The Martialist: The Magazine For Those Who Fight Unfairly

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?”