world war z 1

Henry Michael Brooks, who makes me want to change the world
INTRODUCTION
It goes by many names: "The Crisis," "The Dark Years," "The Walking Plague,"
as well as newer and more "hip" Titles such as "World War Z" or "Z War One." I
personally dislike this last moniker as it implies an inevitable "Z War Two." For
me, it will always be "The Zombie War," and while many may protest the
scientific accuracy of the word sombre, they will be hard-pressed to discover a
more globally accepted term for the creatures that almost caused our extinction.
Zombie
remains a devastating word, unrivaled in its power to conjure up so many
memories or emotions, and it is these memories, and emotions, that are the subject
of this book.
This record of the greatest conflict in human history owes its genesis to a
much smaller, much more personal conflict between me and the chairperson of the
United Nation's Postwar Commission Report. My initial work for the Commission
could be described as nothing short of a labor of love. My travel stipend, my
security access, my battery of translators, both human and electronic, as well as
my small, but nearly priceless voice-activated transcription "pal" (the greatest gift
the world's slowest typist could ask for), all spoke to the respect and value my
work was afforded on this project. So, needless to say, it came as a shock when I
found almost half of that work deleted from the report's final edition.
"It was all too intimate," the chairperson said during one of our many "animated"
discussions. "Too many opinions, too many feelings. That's not what this report is
about. We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the human factor." Of
course, she was right. The official report was a collection of cold, hard data, an
objective "after-action report" that would allow future generations to study the
events of that apocalyptic decade without
2       MAX BROOKS
being influenced by "the human factor." But isn't the human factor what connects
us so deeply to our past' Will future generations care as much for chronologies and
casualty statistics as they would for the personal accounts of individuals not so
different from themselves? By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the
kind of personal detachment from a history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one
day to repeat it' And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference
between us and the enemy we now refer to as "the living dead"? I presented this
argument, perhaps less professionally than was appropriate, to my "boss," who
after my final exclamation of "we can't let these stories die" responded
immediately with, "Then don't. Write a book. You've still got all your notes, and
the legal
freedom to use them. Who's stopping you from keeping these stories alive in the
pages of your own (expletive deleted) book?"
Some critics will, no doubt, take issue with the concept of a personal history book
so soon after the end of worldwide hostilities. After all, it has been only twelve
years since VA Day was declared in the continental United States, and barely a
decade since the last major world power celebrated its deliverance on "Victory in
China Day." Given that most people consider VC Day to be the official end, then
how can we have real perspective when, in the words of a UN colleague, "We've
been at peace about as long as we were at war." This is a valid argument, and one
that begs a response. In the case of this generation, those who have fought and
suffered to win us this decade of peace, time is as much an enemy as it is an ally.
Yes, the coming years will provide hindsight, adding greater wisdom to memories
seen through the light of a matured, postwar world. But many of those memories
may no longer exist, trapped in bodies and spirits too damaged or infirm to see the
fruits of their victory harvested. It is no great secret that global lite expectancy is a
mere shadow of its former prewar figure. Malnutrition, pollution, the rise of
previously eradicated ailments, even in the United States, with its resurgent
economy and universal health care are the present reality; there simply are not
enough resources to care for all the physical and psychological casualties. It is
because of this enemy, the enemy of time, that I have forsaken the luxury of
hindsight and published these survivors' accounts. Perhaps decades from now,
someone
will cake up the Task
o{
recording the recollections of the much older, much wiser
survivors. Perhaps I might even be one of them.
Although this is primarily a book of memories, it includes many of the details,
technological, social, economic, and so on, found in the original Commission
Report, as they are related to the stories of those voices fea-tured in these pages.
This is their book, not mine, and I have tried to main-tain as invisible a presence as
possible. Those questions included in the text are only there to illustrate those that
might have been posed by readers. I have attempted to reserve judgment, or
commentary of any kind, and if there is a human factor that should be removed, let
it be my own.
WARNINGS
GREATER CHONGQING, THE UNITED FEDERATION OF CHINA
[At its prewar height, this region boasted a population of over thirty-five million people.
Now, there are barely fifty thousand. Reconstruction funds have been slow to arrive in
this part of the country, the government choosing to concentrate on the more densely
populated coast. There is no central power grid, no running water besides the Yangtze
River. But the streets are clear of rubble and the local "security council" has prevented
any postwar outbreaks. The chairman of that council is Kwang Jing-shu, a medical
doctor who, despite his advanced age and wartime injuries, still manages to make house
calls to all his patients.)
The first outbreak I saw was in a remote village that officially had no name. The
residents called it "New Dachang," but this was more out of nostalgia than
anything else. Their former home, "Old Dachang," had stood since the period of
the Three Kingdoms, with farms and houses and
WORLD WAR Z         5
even trees said to be centuries old. When the Three Gorges Dam was com' pleted,
and reservoir waters began to rise, much of Dachang had been disassembled, brick
by brick, then rebuilt on higher ground. This New Dachang, however, was not a
town anymore, but a "national historic museum." It must have been a
heartbreaking irony for those poor peasants, to see their town saved but then only
being able to visit it as a tourist. Maybe that is why some of them chose to name
their newly constructed hamlet "New Dachang" to preserve some connection to
their heritage, even if it was only in name. I personally didn't know that this other
New Dachang ex-isted, so you can imagine how confused I was when the call
came in.
The hospital was quiet; it had been a slow night, even for the increasing number of
drunk-driving accidents. Motorcycles were becoming very popular. We used to
say that your Harley-Davidsons killed more young Chi-
nese than all the GIs in the Korean War. That's why I was so grateful for a quiet
shift. I was tired, my back and feet ached. I was on my way out to smoke a
cigarette and watch the dawn when I heard my name being paged. The receptionist
that night was new and couldn't quite understand the di-alect. There had been an
accident, or an illness. It was an emergency, that part was obvious, and could we
please send help at once.
What could I say? The younger doctors, the kids who think medicine is just a way
to pad their bank accounts, they certainly weren't going to go help some
"nongmin" just for the sake of helping. I guess I'm still an old revolutionary at
heart. "Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people." Those words still
mean something to me . . . and I tried to remember that as my Deer bounced and
banged over dirt roads the government had promised but never quite gotten around
to paving.
I had a devil of a time finding the place. Officially, it didn't exist and therefore
wasn't on any map. I became lost several times and had to ask directions from
locals who kept thinking I meant the museum town. I was in an impatient mood by
the time I reached the small collection of hilltop
1.   From "Quotations from Chairman Maozedong," originally from "The Situation and
Our Policy After the Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan." August 13,1945.
2.   A prewar automobile manufactured in the People's Republic.
6       MAX BROOKS
homes. I remember thinking,
This ixad better be damned serious.
Once I saw their
faces, I regretted my wish.
There were seven of them, all on cots, all barely conscious. The villagers had
moved them into their new communal meeting hall. The walls and floor were bare
cement. The air was cold and damp.
Of course they're sick,
I thought. I asked the
villagers who had been taking care of these people. They said no one, it wasn't
"safe." I noticed that the door had been locked from the outside. The villagers
were clearly terrified. They cringed and whispered; some kept their distance and
prayed. Their behavior made me angry, not at them, you understand, not as
individuals, but what they represented about our country. After centuries of
foreign oppression, exploitation, and humiliation, we were finally reclaiming our
rightful place as humanity's middle kingdom. We were the world's richest and
most dynamic superpower, masters of everything from outer space to cyber space.
It was the dawn of what the world was finally acknowledging as "The Chinese
Century" and yet so many of us still lived like these ignorant peasants, as stagnant
and superstitious as die earliest Yangshao savages.
I was still lost in my grand, cultural criticism when I knelt to examine the first
patient. She was running a high fever, forty degrees centigrade, and she was
shivering violently. Barely coherent, she whimpered slightly when I tried to move
her limbs. There was a wound in her right forearm, a bite mark. As I examined it
more closely, I realized that it wasn't from an animal. The bite radius and teeth
marks had to have come from a small, or possibly young, human being. Although
I hypothesized this to be the
source of the infection, the actual injury was surprisingly clean. I asked the
villagers, again, who had been taking care of these people. Again, they told me no
one. I knew this could not be true. The human mouth is packed with bacteria, even
more so than the most unhygienic dog. If no one had cleaned this woman's wound,
why wasn't it throbbing with infection:
I examined the six other patients. All showed similar symptoms, all had similar
wounds on various parts of their bodies. I asked one man, the most lucid of the
group, who or what had inflicted these injuries. He told me it had happened when
they had tried to subdue "him."
"Who?" I asked.
WORLD WAR Z         7
I found "Patient Zero" behind the locked door
of
an abandoned house across town.
He was twelve years old. His wrists and feet were bound with plastic packing
twine. Although he'd rubbed off the skin around his bonds, there was no blood.
There was also no blood on his other wounds, not on the gouges on his legs or
arms, or from the large dry gap where his right big toe had been. He was writhing
like an animal; a gag muffled his growls.
At first the villagers tried to hold me back. They warned me not to touch
him, chat he was "cursed." I shrugged them off and reached for my mask and
gloves. The boy's skin was as cold and gray as the cement on which he lay. I could
find neither his heartbeat nor his pulse. His eyes were wild, wide and sunken back
in their sockets. They remained locked on me like a predatory beast. Throughout
the examination he was inexplicably hostile, reaching for me with his bound hands
and snapping at me through his gag.
His movements were so violent I had to call for two of the largest villagers to help
me hold him down. Initially they wouldn't budge, cowering in the doorway like
baby rabbits. I explained that there was no risk of infection if they used gloves and
masks. When they shook their heads, I made it an order, even though I had no
lawful authority to do so.
That was all it took. The two oxen knelt beside me. One held the boy's feet while
the other grasped his hands. I tried to take a blood sample and instead extracted
only brown, viscous matter. As I was withdrawing the needle, the boy began
another bout of violent struggling.
One of my "orderlies," the one responsible for his arms, gave up trying to hold
them and thought it might safer if he just braced them against the floor with his
knees. But the boy jerked again and I heard his left arm snap. Jagged ends of both
radius and ulna bones stabbed through his gray flesh. Although the boy didn't cry
out, didn't even seem to notice, it was enough for both assistants to leap back and
run from the room.
I instinctively retreated several paces myself. I am embarrassed to admit this; 1
have been a doctor for most
o{
my adult lite. I was trained and . . . you could even
say "raised" by the People's Liberation Army. I've treated more than my share of
combat injuries, faced my own death on more than
one occasion, and now I was scared, truly scared, of this frail child.
8       MAX BROOKS
The boy began
to
twist in my direction, his arm ripped completely tree. Flesh and
muscle tore from one another until there was nothing except the stump. His now
free right arm, still tied to the severed left hand, dragged his body across the floor.
I hurried outside, locking the door behind me. I tried to compose myself, control
my fear and shame. My voice still cracked as I asked the villagers how the boy had
been infected. No one answered. I began to hear banging on the door, the boy's fist
pounding weakly against the thin wood. It was all I could do not to jump at the
sound. I prayed they would not notice the color draining from my face. I shouted,
as much from fear as frustration, that I
had
to know what happened to this child.
A young woman came forward, maybe his mother. You could tell that she had
been crying for days; her eyes were dry and deeply red. She admitted that it had
happened when the boy and his father were "moon fishing," a term that describes
diving for treasure among the sunken ruins of the Three Gorges Reservoir. With
more than eleven hundred abandoned villages, towns, and even cities, there was
always the hope
of
recovering
something valuable. It was a very common practice in those days, and also very
illegal. She explained that they weren't looting, that it was their own village, Old
Dachang, and they were just trying to recover some heirlooms from the remaining
houses that hadn't been moved. She repeated the point, and I had to interrupt her
with promises not to inform the police. She finally explained that the boy came up
crying with a bite mark on his foot. He didn't know what had happened, the water
had been too dark and muddy. His father was never seen again.
I reached for my cell phone and dialed the number of Doctor Gu Wen Kuei, an old
comrade from my army days who now worked at the Institute of Infectious
Diseases at Chongqing University." We exchanged pleasantries, discussing our
health, our grandchildren; it was only proper. I then told him about the outbreak
and listened as he made some joke about the
3. The Institute of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases of the First Affiliated Hospital.
Chongqing Medical University.
WORLD WAR Z        9 hygiene habits of

hillbillies. I tried to chuckle along but
continued that I
Thought the incident might be significant. Almost reluctantly he asked me what
the symptoms were. I told him everything: the bites, the fever, the boy, the arm . . .
his face suddenly stiffened. His smile died.
He asked me To show him the infected. I went back into the meeting hall and
waved the phone's camera over each of the patients. He asked me to move the
camera closer to some of the wounds themselves. I did so and when I brought the
screen back to my face, I saw that his video image had been cut.
"Stay where you are," he said, just a distant, removed voice now. "Take the names
of all who have had contact with the infected. Restrain those already infected. If
any have passed into coma, vacate the room and secure the exit." His voice was
flat, robotic, as if he had rehearsed diis speech or was reading from something. He
asked me, "Are you armed?" "Why would I be?" I asked. He told me he would get
back to me, all business again. He said he had to make a few calls and that I
should expect "support" within several hours.
They were there in less than one, fifty men in large army Z-8A helicopters; all
were wearing hazardous materials suits. They said they were from the Ministry of
Health. I don't know who they thought they were kidding. With their bullying
swagger, their intimidating arrogance, even diese backwater bumpkins could
recognize the Guoanbu.
Their first priority was the meeting hall. The patients were carried out on
stretchers, their limbs shackled, their mouths gagged. Next, they went for the boy.
He came out in a body bag. His mother was wailing as she and the rest of the
village were rounded up for "examinations." Their names
were taken, their blood drawn. One by one they were stripped and photographed.
The last one to be exposed was a withered old woman. She had a thin, crooked
body, a face with a thousand lines and tiny feet that had to have been bound when
she was a girl. She was shaking her bony fist at the
4-  Guokia Anquan Bu: The prewar Ministry of State Security.
10       MAX BROOKS
"doctors." "This is your punishment!" she shouted. "This is revenge for Fengdu!"
She was referring to the City of Ghosts, whose temples and shrines were dedicated
to the underworld. Like Old Dachang, it had been an unlucky obstacle to China's
next Great Leap Forward. It had been evacuated, then demolished, then almost
entirely drowned. I've never been a superstitious person and I've never allowed
myself to be hooked on the opiate of the people. I'm a doctor, a scientist. I believe
only in what I can see and touch. I've never seen Fengdu as anything but a cheap,
kitschy tourist trap. Of course this ancient crone's words had no effect on me, but
her tone, her
anger . . . she had witnessed enough calamity in her years upon the earth: the
warlords, die Japanese, the insane nightmare of the Cultural Revolution . . . she
knew that another storm was coming, even if she didn't have the education to
understand it.
My colleague Dr. Kuei had understood all too well. He'd even risked his neck to
warn me, to give me enough time to call and maybe alert a few others before the
"Ministry of Health" arrived. It was something he had said ... a phrase he hadn't
used in a very long time, not since those "minor" border clashes with the Soviet
Union. That was back in 1969. We had been in an earthen bunker on our side of
the Ussuri, less than a kilometer downriver from Chen Bao. The Russians were
preparing to retake the island, their massive artillery hammering our forces.
Gu and 1 had been trying to remove shrapnel from the belly of this soh dier not
much younger than us. The boy's lower intestines had been torn open, his blood
and excrement were all over our gowns. Every seven seconds a round would land
close by and we would have to bend over his body to shield the wound from
falling earth, and every time we would be close enough to hear him whimper
softly for his mother. There were other voices, too, rising from the pitch darkness
just beyond the entrance to our bunker, desperate, angry voices that weren't
supposed to be on our side of the river. We had two infantrymen stationed at the
bunker's entrance. One of them shouted "Spetsnaz!" and started firing into the
dark. We could hear other shots now as well, ours or theirs, we couldn't tell.
Another round hie and we bent over the dying hoy. Gu's face was only a few
centimeters from mine. There was sweat pouring down his forehead. Even in the
dim light of one paraffin lantern, I could see that he was shaking and pale. He
looked at the patient, then at the doorway, then at me, and suddenly he said, "Don't
worry, everything's going to he all right." Now, this is a man who has never said a
positive thing in his life. Gu was a worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If he had a
headache, it was a brain tumor; if it looked like rain, this year's harvest was ruined.
This was his way of controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always
coming out ahead. Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalistic
predictions, he had no choice but to turn tail and charge in the opposite direction.
"Don't worry, everything's going to be all right." For the first time every-thing
turned out as he predicted. The Russians never crossed the river and we even
managed
to
save our patient.
For years afterward I would tease him about what it took to pry out a little ray of
sunshine, and he would always respond that it would take a hell of a lot worse to
get him to do it again. Now we were old men, and something worse was about to
happen. It was right after he asked me if I was armed. "No," I said, "why should I
be?" There was a brief silence, I'm sure other ears were listening. "Don't worry,"
he said, "everything's going to be all right." That was when I realized that this was
not an isolated outbreak. I ended the call and quickly placed another to my
daughter in Guangzhou.
Her husband worked for China Telecom and spent at least one week of even'
month abroad. I told her it would be a good idea to accompany him
the next time he left and that she should take my granddaughter and stay for as
long as they could. I didn't have time to explain; my signal was jammed just as the
first helicopter appeared. The last thing I managed to say to her was "Don't worry,
everything's going to be all right."
IKwang Jingshu was arrested by the MSS and incarcerated without formal charges. By
the time he escaped, the outbreak had spread beyond China's borders.]
I 2       MAX BROOKS
LHASA, THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF TIBET
[The world's most populous city is still recovering from the results of last week's general
election. The Social Democrats have smashed the Llamist Party in a landslide victory
and the streets are still roaring  with  revelers. I  meet Nury  Televaldi  at  a
crowded sidewalk cafe. We have to shout over the euphoric din.]
Before the outbreak started, overland smuggling was never popular. To arrange for
the passports, the fake tour buses, the contacts and protection on the other side all
took a lot of money. Back then, the only two lucrative routes were into Thailand or
Myanmar. Where I used to live, in Kashi, the only option was into the ex-Soviet
republics. No one wanted to go there, and that is why I wasn't initially a shetou. I
was an importer: raw opium, uncut diamonds, girls, boys, whatever was valuable
from those primitive excuses for countries. The outbreak changed all that.
Suddenly we were besieged with offers, and not just from the liudong renkou, but
also, as you say, from people on the up-and-up. I had urban professionals, private
farm-ers, even low-level government officials. These were people who had a lot to
lose. They didn't care where they were going, they just needed to get out.
Did you know what they were fleeing?
We'd heard the rumors. We'd even had an outbreak somewhere in Kashi. The
government had hushed it up pretty quickly. But we guessed, we knew something
was wrong.
1.   Shetou: A "snake head," the smuggler of "renshe" or "human snake" of refugees.
2.   Liudong renkou: China's "floating population" of homeless labor.
Didn't the government try to shut you down?
Officially they did. Penalties on smuggling were hardened; border check' points
were strengthened. They even executed a few shetou, publicly, just to make an
example. If you didn't know the true story, if you didn't know it from my end,
you'd think it was an efficient crackdown.
You're saying it wasn't?
I'm saying I made a lot of people rich: border guards, bureaucrats, police, even the
mayor. These were still good times for China, where the best way to honor
Chairman Mao's memory was to see his face on as many hundred yuan notes as
possible.
You

world war z 1.5

were that successful.
Kashi was a boomtown. I think 90 percent, maybe more, of all westbound,
overland traffic came through with even a little left over for air travel.
Air travel?
Just a little. I only dabbled in transporting renshe by air, a few cargo flights now
and then to Kazakhstan or Russia. Small-time jobs. It wasn't like the east, where
Guangdong or Jiangsu were getting thousands of people out every week.
Could you elaborate?
Air smuggling became big business in the eastern provinces. These were rich
clients, the ones who could afford prebooked travel packages and first' class tourist
visas. They would step off the plane at London or Rome, or even San Francisco,
check into their hotels, go out for a day's sightseeing, and simply vanish into thin
air. That was big money. I'd always wanted to break into air transport.
I 4       MAX BROOKS
But what about infection? Wasn't there a risk of being discovered?
That was only later, after Flight 575. Initially there weren't too many infected
taking these flights. If they did, they were in the very early stages. Air transport
shetou were very careful. If you showed any signs of advanced infection, they
wouldn't go near you. They were out to protect their busi' ness. The golden rule
was, you couldn't fool foreign immigration officials until you fooled your shetou
first. You had to look and act completely healthy, and even then, it was always a
race against time. Before Flight 575,
I heard this one story about a couple, a very well-to-do businessman and his wife.
He had been bitten. Not a serious one, you understand, but one of the "slow
burns," where all the major blood vessels are missed. I'm sure they thought there
was a cure in the West, a lot of the infected did. Apparently, they reached their
hotel room in Paris just as he began to collapse. His wife tried to call the doctor,
but he forbade it. He was afraid diey would be sent back. Instead, he ordered her to
abandon him, to leave now before he lapsed into coma. I hear that she did, and
after two days of groans and commotion, the hotel start finally ignored the DO
NOT DISTURB sign and broke into the room. I'm not sure if that is how the Paris
outbreak started, though it would make sense.
You say they didn't call for a doctor, that they were afraid they'd be sent back, but
then why try to find a cure in the West?
You really don't understand a refugee's heart, do you? These people were
desperate. They were trapped between their infections and being rounded up and
"treated" by their own government. If you had a loved one, a family member, a
child, who was infected, and you thought there was a shred of hope in some other
country, wouldn't you do even-thing in your power to get there? Wouldn't you
want to believe there was hope?
You said that man's wife, along with the other renshe, vanished into thin air.
It has always been this way, even before the outbreaks. Some stay with family,
some with friends. Many of the poorer ones had to work off their
bao to the local Chinese mafia. The majority of them simply melted into the host
country's underbelly.
The low-income areas?
If that's what you want to call them. What better place to hide than among that part
of society that no one else even wants to acknowledge. How else could so many
outbreaks have started in so many First World ghettos?
It's been said that many shetou propagated the myth of a miracle cure in other
countries.
Some.
Di d you ?
[Pause.1
No,
[Another pause.]
How did Flight 575 change air smuggling?
Restrictions were tightened, but only in certain countries. Airline shetou
were careful but they were also resourceful. They used to have this saying,
"even- rich mans house has a servant's entrance."
What does that mean?
If western Europe has increased its security, go through eastern Europe. If the U.S.
won't let you in, go through Mexico. I'm sure it helped make the
3.  Bao: The debt many refugees incurred during their exodus.
I 6       MAX BROOKS
rich white countries feel safer, even though they had infestations already bubbling
within their borders. This is not my area of expertise, you remember, I was
primarily land transport, and my target countries were in central Asia.
Were they easier to enter?
They practically begged us for the business. Those countries were in such
economic shambles, their officials were so backward and corrupt, they ac-
tually helped us with the paperwork in exchange for a percentage of our fee. There
were even shetou, or whatever they called them in their barbarian babble, who
worked with us to get renshe across the old Soviet republics into countries like
India or Russia, even Iran, although I never asked or wanted to know where any of
the renshe were going. My job ended at the border. Just get their papers stamped,
their vehicles tagged, pay the guards off, and take my cut.
Did you see many infected?
Not in the beginning. The blight worked too fast. It wasn't like air travel. It might
take weeks to reach Kashi, and even the slowest of burns, I've been told, couldn't
last longer than a few days. Infected clients usually reanimated somewhere on the
road, where they would be recognized and collected by the local police. Later, as
the infestations multiplied and the police became overwhelmed, I began to see a
lot of infected on my route.
Were they dangerous?
Rarely. Their family usually had them bound and gagged. You'd see something
moving in the back of a car, squirming softly under clothing or heavy blankets.
You'd hear banging from a car's boot, or, later, from crates with airholes in the
backs of vans. Airholes . . . they really didn't know what was happening to their
loved ones.
Di d you ?
By then, yes, but I knew trying to explain it to them would be a hopeless cause. I
just took their money and sent them on their way. I was lucky. I never had to deal
with the problems of sea smuggling.
That was more difficult?
And dangerous. My associates from the coastal provinces were the ones who had
to contend with the possibility of an infected breaking its bonds
and contaminating the entire hold.
What did they do?
I've heard of various "solutions." Sometimes ships would pull up to a stretch of
deserted coast-it didn't matter if it was the intended country, it could have been
any coast-and "unload" the infected renshe onto the beach. I've heard of some
captains making for an empty stretch of open sea and just tossing the whole
writhing lot overboard. That might explain the early cases of swimmers and divers
starting to disappear without a trace, or why you'd hear of people all around the
world saying they saw them walking out of the surf. At least I never had to deal
with that.
I did have one similar incident, the one that convinced me it was time to quit.
There was this truck, a beat-up old jalopy. You could hear the moans from the
trailer. A lot of fists were slamming against the aluminum. It was actually swaying
back and forth. In the cab there was a very wealthy investment banker from Xi'an.
He'd made a lot of money buying up Amer-
ican credit card debt. He had enough to pay for his entire extended family. The
man's Armani suit was rumpled and torn. There were scratch marks down the side
of his face, and his eyes had that frantic fire I was starting to see more of every
day. The driver's eyes had a different look, the same one as me, the look that
maybe money wasn't going to be much good for much longer. I slipped the man an
extra fifty and wished him luck. That was all 1
COLlld do.
18       MAX BROOKS
Where was the truck headed?
Kyrgyzstan.
METEORA, GREECE
[The monasteiies are built into the steep, inaccessible rocks, some buildings sitting
perched atop high, almost vertical columns. While originally an attractive refuge from the
Ottoman Turks, it later proved just as secure from the living dead. Postwar staircases,
mostly metal or wood, and all easily retractable, cater to the growing influx of both pilgrims
and tourists. Mete-ora has become a popular destination for both groups in recent years.
Some seek wisdom and spiritual enlightenment, some simply search for peace. Stanley
MacDonald is one of the latter. A veteran of almost every campaign across the expanse oi his
native Canada, he first encountered the living dead during a different war, when the Third
Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry was involved in drug interdiction
operations in Kyrgyzstan]
Please don't confuse us with the American "Alpha teams." This was long before
their deployment, before "the Panic," before the Israeli self-quarantine . . . this was
even before the first major public outbreak in Cape Town. This was just at the
beginning of the spread, before anybody knew anything about what was coming.
Our mission was strictly conventional, opium and hash, die primary export crop of
terrorists around the world. That's all we'd ever encountered in that rocky
wasteland. Traders and thugs and locally hired muscle. That's all we expected.
That's all we were ready for.
The cave entrance was easy to find. We'd tracked it back from the blood trail
leading to the caravan. Right away we knew something was wrong. There were no
bodies. Rival tribes always left their victims laid out and mutilated as a warning to
odiers. There was plenty of blood, blood and bits of brown rotting flesh, but the
only corpses we found were the pack mules. They'd been brought down, not shot,
by what looked like wild animals. Their bellies were torn out and large bite
wounds covered their flesh. We guessed it had to be wild dogs. Packs of those
damn things roamed the valleys, big and nasty as Arctic wolves.
What was most puzzling was the cargo, still in their saddlebags, or just scattered
about the bodies. Now, even if this wasn't a territorial hit, even if it was a religious
or tribal revenge killing, no one just abandons fifty kilos of prime, raw, Bad
Brown, or perfectly good assault rifles, or expensive personal trophies like
watches, mini disc players, and GPS locaters.
The blood trail led up the mountain path from the massacre in the wadi. A lot of
blood. Anyone who lost that much wouldn't be getting up again. Only somehow he
did. He hadn't been treated. There were no other track marks. From what we could
tell, this man had run, bled, fallen facedown- we still could see his bloody face-
mark imprinted in the sand. Somehow, without suffocating, without bleeding to
death, he'd lain there for some time, then just gotten up again and started walking.
These new tracks were very different from the old. They were slower, closer
together. His right foot was dragging, clearly why he'd lost his shoe, an old, worn-
out Nike high-top. The drag marks were sprinkled with fluid. Not blood, not
human,
but droplets of hard, black, crusted ooze that none of us recognized. We followed
these and the drag marks to the entrance of the cave.
There was no opening fire, no reception of any kind. We found the tunnel entrance
unguarded and wide open. Immediately we began to see bodies,
men killed by their own booby traps. They looked like they'd been trying . . .
running ... to get out.
Beyond them, in the first chamber, we saw our first evidence of a
1.  Bad Brown: A nickname for the type of opium grown in the Badakhshan
Province of Afghanistan.
20       MAX BROOKS
one-sided firefight, one-sided because only one wall of the cavern was
pockmarked by small arms. Opposite that wall were the shooters. They'd been torn
apart. Their limbs, their bones, shredded and gnawed . . . some still clutching their
weapons, one of those severed hands with an old Makarov still in the grip. The
hand was missing a finger. I found it across the room, along with the body of
another unarmed man who'd been hit over a hundred times. Several rounds had
taken die top of his head off. The finger was still stuck between his teeth.
Every chamber told a similar story. We found smashed barricades, discarded
weapons. We found more bodies, or pieces of them. Only the intact ones died
from head shots. We found meat, chewed, pulped flesh bulging from their throats
and stomachs. You could see by the blood trails, the footprints, the shell casings,
and pock marks that the entire battle had originated from the infirmary.
We discovered several cots, all bloody. At the end of the room we found a
headless . . . I'm guessing, doctor, lying on die dirt floor next to a cot with soiled
sheets and clothes and an old, left-footed, worn-out Nike high-top.
The last tunnel we checked had collapsed from the use of a booby-trapped
demolition charge. A hand was sticking out of the limestone. It was still moving. I
reacted from the gut, leaned forward, grabbed the hand, felt that grip. Like steel,
almost crushed my fingers. I pulled back, tried to get away. It wouldn't let me go. I
pulled harder, dug my feet in. First the arm came free, then the head, the torn face,
wide eyes and gray lips, then the other hand, grabbing my arm and squeezing, then
came the shoulders. I fell back, the things top half coming with me. The waist
down was still jammed under the rocks, still connected to the upper torso by a line
of entrails. It was still moving, still clawing me, trying to pull my arm into its
mouth. I reached for my weapon.
The burst was angled upward, connecting just under and behind the chin and
spraying its brains across die ceiling above us. Pd been the only one in the tunnel
when it happened. I was the only witness . . .
[He pauses.]
"Exposure to unknown chemical agents." That's what they told me back in
Edmonton, that or an adverse reaction to our own prophylactic medication. They
threw in a healthy dose of PTSD for good measure. I just needed rest, rest and
long-term "evaluation" . . .
"Evaluation" . . . that's what happens when it's your own side. It's only
"interrogation" when it's die enemy. They teach you how to resist the enemy, how
to protect your mind and spirit. They don't teach you how to resist your own
people, especially people who think they're trying to "help" you see "the truth."
They didn't break me, I broke myself. I wanted to believe them and I wanted them
to help me. I was a good soldier, well trained, experienced; I knew what I could do
to my fellow human beings and what they could do to me. I thought I was ready
for anything. [He looks out at the valley, his eyes unfocused.] Who in his right
mind could have been readv for this?
THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST, BRAZIL
EI arrive blindfolded, so as not to reveal my "hosts'" location. Outsiders call them the Ya
noma mi, "The Fierce People," and it is unknown whether this supposedly warlike nature
or the fact that their new village hangs suspended from the tallest trees was what
allowed them to weather the crisis as well, if not bet-
ter, than even the most industrialized nation. It is not dear whether Fernando Oliveira,
the emaciated, drug-addicted white man "from the edge of the world," is their guest,
mascot, or prisoner.]
I was sTill a doctor, that's what I told myself. Yes, I was rich, and getting richer all
the time, but at least my success came from performing necessary
2. PTSD; Pest-traumatic stress disorder.
22       MAX BROOKS
medical procedures. I wasn't just slicing and dicing little teenage noses or sewing
Sudanese "pintos" onto sheboy pop divas. I was still a doctor, I was still helping
people, and if it was so "immoral" to the self-righteous, hypocritical North, why
did their citizens keep coming?
The package arrived from the airport an hour before the patient, packed in ice in a
plastic picnic cooler. Hearts are extremely rare. Not like livers or skin tissue, and
certainly not like kidneys, which, after the "presumed consent" law was passed,
you could get from almost any hospital or morgue in the country.
Was it tested?
For what? In order to test for something, you have to know what you're looking
for. We didn't know about Walking Plague then. We were concerned with
conventional ailments-hepatitis or HIV/AIDS-and we didn't even have time to test
for those.
Why is that?
Because the flight had already taken so long. Organs can't be kept on ice forever.
We were already pushing our luck with this one.
Where had it come from?
China, most likely. My broker operated out of Macau. We trusted him. His record
was solid. When he assured us that the package was "clean," I took him at his
word; I had to. He knew the risks involved, so did I, so did the patient. Herr
Muller, in addition to his conventional heart ailments, was cursed with the
extremely rare genetic defect of dextrocardia with situs inversus. His organs lay in
their exact opposite position; the liver was on the left side, the heart entryways on
die right, and so on. You see the unique situation we were facing. We couldn't
have just transplanted a conven-
1. It has been alleged that, before the war, the sexual organs of Sudanese men
convicted of adultery were severed and sold on the world black market.
tional heart and turned it backward. It just doesn't work that way. We needed
another fresh, healthy heart from a "donor" with exactly the same condition.
Where else but China could we find that kind of luck?
It was luck?
[Smiles.] And "political expediency." I told my broker what I needed, gave him
the specifics, and sure enough, three weeks later I received an e-mail simply titled
"We have a match."
So you performed the operation.
I assisted, Doctor Silva performed the actual procedure. He was a prestigious heart
surgeon who worked the top cases at the Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein in Sao
Paulo. Arrogant bastard, even for a cardiologist. It killed my ego to have to work
with . . . under . . . that prick, treating me like I was a first-year resident. But what
was I going to do . . . Herr Muller needed a new heart and my beach house needed
a new herbal Jacuzzi.
Herr Muller never came out of the anesthesia. As he lay in the recovery room,
barely minutes after closing, his symptoms began to appear. His temperature,
pulse rate, oxygen saturation ... I was worried, and it must have tickled my more
"experienced colleague." He told me that it was either a common reaction to the
immunosuppressant medication, or the simple, expected complications of an
overweight, unhealthy, sixty-seven-year-old man who'd just gone through one of
the most traumatic procedures in modern medicine. I'm surprised he didn't pat me
on the head, the prick.
He told me to go home, take a shower, get some sleep, maybe call a girl or two,
relax. He'd stay and watch him and call me if there was any change.
lOliveira purses his lips angrily and chews another wad ol the mysterious leaves at his
side.]
And what was I supposed to think? Maybe it was the drugs, the OKT 3. Or maybe
I was just being a worrier. This was my first heart transplant.
24       MAX BROOKS
What did I know? Still... it bothered me so much that the last thing I wanted to do
was sleep. So I did what any good doctor should do when his patient is suffering; I
hit the town. I danced, I drank, I had salaciously indecent things done to me by
who knows who or what. I wasn't even sure it was my phone vibrating the first
couple of times. It must have been at least an hour before I finally picked up.
