The Zombie Combat Manual (39 page)

Take a standard coconut (brown) and encase it in two layers of duct tape. Place the fruit (a coconut is, in fact, not a nut but a fruit) in a double layer of plastic bags and suspend it from a structure so that it is roughly cranium height. Using the melee or long-range weapon you will wield in combat, strike the fruit just as you would a zombie skull. If you can shatter the hard coating of the coconut even when it is protected by the layers of tape and plastic, you have a good approximation of the strength and accuracy required to deliver a crushing blow.

Granted, a coconut is rather delicate and easily shattered. The taped covering in which you encase the fruit should somewhat compensate for its fragility, but if you find that you can splinter the target easily, a young, green coconut is much sturdier, and can present more of a challenge to the stronger combatant. An even greater challenge would be to use a durian, a fruit from Southeast Asia with a tough, spiked outer husk and available in many Asian markets. Be warned, the odor of the durian’s interior pulp is so unpleasant that the fruit is banned from being eaten in certain public areas in Asia. The stench of the durian has been compared to that of rotting flesh, which, given what you are training for, is not a far cry from the odors you will encounter in zombie combat.

COMBAT REPORT: BRIAN DEVON

Green Beret, Free Republic of Dodge, Iowa

The burlap sack covering my head smells distinctly of fertilizer. Despite the feeling that hours have passed before we arrive at our destination, it has been only forty minutes since I was met and promptly hooded by members of the Dodge Security Force. When the hood is removed, I find myself in the finished basement of what appears to be a domestic residence. As previously agreed, I am stripped down to my underwear. My digital recorder, pen, and notebook are taken. My non-writing hand is shackled to my seat, and I am given several wax markers to transcribe my notes. “Remember Massoud
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,” a member of the security detail says as he drops a sheaf of paper in front of me. The mask, strip search, and writing implements are all part of the precautionary measures taken by the DSF to ensure the safety of their leader, Brian Devon, Green Beret and now administrator of the Free Republic of Dodge. Devon places a plastic glass filled with water on the table between us and sits, flanked by his security personnel. Like many military professionals I’ve met, he exudes a fierce intensity tempered with an almost monklike aura of tranquillity. The following is the first and only interview given by Devon to a journalist.

BD:
This is not how I planned it. We were sent here on a very specific mission. Had the government held up its end of the deal, I would be sitting with a beer at home in the North Carolina secured zone. Instead, I’m talking to a half-naked reporter with a crayon in his hand.

ZCM: What was your mission?

BD
: DID—Domestic Internal Defense. With the amendments to the Insurrection and Posse Comitatus Acts, the military, specifically guys like us, was able to do the kind of work at home that we’ve been doing throughout our history in other parts of the world. In layman terms, we had to secure the city. Typically, at least a twelve-man ODA team would have been sent in for an operation like this, but given the defection of so many good operators to the private sector and the losses we suffered containing the initial overseas outbreaks, all they could afford to send was me and Charlie. Chuck was an X-Ray, part of the military program that recruited civilians straight into Special Forces. I know that those recruits were looked at sideways by many of the traditional guys for being “shake and baked” into SF, but Chuck was as talented as any other Green Beret I knew. He’d be the first to talk down about himself, loved to be self-deprecating. He would finish any suggestion he had with, “But what do I know, I’m an X-Ray.” Anyone who worked with him even once knew better than to believe that.

We were under no illusions as to what we were facing in this operation. We knew exactly why the nature of our op was so ambiguous. Rumor had it that many of these missions were assumed to be one-way tickets. Chuck and I had no problem with that. But what actually happened, what the government did . . . but I’m getting ahead of myself.

We HAHO’d
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in to minimize the announcement of our approach to unfriendlies, undead or otherwise. Opening our chutes high also allowed us to spend more time in the air for an immediate analysis of the region: a bird’s-eye view to assess the vulnerability of the city and threats in the surrounding countryside. The satellite photos we were provided in our mission briefing were days old. For all we knew the town could have already been overrun in that time. But once we caught sight of the city and the terrain, I actually started to feel better about things. I looked over at Chuck as we floated down, and even though his face was obscured by the oxygen mask, I knew he was smiling. Dodge was primarily a manufacturing city—drywall and gypsum—and it looked like the townsfolk were smart enough to secure exposed perimeters with pallets of the stuff in preparation for any external aggression. The airfield looked serviceable, and the highways into and out of the city were clear of living dead. Things didn’t look so bleak after all.

ZCM:
How did the townspeople react to your arrival?

BD:
They were ecstatic. Naturally, they felt that if the city was important enough to send us there, they were going to be all right. And we couldn’t have arrived any sooner. All the ammunition in the town was gone, handed over during the National Voluntary Ordnance Sweeps
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conducted months earlier. Other cities had only about a third of the population left, but most of the original townspeople, including the women and children, were still present in Dodge. The water supply was intact, the electrical grid was operational, and the city was DF—dead-free. But food supplies were running low, and outbreaks were being reported in the metropolitans farther east. The fear was that it would soon sweep through and decimate the town like a swarm of locusts.

