The Martialist: The Magazine For Those Who Fight Unfairly

White Fire, Part 03

By Lawrence Keeney -- Presented Unedited, Verbatim, as Written

Some 45 days since things went terribly wrong in America, the nation is quite a different place. Some parts of the country, namely, the larger cities are pretty much under the control of the de-animated. A Predator drone flying over Dayton, Ohio photographed a field near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base full of the living dead merely standing around, apparently not knowing what to do. A B-52 bomber, flying from North Dakota, dropped ten five-hundred pound bombs on the target. A follow up bomb damage assessment could not detect any ambulatory hostile targets.

Some two months after White Fire spread across the world, some countries are starting to bounce back, to some extent. A diesel submarine recently surfaced some 100 years off the coast of the King’s Bay Submarine Base in Georgia. After just sitting and watching for several hours, a group of heavily armed sailors deployed a Zodiac inflatable boat and headed toward shore. One of the sailors armed with a scoped sniper rifle shot the occasional undead soul that would pop its head up looking for a fast and easy meal. After some deliberation, the foreign sailors boarded the U.S.S. Orlando, a Los Angeles Class boomer that had put in at King’s Bay for emergency repairs before everything went horribly wrong.

What the foreign servicemen were in search of is as yet unclear, the consequences of their illegal act was nearly immediate. A search team of four ventured down into the submarine, and conducted a seemingly uneventful search for five minutes. Soon, the on deck backup team heard several short bursts of gunfire and blood- curdling screams. Fear overtook these sailors and they fled the American vessel in route to the safety of their own submarine. At about the same time, a Coast Guard Dauphin helicopter buzzed the submarine several times. Within moments, two F-18 Super Hornets screamed across the sky. Suddenly, the submarine commander, realizing how close his crew had come to sudden death, raised their colors, the flag of Israel.

Within days, a Royal Australian Navy destroyer, an Italian Aircraft Carrier and several commercial ships began to make careful, controlled landings up and down the entire Atlantic Coast of The United States. These men and women were searching for different things. Some sought to plunder the abandoned wealth of a once-great superpower; others were searching for supplies to ensure their survival.

The carrier Guiseppe Garibaldi was the pride of the Italian fleet. As much a troop carrier as one for aircraft, the vessel was able to carry twenty AV8B Harrier II jets, as well as various helicopters, such as the venerable Augusta Bell 212. It also contained landing craft, amphibious tanks and 800 San Marco Marines. For three days, Harriers had been flying recon duties over Virginia Beach, Virginia. After many photos and much discussion, the officers in charge ordered a Marine insertion in the relatively deserted beach in front of the Hilton Hotel. Three Bell 212’s inserted fifty Marines on the beach in a frenzy of blowing sand, flying deck chairs, and several stray dogs. One by one, the Marines began to clear each beach hotel in preparation for a much larger landing force. At the opposite end of Atlantic Boulevard, several Marines and naval commandos commandeered a half dozen police vehicles and drove through the city calling out to survivors through the loudspeakers and at the same time, trying to draw out the undead. They were able to find dozen-dazed residents and nearly 500 zombies.

LK here again reporting to whomever reads this. We are still fighting the good fight, but day by day, it gets more difficult. People are starting to occasionally disappear. We don’t know where they’ve gone to, and there is no indication of undead attacks. Maybe they fled to higher ground; maybe they left in search of their relatives…we just don’t know.

It occurred to some of the people here who think about such things that we needed some armored vehicles for this war. The solution was found in the parking lot of a local Long John Silvers restaurant. I had noticed an Atlantic Courier armored truck sitting there for some weeks with the doors standing open. Upon closer examination, the keys were in it and the fuel tanks were full. The locked section in the back was stacked floor to ceiling with bags of money, none of which was worth anything more now for anything more than toilet paper. It also had a really dead, and equally pissed zombie guard trapped in the back. Drawing my 1911, I unlocked and jerked open the back door. The poor undead soul flopped out of the back and began to rise. About that time my father removed his skull with a blast of buckshot from his Winchester Model 97.

The vehicle was a three-ton boxed truck on a Ford chassis. The box on the back was mostly sheet steel, however, the walls were lined with Kevlar and the windows were made of Armorlite bulletproof thermoplastic. They couldn’t open, but then intruders couldn’t open them form the outside either. There were four Goodyear industrial runflat tires holding the vehicle up, with two spares hanging on racks under the truck. The truck held two fifty-gallon diesel fuel tanks, which gave it a range of about 300 miles. All in all, our community could not have asked for a better “war wagon” with which to venture into undead controlled territory.

Our guys added rifle racks, a couple of survival kits, refilled the air conditioning system, slapped some law enforcement signs on the doors and we were ready to go. Within a day we would need it.

The call came at approximately 16:00 the next day. A frantic broadcast on the CB radio laid out the problem at hand. A group of churchgoers in Mitchell Heights West Virginia had fought the good fight against the undead for nearly forty days. They had been held up in a very sturdy steel school bus garage for that entire time, but food, ammunition and nerves had run out. After one of their number had been snatched through a gap in the fence and dismembered by the things, The nine remaining survivors decided enough was enough. After scrounging gas cans, the five men and four women collected enough diesel fuel to fill a large, 66-passenger school bus. They packed their supplies, jumped onto the bus and waited. When the undead seemed to have quieted down somewhat, the drive fired up the bus and they crashed through the front gate, heading for Route 119.

“Hello Boone County, our bus is not running too well and we might break down anytime,” The voice on the other end of the radio reported. “If we break down, I don’t think we’ll make it, I can see the zombies walking around all over the road.” Within ten minutes, our team was loaded in the war wagon ready to go.

The trip to their last known location took twenty agonizing minutes to reach. The closer we came, the more frantic the pleas for help became. “They are all around the bus, we can’t hold them off much longer,” the driver screamed.

