Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America by Nicholas Ryan Read Free Book Online Page A

will ever make,” he said. “I had to accept surrendering the lives of Americans in five states, in order to keep the rest of the nation safe. It weighed on my conscience – it still does – but there was simply no other way, no other alternative. We had to build a line that could be defended, and that meant we needed time.”
    “Thirty four days, right?”
    Danvers nodded his head. “You’ve done your research.”
    I said nothing. Danvers filled the silence.
    “In thirty four days we constructed a line that stretched from Wilmington, in North Carolina, through Raleigh and Durham, across to Knoxville, Tennessee and into Nashville. The western leg of the border ended in Memphis, and used the Mississippi River as a natural barrier all the way down to New Orleans.” He stared at me for long silent moments, trying to see if I understood the significance of the achievement. I did, but it was hard to get a sense of proportion.
    “Over eight hundred miles of trenches and fortifications,” he explained. “One of the most incredible engineering feats this country has ever witnessed, given the urgency.”
    I stared back at the dark line on the map, seeing the bulge of it through half of North Carolina and the undulations that linked the major cities across Tennessee. “Trenches, right?”
    “No,” Danvers shook his head. “To call the defensive line merely a trench is to minimize the significance of what we created. It was more than a long line dug into the ground.”
    I had seen photographs of sections of the Danvers Defensive Line. The trenches that had been dug were wide tracts, with coils of barbed wire that were reminiscent of historic images I had seen in books about the Great War a century earlier.
    “What we did was mobilize America’s construction industry and the Army’s engineering corps into one vast orchestrated machine that dug trenches twenty feet wide and eight feet deep. We then built firing platforms for the troops to operate from, and laid thirty feet of barbed wire ahead of each trench.”
    I looked puzzled. “Barbed wire? Surely that wouldn’t have been a deterrent to the infected?”
    “It wasn’t,” Danvers admitted. “It was a hindrance. It slowed them down so that as they pressed against the defensive line, they were snared. That gave our troops time to take head shots.” He grinned, but it was unconvincing. His mouth twisted out of shape leaving his eyes haunted.
    “And the forts you built? How crucial were they?”
    Danvers looked pleased. I sensed the installations that had been sprinkled along the defensive line were something he was proud of.
    “The forts,” he sighed, like he was recalling a particularly fond memory. “Each one was a mile square built of high chain link fence, topped with barbed wire,” he explained. “And each fort had several observation towers for snipers. There was one gate in, and one gate out.” He went to the table and snatched at one of my pads of paper. He had a pen in his pocket. He leaned over the table like a general explaining tactics to a subordinate.
    “We built each fort on a major intersection,” he said and drew a large cross to indicate the overlapping roads. “The fort was built on the road running south, straddling the blacktop, with the actual intersection beyond the rear wall of the fort.” He drew a box over one of the arms of road, and then drew gates at either end. “You see the fort was a mile square – and the gate we built made use of the road that already existed. That meant refugees could come in through the gate and be safe. It also meant our patrols could operate in zombie infected areas. The rear gate allowed us to mobilize troops along the defensive line by using the road that ran east to west along the intersection. It meant, in the event of a zombie attack somewhere along the trench line, that we could send troops from the nearest fort to reinforce the line without having to send them across difficult terrain. The