The first task at hand was to finish the work that the residents had already started. We needed to fortify the city’s perimeters and the entry and exits onto the highways. They did a good job before we got there, reinforcing the city limits with trucks and pallets of dry goods. The problem was that we saw plenty of homemade videos online showing collapsed reinforcements, resulting from a large crush of dead against a single structural weakness, as well as what Chuck called the “gory slope”—when enough zombies assemble against a barrier that they begin to climb on top of one another, cresting the fortification. Luckily, Chuck was 18C, an engineering specialist. He designed this staggered I-beam reinforcement perimeter using blocks of the city’s drywall storage. He even built in patrol ramps in case any dead managed to reach the top of the reinforcements so we could scramble up quickly and chop them down. It was a thing of structural beauty.

The highways were another problem. Despite the image of zombies traversing the countryside, most made their way from city to city through manufactured pathways—roads, bridges, and highways. At that point, the government was still unwilling to render these pathways useless, not only because of the inability for commercial shipments to make it through, but also because of the potential cost of rebuilding the structures when order was restored. “When order was restored”—how goddamn ludicrous does that sound now? Regardless, we were under strict orders not to obliterate any public highway systems or roadways. Chuck came through with another stroke of tactical engineering brilliance. There was one major elevated highway running into and out of the city, making it easier for us to stanch the potential flow of undead. Chuck came up with the idea of jackknifing several sets of semitrailers, one row after another, which we could easily move in case a vehicle needed to enter the city. There was enough gas left in the pumps of the town’s stations to fuel up the trucks and get them maneuvered into position.

With the city reinforced, we went about the task of training the townspeople. Men, women, children, no one was exempt. People have this ongoing misconception about Special Forces. They like to think of us as cowboys, gunslingers—when in fact what we do most of the time is train people to take care of themselves. Chuck liked to describe us as the Peace Corps with M4s. Most of the time we’re sent to the ass-ends of the world to teach people things they think they don’t need to be taught; it was no different here. The women weren’t an issue; they were the most willing to learn. Predictably, some of the men looked at us with a skeptical eye. A good number of them were former active military themselves. This is where Chuck really shone. I’ve seen him do it with tribal warlords in the Middle East, with Congolese contra-rebel troops, and here he was doing the same with ordinary U.S. citizens. Chuck had this innate ability, the kind you just can’t learn, to be able to train people without being condescending. He didn’t make the men feel like they were lesser men for having to learn from him.

ZCM:
What type of training did you provide?

BD:
Improvised combat. There were plenty of guns in the town, only no ammunition left to fill them. With no guarantees of a supply drop or additional troops, Chuck and I knew that the most practical training we could provide was to get everyone in town equipped to handle an improvised weapon. We separated them into appropriate ranks given their physical attributes and distributed tools taken from all the local hardware and agricultural supply stores. Everyone had to participate. Over the next couple of months, we ran drills for hours each day, cycling through each weapon range, until everyone in the town was capable of bringing down a ghoul at every distance possible. I must admit, these folks were quick studies. It usually takes more than two months to get a group this diverse trained up. These folks were good to go within six weeks. And it was none too soon. Shortly after the final training sessions were completed, Chuck smelled it in the air as he was checking on the highway reinforcements. Our first wave was approaching.

The strategy was pretty simple, but still a huge gamble. The tractor-trailer blockade created an elastic defensive zone that we hoped would disrupt most of the horde, but we weren’t sure what would happen if a large enough swarm pressed against the rigs. Chuck and the townspeople who were most skilled with long-range weapons—shovels and pitchforks mostly—were the main line of defense after the trucks. Should any of the dead break through, it was Chuck and his team’s responsibility to put them down or pitch them over the side of the highway embankment, where they would fall forty feet to the underpass. I was leading a group below the pass with short-range weapons that could finish off any dead that happened to survive the drop. If the blockades failed entirely, we would fall back while Chuck detonated the Semtex charges he’d mounted on the trucks.

The horde crested the top of the highway. As they drew closer and the moans began to reverberate in our ears, we realized that this was going to be a real test of Chuck’s perimeter defenses. It was a huge mass, probably more than ten thousand zulus.
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The first ones reached the trucks and began slamming their arms against the cabs. Others reached the first group and started pushing. And the ones after them started pushing. The trucks groaned against the pressing weight. As the bulk of the mass reached the blockade, things started to look ugly. We heard bones snapping. Skulls started to pop. We didn’t think of it at the time, but I guess this was a good thing. The trucks were holding, but the mass of constant pressure was starting to force ghouls through the crevices and small openings between the truck cab and the trailer. As the group continued to ram themselves forward, flesh was being forced through the cracks like sausage meat pressed through the holes of a colander. The smell was nearly unbearable. Once we got past the terrible sight of zombie flesh pouring out over the highway, we realized that the blockade was holding. Very few seemed to be making it past the first truck in one piece. There were some crawlers that got underneath wheels of the truck bed, but Chuck and his guys took care of those pretty quickly. He leaned over the side of the overpass and laughed, “I’ll be a son of a bitch, looks like this is gonna work!” That’s when we heard the fast movers overhead.

The air strike took out the entire blockade. There wasn’t much gasoline left in the semis, but the contingency charges Chuck had rigged went up like the doors of hell were kicked open. Concrete and steel showered down on us in the underpass, but luckily most of my guys weren’t injured. I wish I could say the same for Chuck and his team. They didn’t stand a chance. When the smoke cleared, any zulus that were still intact continued to walk off the edge of what was left of the highway. The rest of us retreated back to the town. That’s when we saw the rest of the damage.