As we got closer, our team could tell the people on the bus were in a world of hurt. One of them was on the ground with three of the dead on him. He was gone, that was for sure. About twenty of the zombies were beating on the windows, and one of them was crawling in the window with his ass sticking out. It looked like this one was in a hospital gown, so it wasn’t hard to figure out where this one started. One thing about the walking dead, they sure have a short attention span. When we rolled on the scene, they lost interest in the bus and came after us. We needed to get space between the bus people and the zombie horde, so Dave threw the rig into reverse, and backed down the highway, with the flesh eaters in hot pursuit. One of the deputies with a Super 90 entry shotgun popped through the hatch in the roof and let loose with five or six shotgun blasts, which were dead on. Any more, the sight of these former human beings getting their skulls blown off doesn’t seem to phase any of us.

Within two minutes, we were able to put down the whole crowd and get back to whatever was left of the survivors. By that time, the poor bus driver had turned badly, and started crawling toward us with what was left of his body, which wasn’t a great deal. Our medic, who, up to this point, had yet to shoot a zombie, drew her Walther P-22 and put a mercy round through his dead eyes. The scene inside the bus was a mess. Of the nine or so folks inside the former school bus, at least six were dead, and one had so far turned. When I opened the door, one of the first to get bitten fell out of the vehicle, rolled over and started snarling at me. I put one right between his eyes with a single round from my M-4 and was splattered with his brain matter for my troubles.

When we boarded the bus, the team went to their side arms with me in the lead. I decided that anyone who wasn’t talking was getting shot, so that’s the way it went. I worked my way down the aisle really fast, with my long slide Glock 34 and mounted tactical light leading the way. In the space of that minute or so, the team took shot seven possible zombies.

All that was left were three kids. Two elementary school age boys and a girl about twelve. “We gotta go man, more are coming,” came across our radios from the spotter on top of the armored car. We scooped the kids up and exited out the back of the bus, and got the hell out of there. I could see more than 30 of the ghouls lumbering down the highway. How many had we killed in the last 40 days? I lost count long ago, was it 100, two?

We stopped about 200 feet away as the first of them climbed up the bus stairs, smelling blood. In their condition, it’s unlikely they heard the pin pulled off the grenade which instantly filled the vehicle with white phosphorus fire. This ignited the fumes in the gas tank, which blew the bus twenty feet in the air, incinerating the bodies of the undead. I think we got all of them with that blast. The whole encounter, from first contact, till the time we boarded the bus, set the IED and got out was less than five minutes.

Looking back on it, we had been a very lucky bunch in our county. Compared to a lot of places, our losses to the undead had been comparatively minimal. I think I attribute this to one thing, namely September 11, 2001. Even though we really didn’t have any terrorist targets, our county decided to act like we did. The communications were great, the fire and police departments worked together, and unlike many areas of the country, the average home in Boone County was comparatively well armed. To look at our little band of raiders, it showed. Our team consisted of an out-of shape middle aged photographer, a nurse, a veterinarian, a retired state trooper and a couple of sheriff’s deputies. When we were at work there were few teams of Navy SEALS that looked as good as we did. I don’t know why. We just listened to what the SWAT team leader told us and realized that the first time we messed up, some thing was going to take a bite out of us. That is a great incentive to do it right the first time and every time.

I am worried about the number of contrails I’ve seen over the past few days. Planes are moving, of that there is no doubt. Who they are, where they are going, and what they are doing is another question entirely.

Crazy 477, a USAF F-16 fighter from The Virginia Air National Guard was flying a patrol over the rural areas of West Virginia south of Charleston when he noticed a disturbing sight. On the main highway between Williamson and Logan, the pilot spotted a staggering number of undead walking Northbound in unison. “ Hothouse actual, crazy Four Seven-Seven,” the pilot called to an air traffic controller monitoring off the Virginia coast. “Hothouse, be advised, have spotted what I believe to be between four and seven hundred unknown hostiles walking in a pack formation travelling Northbound on U.S. 119. Crazy believes these to be undead subjects, request permission to engage.” In an interminable half-minute, the controller gave the fighter pilot the permission he wanted. “Crazy Four-Seven, you are authorized to go weapons hot. Engage at will.”

Crazy 477 accelerated north, turned and made a high pass down the highway. At less than a quarter mile from the zombie pack, the pilot triggered his munition pack after getting a positive target lock on the crowd. Four 1,000 pound CBU-97 cluster bomb units flew toward the target. At an altitude of 980 feet, the bright yellow outer casings of the bombs separated, beginning their deadly mission. Each bomb released 202 high explosive cluster bomblets, for a total of 808 softball-sized bombs. Each cluster bomb was designed to spread its payload over a radius of roughly 800 meters. This meant the bombs not only landed on the poor undead souls, but in the woods on either side of the highway. Several massive fires were started, and at least ten homes and vehicles were immediately destroyed.

This went unnoticed by the pilot as he was fixated on the carnage being visited on the zombie horde. The rain of deadly softballs began to explode when they hit the ground, the highway, and hundreds of undead. The explosions blew off limbs, severed heads and turned hundreds of targets into no more than a dingy reddish mist. More targets, their legs blown off, continued to crawl down the highway, seeming not to understand anything more than a need to feed. On his second pass the pilot realized he had succeeded in just cutting down the zombie packs by half. Laughing at the irony of the situation, he realized one thing;. Six months ago, this attack would have been considered a war crime. Today, it was just necessary.

“Hothouse Actual, be advised, attack was carried out, result was only partially successful. You might want to advise the settlements down the way they have least four hundred hostiles headed their way. I estimate they will make it to the Madison encampment within less than a day. Crazy four seven is Winchester and returning to base.”

Read Part Four