Graziela, my receptionist, was in a real state. She told me that Herr Muller had
slipped into a coma an hour before. I was in my car before she could finish the
sentence. It was a thirty-minute drive back to the clinic, and I cursed both Silva
and myself every second of the way. So I
did
have reason to be concerned! So I
was
right!
Ego, you could say; even though to be right meant dire consequences for me as
well, I still relished tarnishing the invincible Silva's reputation.
I arrived to find Graziela trying to comfort a hysterical Rosi, one of my nurses.
The poor girl was inconsolable. I gave her a good one across the cheek-that
calmed her down-and asked her what was going on. Why were diere spots of
blood on her uniform? Where was Doctor Silva? Why were some of the other
patients out of dieir rooms, and what the hell was that goddamn banging noise?
She told me that Herr Muller had flat-lined, suddenly, and unexpectedly. She
explained that they had been trying to revive him when Herr Muller had opened
his eyes and bitten Doctor Silva on the hand. The two of them struggled; Rosi tried
to help but was almost bitten herself. She left Silva, ran from the room, and locked
the door behind her.
I almost laughed. It was so ridiculous. Maybe Superman had slipped up,
misdiagnosed him, if that was possible. Maybe he'd just risen from the bed, and, in
a stupor, had tried to grab on to Doctor Silva to steady himself. There had to be a
reasonable explanation . . . and yet, there was the blood on her uniform and the
muffled noise from Herr Muller's room. I went back to the car for my gun, more so
to calm Graziela and Rosi than for myself
You carried a gun?
I lived in Rio. What do you think I carried, my "pinto"? I went back to Herr
Muller's room, I knocked several times. I heard nothing. I whispered
his and Silva's names. No one responded. I noticed blood seeping out from under
the door. I entered and found it covering the floor. Silva was lying in the far
corner, Muller crouching over him with his fat, pale, hairy back to me. I can't
remember how I got his attention, whether I called his name, uttered a swear, or
did anything at all but just stand there. Muller turned to me, bits of bloody meat
falling from his open mouth. I saw that his steel su-tures had been partially pried
open and a thick, black, gelatinous fluid oozed through the incision. He got shakily
to his feet, lumbering slowly toward me.
I raised my pistol, aiming at his new heart. It was a "Desert Eagle," Israeli, large
and showy, which is why I'd chosen it. I'd never fired it before, thank God. I
wasn't ready for the recoil. The round went wild, literally blowing his head off.
Lucky, that's all, this lucky fool standing there with a smoking gun, and a stream
of warm urine running dow*n my leg. Now it was my turn to get slapped, several
times by Graziela, before I came to my senses and telephoned the police.
Were you arrested?
Are you crazy ? These were my partners, how do you think I was able to get my
homegrown organs. How do you think I was able to take care of this mess?
They're very good at that. They helped explain to my odier patients that a
homicidal maniac had broken into the clinic and killed both Herr Muller and
Doctor Silva. They also made sure that none of the staff said anything to
contradict that story.
What about the bodies?
They listed Silva as the victim of a probable "car jacking." I don't know-where
they put his body; maybe some ghetto side street in the City of God, a drug score
gone bad just to give the story more credibility. I hope they just burned him, or
buried him . . . deep.
Do you think he .. .
26       MAX BROOKS
I don't know. His brain was intact when he died. If he wasn't in a body bag . .. if
the ground was soft enough. How long would it have taken to dig out*
[He chews anothei leaf, offering me some. I decline.]
And Mister Mullet?
No explanation, not to his widow, not to the Austrian embassy. Just another
kidnapped tourist who'd been careless in a dangerous town. I don't know if Frau
Muller ever believed that story, or if she ever tried to investi-
gate further. She probably never realized how damn lucky she was.
Why was she lucky?
Are you serious? What if he hadn't reanimated in my clinic' What if he'd managed
to make it all the way home?
Is that possible?
Of course it is! Think about it. Because the infection started in the heart, the virus
had direct access to his circulatory system, so it probably reached his brain
seconds after it was implanted. Now you take another organ, a liver or a kidney, or
even a section of grafted skin. That's going to take a lot longer, especially if the
virus is only present in small amounts.
But the donor ...
Doesn't have to be fully reanimated. What if he's just newly infected? The organ
may not be completely saturated. It might only have an infinitesimal trace. You
put that organ in another body, it might take days, weeks, before it eventually
works its way out into the bloodstream. By that point the patient might be well on
the way to recovery, happy and healthy and living a regular life.
But whoever is removing the organ ...
. . . may not know what he's dealing with. I didn't. These were the very early
stages, when nobody knew anything yet. Even if they did know, like elements in
the Chinese army . . . you want to talk about immoral. . . Years before the outbreak
they'd been making millions on organs from ex-ecu ted political prisoners. You
think something like a little virus is going to make them stop sucking that golden
tit?
But how ...
You remove the heart not long after the victim's died . . . maybe even while he's
still alive . . . they used to do that, you know, remove living organs to ensure their
freshness . . . pack it in ice, put it on a plane for Rio . . . China used to be the
largest exporter of human organs on the world market. Who knows how many
infected corneas, infected pituitary glands . . . Mother of God, who knows how
many infected kidneys they pumped into the global market. And that's just the
organs! You want to talk about the "donated" eggs from political prisoners, the
sperm, the blood? You think immigration was the only way the infection swept the
planet' Not all the initial outbreaks were Chinese nationals. Can you ex-plain all
those stories of people suddenly dying of unexplained causes, then reanimating
without ever having been bitten' Why did so many outbreaks begin in hospitals'
Illegal Chinese immigrants weren't going to hospitals. Do you know how many
thousands of people got illegal organ transplants
in those early years leading up to the Great Panic? Even if 10 percent of them were
infected, even 1 percent. . .
Do you have any proof of this theory?
No . . . but that doesn't mean it didn't happen! When I think about how many
transplants I performed, all those patients from Europe, the Arab world, even the
self-righteous United States. Few of you Yankees asked where your new kidney or
pancreas was coming from, be it a slum kid from
28       MAX BROOKS
the City of God or some unlucky student in a Chinese political prison. You didn't
know, you didn't care. You just signed your traveler's checks, went under the
knife, then went home to Miami or New York or wherever.
Did you ever try to track these patients down, warn them?
No, I didn't. I was trying to recover from a scandal, rebuild my reputation, my
client base, my bank account. I wanted to forget what happened, not investigate it
further. By the time I realized the danger, it was scratching at
my front door.
$
BRIDGETOWN HARBOR, BARBADOS, WEST INDIES FEDERATION
[I was told to expect a "tall ship," although the "sails" of IS
Imfingo
refer to the four
vertical wind turbines rising from her sleek, trimaran hull. When coupled with banks of
PEM, or proton exchange membrane, fuel cells, a technology that converts sea-water
into electricity, it is easy to see why the prefix "IS" stands for "Infinity Ship." Hailed as the
undisputed future of maritime transport, it is still rare to see one sailing under anything
but a government Hag. The
Imfingo
is privately owned and operated. Jacob Nyathi is her
captain.]
I was born about the same time as the new, postapartheid South Africa. In those
euphoric days, the new government not only promised the democracy of "one
man, one vote," but employment and housing to the entire country. My father
thought that meant immediately. He didn't understand that these were long-term
goals to be achieved after years- generations-of hard work. He thought that if we
abandoned our tribal homeland and relocated to a city, there would he a brand-new
house and
high-paying jobs just sitting there waiting for us. My father was a simple man, a
day laborer. I can't blame him for his lack of formal education, his dream of a
better life for his family. And so we settled in Khayelitsha, one of the four main
townships outside of Cape Town. It was a life of grinding, hopeless, humiliating
poverty. It was my childhood.
The night it happened, I was walking home from the bus stop. It was around five
A.M. and I'd just finished my shift waiting tables at the T.G.I. Friday's at Victoria
Wharf. It had been a good night. The tips were big, and news from the Tri Nations
was enough to make any South African feel ten feet tall. The Springboks were
trouncing the All Blacks . . . again!
[He smiles with the memory.]
Maybe those thoughts were what distracted me at first, maybe it was simply being
so knackered, but I felt my body instinctively react before I consciously heard the
shots. Gunfire was not unusual, not in my neighborhood, not in those days. "One
man, one gun," that was the slogan of my life in Khayelitsha. Like a combat
veteran, you develop almost genetic survival skills. Mine were razor sharp. I
crouched, tried to triangulate the sound, and at the same time look for the hardest
surface to hide behind. Most of the homes were just makeshift shanties, wood
scraps or corrugated tin, or just sheets of plastic fastened to barely standing beams.
Fire ravaged these lean-tos at least once a year, and bullets could pass through
them as easily as open air.
I sprinted and crouched behind a barbershop, which had been constructed from a
car-sized shipping container. It wasn't perfect, but it would
do for a few seconds, long enough to hole up and wait for the shooting to die
down. Only it didn't. Pistols, shotguns, and that clatter you never for-get, the kind
that tells you someone has a Kalashnikov. This was lasting much too long to be
just an ordinary gang row. Now there were screams, shouts. I began to smell
smoke. I heard the stirrings of a crowd. I peeked out from around the corner.
Dozens of people, most of them in their night-clothes, all shouting "Run! Get out
of there! They're coming!" House lamps were lighting all around me, faces poking
out of shanties. "What's
30       MAX BROOKS
going on here?" they asked. "Who's coming?" Those were the younger faces. The
older ones, they just started running. They had a different kind of survival instinct,
an instinct born in a time when they were slaves in their own country. In those
days, everyone knew who "they" were, and if "they" were ever coming, all you
could do was run and pray.
Did you run?
I couldn't. My family, my mother and two little sisters, lived only a few "doors"
down from the Radio Zibonele station, exactly where the mob was
fleeing from. I wasn't chinking. I was stupid. I should have doubled back around,
found an alley or quiet street.
I tried to wade through the mob, pushing in the opposite direction. I thought I
could stay along the sides of the shanties. I was knocked into one, into one of their
plastic walls that wrapped around me as the whole structure collapsed. I was
trapped, I couldn't breathe. Someone ran over me, smashed my head into the
ground. I shook myself free, wriggled and rolled out into the street. I was still on
my stomach when I saw them: ten or fifteen, silhouetted against the fires of the
burning shanties. I couldn't see their faces, but I could hear them moaning. They
were slouching steadtlv toward me with their arms raised.
I got to my feet, my head swam, my body ached all over. Instinctively I began to
withdraw, backing into the "doorway" of the closest shack. Something grabbed me
from behind, pulled at my collar, tore the fabric. I spun, ducked, and kicked hard.
He was large, larger and heavier than me by a few kilos. Black fluid ran down the
front of his white shirt. A knife protruded from his chest, jammed between the ribs
and buried to the hilt. A scrap of my collar, which was clenched between his teeth,
dropped as his lower jaw fell open. He growled, he lunged. I tried to dodge. He
grabbed my wrist. I felt a crack, and pain shot up through my body. I dropped to
my knees, tried to roll and maybe trip him up. My hand came up against a heavy
cooking pot. I grabbed it and swung hard. It smashed into his face. I hit him again,
and again, bashing his skull until the bone split open and the brains spilled out
across my feet. He slumped over. I
freed myself just as another one of rhem appeared in the entrance. This time the
structure's flimsy nature worked to my advantage. I kicked the back wall open,
slinking out and bringing the whole hut down in the process.
I ran, I didn't know where I was going. It was a nightmare of shacks and fire and
grasping hands all racing past me. I ran through a shanty where a woman was
hiding in the corner. Her two children were huddled against her, crying. "Come
with me!" I said. "Please, come, we have
to
go!" I held out my hands, moved
closer to her. She pulled her children back, brandishing a sharpened screwdriver.
Her eyes were wide, scared. I could hear sounds behind me . . . smashing through
shanties, knocking them over as they came. I switched from Xhosa to English.
"Please," I begged, "you have to run!" I reached for her but she stabbed my hand. I
left her there. I didn't know what else to do. She is still in my memory, when I
sleep or maybe close my eyes sometimes. Sometimes she's my mother, and the
crying children are my sisters.
I saw a bright light up ahead, shining between the cracks in the shanties. I ran as
hard as I could. I tried to call to them. I was out of breadi. I crashed through the
wall of a shack and suddenly I was in open ground. The headlights were blinding.
I felt something slam into my shoulder. I think I was out before I even hit the
ground.
I came to in a bed at Groote Schuur Hospital. I'd never seen the inside of a
recovery ward like this. It was so clean and white. I thought I might be dead. The
medication, I'm sure, helped that feeling. I'd never tried any kind of drugs before,
never even touched a drink of alcohol. I didn't want to end up like so many in my
neighborhood, like my father. All my life I'd
fought to stay clean, and now ...
The morphine or whatever they had pumped into my veins was delicious. I didn't
care about anything. I didn't care when they told me the police had shot me in the
shoulder. I saw the man in the bed next to me frantically wheeled out as soon as
his breathing stopped. I didn't even care when I overheard them talking about the
outbreak of "rabies."
Who was talking about it?
32       MAX BROOKS
I don't know. Like I said, I was as high as the stars. I just remember voices in the
hallway outside my ward, loud voices angrily arguing. "That wasn't rabies!" one of
them yelled. "Rabies doesn't do that to people!" Then . . . something else . . . then
"well, what the hell do you suggest, we've got fifteen downstairs right here! Who
knows how many more are still out there!" It's funny, I go over that conversation
all the time in my head, what I should have thought, felt, done. It was a long time
before I sobered up again, before I woke up and faced the nightmare.
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL
[Jurgen Waimbrunn has a passion for Ethiopian food, which is our reason for meeting at
a Falasha restaurant. With his bright pink skin, and white, unruly eyebrows that match
his "Einstein" hair, he might be mistaken for a crazed scientist or college professor. He is
neither. Although never acknowledging which Israeli intelligence service he was, and
possibly still is, employed by, he openly admits that at one point he could be called "a
spy."]
Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not
stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature. I don't blame anyone for not
believing. I don't claim to be any smarter or better than them. I guess what it really
comes down to is the randomness of birth. I happened to be born into a group of
people who live in constant fear of ex-tinction. It's part of our identity, part of our
mind-set, and it has taught us through horrific trial and error to always be on our
guard.
The first warning I had of the plague was from our friends and customers over in
Taiwan. They were complaining about our new software decryption program.
Apparently it was failing to decode some e-mails from PRC
sources, or at least decoding them so poorly that the text was unintelligible. I
suspected the problem might not be in the software but in the translated messages
themselves. The mainland Reds ... I guess they weren't really Reds anymore but. . .
what do you want from an old man? The Reds had a nasty habit of using too many
different computers from too many different generations and countries.
Before I suggested this theory to Taipei, I thought it might be a good idea to
review the scrambled messages myself. I was surprised to find that the characters
themselves were perfectly decoded. But the text itself... it all had to do with a new
viral outbreak that first eliminated its victim, then reanimated his corpse into some
kind of homicidal berzerker. Of course, I didn't believe this was true, especially
because only a few weeks later the crisis in the Taiwan Strait began and any
messages dealing with rampaging corpses abruptly ended. I suspected a second
layer of encryption, a code within a code. That was pretty standard procedure,
going back to the first days of human communication. Of course the Reds didn't
mean actual dead bodies. It had to be a new weapon system or ultrasecret war
plan. I let the matter drop, tried to forget about it. Still, as one of your great
national heroes used to say: "My spider sense was tingling."
Not long afterward, at the reception for my daughter's wedding, I found myself
speaking to one of my son-in-law's professors from Hebrew University. The man
was a talker, and he'd had a little too much to drink. He was rambling about how
his cousin was doing some kind of work in South Africa and had told him some
stories about golems. You know about the Golem, the old legend about a rabbi
who breathes life into an inanimate statue? Mary Shelley stole the idea for her
book
Frankenstein.
I didn't say
anything ac first, just listened. The man went on blathering about how these
golems weren't made from clay, nor were they docile and obedient. As soon as he
mentioned reanimating human bodies, I asked for the man's number. It turns out
he had been in Cape Town on one of those "Adrena-line Tours," shark feeding I
think it was.
[He rolls his eyes.I
3 4       MAX BROOKS
Apparently the shark had obliged him, right in the tuchus, which is why he had
been recovering at Groote Schuur when the first victims from Khayelitsha
township were brought in. He hadn't seen any of these cases firsthand, but the staff
had told him enough stories to fill my old Dicta-phone. I then presented his stories,
along with those decrypted Chinese e-mails, to my superiors.
And this is where I directly benefited from the unique circumstances of our
precarious security. In October of 1973, when the Arab sneak attack almost drove
us into the Mediterranean, we had all the intelligence in front of us, all the warning
signs, and we had simply "dropped the ball." We
never considered the possibility of an all-out, coordinated, conventional assault
from several nations, certainly not on our holiest of holidays. Call it stagnation,
call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a group of people all
staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the
words correctly. But behind that group is a mir-ror whose image shows the
writings true message. No one looks at the mir-ror. No one thinks it's necessary.
Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to finish what Hitler started, we realized that
not only was that mirror image necessary, but it must forever be our national
policy. From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same
conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-
fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper. If a neighbor's nuclear
power plant might be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, you dig; if a
dictator was rumored to be building a cannon so big it could fire anthrax shells
across whole countries, you dig; and if there was even the slightest chance that
dead bodies were being reanimated as ravenous killing machines, you dig and dig
until you stike the absolute truth.
And that is what I did, I dug. At first it wasn't easy. With China out of the picture .
. . the Taiwan crisis put an end to any intelligence gathering ... I was left with very
few sources of information. A lot of it was chaff, especially on die Internet;
zombies from space and Area 51 . . . what is your country's fetish for Area 51,
anyway? After a while I started to uncover more useful data: cases of "rabies"
similar to Cape Town ... it wasn't called African rabies until later. I uncovered the
psychological evaluations
of some Canadian mountain Troops recently returned from Kyrgyzstan. I found
the blog records of a Brazilian nurse who told her friends all about the murder of a
heart surgeon.
The majority of my information came from the World Health Organization. The
UN is a bureaucratic masterpiece, so many nuggets of valuable data buried in
mountains of unread reports. I found incidents all over the world, all of them
dismissed with "plausible" explanations. These cases allowed me to piece together
a cohesive mosaic of this new threat. The subjects in question were indeed dead,
they were hostile, and they were undeniably spreading. I also made one very
encouraging discovery: how to terminate their existence.
Going for the brain.
IHe chuckles.] We talk about it today as if it is some feat of magic, like holy water
or a silver bullet, but why wouldn't destruction of the brain be the only way to
annihilate these creatures? Isn't it the only way to annihilate us as well?
you
mean human beings?
IHe nods.] Isn't that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vul­
nerable machine we call the body? The brain cannot survive if just one part of the
machine is destroyed or even deprived of such necessities as food or oxygen. That
is the only measurable difference between us and "The Undead." Their brains do
not require a support system to survive, so it is necessary to attack the organ itself.
[ His right hand, in the shape ol a
gun, rises to touch his temple.] A simple solution, but only if we recognized the
problem! Given how quickly the plague was spreading, I thought it might he
prudent to seek confirmation from foreign intelligence circles. Paul Knight had
been a friend of mine for a long time, going all the way back to Entebbe. The idea
to use a double of Amin's black Mercedes, that was him. Paul had retired from
government service right before his agency's "reforms" and gone to work for a
private consulting firm in Bethesda, Maryland. When I visited him at his home, I
was shocked to find that not only had he been working on the very same project,
on his own time, of
36       MAX BROOKS
course, but that his tile was almost as thick and heavy as mine. We sat up the
whole night reading each others findings. Neither of us spoke. I don't think we
were even conscious of each other, the world around us, anything except the
words before our eyes. We finished almost at the same time, just as the sky began
to lighten in the east.
Paul turned the last page, then looked to me and said very matter-of-factly, "This
is pretty bad, huh?" I nodded, so did he, then followed up with "So what are we
going to do about it?"
And that is how the "Warmbrunn-Knight" report was written.
I wish people would stop calling iT char. There were fifteen other names on that
report: virologists, intelligence operatives, military analysts, journalists, even one
UN observer who'd been monitoring the elections in Jakarta when the first
outbreak hit Indonesia. Everyone was an expert in his or her field, everyone had
come to their own similar conclusions before ever being contacted by us. Our
report was just under a hundred pages long. It was concise, it was fully
comprehensive, it was everything we thought we needed to make sure this
outbreak never reached epidemic proportions. I know a Lot of credit has been
heaped upon the South African war plan, and de-servedly so, but if more people
had read our report and worked to make its recommendations a reality, then that
plan would have never needed to exist.
But some people did read and follow your report. Your own government. . .
Barely, and just look at the cost.
BETHLEHEM, PALESTINE
[With his rugged looks and polished charm, Saladin Kader could be a movie star. He is
friendly but never obsequious, self-
assured but never arrogant. He is a professor of urban planning at Khalil Gibran
University, and, naturally, the love of all his female students. We sit under the statue of
the university's namesake. Like everything else in one of the Middle East's most affluent
cities, its polished bronze glitters in the sun.]
I was born and raised in Kuwait City. My family was one of the few "lucky" ones
not to be expelled after 1991, after Arafat sided with Saddam against the world.
We weren't rich, but neither were we struggling. I was comfortable, even
sheltered, you might say, and oh did it show in my actions.
I watched the Al Jazeera broadcast from behind the counter at the Starbucks where
I worked every day after school. It was the afternoon rush hour and the place was
packed. You should have heard the uproar, the jeers and catcalls. I'm sure our
noise level matched that on the floor of the General Assembly.
Of course we thought it was a Zionist lie, who didn't' When the Israeli ambassador
announced to the UN General Assembly that his country was enacting a policy of
"voluntary quarantine," what was I supposed to think' Was I supposed to really
believe his crazy story that African rabies was ac-tually some new plague that
transformed dead bodies into bloodthirsty cannibals? How can you possibly
believe that kind of foolishness, espe-cially when it comes from your most hated
enemy?
I didn't even hear the second part of that fat bastard's speech, the part about
offering asylum, no questions asked, to any foreign-born Jew, any for-eigner of
Israeli-born parents, any Palestinian living in the formerly occupied territories, and
any Palestinian whose family had once lived within
the borders of Israel. The last part applied to my family, refugees from the '67 War
of Zionist aggression. At the heeding of the PLO leadership, we had fled our
village believing we could return as soon as our Egyptian and Syrian brothers had
swept the Jews into the sea. I had never been to Israel, or what was about to be
absorbed into the new state of Unified Palestine.
What did you think was behind the Israeli ruse?
38       MAX BROOKS
Here's what I thought: The Zionists have just been driven out of the occu-pied
territories, they say they left voluntarily, just like Lebanon, and most recently the
Gaza Strip, but really, just like before, we knew we'd driven them out. They know
that the next and final blow would destroy that illegal atrocity they call a country,
and to prepare for that final blow, they're attempting to recruit both foreign Jews
as cannon fodder and . . .
and
-I thought I was so clever for figuring this part out-
kidnapping as many Palestinians as they could to act as human shields! I had all
the answers. Who doesn't at seventeen?
My father wasn't quite convinced of my ingenious geopolitical insights.
He was a janitor at Amiri Hospital. He'd been on duty the night it had its first
major African rabies outbreak. He hadn't personally seen the bodies rise from their
slabs or the carnage of panicked patients and security guards, but he'd witnessed
enough of the aftermath to convince him that staying in Kuwait was suicidal. He'd
made up his mind to leave the same day Israel made their declaration.
That must have been difficult to hear.
It was blasphemy! I tried to make him see reason, to convince him with my
adolescent logic. I'd show the images from Al Jazeera, the images coming out of
the new West Bank state of Palestine; the celebrations, the demoiv strations.
Anyone with eyes could see total liberation was at hand. The Is-raelis had
withdrawal from all the occupied territory and were actually preparing to evacuate
Al Quds, what they call Jerusalem! All die factional fighting, the violence between
our various resistance organizations, I knew that would die down once we unified
for the final blow against the Jews. Couldn't my father see this' Couldn't he
understand that, in a few years, a few months, we
would
be returning to our
homeland, this time as liberators, not as refugees.
How was your argument resolved?
"Resolved," what a pleasant euphemism. It was "resolved" after the second
outbreak, the larger one at Al Jahrah. My father had just quit his job, cleared out
our bank account, such as it was . . . our bags were packed . . .
our e-tickets confirmed. The TV was blaring in die background, riot police
storming die front entrance of a house. You couldn't see what they were shooting
at inside. The official report blamed die violence on "pro-Western extremists." My
father and I were arguing, as always. He tried to convince me of what he'd seen at
the hospital, that by the time our leaders acknowledged the danger, it would be too
late for any of us.
I, of course, scoffed at his timid ignorance, at his willingness to abandon "The
Struggle." What else could I expect from a man who'd spent his whole life
scrubbing toilets in a country that treated our people only slightly better than its
Filipino guest workers. He'd lost his perspective, his self-respect. The Zionists
were offering the hollow promise of a better life, and he was jumping at it like a
dog with scraps.
My father tried, with all the patience he could muster, to make me see that he had
no more love for Israel than the most militant Al Aqsa martyr, but they seemed to
be the only country actively preparing for the coming storm, certainly the only one
that would so freely shelter and protect our family.
I laughed in his face. Then I dropped the bomb: I told him that I'd already found a
website for the Children
o{
Yassin and was waiting for an e-mail from a recruiter
supposedly operating right in Kuwait City. I told my father to go and be the
yehud's whore if he wanted, but the next time we'd meet was when I would be
rescuing him from an internment camp. I was quite proud of those words, I
thought they sounded very heroic. I glared in his face, stood from the table, and
made my final pronouncement: "Surely
2
the vilest of beasts in Allah's sight are those who disbelieve!"
The dinner table suddenly became very silent. My mother looked down,
my sisters looked at each other. All you could hear was the TV, the frantic words of the
on-site reporter telling everyone to remain calm. My father was not a large man. By
that time, 1 think I was even bigger than him. He
1.   Children of Yassin: A youth-based terrorist organization named for the late Sheikh
Yassin. Under strict recruitment codes, all martyrs could be no older than eighteen.
2.  "Sure the vilest of beasts in Allah's sight are those who disbelieve, then they would not
believe." From the Holy Koran, part 8, Section 55.
40       MAX BROOKS
was also not an angry man; I don't think he ever raised his voice. I saw something in his
eyes, something 1 didn't recognize, and then suddenly he was on me, a lightning
whirlwind that threw me up against the wall, slapped me so hard my left ear rang. "You
WILL go!" he shouted as he grabbed my shoulders and repeatedly slammed me against
the cheap dry-wall. "I am your father! You WILL OBEY ME!" His next slap sent my vi­
sion flashing white. "YOU WILL LEAVE WITH THIS FAMILY OR YOU WILL NOT
LEAVE THIS ROOM ALIVE!" More grabbing and shoving, shouting and slapping. I
didn't understand where this man had come from, this lion who'd replaced my docile, frail
excuse for a parent. A lion pro-
tectlng his cubs. He knew that fear was the only weapon he had left to save my life
and if I didn't fear the threat of the plague, then dammit, I was going to fear him!
Did it work?
[Laughs.] Some martyr I turned out to be, I think I cried all the way to Cairo.
Cairo?
There were no direct flights to Israel from Kuwait, not even from Egypt once the
Arab League imposed its travel restrictions. We had to fly from Kuwait to Cairo,
then take a bus across the Sinai Desert to the crossing at Taba.
As we approached the border, I saw the Wall for the first time. It was still
unfinished, naked steel beams rising above the concrete foundation. I'd known
about the infamous "security fence"-what citizen of the Arab world didn't-but I'd
always been led to believe that it only surrounded the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Out here, in the middle of this barren desert, it only confirmed my theory that the
Israelis were expecting an attack along their entire border.
Good,
I thought.
The
Egyptians have finally rediscovered their balls.
At Taba, we were taken off the bus and told to walk, single file, past cages that
held very large and fierce-looking dogs. We went one at a time.
A border guard, this skinny black African-I didn't know there were black Jews
-would hold out his hand. "Wait there!" he said in barely recognizable Arabic.
Then, "you go, come!" The man before me was old. He had a long white beard and
supported himself on a cane. As he passed the dogs, they went wild, howling and
snarling, biting and charging at the confines of their cages. Instantly, two large
chaps in civilian clothing were at the old man's side, speaking something in his ear
and escorting him away. I could see the man was injured. His dishdasha was torn
at the hip and stained with brown blood. These men were certainly no doctors,
however, and the black, unmarked van they escorted him to was certainly no
ambulance.
Bastards,
I thought, as the old mans family wailed after him. Weeding
out the ones too sick and old to be of any use to tlxem
. Then it was our turn to
walk the gauntlet of dogs. They didn't bark at me, nor the rest of my family. I think
one of them even wagged its tail as my sister held out her hand. The next man
after us, however . . . again came the barks and growls, again came the nondescript
civilians. I turned to look at him and was surprised to see a white man, American
maybe, or Canadian . . . no, he had to be American, his English was too loud.
"C'mon, I'm fine!" He shouted and struggled. "C'mon, man, what the fuck'" He
was well dressed, a suit and tie, matching luggage that was tossed aside as he
began to fight with the Israelis. "Dude, c'mon, get the fuck off me! I'm one'a you!
C'mon!" The buttons on his shirt ripped open, revealing a bloodstained bandage
wrapped tightly around his stomach. He was still kicking and screaming as they
dragged him into the back of the van. I didn't understand it. Why these
people?Clearly, it wasn't just about being an Arab, or even about being wounded. I
saw several refugees with severe injuries pass through without
molestation from the guards. They were all escorted to waiting ambulances, real
ambulances, not the black vans. I knew it had something To do with the dogs.
Were they screening for rabies? That made the most sense to me, and it continued
to be my theory during our internment outside Yeroham.
3.  By this point, the Israeli government had completed operation "Moses II."
which transported the last of the Ethiopian "Falasha" into Israel.
42       MAX BROOKS
The resettlement camp?
Resettlement and quarantine. At that time, I just saw it as a prison. It was exactly
what I'd expected to happen to us: the tents, the overcrowding, the guards, barbed
wire, and the seething, baking Negev Desert sun. We felt like prisoners, we
were
prisoners, and although I would have never had the courage to say to my father "I
told you so," he could see it clearly in my sour face.
What I didn't expect was the physical examinations; every day, from an army of
medical personnel. Blood, skin, hair, saliva, even urine and feces . .. it was
exhausting, mortifying. The only thing that made it bearable, and
probably what prevented an all-out riot among some of the Muslim de-tainees,
was that most of the doctors and nurses doing the examinations were themselves
Palestinian. The doctor who examined my mother and sisters was a woman, an
American woman from a place called Jersey City. The man who examined us was
from Jabaliya in Gaza and had himself been a detainee only a few months before.
He kept telling us, "You made the right decision to come here. You'll see. I know
it's hard, but you'll see it was the only way." He told us it was all true, everything
the Israelis had said. I still couldn't bring myself to believe him, even though a
growing part of me wanted to.
We stayed at Yeroham for three weeks, until our papers were processed and our
medical examinations finally cleared. You know, the whole time they barely even
glanced at our passports. My father had done all this work to make sure our
official documents were in order. I don't think thev even cared. Unless the Israeli
Defense Force or the police wanted you for some previous "unkosher" activities,
all that mattered was your clean bill of health.
The Ministry of Social Affairs provided us with vouchers for subsidized housing,
free schooling, and a job for my father at a salary that would support the entire
family.
This is too good to be true,
I thought as we boarded the bus for Tel Aviv.
The
hammer is
going to fall anytime now.
4- At the time, it was unsure whether the virus could survive in solid waste outside
of the human body.
Ic did once we entered die city of Beer Sheeba. I was asleep, I didn't hear the shots
or see the driver's windscreen shatter. I jerked awake as I felt the bus swerve out of
control. We crashed into the side of a building. People screamed, glass and blood
were everywhere. My family was close to the emergency exit. My father kicked
the door open and pushed us out into the street.
There was shooting, from the windows, doorways. I could see that it was soldiers
versus civilians, civilians with guns or homemade bombs.
This is itl
I thought. My
heart felt like it was going to burst! This liberation has started! Before I could do
anything, run out to join my comrades in battle, someone had me by my shirt and
was pulling me through the doorway of a Starbucks.
I was thrown on the floor next to my family, my sisters were crying as my mother
tried to crawl on top of them. My father had a bullet wound in the shoulder. An
IDF soldier shoved me on the ground, keeping my face away from the window.
My blood was boiling; I started looking for something I could use as a weapon,
maybe a large shard of glass to ram through the yehud's throat.
Suddenly a door at the back of the Starbucks swung open, the soldier turned in its
direction and fired. A bloody corpse hit the floor right beside us, a grenade rolled
out of his twitching hand. The soldier grabbed the bomb and tried to hurl it into
the street. It exploded in midair. His body shielded us from the blast. He tumbled
back over the corpse of my slain Arab brother. Only he wasn't an Arab at all. As
my tears dried I noticed that he wore payess and a yarmulke and bloody tzitztt
snaked out from his
damp, shredded trousers. This man was a Jew, die armed rebels out in the street
were Jews! The battle raging all around us wasn't an uprising by Palestinian
insurgents, but the opening shots of the Israeli Civil War.
In your opinion, what do you believe was the cause of that war?
I think there were many causes. I know the repatriation of Palestinians was
unpopular, so was the general pullout from the West Bank. I'm sure the Strategic
Hamlet Resettlement Program must have inflamed more than its share of hearts. A
lot of Israelis had to watch their houses bulldozed in
44       MAX BROOKS
order to make way for those fortified, self-sufficient residential compounds. Al
Quds, I believe . . . that was the final straw. The Coalition Government decided
that it was the one major weak point, too large to control and a hole that led right
into the heart of Israel. They not only evacuated the city, but the entire Nablus to
Hebron corridor as well. They believed that rebuilding a shorter wall along the
1967 demarcation line was the only way to ensure physical security, no matter
what backlash might occur from their own religious right. I learned all this much
later, you understand, as well as the fact that the only reason the IDF eventually
triumphed was
because the majority of the rebels came from the ranks of the Ultra-Orthodox and
therefore most had never served in the armed forces. Did you know that? I didn't. I
realized I practically didn't know anything about these people I'd hated my entire
life. Everything I thought was true went up in smoke that day, supplanted by the
face of our real enemy.
I was running with my family into the back of an Israeli tank," when one of diose
unmarked vans came around the corner. A handheld rocket slammed right into its
engine. The van catapulted into the air, crashed upside down, and exploded into a
brilliant orange fireball. I still had a few steps to go before reaching the doors of
the tank, just enough time
to
see the whole event unfold. Figures were climbing
out of the burning wreck' age, slow-moving torches whose clothes and skin were
covered in burning petrol. The soldiers around us began firing at the figures. I
could see little pops in their chests where the bullets were passing harmlessly
through. The squad leader next to me shouted "B'rosh! Yoreh B'rosh!" and the soh
diers adjusted their aim. The figures'. . . the creatures' heads exploded. The petrol
was just burning out as they hit the ground, these charred black, headless corpses.
Suddenly I understood what my father had been trying to warn me about, what the
Israelis had been trying to warn the rest of the world about! What I couldn't
understand was why the rest of the world wasn't listening.
