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

by Nicholas Ryan

  “The whole town had been flattened by the artillery fire before we got in the air,” she said. “So when we flew over, it already looked pretty much like it does now.”

  I nodded. “What did you see from the Black Hawk?”

  “Tanks,” Tracy Camberwell said. “Hundreds of them rolling down from the north,” she flung her hand at the distance, indicating the direction the 278th’s armor had appeared from on the day the battle had been fought. “I think that whole ridge had once been forested… but you would never know it now. As we flew over, all we could see from the air was grey rubble and brown earth.”

  “Like… what? Give me a word picture.”

  “Like the images I’ve seen in the history books,” she said softly. “Like the fields of Europe during the Great War.” She shivered involuntarily and hugged her arms around her shoulders. “John, it was like flying over an alien world. And the tanks – these huge great steel monsters racing across the ground in one long line…” she went quiet and began to slowly shake her head. “… It was unreal.”

  I raised an eyebrow and regarded Tracy carefully. She was a seasoned journalist who had reported the cruel savagery of war for over two decades. Now she was in her mid-forties. I had a high regard for her work, and for her as a person. Most journalists became bitter and cynical after a time, but not this lady. She had an integrity about her I envied and admired. But I found it hard to believe that a woman of her quality and experience couldn’t come up with a better word than ‘unreal’ to describe the events leading up to the epic battle of Rock Hill.

  I stayed quiet for a few moments, just watching her face – studying the distance in her gaze that gave her expression a kind of dazed cast. I had no doubt she was replaying those images in her mind. And I waited.

  “I’ve never seen so many tanks on a battlefield,” Camberwell said slowly. “And never in such a formation. It was a long line, like they were charging on horses towards the undead. I could see the licks of flame from the machine guns. The Black Hawk pilot flew along the line as the tanks rumbled across the ground, and it was the most awesome, terrifying sight I had ever seen. It was incomprehensible just how much power the Army was unleashing. It was a steel battering ram, travelling at high speed. It couldn’t be stopped.”

  I nodded. “I think that was the plan,” I said gently.

  Tracy Camberwell looked up into my face and her eyes snapped back into focus. She took a deep breath and her shoulders heaved. “Yes, well they were right,” she said. “The zombies came towards the sound in their thousands.”

  “Did you actually see the zombies? Did you see what happened when the tanks rolled over them?”

  Camberwell nodded her head. “There were thousands of them down to the south, maybe a couple of miles from where we are sitting,” she said and scribed directions in the air with her hand. “They were like ants – like the ones you see in the Amazon rainforests. They swarmed towards the sound of the tanks in one solid heaving mass of rage. We were circling overhead, maybe three or four hundred feet above the town. The tanks came through the devastation of these buildings and the actual contact took place just past that fold in the ground up ahead, there.”

  I was fascinated. I got to my feet. Camberwell stood as well.

  “Do you feel like a walk?” I asked. “I’d like to take a closer look.”

  Camberwell dusted dirt off the bottoms of her jeans and we stepped through the debris of broken buildings, following the crumbled path of a road that had been torn up by tank tracks and massed artillery. When we reached the wreckage of the last building we stopped and I swept my eyes across the barren landscape.

  I had the sense that once this had been a lush green field, spattered with stands of trees. But now the ground was heaved into unnatural undulations that were the result of shell bursts and the churn of over one hundred armored vehicles. The ground was bare earth, with errant tufts of green grass and gay splashes of color where weeds had begun to flower.

  “Can you tell me what you saw?” I asked Tracy Camberwell again.

  She put one hand on her hip and shifted her weight. The breeze was picking up. It flattened her shirt against her chest and tugged at the tendrils of her hair. She clawed it into a ponytail and tied it with a rubber band that had been around her wrist.

  “The entire skyline was filled with bodies – undead zombies that just poured over the distant rise in a solid press,” she said.

  “And the tanks?”

