Hawkeye16 said:
Imagine this: Your the president of the USA, and you have just found out that your hometown has been overrun by zombies (fast or slow, your choice). What do you do?
EDIT: in before: nuke the site from orbit.
Call DARPA and tell them to get to work double time on a nerve gas that directly destroys the brain. America's military-industrial complex is absolutely PHENOMENAL. It is extraordinary how quickly they can develop, test an deploy new weapons. They should figure out how to make gas weapons within about 10 days. Look at how quickly they have developed other weapons like the bunker buster of the 1st Gulf War or the Thermobaric grenade for the US-Afghan war.
Air drop hundreds of gas masks and chem suits that residents can use to protect themselves from infection (if airborne) and warn them that a gas attack is coming.
Once the town and surrounding area has been thoroughly gassed, move in to extract any survivors with special forces air dropped to precise points to rally up survivors to specific extraction points to be picked up by helicopter.
Once all the civilians are evacuated, then systematically firebomb the entire area, set fire to the forests, dam or divert the rivers upstream, have helicopters fly over with incendiary ammunition to incinerate everything they don't like the look of from the air. Great thing about everything burning is that it removes most places to hide, no buildings, no trees, no bushes. Just caves. Reinforced structures that don't collapse in fire should be destroyed with JDAMs.
Above all, a "scorched earth" policy destroys all food and water supplies, so then I'd lock the entire region up TIGHT. Surround the entire area with the most trigger happy rednecks who'll shoot anything that comes near, but don't go in yet. Even firebombing and gassing will not kill all of them though the smartest/toughest that do survive will not last long with no food or water, nothing but dry river beds and ash. Treat it like a quarantine, let the virus "burn out" then move in after 40 days to clear up the mess.