Soldier On: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse by Shawn Chesser

government or they are unmanned presently. The fact that this thing started on a Saturday is both a blessing and a curse.”
    The forty-third President of the United States entered the discussion. “Mr. Bishop, we haven’t met, but if my daddy will vouch for you then you’re all right by me. One question, what is the blessing and what is the curse?”
    Bishop ignored the fact that two questions had been asked of him instead of the purported one. The ex-President had a penchant for double speak and butchering words.
    “First the blessing, since the United States has not been attacked by soldiers on our soil since the Revolutionary War, almost all of the military installations encourage their cadre to live off base, thus leaving very few behind to guard the henhouse. The curse is the fact that most of the civilian population was at home and not at work when the outbreak occurred. It would have been much easier to surround the population centers one by one and exterminate those things. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to conduct the cleanse starting in the suburbs and working into the cities.”
    The former President belted out a wheezing laugh. “Ok. Color me convinced.”

Chapter 9
    Outbreak Day 5
    Camp Williams 19th Special Forces Garrison
    Draper, Utah
     
    The zombies were amassed ten deep when Corporal Litters reanimated. His daughter Becca was front and center when the combined weight brought the fence down on top of him.
    Becca led the procession as hundreds of feet trampled over his supine body. Soon after the throng passed, the newly turned soldier arose and limped after, dragging his shattered leg behind.
    ***
    Major Beeson was forced to up the ante on the dead, initially they were luring the zombies into a slit trench and burning them, now there were too many arriving. There were no longer lulls between the waves of infected. The two heavy dozers they had employed in their earlier attempts to bury and burn the walkers were now being used differently. The dozers had protective cages and were fully armored. They had recently returned from deployment overseas and had been up armored there; the ingenuity of warriors on the battlefield knew no bounds. Most of the vehicles at Camp Williams had also been used in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and were up armored as well.
    The major had no shortage of volunteers to operate the bulldozers. Keeping the fencing clear of undead was fairly straight forward; the dozer operators simply plowed over the infected, the heavy treads churning up the corpses. It was a very messy job, skulls popped, geysers of brain matter spewed forth, arms, legs and chunks of putrid flesh often times clogged the treads.
    Disturbingly the dead were beginning to show some cunning. Increasingly dozer operators had to engage zombies that were able to claw their way onto the tractor, sometimes using other zombies as a means to climb onboard.
    It was Private Hector Vargas idea to cut the slit trenches to slow down the first waves of zombies, and he was also the first to volunteer for dozer duty after that tactic had become ineffective.
    Hector had become a United States citizen when his mom gave birth to him in Laredo, Texas. He spent the next eighteen years in the shadows. His family lived on various ranches and orchards all across the southwest. Working menial jobs for little pay was the norm for people like Hector’s mom and dad who had entered the U.S. illegally in search of a better life. He watched the television whenever he had a chance, the exciting recruitment commercials weren’t lost on the bored youngster. His dream was to see the world. He turned eighteen less than a year ago, that same day he joined the U.S. Army looking forward to combat in a foreign land. The Iraq war slowed down before he completed basic training and to his disappointment he was eventually stationed at Camp Williams. To his chagrin he was nothing but a glorified maintenance man who happened to know how to