  “They came right through here,” Camberwell explained, “Right where we are standing, spread out in a long line that reached all the way to our left as far as that distant ridge.”

  “And you were in a Black Hawk directly overhead when this happened?”

  She nodded. “There were other helicopters flying over that ridge on our left I told you about,” she said. “The Army had a dozen Apache helicopters thick in the sky. I think they were to stop the zombies from spilling around the end of the line and getting to the troops that were following in the carriers.”

  I nodded. I knew that already. I said nothing.

  “As the tanks came through this field they accelerated. We could see this huge wall of dust and dirt kicked into the air like a smoke screen as they roared towards the ridge. The sky turned brown and the haze of smoke from the artillery and the exhausts of the engines thickened the air.”

  “But you saw what happened – even through the dirt and the smoke?”

  Camberwell nodded. “I saw,” she said. “And I took photos.”

  I nodded. “Tell me what was in those photos, Tracy. Tell me what happened when the tanks raced towards the ridge where the zombies were.”

  “It was a massacre,” her voice became an eerie whisper. “The tanks rolled right through the zombies like they weren’t there. Thousands of them – literally thousands of them were crushed under the tracks of the tanks.”

  “And the zombies? What did they do once they tanks hit them?”

  Camberwell shrugged her shoulders. “Some tried to clamber aboard the Abrams, and a few succeeded. I think the Army must have had some kind of a rule that insisted no tank stop for any reason, because they kept moving. As the zombies climbed onto the tanks they were thrown off. Most of them didn’t get that far. Most of them were cut down by all the machine guns, and then crushed under the tracks.”

  “How did the zombies look as they reached the tanks?”

  Camberwell frowned and glanced at me like it was the dumbest question she had ever been asked.

  “What do you mean?” she tilted her head curiously.

  “I wanted to know whether the massed artillery had an impact,” I explained. “If the zombies that swarmed towards the tanks were all running like berserkers, then clearly the artillery wasn’t effective.”

  She understood. She frowned thoughtfully. “We couldn’t see that clearly,” she said hastily, but I do think the artillery worked. The zombies didn’t hit the tanks in one long line. It was more fractured than that. It was like a comet.”

  “A what?”

  “A comet.”

  I scratched the side of my nose and frowned. “What the hell does that mean?”

  Camberwell sighed. “It was like this big explosion of rage against the tanks, but there was a long tail of undead behind the first wave. They were slower, struggling. I think that’s what the artillery did – it slowed a lot of them down.”

  This was all making sense, and matching with other accounts of the battle I had heard. I nodded, and took Tracy by the elbow, guiding her down a gentle slope of ground to where I had spotted a shard of white bone, buried in the earth.

  I crouched down and scraped around the edges of the bone with the tip of my pen like an archaeologist who had discovered some rare fossil. The bone was just a fragment – no larger than a box of matches.

  “They’re all like that, I would guess,” Camberwell said. “Fractured. Shattered. Crushed.” She was standing close beside me. I looked up into the sun so that her f
igure was silhouetted and the expression on her face masked by shadow. But the tone of her voice carried a sudden trace of melancholy. I got to my feet. My knees cracked.

  “Are you okay? I asked.

  Camberwell nodded. Her lips were pressed into a thin pale line. “Tens of thousands of zombies were slaughtered during the Battle of Rock Hill,” she said, measuring her words. “The ones that weren’t killed by the artillery barrage, were killed by the machine guns as the tanks raced towards them. The ones that weren’t killed by the machine guns were crushed under the monstrous weight of the tanks as they rolled over the top of them. Anything that survived was killed by the men in the personnel carriers that followed a few miles behind the tanks… and anything that survived all that was gunned down by the Apache helicopters.”

  I nodded. “And that’s a good thing,” I said. “It proved the Army’s tactics worked. Rock Hill was a great victory for the Army. It was the first conflict during the war where we took the fight to the zombies and crushed them.”

