by Coke, Justin
I peed myself a bit, screamed a bit, fell on my ass a bit and started scooting away as fast as I could, but it had its grip and it wasn't letting go. It opened its mouth to bite and I saw its mouth. Someone had jammed two razor blades in its gums. Even though I had knocked out its teeth, it could cut. I put my other arm under its chin and pushed it away.
I managed to get to my feet. I sort of folded him onto his back, his legs beneath his back. I put one foot on its chest and jerked myself free. After that it got one shot to the forehead.
The handcuffs were gone. The chain had been hidden beneath the zombie so I couldn't tell it was free. Whoever had set this trap even did the zombie the favor of giving it teeth again. And a normal person could never have gotten the zombie to play dead like that. This was a herder. I felt eyes on me, and realized that maybe the herder had stayed to enjoy its trick. I was back on the ATV and hauling ass back to base before you could say spit.
My report made most of the commanders nervous. They didn't want to believe it. That was too much control, and too much intelligence. I could tell they wanted to think I was crazy. But it was enough to get the base on higher alert. The plan now that Columbia was safe was to get as much material as we could out of Whiteman. The bombers carried bombs, but not to drop. Every plane they could get in the air was being stuffed with anything worth taking. The place was hopping.
A few days after the incident with Razor Tooth, around 2 AM, the alarms went off. I immediately went back to that night at the Wal-Mart, and headed outside fully armed. There was much less panic this time. Floodlights started popping on, and I gasped. Not more than fifty yards away there were thousands of zombies. The chain link fence with pillars that had been intended to prevent suicide bombers was down. The chain link was on the ground, being trampled beneath hundreds of feet. The horde was inside. I dropped to a knee and started firing, but I was like a fart in the wind.
I knew I'd have to do something more than pop away with my shotgun. I ran for the trucks with a fifty foot lead over the zombie horde.
Now the napalm had been such a crazy hit that we had gone a little napalm crazy. All the vehicles had flamethrowers in them, ready to go and loaded with napalm. I grabbed a few guys, who were a little more lost than I was, and got them headed that way. Now the camp was spread out over three or four buildings. Those buildings were now surrounded, and people were taking shots from windows and wailing. We went to the trucks. Several people had the same idea as I did–or so I thought.
What they were thinking was to get the fuck out of there and leave the rest to their fate. I was planning more of a rescue. I had to do it at gunpoint, but before long we had a convoy going to the helicopter pad. We got there just as the helicopter there was taking off.
If they had left, we would have been lost. I couldn't have kept the deserters at bay, and I'm not sure I should have. There wouldn't have been a whole lot of good options. I knew what it was like to try to drive through thousands of those things. Napalm wasn't going to be useful when I had to worry about setting real people on fire. So I have to admit, I was about an inch away from bolting as I watched that helicopter take off. But it stopped, hovering. The radio in the truck crackled.
"Son, if you want a ride that's not going to happen. We are full. Start driving," the voice said.
"No, I want you to save them."
"How the hell do you propose we do that?" he asked.
"Well, you go pull them off the roof and bring them here. We have flamethrowers and napalm, and as long as we don't have to worry about setting real people on fire we can use it. Most of us came on these trucks, and we have enough capacity to take everyone if we can just get them here."
The helicopter hovered and hovered. Finally it descended and a few airmen got out. They shot me vile looks. The helicopter took off towards the buildings.
"Things are about to get hot over here. Grab a flamethrower, and for fucks sake be careful with it. Hit them as soon as they are in range."
"What’s the range?"
"I have no idea," I replied. I strapped one on myself. Turns out I didn't even know to turn the thing on. One of the guys I had picked up knew his way around them well enough to get us working. Once I was ready, I fired a burst. Thirty yards. I have to admit I was hoping for a bit more.
As we got ready I started thinking about all the flaws in the plan. None of us knew what we were doing; I didn't know if we even had enough napalm, and I didn't know how long this was going to take.
Now, earlier I had talked up how we had quite the fortress. In hindsight I was far too impressed with the fence. But we still have some serious, serious obstacles. For each building we had sealed all but one door, and reinforced that one. No one slept on the bottom floor. The stairs had been gutted, and step ladders were the only way to get up or down. I felt pretty positive that most of the people were still alive. The helicopter came back about fifteen minutes later. Around ten people jumped out. With them came the horde, tailing the helicopter like a dog chasing a car. At this point I was used to it, but having nothing but a wagon-circle of trucks and APC's made me a bit more nervous than usual. Most people who ended up in my situation ended up dead. Caught in the open with a horde.
Perhaps it was just me being paranoid, but I felt some dirty looks coming my way from the people I had dragged into this. 'We could be driving away. Sure we'd feel sad. We'd get over it,' this dirty look seemed to say.
Fuck it, I thought. It's done now.
