the compromise. But on the other hand I wanted to know the story… at any price.
“Okay,” I said grudgingly.
Biggins seemed to relax. The tension went from his shoulders, but his expression transformed into something dark and disturbed. I could see a troubled look shift behind his hard eyes.
“Officially, the Battle of Rock Hill was a stunning military success,” the Colonel declared. “Casualties were minimal. We lost less than a dozen men, and those were as a result of an accidental collision between two of the M113’s that were taking part in the mopping up operation behind the battle tanks. One of those vehicles overturned, and the crew and soldiers aboard were all killed.” He paused for a moment, and then said, “You can write that down for your article.”
I did. I jotted a few quick notes and then laid the notebook and my pen back down on the desk. “And what about unofficially?”
Colonel Biggins rubbed his forehead and for a moment his eyes were hidden behind his hand. “We lost seventy four men, killed by the zombies,” he said. “In turn, each of those infected men were terminated once they began to turn.”
I stared. Gaped. The Colonel scraped his hand down his face like he was trying to change his features by rubbing them into different shapes. Suddenly he looked haggard.
“Seventy four men killed?”
The Colonel nodded. He closed his eyes for a moment and when they blinked open again they were dark and vacant. “Two of the Abrams broke down during the operation,” he shrugged. “Mechanical difficulties. The vehicles were recovered after the battlefield had been cleared, but at the time, the men in those vehicles panicked. The tanks were overrun by undead. The crews radioed for help but didn’t stay in their vehicles. They tried to make a run for it. By that time the line had moved on. The tanks were isolated. The M113’s were closing, but couldn’t get there fast enough. The crews were attacked by zombies and all killed. When the M113’s arrived on the scene, they were confronted with their own comrades, turned into zombies.”
The Colonel lapsed into a long silence, and I sensed there would be nothing gained by a barrage of questions. I glanced out through the window behind the desk. Men in ACU’s – Army Combat Uniforms – were marching purposefully across the parade ground. Overhead, the sky was filling with dark storm clouds.
“It turned into a cluster-fuck,” Colonel Biggins said bluntly. “The men in the M113’s hesitated. They should have opened fire with the machine guns. They didn’t. We lost five troop carriers and all the crew and soldiers aboard those vehicles. Ultimately, Command radioed for air support and three of the Apache’s were called away from the left flank of the attack to terminate the infestation.”
“Command? Who?” I asked. “Who gave the actual order to have those soldiers killed?”
“Me.”
“Oh,” I said then fell silent. “That… that must have been a difficult order to give, Colonel.”
The man didn’t say anything for a long time. He didn’t need to. I could see the agony in his face, the torture of the memory. He sighed at last – a deep shuddering breath of air like he was deflating. “When I gave the command to go into battle I knew the risks and the dangers I was placing those boys in,” Colonel Biggins said. “It’s something that no leader ever becomes comfortable with. Tragedy is the close companion of triumph,” he said philosophically. “It’s rare that you can have one without a little of the other.”
I nodded. “Is that how all commanders learn to reconcile combat casualties?” I asked.
Biggins smiled but the expression was as bleak and bitter as winter. “That’s how we’re supposed to do it,” he said, then shook his head gravely. “But it doesn’t work, son. The pain of losing good men never goes away.”
THE BATTLE OF ROCK HILL
ROCK HILL, SOUTH CAROLINA
“It would have been nice if the machine guns on an Abrams were mounted in the hull, but that kind of weaponry hasn’t really been popular for years,” Captain Rory Walsh said to me. “You’re probably thinking about Tiger tanks and Sherman’s from back in World War II.” He slapped his hand against the warm steel hull of the tank we were standing beside, and I had the sense that it was a gesture of affection – the way a man might pat a faithful dog. “The main machine gun on an Abrams is mounted on the turret,” the captain said, and pointed. “So the Army built cages – these god-awful contraptions that were kind of like a small shark cage. We were supposed to fit them atop the tanks so we could fire the weapon from the turret hatch as the zombies came into range.”
“Supposed to?”
Walsh shrugged. “They were fitted,” he conceded. “Every Abrams and every Bradley in the 278th had one. It was done as part of the Army’s new tactics they were employing to fight the dreads. But they didn’t work,” he admitted. “In theory they were fine – a steel cage so the machine gun could be operated without the danger of zombies climbing aboard the tank and attacking the gunner. But in reality, they were hopeless. Some geek in an office came up with the idea, I guess. That’s the way these things usually work. Once they were fitted, we couldn’t effectively traverse the turret.”