  Camberwell nodded. “Yeah,” she said without any enthusiasm. “And on the surface, you’re right. The zombies were massacred and we won an important victory.”

  “But…”

  “But we forgot they were once people,” Camberwell said. She wrung her hands together. “During the war, the enemy was zombies, but they were also victims. They were victims before they became zombies – before they became the enemy. We lost our humanity, John. We saw them as a dangerous threat, and they were. But before all that – before they became infected zombies, they were our brothers and sisters, our mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. Somewhere along the line we forgot that. We forgot to remember that once, these undead were our fellow Americans.”

  I stared at Camberwell, and saw the glitter of unshed tears welling in her eyes. It was that aspect of humanity she had become famous for as a journalist. She saw what others didn’t. She remembered what the rest of us forgot.

  “You’re right,” I conceded softly. “They were Americans, Tracy. They went to ball games, celebrated Christmas and Thanksgiving. They worked at jobs and loved their kids.” I looked back down at the shard of white bone and saw it in a new, somber light. “But when you’re fighting for survival…”

  “I know,” she nodded. She rested her hand lightly on my forearm and I fell silent. “I just want people to remember, that’s all,” she said. “That’s why I’m still writing. That’s the passion that keeps me working as a journalist. I want readers to know that every victory we celebrated against the zombie hordes was also a terrible tragedy for the American people, and a terrible, terrible conflict for our fighting men and women.”

  Another perspective from the Battle of Rock Hill

  “I’m not flying at the moment,” Buddy Nichols said as he stared down at his hands. They were shaking – a gentle but persistent tremor that couldn’t quite be controlled. “I haven’t even been near an Apache helicopter again since…”

  I nodded and gnawed sympathetically at my lip. I felt the man’s pain, his anguish and the deep emotional scars that the Battle of Rock Hill had seared into this young pilot’s consciousness.

  They were wounds that might never heal.

  “You were piloting one of the Apaches choppers that Command pulled away from the left flank of the battle when the M113’s were overrun, right?”

  Nichols nodded his head. “That’s right,” he said in a voice that was soft as a whisper.

  Every journalist has his or her own moral and ethical compass. We each decide how to handle an interview, and whether an interview should even be conducted. I’ve seen some TV reporters thrust microphones into the faces of grieving parents who are distraught at the death of a loved one, and that kind of aggressive, careless reporting makes me cringe.

  We were sitting under the canvas roof of a makeshift Army Hospital tent behind the lines. Buddy Nichols was perched on the edge of a narrow cot, hunched over with his head bowed and his elbows resting on his knees, staring down at his hands that wouldn’t stop shaking.

  I set down my notepad.

  “We don’t need to do this interview,” I made the decision. “I don’t want you to re-live those moments if it’s too traumatic for you.”

  Buddy’s head shot up sharply and he stared hard into my eyes. There was a tortured, beseeching expression on his face, twisting his mouth into a grimace. “I want to…” he said and then broke off the sentence. “I need to…”

  We spent a long moment staring at each other before I nodded my head slowly. I left my notepad on the ground. “I’m not going to ask you any questions, Buddy,” I said softly, “but if you feel you need to talk about what happened that day at Rock Hill, I’m keen to hear your story – whatever parts of it you feel like you want to share.”

  His head jerked. He swallowed hard, and then his eyes lost their intensity and his gaze became distant. He turned his face a little, like he was staring at some invisible television screen just past my left shoulder. He wrung his hands and clenched his fists so that his knuckles turned white.

  “We were covering the left flank of the battlefield,” he said slowly. There was a hollow kind of echo in his voice so that the words seemed to come from far, far away. “We were working low, and firing at the zombies that threatened to sweep around the edge of the tank line. Then Command called us up with an urgent order. The line had been broken and several of the M113’s were under attack.”

