Cumming, Georgia, United States of America
[Daniel Garredy sits on his back deck, overlooking the crisp, green waters of Lake Lanier. The piedmont region of Georgia experienced the greatest number of refugees in the entire southeast. Daniel has chosen to live here to lead expeditionary forces that clear out wooded areas of the foothills. He sips an old-fashioned, his leathery skin and charred countenance reveal much of his wartime experience]
What do you know about ivy? Like, Japanese kudzu and shit. Grows like crazy, up to several feet in a single day. Invasive species like that…I always disliked them, felt as if somehow they would cause of a bit of trouble. Well fuck, they more than did.
Atlanta was covered with it. Woods, buildings, everywhere ivy could grow. And, sure, they quelled it as best they could in the pre-war times, using pesticides and what not. But after the Great Panic, you think anyone gives a damn about weeding their garden when Zack's about the weed them? Shitty euphemism. Anyway, Atlanta, and really entire areas of the southeast just went crazy. How long was it, 5, 6 months before we tried something in that region? The suburbs looked like one big botanical garden. It was a jungle.
I don't know who at Fort Benning thought it would be a good idea to reclaim Atlanta. Apparently they'd heard of some spec-ops in Britain retaking Swansea, even before they implemented their Redeker. Didn't they know half of Wales was already out? Regardless, it was some serious fucking egg-headedness.
We were sitting on our asses, figuring any minute we'd get orders to go do evac, rounds, clear out something. Columbus was relatively clean, at least for the moment, so we strongly believed…maybe hoped would be a better word; hoped that we (my unit) would get to go set something up there. Obviously we didn't.
It was lunch time; I think there was some POS spaghetti waiting for us. A siren sounded, and I remember thinking that we must have somehow been overrun. Maybe China had finally gotten the balls to attack? Anyway, we manned our stations, going dicks to the sticks trying to get everything in order. The sirens were supposed to be advanced warning, and as airborne, our job was to get in the sky and then drop back into the base once it was under attack.
But you didn't come back?
No. During our ascent, I saw all the humvees rolling out. I suppose that's when I first knew something was up. I didn't find out until much later, but apparently the high ups at Benning told the White House their plan. Just called them up, like it was no big deal. The president, the president himself, told them they were ape shit. He probably sent down psych and reclamation teams to get them out.
Our pilot, Skinny Rimmy we used to call him, a lanky Hispanic guy from somewhere in L.A., was silent the first part of the trip. I asked what the hell was going on. He seemed pretty perplexed, told me all he had orders to do was fly us over Chamblee, just north of Atlanta. If you go there today, they have this big statue, right in front of the high school where we landed. I guess the town just wants to feel like it was part of something. They don't realize how God awful the whole op truly was. I am still amazed by it.
Could you smell the burning from far?
No, but we sure as hell could see the smoke. All of sudden it got damn cloudy. Rimmy called over the system that we received some concrete orders: drop into Chamblee, work our way down I-85 into Atlanta, and meet up with armored. That was as much as we knew. HQ went silent a few minutes later.
Yonkers had already happened, so why did they think tanks would do anything?
You have to remember, nothing about this was actually given rational thought. My personal theory is that General McCray wanted to prove he had a big pair, maybe get a few war medals for spearheading an attack that actually cleared a city, something to the show the country that it could be done. I guess I can't blame him too much.
And the commanders knew nothing about the situation in Atlanta?
They knew it was more or less compromised. If you're talking about the fire, no. It had to have happened while we were en route. They weren't that stupid. Even though not much was known about Zach, no one with any semblance of sanity would willingly fight through a burning city, even in a normal war. And this sure as hell wasn't a normal war.
Rimmy called me up to the cockpit a few clicks from Chamblee. His voice sounded…well, it just sounded scared. That's as plain as I can put it. And he had every right to be. The city looked like a literal hell. Everything was on fire. I'm pretty sure that's the image those religious radicals tried to drill into their disciples head: the dead had risen and hell had sprung up in Atlanta, "a city of sin." The real reason was much less romantic. Apparently a real bitch of a lighting storm had sparked some of the ivy, and a million camp and cooking fires (no electricity, remember?) had amalgamated. Boom. With the city government focusing strictly on refugees, they had no time to devote to landscaping. Midtown got it the worst, with all those trees and whatnot. It looked like some news footage of western forest fires, you know? The funny thing is, there was a pre-war T.V. show that had actually done something about this, one of those post-apocalyptic shows, in the event there were no more people? If there is a God, he's got quite the sense of humor.
I told Rimmy there was no way in hell, ok, bad choice of words…I told him I was not letting my unit, and dammit, three other units parachute to certain death. Rimmy may have appeared timid, but shit, that little Latino sure was steadfast. Would've flown the plane down into the blaze had command told him to. Rimmy wouldn't budge. I was already emotionally compromised, this was all so much to process. I chose not to put up a fight.
We picked a little strip of somewhat calm fire to drop into, right in Chamblee. It wasn't so bad. Modern paratroopers aren't like their forefathers. Most people I talk to have some fabricated image of us being scattered all over the metropolitan area, like D-Day or something. It wasn't like that. We dropped as a unit, we landed as a unit; modern tech allowed us to do so. Sadly, we didn't all land.
