The following work is for private use only and may not be re-published, all or in part, without express written consent of the publisher.
Copyright 2012 Michael Collado
The day the city of New York allowed the protestor to permanently stay inside Central Park was the day I moved my family out of the city. It was the day we lost. You could control and corral 10,000 or 100,000 protestors if you control the perimeter of any area. But Central Park?! You are looking at over 1/3 the surface area of Manhattan. Even if we took every NYPD and National Guard vehicle and surround the park, the people would be able to burrow in. They could start multiple cities within that park. Those 30,000 people became 100,000 people within a week. I remember when I saw all the “For Sale” signs around the co-ops around the park go up. Property prices started to collapse. When I saw millionaires simply abandoning their park view apartments, I knew it was all over.
The park organized with the kind of speed and efficiency that shocked all of us. Within five days being granted permanent residency, they had an extensive network of food, heating and medical supplies. The park’s population grow exponentially. It became harder and harder to gather intelligence because there was no central leadership. It was as though the protestors where like a human bee colony. Except there was no Queen. Nevertheless, the food and the supplies kept coming —even after the food riots broke out in other parts of the city. We don’t know how they did it at first. Hundreds of pounds of bread, sugar, even meat came in every day. Even back at the FBI office in Manhattan, the food rations where not as plentiful as what was available at the park. That was one of the major reasons we ultimately launch the operation to stop the food supply. It had nothing to do with safety. It was jealousy. They were getting fed well. Law Enforcement agencies and high government officials thought they could simply divert the food supplies back to themselves. Boy, did we fuck that up.
I support what OCP (Occupy Central Park) was doing. But I didn’t join ‘cause I just felt that they would get fucked up by the police pretty quick. But they just kept growing and growing. I would check out what was going and the place became a city. I still didn’t join. Then I lost my job at the Bus Depot. Supermarkets started to run out of food. I got my ENC (Emergency Nutritional Card) and waiting in that fucking line. Always waited in line to find out they ran out of food early. The rich people got all the food they want. The police department got feed. Motherfucking politicians got fed. I ain’t gonna lie to you. I did steal rations from other people. I had to. But that started getting dangerous people, you know, started carrying Glocks and shit out in the open. Police started looking the other way. Then I heard that the folks at OCP has food. So I joined the protest. I go in there and the first thing I smell is fucking beef! I couldn’t get to the center of the park fast enough. They had all the fucking food I could eat. Bread, burgers, ribs, chicken. They had cake! No lie. I volunteered to help cook breakfast because I could eat while I cook! I became a believer. Life was actually pretty good. Then the fucking assault on the park. And all the shit.
I will say this until the day I die, the decision to go into the Park was out of the hands of the Mayor’s office. It was out of the hands of the Governor’s office. This was either a decision on the Federal Government level or the military level. We were barely holding on to law and order in the city. And we knew that if the park fell, the entire city would collapse. We had law enforcement officers abandoning their post. The rich and the wealthy had fled the city. The only people left were the poor and the hungry.
I was ready to do a live report at 3AM, Eastern Standard Time. That was usually the quietest hour of the day at the Park. Everyone slept. Even the National Guard seemed to operate at less than full capability at that hour. As I began my live report, I heard the Blackhawks. Actually, let me clarify that. I felt the Blackhawks. You could not hear the blades but you can feel the wind stirring in the air. I look up and there were about a dozen of them visible against the moonlight. You could see the commandos repelling from the choppers. Then we heard a rumble. The U.S. Army half tracks came in. I swear it appeared that the National Guard didn’t even know what was going on. After that, we lost our feed and the concussion grenades went off. Me and my cameraman, Nick, were instantly knocked to the ground. I knew then, that this was not the end of the occupation, but the beginning of something else. The beginning of a war on the people inside the park.
The concussion grenades woke me up. I was prepared for a “clearing out” or an attack. I knew that if I had a weapon, I would instantly be killed. My goal was to make sure that the law enforcement folks didn’t kill me or start a massacre in the Park. I did what I thought was the best thing to do and simply kneel and hold my hands up in the air.
I look up and see the commandos repelling from the Blackhawks. Right then, I knew this wasn’t law enforcement or SWAT. The last time I checked, SWAT doesn’t have Blackhawks. They sent the fucking military on us! The commandos seemed to know exactly where they were going. It’s then I stood up to get a better look at the situation.