“So a lot of the machine guns weren’t firing during the battle of Rock Hill? Is that what you are telling
me?”
The tank captain shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’m telling you that a lot of the guys removed the damned cage before we went into battle. We fired from the turret and then dropped down into the tank and closed the hatch when the dreads were right beneath our tracks. It was the only way we could operate effectively.”
Rory Walsh had the calm demeanor of a man that looked hard to shake. His gaze was steady, his eyes the color of a deep blue ocean. He had the slow unhurried speech and accent of someone from out west, maybe Wyoming. He had a close cut crop of sandy hair and the hint of a moustache I doubted would ever amount to much.
“The turret cage was supposed to give us a sense of security – the freedom to fire the 50 cal and the 7.62, even if there were zombies somehow climbing aboard the vehicle. But they built it without enough room to traverse the weapon. Basically all we could do was fire at what was directly in our path.”
“So you didn’t feel secure inside that cage once the undead came close?”
“No, sir,” Walsh said. “I felt like bait.”
“Bait?”
He nodded his head. “The sight of us drove them crazy. I know a lot of the other guys felt the same. I wasn’t the only one to abandon the weapon and shut the hatch when we started rolling over the undead.”
“Did many zombies manage to climb aboard?”
Walsh shook his head. “Hardly any, it turned out. We had removed everything from the vehicles that might have given them something to grab hold of, and we were traveling at up to forty miles an hour when we hit the open fields around Rock Hill. Even on rough terrain we had trained to keep our speed above twenty clicks.”
I wrote down everything the tank commander told me and then we walked together in a slow circuit of the tank. The Abrams was a mighty monster – a steel goliath. The tracks were thick with chunks of dirt that had been torn from the ground and the rear of the vehicle was black with exhaust smoke, grimy over the paintwork of camouflage.
“Your C.O, Colonel Biggins, explained the long-line tactic, like ancient chariots. What was it like on the ground inside one of the vehicles? Was it as smooth an operation as I was led to believe?”
Walsh looked suddenly pained, as though overcome with a sudden conflict of loyalties. “Yes and no,” he said vaguely. “As the commander of one of the Abrams, I can’t tell you how many hours we spent drilling for the attack – too many to remember. It was day after day of precision manoeuvers, trying to keep each tank in line, trying to maintain steady speed and position in undulating terrain. I would be lying to ya if I said it went perfectly, because it didn’t.”
“What went wrong?”
“Communication was a bitch,” the young man admitted. “Coordinating all those heavy vehicles and getting them to work as one cohesive battering ram was impossible. At one end of the line the ground was smooth, and at the other end of the line we were rolling up ten and fifteen degree inclines. One end of the line had to always be slowed to accommodate the terrain being encountered at the other end of the line. The plan was to hit the dreads at something like forty miles an hour. It never happened. As we came up towards the ridge when we first saw them, we probably weren’t doing more than twenty-five.”
“And afterwards?”
“The fog of war,” Walsh said vaguely. “The sky was filled with smoke. The sun was blood red. I kept contact with the tanks on either side of me. That was all I could do. We were smashing through the undead like they weren’t there, and they just kept coming and coming. Once we broke through the first wave, I got back up behind the machine gun and fired at the bodies we had crushed. We couldn’t have done that with those shark cages. It would have been impossible.”
I frowned thoughtfully. “How could you actually see where you were going?’ I asked naively. “There would have been smoke and thousands of zombies crawling all over the place. How did you maintain formation?”
“It was good luck as much as good management,” Walsh admitted. “The driver sees through three periscopes called vision blocks. He’s also got an integrated display that gives him navigational data, speed… that kind of thing. The driver did a fine job.”
“And the rest of the crew?”
“We were all in the turret basket,” Walsh said. I had my loader and gunner taking turns on the machine gun once the battle started, because so much of my time was spent in contact with command, trying to co-ordinate each tank. I tell ya, it would have been easier on one of those old chariots. At least they could clearly see what they were doing and where they were going.”
We started on another circuit of the Abrams. Walsh glanced at me sideways suddenly. “Do you want to climb aboard and see for yourself what it was like?”
