The Martialist: The Magazine For Those Who Fight Unfairly

White Fire, Part 05

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

August 26, 2005, Boone County, West Virginia

I, for one, never expected the move to work out as well as it has. We moved over seven hundred assorted men, women, and children from an increasingly insecure Madison to a remote, vast, fenced in former mine site. In a little over one month we were able to arrange shelter for all these folks that no one complained about. Well…they didn’t complain too much. The mine site was located at the head of several small communities, which we pretty much stripped bare of anything useful for the comfort of our charges.

We removed dozens of mobile homes and pre-fabricated buildings from their foundations, stripped wiring and light bulbs from the ceilings and walls and took every piece of comfortable furniture we saw. At this point the community has over150 comfortable residences with air conditioning, heat, and electric for basic comforts. Farmers are growing crops and trying to raise chickens, Nubian Goats, pigs and beef. We eat pretty well, considering there hasn’t been grocery store open in nearly months. The residents of our humble outpost are pitching in very well.

The military has given us the radio call sign of Coal Mountain. It isn’t very creative, but the name fits. We are contacted by Eager Control roughly once weekly, to check in and see if they can do anything to help. A couple of weeks ago the Marines came to our rescue in the form of a trauma surgeon who saved the life of one of our two surviving teachers. The lady had the misfortune of having a ruptured appendix. The surgeon, and a couple of our folks, were able to save the lady, who was up and around in a few days.

The living dead are quite literally at our doorstep. It seems at least a couple hundred of them followed us, arriving early last week. First there were two, then ten, and yesterday we counted fifty. They are getting bolder lately too. The zombies have taken to running at our fences in an attempt to either break through them, or knock them down. They bounce off and fall down, lying there for moments, not sure exactly what to do, or why they fell down. Much like inquisitive children, they don’t give up. We have begun to back up large vehicles and pieces of construction equipment against the fence line to give it a little extra strength. Some of our people go out and stand behind the fence taunting the dead, trying to get them to come out from behind the trees and rocks where they hide during the day. Larry Marshall, who lost his teenage daughter to these monsters, has a kill record, with 123 dead souls released from their torture. It seems a scoped Ruger 10-22, loaded with solid point target ammunition provides enough penetration to get in their skulls. He moves around atop one vehicle or another, trying to get the drop on them.

Yesterday, I was watching him when he dropped ten zombies in a stretch of twenty minutes. One would come out, he would shoot it, and two more would come right behind it. They would look down at their dead comrade, not sure what happened, and look up, just in time to get another bullet. Just like a lethal game of whack-a-mole. If you set aside the sad fact that these poor souls were once human beings, it almost becomes fun, in a perverse sort of way. Every few days, when the smell becomes unbearable, our armored bulldozer, a Cat D-9, comes out and pushes the bodies into a pit. A loader comes out, dumping a bucket full of coal atop the bodies, along with diesel fuel. One of our very handy Marine-supplied phosphorus grenades tossed atop the pile sets a very hot fire that easily cremates the poor unfortunate souls. Bones, teeth, everything, it all goes. Sometimes the fires fueled by the coal, burns for a day or even two. It’s not a problem, as we have more coal that we will ever hope to use.

The Next Day

That morning, I was sitting in my lawn chair on the top floor of the building pop and I had staked out for our own private headquarters. I was nursing a finger of Glenlivet Single Malt Scotch, from a bottle I found unopened in a house, when a thunderous boom rolled across the mountain. Snatching up my radio, I called the south tower. “Tower two, what’s the noise,” I asked.

“Six, I hear what sounded like someone screeching tires and then I heard the big noise. I think it was on Route 97, don’t you?” Even as slow as I’d gotten in the past days I recognized a clue when I saw one and bolted down the stairs. Pop was standing in the door, and asked, “What the fuck was that noise, son?”

The lookout reported smoke from the mountain. “I think somebody hit something. If y’all go out there, don’t forget, it’s Indian country.” I didn’t need to be reminded of that fact. Chances are, if there was an auto crash of some sort, the dead were all around it. By the time pop and I gathered up our weapons, the chief deputy and two other fellows had started the “war wagon,” an abandoned ten-ton armored truck, and were loading up. As my dad was loading a magazine in his M-14 rifle, he stated the obvious. “We ought to know now there isn’t a thing we can do for anybody there, but I want to know who were there and what kind of mischief they were into.”