I still laugh, in the sickest of ways I must say, at the cruel irony of it all. Here we are, about to drop into a fucking fire, to fight zombies, something that up until eight months ago had existed only in pop fiction; we're about to do some video game shit, and not one, not two, but three fucking chutes were packed backwards. I'm sure the guy who packed them paid his fair share of reparations in one way or the other, but damn him, or her, anyway. That's three men out of ten. We'd just hit the ground, and there's already three gone. Luckily they didn't hit near us. Their chutes took them off westward, towards Sandy Springs. Or maybe that was unlucky…where was I? We hit the ground right near the high school, like I said earlier. Seven of us without much knowledge of the area trying to fight south against an enemy we'd never encountered. Did I not mention that? Sure, there had been a few G's that wandered near the fort, but nothing up close and personal.
At this point in the war, Land Warrior was still a thing, and despite what you may hear some Yonkers vets say, it truly did save our lives. We linked up with the other three units, and worked our way down Peachtree Boulevard. I still get nightmares when I think of the satellite images of I-85…had we gone that way…not that Peachtree was much better. Remember, there were still a lot of civilians that hadn't turned yet. They were our biggest concern. The problem was, we had no HQ, no one telling us what to do about the civis. We got asked more questions down that 13 mile stretch, almost had to fire once or twice…did fire once or twice.
It took us 5 hours to reach Buckhead. Shit, you want to talk about frivolity? We saw rich fucks trying to salvage computers, cash, Benzes, you name it. It was chaos. They really had no idea what to do, what they truly needed. And as soon as we walked through, they were on our asses.
"Tell that bastard to leave my Bimmer alone."
"Hey, as soon as this blows over, do you know what [company name withheld] stock will be like? Do you want to be rich? I can make you rich, just shoot that bitch with my cash!"
I'd be lying if I said I didn't I smirk at least a few times. It was so textbook Hollywood: a firing raging around us, men in expensive suits moaning and groaning, looters running everywhere. It was an anarchist's wet dream! Or at least Sherman's.
So did you encounter any infected?
We were honestly too overwhelmed to really notice. There were people that had been bitten, sure, but we didn't pay much attention. Actually, we only put down two, maybe three biters from Chamblee to Buckhead. In Atlanta though…
[He pauses, his eyes glaze over.]
Will you tell me about the [football stadium name]…?
Of course, yes. Yea. That's probably why you're interviewing me in the first place. I'll skip ahead.
We got downtown, about another hour from Buckhead. That was the heart of the fire, God…I guess we were so overwhelmed on the whole journey down, that we completely forgot there was no one to tell us where to meet armored. They never even made it. I think we were the only ones, all 24 of us, who made it downtown. I don't know how close far units on the ground got, only that I never saw them.
So there we were, 24 soldiers in the midst of millions of confused and scared refugees. Around us, Atlanta once again burned, and with no directions of any sort, we just sat with our thumbs up our asses.
I found out at the end of the war that some rich guy and a group of mercenaries had taken over the [football stadium name] and sold tickets to highest bidders. I guess they thought that it would be easy to wait out the storm in the relative safety of such a venue. Bless their hearts. Money was no elixir. Who knows how many infected bought tickets in? Those doors were sealed shut. They were in there for a good month.
There's this overpass that runs parallel to one of the [football stadium name]'s corners. We were walking on that, trying to calm this flood, and I mean Noah's Ark level, of people going every which way. None of us had riot training, we did mostly special operations, and for the past few years, we'd all been on an American base. We were rusty to say the least.
The shouts started in the quads that surrounded the stadium. All the spectator entrances were glass doors, and it was obvious that someone had tried to barricade them. The problem is barricades don't last. The next few minutes are kind of hazy. I remember more screams and shouts. The refugees must have seen it before us, because all of sudden, it was like Moses had parted the Red Sea. It was just the 24 of us in this expanse of open road. People were actually jumping off the overpass, tying ropes and trying to shimmy down. We were so confused, what was going on?
I think it was Private Mackey, real big guy, looked like a 'roid head. If ever I can find humor in the ensuing 30 minutes of memory, it will be in his scream. I thought a little girl had gotten crushed falling off the overpass. Instead, an ostensibly endless stream of ghouls began to pour out of the [football stadium name].
The overpass was connected to the stadium quads by this little connector ramp made for buses. To this day, I think about those 100 feet of concrete. For better or worse.
We had several pounds of EDA (explosive demolition agent) that we carried. I ordered two men to rig it up on the bus connecter. I figured it would drop them down under the overpass. You know, they should have given me a fuckin' medal. Screw Redeker, I came up with my own version 2 months before him. And it torments me every day of my life. I had to choose right then and there. Let them fall down, right into the path of those who had sought safety under the overpass, or try to lead them away, towards the larger masses of civis still on the overpass.
I blew that bridge to high hell.
I truly am sorry, but after that, my memory really goes. I'm sure we fought them, sure we corralled some of the refugees, did what we could. My memory picks up with the Big Red One rolling through and picking us up on their journey west…we were in Atlanta for two months.