The Martialist: The Magazine For Those Who Fight Unfairly

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.

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.

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.