Day Zero really started off calmly. You could still hear the chanting and the screaming. But we were used to it. We were used to the smell of the cooking flesh. I can’t believe I am saying this but, standing a few thousand feet from eight hundred thousand cannibals started to feel like business as usual. And to be more honest, I was more concerned about getting a new allotment of food for the day. No one really knows about this but Washington was feeding the reporters in return for favorable reports. And I hate to say this, but I would have read off a White House script if that would insure that I got my food.
Well, the lunch truck didn’t show until about 5PM. And when it did, there were only “half rations” available for the press reporters. We knew then that things were getting really, really bad. Not even the government was able to keep a steady flow of food coming.
The sun started to set over the Manhattan skyline and I began to get anxious. I knew that they would start staring at us again. I kept my weapon at the ready. I even told my squad that they should be prepared for something to happen tonight. I just had a feeling that there everything was about to come to a head.
Sunset on Day Zero was 18:20 hours. At that point, I noticed movement away from the center of the park to the outskirts. Unlike the night before, the movement of all the occupants seem to be coordinated. It was all very strange. And extremely disturbing, as I relayed my information, I was wondering what I was supposed to do if thing went bad. My Blackhawk was not armed. Remember, we had no reason to believe that the people in the park were going to be violent. Just a few days ago, they were mostly at the edge of death.
Darkness fell. Everything around us was silent. Then we began to hear the chants. No one had no idea what that meant. But the chant was growing louder and louder. Everyone in that park was chanting the same thing in unison. That set off something in me that was purely instinctual. To me, that was the sound of eight hundred thousand animal growling, preparing to strike.
I got on the radio and said to my squad, “You see anyone come out of those trees, you shoot to kill. I don’t care if you see the face of your own child, you blew their fucking heads off.” The chants grow to a uniform scream. Then silence. All of a sudden, all hell breaks loose.
I was standing behind a police barrier The National Guard were on the frontline, about one hundred feet from the park’s treeline. All of a sudden, I see a mass of humanity emerge from the darkness. Pale white skin. Red eyes. Red mouths. A wall of flesh. They came out of the darkness so fast, everyone was caught by surprise. I heard a hail of machine gun fire. But the sounds of that horrific screaming drowned everything out.
Within ten seconds, the entire park was clear of occupants. They emerged from every direction, right into the Guard frontline. The Guard could not shoot their weapons fast enough. It looked like a mass of ants overrunning the poor souls on the ground. I could not do anything. The Blackhawk had no weapons. I could only watch. And pray.
I may have been the only soul on the Westside of the park with my weapon pointed and ready to fire. We I saw the first sign of flesh, I did not hesitate. I opened up. That’s what saved my life. I emptied my weapon into every living thing in front of me.
I could feel the ground shaking. I knew then that there was only one thing I could do, as a solder, in order to survive. And that was to run. I didn’t need to do the math to realize that I would run out of ammunition before that park ran out of flesh eaters.
After the initial shock of watching so many blood shot eyes and bloody mouths, I ran. I pissed my pants. I shit myself. I run faster than I had ever run in my life. After two blocks of running, I no longer heard machine gun fire. But I did hear screaming. Lots and lots of anguished screaming. It was the sounds of thousands of men being eating alive.
The reports coming in from the Blackhawks were not completely clear. But you really could not put to words what was happening. I was at the operations center in Ft. Lee and we lost our live feeds about twenty seconds after the attack. However, I was able to quickly determine that three things had happen —The Guard had been overrun at the park, thousands of my men were being killed and there was nothing standing between the flesh eaters and the twenty million people who lived within 30 miles of the park. That’s when I ordered the armed Blackhawk attack into Manhattan. I knew we would get some of them. But we would not be able to get all of them. That scope of the situation, frankly, was now officially over my pay grade.
At that point, this became a U.S. Military operation. I didn’t realize it at the time. But this was the first time that the United States military was engaged, in combat and on American soil, since World War 2. The National Guard nor any Law Enforcement Agency could not engage what was essentially 700,000 to 800,000 enemy combatants on American soil.
The order from the Pentagon was to engage the enemy and “Kill at will.” At Centcom, we became the “eye in the sky” for all ground and air forces. This was an extremely tense moment. This operation, remember, was not urban combat in Iraq nor Kabul. This was in Manhattan. We had to find a way to kill several hundred thousand of these monsters with minimum collateral damage.
There was no briefing. Well, to be honest, it was a “briefing on the fly.” We literally were in the air when we were told about the situation. None of it seemed to register with me. There are nearly 800,000 humans eating other humans. They are moving in all directions from Central Park. And we had instructions to kill at will. This was a clusterfuck of major proportions.
My first engagement was over Madison Avenue, near the park. I see twenty to thirty targets moving to the south. I didn’t pull the trigger because I could’t confirm they were enemy combatants. Then I see all of them rush someone in the street. They surrounded a frightened person and began to bite and tear into the flesh of that individual. Right there and then, I fired.
I hit all of them. I hit the victim. I don’t feel bad about saying that. I know that he would prefer a quick death over being eaten alive. That engage was the only real successful part of the mission. Everything after that became a disaster.
I was stationed at Fifth and 34th street when I heard about the incident in the park. The radio exploded with various reports. Within a minute, a came to understand that all of these fucking cannibals have launched an attack all over the city. My heart started to race. I made a quick mental check of all of my weapons. I knew I didn’t have enough to survive if more than a hundred of them came towards me.
There was a battalion of us on that intersection. We assume a “Turtle Formation.” All one hundred of us squeezed into a compact arrangement with weapons pointing in every direction. We knew that the only way to stay alive was to stand our ground and stick together.
Then we heard the rumbling. Coming from the north, I saw a wave of humanity. They were running towards us. Many of them were holding the meat and limbs and other human remains. It is a sight I never wanted to see again in my lifetime.
We opened up with our weapons. We hit that initial first wave of flesh eaters. They went down. Then more of them came. We fire again. They go down. Still more were coming. We started to run out of ammo. They kept coming and coming. Panic hit all of us and we all started running for our lives.
I started running and firing behind me. I didn’t look, I just shot blindly. I wanted to get into a tall structure, head to the roof and wait for a rescue. I run south on Madison until I hit 25th street over at Madison Square Park. I look towards the park and see another fucking wave of these flesh eaters. I make a run towards an apartment building in hopes of just getting the fuck off of the street.
I run to the doors. No luck. The residents barricaded themselves inside the building. The flesh eaters where