5. Unlike most country's main battle tanks, the Israeli "Merkava" contains rear
hatches for troop deployment.
BLAME
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA, USA
[The office of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency
could belong to a business executive or doctor or an everyday, small-town high school principal.
There aie the usual collection of reference books on the shelf, degrees and photos on the wall,
and, on his desk, an autographed baseball from Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench.
Bob Archer, my host, can see by my face that I was expecting something different. I
suspect that is why he chose to conduct our interview here.]
When you chink about the CIA, you probably imagine two of our most popular
and enduring myths. The first is that our mission is to search the
globe for any conceivable Threat to the United States, and the second is that we
have the power to perform the first. This myth is the by-product of an
organization, which, by its very nature, must exist and operate in secrecy. Secrecy
is a vacuum and nothing fills a vacuum like paranoid speculation. "Hey, did you
hear who killed so and so, I hear it was the CIA. Hey,
46       MAX BROOKS
what about that coup in El Banana Republico, must have been the CIA. Hey, be
careful looking at that website, you know who keeps a record of every website
anyone's ever looked at ever, the CIA!" This is the image most people had of us
before the war, and it's an image we were more than happy to encourage. We
wanted bad guys to suspect us, to fear us and maybe think twice before trying to
harm any of our citizens. This was the advantage of our image as some kind of
omniscient octopus. The only disadvantage was that our own people believed in
that image as well, so whenever anything, anywhere occurred without any
warning, where do you think the finger was pointed: "Hey, how did that crazy
country get those nukes' Where was the CIA' How come all those people were
murdered by that fanatic ? Where was the CIA ? How come, when the dead began
coming back to life, we didn't know about it until they were breaking through our
living
room windows? Where the hell was the goddamn CIA! ?!"
The Truth was, neither the Central Intelligence Agency nor any of the other
official and unofficial U.S. intelligence organizations have ever been some kind of
all-seeing, all-knowing, global illuminati. For starters, we never had that kind of
funding. Even during the blank check days of the cold war, it's just not physically
possible to have eyes and ears in every back room, cave, alley, brothel, bunker,
office, home, car, and rice paddy across the entire planet. Don't get me wrong, I'm
not saying we were impotent, and maybe we can take credit for some of the things
our fans, and our critics, have sus-pected us of over the years. But if you add up all
the crackpot conspiracy theories from Pearl Harbor to the day before die Great
Panic, then you'd have an organization not only more powerful than the United
States, but the united efforts of the entire human race.
We're not some shadow superpower with ancient secrets and alien technology. We
have very real limitations and extremely finite assets, so why would we waste
those assets chasing down each and even- potential threat* That goes to the second
myth
o{
what an intelligence organization really does. We can't just spread
ourselves thin looking for, and hoping to stumble
1. The CIA. originally the OSS, was nor created until June 1942, six months after
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
on, new and possible dangers. Instead, we've always had to identify and focus on
those that are already clear and present. If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire
to your house, you can't be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly
it's the Arab in your backyard, you can't be worrying about the People's Republic
of China, and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction
notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you're
going to do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse.
But didn't the plague originate in China?
It did, as well as did one of the greatest single Maskirovkas in the history of
modern espionage.
I'm sorry?
It was deception, a fake out. The PRC knew they were already our number-one
surveillance target. They knew they could never hide the existence of their
nationwide "Health and Safety" sweeps. They realized that the best way to mask
what they were doing was to hide it in plain sight. Instead of lying about the
sweeps themselves, they just lied about what they were sweeping tor.
The dissident crackdown?
Bigger, the whole Taiwan Strait incident: the victory of the Taiwan National
Independence Party, the assassination of the PRC defense minister, the buildup,
the war threats, the demonstrations and subsequent crackdowns were all
engineered by the Ministry of State Security' and all of it was to divert the world's
eye from the real danger growing within China. And it worked! Every shred of
intel we had on the PRC, the sudden disappearances, the mass executions, the
curfews, the reserve call-ups- everything could easily be explained as standard
ChiCom procedure. In fact, it worked so well, we were so convinced that World
War III was about
48       MAX BROOKS
to break out in the Taiwan Strait, that we diverted other intel assets from countries
where undead outbreaks were just starting to unfold.
The Chinese were that good.
And we were that bad. It wasn't the Agency's finest hour. We were still reeling
from the purges . . .
You mean the reforms?
No, I mean the purges, because that's what they were. When Joe Stalin either shot
or imprisoned his best military commanders, he wasn't doing half as much damage
to his national security as what that administration did to us with their "reforms."
The last brushf ire war was a debacle and guess who took the fall. We'd been
ordered to justify a political agenda, then when that agenda became a political
liability, those who'd originally given the order now stood back with the crowd
and pointed the finger at us. "Who told us we should go to war in the first place?
Who mixed us up in all this mess? The CIA!" We couldn't defend ourselves
without violating national security. We had to just sit there and take it. And what
was the result? Brain drain. Why stick around and be the victim of a political
witch hunt when you could escape to the private sector: a fatter paycheck, decent
hours, and maybe, just maybe, a little respect and appreciation by the people you
work for. We lost a lot of good men and women, a lot of experi-ence, initiative,
and priceless analytical reasoning. All we were left with were the dregs, a bunch
of brownnosing, myopic eunuchs.
But that couldn't have been everyone.
No, of course not. There were some of us who stayed because we actually believed
in what we were doing. We weren't in this for money or working conditions, or
even the occasional pat on the back. We were in this be-cause we wanted to serve
our country. We wanted to keep our people safe. But even with ideals like that
there comes a point when you have to real-
ize that the sum
at
all your blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately amount to zero.
So you knew what was really happening.
No ... no ... I couldn't. There was no way to confirm . . .
But you had suspicions.
I had . . . doubts.
Could you be more specific?
No, I'm sorry. But I can say that I broached the subject a number of times to my
coworkers.
What happened?
The answer was always the same, "Your funeral."
And was it?
[Nods.] I spoke to . . . someone in a position of authority . . . just a five-minute
meeting, expressing some concerns. He thanked me for coming in and told me
he'd look into it right away. The next day I received transfer orders: Buenos Aires,
effective immediately.
Did you ever hear of the Warmbrunn-Knight report?
Sure now, but back then . . . the copy that was originally hand delivered by Paul
Knight himself, the one marked "Eyes Only" for the director... it was found at the
bottom of the desk of a clerk in the San Antonio field of' fice of the FBI, three
years after the Great Panic. It turned out to be aca-demic because right after I was
transferred, Israel went public with its
50       MAX BROOKS
statement of "Voluntary Quarantine." Suddenly the time for advanced warning
was over. The facts were out; it was now a question of who would believe them.
VAALAJARVI, FINLAND
[It is spring, "hunting season." As the weather warms, and the
bodies of frozen zombies begin to reanimate, elements of the UN N-For (Northern
Force) have arrived foi theii annual "Sweep and Clear." Every year the undead's
numbers dwindle. At current trends, this area is expected to be completely "Secure"
within a decade. Travis D'Ambrosia, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, is here to
personally oversee operations. There is a softness to the general's voice, a sadness.
Throughout our interview, he struggles to maintain eye contact.]
I won't deny mistakes were made. I won't deny we could have been better
prepared. I'll be the first one to admit that we lee the American people down. I just
wane che American people to know why.
"What if the Israelis are right?" Those were the first words out of che chairman's
mouth che morning after Israel's UN declaration. "I'm not saying they are," he
made sure to stress that point, "I'm just saying, what if?" He wanted candid, not
canned, opinions. He was that type
o{
man, che chairman of che Joint Chiefs. He
kept the conversation "hypothetical," indulging in the fantasy that this was just
some intellectual exercise. After all, if che rest of the world wasn't ready to believe
something so outrageous, why should the men and women in this room?
We kept up with the charade as long as we could, speaking with a smile or
punctuating with a joke . . . I'm not sure when the transition happened. It was so
subtle, I don't think anyone even noticed, but suddenly you had a
WORLD WAR Z          51
room full
at
military professionals, each one with decades of combat expe-rience
and more academic training than the average civilian brain surgeon, and all of us
speaking openly, and honestly, about the possible threat of walking corpses. It was
like ... a dam breaking; the taboo was shattered, and the truth just started flooding
out. It was . . . liberating.
So you bad bad your own private suspicions?
For months before the Israeli declaration; so had the chairman. Everyone in that
room had heard something, or suspected something.
Had any of you read tbe Warmbrunn-Knigbt report?
No, none of us. I had heard the name, but had no idea about its content. I actually
got my hands on a copy about two years after die Great Panic. Most of its military
measures were almost line for line in step with our own.
Your own what?
Our proposal to the White House. We outlined a fully comprehensive program, not
only to eliminate the threat within the United States, but to roll back and contain it
throughout the entire world.
What happened?
The White House loved Phase One. It was cheap, fast, and if executed properly,
100 percent covert. Phase One involved the insertion of Special Forces units into
infested areas. Their orders were to investigate, isolate, and eliminate.
Eliminate?
With extreme prejudice.
52       MAX BROOKS
Those were the Alpha teams?
Yes, sir, and they were extremely successful. Even though their battle record is
sealed for the next 140 years, I can say that it remains one of the most outstanding
moments in the history of America's elite warriors.
So what went wrong?
Nothing, with Phase One, but the Alpha reams were only supposed ro be a stopgap
measure. Their mission was never to extinguish the threat, only delay it long
enough to buy time for Phase Two.
But Phase Two was never completed.
Never even begun, and herein lies the reason why the American military was
caught so shamefully unprepared.
Phase Two required a massive national undertaking, the likes of which hadn't been
seen since the darkest days
o{
the Second World War. That kind of effort requires
Herculean amounts of both national treasure and national support, both of which,
by that point, were nonexistent. The American people had just been through a very
long and bloody conflict. They were tired. They'd had enough. Like the 1970s, the
pendulum was swinging from a militant stance to a very resentful one.
In totalitarian regimes-communism, fascism, religious fundamentalism-popular
support is a given. You can start wars, you can prolong them, you can put anyone
in uniform for any length of time without ever having to worry about the slightest
political backlash. In a democracy, the polar opposite is true. Public support must
be husbanded as a finite national resource. It must be spent wisely, sparingly, and
with the greatest return on your investment. America is especially sensitive to war
weariness, and nothing brings on a backlash like the perception of defeat. I say
"perception" because America is a very all-or-nothing society. We like the big
win, the touchdown, the knockout in the first round. We like to know, and
for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn't only uncontested, it was
WORLD WAR Z        53
positively devastating. If not. . . well. . . look at where we were before the Panic.
We didn't lose the last brushfire conflict, far from it. We actually ac-complished a
very difficult task with very few resources and under extremely unfavorable
circumstances. We won, but the public didn't see it that way because it wasn't the
blitzkrieg smackdown that our national spirit de-manded. Too much time had gone
by, too much money had been spent, too many lives had been lost or irrevocably
damaged. We'd not only squandered all our public support, we were deeply in the
red.
Think about just the dollar value of Phase Two. Do you know the price tag of
putting just one American citizen in uniform? And I don't just mean the time that
he's actively in that uniform: the training, the equipment, the food, the housing, the
transport, the medical care. I'm talking about the long-term dollar value that the
country, the American taxpayer, has to shell out to that person for the rest of their
natural life. This is a crushing financial burden, and in those days we barely had
enough funding to maintain what we had.
Even if the coffers hadn't been empty, if we'd had all the money to make
all the uniforms we needed to implement Phase Two, who do you think we could
have conned into filling them' This goes to the heart of America's war weariness.
As if the "traditional'' horrors weren't bad enough-the dead, the disfigured, the
psychologically destroyed-now you had a whole new breed of difficulties, "The
Betrayed." We were a volunteer army, and look what happened to our volunteers.
How many stories do you remember about some soldier who had his term of
service extended, or some ex-reservist who, after ten years of civilian life,
suddenly found himself recalled into active duty? How many weekend warriors
lost their jobs or houses? How many came back to ruined lives, or, worse, didn't
come back at all? Americans are an honest people, we expect a fair deal. I know
that a lot of other cultures used to think that was naive and even childish, but it's
one of our most sacred principles. To see Uncle Sam going back on his word,
revoking people's private lives, revoking
their freedom
. . .
After Vietnam, when I was a young platoon leader in West Germany, we'd had to
institute an incentives program just to keep our soldiers from going AWOL. After
this last war, no amount of incentives could fill our
54       MAX BROOKS depleted ranks, no payment bonuses or term reductions, or
online recruit-
ing tools disguised as civilian video games. This generation had had enough, and
that's why when the undead began to devour our country, we were almost too
weak and vulnerable to stop them.
I'm not blaming the civilian leadership and I'm not suggesting that we in uniform
should be anything but beholden
to
them. This is our system and it's the best in the
world. But it must be protected, and defended, and it must never again be so
abused.
■&
VOSTOK STATION: ANTARCTICA
[In prewar times, this outpost was considered the most remote on Earth. Situated near
the planet's southern geomagnetic pole, atop the four-kilometer ice crust oi Lake
Vostok, temperatures here have been recorded at a world record negative eighty-
nine degrees Celsius, with the highs rarely reaching above negative twenty-two.
This extreme cold, and the fact that overland transport takes over a month to
reach the station, were what made Vostok so attractive to Breckinridge "Breck" Scott.
We meet in "The Dome," the reinforced, geodesic greenhouse that draws power
from the station's geothermal plant. These and many other improvements were
implemented by Mister Scott when he leased the station from the Russian
government. He has
not left it since the Great Panic.]
Do you understand economics? I mean big-time, prewar, global capitalism. Do you get
how it worked? I don't, and anyone who says they do is full
1. Before the war, an online "shooter game" known as "Americas Army" was made avail'
able, free of charge, by the U.S. government to the general public, some have alleged, to
entice new recruits.
WORLD WAR Z         55
of shit. There are no rules, no scientific absolutes. You win, you lose, it's a total
crapshoot. The only rule that ever made sense
to
me I learned from a history, not an
economics, professor at Wharton. "Fear," he used to say, "fear is the most valuable
commodity in the universe." That blew me away. "Turn on the TV," he'd say. "What are
you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to
live without their products." Fuckin' A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness,
fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is die most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal.
Fear sells. That was my mantra. "Fear sells."
When I first heard about the outbreaks, back when it was still called
African rabies, I saw the opportunity of a lifetime. 1*11 never forget that first
report, the Cape Town outbreak, only ten minutes of actual reporting then a full
hour of speculating about what would happen if the virus ever made it to America.
God bless the news. I hit speed dial thirty seconds later,
I met with some of my nearest and dearest. They'd all seen the same report. I was
the first one to come up with a workable pitch: a vaccine, a real vaccine for rabies.
Thank God there is no cure for rabies. A cure would make people buy it only if
they thought they were infected. But a vaccine! That's preventative! People will
keep taking that as long as they're afraid it's out there!
We had plenty of contacts in the biomed industry, with plenty more up on the Hill
and Penn Ave. We could have a working proto in less than a month and a proposal
written up within a couple of days. By the eighteenth hole, it was handshakes all
around.
What about the FDA?
Please, are you serious? Back then the FDA was one of the most underfunded,
mismanaged organizations in the country. 1 think they were still high-f iving over
getting Red No. 2 out of M&Ms. Plus, this was one of the most business-friendly
administrations in American history. J. P. Morgan
1.  Myth; although red M&Ms were removed from 1976 to 1985, they did not use
Red Dye No. 2.
and John D. Rockefeller were getting wood from beyond the grave for this guy in
the White House. His staff didn't even bother to read our cost assessment report. I
think they were already looking for a magic bullet. They railroaded it through the
FDA in two months. Remember the speech die prez made before Congress, how it
had been tested in Europe for some time and the only thing holding it up was our
own "bloated bureaucracy"? Remember the whole thing about "people don't need
big government, they need big protection, and they need it big-time!" Jesus
Christmas, I think half the country creamed their pants at that. How-high did his
approval rating go that night, 60 percent, 70? I just know that it jacked our IPO
389 percent on the first day! Suck on that, Baidu dot-com!
And you didn't know if it would work?
We knew it would work against rabies, and that's what they said it was, right, just
some weird strain of jungle rabies.
Who said that?
You know, "they," like, the UN or the . . . somebody. That's what everyone ended
up calling it, right, "African rabies."
Was it ever tested on an actual victim?
Why? People used to take flu shots all the time, never knowing if it was for
the right strain. Why was this any different*
But the damage . . .
Who thought it was going to go that far* You know how many disease scares
there used to be. Jesus, you'd think the Black Death was sweeping the globe every
three months or so . . . ebola, SARS, avian flu. You know
WORLD WAR Z        57
how many people made money on those scares* Shit, I made my first million on
useless antiradiation pills during the dirty bomb scares.
But if someone discovered. . .
Discovered what* We never lied, you understand* They told us it was rabies, so
we made a vaccine for rabies. We said it had been tested in Europe, and the drugs
it was based on had been tested in Europe. Technically, we never lied.
Technically, we never did anything wrong.
But if someone discovered that it wasn't rabies
. . .
Who was going to blow the whistle? The medical profession? We made sure it
was a prescription drug so doctors stood just as much to lose as us. Who else?The
FDA who let it pass?The congressmen who all voted for its acceptance? The
surgeon general? The White House? This was a win-win situation! Everyone got
to be heroes, everyone got to make money. Six months after Phalanx hit the
market, you started getting all these cheaper, knockoff brands, all solid sellers as
well as the other ancillary stuff like home air purifiers.
But the virus wasn't airborne.
It didn't matter! It still had the same brand name! "From the Makers of. . ." All I
had to say was "May Prevent
Some
Viral Infections." That was it! Now I
understand why it used to be illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater. People
weren't going to say "Hey, I don't smell smoke, is diere really a fire," no, they say
"Holy shit, there's a fire! RUN!" [Laughs.] I made money on home purifiers, car
purifiers; my biggest seller was this little doodad you wore around your neck when
you got on a plane! I don't know it it even filtered ragweed, but it sold.
Things got so good, I started setting up these dummy companies, you know, with
plans to build manufacturing facilities all over the country. The
58       MAX BROOKS
shares from these dumbos sold almost as much as the real stuff. It wasn't even the
idea of safety anymore, it was the idea of the idea of safety! Remember when we
started to get our first cases here in the States, that guy in Florida who said he'd
been bitten but survived because he was taking Phalanx? OH! [He stands, mimes
the act of frantic fornication.] God freakin' bless that dumbass, whoever he was.
But that wasn't because of Phalanx. Your drug didn't protect people at all.
It protected them from their fears. That's all I was selling. Hell, because of
Phalanx, the biomed sector started to recover, which, in turn, jump-started the
stock market, which then gave the impression of a recovery, which then restored
consumer confidence to stimulate an actual recovery! Phalanx hands down ended
the recession!
I ... I
ended the recession!
And then? When the outbreaks became more serious, and the press finally
reported that there was no wonder drug?
Pre-fucking-cisely! That's the alpha cunt who should be shot, what's her name,
who first broke that story! Look what she did! Pulled the tuckin' rug right out from
under us all! She caused the spiral! She caused the Great Panic!
And you take no personal responsibility?
For what? For making a little fuckin' cash . . . well, not a lircle [giggles]. All 1 did
was what any of us are ever supposed to do. I chased my dream, and I got my
slice. You wanna blame someone, blame whoever first called it rabies, or who
knew it wasn't rabies and gave us the green light anyway. Shit, you wanna blame
someone, why not start with all the sheep who forked over their greenbacks
without bothering
to
do a little responsible research. I never held a gun to their
heads. They made the choice themselves. They're the bad guys, not me. I never
directly hurt anybody, and if anybody was too stupid to get themselves hurt, boo-
fuckin-hoo. Of course ...
WORLD WAR Z        59
If there's a hell. . . [giggles as he talksl ... I don't want to think about how many of
diose dumb shits might be waiting for me. I just hope they don't want a refund.
AMARILLO, TEXAS, USA
[Grover Carlson works as a fuel collector for the town's experimental bioconversion
plant. The fuel he collects is dung. I follow the former White House chief of staff as he
pushes his wheelbarrow across the pie-laden pastures.!
Of course we got our copy of the Knight-Wamjews report, what do you think we
are, the CIA? We read it three months before the Israelis went public. Before the
Pentagon started making noise, it was my job to personally brief the president,
who in turn even devoted an entire meeting to discussing its message.
Which was?
Drop everything, focus all our efforts, typical alarmist crap. We got dozens of
these reports a week, every administration did, all of them claiming that their
particular boogeyman was "the greatest threat to human existence." C'mon! Can
you imagine what America would have been like if the federal government
slammed on the brakes every time some paranoid crackpot cried "wolf" or "global
warming" or "living dead"? Please. What we did, what every president since
Washington has done, was provide a measured, appropriate response, in direct
relation to a realistic threat assessment.
And that was the Alpha teams.
Among others things. Given how low a priority the national security adviser
thought this was, I think we actually gave it some pretty healthy table
time. We produced an educational video for state and local law enforcement about
what to do in case of an outbreak. The Department of Health and Human Services
had a page on its website for how citizens should respond to infected family
members. And hey, what about pushing Phalanx right through the FDA?
But Phalanx didn't work.
Yeah, and do you know how long it would have taken to invent one that did? Look
how much time and money had been put into cancer research, or AIDS. Do you
want to be the man who tells the American people that he's diverting funds from
either one of those for some new disease that most people haven't even heard of?
Look at what we've put into research during and after the war, and we still don't
have a cure or a vaccine. We knew Phalanx was a placebo, and we were grateful
for it. It calmed people down and let us do our job.
What, you would have rather we told people the truth?That it wasn't a new strain
of rabies but a mysterious uber-plague that reanimated the dead? Can you imagine
the panic that would have happened: the protest, the riots, the billions in damage to
private property? Can you imagine all those wet'pants senators who would have
brought the government to a standstill so they could railroad some high-profile and
ultimately useless "Zombie Protection Act" through Congress? Can you imagine
the damage it would have done to that administration's political capital? We're
talking about an election year, and a damn hard, uphill fight. We were the
"cleanup
crew," the unlucky bastards who had to mop up all the shit left by the last
administration, and believe me, the previous eight years had piled up one tall
mountain
at
shit! The only reason we squeaked back into power was because our
new propped-up patsy kept promising a "return to peace and prosperity." The
American people wouldn't have settled for anything less. They thought they'd been
through some pretty tough times already, and it would have been political suicide
to tell them that the toughest ones were actually up ahead.
WORLD WAR Z        61
So you never really tried to solve the problem.
Oh, c'mon. Can you ever "solve" poverty? Can you ever "solve" crime? Can you
ever "solve" disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no.
All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get
on with their lives. That's not cynicism, that's maturity. You can't stop the rain. All
you can do is just build a roof that you hope won't leak, or at least won't leak on
the people who are gonna vote for you.
What does that mean?
C'mon ...
Seriously. What does that mean?
Fine, whatever, "Mister Smith goes
to
motherfuckiiV Washington," it means that,
in politics, you focus on the needs of your power base. Keep
them happy, and they keep you in office.
Is that why certain outbreaks were neglected?
Jesus, you make it sound like we just forgot about them.
Did local law enforcement request additional support from the federal
government?
When have cops
not
asked for more men, better gear, more training hours, or
"community outreach program funds"? Those pussies are almost as bad as
soldiers, always whining about never having "what they need," but do they have to
risk their jobs by raising taxes? Do they have to explain to Suburban Peter why
they're fleecing him for Ghetto Paul?
You weren't worried about public disclosure?
From who?
The press, the media.
The "media"? You mean those networks that are owned by some of the largest
corporations in the world, corporations that would have taken a nosedive if
anodier panic hit the stock market? That media?
So you never actually instigated a cover-up?
We didn't have to; they covered it up themselves. They had as much, or more, to
lose than we did. And besides, they'd already gotten their stories the year before
when the first cases were reported in America. Then winter came, Phalanx hit the
shelves, cases dropped. Maybe they "dissuaded" a few younger crusading
reporters, but, in reality, the whole thing was pretty much old news after a few
months. It had become "manageable." People were learning to live with it and they
were already hungry forsome-thing different. Big news is big business, and you
gotta stay fresh if you want to stay successful.
But there were alternative media outlets.
Oh sure, and you know who listens to them? Pansy, overeducated know-it-
alls, and you know who listens to them? Nobody! Who's going to care about some
PBS-NPR fringe minority that's out of touch with the mainstream? The more those
elitist eggheads shouted "The Dead Are Walking," the more most real Americans
tuned them out.
So, let me see if I understand your position.
The administration's position.
WORLD WAR Z        63
The administration's position,  which is that you gave this problem the amount of
attention that you thought it deserved.
Right.
Given that at any time, government always has a lot on its plate, and especially at
this time because another public scare was the last thing the American people
wanted.
Yep.
So
you figured that the threat was small enough to be "managed" by both the
Alpha teams abroad and some additional law enforcement training at home.
You got it.
Even though you'd received warnings to the contrary, that it could never just be
woven into the fabric of public life and that it actually was a global catastrophe in
the making.
[Mister Carlson pauses, shoots me an angry look, then heaves a shovelful of "fuel" into
his cart.l
Grow up.
0
TROY, MONTANA, USA
[This neighborhood is, according to the brochure, the "New Community" for the "New
America." Based on the Israeli "Masada" model, it is clear just from first glance that this
neighborhood
was built with one goal in mind. The houses all rest on stilts, so high as to afford each a
perfect view over the twenty-foot-high, reinforced concrete wall. Each house is accessed
by a retractable staircase and can connect to its neighbor by a similarly retractable
walkway. The solar cell roofs, the shielded wells, the gardens, lookout towers, and thick,
sliding, steel-reinforced gate have all served to make Troy an instant success with its in­
habitants, so much so that its developer has already received seven more orders across
the continental United States. Troy's developer, chief architect, and first mayor is Mary
Jo Miller.]
Oh yeah, I was worried, I was worried about my car payments and Tim's business
loan. I was worried about that widening crack in the pool and the new
nonchlorinated filter that still left an algae film. I was worried about our portfolio,
even though my e-broker assured me this was just first-time investor jitters and
that it was much more profitable than a standard 40l(k). Aiden needed a math
tutor, Jenna needed just the right Jamie Lynn Spears cleats for soccer camp. Tim's
parents were thinking of coming to stay with us for Christmas. My brother was
back in rehab. Finley had worms, one of the fish had some kind of fungus growing
out of its left eye. These were just some of my worries. I had more than enough to
keep me busy.
Did you watch the news?
Yeah, for about five minutes every day: local headlines, sports, celebrity
gossip. Why would I want to get depressed by watching TV? I could do that just
by stepping on the scale every morning.
What about other sources? Radio?
Morning drive time* That was my Zen hour. After the kids were dropped off, I'd
listen to [name withheld for legal reasons). His jokes helped me get
through the day.
WORLD WAR Z        65
What about the Internet?
What about it? For me, it was shopping; for Jenna, it was homework; for Tim, it
was . . . stuff he kept swearing he'd never look at again. The only news I ever saw
was what popped up on my AOL welcome page.
At work, there must have been some discussion
. . .
Oh yeah, at first. It was kinda scary, kinda weird, "you know I hear it's not really
rabies" and stuff like that. But then that first winter things died
down, remember, and anyway, it was a lot more fun to rehash last night's episode
of
Celebrity Fat Camp
or totally bitch out whoever wasn't in the break room at
that moment.
One time, around March or April, I came into work and found Mrs. Ruiz clearing
out her desk. I thought she was being downsized or maybe outsourced, you know,
something I considered a real threat. She explained that it was "them," that's how
she always referred to it, "them" or "everything that's happening." She said that her
family'd already sold their house and were buying a cabin up near Fort Yukon,
Alaska. I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard, especially from
someone like Inez. She wasn't one of the ignorant ones, she was a "clean"
Mexican. I'm sorry to use that term, but that was how I thought back then, that was
who I was.
Did your husband ever show any concern?
No, hut the kids did, not verbally, or consciously, I think. Jenna started getting into
fights. Aiden wouldn't
go
to sleep unless we left the lights on. Little things like
that. I don't think they were exposed to any more information than Ti m, or I, but
maybe they didn't have die adult distractions to shut it out.
How did you and your husband respond?
Zoloft and Ritalin SR for Aiden, and Adderall XR for Jenna. It did the trick for a
while. The only thing that pissed me off was that our insurance didn't cover it
because the kids were already on Phalanx.
How long had they been on Phalanx?
Since it became available. We were all on Phalanx, "Piece of Phalanx, Peace of
Mind." That was our way of being prepared ... and Tim buying a gun. He kept
promising to take me to the range to learn how to shoot. "Sunday," he'd always
say, "we're goin' this Sunday." I knew he was full of it. Sundays were reserved for
his mistress, that eighteen-footer, twin-engine bitch he seemed to sink all his love
into. I didn't really care. We had our pills, and at least he knew how to use die
Glock. It was part of life, like smoke alarms or airbags. Maybe you think about it
once in a while, it was always just. . . "just in case." And besides, really, there was
already so much out there to worry about, every month, it seemed, a new nail-
biter. How can you keep track of all
o{
it? How do you know which one is really
real?
How did you know?
It had just gotten dark. The game was on. Tim was in the BarcaLounger with a
Corona. Aiden was on the floor playing with his Ultimate Soldiers. Jenna was in
her room doing homework. I was unloading the Maytag so I didn't hear Finley
barking. Well, maybe I did, but I never gave it any thought. Our house was in the
community's last row, right at the foot of the hills. We lived in a quiet, just
developed part of North County near San Diego. There was always a rabbit,
sometimes a deer, running across the lawn, so Finley was always throwing some
kind of a shit fit. I think I glanced at the Post-it to get him one of those citronella
bark collars. I'm not sure when the other dogs started barking, or when I heard the
car
alarm down the street. It was when I heard something that sounded like a gunshot
that I went into the den. Tim hadn't heard anything. He had the volume jacked up
too high. I kept telling him he had to get his hearing checked, you just don't spend
your twenties in a speed metal band without . .. [sighsl. Aiden'd heard something.
He asked me what it was. I was about to say I didn't know when I saw his eyes go
wide. He was looking past me, at the glass sliding door that led to die backyard. I
turned just in time to see it shatter.
WORLD WAR Z        67
It was about five foot ten, slumped, narrow shoulders with this puffy, wagging
belly. It wasn't wearing a shirt and its mottled gray flesh was all torn and
pockmarked. It smelled like the beach, like rotten kelp and saltwater. Aiden
jumped up and ran behind me. Tim was out of the chair, standing between us and
that thing. In a split second, it was like all the lies fell away. Tim looked frantically
around the room for a weapon just as it grabbed him by die shirt. They fell on the
carpet, wrestling. He shouted for us to get in the bedroom, for me to get the gun.
We were in the hallway when I heard Jenna scream. I ran to her room, threw open
the door. Another one, big, I'd say six and a half feet with giant shoulders and
bulging
arms. The window was broken and it had Jenna by the hair. She was
sc re a m i n.g 11M o m m y mo m m y mo m my!' *
IVftaf did you
do?
I . . . I'm not Totally sure. When I try To remember, everything goes by too fast. I
had it by the neck. It pulled Jenna toward its open mouth. I squeezed hard . . .
pulled . . . The kids say I tore the things head off, just ripped it right out with all
the flesh and muscle and whatever else hanging in tatters. I don't think that's
possible. Maybe with all your adrenaline pumping ... I think the kids just have
built it up in their memories over the years, making me into SheHulk or
something. I know I freed Jenna. I remember that, and just a second later, Tim
came in the room, with this thick, black goo all over his shirt. He had the gun in
one hand and Finley's leash in the other. He threw me the car keys and told me to
get the kids in the Suburban. He ran into the backyard as we headed for the garage.
I heard his gun go off as I started the engine.
THE    GREAT    PANIC
PARNELL AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE: MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, USA
[Gavin Blaiie pilots one of the D-17 combat dirigibles that make up the core of
America's Civil Air Patrol. It is a task well suited to him. In civilian life, he piloted a
Fujifilm blimp.]
It stretched to the horizon: sedans, trucks, buses, RVs, anything that coukl drive. I
saw tractors, I saw a cement mixer. Seriously, I even saw a flatbed with nothing
but a giant sign on it, a billboard advertising a "Gentlemen's Club." People were
sitting on top
o{
it. People were riding on top of everything, on roofs, in between
luggage racks. It reminded me of some old picture of trains in India with people
hanging on them like monkeys.
All kinds of crap lined the road-suitcases, boxes, even pieces ofexpen-sive
furniture. I saw a grand piano, I'm not kidding, just smashed like it was
thrown off the top of a truck. There were also a lot of abandoned cars. Some had
been pushed over, some were stripped, some looked burned out. I saw a lot of
people on foot, walking across the plains or alongside the road. Some were
knocking on windows, holding up all kinds of stuff. A few
WORLD WAR Z        69
women were exposing themselves. They must have been looking to trade,
probably gas. They couldn't have been looking for rides, they were moving faster
than cars. It wouldn't make sense, but. . . [shrugs].
Backdown the road, about thirty miles, traffic was moving a little better. You'd
think the mood would be calmer. It wasn't. People were flashing their lights,
bumping the cars in front of them, getting out and throwing down. I saw a few
people lying by the side of the road, barely moving or not at all. People were
running past them, carrying stuff, carrying children, or just running, all in the same
direction of the traffic. A few miles later, I saw why.
Those creatures were swarming among the cars. Drivers on the outer lanes tried to
veer off the road, sticking in the mud, trapping the inner lanes. People couldn't
open their doors. The cars were too tightly packed. I saw those things reach in
open windows, pulling people out or pulling them-
selves in. A lot of drivers were trapped inside. Their doors were shut and, I'm
assuming, locked. Their windows were rolled up, it was safety tempered glass.
The dead couldn't get in, but the living couldn't get out. I saw a few people panic,
try to shoot through their windshields, destroying the only protection they had.
Stupid. They might have bought themselves a few hours in there, maybe even a
chance to escape. Maybe there was no escape, just a quicker end. There was a
horse trailer, hitched to a pickup in the center lane. It was rocking crazily back and
forth. The horses were still inside.
The swarm continued among the cars, literally eating its way up the stalled lines,
all those poor bastards just trying to get away. And that's what haunts me most
about it, they weren't headed anywhere. This was the 1-80, a strip of highway
between Lincoln and North Platte. Both places were heavily infested, as well as all
those little towns in between. What did they think they were doing? Who
organized this exodus? Did anyone? Did people see a line of cars and join them
without asking? I tried to imagine what it must have been like, stuck bumper to
bumper, crying kids, barking dog, knowing what was coming just a few miles
back, and hoping, praying that someone up ahead knows where he's going.
You ever hear about that experiment an American journalist did in Moscow in the
1970s? He just lined up at some building, nothing special about it, just a random
door. Sure enough, someone got in line behind
him, then a couple more, and before you knew it, they were backed up around the
block. No one asked what the line was for. They just assumed it was worth it. I
can't say if that story was true. Maybe it's an urban legend, or a cold war mvth.
Who knows?