It seemed as though the trip up the mountain took forever, but it only took about ten or fifteen minutes. We stopped about 100 yards down the road from the crash, and immediately it was clear we were too late. A Little Debbie snack cake truck rigged to pull a covered utility trailer had come around the mountain curve at probably a high rate of speed, and had hit a zombie, inconveniently standing in the road. The truck flipped twice, throwing the driver and a passenger into the road, where they were immediately set upon by the living dead. The truck burst into flames and had burned down to the frame. The trailer had disgorged its contents but was otherwise intact. A crowd of six zombies was feasting on the dead motorists.

“You fellas cool your jets for a minute while I take care of this little problem,” Pop said, then went through a hatch in the roof with his M-14.

As we watched through the glass, the dead started to trot toward our vehicle. Suddenly, we heard one quick shot after another, and undead skulls began to explode. One, two, three undead fell and another two stumbled over their compadres, falling headfirst into the goo. Two more shots and they were also released from death. The third zombie appeared to be getting away until I heard pop say, “No you don’t. Come here you little fucker.” The zombie head suddenly exploded and pitched over the railing to the ground below. My dad stuck his head in the roof hatch, feeling quite proud of him self and said, “I’ve been doing a little practicing. Just a teeny bit. It’s not hard to hit those fuckers though, they don’t even try to hide.” Pop stuck a cigar in his mouth, lit it and added, “Pick up all my brass son.”

Pulling up closer to the accident, we got out to see what swag the victims had collected. Everywhere we looked, it seems as if an army surplus store had exploded on the highway. There were meals ready to eat, or MREs, ammunition boxes and various pieces of military clothing. Those were not the most important items we collected that day.

Ten large Pelican hard cases were spread across the road, one of which had broken open. The case held two M-16 A2 rifles with M-249 grenade launchers attached. A check of the cases revealed four more similar rifles and four FN M-249 Squad Automatic Weapons. The SAW was used in many military operations throughout the 1990s. Chambered for the same round used in our M-16s, it was fed by M-16 magazines, or by 100 round belts secured under the weapon in cloth bags. We had certainly hit the jackpot in terms of firepower today. “Coal Mountain, this is Six. We need some helpers to load here. Step it up.” In addition to the weapons, we discovered ten cases of white phosphorus grenades, along with five more cases of 40MM grenades for the M249. If the dead ever decided to swarm our installation en mass, this stuff would come in handy.

While stocking out armory, the question came up, where did these people find all this artillery? Was it from a military convoy that had come to a bad end? We didn’t know, until an older fellow came in with Pop. “This is Johnny Midkiff, he’s got something to tell you about,” Pop added. The man, who I didn’t know, rolled a cigarette, lit it and looked straight at me. “Before I retired last year, I used to haul goods from the National Guard Armory to a funny looking building behind the Veteran’s Hospital at Sundial,” he explained. “It never amounted to much until last November, when they put up a big fence around the building and posted guards there. On one trip, I backed the truck up to the door and got out to shoot the shit with those guys and see what was in the trailer. I got one look before the ran me the hell out of there.” Midkiff waited for a minute for his report to sink in. “So…what was in the trailer John?”

He put out his smoke, looked up, and added, “It looked to me, and remember, I haven’t been in the Army for thirty years. But, it looked to me like a whole trailer load of food and crates of ammunition. If you ask me, I think they have a bunker down there for soldiers or something.” I looked at my dad and said, “Pop, would you mind calling the sheriff and asking him to come see us?”

The hospital was perched on the top of a mountain overlooking Beckley West Virginia, some 45 miles north of us. I remembered it as a beautiful place, with the woods bordering the back of the facility. It housed and treated hundreds of injured and retired military veterans suffering from various illnesses. Before first light the next morning Pop, the sheriff, Johnny Midkiff, and I went out the gate in an armored Hummer to check the place out. The trip took less than an hour, and we stopped on an adjacent hill to check out the place with binoculars. Hundreds of cars were in the lot, with three West Virginia State Police cruisers sitting in the driveway with doors and trunks open, as if they had responded to a call, but were overwhelmed by the living dead. Not seeing any zombies, we moved forward. Driving slowly down the feeder road, our vehicle drove over a long dead soul some ghoul had feasted upon. The half-eaten carcass of someone was wedged in the window of a delivery truck. He almost made it out, before something got him.

