The Battle of the Five Colleges

The Battle of the Five Colleges was an improvised defensive victory during the Great Panic, fought by three hundred students who converted Scripps Women’s College into a fortified stronghold and held off ten thousand zombies for four months. Its decisive significance lies in the double life it acquires afterward: first as a desperate local stand achieved with ordinary tools, then as Victory at Avalon, the documentary Roy Elliot made to give a frightened population an image of organized resistance.

Formation of the Stronghold

At the start of the Great Panic, most people were running for the hills, but three hundred students at the five colleges outside Greater Los Angeles chose to remain and make a stand. They turned Scripps Women’s College into something resembling a medieval city. Supplies were gathered from the other campuses, while the defenders armed themselves with a mixture of landscaping tools and ROTC practice rifles. The defense relied on labor as much as weaponry: the students planted gardens, dug wells, and strengthened an already existing wall.

The surrounding conditions made the decision exceptionally dangerous. Mountains burned behind the campus, and the suburbs around it descended into violence. Against that landscape of flight and social collapse, the students built a bounded community capable of producing food, securing water, and concentrating defense. Their position was not presented as the product of advanced military equipment or professional command. Its strength came from collective work, improvised resources, and the conversion of an educational institution into a place of survival.

The Four-Month Defense

The students held off ten thousand zombies over the course of four months, until the Inland Empire could finally be pacified. The scale of the defense made it an extraordinary underdog action: a small body of civilians endured a prolonged siege against a force vastly larger than itself. The account emphasizes duration as much as spectacle. The stand was not a single dramatic clash but a sustained process of maintaining walls, supplies, water, weapons, and morale while the surrounding region burned and broke apart.

The battle also foreshadows the military lessons later associated with the war. At Yonkers, Todd Wainio condemns the decision to keep troops on the ground behind sandbags and in fighting holes, where conventional ideas of cover and concealment proved badly suited to an enemy that could not be frightened or suppressed in the usual way. Later doctrine instead values durable, economical, adaptable systems: the resource-to-kill ratio associated with General Travis D’Ambrosia, the reliable Standard Infantry Rifle, Cherry PIE ammunition that destroys an infected brain without spreading infected matter, and disciplined firing formations that keep a continuous line operating. The students of Scripps do not possess that mature doctrine, but their defense similarly demonstrates that survival depends on adaptation rather than on inherited military assumptions.

Victory at Avalon

Roy Elliot reached the colleges at the end of the siege, traveling with his oldest son for one week on mountain bikes while carrying a DV camera, spare batteries, and a solar-powered charger. He recorded ninety-six hours of raw footage, arriving in time to see the last of the undead fall and the students and soldiers link up beneath an oversized, homemade American flag fluttering from the Pomona bell tower.

Elliot brought the footage home, edited it in his own edit bay, and had his wife provide the narration. He made fourteen copies in different formats and screened them that Saturday night at camps and shelters throughout Los Angeles. He called the film Victory at Avalon: The Battle of the Five Colleges. The title came from stock footage shot by one of the students during the siege, and it gave the defense a legendary shape: a besieged campus recast as Avalon, a fragile island of order surrounded by living death.

The film’s most memorable sequence juxtaposed preparation and beauty with imminent catastrophe. On the night before the final and worst attack, a fresh horde from the east was visible on the horizon while students sharpened weapons, reinforced defenses, and stood watch on the walls and towers. Music played constantly over the campus loudspeaker to sustain morale. Elliot used a Scripps student’s beautiful rendition of a Roxy Music song beneath his montage of preparations for battle, creating a deliberate contrast between the calm, almost sacred quality of the singing and the storm approaching the defenders.

Reception and Reinterpretation

Elliot expected the film to produce immediate cheering, applause, and gratitude. Instead, he judged the first screening a failure. The audience filed past silently with their eyes on the floor, leaving him to abandon his fantasy of being thanked as the person who had shown them a path toward hope. He went home thinking the film might have been merely a nice idea, perhaps useful only as labor for a potato farm in MacArthur Park.

That muted response reveals how far the public remained from the film’s intended emotional conclusion. The battle had ended in victory, but the people watching were still living inside the Great Panic, when a story of survival could feel less like reassurance than an accusation or an unbearable reminder of what had been lost. The documentary’s formal triumph could not automatically become a psychological triumph for its audience.

The Battle’s Afterlife

The battle survives not only as Elliot’s film but through the later identity of one of its defenders. During the long American advance, Todd Wainio encounters his squad leader, remembered from the movie as the tall woman with the ditch blade who sang the song. By then she has burned away her former curves and replaced her long, thick black hair with a crew cut. She is known as Sergeant Avalon, a living transformation of the battle’s public name into a military identity.

Yet the later encounter also strips away the movie’s heroic surface. Sergeant Avalon is a good squad leader, but she never smiles or speaks about herself. When the unit finds a rare turtle in a field, she briefly looks like a child and whispers “Mitakuye Oyasin,” a Lakota expression meaning “all my relations.” Todd learns that she is part Sioux, a part of her identity she had never discussed. Doctor Chandra appears with his familiar offer of coffee, treating her not as an icon but as a soldier who might need ordinary human companionship.

The Battle of the Five Colleges therefore remains both a military episode and a contested act of memory. Its concrete achievement is immense: three hundred students, improvised defenses, four months, and ten thousand zombies held back until relief arrived. Its symbolic achievement is less stable. The homemade flag, the surviving students, the music, and the name Avalon turn the defense into a story of communal courage, while the silent audiences and the hardened Sergeant Avalon insist that no film can restore the innocence or emotional certainty that the war destroyed.