ALANG, INDIA
[I stand on the shore with Ajay Shah, looking out at the rusting wrecks of once-proud
ships. Since the government does not possess the funds to remove them and because
both time and the elements have made their steel next to useless, they remain silent
memorials to the carnage this beach once witnessed.]
They tell me what happened here was not unusual, all around our world where the
ocean meets the land, people trying desperately to board whatever floated for a
chance of survival at sea.
I didn't know what Alang was, even though I'd lived my entire lite in nearby
Bhavnagar. I was an office manager, a "zippy," white-collar professional from the
day I left university. The only time I'd ever worked with my hands was to punch a
keyboard, and not even that since all our software went voice recognition. I knew
Alang was a shipyard, that's why I tried to
make for it in the first place. I'd expected to find a construction site cranking out
hull after hull to carry us all To safety. I had no idea that it was just the opposite.
Alang didn't build ships, it killed them. Before the war, it was the largest breakers
yard in the world. Vessels from all nations were bought by Indian scrap-iron
companies, run up on this beach, stripped, cut, and disassembled until not the
smallest bolt remained. The several dozen vessels I saw were not fully loaded,
fully functional ships, but naked hulks lining up to die.
WORLD WAR Z         71
There were no dry docks, no slipways. Alang was not so much a yard as a long
stretch of sand. Standard procedure was to ram the ships up onto the shore,
stranding them like beached whales. I thought my only hope was the half dozen
new arrivals that still remained anchored offshore, the ones with skeleton crews
and, I hoped, a little bit of fuel left in their bunkers. One of these ships, the
Veronique Delmas,
was trying to pull one of her beached sisters out to sea. Ropes
and chains were haphazardly lashed to the stern of the APL
Tulip,
a Singapore
container ship that had already been partially gutted. I arrived just as the
Delmas
fired up her engines. I could
see the white water churning as she strained against the lines. I could hear some of
the weaker ropes snap like gunshots.
The stronger chains though . . . they held out longer than the hull. Beaching the
Tulip
must have badly fractured her keel. When the
Delmas
began to pull, I heard
this horrible groan, this creaking screech of metal. The
Tulip
literally split in two,
the bow remaining on shore while the stern was pulled out to sea.
There was nothing anyone could do, the Delmas was already at flank speed,
dragging the
Tulip's
stern out into deep water where it rolled over and sank within
seconds. There must have been at least a thousand people aboard, packing every
cabin and passageway and square inch of open deck space. Their cries were
muffled by the thunder of escaping air.
Why didn't the refugees just wait aboard the beached ships, pull up the ladders,
make them inaccessible?
You speak with rational hindsight. You weren't there that night. The yard was
crammed right up to the shoreline, this mad dash of humanity backlit by inland
fires. Hundreds were trying to swim out to the ships. The surf was choked with
those who didn't make it.
Dozens of little boats were going back and forth, shuttling people from shore to
ships. "Give me your money," some of them would say, "every-thing you have,
then I'll take you."
Money was still worth something?
Money, or food, or anything they considered valuable. I saw one ship's crew diat
only wanted women, young women. I saw another that would only take light-
skinned refugees. The bastards were shining their torches in people's faces, trying
to root out darkies like me. I even saw one captain, standing on the deck of his
ship's launch, waving a gun and shouting "No scheduled castes, we won't take
untouchables!" Untouchables? Castes? Who the hell still thinks like that? And this
is the crazy part, some older people actually got out of the queue! Can you believe
that?
I'm just highlighting the most extreme negative examples, you understand. For
every one profiteer, or repulsive psychopadi, there were ten good and decent
people whose karma was still untainted. A lot of fishermen and small boat owners
who could have simply escaped with their families chose to put themselves in
danger by continuing to return to shore. When you think about what they were
risking: being murdered for their boats, or just marooned on the beach, or else
attacked from beneath by so many underwater ghouls . . .
There were quite a few. Many infected refugees had tried to swim for the ships
and then reanimated after they drowned. It was low tide, just deep enough for a
man to drown, but shallow enough for a standing ghoul to reach up for prey. You
saw many swimmers suddenly vanish below the surface, or boats capsize with
their passengers dragged under. And still rescuers continued to return to shore, or
even jumped from ships to save people in the water.
That was how I was saved. I was one of those who tried to swim. The
ships looked much closer than they actually were. I was a strong swimmer, but
after walking from Bhavnagar, after fighting for my life for most of that day, I
barely had enough strength to float on my back. By the time I reached my intended
salvation, there wasn't enough air in my lungs to call for help. There was no
gangway. The smooth side towered over me. I banged on the steel, shouting up
with the last bit of breath I had.
Just as I slipped below the surface, I felt a powerful arm wrap around my chest.
This
is it,
I thought; any second, I thought I would feel teeth dig into my flesh.
Instead of pulling me down, the arm hauled me back up to the
WORLD WAR Z        73
surface. I ended up aboard the Sir
Wilfred Grenfell,
an ex-Canadian Coast Guard
cutter. I tried to talk, to apologize for not having any money, to ex-plain that I
could work for my passage, do anything they needed. The crewman just smiled.
"Hold on," he said to me, "we're about to get under way." I could feel the deck
vibrate then lurch as we moved.
That was the worst part, watching the other ships we passed. Some of the onboard
infected refugees had begun to reanimate. Some vessels were floating
slaughterhouses, others just burned at anchor. People were leaping into the sea.
Many who sank beneath the surface never reappeared.
TOPEKA, KANSAS, USA
[Sharon could be considered beautiful by almost any standard - with long red hair,
sparkling green eyes, and the body of a dancer or a prewar supermodel. She also has
the mind of a four-yeai-old girl.
We are at the Rothman Rehabilitation Home for Feral Children. Doctor Roberta Kelner,
Sharon's caseworker, describes her condition as "lucky." "At least she has language
skills, a cohesive thought process," she explains. "It's rudimentary, but at least it's fully
functional." Doctor Kelner is eager for the interview, but Doctor Sommers, Rothman's
program director, is not. Funding has always been spotty for this program, and the
present administration is threatening to close it down altogether.
Sharon is shy at first. She will not shake my hand and seldom makes eye contact.
Although Sharon was found in the ruins of Wichita, there is no way of knowing where her
story originally occurred.]
We were in church, Mommy and me. Daddy cold us that he would come find us.
Daddy had to go do something. We had to wait for him in church.
Everybody was there. They all had scuff. They had cereal, and water, and juice,
and sleeping bags and flashlights and ... [she mimes a rifle]. Mrs. Randolph had
one. She wasn't supposed to. They were dangerous. She told me they were
dangerous. She was Ashley's mommy. Ashley was my friend. I asked her where
was Ashley. She started to cry. Mommy told me not to ask her about Ashley and
told Mrs. Randolph that she was sorry. Mrs. Randolph was dirty, she had red and
brown on her dress. She was fat. She had big, soft arms.
There were other kids, Jill and Abbie, and other kids. Mrs. McGraw was watching
them. They had crayons. They were coloring on the wall. Mommy told me to go
play with them. She told me it was okay. She said Pastor Dan said it was okay.
Pastor Dan was there, he was trying to make people listen to him. "Please
everyone . . ." (she mimics a deep, low voice] "please stay calm, the 'thor-ties' are
coming, just stay calm and wait for the 'thorties.' " No one was listening to him.
Everyone was talking, nobody was sitting. People were trying to talk on their
things [mimes holding a cell phone], they were angry at their things, throwing
them, and saying bad words. I felt bad for Pastor Dan. (She mimics the sound of a
siren.] Outside. (She does it again, starting soft, then growing, then fading out
again multiple times.]
Mommy was talking to Mrs. Cormode and other mommies. They were fighting.
Mommy was getting mad. Mrs. Cormode kept saying (in an angry drawl], "Well
what if? What else can you doP' Mommy was shaking her head. Mrs. Cormode
was talking with her hands. I didn't like Mrs. Cormode. She was Pastor Dan's wife.
She was bossy and mean.
Somebody yelled . . . "Here they come!" Mommy came and picked me up. They
Took our bench and put it next to the door. They put all the benches next to the
door. "Quick!" "Jam the door!" (She mimics several different voices.! "I need a
hammer!" "Nails!" "They're in the parking lot!" "They're coming this way!" IShe
turns to Doctor Kelner.l Can I?
[Doctor Sommers looks unsure. Doctor Kelner smiles and nods. I later learn that the
room is soundproofed for this reason.!
WORLD WAR Z          75
[Sharon mimics the moan of a zombie. It is undoubtedly the most realistic I have ever
heard. Clearly, by their discomfort, Sommers and Kelner agree.!
They were coming. They came bigger. [Again she moans. Then follows up by pounding
her right fist on the table.! They wanted
to
come in. IHer blows are powerful,
mechanical.! People screamed. Mommy hugged me tight. "It's okay." [Her voice softens
as she begins to stroke her own hair.! "I won't let them get you. Shhhh. . . ."
[Now she bangs both fists on the table, her strikes becoming more chaotic
as il to simulate multiple ghouls.l "Brace the door!" "Hold it! Hold it!" IShe simulates the
sound of shattering glass.) The windows broke, the windows in the front next to the door.
The lights got black. Grown-ups got scared. They screamed.
IHer voice returns to her mother's.) "Shhhh . . . baby. I won't let them get you." IHer
hands go from her hair to her face, gently stroking her forehead and cheeks. Sharon
gives Kelner a questioning look. Kelner nods. Sharon's voice suddenly simulates the
sound of something large breaking, a deep phlegm-filled rumble from the bottom of her
throat.) "They're coming in! Shoot 'em, shoot 'em!" IShe makes the sound of gunfire then
.. .1 "I won't let them get you, I won't lee them get you." [Sharon suddenly looks away,
over my shoulder to something that isn't there.) "The children! Don't let them get the
children!" That was Mrs. Cormode. "Save the children! Save the children!" [Sharon
makes more gunshots. She balls her hands into a large double fist, bringing it down hard
on an invisible form.] Now the kids started crying. [She simulates stabbing, punching,
striking with objects.) Abbie cried hard. Mrs. Cor mode picked her up. IShe mimes lifting
something, or someone, up and swinging them against the wall.) And then Abbie
stopped. IShe goes back to stroking her own face, her mother's voice has become
harder.) "Shhh . . . it's okay, baby, it's okay . . ." [Her hands move down from her lace to
her throat, tightening into a strangling grip.] "I won't let them get you. I WON'T LET
THEM GET YOU!"
ISharon begins to gasp for air.l
[Doctor Sommers makes a move to stop her. Doctor Kelner puts up a hand. Sharon
suddenly ceases, throwing her arms out to the sound of a gunshot.]
Warm and wet, salty in my mouth, stinging my eyes. Arms picked me up and
carried me. [She gets up from the table, mimicking a motion close to a football.]
Carried me into the parking lot. "Run, Sharon, don't stop!" [This is a different
voice now, not her mother's.] "Just run, run-run* run!" They pulled her away from
me. Her arms let me go. They were big, soft arms.
KHUZHIR, OLKHON ISLAND, LAKE BAIKAL, THE HOLY RUSSIAN EMPIRE
[The room is bare except for a table, two chairs, and a large wall mirror, which is almost
sure to be one-way glass. I sit across from my subject, writing on the pad provided for
me Imy transcriber has been forbidden for "security reasons"). Maria Zhuganova's face
is worn, her hair is graying, her body strains the seams of the fraying uniform she insists
on wearing for this interview. Technically we are alone, although I sense watching eyes
behind the room's one-way glass.]
We didn't know chat there was a Great Panic. We were completely isolated. About
a month before it began, about the same time as that American newswoman broke
the story, our camp was placed on indefinite communication blackout. All the
televisions were removed from the barracks, all the personal radios and cell
phones, too. I had one of those cheap disposable types with five prepaid minutes.
It was all my parents could afford. I was supposed to use it to call them on my
birthday, my first birthday away from home.
WORLD WAR Z        77
We were stationed in North Ossetia, Alania, one of our wild southern republics.
Our official duty was "peacekeeping," preventing ethnic strife between the Ossetia
and Ingush minorities. Our rotation was up about the same time they cut us off
from the world. A matter of "state security" they called tt.
Who were "they"?
Everyone: our officers, the Military Police, even a plain-clothed civilian who just
seemed to appear one day out of nowhere. He was a mean little
bastard, with a chin, rat face. That's what we called him: "Rat Face."
Did you ever try to find out who be was?
What, me personally* Never. Neither did anyone else. Oh, we griped; soldiers
always gripe. But there also wasn't time for any serious complaints. Right after the
blackout was put into effect, we were placed on full combat alert. Up until then it
had been easy duty-lazy, monotonous, and broken only by the occasional
mountain stroll. Now we were in those mountains for days at a time with full
battle dress and ammo. We were in every village, every house. We questioned
every peasant and traveler and ... I don't know . . . goat that crossed our path.
Questioned them? For what?
I didn't know. "Is everyone in your family present?" "Has anyone gone missing?"
"Has anyone been attacked by a rabid animal or man?" That was the part that
confused me the most. Rabid? I understood the animal part, but man? There were
a lot of physical inspections, too, stripping these people to their bare skin while the
medics searched every inch of their bodies for . . . something . . . we weren't told
what.
It didn't make sense, nothing did. We once found a whole cache of weapons, 74s, a
few older 47s, plenty of ammo, probably bought from some corrupt opportunist
right in our battalion. We didn't know who the
weapons belonged to; drug runners, or the local gangsters, maybe even those
supposed "Reprisal Squads" that were the reason for our deployment in the first
place. And what did we do? We left it all. That little civilian, "Rat Face," he had a
private meeting with some of the village elders. I don't know what was discussed,
but I can tell you that they looked scared half to death: crossing themselves,
praying silently.
We didn't understand. We were confused, angry. We didn't understand what the
hell we were doing out there. We had this one old veteran in our platoon, Baburin.
He'd fought in Afghanistan and twice in Chechnya. It was rumored that during
Yeltsin's crackdown, his BMP was the first to fire on the Duma. We used to like to
listen to his stories. He was always good-natured, always drunk . . . when he
thought he could get away with it. He changed after the incident with the weapons.
He stopped smiling, there were no more stories. I don't think he ever touched a
drop after that, and when he spoke to you, which was rare, the only thing he ever
said was, "This isn't good. Something's going to happen." Whenever I tried to ask
him about it, he would just shrug and walk away. Morale was pretty low after that.
People were tense, suspicious. Rat Face was always there, in the shadows,
listening, watching, whispering into the ears of our officers.
He was with us the day we swept a little no-name town, this primitive hamlet at
what looked like the edge of the world. We'd executed our standard searches and
interrogations. We were just about to pack it in. Suddenly this child, this little girl
came running down the only road in town. She was crying, obviously terrified.
She was chattering to her parents ... I wish I could have taken the time to learn
their language . . . and pointing across the field. There was a tiny figure, another
little girl, staggering
across the mud toward us. Lieutenant Tikhonov raised his binoculars and I watched his
face lose its color. Rat Face came up next to him, gave a look through his own glasses,
then whispered something in the lieutenant's ear. Petrenko, platoon sharpshooter, was
ordered to raise his weapon and center the girl in his sights. He did. "Do you have her?"
"I have her." "Shoot."
1. The BMP is an armored personnel carrier invented and used by Soviet, and now
Russian, military forces.
WORLD WAR Z        79
That's how it went, I think. I remember there was a pause. Petrenko looked up at the
lieutenant and asked him to repeat the order. "You heard me," he said angrily. I was
farther away than Petrenko and even I'd heard him. "I said eliminate the target, now!" I
could see the tip of his rifle was shaking. He was a skinny little runt, not the bravest or
the strongest, but suddenly he lowered his weapon and said he wouldn't do it. Just like
that. "No, sir." It felt like the sun froze in the sky. No one knew what to do, especially
Lieutenant Tikhonov. Everyone was looking at one another, then we were all looking out
at the field.
Rat Face was walking out there, slowly, almost casually. The little girl
was now close enough so we could see her face. Her eyes were wide, locked on
Rat Face. Her arms were raised, and I could just make out this high-pitched,
rasping moan. He met her halfway across the field. It was over be-fore most of us
realized what had happened. In one smooth motion, Rat Face pulled a pistol from
underneath his coat, shot her right between the eyes, then turned around and
sauntered back toward us. A woman, probably the little girl's modier, exploded
into sobs. She fell to her knees, spitting and cursing at us. Rat Face didn't seem to
care or even notice. He just whispered something to Lieutenant Tikhonov, then
remounted the BMP as if he was hailing a Moscow taxicab.
That night . . . lying awake in my bunk, I tried not to think about what had
happened. I tried not to think about the fact that the MPs had taken Petrenko away,
or that our weapons had been locked in the armory. I knew 1 should have felt bad
for the child, angry, even vengeful toward Rat Face, and maybe even a little bit
guilty because I didn't lift a finger to stop it. I knew those were the kinds of
emotions I should have been feeling; at that point the only thing I could feel was
fear. I kept thinking about what Baburin had said, that something bad was going to
happen. I just wanted to go home, see my parents. What if there'd been some
horrible terrorist attack? What if it was a war* My family lived in Bikin, almost
within sight of the Chinese border. I needed to speak to them, to make sure they
were okay. I worried so much that I started throwing up, so much so that they
checked me into the infirmary. That's why I missed the patrol that day, that's why I
was still on bed rest when they came back the following afternoon.
I was in my bunk, rereading an outdated copy of
Semnadstat.
I heard a
commotion, vehicle engines, voices. A crowd was already assembled on the
parade ground. I pushed my way through and saw Arkady standing in the center of
the mob. Arkady was the heavy machine gunner from my squad, a big bear of a
man. We were friends because he kept the other men away from me, if you
understand what I mean. He said I reminded him of his sister. [Smiles sadly.] 1
liked him.
There was someone crawling at his feet. It looked like an old woman, but there
was a burlap hood over her head and a chain leash wrapped around her neck. Her
dress was torn and the skin of her legs had been scraped clean off. There was no
blood, just this black pus. Arkady was well into a loud, angry speech. "No more
lies! No more orders to shoot civilians on sight! And that's why 1 put the little
zhopoliz down . . ."
I looked for Lieutenant Tikhonov but I couldn't see him anywhere. I got a ball of
ice in my stomach.
". . . because I wanted you all to see!" Arkady lifted the chain, pulling the old
babushka up by her throat. He grabbed the hood and ripped it off. Her face was
gray, just like the rest of her, her eyes were wide and fierce. She snarled like a
wolf and tried to grab Arkady. He wrapped one powerful hand around her throat,
holding her at arm's length.
"I want you all to see why we are here!" He grabbed the knife from his belt and
plunged it into the woman's heart. I gasped, we all did. It was buried up to the hilt
and she continued to squirm and growl. "You see!" he shouted, stabbing her
several more times. "You see! This is what they're not telling us! This is what they
have us breaking our backs to find!" You
could see heads start to nod, a few grunts of agreement. Arkady continued, "What if these
things are everywhere ? What if they're back home, with our families right now!" He was
trying to make eye contact with as many of us as possible. He wasn't paying enough
attention to the old woman. His grip loosened, she pulled free and bit him on the hand.
Arkady roared. His fist caved in the old woman's face. She fell to his feet, writhing and
gurgling
2.
Semnadstat
was a Russian magazine aimed at teenage girls. It's title.
17,
was illegally
copied from an American publication of the same name.
WORLD WAR Z        81
that black goo. He finished the job with his boot. We all heard her skull crack.
Blood was trickling down the gouge in Arkady's fist. He shook it at the sky, screaming as
the veins in his neck began to bulge. "We want to go home!" he bellowed. "We want to
protect our families!" Odiers in the crowd began to pick it up. "Yes! We want to protect
our families! This is a tree country! This is a democracy! You can't keep us in prison!" I
was shouting, too, chanting with the rest. That old woman, the creature that could take a
knife in the heart without dying . . . what it they were back home? What
if they were threatening our loved ones .. . my parents? All the fear, all the doubt,
every tangled, negative emotion all fused into rage. "We want to go home! We
want to go home!" Chanting, chanting, and then ... A round cracked past my ear
and Arkady's left eye imploded. I don't remember running, or inhaling the tear gas.
I don't remember when the Spetznaz commandos appeared, but suddenly they
were all around us, beating us down, shackling us together, one of them stepping
on my chest so hard I thought I was going to die right then and there.
Was that the Decimation?
No, that was the beginning. We weren't the first army unit to rebel. It had actually
started about the time the MPs first closed down the base. About the time we
staged our little "demonstration," the government had decided how to restore
order.
[She straightens her uniform, composes herself before speaking.]
To "decimate" ... I used to think it meant just to wipe out, cause horrible damage,
destroy ... it actually means to kill by a percentage of ten, one out of every ten
must die . . . and that's exactly what they did to us.
The Spetznaz had us assemble on the parade ground, full dress uniform no less.
Our new commanding officer gave a speech about duty- and responsibility, about
our sworn oath to protect the motherland, and how we
had betrayed that oath with our selfish treachery and individual cow-ardice. I'd
never heard words like that before. "Duty*" "Responsibility'" Russia, my Russia,
was nothing but an apolitical mess. We lived in chaos and corruption, we were just
trying to get through the day. Even the army was no bastion of patriotism; it was a
place to learn a trade, get food and a bed, and maybe even a little money to send
home when the government decided it was convenient to pay its soldiers. "Oath to
protect the motherland?" Those weren't the words of my generation. That was
what you'd hear from old Great Patriotic War veterans, the kind of broken,
demented geezers who used to besiege Red Square with their tattered Soviet
banners and their rows and rows of medals pinned to their faded, moth-eaten uni­
forms. Duty to the motherland was a joke. But I wasn't laughing. I knew the
executions were coming. The armed men surrounding us, the men in the guard
towers, I was ready, every muscle in my body was tensing for the shot. And then I
heard those words . . .
"You spoiled children think democracy is a God-given right. You expect it, you
demand it! Well, now you're going to get your chance to practice it."
His exact words, stamped behind my eyelids for the rest of my life.
What did he mean?
We would be the ones to decide who would be punished. Broken up into groups of
ten, we would have to vote on which one of us was going to be executed. And then
we . . . the soldiers, we would be the ones to personally murder our friends. They
rolled these little pushcarts past us. I can still
hear their creaking wheels. They were full of stones, about the size of your hand,
sharp and heavy Some cried out, pleaded with us, begged like children. Some, like
Baburin, simply knelt there silently, on this knees, staring right into my face as 1
brought the rock down into his.
[She sighs softly, glancing over her shoulder at the one-way glass.]
Brilliance. Sheer fucking brilliance. Conventional executions might have
reinforced discipline, might have restored order from the top down,
WORLD WAR Z        83
but by making us all accomplices, they held us together not just by fear, but by
guilt as well. We could have said no, could have refused and been shot ourselves,
but we didn't. We went right along with it. We all made a conscious choice and
because that choice carried such a high price, I don't think anyone ever wanted to
make another one again. We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more
than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the
freedom to point to someone else and say "They told me to do it! It's dieir fault,
not mine." The freedom, God help us, to say "I was only following orders."
BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOS, WEST INDIES FEDERATION
[Trevor's Bai personifies the "Wild West Indies," or, more specifically, each island's
"Special Economic Zone." This is not a place most people would associate with the
order and tranquility of postwar Caribbean life. It is not meant to be. Fenced off from the
rest of the island and catering to a culture of chaotic violence and debauchery, the
Special Economic Zones are engineered specifically to separate "off-islanders" from
their money. My discomfort seems to please T. Sean Collins. The giant Texan slides a
shot of "kill-devil" rum in my direction, then swings his massive, boot-clad feet onto the
table.)
They haven't come up with a name for what I used to do. Not a real one, not yet.
"Independent contractor" sounds like I should be layin' dry-wall and smearin'
plaster. "Private security" sounds like some dumbass mall guard. "Mercenary" is
the closest, I guess, but at the same time, about as far from the real me as you
could have gotten. A mercenary sounds like some crazed-out 'Nam vet, all tats and
handlestache, humpin' in some Third World cesspool 'cause he can't hack it back
in the real world. That
wasn't me at all. Yeah, I was a vet, and yeah, I used my training for cash . . . tunny
thing about the army, they always promise to teach you "marketable skills," but
they never mention that, by far, there's nothing more marketable than knowing
how to kill some people while keeping others from being killed.
Maybe I was a mercenary, but you'd never know it to look at me. I was clean-cut,
nice car, nice house, even a housekeeper who came in once a week. I had plenty of
friends, marriage prospects, and my handicap at the country club was almost as
good as the pros. Most importantly, I worked for a company no different from any
other before the war. There was no cloak and dagger, no back rooms and midnight
envelopes. I had vacation days and sick days, full medical and a sweet dental
package. I paid my taxes, too much; I paid into my IRA. I could have worked
overseas; Lord knows there was plenty of demand, but after seeing what my
buddies went through in the last brushfire, I said, screw it, let me guard some fat
CEO or worthless, dumb celebrity. And that's where I found myself when the
Panic hit.
You don't mind if I don't mention any names, 'kay? Some of these people are still
alive, or their estates are still active, and . . . can you believe, they're still
threatening to sue. After all that's gone down? Okay, so I can't name names or
places, but figure it's an island ... a big island ... a
long
island, right next to
Manhattan. Can't sue me for that, right?
My client, I'm not sure what he really did. Something in entertainment, or high
finance. Beats me. I think he might have even been one of the senior shareholders
in my firm. Whatever, he had bucks, lived in this amazing pad by the beach.
Our client liked to know people who were known by all. His plan was to provide
safety for those who could raise his image during and after the war, playing Moses
to the scared and famous. And you know what, they fell for it. The actors, and
singers, and rappers and pro athletes, and just the professional faces, like the ones
you see on talk shows or reality shows, or even that little rich, spoiled, tired-
looking whore who was famous for just being a rich, spoiled, tired-looking whore.
There was that record mogul guy with the big 'ole diamond earrings. He had this
tricked-out AK with a grenade launcher. He loved to talk about
WORLD WAR Z        85
how it was an exact replica of the one from
Scarface.
I didn't have the heart to tell
him that Senor Montana had used a sixteen A-l.
There was the political comedy guy, you know, the one with the show. He was
snorting blow between the air bags of this teeny Thai stripper while spewing about
how what was happening wasn't just about the living versus the dead, it would
send shock waves through every facet of our society: social, economic, political,
even environmental. He said that, subconsciously, everyone already knew the truth
during the "Great Denial," and that's why they wigged out so hard when the story
was finally broken. It all
actually kinda made sense, until he started spewing about high fructose corn syrup
and the feminization of America.
Crazy, I know, but you kinda expected those people to be there, at least 1 did.
What I didn't expect was all their "people." Every one of them, no matter who they
were or what they did, had to have, at least, I don't know-how many stylists and
publicists and personal assistants. Some of them, I think, were pretty cool, just
doing it for the money, or because they figured they'd be safe there. Young people
just trying to get a leg up. Can't fault them for that. Some of the others though . . .
real pricks all high on the smell of their own piss. Just rude and pushy and
ordering everyone else around. One guy sticks out in my mind, only because he
wore this baseball cap that read "Get It Done!" I think he was the chief handler of
the fat fuck who won that talent show. That guy must have had fourteen people
around him! I remember thinking at first that it would be impossible to take care of
all these people, but after my initial tour of the premises, I realized our boss had
planned for everything.
He'd transformed his home into a survivalists' wet dream. He had enough
dehydrated food to keep an army fed for years, as well as an endless supply of
water from a desalinizer that ran right out into the ocean. He had wind turbines,
solar panels, and backup generators with giant fuel tanks buried right under the
courtyard. He had enough security measures to hold off the living dead forever:
high walls, motion sensors, and weapons, oh the weapons. Yeah, our boss had
really done his homework, but what he was most proud of was the fact that every
room in the house was wired for a simultaneous webcast that went out all over the
world 24/7. This was the
real reason for having all his "closest" and "best" friends over. He didn't just want
to ride out the storm in comfort and luxury, he wanted everyone to
know
he'd done
it. That was the celebrity angle, his way of ensuring high-profile exposure.
Not only did you have a webcam in almost every room, but there was all the usual
press you'd find on the Oscar's red carpet. I honestly never knew how big an
industry entertainment journalism was. There had to be dozens of them there from
all these magazines and TV shows. "How are you feeling?" I heard that a lot.
"How are you holding up?" "What do you think is going to happen?" and I swear I
even heard someone ask "What are you wearing?"
For me, the most surreal moment was standing in the kitchen with some of the
staff and other bodyguards, all of us watching the news that was showing, guess
what, us! The cameras were literally in the other room, pointed at some of the
"stars" as they sat on the couch watching another news channel. The feed was live
from New York's Upper East Side; the dead were coming right up Third Avenue,
people were taking them on hand to hand, hammers and pipes, the manager of a
Modell's Sporting Goods was handing out all his baseball bats and shouting
"Get
'em in the head!" There was this one guy on rollerblades. He had a hockey stick in
his hand, a big 'ole meat cleaver bolted to the blade. He was doing an easy thirty,
at that speed he might have taken a neck or two. The camera saw the whole thing,
the rotted arm that shot out of the sewer drain right in front of him, die poor guy
back flipping into the air, coming down hard on his face, then being dragged,
screaming, by his ponytail into the drain. At that moment the camera in our living
room swung back to catch the reac-
tions of the watching celebs. There were a few gasps, some honest, some staged. I
remember thinking I had less respect for the ones who tried to fake some tens than
I J id tor the little spoiled whore who called the rollerblading guy a "dumbass."
Hey, at least she was being honest. I remember I was standing next to this guy,
Sergei, a miserable, sad-faced, hulking motherfucker. His stories about growing up
in Russia convinced me that not all Third World cesspools had to be tropical. It
was when the camera was catching the reactions of the beautiful people that he
mumbled
WORLD WAR Z        87
something to himself in Russian. The only word I could make out was
"Romanovs" and I was about to ask him what he meant when we all heard the
alarm go off.
Something had triggered the pressure sensors we'd placed several miles around the
wall. They were sensitive enough to detect just one zombie, now they were going
crazy. Our radios were squawking: "Contact, contact, southwest corner ... shit,
there's hundreds of them!" It was a damn big house, it took me a few minutes to
get to my firing position. I didn't understand why the lookout was so nervous. So
what if there were a couple hundred. They'd never get over the wall. Then I heard
him shout "They're
running! Holy fuck in' shit, they're fast!" Fast zombies, that turned my gut. If they
could run, they could climb, if they could climb, maybe they could think, and if
they could think . . . now I was scared. I remember our boss's friends were all
raiding the armory, racing around like extras in an '80s ac-tion flick by the time I
made the third-floor guestroom window.
I flipped the safety off my weapon and flipped the guards off my sight. It was one
of the newest Gen's, a fusion
o{
light amplification and thermal imaging. I didn't
need the second part because Gs gave off no body heat. So when I saw the searing,
bright green signatures of several hundred runners, my throat tightened. Those
weren't living dead.
"There it is!" I heard them shout. "That's the house on the news!" They were
carrying ladders, guns, babies. A couple of them had these heavy satchels strapped
to their backs. They were booking it for the front gate, big tough steel that was
supposed to stop a thousand ghouls. The explosion tore them right off their hinges,
sent them flipping into the house like giant ninja stars. "Fire!" the boss was
screaming into the radio. "Knock 'em down! Kill 'em! Shootshootshoot!"
The "attackers," for lack of a better label, stampeded for the house. The courtyard
was full of parked vehicles, sports cars and Hummers, and even a monster truck
belonging to some NFL cat. Freakin fireballs, all of them, blowing over on their
sides or just burning in place, this thick oily smoke from their tires blinding and
choking everyone. All you could hear was gunfire, ours and theirs, and not just our
private security team. Any big shot who wasn't crapping his pants either had it in
his head to be a hero, or
tele he had to protect his rep in front of his peeps. A lot of them demanded that
their entourage protect them. Some did, these poor twenty-year-old personal
assistants who'd never fired a gun in their lives. They didn't last very long. But
then there were also die peons who turned and joined the attackers. I saw this one
real queeny hairdresser stab an actress in the mouth with a letter opener, and,
ironically, I watched Mister "Get It Done" try to wrestle a grenade away from the
talent show guy before it went off in their hands.
It was bedlam, exactly what you thought the end of the world was supposed to
look like. Part of the house was burning, blood everywhere, bodies or bits of them
spewed over all that expensive stuff. I met the whore's rat dog as we were bodi
heading for the back door. He looked at me, I looked at him. If it'd been a
conversation, it probably woulda gone like, "What about your master?" "What
about yours?" "Fuck 'em." That was the attitude among a lot of the hired guns, the
reason I hadn't fired a shot all night. We'd been paid to protect rich people from
zombies, not against other not-so-rich people who just wanted a safe place to hide.
You could hear them shouting as they charged in through the front door. Not "grab
the booze" or "rape the bitches"; it was "put out the fire!" and "get the women and
kids upstairs!"
I stepped over Mister Political Comedy Guy on my way out to the beach. He and
this chick, this leathery old blonde who I thought was supposed to be his political
enemy, were goin' at it like there was no tomorrow, and, hey, maybe for them,
there wasn't. I made it out to die sand, found a surfboard, probably worth more
than the house I grew up in, and started
paddling for the lights on the horizon. There were a lot of boats on the water that
night, a lot of people gettuV outta Dodge. I hoped one of them might give me a
ride as far as New York Harbor. Hopefully I could bribe them with a pair of
diamond earrings.
[He iinishes his shot of rum and signals for another.)
Sometimes I ask myself, why didn't they all just shut the fuck up, you know? Not
just my boss, but all of those pampered parasites. They had the
WORLD WAR Z        89
means to stay way outta harm's way, so why didn't they use it; go to Antarctica or
Greenland or just stay where they were but stay the hell outta the public eye' But
then again, maybe they couldn't, like a switch you just can't turn off. Maybe it's
what made them who they were in the first place. But what the hell do I know'
[The waiter arrives with another shot and T. Sean flicks a silver rand coin to him.]
"If you got it, flaunt it,"
ICE CITY, GREENLAND
[From the surface, all that is visible are the funnels, the massive, carefully sculpted wind
catchers that continue to bring fresh, albeit cold, air to the three-hundred-kilometer
maze below. Few of the quarter million people who once inhabited this hand-
carved marvel of engineering have remained. Some stay to encourage the small but
growing tourist trade. Some are here as custodians, living on the pension that goes
with UNESCO's renewed World Heritage Program. Some, like Ahmed Farahnakian,
formerly Major Farahnakian of the Iranian Revolution Guards Corps Air Force, have
nowhere else to go.]
India and Pakistan. Like North and South Korea or NATO and the old Warsaw
Pact. If two sides were going to use nuclear weapons against each other, it had to
be India and Pakistan. Everyone knew it, everyone ex-pected it, and that is exactly
why it didn't happen. Because the danger was so omnipresent, all the machinery
had been put in place over die years to avoid it. The hotline between the two
capitals was in place, ambassadors
were on a first-name basis, and generals, politicians, and everyone involved in the
process was trained to make sure the day they all feared never came. No one could
have imagined-I certainly didn't-that events would unfold as they did.
