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

intersecting roads gave us smooth lines of supply and reinforcement.”
    I nodded. I appreciated the genius behind the simple plan. “And the forts were twenty miles apart, right?”
    “Approximately,” Danvers said. “It depended on the intersections we had at our disposal. We built each fort a few miles south of the major cities along the line.”
    I stood back, glanced once more at the big map, and then down at the hastily scrawled drawing Danvers had made. “It seems that the Containment strategy you devised is a cross between World War I trench warfare, and the kind of forts we built back in the wild west when the cavalry were fighting Indians.”
    Danvers grunted. “That’s a fair appraisal,” he admitted. “When I developed the plan for the line I had to consider the type of enemy we were going to be confronting. As I said before, America has never fought an enemy so primitive that it rendered our superior technology ineffective – until the zombie outbreak,” he spoke with the force of complete conviction. “I knew modern warfare, built around technology, was not the answer. I found the solution, ultimately, in our history.”
    “You make it sound simple.”
    The man shook his head. “It wasn’t simple,” he said. “It was hard work and it involved great sacrifice. ‘Operation Containment’ wasn’t just about building this defensive line, it was about the missions our brave soldiers undertook in the course of the operation. The line gave us a base – a place to defend, but once we had that containment line built, we still ran operations in zombie infected areas as part of the initial response. America has a lot of heroes they don’t know about. That’s why I agreed to this interview. I want you to tell the people of this country about the heroic dedication of the men and women who pledged to defend them.”
    I nodded. I already had several more interviews lined up with combatants who had been actively involved in ‘Operation Containment’.
    I sat back down at the table and gathered my thoughts for a moment. I had a dozen pages of scribbled notes. I flicked back through the pages quickly. I realized my writing was so scrawled, I would be lucky to read the mess later.
    “What was the biggest challenge to ‘Operation Containment’?” I asked after a long moment. “I mean apart from the logistics of building the line. Was it in the operations that were conducted in zombie territory, or dealing with politicians…?”
    Danvers stared hard at me. Slowly he sat forward and thrust his face close to mine so that I could not mistake the gravity in his expression.
    “The numbers,” he said, like it was some secret that until this moment had never been revealed. “The sheer numbers of the enemy,” he shook his head and seemed to become lost in his own brooding thoughts for several minutes. Finally he sat upright, and pressed his palms flat against the tabletop. “By abandoning Florida, and conceding that we couldn’t defend Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia or South Carolina, we created an enemy army of about twenty eight million,” he said the words slowly, making sure I understood the significance. “Twenty eight million mindless ghouls that couldn’t be stopped, couldn’t be reasoned with, couldn’t be dissuaded, but could only be killed by a bullet to the brain. Think about that,” Danvers said, and then lapsed into pensive silence while I tried to grasp the enormity.
    I shook my head slowly. It was an impossible number to conceive. More than ten percent of the nation’s population had been infected. I knew too that southern parts of North Carolina and Tennessee had also been forsaken.
    “Look at it from a military point of view,” he went on with a kind of macabre relish to emphasize his point, “and you’ll understand better what we were dealing with.”
    He got up again and went to one of the blank multimedia screens on the opposite wall. He pressed some buttons and the screen