I shook my head. As big as the Abrams was, I was claustrophobic. Sitting inside the tank would have been like sitting inside a steel coffin. “I’ll take your word for it,” I tried to smile and failed.
Walsh shrugged his shoulders like he was a little surprised, but not so surprised that he was going to insist. “When the battle was over and we came back to the FOB, we finally had a chance to see the way the conflict had played out on monitors during the de-briefing,” the young tank commander explained. “Observer helicopters had been in the air, ya see. One of them carried journalists but the rest were following the battle, recording the conflict for analysis. Between those birds, Command was hovering above us, trying to co-ordinate the attack. When we came back and played through the tape, it was like a football team on Monday morning going over the weekend game.”
I thanked Captain Walsh for his time. I realized I needed a different perspective of this epic battle that had begun to turn the tide against the zombies. I wanted a broad overview – a sense of how vast the conflict had been.
I needed to speak to a journalist.
Another perspective from the Battle of Rock Hill
Tracy Camberwell lined me up in the viewfinder and snapped off three quick shots before I could react.
“I’m supposed to be interviewing you,” I reminded her casually.
Camberwell smiled and flicked an errant strand of long black hair away from her face. She set down her camera and crossed her legs. “Occupational hazard,” she said.
We were sitting by the side of a road, just outside the town limits of what remained of Rock Hill. The scene was one of devastation; torn mangled iron, crumbled rubble that had once been buildings. The road had been heaved up and broken by relentless artillery fire. Everything was grey and dusty and destroyed.
Camberwell was a seasoned journalist – a war correspondent who had filed reports from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and the troubled African continent. She worked with a camera and a laptop, filing freelance news releases for several of the world’s major media outlets. But like many correspondents, she had returned to America when the zombie infection had spread like wildfire through the southern states, reporting as one of a handful of journalists who had been embedded with the US Army throughout the epic zombie war.
“I got this for you,” I said. “To thank you for this interview.” I reached into my bag and held up a bottle of shampoo. Tracy’s eyes grew wide with astonishment. She reached out for the plastic bottle and I handed it to her. She snapped the lid open and inhaled. “It smells like apples,” she said with a wistful smile. “Thank you!”
I nodded. The shampoo had cost me a small bottle of scotch, traded to a dubious character lurking in a dark Nashville alley.
Camberwell was wearing a man’s shirt and pair of dusty denim jeans. She rolled up the sleeves of the shirt until her forearms were bare. Her hands were those of a woman who had worked for a living. She wore no rings, no nail polish. She uncrossed her legs and then held a hand up to her face to shield her eyes from the low angle of the afternoon sun.
“We flew directly over this place,” Camberwell said after a long moment of silence, the tone of her voice haunting and reminiscent. “At the time it was teeming with zombies. They were swarming towards the sound of the
oncoming tanks. It was quite incredible – a seething mass of bodies moving like a wave.”
Her voice tailed away as a gust of wind scattered debris and dirt into the air. All around us was the flat grey rubble of a wasteland. The wind moaned through the broken buildings like it does through the shifting dunes of a desert.
“You were in one of the observation Black Hawks, right?”
She nodded, and then turned her face to fix me with her gaze. “Yes,” she said softly. “There were four of us – all print media journalists, naturally.”
“Naturally,” I nodded my head. The Army had refused all television media requests to film or broadcast any footage of the apocalypse. No media aircraft were permitted to cross the no-fly zone beyond the 36th parallel. The only journalists offered the opportunity to cover the military response to the zombie outbreak were newspaper journalists, and even their photographs were censored before publication was permitted. The government’s control over what the American public had witnessed of the outbreak had been rigid and strict.
“What was it like?” I asked.
Interviewing another journalist isn’t as easy a task as it might seem. To the casual observer, another journalist would appear to be the perfect interview subject – after all they know the kind of comments that work for media and they know the value of accurate description. But it often doesn’t work that way. Sometimes journalists can be the hardest interviews of all, because they tend to filter the spontaneous honesty of their comments like they’re writing the copy in their heads before committing to the words.
Camberwell shrugged her shoulders, and then flicked me a wry smile. We were old friends. We had worked on a major newspaper together several years earlier.
“C’mon, Tracy,” I said. “Make it easy on me.”
She laughed, and the sound was one of unaffected delight – like the tinkle of a delicate crystal bell. It seemed out of place in such a desolate place of devastation. She nodded her head.
Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America Page 19