The infection hadn't hit us as hard as some other countries. Our land was very
mountainous. Transportation was difficult. Our population was relatively small;
given the size of our country and when you consider that many of our cities could
be easily isolated by a proportionately large military, it is not difficult to see how
optimistic our leadership was.
The problem was refugees, millions of them from the east, millions! Streaming
across Baluchistan, throwing our plans into disarray. So many areas were already
infected, great swarms slouching toward our cities. Our border guards were
overwhelmed, entire outposts buried under waves of ghouls. There was no way to
close the border and at the same time deal with our own outbreaks.
We demanded that the Pakistanis get control of dieir people. They assured us they
were doing all they could. We knew they were lying.
The majority of refugees came from India, just passing through Pakistan in an
attempt to reach someplace safe. Those in Islamabad were quite willing to let them
go. Better to pass the problem along to another nation than have to deal with it
themselves. Perhaps if we could have combined our forces, coordinated a joint
operation at some appropriately defensible location. I know the plans were on die
table. Pakistan's south central mountains: the Pab, the Kirthar, the Central Brahui
range. We could have stopped any number of refugees, or living dead. Our plan
was refused.
Some paranoid military attache at their embassy Told us outright that any foreign
troops on their soil would be seen as a declaration of war. I don't know if their
president ever saw our proposal; our leaders never spoke to him directly. You see
what I mean about India and Pakistan. We didn't have their relationship. The
diplomatic machinery was not in place. For all we know this little shit-eating
colonel informed his government that we were attempting to annex their western
provinces!
But what could we do? Every day hundreds of thousands of people
WORLD WAR Z        91
crossed our border, and of those perhaps tens of thousands were infected! We had
to take decisive action. We had to protect ourselves!
There is a road that runs between our two countries. It is small by your standards,
not even paved in most places, but it was the main southern ar-tery in Baluchistan.
To cut it at just one place, the Ketch River Bridge, would have effectively sealed
off 60 percent of all refugee traffic. I flew the mission myself, at night with a
heavy escort. You didn't need image intensifies. You could see the headlights from
miles away, a long, thin white Trail in the darkness. I could even see small-arms
flashes. The area was
heavily infested. I targeted the bridge's center foundation, which would be the
hardest part to repair. The bombs separated cleanly. They were high-explosive,
conventional ordnance, just enough to do the job. American aircraft, from when
we used to be your allies of convenience, used to destroy a bridge built with
American aid for the same purpose. The irony was not lost on the high command.
Personally, I could have cared less. As soon as I felt my Phantom lighten, I hit my
burners, waited for my observer plane's report, and prayed with all my might that
the Pakistanis wouldn't retaliate.
Of course my prayers went unanswered. Three hours later their garrison at Qila
Safed shot up our border station. I know now that our president and Ayatollah
were willing to stand down. We'd gotten what we wanted, they'd gotten their
revenge. Tit for tat, let it go. But who was going to tell the other side ? Their
embassy in Tehran had destroyed its codes and radios. That sonofabitching colonel
had shot himself rather than betray any "state secrets." We had no hotline, no
diplomatic channels. We didn't know how to contact the Pakistani leadership. We
didn't even know if there was any leadership left. It was such a mess, confusion
turning to anger, anger turning on our neighbors. Every hour the conflict escalated.
Border clashes, air strikes. It happened so fast, just three days of conventional
warfare, neither side having any clear objective, just panicked rage.
[He shrugs.]
We created a beast, a nuclear monster that neither side could tame . . . Tehran,
Islamabad, Qom, Lahore, Bandar Abbas, Onnara, Emam Khomeyni, Faisalabad.
No one knows how many died in the blasts or would die when the radiation clouds
began to spread over our countries, over India, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, over
America.
No one diought it could happen, not between us. For God's sake, they helped us
build our nuclear program from the ground up! They supplied the materials, the
technology, the third party brokering with North Korea and Russian renegades...
we wouldn't have been a nuclear power if it wasn't for our fraternal Muslim
brothers. No one would have expected it, but then again, no one would have
expected the dead to rise, now would they? Only one could have foreseen this, and
I don't believe in him anymore.
DENVER, COLORADO, USA
[My train is late. The western drawbridge is being tested. Todd Wainio doesn't seem to
mind waiting for me at the platform. We shake hands under the station's mural of Victory,
easily the most recognizable image of the American experience in World War Z.
Originally taken from a photograph, it depicts a squad of sol-
diers standing on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, their backs turned to us as
they watch dawn break over Manhattan. My host looks very small and frail next to these
towering, two-dimensional icons. Like most men of his generation, Todd Wainio is old
before his time. With an expanding paunch, receding, graying hair, and three, deep,
parallel scars down the side of his right cheek, it would be difficult to guess that this
former U.S. Army infantryman is still, at least chronologically, at the beginning of his life.]
WORLD WAR Z          93
The sky was red that day. All the smoke, the crap that'd been filling che air all
summer. Ic put everything in an amber red light, like looking at the world
through hell-colored glasses. That's how I first saw Yonkers, this liccle, depressed,
rust-collar burb just north of New York City. I don't think anybody ever heard of
it. I sure as hell hadn't, and now it's up there widi, like, Pearl Harbor . . . no,
not Pearl. . . that was a surprise attack. This was more like Little Bighorn, where
we . . . well ... at least the people in charge,
they
knew what was up, or they should have. The point is, it wasn't a surprise, the
war ... or emergency, or whatever you want to call it... it was already on. It had
been, what, three months since everyone jumped on the panic train.
You remember what it was like, people just freaking out. . . boarding up their
houses, stealing food, guns, shooting everything that moved. They probably killed
more people, the Rambos and the runaway fires, and the traffic accidents and just
the . . . the whole shit storm that we now call "the Great Panic"; I think that killed
more people at first than Zack.
I guess I can see why the powers that be thought that one big stand-up battle was
such a good idea. They wanted to show the people that they were still in charge,
get them to calm the hell down so they could deal with the real problem. I get it,
and because they needed a propaganda smack-down, I ended up in Yonkers.
It actually wasn't the worst place to make a stand. Part of the town sat right in this
little valley, and right over the west hills you had the Hudson River. The Saw Mill
River Parkway ran right through the center of our main line of defense and the
refugees streaming down the freeway were leading the dead right to us. It was a
natural choke point, and it was a good idea . . . the only good idea that day.
[Todd reaches for another
"Q,"
the homegrown, American variety
cigarette so named tor its one-quarter tobacco content.]
Why didn't they put us on the roofs? They had a shopping center, a
couple of garages, big buildings with nice flat Tops. They could have put a whole
company right above the A&P. We could have seen the whole
94       MAX BROOKS
valley,
and
we would have been completely safe from attack. There was this
apartment building, about twenty stories, I think . . . each floor had a commanding
view of the freeway. Why wasn't there a rifle team in each window?
You know where they put us' Right down on the ground, right behind sandbags or
in fighting holes. We wasted so much time, so much energy preparing these
elaborate firing positions. Good "cover and concealment," they told us. Cover and
concealment? "Cover" means physical protection, conventional protection, from
small arms and artillery or air-dropped ordnance. That sound like the enemy we
were about to go up against? Was Zack now calling in air strikes and fire
missions? And why the hell were we worried about concealment when the whole
point of the battle was to get Zack to come directly at us! So backasswards! All of
it!
I'm sure whoever was in charge must have been one of the last of the Fulda
Fucktards, you know, those generals who spent their nard-drop years training to
defend West Germany from Ivan. Tight-assed, narrow-minded . .. probably pissed
off from so many years of brushfire war. He must have been
an rr because everything we did freak in stunk or Cold War btatic
Defense.
You
know they even tried to dig fighting holes for the tanks? The engineers blasted
them right out of the A&P parking lot.
you
had tanks?
Dude, we had everything: tanks, Bradleys, Humvees armed with everything from
fifty cals to these new Vasilek heavy mortars. At least those
might
have been
useful. We had Avenger Humvee mounted Stinger surface-to-air missile sets, we
had this AVLB portable bridge layer system, perfect for the three-inch-deep creek
that ran by the freeway. We had a bunch of XM5 electronic warfare vehicles all
crammed with radar and jamming gear and . . . and ... oh yeah, and we even had a
whole FOL, Family of Latrines, just plopped right there in the middle of
everything. Why, when the water pressure was still on and toilets were still
flushing in every building and house in the neighborhood? So much we didn't
need! So much shit that only blocked traffic and looked pretty, and that's what I
think they were really there for, just to look pretty.
For the press.
Hell yeah, there muse have been at least one reporter for every two or three
uniforms! On foot and in vans, I don't know how many news choppers must have
been circling . . . you'd think with so many they'd spare a few to try and rescue
people from Manhattan . . . hell yeah, I think it was all for the press, show them
our big green killpower ... or tan . . . some were just back from the desert, they
hadn't even been repainted yet. So much of it was for show, not just the vehicles
but us as well. They had us in MOPP 4, dude, Mission Oriented Protective
Posture, big bulky suits and masks that are supposed to protect you from a
radioactive or biochem environment.
Couid
your superiors have believed the undead virus was airborne?
If that's true, why didn't they protect the reporters? Why didn't our "superiors"
wear them, or anyone else immediately behind the line. They were cool and
comfortable in their BDUs while we sweated under layers of rubber, charcoal, and
thick, heavy body armor. And what genius thought to put us in body armor
anyway? Because die press reamed 'em for not having enough in the last war?
Why the hell do you need a helmet when you're fighting a living corpse? They're
the ones who need the helmets, not us! And then you've got the Net Rigs . . . the
Land Warrior combat integration system. It was this whole personal electronics
suite that allowed each one of us to link up with each other and the higher-ups to
link up with us. Through your eyepiece you could download maps, GPS data, real-
time
satellite recon. You could find your exact position on a battlefield, your buddies'
positions, the bad guys . . . you could actually look through the video camera on your
weapon, or anyone else's, to see what's over a hedge or around a corner. Land Warrior
allowed every soldier to have the infor-mation of an entire command post, and let the
command post control those soldiers as a single unit. "Netrocentric," that's what I kept
hearing
1. Although this is an exaggeration, prewar records have shown Yonkers to have the
largest press-to-military ratio than any other battlefield in history.
96       MAX BROOKS
from the officers in front of the cameras. "Netrocentric" and "hyperwar." Cool terms, but
they didn't mean shit when you're trying to dig a fighting hole with MOPP gear and body
armor, and Land Warrior and standard combat load, and all of it on the hottest day in
what was one of the hottest summers on record. I can't believe I was still standing when
Zack began to show up.
It was just a trickle at first, ones and twos staggering between the abandoned cars that
jammed the deserted freeway. At least the refugees had been evacuated. Okay, that was
another thing they did right. Picking a
choke point and clearing the civilians, great job. Everything else . . .
Zack started entering the first kill zone, the one designated for the MLRS. I didn't
hear the rockets launch, my hood muffled the noise, but 1 saw them streak toward
the target. 1 saw them arch on their way down, as their casings broke away to
reveal all those little bomblets on plastic streamers. They1 re about the size of a
hand grenade, antipersonnel with a limited antiarmor capacity. They scattered
amongst the Gs, detonating once they hit the road or an abandoned car. Their gas
tanks went up in like little volcanoes, geysers of fire and debris that added to the
"steel rain." I got to be honest, it was a rush, dudes were cheering in their mikes,
me too, watching ghouls start to tumble. I'd say there were maybe thirty, maybe
forty or fifty, zombies spread out all across this half mile stretch of freeway. The
opening bombardment took out at least three-quarters of them.
Only three-quarters.
[Todd finishes his cigarette in one long, angry drag. Immediately, he reaches for
another.)
Yep, and that's what should have made us worry right then and there. "Steel rain"
hit each and every single one of them, shredded their insides; organs and flesh
were scattered all over the damn place, dropping from their bodies as diey came
toward us . . . but head shots . . . you're trying to destroy the brain, not the body,
and as long as they got a working thinker and some mobility' . . . some were still
walking, others too thrashed
to stand were crawling. Yeah, we should have worried, but there wasn't time.
The trickle was now turning into a stream. More Gs, dozens now, diick among the
burning cars. Funny thing about Zack . . . you always think he's gonna be dressed
in his Sunday best. That's how the media portrayed them, right, especially in the
beginning ... Gs in business suits and dresses, like, a cross section of everyday
America, only dead. That's not what they looked like at all. Most infected, the
early infected, the ones who went in that first wave, they either died under
treatment or at home in their own beds. Most were either in hospital gowns, or
pajamas and nightshirts. Some were in sweats or their undies ... or just naked, a lot
of them conv pletely buck bare. You could see their wounds, the dried marks on
their bodies, the gouges that made you shiver even inside that sweltering gear.
The second "steel rain" didn't have half the impact of the first, no more gas tanks
to catch, and now the more tightly packed Gs just happened to be shielding each
other from a possible head wound. I wasn't scared, not yet. Maybe my wood was
gone, but I was pretty sure it'd be back when Zack entered the Army's kill zone.
Again, I couldn't hear the Paladins, too far back up the hill, but I sure heard, and
saw, their shells land. These were standard HE 155s, a high ex-plosive core with a
fragmentation case. They did even less damage than the rockets!
Why is that?
No balloon effect for one. When a bomb goes off close to you, it causes the
liquid in your body to burst, literally, like a freakin' balloon. That doesn't happen
with Zack, maybe because he carries less bodily fluid than us or because that
fluid's more like a gel. I don't know. But it didn't do shit, neither did the SNT
effect
What is SNT?
Sudden Nerve Trauma, I think that's what you call it. It's another effect of close-in
high explosives. The trauma is so great sometimes that your
98       MAX BROOKS
organs, your brain, all of it, just shuts down like God flickin' your life
switch. Something to do with electrical impulses or whatnot. I don't know, I'm not
a fuckin' doctor.
But that didn't happen.
Not once! I mean . . . don't get me wrong . . . it's not like Zack just skipped
through the barrage unscathed. We saw bodies blown to shit, tossed into the air,
ripped to pieces, even complete heads, live heads with eyes and jaws still moving,
popping sky high like freakin' Cristal corks . . . we were
Taking them down, no doubt, but not as many or as fast as we needed to!
The stream was now like a river, a flood of bodies, slouching, moaning, stepping
over their mangled bros as they rolled slowly and steadily toward us like a slow-
motion wave.
The next kill zone was direct fire from the heavy arms, the tanks main 120s and
Bradleys with their chain guns and FOTT missiles. The Humvees also began to
open up, mortars and missiles and the Mark-19s, which are, like, machine guns,
but firing grenades. The Comanches came whining in at what felt like inches
above our heads with chains and Hellfires and Hydra rocket pods.
It was a fuckin* meat grinder, a wood chipper, organic matter clouding like
sawdust above the horde.
Nothing can survive this,
I was thinking, and for a little while, it looked like I was
right. . . until the fire started to die.
Started
to die?
Petering out, withering . . .
[For a second he is silent, and then, angrily, his eyes reiocus.l
No one thought about it,
no one!
Don't pull my pud with stories about budget cuts
and supply problems! The only thing in short supply was com-
mon fucking sense! Not one of those West Point, War College, medals-up-the-ass,
four-star fart bags said, "Hey, we got plenty of fancy weapons, we got enough shit
for them to shoot!?!" No one thought about how many rounds the artillery would
need for sustained operations, how many rockets for the MLRS, how many
canister shots . . . the tanks had these things called canister shots . . . basically a
giant shotgun shell. They fired these little tungsten balls . . . not perfect you know,
wasting like a hundred balls for even- G, but fuck, dude, at least it was something!
Each Abrams only had three, three! Three out of a total loadout of forty! The rest
were standard HEAT or SABOT! Do you know what a "Silver Bullet," an armor-
piercing, depleted-uranium dart is going to do to a group of walking corpses?
Nothing! Do you know what it feels like to see a sixty-something-ton tank tire into
a crowd with absolutely ass-all result! Three canister rounds! And what about
flechettes? That's the weapon we always hear about these days, flechettes, these
little steel spikes that turn any weapon into an instant scattergun. We talk about
them like they're a new Invention, but we had them as far back as, like, Korea. We
had them for the Hydra rockets and the Mark-19s. Just imagine that, just one 19
firing three hundred and fifty rounds a minute, each round holding, like, a
hundred" spikes! Maybe it wouldn't have turned the tide . . . but . . . Goddammit!
The fire was dying, Zack was still coining . . . and the fear . .. everyone was
feeling it, in the orders from the squad leaders, in the actions of the men around
me . . . That little voice in the back of your head that just keeps squeaking "Oh
shit, oh shit."
We were the last line of defense, the afterthought when it came to firepower. We
were supposed to pick off the random lucky G who happened to
slip through The giant bitchslap of our heavier stuff. Maybe one in three of us was
expected to fire his weapon, one in every ten was expected to score a kill.
They came by the thousands, spilling out over the freeway guardrails, down the
side streets, around the houses, through them ... so many of them, their moans so
loud they echoed right through our hoods.
2. The standard, prewar 40-mm canister cartridge held 115 tlechettes.
100       MAX BROOKS
We flipped our safeties off, sighted our targets, the order came to fire . . . I was a
SAW gunner, a light machine gun that you're supposed to fire in short, controlled
bursts about as long as it takes to say "Die motherfucker die." The initial burst was
too low, I caught one square in the chest. I watched him fly backward, hit the
asphalt, then get right back up again as if nothing had happened. Dude . . . when
they get back up ...
[The cigarette has burned down to his fingers. He drops and crushes it without noticing.]
I did my best to control my fire, and my sphincter, "lust go for the head,"
I kept telling myself. "Keep it together, just go for the head." And all the time my
SAW's chattering "Die motherfucker die."
We could have stopped them, we should have, one guy with a rifle, that's all you
need, right? Professional soldiers, trained marksmen . . . how could they get
through? They still ask that, critics and armchair Pattons who weren't there. You
think it's that simple' You think that after being "trained" to aim for the center
mass your whole military career you can suddenly make an expert head shot every
time' You think in that strait-jacket and suffocation hood it's easy to recharge a clip
or clear a weapon jam? You think that after watching all the wonders of modern
warfare tall flat on their high-tech hyper ass, that after already living through three
months of the Great Panic and watching everything you knew as reality be eaten
alive by an enemy that wasn't even supposed to exist that you're gonna keep a cool
fucking head and a steady fucking trigger finger?
[He stabs that finger at me.l
Well, we did! We
still
managed to do our job and make Zack pay for every fuckin'
inch! Maybe if we'd had more men, more ammo, maybe if we'd just been allowed
to focus on our job . . .
3. SAW: A light machine gun, short for Squad Automatic Weapon.
[His finger curls back into his fist.]
Land Warrior, high-tech, high-priced, high-profile netro-fucking-centric Land
Warrior. To see what was in front of our face was bad enough, but spybtrd uplinks
were also showing how truly large the horde was. We might be facing diousands,
but behind them were millions! Remember, we were taking on the bulk of New
York City's infestation! This was only the head of one really long undead snake
stretching all the way back to Times Fuckin' Square! We didn't need to see that. I
didn't need to know that! That little scared voice wasn't so little anymore. "Oh shit,
OH SHIT!" And suddenly it wasn't in my head anymore. It was in my earpiece.
Every time some jerkoff couldn't control his mouth, Land Warrior made sure the
rest of us heard it. "There's too many!" "We gotta get the fuck outta here!"
Someone from another platoon, I didn't know his name, started hollering "I hit him
in the head and he didn't die! They don't die when you shoot them in the head!"
I'm sure he must have missed the brain, it can happen, a round j ust grazing the
inside of the skull. . . maybe if he'd been calm and used his own brain, he would
have realized that. Panic's even more infectious than the Z Germ and the wonders
of Land Warrior allowed that germ to become airborne. "What?" "They don't die?"
"Who said that?" "You shot it in the head?" "Holy crap! They're indestructible!"
All over the net you could hear this, browning shorts across the info
superhighway.
"Everyone pipe down!" someone shouted. "Hold the line! Stay off the net!" an
older voice, you could tell, but suddenly it was drowned out in this scream and
suddenly my eyepiece, and I'm sure everyone else's, was filled with the sight of
blood spurting into a mouth of broken teeth. The sight
was from a dude in the yard ot a house behind the line. The owners must have left
a few reanimated family members locked in when they bugged out. Maybe the
shock from the explosions weakened the door or some-thing, because they came
bursting out, right into this poor bastard. His gun camera recorded the whole thing,
fell right at the perfect angle. There were five of them, a man, a woman, three kids,
they had him pinned on his back, the man was on his chest, the kids had him by
the arms, trying to bite through his suit. The woman tore his mask off, you could
see the terror in
102       MAX BROOKS
his face. I'll never forget his shriek as she bit off his chin and lower lip. "They're
behind us!" someone was shouting. "They're coming out of the houses! The line's
broken! They're everywhere!" Suddenly the image went dark, cut off from an
external source, and the voice, the older voice, was back again . . . "Stay off the
net!" he ordered, trying real hard to control his voice and then the link went dead.
I'm sure it must have taken more than a few seconds, it had to, even if they'd been
hovering above our heads, but, it seemed like right after the communications line
blacked out that the sky was suddenly screaming with JSFs.  I didn't see them
release their ordnance. I was at the bottom of
my hole cursing the army and God, and my own hands for not digging deeper.
That ground shook, the sky went dark. Debris was everywhere, earth and ash and
burning whatever flying above my head. I felt this weight slam between my
shoulder blades, soft and heavy. I rolled over, it was a head and torso, all charred
black and still smoking and still trying to bite! I kicked it away and scrambled out
of my hole seconds after the last of the JSOW5 fell.
I found myself staring into this cloud of black smoke where the horde had been.
The freeway, the houses, everything was covered by this midnight cloud. I
vaguely remember other guys getting out of their holes, hatches opening on tanks
and Bradleys, everyone just staring into the darkness. There was a quiet, a stillness
that, in my mind, lasted for hours.
And then they came, right out of the smoke like a freakiiV little kid's nightmare!
Some were steaming, some were even still burning . . . some were walking, some
crawling, some just dragging themselves along on their torn bellies . . . maybe one
in twentv was still able to move, which left . . . shit... a couple thousand? And
behind them, mixing with their ranks and pushing steadily toward us, the
remaining million that the air strike hadn't even touched!
And that was when the line collapsed. I don't remember it all at once. I see these
flashes: people running, grunts, reporters. I remember a newsman
4.   JSF: Joint Strike Fighters.
5.  JSOW: Joint Standoff Weapon.
with a big Yosemite Sam mustache trying to pull a Beretta from his vest be-fore
three burning Gs pulled him down ... I remember a dude forcing open the door of a
news van, jumping in, throwing out a pretty blond reporter, and trying to drive
away before a tank crushed them both. Two news choppers crashed together,
showering us with their own steel rain. One Comanche driver.. . brave, beautiful
motherfucker . . . tried to turn his rotor into the oncoming Gs. The blade diced a
path right down their mass before catching on a car and hurling him into the A&P.
Shooting . . . crazy random shooting ... I took a round in the sternum, in my
armor's center plate. I felt like I'd run into a wall, even though I'd been standing
still. It knocked me on my ass, I couldn't breathe, and just then some dumb-ass
lobbed a flash bang right in front of me.
The world was white, my ears were ringing. I froze . . . hands were claw-ing me,
grabbing my arms. I kicked and punched, I felt my crotch get warm and wet. I
shouted but couldn't hear my own voice. More hands, stronger, were trying to haul
me somewhere. Kicking, squirming, cursing, crying . . . suddenly a fist clocked me
in the jaw. It didn't knock me out, but I was suddenly relaxed. These were my
buddies. Zack don't punch. They dragged me into the closest Bradley. My vision
cleared just long enough to see the line of light vanish with the closing hatch.
[He reaches for another
Q,
then abruptly decides against it.l
I know "professional" historians like to talk about how Yonkers represented a
"catastrophic failure of the modern military apparatus," how it
proved the old adage that armies perfect the art of fighting the last war just in time
tor the next one. Personally, I think that's a big 'ole sack of it. Sure, we were
unprepared, our tools, our training, everything I just talked about, all one class-A,
gold-standard clusterfuck, but the weapon that really failed wasn't something that
rolled oft an assembly line. It's as old as ... I don't know, I guess as old as war. Its
tear, dude, just tear and you don't have to be Sun treakin Tzu to know that real
fighting isn't about killing or even hurting the other guy, it's about scaring him
enough to call it a day. Break their spirit, that's what every successful army goes
for, from tribal face paint to
I 04       MAX BROOKS
the "blitzkrieg" to . . . what did we call the first round of Gulf War Two, "Shock
and Awe"?Perfect name, "Shock and Awe"! But what if the enemy can't be
shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically
can't!
That's what happened
that day outside New York City, that's the failure that almost lost us the whole
damn war. The fact that we couldn't shock and awe Zack boomeranged right back
in our faces and actually allowed Zack to shock and awe us! They're not afraid!
No matter what we do, no matter how many we kill, they will never, ever be
afraid!
Yonkers was supposed to be the day we restored confidence to the
American people, instead we practically told them to kiss their ass goodbye. If it
wasn't for the Sou'frican Plan, I have no doubt, we'd all be slouching and moaning
right now.
The last thing I remember was the Bradley being tossed like a Hot Wheels car. I
don't know where the hit was, but I'm guessing it must have been close. I'm sure
had I still been standing out there, exposed, I wouldn't be standing here today.
Have you ever seen the effects of a thermobaric weapon? Have you ever asked
anyone with stars on their shoulders about them* I bet my ballsack you'll never get
the full story. You'll hear about heat and pressure, the fireball that continues
expanding, exploding, and literally crushing and burning everything in its path.
Heat and pressure, that's what thermobaric means. Sounds nasty enough, right?
What you won't hear about is the immediate aftereffect, the vacuum created when
that fireball suddenly contracts. Anyone left alive will either have the air sucked
right out of their lungs, or-and they'll
never
admit this to anyone-have their lungs
ripped right out of their mouth. Obviously no one's going to live long enough to
tell that kind of horror story, probably why the Pentagon's been so good at
covering up the truth, but if you ever see a picture of a G, or even an example of a
real walking specimen, and he's got both air bags and windpipe just dangling out
from his lips, make sure you give him my number. I'm always up for meeting
another veteran of Yonkers.
TURNING    THE    TIDE
ROBBEN ISLAND, CAPE TOWN PROVINCE, UNITED STATES OF SOUTHERN
AFRICA
IXolelwa Azania greets me at his wilting desk, inviting me to switch places with him so
I can enjoy the cool ocean breeze from his window. He apologizes foi the "mess"
and insists on clearing the notes off his desk before we continue. Mister Azania is
halfway through his third volume of
Rainbow Fist: South Africa at War.
This volume
happens to be about the subject we are discussing, the turning point against the
living dead, the moment when his country pulled itself back from the brink.]
Dispassionate, a rather mundane word to describe one of history's most
controversial figures. Some revere him as a savior, some revile him as a monster,
but if you ever met Paul Redeker, ever discussed his views of the world and the
problems, or more importantly, the solutions to the problems that plague the
world, probably the one word that would always cling to your impression of the
man is dispassionate.
I 06       MAX BROOKS
Paul always believed, well, perhaps not always, but at least in his adult life, that
humanity's one fundamental flaw was emotion. He used to say that the heart
should only exist to pump blood to the brain, that anything else was a waste of
time and energy. His papers from university, all dealing with alternate "solutions"
to historical, societal quandaries, were what first brought him to the attention of
the apartheid government. Many psy-chobiographers have tried to label him a
racist, but, in his own words, "racism is a regrettable by-product of irrational
emotion." Others have argued that, in order for a racist to hate one group, he must
at least love another. Redeker believed both love and hate to be irrelevant. To him,
they were "impediments of the human condition," and, in his words again,
"imagine what could be accomplished if the human race would only shed its
humanity." Evil? Most would call it that, while others, particularly that
small cadre in the center of Pretoria's power, believed it to be "an invaluable
source of liberated intellect."
It was the early 1980s, a critical time for the apartheid government. The country
was resting on a bed of nails. You had the ANC, you had the Inkatha Freedom
Party, you even had extremist, right-wing elements of the Afrikaner population
that would have liked nothing better than open revolt in order to bring about a
complete racial showdown. On her border, South Africa faced nothing but hostile
nations, and, in the case of Angola, a Soviet'backed, Cubaivspearheaded civil war.
Add to this mixture a growing isolation from the Western democracies (which
included a critical arms embargo) and it was no surprise that a last-ditch tight for
survival was never far from Pretoria's mind.
This is why they enlisted the aid of Mister Redeker to revise the govern' merit's
ultrasecret "Plan Orange." "Orange" had been in existence since the apartheid
government first came to power in 1948. It was the dooms-day scenario for the
country's white minority, the plan to deal with an all-out uprising of its indigenous
African population. Over the years it had been updated with the changing strategic
outlook of the region. Every decade that situation grew more and more grim. With
multiplying independence of her neighbor states, and multiplying voices for
freedom from the majority of her own people, those in Pretoria realized that a full-
blown
confrontation might not just mean the end for the Afrikaner government, but the
Afrikaners themselves.
This is where Redeker stepped in. His revised Plan Orange, appropriately
completed in 1984, was the ultimate survival strategy for the Afrikaner people. No
variable was ignored. Population figures, terrain, resources, logistics . . . Redeker
not only updated the plan to include both Cuba's chemical weapons and his own
country's nuclear option, but also, and this is what made "Orange Eighty-Four" so
historic, the determination of which Afrikaners would be saved and which had to
be sacrificed.
Sacrificed?
Redeker believed that to try to protect everyone would stretch the government's
resources to the breaking point, thus dooming the entire population. He compared
it to survivors from a sinking ship capsizing a lifeboat that simply did not have
room for them all. Redeker had even gone so far as to calculate who should be
"brought aboard." He included income, IQ, fertility, an entire checklist of
"desirable qualities," including the subject's location to a potential crisis zone.
"The first casualty of the conflict must be our own sentimentality" was the closing
statement tor his proposal, "for its survival will mean our destruction."
Orange Eighty-Four was a brilliant plan. It was clear, logical, efficient, and it
made Paul Redeker one of the most hated men in South Africa. His first enemies
were some of die more radical, fundamentalist Afrikaners, the   racial   ideologues
and  the  ultrareligious.   Later,  after  the  fall  of
apartheid, his name began circulating among the general population. Of course he
was invited to appear before the "Truth and Reconciliation" hearings, and, of
course, he refused. "I won't pretend to have a heart simply to save my skin," he
stated publicly, adding, "No matter what I do, I'm sure they will come for me
anyway."
And they did, although it probably was not in the manner Redeker could have
expected. It was during our Great Panic, which began several weeks before yours.
Redeker was holed up in the Drakensberg cabin he had bought with the
accumulated profits of a business consultant. He liked
108       MAX BROOKS
business, you know. "One goal, no soul," he used to say. He wasn't surprised when
the door blew off its hinges and agents of the National Intelligence Agency rushed
in. They confirmed his name, his identity, his past actions. They asked him point-
blank if he had been the author of Orange Eighty-Four. He answered without
emotion, naturally. He suspected, and accepted, this intrusion as a last-minute
revenge killing; the world was going to hell anyway, why not take a few
"apartheid devils" down first. What he could have never predicted was the sudden
lowering of their firearms, and the removal of the gas masks of the NIA agents.
They were of all colors: black,
Asian, colored, and even a white man, a Tall Afrikaner who stepped forward, and
without giving his name or rank, asked abruptly . . . "You've got a plan for this,
man. Don't you?"
Redeker had, indeed, been working on his own solution to the undead epidemic.
What else could he do in this isolated hideaway? It had been an intellectual
exercise; he never believed anyone would he left to read it. It had no name, as
explained later "because names only exist to distinguish one from others," and,
until that moment, there had been no other plan like his. Once again, Redeker had
taken even-thing into account, not only the strategic situation of the country, but
also the physiology, behavior, and "combat doctrine" of the living dead. While you
can research the de-tails of the "Redeker Plan" in any public library around the
world, here are some of the fundamental keys:
First of all, there was no way to save everyone. The outbreak was too far gone.
The armed forces had already been too badly weakened to effectively isolate the
threat, and, spread so thinly throughout the country, they could only grow weaker
with each passing day. Our forces had to be consolidated, withdrawn to a special
"safe zone," which, hopefully, would he aided by some natural obstacle such as
mountains, rivers, or even an offshore island. Once concentrated within this zone,
the armed forces could eradicate the infestation within its borders, then use what
resources were available to defend it against further onslaughts of the living dead.
That was the first part of the plan and it made as much sense as any conventional
military retreat.
The second part of the plan dealt with the evacuation of civilians, and
this could not have been envisioned by anyone else but Redeker. In his mind, only
a small fraction of the civilian population could be evacuated to the safe zone.
These people would be saved not only to provide a labor pool for the eventual
wartime economic restoration, but also to preserve the legitimacy and stability of
the government, to prove to those already within the zone that their leaders were
"looking out for them."
There was another reason for this partial evacuation, an eminently logical and
insidiously dark reason that, many believe, will forever ensure Redeker the tallest
pedestal in the pantheon of hell. Those who were left behind were to be herded
into special isolated zones. They were to be "human bait," distracting the undead
from following the retreating army to their safe zone. Redeker argued that these
isolated, uninfected refugees must be kept alive, well defended and even
resupplied, if possible, so as to keep the undead hordes firmly rooted to the spot.
You see the genius, the sickness* Keeping people as prisoners because "every
zombie besieging those survivors will be one less zombie throwing itself against
our defenses." That was the moment when the Afrikaner agent looked up at
Redeker, crossed himself, and said, "God help you, man." Another one said, "God
help us all." That was the black one who appeared to be in charge of the operation.
"Now lets get him out of here."
Within minutes they were on a helicopter for Kimberley, the very underground
base where Redeker had first written Orange Eighty-Four. He was ushered into a
meeting of the president's surviving cabinet, where his report was read aloud to the
room. You should have heard the uproar, with no voice louder than the defense
ministers. He was a Zulu, a fero-
cious man who'd rather be fighting in the streets than cowering in a bunker.
The vice president was more concerned about public relations. He didn't want to
imagine what his backside would be worth if news of this plan ever leaked to the
population.
The president looked almost personally insulted by Redeker. He physically
grabbed the lapels of the safety and security minister and demanded why in hell he
brought him this demented apartheid war criminal.
110       MAX BROOKS
The minister stammered that he didn't understand why the president was so upset,
especially when it was he who gave the order to find Redeker.
The president threw his hands in the air and shouted that he never gave such an
order, and then, from somewhere in the room, a faint voice said, "I did."
