titled.

I’ve read World War Z by Max Brooks almost three times by now, and I love it each time. For those who haven’t read it, it’s a history of the Zombie War, during which zombies overrun the world and force the US government to retreat to Honolulu. This story picks up in the middle of the offensive to retake America from the zombie horde (though it is theoretically written after the war). I’ve been itching to write something in Brooks’ zombie-war-historian style, in that same canon. Fanfiction for a book, basically. And this is what my mind shat out.

*****

[Dressed in a plaid workman’s shirt, khaki cargo shorts and sandals, Kevin Gibbs greets me at the porch of his newly constructed, state-of-the-art farmhouse in the heart of Napa wine country. Equipped with the latest in agricultural technology, and a comfortable dwelling in its own right, his home is horticulturist’s paradise. Instead of growing wine grapes, however, Kevin runs the largest marijuana growing operation in the western United States. His company, Gibbs Dispensaries, makes hundreds of millions of dollars in federally-taxed revenue each year, and the amount is growing as more and more states legalize the drug. He offers me an ornate pipe and lighter, which I refuse, and takes a long pull himself, coughing out the mildly skunk-scented smoke with a satisfied grin. Looking at him now, I would have never guessed that he had reached the rank of Major in the US Army during the war.]

Yeah, those were some pretty dark days for sure, when we learned for real that zombies weren’t the only things actively trying to kill us out there. Morale took a major hit, at least in my unit.  I mean, how would you react if you were in our shoes, or boots or whatever? The country’s just gotten enough balls to return to the mainland, the president’s made his “turn of the tide” speech, and all of a sudden you’re not just getting chased by the undead, but you’re also getting shot at? On purpose? By the people you’re trying to liberate? That was bad news, for sure.

I spent the war in Army Group North. We were helping clear the northern half of the country east of the Rocky Line. My unit was there for the Battle of Hope, the first major engagement we fought with our new, Department of Strategic Resources-developed combat doctrine, and we were involved in a few other major engagements too—Salt Lake City, Omaha, others. The one that sticks out the most for me, though, was Chicago. Chicago sticks out in the minds of a lot of ex-military, whether or not they fought there, because it marks the end of our exclusively zombie-centric way of fighting. Mind you, this was during the latter half of the campaign, when we already held the initiative that took us all the way to the Hero City, but it definitely had an effect on how we fought the remainder of the war.

We were on the outskirts of Chicago metropolitan area when we got the first sign that something was up. The video feed for one of the K-9s we had on patrol went dead, and I was on the recovery team sent out to the unit’s last known location. We all expected technical difficulties; that kind of thing happened like every other mission. But when we got to the coordinates, we found her corpse on the side of a highway leading into the city proper, with a couple of zombies gnawing on it. The handler threw a shit fit, understandably—all the handlers got real attached to their dogs; it came with the job—but after we calmed him down we were able to try and figure out what happened.

Our first response was that, well, sometimes a large group of zombies can corner a K-9 and bring it down. This wouldn’t be the first time. Or even the hundredth. But the terrain was wide open, there were only two zombies in the immediate area and the dog had plenty of room to evade, as they’re all trained to do, so we threw out that theory. When we inspected the dog’s corpse, though, we figured out what did her in: 12 gauge buckshot to the heart and lungs. The dog’s audio-visual equipment was gone too. Close by we found the spent shells and tracks leading back towards the city. This wasn’t an accident, or even somebody hunting for food—this was a crime, pure and simple. Our whole K-9 battalion got riled up at that once word of the incident got to them, and we were all a little more wary after that—we’d encountered plenty of people suffering from Last Man On Earth syndrome, shooting at anything that moved, or maybe even picking off K-9s for food, but never the kind of senseless murder that we found on the I-55 that day. We weren’t surprised at all when orders came down for us to wear our helmets and body armor for the push into the city.

The offensive into Chicago metro was a slog, a harder one than any other engagement I’d been through, for sure. Of course, we all expected that—Chicago was one of the largest pre-war population centers in the country, so we knew it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. And that expectation was definitely met. In all, the Chicago Swarm totaled around three quarters of a million zombies, all centralized in about a 10-mile radius, and we eradicated them all, block by block and house by house. It took us about a week to get to the Chicago Loop. That’s where the real Siege of Chicago started.