“I don’t see this building LK,” the sheriff noted. “Oh wait, there she is.” Behind the hospital, to the side, was in fact a large warehouse surrounded by a ten-foot high fence. The fence line was covered with a half-dozen signs saying “U.S. Government Property. Entry without authorization is a federal offense.” A large truck, abandoned by its driver without shutting the doors blocked the gate entrance. One look into the truck cab revealed the driver was still in there. Well, part of the driver was in there, anyway.

Midkiff looked at the truck, and noted, “Yep, I think I knew that guy. This is the company I worked for too.” He walked around the side of the vehicle, between it, and the fence, and suddenly the fence shook and a pair of quick gunshots shattered the calm of the day. “Dead bastard tried to bite me,” He said, holstering his revolver and kicking a head shot zombie back through the fence. In the blink of an eye a chorus of moans moved across the parking lot like waves at the beach. I looked up and saw zombies scratching at hospital windows, crawling through other broken windows and peering from the roof down to our location. In the treeline, I spotted two of the undead, crawling across the grass, while a crowd of them had suddenly gathered in the patio area, 100 yards away. Like drunken beggars, two of them began to awkwardly run toward us.

Pop’s M-14 spoke twice and the runners crumbled to the ground. The sheriff began firing cool single, accurate shots from his nickel-plated Browning 9mm High Power. “Time to go boy,” Pop yelled, and we piled into the Hummer, which started instantly. My dad grabbed at the green bag between the seats and pulled out a pair of phosphorus grenades. “If you’ll give me a minute, I’ll burn some of these sumbitches up, “ He said with a smile. In a fast pitch that impressed even me, Pop slung a grenade into the midst of dead. Two of them looked down as the bomb’s fuse detonated.

Deadly phosphorus sprayed up and out, like water from child’s backyard sprinkler. The substance, which consumes oxygen, covered their bodies, burning through them like a blast furnace. Within three-tenths of a second, the bodies of six living dead were consumed by a 3,000 degree fire that kept on burning. In essence, they were cremated where they stood. The Hummer blew through a crowd of dead, throwing several of them onto the hood of the vehicle, sliding down the sides and under the wheels. The men blasted through the clogged parking lot at breakneck speed, not stopping until the top of the access road. Two sets of binoculars scanned the scene in front of the hospital. There weren’t just a few dozen of the living dead. There were hundreds of them. Congregating in front of the building, and not sure what to do, the zombies bumped into each other, ran into walls, and fell down, much like drunken frat boys on a Saturday night.

“Well, I guess this crowd isn’t going to let us take all the stuff there, now are they, “ the sheriff asked to no one in particular. Pop cleared his throat, laughed, and responded. “This is going to be a tough nut to crack. There really is no way of painting the pig any other way. Let me and my old buddy Johnny think on it for a couple of days, and we shall give you a Cracker Jack solution. Don’t worry your head boys, we’ll whip this problem.”

The next morning, my dad woke me at 4:30 AM, with a fifth of Wild Turkey in one hand a wild gleam in his eye. “Son, I’ve got this thing licked, but we have to make a run to Madison to the pool store. Tomorrow,” He said. “What’s up Pop,” I asked.

He fell back into my recliner, and before falling asleep said, “Don’t worry boy, it’s gonna be fun.”

That afternoon, Pop kicked open the front door of Larrabee’s Pool Store, while I stood lookout for the living dead with his M-14. He loaded the back of our Hummer down with fifty-gallon jugs of Potassium Chlorite pool cleaning solution, and ten gallons of bleach he found in a store room. “That old boy had a humidor on his desk full of Cuban cigars son, who would have thought it?” He jumped in the front seat and asked, “You coming, or what?”

