creative Prompt #132 - Creative

[comicfan]

War is never pretty. Who expected a war like this though? Over half the world’s populace is gone. Things are going to have to start over. What is your job in the aftermath of war? What was it fought about?

[JamesSavik]

This piece is part of the world created in Max Brook's World War Z

 

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Liberation Day

July 4, 2018

We knew that they were coming for several years. It was just a matter of time. We first contacted General Mitchell’s 3^rd Army Group when they began moving into Arkansas and Louisiana over a year ago. When they got to a north-south line of Ruston, Jonesburo and Winfield, we began to provide air support and med-evac their wounded to River Region Medical Center in Vicksburg.

 

They were astonished at what we had been able to accomplish. When everything collapsed during the Great Panic, Mississippi had several advantages over the rest of the states East of the river. First- we had a very low population density and our towns and cities are spread out. Second- almost every male in the state knew how to use a gun. Third- we had a huge number of veterans. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in particular made the difference. Finally- we came up with a plan that allowed us time to evacuate civilians and fortify key facilities that allowed us to survive.

 

We tried like everybody else to attack the zombies head on but were quickly overwhelmed. We found that we were fighting a delaying action. In the Emergency Operations Bunker in Pearl a plan was hatched that saved Mississippi and allowed the state to survive when all the rest collapsed.

 

We decided that we would use the city of Vicksburg as our citadel. It has a nuclear plant close by that could easily be secured, a chemical plant, an oil refinery and geography that made it a natural fortress.

 

While our National Guard fought a heroic delaying action allowing our people to retreat to the railheads at Vicksburg, the Army Corp of Engineers was busy enhancing the natural barriers that made the city such a tough nut to crack during the Civil War.

 

Attention was paid to the lessons of history. During the Siege of Vicksburg, Confederate forces were starved, not beaten. Vast amounts of food were sent to the rail yards. As the trains came and went, we were always shipping out people to the West Coast. We put a hard limit of 75,000 people in the Vicksburg Green Zone and another 25,000 in surrounding enclaves. We weren’t going to repeat the mistakes of the past.

 

A 10 foot ditch was cut around the perimeter of the city. Fortifications were erected. We were able to use our heavy equipment because our refinery was churning out gas and diesel from pipelines fed by wells running off the electrical grid. Perimeters were set up around the Nuclear plant at Grand Gulf and several armed farm enclaves to grow food and livestock. Nobody got fat but we didn’t have starvation like so many other places.

 

We had some frightening moments. Early on we tried to hold onto Jackson but lost entirely too many men. When we finally evacuated, it was a bloody mess. Several Mississippi towns and cities were over run and there was simply nothing we could do about it.

 

Once the Great Panic had passed, we spent a great deal of time and effort clearing the roads in the first couple of years. It took us almost nine months to clear I-20 from Vicksburg to Meridian where we were able to get our take custody to the aircraft at the Naval Air Station.

 

We continued to clear the interstates. We were able to get I-55 clear to Oxford and as far South as Slidell, Louisiana. Walkers were crawling out of Memphis and New Orleans. There was another Green Zone in Baton Rouge. We tried to cooperate but there was very little we could do because of the distance and the numbers of infected.

 

Our biggest achievement was opening I-49 from Jackson to Hattiesburg and Camp Shelby. The equipment that we were able to retrieve from the Army base assured our survival. Once we were able to get to Hattiesburg, we were able to push on to the Gulf Coast. We established armed outpost on all of these routes. Once we had access to the coast, we were able to get to equipment at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi and the Navy Seabees based in Gulfport.

 

Eventually we had outposts at key points all over the state: Starkville, Oxford, Tupelo, Meridian, Greenville, Jackson, Hattiesburg, Natchez, Gulfport and Biloxi.

 

For some reason that no one seems to understand, the undead began to form super-swarms. Little ones of twenty or thirty thousand were just a nuisance but the super-swarm of eight million that crossed over into Mississippi from Alabama in the summer of 2012 was the worst threat that we had yet seen.

 

It formed in Georgia and Florida and picked up steam as it crossed Alabama. It was thirty miles wide and sixty miles long. Where ever it went, it destroyed everything.

 

CentComm warned us that they were on the way. We evacuated some of our smaller outposts and dug in. We started out with air strikes but we could only cook a few thousand at a time with napalm. We ended up having to fight them in the Delta. We couldn’t afford to lose our farms. The battle lasted from June to December of that year and we suffered two hundred casualties. At the end, we had a platoon of Abrams tanks out running over the bastards.

 

Summer of ’14 was awful. We had an outbreak of yellow fever. Almost everybody was sick. I was standing post and puking. Even with doctors and medicine the damned stuff killed more of us than zombies for a while.

 

That was the year the Army finally got its act together and started grinding its way East. They started at the passes in the Rockies and began pushing East clearing cities and towns as they went. They started in Carson City, Nevada and began moving East at a clip of about 10 miles a day.

 

Thing was that it wasn’t just zombies that were the problem. In the fall of ’14 the Cubans decided to raid the abandoned military bases on the Gulf Coast. They worked their way down the Gulf Coast until we caught them raiding Keesler. We sank their ships with a little help from a navy attack sub and wiped out the ground troops they sent in. Turns out they had been looking for nukes and actually got a few at some of the bases in Florida. Too bad they never made it home with them. The Navy launched a retaliatory volley of cruise missiles at Cuba- one of which sent Fidel to meet his maker.

 

Other groups that caused us no end of problems were renegade military outfits, looters, bogus FEMA operators that didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. We weren’t asking the Feds for anything so we didn’t need their advice.

 

Toward the later years our equipment began to wear out. We lost several helicopters and a number of hummers went lame on us. I was on a hop in a Blackhawk from Vicksburg to Hattiesburg when the chopper went down.

 

Six of us got out. We were all armed with wounded, in the middle of nowhere with zombies everywhere. We found out that we were a few miles north of Monticello, MS. We made it to the high school and were chased up to the roof. It took them a few days to find us. We were forced to cut back on the use of the helos and no vehicles went out alone.

 

I used to count how many zombies that I’d taken out. I stopped counting when I started shooting zombies that I had known when they were alive. That’s the shit that’s in my nightmares: shooting the guy who used to be the sports reporter for our local ABC affiliate. That shit will mess you up.

 

It gets worse. One of our men ended up seeing the zombie version of his ex-wife and kids. He pulled his sidearm and blew his brains out.

 

Suicide was a real problem for a while. Finally everybody that was going to punch out had already done it and it was over.

 

I can’t really believe that it’s over. Sure- we’re no longer cut off. We’re no longer alone. We still have to clear the state. And there’s the small matter of the rest of the Eastern sea board.

We didn’t have a ceremony. We didn’t have a band. Most people just continued to do their job.

 

What do we do tomorrow? Don’t know. Don’t care. Tonight I’m just going to get drunk.

 

Let tomorrow take care of itself.

[comicfan]

Why did I somehow know this one would attract you? Your zombie world is definitely one worth reading. All these little glimpses you keep giving us simply whet the appetite James.

[astone2292]

https://gayauthors.org/story/astone2292/rocky-prompts-tennessee/3

My take, titled Starting Over.