As in Chapter 1, this is modeled after Studs Terkel’s oral histories.
The Pied Pipers
My informant requested and received assurances of anonymity, as certain of this team’s actions were technically illegal.
How did you get started fighting zombies?
Well, like, everybody grew up watching shows and movies and things about zombies, the zombie apocalypse, right? So when we heard there were zombies in [Big City], we’re like, “Okay, we know what to do here.”
If it’s that fungus thing, then, yeah, we’re totally doomed. Or if everybody that dies, zombifies or something, then, you know, [obscenity] doomed.
But if it’s just the standard bite‑and‑turn‑into‑a‑zombie type, we got that. But the [obscenity] government, they wanted to put everybody in a safe space. Yeah, like that’s gonna work. That’s basically ringing the dinner bell for the zombies, right? But at least they got tied up in a million miles of [obscenity] red tape, so they never got it done.
While they were busy trying to do that, we decided we’re going to protect our own town. We didn’t have any guns because they were, like, against the [obscenity] law. And no, I don’t know anybody who had any back then.
Eventually they, I mean the [obscenity] government, they did something right and let people buy guns. Except by that time, everybody in the [obscenity] State, everybody in the [obscenity] world was trying to buy guns. So there just weren’t any. And we couldn’t buy any anyway, since we were underage.
And so we’re like, “Okay, what can we do?” So we got together, me and the others from the drone team, and we’re like, “If these are, you know, regular [obscenity] zombies, then they like noise and they might like lights.”
So we rigged up some of the drones with flashing LEDs and some of them with radios. And we set the radios to a rap station, so there’d be a ton of voices and a little music, right, but a ton of voices. And then we had a third one that we set up that had a camera. So that was our spotter drone, you know, like they had in Ukraine.
And so we sent them out and kind of went up and down the highway because that’s where we figured the [obscenity] zombies would probably be most likely to come by. Turns out most of them followed the sound, but some of them liked to follow the light. So we had to do both.
At first we just, like, flew the drones in circles around the zombies so they’d stay in one spot, kind of herding them. But we still needed a way to get rid of them, you know? Can’t just keep ’em around forever.
We talked about, like, setting them on fire. But we’re like, “That’s gonna start a brushfire. And there’s not enough firemen left to go do anything about it.”
We decided what we really needed was some place where the fire couldn’t get out of. So there’s this quarry out east of town; sometimes it’s got some water in it, not very much back then. And, you know, people like to go there and drink and — but I wouldn’t know about that ’cause I’m underage.
So me and a bunch of the others, even some that were just brothers and sisters of the team, we went out with brooms and rakes and stuff, and we cleared all the stuff that would burn, like the dead grass and the dead leaves and all that junk. We threw it all down in the water that was at the bottom, so that there was nothing there that would catch except, like, the zombies.
And so then we sent more drones out to lead that [obscenity] group of zombies that we’d rounded up right into the quarry. And they’re dumb as hell, you know. They just followed the drones. So we’re sitting on the edge watching them come shuffling in.
We had to set them on fire somehow. What we really needed was Roman candles, but Roman candles are against the [obscenity] law. We got some later, but back when we started out, we didn’t have any. The statute of limitations hasn’t run on that, so, like, you’re making this anonymous, right? For sure?
Anyway sparklers were legal. So we got a bunch of [obscenity] sparklers and tied them to a drone, one of the cheap drones, you know, that we could spare. And once we got all the zombies down in there, we had to get a fire started somehow, so we just, like, tied a little bucket to this drone and put some gas in it. We’d just send the drone out to buzz over them, and they start waving their arms at it and try to jump, and they spill the gas all over the place.
[Operator] got super good at that, running the drone over them so they’d splash the gas all over the crowd and we’d get the drone back.
Anyway, after that, we’d light all the [obscenity] sparklers and send that drone just zooming, kamikaze-ing in. Boom! It hits the zombies. And, man, they went up like a bonfire. Once one of them catches, the rest of them catch, too. It was wild. So that was it for them and for that drone.
After that, we kept the drones patrolling, watching and listening for more [obscenity] zombies. All day and all night, we’d blast noise and flash lights to lure them in, round ’em up, and run them into the quarry. And then once we had enough in there, we just sent something down there to set them on fire. I mean, once we got the Roman candles from somebody, that worked better because we didn’t have to sacrifice a drone. We just sat up there and shot Roman candles at them. It was so wild.
And that’s just how it worked.
There were some fires across the West during the war.
Our fire never made it out of that quarry. There were some [obscenity] fires, yeah, but not started by us. So, I mean, yeah, technically we did some arson and the [obscenity] statute of limitations hasn’t run. But our fire never got out of that quarry.
How many zombies did you account for?
Who knows? I don’t [obscenity] know how many zombies we burned up. Thousands, for sure. And, of course, everybody else started getting the idea.
So, you know, that’s our story.
We’d rather not get, like, famous or anything because of the [obscenity] government. Not that I regret it. We did what we had to do. Those zombies were gonna get to our town if we didn’t stop them.