The Pandemonium Conflict

The Nature of the War

The fighting began not with a scream but a stare. Scouts caught glimpses of black-eyed children picking through rubbish heaps. Then a dead goat. Then a missing man.

Pandemonium’s first offensive was not an attack. It was a siege of resource denial. They stripped the parkland of foragables and game. They stole tools left unattended, tore up seedlings planted in the new fields, and killed livestock without eating them. This was strategic behavior — dominance assertion drawn from primal instinct and matriarchal protection.

When the survivors set up their first perimeter, the zombies tested it with rocks. When that failed, they came in small coordinated raids. They did not throw themselves at walls — they climbed. They crawled. They waited. They learned, faster than the settlers expected.

Tool-using individuals — likely adolescents — used scavenged poles to push open unlatched windows. One elder male with a frostbitten arm learned to swing a rusted sledge at barricades. They wore clothing in cold rain, vanished in storms, and returned in fog. At least two were believed to wield Vigor, casting simple bursts of concussive force to dislodge defenders from rooftops.

The settlers responded with fire and steel, but these weren’t unfeeling undead. Pandemonium retreated under pressure. They buried their dead. When a young female was shot while protecting an infant, her troop retrieved her body that night under cover of darkness. They didn’t howl — they waited, and the next night, a male set fire to the settler's food store using a broken solar panel and an old torch.

The battle for the hospital complex lasted over three years — from the late 9th to early 13th SE. Not in one continuous fight, but in waves of territorial conflict, resource sabotage, and painstaking urban combat. The survivors adapted. They began studying their enemy — tracking patterns, social bonds, night-call behaviors. Dr. Ilsa Carr and Barrett Averill created the first “Pandemonium Logs,” which would become the foundation of zombie behavioral studies in Camp Hope.

Victory, and the Birth of Camp Hope

Victory came not from a great battle, but from patience, attrition, and understanding. Over the final winter, Pandemonium splintered. A fracture in the matrilineal structure led a third of the troop to migrate west, likely in search of better forage. The rest — either wounded, sickened by rot, or too entrenched to flee — were slowly driven from the hospital block.

The final confrontation occurred in the main surgical wing, where the remaining matriarch and her closest kin had holed up. She refused to flee. She held the hall with fire and stone, flanked by three males. It took a full day to take the ward. When it was done, the hospital was declared secure.

That spring, Gloria Dina Montu Averill was born, the first child of Camp Hope, and the first to be born free from the road since the Fall. Her birth marked the official founding of the camp, dated to the early summer of 13 SE.

Legacy

Pandemonium has never been forgotten. Survivors still speak of the sound of grunt-calls echoing in corridors, or of seeing black eyes in the storm drains. The troop that once defended the ruins of the hospital is now scattered across the region. Some integrated into other zombie troops. Some became solitary predators. But none ever again assembled with the discipline and fury they showed during the Founding War.

Today, Pandemonium is used in stories to teach children caution, and their tactics are still studied by the Town Watch and Doctors alike. What began as chaos ended in order — and Hope.