Dead Wrangler (15 page)

It went on for quite a while. I lost track of time. The body we had recovered had been shot and crushed by the horde. There wasn't much to work with, so we spent a lot of time reconstructing what it had looked like. I told them I'd only seen it for a few hazy seconds, but I got the impression that I had seen more than most living humans. And that was about it. They kept me around for a week or two, coming by to ask questions about some detail I hadn't been clear on. Because I was supposed to be in isolation, I didn't even have to do any work. I could go to the park as long as I didn't talk to anyone. They gave me a Kindle to entertain me. Hot showers, books, and complete safety? It was the best vacation of my life. In my more self-pitying moments I even felt like I deserved the vacation. Of course the reality is that you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting someone whose story was a hell of a lot worse than mine.

While I didn't realize it at the time, knowing about herders put me in a special class. I had a security clearance, by default. Since I had some experience with herders I got drafted into a unit that specialized in learning as much as they could about the herders. There was no rank or uniform; I just got told to show up at a certain place at a certain time. From there I started getting people coffee and listening in. It was at that point I learned about supernovas, and learned that the St. Louis supernova was showing some unusual activity. It had collapsed its net and was sending two million zombies towards Columbia. This was taken as definitive evidence of substantial herder involvement. The zombies appeared to need constant attention to stay under control. Such a concerted effort would have required dozens of them, maybe more.

There were a few schools of thought about what to do.

One was to evacuate key personnel and leave the rest to fend for themselves. The resources to evacuate the station would have been devastating. Each helicopter ride cost a small fortune in irreplaceable parts and fuel. Evacing the three or four hundred people still at the station would have damaged the war effort for months.

I didn't like this option and I said so.

The other option was a little more audacious. There was a school of thought that said that whenever we saw large concentrations like this, the only sane thing to do was to bomb the fuck out of it. We would need to kill them anyway, and if it fucked with whatever the herders were planning, all the better.

But they didn't have the munitions to do it. And they had at best a month before the supernova arrived in Columbia.

That was when Whiteman was brought up. There was a lot of munitions there, and while the satellite photos indicated that it was still hot, it wasn't that hot. It could be pacified. Then we would have the planes, parts, and munitions to start pounding the incoming horde to bits.

Ah, but the do-nothing party said, you have to worry about the Kansas City horde. Its nova was pretty close to Whiteman, The herders there would descend on the air force base in a heartbeat if they knew we were there.

There was no good option. That was clear. But I couldn't stomach leaving those people to die. Even the do-nothing party didn't want to abandon anyone; they just felt like it was the only option.

Reckless valor won the day, and after a few days of debate and planning they asked for 150 volunteers to retake Whiteman. A delegation of Air Force pilots and mechanics had already been chosen. Our jobs would be to protect them and do whatever they wanted us to do. Of course I volunteered.

The choice was made to do an armored convoy. Av gas was always in short supply, and we had a quiet and clear set of highways to make our run with. Now, that was a relative term, but in armored vehicles the problem I had encountered in Bowling Green wouldn't repeat. Hell, these vehicles were meant to run people over.

We set out at dawn. I was in the back of a two ton truck. The truck was loaded with phosphorous grenades, flamethrowers, and every other item that no one wanted to be near. It was a sign of my status in the expedition that I got to sit in the back with all the incendiaries. But I didn't mind.

The trek there was fast. We didn't stop for much. Sometimes we would slow down as the lead truck pushed a crashed vehicle out of the way. Sometimes the truck would squish over the remains of something the lead truck had run over, but we were traversing the minimum density net. We'd be dragging God knows how many with us, but that was only a concern once we stopped moving. They weren't ready for us then.

Whiteman only had a few hundred zombies to worry about. We just circled the wagons and started firing. The place was pacified in an hour or less. We got to work patching holes in the gates and building makeshift defenses out of whatever we could. While some of the military guys felt this whole operation was run on a shoestring, to me it seemed lavish. Flamethrowers all around, assault rifles and bunkers. Compared to the fights I had been in, this was a military operation.

I was a bit furious to see that the first plane they got ready to fly was a C-130–packed with parts and anything else deemed important. This plane started doing a non-stop two way between New City and the base. The do-nothings had extracted this concession to ensure at least some profit to what they thought was a doomed venture.

We were kept busy cleaning out the many buildings and dealing with the scouts that stumbled in.

I had just been introduced to the whole net concept, and it occurred to me as I watched them stumble in... what if you spoofed the net? If you chained a few zombies around a perimeter, would the other zombies take that as proof the net was complete and head back? I thought it couldn't hurt to try to find out.

So what we did was we went out a few miles and found a zombie. The density was low enough that it was as safe as being out in the open world was ever going to be. We lassoed the monster and dragged it out to a tree. There we used a knife to cut an incision around the fleshy part of the neck, leaving only the spinal cord intact. Then we took a length of steel cable and looped it around the spinal column, then tied it to the tree. We handcuffed its hands behind its back and shattered its knees with a sledgehammer. Using a rubber mallet, we knocked out its teeth.

The reason we took such extreme measures was to render the thing helpless. Leaving one of the things alive runs against every instinct we had. The neck cut was to ensure that it was impossible for it to wriggle its head loose. The rest was to ensure that even if it did get free one day, it would be as helpless as we could make it without killing it. We did this again and again. By the time we were done, there was a three mile curve guarded by our decoys, placed at the outer range of sight from the last. I hoped they would serve as false flags that would convince other zombies that there were no juicy targets inside the perimeter. It does not prevent them from getting through, it only discourages them.