He had been sitting against the back wall; now he stood, hunched over by age, and
supported by canes, but with a spirit as strong and vital as it had ever been. The
elder statesman, the father of our new democracy, the man whose birth name had
been Rolihlahla, which some have translated
simply into "Troublemaker." As he stood, all others sat, all others except Paul
Redeker. The old man locked eyes on htm, smiled with that warm squint so
famous the world over, and said, "Molo, mhlobo warn." "Greetings, person of my
region." He walked slowly over to Paul, turned to the govern' ing body of South
Africa, then lifted the pages from the Afrikaner's hand and said in a suddenly loud
and youthful voice, "This plan will save our people." Then, gesturing to Paul, he
said, "This
man
will save our people." And then came that moment, the one that
historians will probably debate until the subject fades from memory. He embraced
the white Afrikaner. To anyone else this was simply his signature bear hug, but to
Paul Redeker . . . I know that the majority of psychobiographers continue to paint
this man without a soul. That is the generally accepted notion. Paul Redeker: no
feelings, no compassion, no heart. However, one of our most revered authors,
Biko's old friend and biographer, postulates that Redeker was actu-ally a deeply
sensitive man, too sensitive, in fact, for life in apartheid South Africa. He insists
that Redeker's lifelong jihad against emotion was the only way to protect his sanity
from the hatred and brutality he witnessed on a daily basis. Not much is known
about Redeker's childhood, whether he even had parents, or was raised by the
state, whether he had friends or was ever loved in any way. Those who knew him
from work were hard-pressed to remember witnessing any social interaction or
even any physical act of warmth. The embrace by our nation's father, this genuine
emotion piercing his impenetrable shell . . .
lAzania smiles sheepishly.]
Perhaps this is all too sentimental. For all we know he was a heartless monster,
and the old man's embrace had absolutely no impact. But I can tell you that that
was the last day anyone ever saw Paul Redeker. Even now, no one knows what
really happened to him. That is when I stepped in, in those chaotic weeks when the
Redeker Plan was implemented throughout the country. It took some convincing
to say the least, but once I'd convinced them that I'd worked for many years with
Paul Redeker, and, more importantly, I understood his way of thinking better than
anyone left alive in South Africa, how could they refuse? I worked on the retreat,
then afterward, during the consolidation months, and right up until the end oi the
war. At least they were appreciative of my services, why else would they grant me
such luxurious accommodations? [Smiles.] Paul Redeker, an angel and a devil.
Some hate him, some worship htm. Me, I just pity him. If he still exists,
somewhere out there, I sincerely hope he's found his peace.
[After a parting embrace from my guest, I am diiven back to my ferry for the mainland.
Security is tight as I sign out my entrance badge. The tall Afrikaner guard photographs
me again. "Can't be too careful, man," he says, handing me the pen. "Lot of people out
there want to send him to hell." I sign next to my name, under the heading of Robben
Island Psychiatric Institution. NAME OF PATIENT YOU ARE VISITING: PAUL
REDEKER.]
ARMAGH, IRELAND
[While not a Catholic himself, Philip Adlei has joined the throngs of visitors to the
pope's wartime refuge. "My wife is Bavarian," he explains in the bar of oui hotel. "She
had to make the pilgrimage to Saint Patrick's Cathedral." This is his first time away
from Germany since the end of the war. Our meeting is accidental. He does not
object to my recorder.]
112       MAX BROOKS
Hamburg was heavily infested. They were in the streets, in the buildings, pouring
out of the Neuer Elbtunnel. We'd tried to blockade it with civilian vehicles, bur
they were squirming through any open space like bloated, bloody worms.
Refugees were also all over. They'd come from as far away as Saxony, thinking
they could escape by sea. The ships were long gone, the port was a mess. We had
over a thousand crapped at the Reynolds Aluminiumwerk and at least triple that at
the Eurokai terminal. No food, no clean water, just waiting
to
be rescued with the
dead swarming outside, and I don't know how many infected inside.
The harbor was choked with corpses, but corpses char were still moving. We'd
blasted them into the harbor with antiriot water cannons; it saved ammo and it
helped to keep the streets clear. It was a good idea, until the pressure in the
hydrants died. We'd lost our commanding officer two days earlier . . . freak
accident. One of our men had shot a zombie that was almost on top of htm. The
bullet had gone right through the creature's head, taking bits of diseased brain
tissue out the other end and into the colonel's shoulder. Insane, eh? He turned over
sector command to me before dying. My first official duty was to put him down.
I'd set up our command post in the Renaissance Hotel. It was a decent location,
good fields of fire with enough space to house our own unit and several hundred
refugees. My men, those not involved in holding the barricades, were attempting
to perform these conversions on similar buildings. With the roads blocked and
trains inoperative, I thought it best to sequester as many civilians as possible. Help
would be coming, it was just a question of when it would arrive.
I was about to organize a detail to scrounge for converted hand-to-hand weapons,
we were running low on ammunition, when the order came to retreat. This was not
unusual. Our unit had been steadily withdrawing since the first days of the Panic.
What
wiis
unusual, though, was the rally point. Division was using map-grid
coordinates, the first time since the trouble began. Up until then they had simply
used civilian designations on an open channel; this was so refugees could know
where to assemble. Now it was a coded transmission from a map we hadn't used
since the end of the cold war. I had to check the coordinates three times to
confirm. They put us at
Schafstedt, just north of the Nord-Ostsee Kanal. Might as well be fucking
Denmark!
We were also under strict orders
not
to move the civilians. Even worse, we were
ordered not to inform them of our departure! This didn't make any sense. They
wanted us to pull back to Schleswig-Holstein but leave the refugees behind? They
wanted us to just cut and run? There had to be some kind of mistake.
I asked for confirmation. I got it. I asked again. Maybe they got the map wrong, or
had shifted codes without telling us. (It wouldn't be their first mistake.)
I suddenly found myself speaking to General Lang, commander of the entire
Northern Front. His voice was shaking. I could hear it even over the shooting. He
told me the orders were not a mistake, that I was to rally what was left of the
Hamburg Garrison and proceed immediately north. This isn't happening, I told
myself. Funny, eh? I could accept everything else that was happening, the fact that
dead bodies were rising to consume the world, but this . . . following orders that
would indirectly cause a mass murder.
Now, I am a good soldier, but I am also a West German. You understand the
difference? In the East, they were told that they were not responsible for the
atrocities of the Second World War, that as good communists, they were just as
much victims of Hitler as anyone else. You understand why the skinheads and
proto-fascists were mainly in the East? They did not feel the responsibility of the
past, not like we did in the West. We were taught since birth to bear the burden of
our grandfathers' shame. We were taught
that, even if we wore a uniform, Thar our first sworn duty was to our conscience,
no matter what the consequences. That is how I was raised, that is how I
responded. I told Lang that I could not, in good conscience, obey this order, that I
could not leave these people without protection. At this, he exploded. He told me
that I
would
carry out my instructions or I, and, more importantly, my men, would
be charged with treason and prosecuted with "Russian efficiency."
And this is
what we've come to,
I thought. We'd all heard of what was happening in Russia .. .
the mutinies, the crackdowns, the decimations. I looked around at all these boys,
eighteen, nineteen years
1 14       MAX BROOKS
old, all tired and scared and fighting for their lives. I couldn't do that to them. I
gave the order to withdraw.
How did they take it?
There were no complaints, at least, not to me. They fought a little amongst
themselves. I pretended not to notice. They did their duty.
What about the civilians?
IPause.l We got everything we deserved. "Where are you going?" they shouted
from buildings. "Come back, you cowards!" I tried to answer. "No, we're coming
back for you," I said. "We're coming back tomorrow with more men. Just stay
where you are, we'll be back tomorrow." They didn't believe me. "Fucking liar!" I
heard one woman shout. "You're letting my baby die!"
Most of them didn't try to follow, too worried about the zombies in the streets. A
few brave souls grabbed on to our armored personnel carriers. They tried to force
their way down the hatches. We knocked them off. We had
to
button up as the
ones trapped in buildings started throwing things, lamps, furniture, down on us.
One of my men was hit with a bucket filled with human waste. I heard a bullet
clang off the hatch of my Marder.
On our way out of the city we passed the last of our new Rapid Reaction
Stabilization Units. They had been badly mauled earlier in the week. I didn't know
it at the time, but they were one of those units classified as expendable. They were
detailed to cover our retreat, to prevent too many zombies, or refugees, from
following us. They were ordered to hold to the end.
Their commander was standing through the cupola of his Leopard. I knew him.
We'd served together as part of the NATO's IFOR in Bosnia. Maybe it is
melodramatic to say he saved my life, but he did take a Serbian's bullet that I'm
sure was meant for me. The last time I saw him was in a hospital in Sarajevo,
joking about getting out of this madhouse those
people called a country. Now here we were, passing on the shattered autobahn in
die heart of our homeland. We locked eyes, traded salutes. I ducked back into the
APC, and pretended to study my map so the driver wouldn't see my tears. "When
we get back," I told myself, "I'm going to kill that son of a bitch."
General Lang.
I had it all planned. I would not look angry, not give him any reason to worry. I'd
submit my report and apologize for my behavior. Maybe he'd want to give me
some kind of pep talk, try to explain or justify our retreat. Good, I thought, I'd
listen patiently, put him at ease. Then, when he rose to shake my hand, I'd draw
my weapon and blow his Eastern brains against the map of what used to be our
country. Maybe his whole staff would be there, all the other little stooges who
were "just following orders." I'd get them all before they took me! It would be
perfect. I wasn't going to just goose-step my way into hell like some good little
Hitler Jugend. I'd show him, and everyone else, what it meant to be a real
Deutsche Soldat.
But that's not what happened.
No. I did manage to make it into General Lang's office. We were the last unit
across the canal. He'd waited for that. As soon as the report came in, he'd sat down
at his desk, signed a few final orders, addressed and sealed a letter to his family,
then put a bullet through his brain.
Bastard. I hate him even more now than I did on the road from Hamburg.
Why is that?
Because I now understand why we did what we did, the details of the Prochnow
Plan.
1. Germany's version of the Redeker Plan.
116       MAX BROOKS
Wouldn't this revelation engender sympathy for him?
Are you kidding* That's exactly why I hate him! He knew that this was just the
first step of a long war and we were going to need men like him to help win it.
Fucking coward. Remember what I said about being beholden to your conscience?
You can't blame anyone else, not the plan's architect, not your commanding
officer, no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live even-
agonizing day with the consequences of those choices. He knew this. That's why
he deserted us like we deserted those
civilians. He saw the road ahead, a steep, treacherous mountain road. We'd all
have to hike that road, each of us dragging the boulder of what we'd done behind
us. He couldn't do it. He couldn't shoulder the weight.
«?
YEVCHENKO VETERANS' SANATORIUM, ODESSA, UKRAINE
[The ioom is windowless. Dim, fluorescent bulbs illuminate the concrete walls and
unwashed cots. The patients here mainly suffer from respiratory disorders, many
made worse by the lack of any usable medication. There are no doctors here, and
understaffed nurses and orderlies can do little to ease the suffering. At least the
room is waim and dry, and tor this country in the dead of winter, that is a luxury
beyond measure. Bohdan Taras Kondratiuk sits upright on his cot at the end of
the room. As a war hero he rates a hung sheet for privacy. He coughs into his
handkerchief before speaking.]
Chaos. I don't know how else to describe it, a complete breakdown of
organization, of order, of control. We'd just fought four brutal engagements: Luck,
Rovno, Novograd, and Zhitomir. Goddamn Zhitomir. My
men were exhausted, you understand. What they'd seen, what they'd had to do, and
all the time pulling back, rearguard actions, running. Every day you heard about
another town falling, another road closing, another unit overwhelmed.
Kiev was supposed to be safe, behind the lines. It was supposed to be the center of
our new safety zone, well garrisoned, fully resupplied, quiet. And so what happens
as soon as we arrive? Are my orders to rest and refit? Repair my vehicles,
reconstitute my numbers, rehabilitate my wounded? No, of course not. Why
should things be as they should be? They never have been before.
The safety zone was being shifted again, this time to the Crimea. The government
had already moved . . . fled ... to Sevastopol. Civil order had collapsed. Kiev was
being fully evacuated. This was the task of the military, or what was left of it.
Our company was ordered to oversee the escape route at Patona Bridge. It was the
first all electrically welded bridge in the world, and many for-eigners used to
compare its achievement to diat of the Eiffel Tower. The city had planned a major
restoration project, a dream to renew its former glory. But, like everything else in
our country, that dream never came true. Even before the crisis, the bridge had
been a nightmare of traffic jams. Now it was crammed with evacuees. The bridge
was supposed to be closed to road traffic, but where were the barricades we were
promised, die concrete and steel that would have made any forced entry
impossible? Cars were everywhere, little Lags and old Zhigs, a few Mercedes, and
a mammoth GAZ truck sitting right in the middle, just turned over on its side!
We tried to move it, get a chain around the axle and pull it free with one of the
tanks. Not a chance. What could we do?
We were an armored platoon, you understand. Tanks, not military police. We
never saw any MPs. We were assured they would be there, but we never saw or
heard from them, neither did any
o{
the other "units" along any of the other
bridges. To even call them "units" is a joke. These were just mobs of men in
uniforms, clerks and cooks; anyone who happened to be attached to the military
suddenly became in charge of traffic control.
118       MAX BROOKS
None of us were set up for this, weren't trained for it, weren't equipped . . . Where
was the riot gear they promised us, the shields, the armor, where was the water
cannon? Our orders were to "process" all evacuees. You understand "process," to
see if any of them had been tainted. But where were the goddamn sniffer dogs?
How are you supposed to check for infection without dogs? What are you
supposed to do, visually inspect each refugee? Yes! And yet, that is what we were
told to do. [Shakes his head.] Did they really think that those terrified, frantic
wretches, with death at their backs and safety-perceived safety-only meters away
were going to form an or-
derly line and let us scrip them naked to examine even- centimeter of skin: Did
they think men would just stand by while we examined their wives, their mothers,
their little daughters? Can you imagine? And we actually tried to do it. What other
alternative was there? They had to be separated if any of us were going to survive.
What's the point of even trying to evacuate people if they're just going to bring the
infection with them?
[Shakes his head, laughs bitterly.] It was a disaster! Some just refused, others tried
to run by or even jump into the river. Fights broke out. Many of my men were
beaten badly, three were stabbed, one was shot by a frightened grandfather with a
rusty old Tokarev. I'm sure he was dead before hitting the water.
I wasn't there, you understand. I was on the radio trying to call for support! Help is
coming, they kept saying, do not break, do not despair, help is coming.
Across the Dnieper, Kiev burned. Black pillars rose from the city center. We were
downwind, the stench was terrible, the wood and rubber and stink of burning flesh.
We didn't know how far they were now, maybe a kilometer, maybe less. Up on the
hill, the fire had engulfed the monastery. Goddamn tragedy. With its high walls,
its strategic location, we could have made a stand. Any first-year cadet could have
turned it into an impregnable fortress-stocked the basements, sealed the gates, and
mounted snipers in the towers. They could have covered the bridge for . . . fucking
forever!
I thought I heard something, a sound from the other bank . . . that sound, you
know, when they are all together, when they are close, that. . . even
over the shouts, the curses, the honking horns, the distant sniper fire, you know
that sound.
[He attempts to mimic their moan but collapses into uncontrolled coughs. He holds his
handkerchief up to his face. It comes away bloody.]
That sound was what pulled me away from the radio. I looked over at the city.
Something caught my eye, something above the rooftops and closing fast.
The jet streaked over us at treetop level. There were four of them, Sukhoi 25
"Rooks," close, and low enough to identify by sight.
What tlxe hell,
I thought,
are
they going to try to cover the bridge's approach? Maybe bomb the area behind it?
It had worked at Rovno, at least for a few minutes. The Rooks circled, as if
confirming their targets, then banked low and came straight at us!
Devil's mother,
I
thought,
they are going to bonib the bridge!
They'd given up on the evacuation
and were going to kill everyone!
"Off the bridge!" I started shouting. "Everyone get off!" Panic shot through the
crowd. You could see it like a wave, like a current of electric-ity. People started
screaming, trying to push forward, back, into one another. Dozens were jumping
into the water with heavy clothes and shoes that prevented them from swimming.
I was pulling people across, telling them to run. I saw the bombs released, thought
maybe I could dive at the last moment, shield myself from the blast. Then the
parachutes opened, and I knew. In a split second, I was
up and dashing like a frightened rabbit. "Button up!" I screamed. "Button up!" I
leapt onto the nearest tank, slammed the hatch down, and ordered the crew to
check the seals! The tank was an obsolete T-72. We couldn't know if the
overpressure system still worked, hadn't tested it in years. All we could do was
hope and pray while cringing in our steel coffin. The gunner was sobbing, the
driver was frozen, the commander, a junior sergeant just twenty years old, was
balled up on the floor, clutching the little cross he had around his neck. I put my
hand on the top of his head, assured him we would be fine while keeping my eyes
glued to the periscope.
120       MAX BROOKS
RVX doesn't start out as a gas, you see. It starts out as rain: tiny, oily droplets that
cling to whatever they contact. It enters through the pores, the eyes, the lungs.
Depending on the dosage, the effects can be instantaneous. I could see the
evacuees' limbs begin to tremble, arms falling to their sides as the agent worked its
way through their central nervous system. They rubbed their eyes, fought to speak,
move, breathe. I was glad I couldn't smell the contents of their undergarments, the
sudden discharge of bladder and bowels.
Why would they do it' I couldn't understand. Didn't the high command
know that chemical weapons had no effect on the undead? Didn't they learn
anything from Zhitomir?
The first corpse to move was a woman, just a second or more before the others, a
twitching hand groping across the back of a man who looked like he'd been trying
to shield her. He slipped off as she rose on uncertain knees. Her face was mottled
and webbed with blackened veins. I think she saw me, or our tank. Her jaw
dropped, her arms rose. I could see the others coming to life, even- fortieth or
fiftieth person, everyone who had been bitten and had previously tried to conceal
it.
And then I understood. Yes, they'd learned from Zhitomir, and now they found a
better use for their cold war stockpiles. How do you effectively separate the
infected from the others? How do you keep evacuees from spreading the infection
behind the lines? That's one way.
They were starting to fully reanimate, regaining their footing, shuffling slowly
across the bridge toward us. I called for the gunner. He could barely stutter a
response. 1 kicked him in the back, barked the order to sight his targets! It took a
few seconds but he settled his crosshairs on the first woman and squeezed the
trigger. I held my ears as the Coax belched. The other tanks followed suit.
Twenty minutes later, it was over. I know I should have waited for orders, at least
reported our status or the effects of the strike. I could see six more flights of Rooks
streaking over, five heading for the other bridges, the last for the city center. 1
ordered our company to withdraw, to head south-west and just keep going. There
were a lot of bodies around us, the ones
who'd just made it over the bridge before the gas hit. They popped as we ran over
them.
Have you been to the Great Patriotic War Museum Complex* IT was one of the
most impressive buildings in Kiev. The courtyard was filled with machines: tanks,
guns, every class and size, from the Revolution to the modern day. Two tanks
faced each other at the museum's entrance. They were decorated with colorful
drawings now, and children were allowed To climb and play on them. There was
an Iron Cross, a full meter in size, made from the hundreds of real Iron Crosses
taken from dead Hitlerites. There was a mural, from floor to ceiling, showing a
grand battle. Our soldiers were all connected, in a seething wave of strength and
courage that crashed upon the Germans, that drove them from our homeland. So
many symbols of our national defense and none more spectacular than the statue
of the
Rodina Mat (Motlxerland)
. She was the tallest building in die city, a more
than sixty-meter masterpiece of pure stainless steel. She was the last thing I saw in
Kiev, her shield and sword held high in everlasting triumph, her cold, bright eyes
looking down at us as we ran.
SAND LAKES PROVINCIAL WILDERNESS PARK, MANITOBA, CANADA [Jesika Hendricks
gestures to the expanse of subarctic waste-
land. The natural beauty has been replaced by wreckage: abandoned vehicles, debris,
and human corpses remain partially frozen into the gray snow and ice. Originally from
Waukesha, Wisconsin, the now naturalized Canadian is part of this region's
Wilderness Restoration Project. Along with several hundred other volunteers, she has
come here every summer since the end of official hostilities. Although WRP claims to
have made substantial progress, none can claim to see any end in sight.]
122       MAX BROOKS
I don't blame rhem, the government, the people who were supposed to protect us.
Objectively, I guess I can understand. They couldn't have everyone following the
army west behind the Rocky Mountains. How were they going to feed all of us,
how were they going to screen us, and how-could they ever hope to stop the
armies of undead that almost certainly would have been following us? I can
understand why they would want to divert as many refugees north as possible.
What else could they do, stop us at the Rockies with armed troops, gas us like the
Ukrainians? At least if we went north, we might have a chance. Once the
temperature dropped and
the undead froze, some us might be able to survive. That was happening all around
the rest of the world, people fleeing north hoping to stay alive until winter came.
No, I don't blame them for wanting to divert us, I can forgive that. But the
irresponsible way they did it, the lack of vital information that would have helped
so many to stay alive . . . that I can never forgive.
It was August, two weeks after Yonkers and just three days after the government
had started withdrawing west. We hadn't had too many outbreaks in our
neighborhood. I'd only seen one, a collection of six feeding on a homeless man.
The cops had put them down quickly. It happened three blocks from our house and
that was when my father decided to leave.
We were in the living room; my father was learning how
to
load his new-rifle
while Mom finished nailing up the windows. You couldn't find a channel with
anything
but
zombie news, either live images, or recorded footage from Yonkers.
Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So
much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of
"experts" all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more "shocking" and "in
depth" than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to
do. The only thing any of them could agree on was that all private citizens should
"go north." Because the living dead freeze solid, extreme cold is our only hope.
That's all we heard. No more instructions on
where
to head north, what to bring
with us, how to survive, just that damn catchphrase you'd hear from every talking
head, or just crawling over and over across die bottom of the TV. "Go north. Go
north. Go north."
"That's it," Dad said, "we're getting out of here tonight and heading
north." He tried to sound determined, slapping his rifle. He'd never touched a gun
in his life. He was a gentleman in the most literal sense-he was a gentle man.
Short, bald, a pudgy face that turned red when he laughed, he was the king of the
had jokes and cheesy one-liners. He always had something for you, a compliment
or a smile, or a little extension to my allowance that Mom wasn't supposed to
know about. He was the good cop in the family, he left all the big decisions to
Mom.
Now Mom tried to argue, tried to make him see reason. We lived above the
snowline, we had all we needed. Why trek into the unknown when we could just
stock up on supplies, continue to fortify the house, and just watt until the first fall
frost? Dad wouldn't hear it. We could be dead by the fall, we could be dead by
next week! He was so caught up in the Great Panic. He told us it would be like an
extended camping trip. We'd live on moose-burgers and wild berry desserts. He
promised to teach me how to fish and asked me what I wanted to name my pet
rabbit when I caught it. He'd lived in Waukesha his whole life. He'd never been
camping.
[She shows me something in the ice, a collection of ciacked DVDs.]
This is what people brought with them: hair dryers, GameCubes, laptops by the
dozen. I don't think they were stupid enough to think they could use them. Maybe
some did. I think most people were just afraid of losing them, that they'd come
home after six months and find their homes looted. We actually thought we were
packing sensibly. Warm clothes, cook-
ing utensils, things from the medicine cabinet, and all the canned food we could
carry. It looked like enough food for a couple of years. We finished half of it on
the way up. That didn't bother me. It was like an adventure, the trek north.
All those stories you hear about the clogged roads and violence, that wasn't us. We
were in the first wave. The only people ahead of us were the Canadians, and most
of them were already long gone. There was still a lot of traffic on the road, more
cars than I'd ever seen, but it all moved pretty quickly, and only really snarled in
places like roadside towns or parks.
I 24       MAX BROOKS
Parks?
Parks, designated campgrounds, any place where people thought they'd gone far
enough. Dad used to look down on those people, calling them shortsighted and
irrational. He said that we were still way too close to pop' ulacion centers and the
only way to really make it was to head as far north as we could. Mom would
always argue that it wasn't their fault, that most of them had simply run out of gas.
"And whose fault is that," Dad would say. We had a lot of spare gas cans on the
roof
o{
the minivan. Dad had
been stocking up since the first days of the Panic. We'd pass a lot of traffic snarls
around roadside gas stations, most of which already had these giant signs outside
that said NO MORE GAS. Dad drove by them really fast. He drove fast by a lot of
things, the stalled cars that needed a jump, or hitch' hikers who needed a ride.
There were a lot of those, in some cases, walking in lines by the side of the road,
looking like the way you think refugees are supposed to look. Every now and then
a car would stop to pick up a couple, and suddenly everyone wanted a ride. "See
what they got themselves into?" That was Dad.
We did pick up one woman, walking by herself and pulling one of those wheeled
airline bags. She looked pretty harmless, all alone in the rain. That's probably why
Mom made Dad stop to pick her up. Her name was Patty, she was from Winnipeg.
She didn't tell us how she got out here and we didn't ask. She was really grateful
and tried to give my parents all the money she had. Mom wouldn't let her and
promised to take her as far as we were going. She started crying, thanking us. I
was proud of my parents for doing the right thing, until she sneezed and brought
up a handkerchief to blow her nose. Her left hand had been in her pocket since we
picked her up. We could see that it was wrapped in a cloth and had a dark stain
that looked like blood. She saw that we saw and suddenly looked nervous. She
told us not to worry and that she'd just cut it by accident. Dad looked at Mom, and
they both got very quiet. They wouldn't look at me, they didn't say anything. That
night I woke up when I heard the passenger door slam shut. I didn't think it was
anything unusual. We were always stopping for
bathroom breaks. They always woke me up just in case I had to go, but this time I
didn't know what had happened until the minivan was already moving. I looked
around for Patty, but she was gone. I asked my parents what had happened and
they told me she'd asked them to drop her off. I looked behind us and thought I
could just make her out, this little spec getting smaller each second. I thought she
looked like she was running after us, but I was so tired and confused I couldn't be
sure. I probably just didn't want to know. I shut a lot out during that drive north.
Like what?
Like the other "hitchhikers," the ones who didn't run. There weren't a lot,
remember, we're talking about the first wave. We encountered half a dozen at
most, wandering down the middle of the road, raising dieir arms when we got
close. Dad would weave around them and Mom would tell me to get my head
down. I never saw them too close. I had my face against the seat and my eyes shut.
I didn't want to see them. I just kept thinking about mooseburgers and wild berries.
It was like heading to the Promised Land. I knew once we headed far enough
north, everything would be all right.
For a little while it was. We had this great campsite right on the shore of a lake,
not too many people around, but just enough to make us feel "safe," you know, if
any of the dead showed up. Everyone was real friendly, this big, collective vibe of
relief. It was kind of like a party at first. There were these big cookouts every
night, people all throwing in what they'd hunted or fished, mostly fished. Some
guys would throw dynamite in the lake and
there'd be this huge bang and all these fish would come floating to the surface. I'll
never forget those sounds, the explosions or the chainsaws as people cut down
trees, or the music of car radios and instruments families had brought. We all sang
around the campfires at night, these giant bonfires of logs stacked up on one
another.
That was when we still had trees, before the second and third waves starting
showing up, when people were down to burning leaves and stumps, then finally
whatever they could get their hands on. The smell of
I 26       MAX BROOKS
plastic and rubber got really bad, in your mouth, in your hair. By that time the fish
were all gone, and anything left for people to hunt. No one seemed to worry.
Everyone was counting on winter freezing the dead.
But once the dead were frozen, bow were you going to survive the winter?
Good question. I don't think most people thought that far ahead. Maybe they
figured that the "authorities" would come rescue us or that they coukl just pack up
and head home. I'm sure a lot of people didn't think about any-
Thing except the day in front of them, just grateful that they were finally safe and
confident that things would work themselves out. "We'll all be home before you
know it," people would say. "It'll all be over by Christmas."
[She draws my attention to another object in the ice, a Sponge-Bob SquarePants
sleeping bag. It is small, and stained brown.I
What do you think this is rated to, a heated bedroom at a sleepover party? Okay,
maybe they couldn't get a proper bag-camping stores were always the first bought
out or knocked off-but you can't believe how ignorant some of these people were.
A lot of them were from Sunbelt states, some as far away as southern Mexico.
You'd see people getting into their sleeping bags with their boots on, not realizing
that it was cutting off their circulation. You'd see them drinking to get warm, not
realizing it was actu-ally lowering their temperature by releasing more body heat.
You'd see them wearing these big heavy coats with nothing but a T-shirt
underneath. They'd do something physical, overheat, take off the coat. Their
bodies'd be coated in sweat, a lot of cotton cloth holding in the moisture. The
breeze'd come up ... a lot of people got sick that first September. Cold and flu.
They gave it to the rest of us.
In the beginning everyone was friendly. We cooperated. We traded or even bought
what we needed from other families. Money was still worth something. Everyone
thought the banks would be reopening soon. When-ever Mom and Dad would go
looking for food, they'd always Leave me with a neighbor. I had this little survival
radio, the kind you cranked for power,
so we could listen to the news every night. It was all stories of the pullout, army
units leaving people stranded. We'd listen with our road map of the United States,
pointing to the cities and towns where the reports were coming from. I'd sit on
Dad's lap. "See," he'd say, "they didn't get out in time. They weren't smart like us."
He'd try to force a smile. For a little while, I thought he was right.
But after the first month, when the food started running out, and the days got
colder and darker, people started getting mean. There were no more communal
fires, no more cookouts or singing. The camp became a mess, nobody picking up
their trash anymore. A couple times I stepped in human shit. Nobody was even
bothering to bury it.
I wasn't left alone with neighbors anymore, my parents didn't trust anyone. Things
got dangerous, you'd see a lot of fights. I saw two women wrestling over a fur
coat, tore it right down the middle. I saw one guy catching another guy trying to
steal some stuff out of his car and beat his head in with a tire iron. A lot of it took
place at night, scuffling and shouts. Every now and then you'd hear a gunshot, and
somebody crying. One time we heard someone moving outside die makeshift tent
we'd draped over the minivan. Mom told me to put my head down and cover my
ears. Dad went outside. Through my hands I heard shouts. Dad's gun went off.
Someone screamed. Dad came back in, his face was white. I never asked him what
happened.
The only time anyone ever came together was when one of the dead showed up.
These were the ones who'd followed the third wave, coming alone or in small
packs. It happened every couple of days. Someone would sound an alarm and
everyone would rally to take them out. And then, as
soon as it was over, we'd all Turn on each other again.
When it got cold enough to freeze the lake, when the last of the dead stopped
showing up, a lot of people thought it was safe enough to try to walk home.
Walk? Not drive?
No more gas. They'd used it all up for cooking fuel or just to keep their car heaters
running. Every day there'd be these groups of half-starved, ragged
128       MAX BROOKS
wretches, all loaded down with all this useless stuff they'd brought with them, all
with this look of desperate hope on their faces.
"Where do they think they're going?" Dad would say. "Don't they know-that it
hasn't gotten cold enough farther south? Don't they know what's still waiting for
them back there"' He was convinced that if we just held out long enough, sooner
or later things would get better. That was in Oc-tober, when 1 still looked like a
human being.
[We come upon a collection of bones, too many to count. They lie
in a pit, half covered in ice.]
I was a pretty heavy kid. I never played sports, I lived on fast food and snacks. I
was only a little bit thinner when we arrived in August. By November, I was like a
skeleton. Mom and Dad didn't look much better. Dad's tummy was gone, Mom
had these narrow cheekbones. They were fighting a lot, fighting about everything.
That scared me more than anything. They'd never raised their voices at home.
They were schoolteachers, "progressives." There might have been a tense, quiet
dinner every now and then, but nothing like this. They went for each other every
chance they had. One time, around Thanksgiving ... I couldn't get out of my
sleeping bag. My belly was swollen and I had these sores on my mouth and nose.
There was this smell coming from the neighbor's RV. They were cooking
something, meat, it smelled really good. Mom and Dad were outside arguing.
Mom said "it" was the only way. I didn't know what "it" was. She said "it" wasn't
"that bad" because the neighbors, not us, had been the ones to actually "do it." Dad
said that we weren't going to stoop to that level and that Mom should be ashamed
of herself. Mom really laid into Dad, screeching that it was all his fault that we
were here, that I was dying. Mom told him that a real man would know what to do.
She called him a wimp and said he wanted us to die so then he could run away and
live like the "faggot" she always knew he was. Dad told her to shut the fuck up.
Dad
never
swore. I heard something, a crack from outside. Mom came back in,
holding a clump of snow over her right eye. Dad followed her. He didn't say
anything. He had this look on his face
I'd never seen before, like he was a different person. He grabbed my sur-vival
radio, the one people'd try to buy ... or steal, for a long time, and went hack out
toward the RV. He came back ten minutes later, without the radio but with a big
bucket of this steaming hot stew. It was so good! Mom told me not to eat too fast.
She fed me in little spoonfuls. She looked relieved. She was crying a little. Dad
still had that look. The look I had myself in a few months, when Mom and Dad
both got sick and I had to feed them.
[I kneel to examine the bone pile. They have all been broken, the
marrow extracted.]
Winter really hit us in early December. The snow was over our heads, literally,
mountains of it, thick and gray from the pollution. The camp got silent. No more
fights, no more shooting. By Christmas Day there was plenty of food.
[She holds up what looks like a miniature femur. It has been scraped clean by a
kniie.l
They say eleven million people died that winter, and that's just in North America.
That doesn't count the other places: Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia. I don't want
to think about Siberia, all those refugees from southern China, the ones from Japan
who'd never been outside a city, and all
those poor people from India. That was the first Gray Winter, when the filth in the
sky started changing the weather. They say that a part of that filth, I don't know
how much, was ash from human remains.
IShe plants a marker above the pit.]
It took a lot of time, but eventually the sun did come out, the weather began to
warm, the snow finally began to melt. By mid-July, spring was finally here, and so
were the living dead.
I 30       MAX BROOKS
[One of the other team members calls us over. A zombie is half
buried, frozen from the waist down in the ice. The head, arms, and upper torso are very
much alive, thrashing and moaning, and trying to claw toward us.l
Why do they come back after freezing? All human cells contain water, right? And
when diat water freezes, it expands and bursts the cell walls. That's why you can't
just freeze people in suspended animation, so then why does it work for the living
dead?
[The zombie makes one great lunge in our direction; its frozen lower torso begins to
snap. Jesika raises her weapon, a long iron crowbar, and casually smashes the
creature's skull.]
0
UDAIPUR LAKE PALACE, LAKE PICHOLA, RAJASTHAN, INDIA
[Completely covering its foundation of lagniwas Island, this idyllic, almost fairy-tale
structure was once a maharaja's residence, then a luxury hotel, then a haven to several
hundred refugees, until an outbreak of cholera killed them all. Under the direction of
Project Manager Sardar Khan, the hotel, like the lake and surrounding city, is finally
beginning to return to life. During his recollections. Mister Khan sounds less like a battle-
hardened, highly educated civilian engineer, and more like a young, frightened lance
corporal who once found himself on a chaotic mountain road.l
I remember the monkeys, hundreds of them, climbing and skittering among the
vehicles, even over the tops of people's heads. I'd watched them as far back as
Chandigarh, leaping from roofs and balconies as the living
dead tilled the street. I remember them scattering, chattering, scrambling straight
up telephone poles to escape the zombies' grasping arms. Some didn't even wait to
be attacked; they knew. And now they were here, on this narrow, twisting
Himalayan goat track. They called it a road, but even in peacetime it had been a
notorious death trap. Thousands of refugees were streaming past, or climbing over
the stalled and abandoned vehicles. People were still trying to struggle with
suitcases, boxes; one man was stubbornly holding on to the monitor for a desktop
PC. A monkey landed on his head, trying to use it as a stepping-stone, but the man
was too close to the edge and the two of them went tumbling over the side. It
seemed like even-second someone would lose their footing. There were just too
many people. The road didn't even have a guardrail. I saw a whole bus go over, I
don't even know how, it wasn't even moving. Passengers were climbing out of the
windows because the doors of the bus had been jammed by foot traffic. One
woman was halfway out the window when the bus tipped over. Some-thing was in
her arms, something clutched tightly to her. I tell myself that it wasn't moving, or
crying, that it was just a bundle of clothes. No one within arm's reach tried to help
her. No one even looked, they just kept streaming by. Sometimes when I dream
about that moment, I can't tell the difference between them and the monkeys.