We knew there were still some holdouts in the downtown area before we got there. Satellite imaging and ground recon showed signs of significant human habitation—campfires, large shelters, fortifications, stuff like that—but we never seriously entertained the idea that they would be hostile to us. Sure, we’d been shot at before, but always by jumpy LaMOEs who usually only got one shot off before they realized who they were shooting at and stood down, often with an apology. The notion that some people wouldn’t want to be liberated seemed crazy to all of us, I think. But these guys in the Loop, as fucked up and ballsy as they were, were sure as hell not crazy.

I wasn’t there for the first contact, but I definitely heard it happen. We were picking along the ruins of the retail district, looking for Zack as always, when all of a sudden, from the direction of the Willis Tower, we hear a single shot. Not from a Standard Infantry Rifle, though—a SIR makes a very distinct sound, and with the number of times each of us had fired one, we all knew it pretty much instinctively. No, this was a completely different sound.

[He mimics the sound.]

Sharper, I guess, I don’t know. But anyway, the radio just fucking explodes in my ear. “Man down! Wainio’s down! That was a gunshot!” And then more fire from non-SIRs, some of it sounding like a pretty heavy caliber. And full automatic too. We were the closest guys to the unit that had been engaged, so we hoofed it to assist before the Quick Reaction Force got called in. About a block away from the site, though, we got engaged ourselves. Somebody started spraying automatic fire at us from a third story window, and we were in perfect enfilade. Two guys got hit immediately and went down in the street while the rest of us ran for cover and tried to return fire. Thing is, we were trained to kill zombies, not humans, and none of us were professional, pre-war military. Hell, I worked at a Barnes & Noble before Z-Day. So really we were just a bunch of scared boys and girls firing off pot shots from behind burned-out cars. Thank god the guy’s gun jammed and he ran off, or he could have pinned us down for as long as he had ammo. We ended up gathering our wounded, withdrawing a few blocks and waiting for the QRF to come save the day.

But the QRF ran into its own problems: Roadside bombs. Fucking roadside bombs! This was fucked up for a few reasons: One, it was the Chicago Loop, not downtown Fallujah, two, this meant we needed an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team that we didn’t have, and three, we were trying to help these guys.  And of course we didn’t bother to up-armor our Humvees and ASVs, because why would we? It wasn’t like Zack was hurling shells downrange, and the extra armor would just slow them down. So the QRF got just as bogged down as we did, and the entire force was ordered to withdraw and make a cordon about a few miles away from the first engagement site. It wasn’t long before we learned that engagements had flared up throughout the downtown area, with maybe a few hundred hostiles keeping us out. It was obvious these guys were numerous, organized, and at least a little technically and tactically proficient, so we weren’t about to try and fuck with them by ourselves.

[Did you try talking to them?]

We tried negotiations at first, but those broke down like immediately. Command sent a D-17 dirigible with a loudspeaker to orbit the Loop, broadcasting a message to put down their arms and let us liberate the city, and that they would be granted amnesty. It just got shot at. The brass ended up sending in a special unit to deal with the problem directly.

[Which unit?]

I never really learned the formal designation of the force they sent, but it was a Bravo Team.

[Bravo Team?]

Yeah. You know how we sent Alpha Teams abroad to advise local forces and engage Zack? Well, Bravo Teams were the equivalent for humans. They were meant for rebs, secessionists, organized criminals, basically any human force that violently resisted re-integration. They were made up of pre-war special forces, counter-terrorism units and I’m pretty sure ex-private military contractors who got scooped up by DeStRes. The government kept them on the down low because of the PR shitstorm it would have caused during the war, but they popped up here and there throughout the push to New York. Black Hills, Arlen, and I’m sure a bunch of others I never heard about. I’ll be dead long before that list gets declassified. But yeah, they sent a small detachment to Chicago to help us deal with these guys.

[And how did they deal with them?]

“With overwhelming firepower.” That’s what command called it, anyway. They brought in Main Battle Tanks, the kind you only saw in pre-Z wars, Bradleys, up-armored ASVs, the works. All of these guys looked like the most battle-hardened sons of bitches you could find—lots of scars and skull tattoos and shit—but they didn’t have that gung-ho, jarheaded attitude we in the regular army kind of expected. None of the frat-boy grabassing.  They were all just pretty grim. Quiet. Just went about their business like they were on a job that they didn’t particularly like. I mean, none of us liked what we had to do in order to get our country back, but these guys were…different. Almost more bleak and gloomy than we were. I think that was what put me off the most about them. But in the end, I can kind of understand why they were like that.

[Why’s that?]

Because here we were, fighting the war that all of humanity was waging against an enemy that all of humanity hated, while they were still stuck fighting living, breathing human beings.

To be continued

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