  Buddy Nichols rubbed his brow the way a man does when his head is pounding. There were beads of perspiration on his top lip like he was in the grips of a fever. An orderly in a crisp clean uniform leaned over Buddy’s shoulder. He was carrying a small white plastic cup and a handful of tablets. The orderly smiled in the benign perfunctory manner of someone with too many other patients waiting for attention. Nichols accepted the cup and set it down beside him on the cot.

  “At first we didn’t understand – we didn’t realize the crews of those carriers had been infected,” Nichols said. “We thought it was a breach in the line between a couple of the Abrams. We turned west and flew back along the advancing line of tanks. The zombies were like ants – swarming ants thick on the ground. We could see the heavy tanks crushing them and the trails of blood and gore like… like snail trails across the grass and dirt. In the distance, to the south, we could see the troops in the M113’s mopping up. There was a cluster of the vehicles parked at crazy angles, and a tight knot of the undead around the troops. The undead were in uniform. That was when we realized the crews were being overwhelmed – infected.”

  “And you opened fire?”

  Nichols shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not immediately. We radioed back to command, told them what was happening to the crews of those M113’s.”

  “And then…?”

  “Command repeated the order to execute the attack.”

  Buddy chewed his lip. He started clenching and releasing his hands. I could see unshed tears welling up in his reddened bloodshot eyes. “I gave the order to my co-pilot gunner. I told him to open fire.”

  I said nothing. Nichols wrenched his mouth into a twist of pain and began to sob softly. A tear ran down the man’s cheek and he cuffed it away with the sleeve of his uniform.

  “Once wasn’t enough,” the Apache pilot muttered. “If it had been, then… then maybe it would have been all right. But the zombies… the guys that had been in the M113’s kept getting up,” his voice pitched higher with the stab of his anguish. “We had to sweep over them again, and again. We fired until there was nothing left of them – nothing but mush and gore and blood.” His voice trailed off into tortured silence. He gave a long shuddering breath and his shoulders heaved as if the burden of some great weight had been lifted from him.

  I reached out and shook his hand. I thanked him for his service to our country. Buddy Nichols stared at me like he was seeing right through me – seeing something else entirely.

  “They were our men,” he croaked, his voice strangled by his despair
. “One minute they were American soldiers… and the next…”

  OUTSIDE OF ROCK HILL CITY LIMITS, SOUTH CAROLINA

  As I sat and watched the man picking through the ruins of his life, I wondered if this was how it felt for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. I wondered if it might be the same overwhelming flood of emotions that swept over those who had lost their home in a forest fire, or any other terrible natural disaster.

  It was a wrenching experience.

  The house that had kept him and his family safe was gone now, destroyed in the battle and the relentless bombardment of artillery that had turned the surrounding farmland to cratered dirt. But even though many months had passed since the day he had been rescued by the Army, this moment was still filled with powerful emotion for him.

  He knelt over a small jewelry box and lifted the lid like he was peeling open a tender wound. I heard the soft tinkle of broken music, and the man’s shoulders began to shake as he sobbed.

  Karl Penrose stood slowly and clutched the tiny box tight within his hand. He turned towards me and shook his head in a silent gesture of despair. He took a couple of halting steps and then stopped again, sifting through the empty recesses of his memory.

  The compound walls that surrounded the man’s home had been reduced to rubble. The wrought iron gate was a twisted mangle, and the land had become overgrown by weeds. Of the house itself, nothing remained but for the blackened burned beams that had supported the roof. Clay tiles lay like shattered pieces of glass amongst fragments of crockery – chipped cups and broken plates. Penrose’s steps through the wreckage were like the reverent footfalls of a man respectfully making his way through a cemetery. He came to where I stood at last, and let out a long anguished sigh that had been choked in the back of his throat.

  “There’s nothing else,” he said. His voice was hollow. He held the jewelry box up to show me. It was a small wooden shape, covered in dust. The corners had been chipped, the timber battered. “My daughter’s…” the words drifted away and he fell silent.