I ran over towards the center of the Park and saw the commandos go after our kitchen. They seized out cooking supplies and formed a circle around it. I was, “Are you serious? This is all about our food?!” I started to laugh at first. Then the realization hit me. Holy fuck! They don’t need to clear us out. They are going to starve us. Immediately, I got really scared. I wanted to talk to these guys. But they wore masked and had weapons pointed in every direction. I knew there was no talking to them. They were just simply, “Following orders.”
The whole fucking night too me by surprised. We were never told of a military operation at the Park. Seizing and stopping the black market food supply was not something we wanted to do. Yes, stopping the food supply was popular rhetoric for the politicians. However, we knew that once you took away the food, the situation in the park would deteriorate immediately. And, at that point, all bets are off the table.
It was a gigantic clusterfuck. No one told us about the operation. We were getting reports that the National Guard and the U.S. Army Rangers had exchanged fire at one point. There was no real order the Mayor could give to the Chief of Police, on the situation besides to maintain order outside of the park perimeter.
It was only about five hours later that the Mayor had a conversation with the Secretary of Defense about the removal of the food supply. The Mayor was irate. He knew right then that Washington had backed him into an unwinnable situation. Washington had no idea how big the population had gotten at the park. Estimates were putting the occupation at one to two million people. You simply could not “get everyone out” safely. And if the Mayor even tried send food into the park, that would only piss off the other residence in the city and give them reason to occupy the park. Not to mention that our public safety officers barely had enough food supply for themselves and almost nothing for their family. We basically had to sit there are simply wait to see what would happen.
When the sun rose, word spread quickly about the commando operation. We started to see a sprinkling of disbursement of people. We all started to feel as though this would be the beginning of the end. We estimated that about 10% of the park had left by noon.
At around 16 hundred hours, the City of New York arrived with food supplies as an “enticement” for people who would vacate the area. A few thousand more left the park. However, by the evening, the disbursement has stopped. That’s when my heart began to sank. About 1.4 million people are going to take their chances, in the park, with no food.
By the afternoon, we started hunting anything that moved, squirrels, pigeons, rats, even fish out of the reservoir. We had to ration out everything very thin. Only women and children ate. Men started eating the leaves off of the trees. We were like locusts. By the third day after our food was taken, we ate everything that could be eating, in the that park. Many people were starting to get sick due to eating diseased plants or animals. By the fourth day, I started to see some desperation.
I had to make a decision here. I could come and go as I please. However, if I showed any evidence, that I ate anything, my cover would have been blown. I would have been in the middle of the park with a million potential hostiles. I had a 9 millimeter but that wouldn’t have gotten me out of the park.
I went for six days without eating solid food. Instead, I started ingesting supplements to ensure that body would not deteriorate to an unhealthy level. However, I started to see women and children starve. Some of the older people, in the park, were beginning to have a serious downturn in their health. By the seventh day, I voluntarily blew my cover.
I was surprised that no one expressed anger or disallusion when they found out my true identity. Instead, they seemed to trust me more. They knew we were all in the same boat. That’s when I started to sneak in and share my meager food supply allotment with three other people. It was at that point, that I started to spiritually side with the occupiers at the park.
We all started to starve a week after the food went away. You started to see people lose lots of weight. Everyone in the park started to get skinny. The kids really started to look bad. The city promised that they would feed the kids but they couldn’t feed the parents. So you had moms and dads make this decision. Do they give up their kids to the city so the kids could eat. Or do they keep the kids and watch them starve. Some gave up their kids. Others didn’t trust the government with their young. That’s when I started to lose my mind. Shit just didn’t make sense anymore. I prayed for God to come down and straighten this shit out.
I started to hallucinate. I had not eaten in four days. I would see these humanoid forms in front of me. I would hear voices in my head. And I would shake. I had never felt this level of hunger and desperation in my life. I kept saying, “Let me out. Let me out.” I wandered around the park for an entire day looking for a way out.
By the early evening, someone had escorted by to the outskirts of the park. I collapsed and a National Guardsmen placed me on a stretcher. They lied me down next to another woman. There were 35 of us. All women. We were all mumbling. The Guardsmen gave us water and an IV feed of nutrients. After an hour or so, I asked someone, “Where are the men?” One of the women answered, “They don’t have enough supplies for them.” I am only alive today because I was a woman. The men were left to fend for their own.