I wasn't supposed
to
be there, I wasn't even a combat engineer. I was with the
BRO ; my job was to build roads, not blow them up. I'd just been wandering
through the assembly area at Shimla, trying to find what re-mained of my unit,
when this engineer, Sergeant Mukherjee, grabbed me by the arm and said, "You,
soldier, you know how to drive?"
I chink I stammered something to the affirmative, and suddenly he was shoving
me into the driver's side of a jeep while he jumped in next to me with some kind of
radiolike device on his lap. "Get back to the pass! Go! Go!" I took off down the
road, screeching and skidding and crying desperately to explain that I was actually
a steamroller driver, and not even fully qualified at that. Mukherjee didn't hear me.
He was
too
busy fiddling with
I.  BRO: The Border Roads Organization.
I 32       MAX BROOKS
the device on his lap. "The charges are already set," he explained. "All we have to
do is watt for the order!"
"What charges?" I asked. "What order?"
"To blow the pass, you arse head!" he yelled, motioning to what I now-recognized
as a detonator on his lap. "How the hell else are we going to stop them'"
I knew, vaguely, that our retreat into the Himalayas had something to do with
some kind of master plan, and that part of that plan meant closing all the mountain
passes to the living dead. I never dreamed, however, that
I would be such a vital participant! For the sake of civil conversation, I will not
repeat my profane reaction to Mukherjee, nor Mukherjee's equally profane
reaction when we arrived at the pass and found it still full of refugees.
"It's supposed to be clear!" he shouted. "No more refugees!"
We noticed a soldier from the Rashtriya Rifles, the outfit that was supposed to be
securing the road's mountain entrance, come running past the jeep. Mukherjee
jumped out and grabbed the man. "What the hell is this"' he asked; he was a big
man, tough and angry. "You were supposed to keep the road clear." The other man
was just as angry, just as scared. "You want to shoot your grandmother, go ahead!"
He shoved the sergeant aside and kept going.
Mukherjee keyed his radio and reported that the road was still highly active. A
voice came back to him, a high-pitched, frantic younger voice of an officer
screaming that his orders were to blow the road no matter how-many people were
on it. Mukherjee responded angrily that he had to wait till it was clear. If we blew
it now, not only would we be sending dozens of people hurtling to their deaths, but
we would be trapping thousands on the other side. The voice shot back that the
road would never be clear, that the only thing behind those people was a raging
swarm of God knows how-many million zombies. Mukherjee answered that he
would blow it when the zombies got here, and not a second before. He wasn't
about to commit murder no matter what some pissant lieutenant . . .
But then Mukherjee stopped in midsentence and looked at something over my
head. I whipped around, and suddenly found myself staring into
the face of General Raj'Singh! I don't know where he came from, why he was
there ... to this day no one believes me, not that he wasn't there, but that
I
was. I
was inches away from him, from the Tiger of Delhi! I've heard that people tend to
view those they respect as appearing physically taller than they actually are. In my
mind, he appears as a virtual giant. Even with his torn uniform, his bloody turban,
the patch on his right eye and the bandage on his nose (one of his men had
smashed him in the face to get him on the last chopper out of Gandhi Park).
General Raj-Singh . . .
[Khan takes a deep breath, his chest filling with pride.1
"Gentlemen," he began ... he called us "Gentlemen" and explained, very carefully,
that the road had to be destroyed immediately. The air force, what was left of it,
had its own orders concerning the closure of all mountain passes. At this moment,
a single Shamsher fighter bomber was already on station above our position. If we
found ourselves unable, or unwilling, to accomplish our mission, then the Jaguar's
pilot was ordered to execute "Shiva's Wrath." "Do you know what that means?"
Raj-Singh asked. Maybe he thought I was too young to understand, or maybe he
must have guessed, somehow, that I was Muslim, but even if I'd known absolutely
nothing about the Hindu deity of destruction, everyone in uniform had heard
rumors about the "secret" code name for the use of thermonuclear weapons.
Wouldn't that have destroyed the pass?
Yes, and half the mountain as well! Instead of a narrow choke point hemmed in by
sheer cliff walls, you would have had little more than a massive, gently sloping
ramp. The whole point of destroying these roads was to create a barrier
inaccessible to the living dead, and now some ignorant air force general with an
atomic erection was going to give them the perfect entrance right into the safe
zone!
Mukherjee gulped, not sure of what to do, until the Tiger held out his hand for the
detonator. Ever the hero, he was now willing to accept the
I 34       MAX BROOKS
burden of mass murderer. The sergeant handed it over, close to tears. General Raj-
Singh thanked him, thanked us both, whispered a prayer, then pressed his thumbs
down on the firing buttons. Nothing happened, he tried again, no response. He
checked the batteries, all the connections, and tried a third time. Nothing. The
problem wasn't the detonator. Something had gone wrong with the charges that
were buried half a kilometer down the road, set right in the middle of the refugees.
This
is the end,
I thought,
we're all going to die.
All I could think of was getting
out of there, far enough away to maybe avoid the nuclear blast. I still feel guilty
about those thoughts, caring only for myself in a moment like that.
Thank God for General Raj-Singh. He reacted . . . exactly how you would expect a
living legend to react. He ordered us to get out of here, save ourselves and get To
Shimla, then Turned and ran right into crowd. Mukherjee and I looked at each
other, without much hesitation, I'm happy to say, and took oft after him.
Now we wanted to be heroes, too, to protect our general and shield him from the
crowd. What a joke. We never even saw him once the masses en-veloped us like a
raging river. I was pushed and shoved from all directions. I don't know when I was
punched in the eye. I shouted that I needed to get past, that this was army business.
No one listened. I fired several shots in the air. No one noticed. I considered
actually firing into the crowd. I was becoming as desperate as them. Out of the
corner of my eye I saw Mukherjee go tumbling over the side with another man
still fighting for his rifle. I turned to tell General Raj-Singh but couldn't find him in
the crowd. I called his name, tried to spot him above the other heads. I climbed
onto the roof of a microbus, trying to get my bearings. Then the wind came up; it
brought the stink and moan whipping through the valley. In front of me, about half
a kilometer ahead, the crowd began running. I strained my eyes . . . squinted. The
dead were coming. Slow and deliberate, and just as tightly packed as the refugees
they were devouring.
The microbus shook and I fell. First I was floating on a sea of human bodies, then
suddenly I was beneath them, shoes and bare feet trampling on my flesh. I felt my
ribs crack, I coughed and tasted blood. I pulled my-
self under the microbus. My body was aching, burning. I couldn't speak. I could
barely see. I heard the sound of the approaching zombies. I guessed that they
couldn't be more than two hundred meters away I swore I wouldn't die like the
others, all those victims torn to pieces, that cow I saw struggling and bleeding on
the banks of the Satluj River in Rupnagar. I fumbled for my sidearm, my hand
wouldn't work. I cursed and cried. I thought I'd be religious at that point, but I was
just so scared and angry I started beating my head against the underside of the van.
I thought if I hit it hard enough I could bash in my own skull. Suddenly there was
a deafening roar and the ground rose up underneath me. A wave of screams and
moans mixed with this powerful blast of pressurized dust. My face slammed into
the machinery above, knocking me cold.
The first thing I remember when I came to was a very faint sound. At first I
thought it was water. It sounded like a fast drip . . . tap-tap-tap, like that. The tap
became clearer, and I suddenly became aware of two other sounds, the crackle of
my radio . . . how that wasn't smashed I'll never know . . . and the ever-present
howling of the living dead. I crawled out from under the microbus. At least my
legs were still working well enough to stand. I realized that I was alone, no
refugees, no General Raj-Singh. I was standing among a collection of discarded
personal belongings in the middle of a deserted mountain path. In front of me was
a charred cliff wall. Beyond it was the other side of the severed road.
That's where the moan was coming from. The living dead were still coming for
me. With eyes front and arms outstretched, they were falling in droves off the
shattered edge. That was the tapping sound: their bodies
smashing on the valley floor far below.
The Tiger must have set the demolition charges off by hand. I guessed he must
have reached them the same time as the living dead. I hope they didn't get their
teeth in him first. I hope he's pleased with his statue that now stands over a
modern, four-lane mountain freeway. I wasn't thinking about his sacrifice at that
moment. I wasn't even sure if any of this was real. Staring silently at this undead
waterfall, listening to my radio report from the other units:
"Vikasnagar: Secure."
I 36       MAX BROOKS
"Bilaspur: Secure."
"Jawala Mukhi: Secure."
"All passes report secure: Over!"
Am I
dreaming,
I thought, am J insane?
The monkey didn't help matters any. He was sitting on top of the mi-crobus, just
watching the undead plunge to their end. His face appeared so serene, so
intelligent, as if he truly understood the situation. I almost wanted him to turn to
me and say, "This is the turning point of the war! We've finally stopped them!
We're finally safe!" But instead his little penis
popped out and he peed in my face.
HOME    FRONT    USA
TAOS, NEW MEXICO
[Arthur Sinclair, Junior, is the picture of an old-world patrician: tall, lean, with
dose-cropped white hair and an affected Harvard accent. He speaks into the ether,
rarely making eye contact or pausing for questions. During the war, Mister Sinclair
was
director of the U.S. government's newly formed DeStRes, or Department of Strategic Resources.]
I don't know who first thought of the acronym "DeStRes" or if they coiv sciously
knew how much it sounded like "distress," hut it certainly could not have been
more appropriate. Establishing a defensive line at the Rocky Mountains might
have created a theoretical "safe zone," but in reality that
zone consisted mainly of rubble and refugees. There was starvation, disease,
homelessness in the millions. Industry was in shambles, transportation and trade
had evaporated, and all of this was compounded by the living dead both assaulting
the Rocky Line and festering within our safe zone. We had to get our people on
their feet again-clothed, fed, housed,
I 38       MAX BROOKS
and back to work-otherwise this supposed safe zone was only forestalling the
inevitable. That was why the DeStRes was created, and, as you can imagine, I had
to do a lot of on-the-job training.
Those first months, I can't tell you how much information I had to cram into this
withered old cortex; the briefings, the inspection tours . . . when I did sleep, it was
with a book under my pillow, each night a new one, from Henry J. Kaiser to Vo
Nguyen Giap. I needed every idea, every word, every ounce of knowledge and
wisdom to help me fuse a fractured landscape into the modern American war
machine. If my father had been alive, he probably would have laughed at my
frustration. He'd been a staunch New Dealer, working closely with FDR as
comptroller of New York State. He used mediods that were almost Marxist in
nature, the kind of collectivization that would make Ayn Rand leap from her grave
and join
the ranks of the living dead. I'd always rejected the lessons he'd tried to impart,
running as far away as Wall Street to shut them out. Now I was wracking my
brains to remember them. One thing those New Dealers did better than any
generation in American history was find and harvest the right tools and talent.
Too/s
and talent?
A term my son had heard once in a movie. I found it described our reconstruction
efforts rather well. "Talent" describes the potential workforce, its level of skilled
labor, and how that labor could be utilized effectively. To be perfectly candid, our
supply of talent was at a critical low. Ours was a postindustrial or service-based
economy, so complex arid highly specialized that each individual could only
function within the confines of its narrow, compartmentalized structure. You
should have seen some of the "careers" listed on our first employment census;
everyone was some version of an "executive," a "representative," an "analyst," or a
"consultant," all perfectly suited to the prewar world, but all totally inadequate for
the present crisis. We needed carpenters, masons, machinists, gunsmiths. We had
those people, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were necessary. The first labor
survey
stated clearly that over 65 percent of the present civilian workforce were classified
F-6, possessing no valued vocation. We required a massive job re-Training
program. In short, we needed to get a lot of white collars dirty.
It was slow going. Air traffic was nonexistent, roads and rail lines were a
shambles, and fuel, good Lord, you couldn't find a tank of gas between Blaine,
Washington, and Imperial Beach, California. Add to this the fact that prewar
America not only had a commuter-based infrastructure, but that such a method
also allowed for severe levels of economic segregation. You would have entire
suburban neighborhoods of upper-middle-class professionals, none of whom had
possessed even the basic know-how to replace a cracked window. Those with that
knowledge lived in their own blue-collar "ghettos," an hour away in prewar auto
traffic, which translated to at least a full day on foot. Make no mistake, bipedal
locomotion was how most people traveled in the beginning.
Solving this problem-no, challenge, there are no problems-was the refugee camps.
There were hundreds of them, some parking-lot small, some spreading for miles,
scattered across the mountains and coast, all requiring government assistance, all
acute drains on rapidly diminishing resources. At the top of my list, before I
tackled any other challenge, diese camps had to be emptied. Anyone F-6 but
physically able became unskilled labor: clearing rubble, harvesting crops, digging
graves. A lot of graves needed to be dug. Anyone A-l, those with war-appropriate
skills, became part of our CSSP, or Community Self-Sufficiency Program. A
mixed group of instructors would be tasked with infusing these sedentary,
overeducated, desk-bound, cubicle mice with the knowledge necessary to make it
on their own.
It was an instant success. Within three months you saw a marked drop in requests
for government aid. I can't stress how vital this was to victory. It allowed us to
transition from a zero-sum, survival-based economy, into full-blown war
production. This was the National Reeducation Act, the organic outgrowth of the
CSSP. I'd say it was the largest jobs training program since the Second World
War, and easily the most radical in our history.
140       MAX BROOKS
You've mentioned, on occasion, the problems faced by the
NRA . . .
I was getting to that. The president gave me the kind of power I needed to meet
any physical or logistical challenge. Unfortunately, what neither he nor anyone on
Earth could give me was the power to change the way people thought. As I
explained, America was a segregated workforce, and in many cases, that
segregation contained a cultural element. A great many of our instructors were
first-generation immigrants. These were the people who knew how to take care of
themselves, how to survive on very little and work with what they had. These were
the people who tended small
gardens in their backyards, who repaired their own homes, who kept their
appliances running for as long as mechanically possible. It was crucial that these
people teach the rest of us to break from our comfortable, disposable consumer
lifestyle even though their labor had allowed us to maintain that lifestyle in the
first place.
Yes, there was racism, but there was also classism. You're a higlvpowered
corporate attorney. You've spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering
deals, talking on the phone. That's what you're good at, that's what made you rich
and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to
keep talking on the phone. The more work you do, the more money you make, the
more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That's the way the world
works. But one day it doesn't. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal
brokered. What it does need is toi-lets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your
teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.
Once, on a fact-finding tour through LA, I sat in the back of a reeducation lecture.
The trainees had all held lofty positions in the entertainment industry, a melange
of agents, managers, "creative executives," whatever the hell that means. I can
understand their resistance, their arrogance. Before the war, entertainment had
been the most valued export of the United States. Now they were being trained as
custodians for a munitions plant in Bakersfield, California. One woman, a casting
director, exploded. How-dare they degrade her like this! She had an MFA in
Conceptual Theater, she had cast the top three grossing sitcoms in the last five
seasons and she
made more in a week than her instructor could dream of in several lite-times! She
kept addressing that instructor by her first name. "Magda," she kept saying,
"Magda, enough already. Magda, please." At first I thought this woman was just
being rude, degrading the instructor by refusing to use her title. I found out later
that Mrs. Magda Antonova used to be this woman's cleaning lady. Yes, it was very
hard for some, but a lot of them later admitted that they got more emotional
satisfaction from their new jobs than anything closely resembling their old ones.
I met one gentleman on a coastal fern- from Portland to Seattle. He had worked in
the licensing department for an advertising agency, specifically in charge of
procuring the rights to classic rock songs for television com' mercials. Now he was
a chimney sweep. Given that most homes in Seattle had lost their central heat and
the winters were now longer and colder, he was seldom idle. "I help keep my
neighbors warm," he said proudly. I know it sounds a little too Norman Rockwell,
but I hear stories like that all the time. "You see those shoes, I made them," "That
sweater, that's my sheep's wool," "Like the corn? My garden." That was the upshot
of a more local' ized system. It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of
their labor, it gave them a sense of individual pride to know they were making a
clear, concrete contribution to victory, and it gave me a wonderful feeling that I
was part of that. I needed that feeling. It kept me sane for the other part of my job.
So much for "talent." "Tools" are the weapons of war, and the industrial and
logistical means by which those weapons are constructed.
[He swivels in his chair, motioning to a picture above his desk. I lean closer and
see that it's not a picture but a fiamed label.1
Ingredients:
molasses from the United States
anise from Spain
licorice from France
142       MAX BROOKS
vanilla (bourbon) from Madagascar cinnamon from Sri Lanka cloves from
Indonesia wintergreen from China pimento berry oil from Jamaica balsam oil from
Peru
And that's just for a bottle of peacetime root beer. We're not even talk' ing about
something like a desktop PC, or a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
Ask anyone how the Allies won die Second World War. Those with very little
knowledge might answer that it was our numbers or generalship. Those without
any knowledge might point to techno-marvels like radar or the atom bomb.
(Scowls.) Anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of that conflict will
give you three real reasons: first, the ability to manufacture more materiel: more
bullets, beans, and bandages than the enemy; second, the natural resources
available to manufacture that materiel; and third, the logistical means to not only
transport those resources to the factories, but also to transport the finished
products out to the front lines. The Allies had the resources, industry, and logistics
of an entire planet. The Axis, on the other hand, had to depend on what scant
assets they could scrape up within their borders. This time we were the Axis. The
living dead controlled most of the world's landmass, while American war produc­
tion depended on what could be harvested within the limits of the western states
specifically. Forget raw materials from safe zones overseas; our merchant fleet
was crammed to the decks with refugees while fuel shortages had dry-docked most
of our navy.
We had some advantages. California's agricultural base could at least erase the
problem of starvation, if it could be restructured. The citrus growers didn't go
quietly, neither did the ranchers. The beef barons who controlled so much prime
potential farmland were the worst. Did you ever hear of Don Hill? Ever see the
movie Roy Elliot did on him? It was when
the infestation hit the San Joaquin Valley, the dead swarming over his fences,
attacking his cattle, tearing them apart like African driver ants. And there he was
in the middle of it all, shooting and hollering like Gregory Peck in
Duel in the
Sun.
I dealt with him openly and honestly. As with everyone else, I gave him the
choice. I reminded him that winter was coming and there were still a lot of very
hungry people out there. I warned him that when the hordes of starving refugees
showed up to finish what the living dead started, he'd have no government
protection whatsoever. Hill was a brave, stubborn bastard, but he wasn't an idiot.
He agreed to surrender his land and herd only on the condition that his and
everyone else's breeding stock remained untouched. We shook on that.
Tender, juicy steaks-can you think of a better icon of our prewar artificial standard
of living' And yet it was that standard that ended up being our second great
advantage. The only way to supplement our resource base was recycling. This was
nothing new. The Israelis had started when they sealed their borders and since then
each nation had adopted it to one degree or another. None
o{
their stockpiles,
however, could even compare to what we had at our disposal. Think about what
life was like in the prewar America. Even those considered middle class enjoyed,
or took for granted, a level of material comfort unheard of by any other nation at
any other time in human history. The clothing, the kitchenware, the electronics,
the automobiles, just in the Los Angeles basin alone, outnumbered the prewar
population by three to one. The cars poured in by the millions, every house, every
neighborhood. We had an entire industry of over a hundred thousand employees
working diree shifts, seven days a week: collecting,
cataloging, disassembling, storing, and shipping parts and pieces to factories all
over the coast. There was a little trouble, like with the cattle ranchers, people not
wanting to turn over their Hummers or vintage Italian midlife crisis mobiles.
Funny, no gas to run them but they still hung on anyway. It didn't bother me too
much. They were a pleasure to deal with compared to the military establishment.
Of all my adversaries, easily the most tenacious were the ones in uniform. I never
had direct control over any of their R&D, they were free to green light whatever
they wanted. But given that almost all their programs
1 44       MAX BROOKS
were farmed out to civilian contractors and that those contractors depended on
resources controlled by DeStRes, I had de facto control. "You
cannot
mothball our
Stealth bombers," they would yell. "Who the Blank do you think you are to cancel
our production of tanks?" At first I tried to reason with them: "The M-l Abrams
has a jet engine. Where are you going to find that kind of fuel ? Why do you need
Stealth aircraft against an enemy that doesn't have radar?" I tried to make them see
that given what we had to work with, as opposed to what we were facing, we
simply had to get the largest return on our investment or, in their language, the
most
bang for our buck. They were insufferable, with their all-hours phone calls, or just
showing up at my office unannounced. I guess I can't really blame them, not after
how we all treated them after the last brushfire war, and certainly not after almost
having their asses handed to them at Yonkers. They were teetering on the edge of
total collapse, and a lot of them just needed somewhere to vent.
[He grins confidently.!
I started my career trading on the floor of the NYSE, so I can yell as hard and long
as any professional drill sergeant. After each "meeting," I'd expect the call, the one
Pd been both dreading and hoping for: "Mister Sinclair, this is the president, I just
want to thank you for your service and we'll no longer be requiring . . ."
[Chuckles.] It never came. My guess is no one else wanted the job.
[His smile fades.]
Pm not saying that I didn't make mistakes. I know I was too anal about the air
force's D-Corps. 1 didn't understand their safety protocols or what dirigibles could
really accomplish in undead warfare. All 1 knew was that with our negligible
helium supply, the only cost-effective lift gas was hydrogen and no way was I
going to waste lives and resources on a fleet of modern' day Hindenburgs. I also
had to be persuaded, by the president, no less, to reopen the experimental cold
fusion project at Livermore. He argued that
even though a breakthrough was, at best, still decades away, "planning for the
future lets our people know there will be one." I was too conservative with some
projects, and with others I was far too liberal.
Project Yellow Jacket-I still kick myself when I think about that one. These
Silicon Valley eggheads, all of them geniuses in their own field, convinced me
that they had a "wonder weapon" that could win the war, theoretically, within
forty-eight hours of deployment. They could build micro missiles, millions of
them, about the size of a .22 rimfire bullet, that could be scattered from transport
aircraft, then guided by satellites to the brain of every zombie in North America.
Sounds amazing, right? It did to me.
[He grumbles to himself.1
When I think of what we poured down that hole, what we could have produced
instead . . . ahhh . . . no point in dwelling on it now.
I could have gone head-to-head against the military for the duration of the war, but
I'm grateful, in the end, that I didn't have to. When Travis D'Ambrosia became
chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he not only invented the resource-to-kill ratio, but
developed a comprehensive strategy to employ it. I always listened to him when
he told me a certain weapons system was vital. I trusted his opinion in matters like
the new Battle Dress Uniform or the Standard Infantry Rifle.
What was so amazing to see was how the culture of RKR began to take hold
among the rank and tile. You'd hear soldiers talking on the street, in bars, on the
train; "Why have X, when for the same price you could have
ten Ys, which could kill a hundred times as many Zs." Soldiers even began coming
up with ideas on their own, inventing more cost-effective tools than we could have
envisioned. I think they enjoyed it-improvising, adapting, outthinking us
bureaucrats. The marines surprised me the most. I'd always bought into the myth
of the stupid jarhead, the knuckle-dragging, locked-jaw, testosterone-driven
Neanderthal. I never knew that because the Corps always has to procure its assets
through the navy, and because admirals are never going to get too fired up about
land warfare, that improvisation has had to be one of their most treasured virtues.
I 46       MAX BROOKS
[Sinclair points above my head to the opposite wall. On it hangs a heavy steel rod
ending in what looks like a fusion of shovel and double-bladed battle-axe. Its official
designation is the Standard Infantry Entrenchment Tool, although, to most, it is known as
either the "Lobotomizer," or simply, the "Lobo."]
The leathernecks came up with that one, using nothing but the steel of recycled
cars. We made twenty-three million during the war.
[He smiles with pride.]
And they're still making them today.
BURLINGTON, VERMONT
[Winter has come later this season, as it has every year since the end of the war. Snow
blankets the house and surrounding farmland and frosts the trees that shade the dirt
track by the river. Everything about this scene is peaceful, except for the man with me.
He insists on calling himself "the Whacko," because "everyone else calls me that, why
shouldn't you?" His stride is fast and purposeful, the cane given to him by his doctor land
wife) serves only to stab at the air.]
To be honest, I wasn't surprised to be nominated for vice president. Even-one
knew a coalition party was inevitable. I'd been a rising star, at least until I "self-
destructed." That's what they said about me, right* All the cowards and hypocrites
who'd rather die than see a real man express his passion. So what if I wasn't the
world's best politician? I said what I felt, and I wasn't afraid to say it loud and
clear. That's one of the main reasons I
was the logical choice for copilot. We made a great team; he was the light, I was
the heat. Different parties, different personalities, and, let's not kid ourselves,
different skin colors as well. I knew I wasn't the first choice. I know who my party
secretly wanted. But America wasn't ready to go that far, as stupid, ignorant, and
infuriatingly Neolithic as it sounds. They'd rather have a screaming radical for a
VP than another one of "those people." So I wasn't surprised at my nomination. I
was surprised at everything else.
you
mean the elections?
Elections? Honolulu was still a madhouse; soldiers, congressmen, refugees, all
bumping into one another trying to find something to eat or a place to sleep or just
to find out what the hell was going on. And that was paradise next to the mainland.
The Rocky Line was just being established; everything west of it was a war zone.
Why go through all the trouble of elections when you could have Congress simply
vote for extended emer-gency powers? The attorney general had tried it when he
was mayor of New York, almost got away with it, too. I explained to the president
that we didn't have the energy or resources to do anything but fight for our very
existence.
What did he say?
Well, let's just say he convinced me otherwise.
Can you elaborate?
I could, but I don't want to mangle his words. The old neurons aren't firing like
thev used to.
Please try.
You'll fact-check with his library?
I 48       MAX BROOKS
I promise.
Well. . . we were in his temporary office, the "presidential suite" of a hotel. He'd
just been sworn in on Air Force Two. His old boss was sedated in the suite next to
us. From the window you could see the chaos on the streets, the ships at sea lining
up to dock, the planes coming in every thirty seconds and ground crew pushing
them off the runway once they landed to make room for new ones. I was pointing
to them, shouting and gesturing with the passion I'm most famous for. "We need a
stable government, fast!" I kept saying. "Elections are great in principle but this is
no time for high
ideals."
The president was cool, a lot cooler than me. Maybe it was all that military
training ... he said to me, "This is the
only
time for high ideals because those ideals
are all that we have. We aren't just fighting for our physical survival, but for the
survival of our civilization. We don't have the luxury of old-world pillars. We
don't have a common heritage, we don't have a millennia of history. All we have
are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have . . . [struggling to
remember!... all we have is what we want to be." You see what he was saying. Our
country only exists because people believed in it, and if it wasn't strong enough to
protect us from diis crisis, then what future could it ever hope to have? He knew
that America wanted a Caesar, but to be one would mean the end of America.
They say great times make great men. I don't buy it. 1 saw a lot of weakness, a lot
of filth. People who should have risen to the challenge and either couldn't or
wouldn't. Greed, fear, stupidity, and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it today.
My boss was a great man. We were damn lucky to have him.
The business of elections really set the tone for his entire administration. So many
of his proposals looked crazy at first glance, but once you peeled back the first
layer, you realized that underneath there existed a core of irrefutable logic. Take
the new punishment laws, those really set me off. Putting people in stocks?
Whipping them in town squares! ?! What was this, Old Salem, the Taliban's
Afghanistan? It sounded barbaric, un-
American, until you really thought about the options. What were you going to do
with thieves and looters, put them in prison? Who would that help? Who could
afford to divert able-bodied citizens to feed, clothe, and guard other able-bodied
citizens? More importantly, why remove the punished from society when they
could serve as such a valuable deterrent? Yes, there was the fear of pain-the lash,
the cane-but all of that paled when compared to public humiliation. People were
terrified of having their crimes exposed. At a time when everyone was pulling
together, helping each other out, working to protect and take care of one another,
the worst thing you could do to someone was to march them up into the public
square with a giant poster reading "I Stole My Neighbor's Firewood." Shame's a
powerful weapon, but it depended on everyone else doing the right thing. No one
is above the law, and seeing a senator given fifteen lashes for his involvement in
war profiteering did more to curb crime than a cop on every street corner. Yes,
there were the work gangs, but those were the recidivists, those who'd been given
chances time and time again. I remember the attorney general suggesting that we
dump as many of them into the infested zones as possible, rid ourselves of the
drain and potential hazard of their continued presence. Both the president and I
opposed diis proposition; my objections were ethical, his were practical. We were
still talking about American soil, infested yes, but, hopefully one day to be
liberated. "The last thing we needed," he said "was to come up against one of these
ex-cons as The New Grand Warlord of Duluth." I thought he was joking, but later,
as I saw the exact thing happen in other countries, as some exiled criminals rose to
command their own isolated, and in some cases, powerful fiefdoms, I realized
we'd dodged one hell of a speeding bullet. The work gangs were always
an issue for us, politically, socially, even economically, but what other choice did
we have for those who just refused to play nice with others?
you
did use the death penalty.
Only in extreme cases: sedition, sabotage, attempted political secession. Zombies
weren't the only enemies, at least not in the beginning.
I 50       MAX BROOKS
The Fun dies?
We had our share of religious fundamentalists, what country didn't* Many of them
believed that we were, in some way, interfering with God's will.
[He chuckles.]
I'm sorry, I've gotta learn to be more sensitive, but for cryin' out loud, you really
think the supreme creator of the infinite multiverse is going to
have his plans unraveled by a few Arizona National Guardsmen?
[He waves the thought away.]
They got a lot more press than they should have, all because that nut-bird tried to
kill the president. In reality, they were much more a danger to themselves, all
those mass suicides, the "mercy" child killings in Med-ford . . . terrible business,
same with the "Greenies," the leftie version of the Fundies. They believed that
since the living dead only consumed animals, but not plants, it was the will of the
"Divine Goddess" to favor flora over fauna. They made a little trouble, dumping
herbicide in a town's water supply, booby-trapping trees so loggers couldn't use
them for war production. That kind
o{
ecoterrorism eats up headlines but didn't
really threaten our national security. The Rebs, on the other hand: armed, orga­
nized political secessionists. That was easily our most tangible danger. It was also
the only time I ever saw the president worried. He wouldn't let on, not with that
dignified, diplomatic veneer. In public, he treated it as just another "issue," like
food rationing or road repair. He'd say in private . . . "They must be eliminated
swiftly, decisively, and by any means necessary." Of course, he was only talking
about those within the western safe zone. These diehard renegades either had some
beef with the government's wartime policy or had already planned
to
secede years
before and were just using the crisis as their excuse. These were the "enemies of
our country," the domestic ones anyone swearing to defend our country mentions
in his
or her oath. We didn't have to think twice about an appropriate response to them.
But the secessionists east of the Rockies, in some of the besieged, isolated zones . .
. that's when it got "complicated."
Why is that?
Because, as the saying went, "We didn't leave America. America left us." There's a
lot of truth to that. We deserted those people. Yes, we left some Special Forces
volunteers, tried to supply them by sea and air, but from a purely moral standing,
these people were truly abandoned. I couldn't blame them for wanting to go their
own way, nobody could. That's why when we began to reclaim lost territory, we
allowed every secessionist enclave a chance for peaceful reintegration.
But there was violence.
I still have nightmares, places like Bolivar, and the Black Hills. I never see the
actual images, not the violence, or the aftermath. I always see my boss, this
towering, powerful, vital man getting sicker and weaker each time. He'd survived
so much, shouldered such a crushing burden. You know, he never tried to find out
what had happened to his relatives in Jamaica? Never even asked. He was so
fiercely focused on the fate of our nation, so determined to preserve the dream that
created it. I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill
them.
WENATCHEE, WASHINGTON
[Joe Muhammad's smile is as broad as his shoulders. While his day job is as the owner
of the town's bicycle repair shop, his spare time is spent sculpting molten metal into
exquisite works
152       MAX BROOKS
of art. He is, no doubt, most famous for the bronze statue on the mall in Washington,
D.C., the Neighborhood Security Memorial of two standing citizens, and one seated in a
wheelchair.]
The recruiter was clearly nervous. She tried to talk me out of it. Had I spoken to
the NRA representative first? Did I know about all the other essential war work? I
didn't understand at first; I already had a job at the recycling plant. That was the
point of Neighborhood Security Teams, right? It was a part-time, volunteer service
for when you were home from work. I tried explaining this to her. Maybe there
was something I wasn't getting. As she tried some other half-hearted, half-assed
excuses, I saw her eyes tlick to my chair.
[]oe is disabled.]
Can you believe chat* Here we were with mass extinction knocking on the door,
and she's trying
to
be politically correct? I laughed. I laughed right in her face.
What, did she think I just showed up without knowing what was expected of me'
Didn't this dumb bitch read her own security manual? Well, I'd read it. The whole
point of the NST program was to patrol your own neighborhood, walking, or, in
my case, rolling down the sidewalk, stopping to check each house. If, for some
reason, you had to go inside, at least two members were always supposed to wait
out in the street. [Motions to himself.] Hello! And what did she think we were
facing anyway' Its not like we had to chase them over fences and across
backyards. They came to us. And if and when they did so, let's just say, for the
sake of argument, there was more than we could handle' Shit, if I couldn't roll
myself faster than a walking zombie, how could I have lasted this long? I stated
my case very clearly and calmly, and I even challenged her to present a scenario in
which my physical state could be an impediment. She couldn't. There was some
mumbling about having to check with her CO, maybe I could come back
tomorrow. I refused, told her she could call her
WORLD WAR Z         153
CO, and his CO and everyone right up to the Bear himself, but I wasn't moving
until I got my orange vest. I yelled so loud everyone in the room could hear. All
eyes turned to me, then to her. That did it. I got my vest and was out of there faster
than anyone else that day.
Like I said, Neighborhood Security literally means patrolling the neighborhood.
It's a quasi-military outfit; we attended lectures and training courses. There were
designated leaders and fixed regulations, but you never had to salute or call people
"sir" or shit like that. Armament was pretty nonregulation as well. Mostly hand-to-
hand jobs-hatchets, bats, a few crowbars and machetes-we didn't have Lobos yet.
At least three people in your team had to have guns. I carried an AMT Lightning,
this little semiauto .22-caliber carbine. It had no kick so I could shoot without hav­
ing to lock down my wheels. Good gun, especially when ammo became
standardized and reloads were still available.