For days we worked, until it was like clockwork. I was quite proud of our team. We didn't even have a single close call, and by the time we were done we had it down to a science. It took 15 minutes from decoy to the next decoy.

Of course, it was pretty hard to come up with a scientifically verifiable method of seeing if it worked. There were so many variables that it would be hard to determine if it was really working or not. I was afraid that all our activity might increase the amount of zombies and make my strategy look counterproductive.

It was hard to say whether the strategy worked or not. There was an increase, and then it evened out to where it was before we set up the net. But then, we were flying large, loud planes in and out, so evening out might be a sign of success. It's what I like to tell myself.

My little experiment is the side show to the main story. After a few weeks Whiteman was a formidable fortress against the zombie horde. Planes were flying again. Most of these were supply planes heading back to New City with lots of missiles and equipment. We only kept a few planes of our own.

Now you have to understand that the horde that was coming our way was very dense. It averaged about ninety thousand per square mile.

I think I mentioned this before–but the zombie burns well. In fact, once you get it over 600 degrees Celsius, it will burn on its own, no outside fuel source necessary. One of the downsides of immortality, it seems. The energy source that allowed the zombie to keep going without any outside source of energy combusted at 600 degrees Celsius.

Napalm burns at 1000 degrees Celsius.

Bombs were moderately effective against zombies. If the blast wave was enough to damage the brain, it could kill quite a few zombies. But the effectiveness was much, much less than if you had dropped it on the same number of people. If a thermobaric bomb ruptures your lungs, you die. If it ruptures a zombies lungs, it has about as much effect as taking out its tonsils.

So napalm was the name of the game. And boy, did we have plenty of it. The plan was to load up a whole lot of B-52s with napalm bombs, then drop them in a ring around the center of the horde. The hope was to set off such a gigantic firestorm that the whole horde would start self-igniting.

There weren't enough crew for all the planes, so a few of us got drafted to fill in some of the simpler roles. I became a bombardier. My job was to hit the bomb release button when they told me to. Couldn't have been simpler.

We left at daylight. This was my second post-apocalypse flight, and the only thing that made it a little more tolerable was the altitude. It's such a miserable experience, realizing how alone we are.

If there were three hundred million Americans before this started, then there might be ten million of us left. I mentioned that number to an intelligence analyst. He got that look on his face when you don't want to tell a child that their pet dog didn't go live on a farm. So even that depressing number is too high.

The Neanderthals lived in Europe for a long long time, from Spain to Russia. At their peak there might have been fifteen thousand of them. Do you know how long you would have to have walked to find one? A Neanderthal couldn't have claimed the continent for their own, when they were so few. And here we are, with less population than before Columbus landed. I decided to try to treasure flying even though I hated it. It seemed obvious to me that even if the human race survived, the children would be living in a society in decline. When their old thing broke, they'd get to replace it with something worse. They'd be using horses and oxen instead of tractors. Pen and pencil instead of computers. It made me sad to know that all the knowledge we had was going to fade away. I'm so used to expecting that whatever I have now will be obsolete in a year that the thought of heading backwards made me sad. I guess that's a pretty shallow thing to think when most of humanity had died horrible deaths and monsters roam the earth. But it bothered me. That's how the enormity of the catastrophe hit me. Realizing that if we were lucky, I was going to be one of the last few people to ride in an airplane for a long time. If we were lucky.

Anyway. It wasn't too long before we were on target. Some smart fellow had made sure we went so high up that we couldn't be seen or heard. My thinking had been that we would buzz it at fifty feet and stare the zombies in the face. But that smart fellow realized that with herders around, they might try to disperse the horde if they saw the planes. We didn't know how smart they were, but given the way the targets were packed in, we didn't need accuracy. And if we could get our payloads out before the first bomb hit the target, it could only increase our chances of maximizing the damage.

So I sat in the back, staring out the window. Even at twenty five thousand feet, I could see the horde. It was like an army of ants. From a distance it quivered and twisted like a flock of tiny birds in slow motion. Soon my headphones came on.

"Five minutes to drop. Get ready."

Five minutes later, the command came. I hit the button, and the bomb bay doors opened.

"Drop."

Push.

"Drop."

Push.

Never before or since have I killed so many zombies with so little effort. Within a few minutes our bombs were depleted. I closed the door. We started descending. We got low. Then we hit the zone.

I have never before seen a zombie look afraid. I've never seen it since. But my God, they were running for their lives. The flames were enormous. Even a thousand feet up, I could feel the temperature start to rise. My headphone was alive with the cheers and whooping of everyone in every bomber. I cheered with them. The conflagration was immense. It was blinding at times, even through the roiling thick smoke. When I looked away from the flames, I saw zombies spontaneously combust nearby and spread fire to their neighbors.

I heard later that the satellites said that parts of the fire reached 1500 degrees. The fire raged for a week, feeding off endless corpses. If you go back to that part of the country today, you will see puddles of metal that used to be cars. Concrete pillars that used to be a gas station. The soil there is rich from all the ash. The grass is green and the trees seem almost cocky. You can find bone fragments. The areas where whole skulls and femurs are found represent where the fire was at its weakest. Bones didn't survive the hottest parts.

It was, without a doubt, the most glorious thing I have ever seen.

Since that day the Whiteman raid has become world famous. Everywhere that could be reached by radio heard about it, and then they asked to hear again. Video of the bombing was played in loops at bars. Every single person involved gets free drinks. Even me, and all I did was press a big red button thirty times.