I was so hungry that I started eating the dirt. I didn’t even know where I was anymore. I started seeing things at night. It look like there were ghosts among the trees. Then on, day nine after we lost our food, I went crazy. I started running through the trees. I just kept running and running. I finally emerged from the park where a National Guardsmen shot me with a rubber bullet. Because they shot me, they had to take me to a medical tent. I got an IV. I got water. I was never so happy to have been shot in my life.
We started to see these dangerously skinny people emerging from the Park. It shook me. Whenever we saw a woman or a child, we would give them our food and out water. We couldn’t do that to the men. We simply needed to feed ourselves. But I never saw such starvation in the flesh. It looked like something out of the Holocaust films you see in the History Channel. I really wondered if I would be persecuted for War Crimes when this was over. I did know that God was going to punish all of us.
The condition of the people emerging from the park was horrific. It was something I thought I would never see on American soil. We were all hungry. We all had on loose clothes. But these people are on the edge of death. It scared me because I felt that this was going to be my fate within a few weeks. If you were not rich, if you were not connected, you were not eating well. And if you were in that park, we were not eating at all.
By the ninth day, people began to drop dead. We would take the bodies and try our best to bury them. But we were all too weak. The bodies started to rot and smell. By the early evening, one of the many people who had lost their mind, grabbed one of the corpses. He looked down at it. He bit down on the side of the dead man’s side. We tried to push him away. He growled at us. His mouth was filled with the blood, tissue and meat of the dead man. He began to drag the body off like a wild animal. He disappeared into the trees with the corpse. My blood ran cold. That’s when I realized I had to get out of that park.
Everything was calm until the tenth night after the food was confiscated. That was the night the giant bonfire started in the middle of the park. We saw black smoke. Then we heard the screaming and the chanting. We had no idea what the fuck was going on in their. It was the sound of hundreds of thousands of people turning into savages. They began to lose their minds.
By 3AM that night, we began to smell burning flesh. The stench was horrible. The mass of humans inside the park were screaming and chanting and yelling. A chill came across all of us around the park. It was then we knew that the people inside the park began to resort to cannibalism.
I looked down at the middle of the park. They had set up a massive bonfire. Hundreds of thousands of people began to walk around the fire. They were dancing and chanting like savages. Then I saw a parade of men carrying corpses close to the fire. I thought they were going to simply burn the dead bodies. Then I saw the men lie the corpses next to the fire and open up the bellies. They ripped out the meat and began to cook it. They passed out the meat to the people who began to stir into a frenzy. My heart nearly stopped. I could not believe what I was watching. Even through I was four hundred feet above the park, I feared for my life.
We got confirmation that the people inside the park were eating the corpses. All of us just looked at each other. It went unsaid. But we all felt the same way. We had to go into that park and kill each and every one of those people. Every last one. These people are no longer human. They have become something so frightening and so damaged that they would never be able to function in any society.
We no longer say sick and skinny people leaving the park. That next day, after the bonfire, no one came out. But the chants continued. The screaming was intense. They did not let up. Let me tell you something, I have reported from the worst war zones on the planet. And I had never been so scared in my life. In a war zone, you could understand the danger. In that park, we really didn’t know what was going on. This was an unknown fear that froze the blood in my veins.
The stench of the cooking flesh made us realize that we were no longer in an American city or in a protest area. We are in a war zone. Everyone took the safety off their weapons. We were all ready for anything to happen.
After dark, you could sense that the people inside of the park were watching us. I put on the night vision goggles and saw thousands of eyes staring at me. When I patrolled the perimeter of the Park, you could see an endless array of eyes. They were silent. But they were watching. I knew that these people were no longer the scared, hungry masses. In effect, they were the hunters and we were the prey.
It was the morning of DAY ZERO. Of course, none of us knew it would be Day Zero. But we knew about the cannibalism in the park. We knew about the strange behavior. But the overall calm in the park told made us feel that this would be any other day.
I went over to City Hall. The Mayor got his daily briefing about the situation at the current situation at the park. And then we went over to Lincoln Center to meet with neighborhood leaders. The Mayor seemed to be almost resigned to the fact that the situation was out of his hands. He really just wanted to finish his term and have his reputation intact. The thing is, we were all working for food right now. And the Mayor just wanted to keep all the powers that be happy so he could still have his political connections which was the only real access to food, energy, and security.
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.