The zombie's strength is that it never stops attacking. Its weakness is that it never stops attacking. The flamethrowers started firing a bit early as people got a feel for the range, but that didn't slow the horde down one bit. They ran right into that napalm and caught on white hot fire.
Trivia question: how long can a zombie run as it combusts into ash? Answer: about ten yards. At 1000 °C, even zombies fall apart pretty fast. As the zombies fell they made a little barricade of burning bodies. The zombies who tried to climb it got it twice over; from their ex-comrades and from our flamethrowers. The corpses piled up in an ashy barricade.
This time they didn't run away, and they didn't stop. Seems like the herders were willing to expend this little horde to try to get us. And they almost did. Do you know how hot it gets when you are in the center of a 1000 °C fire? We were all sweating rivers. By the time it got up to 80 °C, I was ready to switch weapons just to cool off. Machine guns were mounted on all of the trucks, and if you wrapped a shirt or two around your hands you could even operate one without giving yourself a nasty burn.
The machine gun is a bad zombie weapon. But it was better than adding to the fire that was broiling us.
The bonfire was hurting both of us. The zombies could only hurt us by throwing themselves on the fire, and we were getting cooked by our own fire. My God, it was hot. You couldn't touch anything that was metal. The guys in the APCs had to clear out. And the zombies kept coming. As the helicopter brought more people, it got even hotter.
We were there for two hours before the helicopter landed for the last time. By then we had a new problem, which was how the hell did we get out of the inferno.
A hundred and fifty people crammed into a pretty tight space, and a fire burning hot. Did I mention I get panicky when I'm in a crowd?
For me this was about the worse part of the whole war. It was so hot and we did not have enough water. What we did have was hot enough to brew tea.
But when a fire burns that hot it burns fast. An hour later the trucks were cool enough that they wouldn't burn too much to the touch. The APC went first and drove through the pile of ashes and bones. The rest followed in his footsteps. It was a lot easier than I had imagined. What horde was left was dispersed, and before long we were driving out of the hole in the fence that the zombies had made.
So, the Whiteman Raid:
Fourteen human casualties. Zombies eliminated: two million. Lives save: at least three hundred, and who knows how many other real people those two million zombies would ha
ve killed. So maybe thousands or tens of thousands of lives. If you counted the zombies killed with the supplies we recovered, the number would be much higher.
The Whiteman raid was without a doubt the most successful military action against the zombie up to that time.
There were a lot of promotions made off that raid, and they deserved them. I got bumped up from a Civilian Analyst to a full-fledged intelligence officer.
The party for our arrival was excellent, the debriefing was not. They hunted for someone to blame for the zombies getting through the gate. Even they, who knew more about herders than anyone, did not want to believe they were that smart. They didn't want to believe they could cut fences, and they most certainly didn't want to believe my story about Razor Tooth. There's nothing harder than convincing someone of something they don't want to believe. They grilled me hard, trying to get me to admit I was exaggerating.
Even people who have seen herders don't want to believe that they are smart. Among the majority of people who have only heard whispered stories they are considered an urban legend. I now believe that those New Yorkers who had talked about demons leading the zombies–I think those guys were more or less spot on. I wonder what they saw. It would be fascinating to see the herder in an environment where it was in total control and safety. I bet it would have been pretty interesting to have seen what those New Yorkers saw.
The herders had figured out breaking and entering somewhere, is what I'm getting at. I think they cut their teeth in places like New York.
Now, back to the herder biology.
This is another thing that people have kept secret, but the herders were in some sense human. I guess the right term is hybrid. The plague DNA and the DNA of unborn children were hybridized. Sometimes (I think this worked only rarely), when a pregnant woman turned, her fetus... sort of went sideways. The thing, I hesitate to use the word child, grew up expressing the DNA of the plague and the child.
Every herder has trisomy–which is to say it was two strands of human DNA and a third strand of plague DNA.
This meant that unlike zombies, herders were living things in the same way that I am a living thing. It had organs, and a skeleton. It could be frozen, or die from starvation. It could be killed the same way you could kill any other living animal.
There are some stories that even suggest it's possible for the herder to catch the plague. Herders that were stupid like other zombies, and were difficult to kill.
I'd like to believe these stories, but nobody ever managed to show up with a body or film. I'd like to believe them, if only for the irony of it. But I suspect that the stories are fabrications, intentional or not. I'd have to see a body before I would accept that. To me it seems, living amongst the plague like they do, they would all have caught it if they could.
My theory is that the zombified herder would be the result of a birth defect; a herder that didn't quite make it. But then undead things don't grow, so my theory is as problematic as theirs, I guess.
In any case that was our opponent; ourselves, turned against us. And they knew more about us than we knew about them.
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Justin Coke lives in the middle of Missouri. He enjoys mountain biking, Lovecraft, fishing, soccer, pizza, and good beer. He wrote Like Father, which appeared in Wicked Words Quarterly. He also has 37,148 comment karma on Reddit.
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