Within a day, he was ready. Having taken a 1988 Oldsmobile from our stock of bug out vehicles, Pop had taken out the back seat and put in a large plastic storage drum, which had previously been used to store 55 gallons of hydrogen peroxide. A trip to the machine shop had yielded a truckload of pieces of scrap metal and ball bearings. The next morning, he made ten trips from his shed to the car, dumping five gallon buckets of some foul smelling white liquid into the drum. “About done,” Pop said. “Just have to wait until this stuff dries, then we can finish up.”

Soon, our team had a functional car bomb. Pop had made slightly over four hundred pounds of a crude plastic explosive out of Potassium Chlorite, common household bleach and ten boxes of candle wax. Packed in and around the drum were a thousand steel ball bearings, along with pieces of metal in various sizes. The detonator was made from several components and the timer was a battery-operated alarm clock. “We are done….son,” He said with a laugh. “Boy, you and I, we are going to take some chances tomorrow. Are you up for it?”

At ten the net morning, my father and I were sitting at the top of the hospital road in the Oldsmobile. Behind us, at a safe distance, were five trucks loaded with armed men and women. I was armed with his Thompson and both my Glocks. He had a Colt 1911 in a belt holster, and another in a shoulder holster. Sitting to our right was Midkiff, idling in a Chevrolet Colorado truck. The man smoked a cigar and listened to Toby Keith, just like it was normal to be killing flesh eating zombies. “Ready son?” He asked. “Well yeah Pop, but you still haven’t let me in on the game.” He smiled and said, “We are going to smoke these bad boys and girls out like roaches. Then we are gonna get rid of them once and for all.”

He stepped on the gas and headed down the road, with his buddy in hot pursuit. At the last minute, Midkiff made a hard left turn and went to the edge of the parking lot. As I watched, the man got out with his binoculars and shotgun to watch the show.

As we pulled up right under the covered entrance to the hospital, Pop pulled the pin on a Def Tec flash bang grenade and flipped it through the broken glass of the front door. The bright flash and thunder crack blew out what was left of the window glass and immediately, a steady steam of the living dead began to appear from behind walls, fences and bushes. A pack of them came stumbling down the hall. Soon there were more than I could count. Pop began to honk the horn and scream at them. “Come on you fuckers, there are more of you out there.” I began to realize there was suddenly a crowd of probably three-hundred zombies within feet of our car. “Oops son, it’s time to go,” Pop said, and stomped on the gas. He sped off toward the edge of the parking lot, with the crowd in hot pursuit. Pop thundered to a stop within ten-feet of Midkiff, who had already started up the truck. He pressed a button on the clock, which was attached to the bomb with two long wires and said “You have twenty seconds to get the fuck into the truck, now move.” We jumped into the back of the pickup and it sped off. “I just hope I made this damn thing right,” my genius father noted.

The mass of living dead, apparently unaware it was empty, converged on both sides of the car just in time to see the alarm clock buzz. An electric charge fired the detonator, which detonated the bomb. In reality, the device exploded in a rather impressive fashion. The witch’s brew, gleaned from instructions my father found on the Internet two years ago, lifted the car twenty-feet into the air. The car was pointed toward the crowd, thus the aluminum block engine was ejected from under the hood, flew into the air, and, when terminal velocity set in, landed on the head of a zombie dressed in a torn bathrobe. The ball bearings and assorted shrapnel were ejected from the car in all directions like a tremendous shotgun shell. These projectiles ended the suffering of the majority of the dead. Their heads were blown off, or split in two by flying shards of scrap metal. Ball bearings landed all around us, and two of them bounced off the tailgate of our truck.

Glass in the remaining parked cars were blown out by the force of the blast, and fumes from half-empty fuel tanks finished the job. Immediately, two, three, four more cars blew up. The firestorm incinerated what was left of the dead. The Oldsmobile lifted at least twenty feet in the air, flipped over, and landed on top of an ancient Chevette. The heat wave from the blast hit us in the face like a fireball, even though we were at least two-hundred yards away. A mushroom cloud from the explosion rose well above the ridge line.

Within five seconds, all the living dead pursuing us just moments earlier were released to the peace of death. The explosion left a crater in the parking lot ten-feet deep.

Pop turned to me, punched me in the shoulder and yelled, “Pretty damn impressive, if you ask me.” He took a drink from his flask and said, “Want a snort?”

Read Part Six