Wednesday, July 25, 2012


Okay, I don't want to give a blow-by-blow on how the big fight went down yesterday, because I wasn't actually there. I know the generalities of the thing, and our people were brilliant and methodical.

The basic idea was to herd the zombies where we wanted them. That was actually pretty easy since they were butted up against a steep hill. Our folks slathered ammonia around the entire area, pushing the undead into a smaller and smaller area. Up the hill, in fact. Which was where the archers were waiting.

Firing down on the New Breed trying to climb the hill was the safest and most efficient way the team leaders could come up with to cut down a large number of them relatively quickly. Moving uphill slowed the zombies down quite a bit, and the fallen bodies of the front lines made it that much harder for those behind to trudge upward.

New Breed, not being stupid, will only walk into a death trap for so long before deciding to do something else. We've known for a while that the undead will travel through areas contaminated by ammonia if they have to. They did. Funny thing about the zombie sense of smell; when they move through areas they don't like, such as a cloud of ammonia, they invariably go where the smell is weakest.

We knew that, too.

Which was how the attack teams managed to get the undead to walk around in a section of woods liberally mined with small balloons filled with alcohol-laced gel. Well, some of them. Others were packed with thermite gel. Pretty much all of them burst when the zombies stepped on them. For the record, those fuckers still don't like fire at all.

The path was chosen carefully by our folks out of concern for starting a wildfire we couldn't control. When the flames hit, the undead panicked. Those that didn't have their legs burned to useless sticks by the rapid spread of the fire ran like hell through the areas of heavily-concentrated ammonia. That slowed them down and made them less sharp.

It helps that there were auxiliary units placed around the area for just that scenario. Turns out the workers that migrated to aid with building our infrastructure were quite happy to lend a hand.

It wasn't beautiful or perfect. Five people were seriously injured, and two died. More than five hundred zombies were killed, though. Not bad numbers, though of course we can never replace those we lost.

Efficiency could have been better. The whole deal took nearly three hours if you count the time spent performing coup-de-grace on the hundreds of injured zombies. The hard part wasn't making the situation less dangerous, our weaponry and planning did that. No, it was maintaining the patience to treat every zombie crawling toward our fighters as a true and deadly threat. Kill a few clawing their way across the dirt toward you and it starts to seem like an easy job. Until one bites you on the leg or manages to trip you. Our teams had to move in roughly circular groups to keep eyes all around for sneaky undead trying to do just that.

Of course there was a lot of hand-to-hand, but that's really not interesting to me at this point. Our people are practiced at fighting fully functional zombies in teams, which are easy to spot when they're moving about unhindered. It's almost funny to me that the injured undead were more of a threat, but it's the truth. Those not crisped below the knees were so dazed by the fire and sudden violence (not to mention the ammonia) that they could barely manage a straight line, much less a cohesive front.

It was a big victory. Our people cut them down like so much wheat. Wow, I totally wrote a blow-by-blow. Ha. I didn't mean to. I wanted to tell you about some other stuff going on, but that'll just have to wait until the day after tomorrow, as I'll be off as usual in the morning. I may be a little high on victory at the moment. I better go.

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