Teams changed depending on your schedule. It was pretty chaotic back then,
DeStRes reorganizing everything. Night shift was always tough. You forget how
dark the night really is without streetlights. There were barely any houselights,
too. People went to bed pretty early back then, usually when it got dark, so except
for a few candles or if someone had a license for a generator, like if they were
doing essential war work from home, the houses were pitch-black. You didn't even
have the moon or the stars anymore, too much crap in the atmosphere. We
patrolled with flashlights, basic civilian store-bought models; we still had batteries
then, with red cellophane on the end to protect our night vision. We'd stop at each
house,
knock, ask whoever was on watch if everything was okay. The early months were
a little unnerving because of the resettlement program. So many people were
coming out of the camps that each day you might get at least a dozen new
neighbors, or even housemates.
I never realized how good we had it before the war, tucked away in my little
Stepford suburbistan. Did I really need a three-thousand-square-foot house, three
bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen, living room, den, and home
I. "The Bear" was the Gulf War I nickname tor the commandant of the NST
program.
I 5 4        MAX BROOKS
office? I'd lived alone for years and suddenly I had a family from Alabama, six of
them, just show up at my door one day with a letter from the Department of
Housing. It's unnerving at first, but you get used to it quickly. I didn't mind the
Shannons, that was the family's name. We got along pretty well, and I always slept
better with someone standing watch. That was one of the new rules for people at
home. Someone had to be the designated night watchman. We had all their names
on a list to make sure they weren't squatters and looters. We'd check their ID, their
face, ask them if every-
Thing was all quiet. They usually said yes, or maybe reported some noise we'd
have to check out. By the second year, when the refugees stopped coming and
everyone got to know each odier, we didn't bother with lists and IDs anymore.
Everything was calmer then. That first year, when the cops were still re-forming
and the safe zones weren't completely pacified . . .
[Shivers foi diamatic effect.]
There were still a lot of deserted houses, shot up or broken into or just abandoned
with the doors left wide open. We'd put police tape across all doorways and
windows. If any of them were found snapped, that could mean a zombie was in the
house. That happened a couple of times. I'd wait outside, rifle ready. Sometimes
you'd hear shouts, sometimes shots. Sometimes, you'd just hoar a moan, scuffling,
then one of your teammates would come out with a bloody hand weapon and a
severed head. I had
to
put a few down myself. Sometimes, when the team was
inside, and I was watching the street, I'd hear a noise, a shuffling, a rasping,
something dragging itself through the bushes. I'd hit it with the light, call for
backup, then take it down.
One time I almost got tagged. We were clearing a two-story job: four bed, four
bath, partially collapsed from where someone had driven a Jeep Liberty through
the living room window. My partner asked if it was cool to take a powder break. I
let her go behind the bushes. My bad. I was too distracted, too concerned with
what was going on inside the house. I didn't notice what was behind me. Suddenly
there was this tug on my chair. I tried to turn, but something had the right wheel. I
twisted, brought my
light around. Ic was a "dragger," the kind that's lost its legs. It snarled up at me
from the asphalt, trying to climb over the wheel. The chair saved my life. It gave
me the second and a half I needed to bring my carbine around. If I'd been standing,
it might have grabbed my ankle, maybe even taken a chunk. That was the last time
I slacked off at my job.
Zombies weren't the only problem we had to deal with hack then. There were
looters, not so much hardened criminals as just people who needed stuff to
survive. Same with squatters; both cases usually ended well. We'd just invite them
home, give them what they needed, take care of diem until the housing folks could
step in.
There were some real looters, though, professional bad guys. That was the only
time I got hurt.
[He pulls down his shirt, exposing a circular scar the size of a prewar dime.]
Nine millimeter, right through the shoulder. My team chased him out of the house.
I ordered him to halt. That was the onlv time I ever killed someone, thank God.
When the new laws came in, conventional crime pretty much dried up altogether.
Then there were the ferals, you know, the homeless kids who'd lost their parents.
We'd find them curled up in basements, in closets, under beds. A lot of them had
walked from as far away as back east. They were in bad shape, all malnourished
and sickly. A lot
o{
times they'd run. Those were the only times I felt bad, you
know, that I couldn't chase them. Someone
else would go, a lot of times they'd catch up, but not always.
The biggest problem were quislings.
Quislings?
Yeah, you know, the people that went nutballs and started acting like zombies.
l5 6       MAX BROOKS
Could you elaborate?
Well, I'm not a shrink, so I don't know all the tech terms.
That's all right.
Well, as I understand it, there's a type of person who just can't deal with a fight-or-
die situation. They're always drawn to what they're afraid of. Instead of resisting it,
they want to please it, join it, try to be like it. I guess that happens in kidnap
situations, you know, like a Patty Hearst/
Stockholm Syndrome-type, or, like in regular war, when people who are invaded
sign up for the enemy's army. Collaborators, sometimes even more die-hard than
the people they're trying to mimic, like those French fascists who were some of
Hitler's last troops. Maybe that's why we call them quislings, like it's a French
word or something.
But you couldn't do it in this war. You couldn't just throw up your hands and say,
"Hey, don't kill me, I'm on your side." There was no gray area in this fight, no in
between. I guess some people just couldn't accept that. It put them right over the
edge. They started moving like zombies, sounding like them, even attacking and
trying to eat other people. That's how we found our first one. He was a male adult,
midthirties. Dirty, dazed, shuffling down the sidewalk. We thought he was just in
Z-shock, until he bit one of our guys in the arm. That was a horrible few seconds. I
dropped the Q with a head shot then turned to check on my buddy. He was
crumpled on the curb, swearing, crying, staring at the gash in his forearm. This
was a death sentence and he knew it. He was ready to do himself until we
discovered that the guy I shot had bright red blood pouring from his head. When
we checked his flesh we found he was still warm! You should have seen our
buddy lose it. It's not every day you get a reprieve from the big governor in the
sky. Ironically, he almost died anyway. The bastard had so much bacteria in his
mouth that it caused a near fatal staph infection.
2.  Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonsson Quisling: The Nazi'installed president of
Norway during World War II.
We thought maybe we stumbled onto some new discovery but it turned out it'd
been happening for a while. The CDC was just about to go public. They even sent
an expert up from Oakland to brief us on what to do if we encountered more of
them. It blew our minds. Did you know that quislings were the reason some people
used to think they were immune: They were also the reason all those bullshit
wonder drugs got so much hype. Think about it. Someone's on Phalanx, gets bit
but survives. What else is he going to think* He probably wouldn't know there
was even such a thing as quislings. They're just as hostile as regular zombies and
in some cases even more dangerous.
How so?
Well, for one thing, they didn't freeze. I mean, yeah, they would if they were
exposed over time, but in moderate cold, it they'd gone under while wearing warm
clothes, they'd be fine. They also got stronger from the people they ate. Not like
zombies. They could maintain over time.
But you could kill them more easily.
Yes and no. You didn't have to hit them in head; you could take out the lungs, the
heart, hit them anywhere, and eventually they'd bleed to death. But if you didn't
stop them with one shot, they'd just keep coming until they died.
They don't feel pain?
Hell no. It's that whole mind-over-matter thing, being so focused you're able to
suppress relays to the brain and all that. You should really talk to an expert.
Please continue.
Okay, well, that's why we could never talk them down. There was nothing left to
talk to. These people were zombies, maybe not physically, but
I 58       MAX BROOKS
mentally you could not tell the difference. Even physically it might be hard, it they
were dirty enough, bloody enough, diseased enough. Zombies don't really smell
that bad, not individually and not if they're fresh. How do you tell one of these
from a mimic with a whopping dose of gangrene? You couldn't. It's not like the
military would let us have sniffer dogs or anything. You had to use the eye test.
Ghouls don't blink, I don't know why. Maybe because they use their senses
equally, their brains don't value sight as much. Maybe because they don't have as
much bodily fluid they can't keep using it to coat die eyes. Who knows, but they
don't blink and quislings do. That's how you spotted
them; back up a few paces, and wait a few seconds. Darkness was easier, you just
shone a beam in their faces. If they didn't blink, you took them down.
And if they did?
Well, our orders were to capture quislings if possible, and use deadly force only in
self-defense. It sounded crazy, still does, but we rounded up a few, hog-tied them,
turned them over to police or National Guard. I'm not sure what they did with
them. I've heard stories about Walla Walla, you know, the prison where hundreds
of them were fed and clothed and even med-ically cared for. IHis eyes Hick to the
ceiling.I
You don't agree.
Hey, I'm not going there. You want to open that can of worms, read the pa-pers.
Every year some lawyer or priest or politician tries to stoke that fire for whatever
side best suits them. Personally, I don't care. I don't have any feelings toward them
one way or the other. I think the saddest thing about them is that they gave up so
much and in the end lost anyway.
Why is that?
'Cause even though we can't tell the difference between them, the real zombies
can. Remember early in the war, when everybody was trying to
work on a way to turn the living dead against one another? There was all this
"documented proof" about infighting-eyewitness accounts and even footage of one
zombie attacking another. Stupid. It was zombies attacking quislings, but you
never would have known that to look at it. Quislings don't scream. They just lie
there, not even trying to fight, writhing in that slow, robotic way, eaten alive by
the very creatures they're trying to be.
MALIBU, CALIFORNIA
[I don't need a photograph to recognize Roy Elliot. We meet lor coffee on the
restored Malibu Pier Fortress. Those around us also instantly recognize him, but,
unlike prewar days, keep a respectful distance.]
ADS, that was my enemy: Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome, or, Apoc-alyptic
Despair Syndrome, depending on who you were talking to. Whatever the label, it
killed as many people in those early stalemate months as hunger, disease,
interhuman violence, or the living dead. No one understood what was happening at
first. We'd stabilized the Rockies, we'd sanitized the safe zones, and still we were
losing upwards of a hundred or so people a day. It wasn't suicide, we had plenty of
those. No, this was differ-
ent. Some people had minimal wounds or easily treatable ailments; some were in
perfect health. They would simply go to sleep one night and not wake up the next
morning. The problem was psychological, a case of just giving up, not wanting to
see tomorrow because you knew it could only bring more suffering. Losing faith,
the will to endure, it happens in all wars. It happens in peacetime, too, just not on
this scale. It was helplessness, or at least, the perception of helplessness. I
understood that feeling. I directed movies all my adult life. They called me the boy
genius, the wun-derkind who couldn't fail, even though I'd done so often.
I 60       MAX BROOKS
Suddenly I was a nobody, an F-6. The world was going to hell and all my vaunted
talents were powerless to stop it. When I heard about ADS, the government was
trying to keep it quiet-I had to find out from a contact at Cedars-Sinai. When I
heard about it, something snapped. Like the time I made my first Super 8 short and
screened it for my parents. This I can do, I realized. This enemy I can fight!
And the rest is history.
[Laughs.] I wish. I went straight to the government, they turned me down.
Really? I would think, given your career . . .
What career? They wanted soldiers and farmers, real jobs, remember* It was like
"Hey, sorry, no dice, but can I get your autograph'" Now, I'm not the surrendering
type. When I believe in my ability to do something, there is no such word as no. I
explained to the DeStRes rep that it wouldn't cost Uncle Sam a dime. I'd use my
own equipment, my own people, all I'd need from them was access
to
the military.
"Let me show the people what you're doing to stop this," I told him. "Let me give
them something to believe in." Again, I was refused. The military had more
important missions right now than "posing for the camera."
Did you go over his head?
To who? There were no boats to Hawaii and Sinclair was racing up and down the
West Coast. Anybody in any position to help was either physically unavailable or
far too distracted with more "important" matters.
Couldn't you have become a freelance journalist, gotten a government press pass?
It would have taken too long. Most mass media was either knocked out or
federalized. What was left had to rebroadcast public safety announce'
meats, to make sure anyone just tuning in would know what to do. Everything was
still such a mess. We barely had passable roads, let alone the bureaucracy to give
me full-time journalist status. It might have taken months. Months, with a hundred
dying every day. I couldn't wait. I had to do something immediately. I took a DV
cam, some spare batteries, and a solar-powered charger. My oldest son came with
me as my sound man and "first AD." We traveled on the road for one week, just
the two of us on mountain bikes, looking for stories. We didn't have to go fan
Just outside of Greater Los Angeles, in a town called Claremont, are five colleges-
Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont Mckenna. At the start of
the Great Panic, when everyone else was running, literally, for the hills, three
hundred students chose to make a stand. They turned the Women's College at
Scripps into something resembling a medieval city. They got their supplies from
the other campuses; their weapons were a mix of landscaping tools and ROTC
practice rifles. They planted gardens, dug wells, fortified an already existing wall.
While the mountains burned behind them, and the surrounding suburbs descended
into violence, those three hundred kids held off ten thousand zombies! Ten
thousand, over the course of four months, until the Inland Empire could finally be
pacified. We were lucky to get there just at the tail end, just in time to see the last
of the undead tall, as cheering students and sol-diers linked up under the oversized,
homemade Old Glory fluttering from the Pomona bell tower. What a story!
Ninety-six hours of raw footage in the can. I would have liked to have gone
longer, but time was critical. One hundred a day lost, remember.
We had to gee this one out there as soon as possible. I brought the footage back to
my house, cut it together in my edit bay. My wife did the narration. We made
fourteen copies, all on different formats, and screened them that Saturday night at
different camps and shelters all over LA. I called it Victor)'
at Avalon: The Battle
of the Five Colleges.
The name,
Avalon,
comes from some stock footage one of the students
1. California's Inland Empire was one of the last zones to be declared secure.
I 62       MAX BROOKS
had shot during the siege. It was the night before their last, worst attack, when a
fresh horde from the east was clearly visible on the horizon. The kids were hard at
work-sharpening weapons, reinforcing defenses, standing guard on the walls and
towers. A song came floating across the campus from the loudspeaker that played
constant music to keep morale up. A Scripps student, with a voice like an angel,
was singing the Roxy Music song. It was such a beautiful rendition, and such a
contrast with the raging storm about to hit. I laid it over my "preparing for battle"
montage. I still get choked up when I hear it.
How did it play with the audience?
It bombed! Not just the scene, but the whole movie; at least, that's what I thought.
I'd expected a more immediate reaction. Cheering, applause. I would never have
admitted this to anyone, even to myself, but I had this egotistical fantasy of people
coming up to me afterward, tears in their eyes, grabbing my hands, thanking me
for showing them the light at the end of the tunnel. They didn't even look at me. I
stood by the doorway like some conquering hero. They just filed past silently with
their eyes on their shoes. I went home that night thinking, "Oh well, it was a nice
idea, maybe the potato farm in MacArthur Park can use another hand."
What happened?
Two weeks went by. I got a real job, helping to reopen the road at Topanga
Canyon. Then one day a man rode up to my house. Just came in on horse-back as
if out of an old Cecil B. De Mille western. He was a psychiatrist from the county
health facility in Santa Barbara. They'd heard about the success of my movie and
asked if I had any extra copies.
Success?
That's what I said. As it turns out, the very night after
Avalon
made its "debut,"
ADS cases dropped in LA by a whole 5 percent! At first they
Thought it might just be a statistical anomaly, until a further study revealed that
the decline was drastically noticeable only among communities where the movie
was shown!
And no one told you?
No one. [Laughs.] Not the military, not the municipal authorities, not even the
people who ran the shelters where it was continuing to be screened without my
knowledge. I don't care. The point is it worked. It made a difference, and it gave
me a job for the rest of the war. I got a few volunteers together, as much of my old
crew as I could find. That kid who shot the Claremont stock footage, Malcolm
Van Ryzin, yes, that Malcolm, he became my DP. We commandeered an
abandoned dubbing house in West Hollywood and started cranking them out by
the hundreds. We'd put them on every train, every caravan, every coastal ferry
heading north. It took a while to get responses. But when they came . . .
[He smiles, holds his hands up in thanks.]
Ten percent drop throughout the entire western safe zone. I was already on the
road by then, shooting more stories.
Anacapa
was already wrapped, and we were
halfway through Mission
District.
By the time Dos
Palmos
hit screens, and ADS
was down 23 percent. . . only then did the government finally take an interest in
me.
Additional resources?
[Laughs.l No. I'd never asked for help and they sure weren't going to give it. But I
did finally get access to the military and that opened up a whole new world.
2.   Malcolm Van Ryzin: One of the most successful cinematographers in Hollywood.
3.   DP* Director of Photography.
I 64       MAX BROOKS
Is that when you made
Fire of the Gods?
[Nods.l The army had two functioning laser weapons programs: Zeus and
MTHEL. Zeus was originally designed for munitions clearing, zapping land mines
and unexploded bombs. It was small and light enough to be mounted in a
specialized Humvee. The gunner sighted a target through a coaxial camera in the
turret. He placed the aim point on the intended surface, then fired a pulse beam
through the same optical aperture. Is that too technical:
Not at all
I'm sorry. I became extremely immersed in the project. The beam was a
weaponized version of solid-state, industrial lasers, the kind used to cut steel in
factories. It could either burn through a bomb's outer casing or heat it
to
a point
that detonated die explosive package. The same principle worked for zombies. On
higher settings it punched right through their foreheads. On lower settings, it
literally boiled their brain till it exploded through the ears, nose, and eyes. The
footage we shot was dazzling, but Zeus was a popgun next to MTHEL.
The acronym stands for Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser, codesigned by the
United States and Israel to take out small incoming projectiles. When Israel
declared self-quarantine, and when so many terrorist groups were lobbing mortar
rounds and rockets across the security wall, MTHEL was what knocked them
down. About the size and shape of a World War II searchlight, it was, in fact, a
deuterium fluoride laser, much more powerful than the solid state on Zeus. The
effects were devastating. It blasted flesh from bones that then heated white before
shattering into dust. When played at regular speed, it was magnificent, but at slo-
mo . . . fire of the gods.
Is it true that the number of ADS cases were halved a month after the movie's
release?
I think that might be an overstatement, but people were lined up on their off-hours.
Some saw it every night. The poster campaign showed a close-up of a zombie
being atomized. The image was lifted right from a frame in the
movie, the one classic shot when the morning fog actually allowed you To see the
beam. The caption underneath read simply "Next." It single-handedly saved the
program.
your
program.
No, Zeus and MTHEL.
They were in jeopardy?
MTHEL was due to close a month after shooting. Zeus had already been chopped.
We had to beg, borrow, and steal, literally, to get it reactivated just for our
cameras. DeStRes had deemed both as a gross waste of resources.
Were they?
Inexcusably so. The "M" in MTHEUs "Mobile" really meant a convoy of
specialized vehicles, all of which were delicate, none truly all-terrain and each one
completely dependent on the other. MTHEL also required both Tremendous
power and copious amounts of highly unstable, highly toxic chemicals for the
lasering process.
Zeus was a little more economical. It was easier to cool, easier to maintain, and
because it was Humvee-mounted, it could go anywhere it was needed. The
problem was, why would it be needed? Even on high power, the gunner still had to
hold a beam in place, on a moving target, mind you, for several seconds. A good
sharpshooter could get the job done in half the
time with twice the kills. That erased the potential for rapid fire, which was
exactly what you needed in swarm attacks. In fact, both units had a squad of
riflemen permanently assigned to them, people protecting a machine that is
designed to protect people.
They were that bad?
Not for their original role. MTHEL kept Israel safe from terrorist bombardment,
and Zeus actually came out of retirement to clear unexploded
I 66       MAX BROOKS
ordnance during the army's advance. As purpose-built weapons, they were
outstanding. As zombie killers, they were hopeless duds.
So why did you film them?
Because Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national
Zeitgeist. Whether we realize it or not, even the most indefatigable Luddite can't
deny our country's technoprowess. We split the atom, we reached the moon, we've
filled every household and business with more
don't know if that's a good thing, I'm in no place to judge. But I do know that just
like all those ex-atheists in foxholes, most Americans were still proving for the
God of science to save them.
But it didn't.
But it didn't matter. The movie was such a hit that I was asked to do a whole
series. I called it "Wonder Weapons," seven films on our military's cutting-edge
technology, none of which made any strategic difference, but all of which were
psychological war winners.
Isn't that. . .
A lie? It's okay. You can say it. Yes, they were lies and sometimes that's not a bad
thing. Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or
burn you to death, depending on how they're used. The lies our government told us
before the war, the ones that were supposed to keep us happy and blind, those
were the ones that burned, because they prevented us from doing what had to be
done. However, by the time I made
Avolon,
everyone was already doing
everything they could possibly do to survive. The lies of the past were long gone
and now the truth was everywhere, shambling down their streets, crashing through
their doors, clawing at their throats. The truth was that no matter what we did,
chances were most of us, if not all of us, were never going to see the future. The
truth was that we
were standing at what might be the twilight of our species and that truth was
freezing a hundred people to death every night. They needed some-thing to keep
them warm. And so I lied, and so did die president, and every doctor and priest,
every platoon leader and every parent. "We're going to be okay." That was our
message. That was the message of every other filmmaker during the war. Did you
ever hear of
Tixe Hero City?
Of course.
Great film, right* Marty made it over the course of the Siege. Just him, shooting
on whatever medium he could get his hands on. What a masterpiece: the courage,
the determination, the strength, dignity, kindness, and honor. It really makes you
believe in the human race. It's better than anything I've ever done. You should see
it.
I have.
Which version?
I'm sorry?
Which version did you see?
I wasn't aware ...
That there were two? You need to do some homework, young man. Marty
made both a wartime and postwar version of
The Hero City.
The version you saw,
it was ninety minutes'
I think.
Did it show the dark side of the heroes in
The Hero City?
Did it show the violence
and the betrayal, the cruelty, the depravity, the bottomless evil in some of those
"heroes' " hearts? No, of course not. Why would it?That was
I 68       MAX BROOKS
our reality and its what drove so many people to get snuggled in bed, blowout their
candles, and take their last breath. Marty chose, instead, to show the other side, the
one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape
and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they're going to be
okay. There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope.
PARNELL AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, TENNESSEE
[Gavin Blaire escorts me to the office of his squadron commander. Colonel Christina
Eliopolis. As much a legend for her temper as for her outstanding war record, it is difficult
to see how so much intensity can be compacted into her diminutive, almost childlike
frame. Her long black bangs and delicate facial features only reinforce the picture of
eternal youth. Then she removes her sunglasses, and I see the fire behind her eyes.]
I was a Raptor driver, the FA-22. It was, hands down, the best air supe-riority
platform ever built. It could outfly and outfight God and all his angels. It was a
monument to American technical prowess . . . and in this war, that prowess
counted for shit.
That must have been frustrating.
Frustrating? Do you know what it feels like to suddenly be told that the one goal
you've worked toward your whole life, that you've sacrificed and suffered for,
that's pushed you beyond limits you never knew you had is now considered
"strategically invalid"?
Would you say this was a common feeling?
Let me put it this way; the Russian army wasn't the only service to be decimated
by their own government. The Armed Forces Reconstruction Act basically
neutered the air force. Some DeStRes "experts" had determined that our resource-
to-kill ratio, our RKR, was the most lopsided of all the branches.
Could you give me some example?
How about the JSOW, the Joint Standoff Weapon? It was a gravity bomb, guided
by GPS and Inertial Nav, that could be released from as far as forty miles away.
The baseline version carried one hundred and forty BLU-97B submunitions, and
each bomblet carried a shaped charge against armored targets, a fragmented case
against infantry, and a zirconium ring
to
set the entire kill zone ablaze. It had been
considered a triumph, until Yonkers. Now we were told that the price of one
JSOW kit-the materials, manpower, time, and energy, not to mention the fuel and
ground maintenance needed for the delivery aircraft-could pay for a platoon of
infantry pukes who could smoke a thousand times as many Gs. Not enough bang
for our buck, like so many of our former crown jewels. They went through us like
an industrial laser. The B-2 Spirits, gone; the B-l Lancers, gone; even the old
BUFFs, the B-52 Big Ugly Fat Fellows, gone. Throw in the Eagles, the Falcons,
the Tomcats, Hornets, JSFs, and Raptors, and you have more combat aircraft lost
to the stroke of a pen than to all the SAMs, Flak,
and enemy fighters in history. At least the assets weren't scrapped, thank God, just
mothballed in warehouses or diat big desert graveyard at AMARC.   "Long-term
investment," they called it. That's the one thing
1.   Joint Standoff Weapons were used in concert with a variety of other air-launched ord­
nance at Yonkers.
2.   A slight exaggeration. The amount of combat aircraft "grounded" during World War
Z does not equal those lost during World War II.
3.   AMARC: Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center outside of Tucson,
Arizona.
I 70       MAX BROOKS
you can always depend on; as we're fighting one war, we're always preparing for the next
one. Our airlift capacity, at least the organization, was almost left intact.
Almost?
The Globemasters had to go, so did anything else powered by a "gas guzzling" jet. That
left us with prop-powered aircraft. I went from flying the closest thing to an X-Wing
fighter, to the next best thing to a U-Haul.
Was that the main mission of the air force?
Airborne resupply was our primary objective, the only one that really counted
anymore.
[She points to a yellowed map on the wall.]
The base commander let me keep it, after what happened to me.
[The map is of the wartime continental United States. All land west of the Rockies is
shadowed a light giay. Amongst this gray are a variety of colored circles.]
Islands in the Sea of Zack. Green denotes active military facilities. Some of them
had been converted into refugee centers. Some were still contributing to the war
effort. Some were well defended but had no strategic impact.
The Red Zones were labeled "Offensively Viable": factories, mines, power plants.
The army'd left custodial teams during the big pullback. Their job was to guard
and maintain these facilities for a time when, if, we could add them to the overall
war effort. The Blue Zones were civilian areas where people had managed to make
a stand, cane out a little piece of real estate, and figure some way to live within its
boundaries. All these zones were in need of resupply and that's what the
"Continental Airlift" was all about.
Ir was a massive operation, not just in terms of aircraft and fuel, but organization
as well. Remaining in contact with all these islands, processing their demands,
coordinating with DeStRes, then trying to procure and prioritize all the materiel
for each drop made it the statistically largest undertaking in air force history.
We tried to stay away from consumables, things like food and medicine that
required regular deliveries. These were classified as DDs, dependency drops, and
they got a backseat to SSDs, self-sustaining drops, like tools, spare parts, and tools
to make spare parts. "They don't need fish," Sinclair used to say, "they need
fishing poles." Still, every autumn, we dropped a lot of fish, and wheat, and salt,
and dried vegetables and baby formula . . . Winters were hard. Remember how
long they used to be? Helping people to help themselves is great in theory, but you
still gotta keep 'em alive.
Sometimes you had to drop in people, specialists like doctors or engi' neers,
people with the kind of training you just can't get from a how-to manual. The Blue
Zones got a lot of Special Forces instructors, not only to teach them how better to
defend themselves, but to prepare them for the day they might have to go on the
offensive. I have a lot of respect for diose guys. Most of them knew it was for the
duration; a lot of the Blue Zones didn't have airstrips, so they had to parachute in
without any hope of pickup. Not all those Blue Zones remained secure. Some were
eventually overrun. The people we dropped in knew the risks they were taking. A
lotta heart, all of them.
That goes for the pilots as well.
Hey, I'm not minimizing our risks ar all. Every day we had to fly over hundreds, in
some cases thousands, of miles of infested territory. That's why we had Furple
Zones. (She refers to the last color on the map. The purple circles are few and far
between.] We set these up as refuel and repair facil-ities. A lot of the aircraft didn't
have the range to reach remote drop zones on the East Coast if in-flight refueling
assets weren't available. They
I 7 2       MAX BROOKS
helped reduce the number of ships and crews lost en route. They brought our fleet
survivability up to 92 percent. Unfortunately, I was part of the other eight.
I'll never be sure what exactly brought us down: mechanical malfunc-tion or metal
fatigue combined with weather. It might have been the contents of our pay load,
mislabeled or mishandled. That happened a lot more than anyone wanted to think
about. Sometimes if hazardous materials weren't packaged properly, or, God
forbid, some shit-for-bra ins QC inspector let his people assemble their detonators
be/ore crating them for travel. . . that happened to a buddy of mine, just a routine
flight from Palmdale to Vandenberg, not even across an infested area. Two
hundred Type 38 deto-
nators, all fully assembled with their power cells accidentally running, all set to
blow on the same freq as our radio.
[She snaps her fingers.]
That could have been us. We were on a hop from Phoenix to the Blue Zone
outside Tallahassee, Florida. It was late October, almost full winter back then.
Honolulu was trying to squeeze out just a few more drops before the weather
socked us in till March. It was our ninth haul that week. We were all on "tweeks,"
these little blue stims that kept you going without hampering your reflexes or
judgment. I guess they worked well enough, but they made me have to piss my
kidneys out every twenty minutes. My crew, the "guys," used to give me a lot of
grief, you know, girls always having to go. I know they weren't really putting the
hate on, but I still tried to hold it as long as I could.
After two hours of banging around in some seriously heavy turbulence, I finally
broke down and turned the stick over to my copilot. I'd just zipped up when
suddenly there was this massive jolt like God had just drop-kicked our tail. . . and
suddenly our nose was dipping. The head on our C-130 wasn't even really a toilet,
just a portable chempot with a heavy, plastic shower curtain. That's probably what
ended up saving my life. If I'd been trapped in a real compartment, maybe knocked
out or unable to reach the
latch . . . Suddenly there was this screech, this overpowering blast of high-pressure
air and I was sucked out right through the rear of the aircraft, right past where the
tail should have been.
I was spiraling, out of control. I could just make out my ship, this gray mass
shrinking and smoking on its way down. I straightened myself out, hit my chute. I
was still in a daze, my head swimming, trying to catch my breath. I fumbled for
my radio and started hollering for my crew to punch out. I didn't get an answer.
All I could see was one other chute, the only other one that made it out.
That was the worst moment, right there, just hanging helplessly. I could see the
other chute, above and north of me by about three and a half clicks. I looked for
the others. I tried my radio again, but wasn't able to get a signal. I figured it had
been damaged during my "exit." I tried to get my bearings, somewhere over
southern Louisiana, a swampy wilderness that seemed to have no end. I wasn't
sure exactly, my brain was still misfiring. At least I had sense enough to check the
bare essentials. I could move my legs, my arms, I wasn't in pain or bleeding
externally. I checked to make sure my survival kit was intact, still strapped to my
thigh, and that my weapon, my Meg, was still jamming me in the ribs.
Did the air force prepare you for situations like these?
We all had to pass the Willow Creek Escape and Evade program in the Klamath
Mountains in California. It even had a few real Gs in there with us, tagged and
tracked and placed at specific marks to give us the "real
feel." Its a lot like what chey teach you in the civilian manual: movement, stealth, how to
take out Zack before he can howl your position. We all "made it," lived, I mean, although
a couple of pilots washed out on a
4- Meg: The pilot's nickname for their standard issue .22 automatic pistol. It is suspected
that the appearance of the weapon, its extended suppressor, folding stock, and telescopic
sight, give it the appearance of the old Hasbro Transformers toy "Megatron." This fact
has yet to be confirmed.
I 74       MAX BROOKS
Section Eight. I guess they just couldn't hack the real feel. That never bothered me, being
alone in hostile territory. That was standard operating procedure for me.
Always?
You wanna talk about being alone in a hostile environment, try my four years at Colorado
Springs.
But there were other women ...
Other cadets, other competitors who happen to have the same genitalia. Trust me,
when the pressure kicked in, sisterhood punched out. No, it was me, only me. Self-
contained, self-reliant, and always, unquestionably self-assured. That's the only
thing that got me through four years of Academy hell, and it was the only thing I
could count on as I hit the mud in the middle of G country.
I unclasped my chute-they teach you not to waste time concealing it-and headed in
the direction of the other chute. It took me a couple hours, splashing through this
cold slime that numbed everything below my knees. I wasn't thinking clearly, my
head was still spinning. No excuse, I know, but that's why I didn't notice that the
birds had suddenly beat it in the opposite direction. I did hear the scream though,
faint and far away. I could see the chute tangled in the trees. I started running,
another no-no, making all that noise without stopping to listen for Zack. I couldn't
see anything, just all these naked gray branches until they were right on top of me.
If it wasn't for Rollins, my copilot, I'm sure I'da been a goner.
I found him dangling from his harness, dead, twitching. His flight suit had been
torn open and his entrails were hanging . . . draped over five of them as they fed in
this cloud of red-brown water. One of them had managed to get its neck entangled
in a section of small intestine. Even- time it
5.  At this point in the war. the new battle dress uniforms (BDUs) were not in mass
production.
moved ir would jerk Rollins, ringing him like a fucking bell. They didn't notice me
at all. Close enough to touch and they didn't even look.
At least I had the brains to snap on my suppressor. I didn't have to waste a whole
clip, another fuckup. I was so angry I almost started kicking their corpses. I was so
ashamed, so blinded by self-hate . . .
Self-hate?
I screwed the pooch! My ship, my crew ...
But it was an accident. It wasn't your fault.
How do you know that? You weren't there. Shit, I wasn't even there. I don't know
what happened. I wasn't doing my job. I was squatting over a bucket like a
goddamn girl!
I found myself burning up, mentally. Fucking weakling, I told myself, fucking
loser. I started to spiral, not just hating myself, but hating myself for hating
myself. Does that make any sense? I'm sure I might have just stayed there, shaking
and helpless and waiting for Zack.
But then my radio started squawking. "Hello? Hello? Is anyone out there? Anyone
punch outta that wreck?" It was a woman's voice, clearly civilian by her language
and tone.
I answered immediately, identified myself, and demanded that she respond in
kind. She told me she was a skywatcher, and her handle was "Mets Fan," or just
"Mets" for short. The Skywatch system was this ad hoc net-
work of isolated ham radio operators. They were supposed to report on downed
aircrews and do what they could to help with their rescue. It wasn't the most
efficient system, mainly because there were so few, but it looked like today was
my lucky day. She told me that she had seen the smoke and falling wreckage of
my Here' and even though she was probably less than a day's walk from my
position, her cabin was heavily surrounded. Before I could say anything she told
me not to worry, that she'd already reported my position to search and rescue, and
the best thing to do was to get to open ground where I could rendezvous for
pickup.
I 76       MAX BROOKS
I reached for my GPS but it had been torn from my suit when I was sucked out of
my ship. I had a backup survival map, but it was so big, so uiv specific, and my
hump took me over so many states that it was practically just a map of the U.S. . . .
my head was still clouded with anger and doubt. I told her I didn't know my
position, didn't know where to go ...
She laughed. "You mean you've never made this run before? You don't have every
inch of it committed to memory? You didn't see where you were as you were
hanging by the silk?" She was so sure of me, trying to get me to think instead of
just spoon-feeding me the answers. I realized that I did
know this area well, that I
had
flown over it at least twenty times in the last three
months, and that I had to be somewhere in the Atchafalaya basin. "Think," she told
me, "what did you see from your chute? Were there any rivers, any roads?" At
first, all I could remember were the trees, the endless gray landscape with no
distinguishable features, and then gradually, as my brain cleared, I remembered
seeing both rivers and a road. I checked on the map and realized that directly north
of me was the I-10 freeway. Mets told me that was the best place for an S&R
pickup. She told me it shouldn't take any longer than a day or two at best if I got a
move on and stopped burning daylight.
As I was about to leave, she stopped me and asked if there was anything I'd
forgotten to do. I remember that moment clearly. I turned back to Rollins. He was
just starting to open his eyes again. I felt like I should say something, apologize,
maybe, then I put a round through his forehead.
Mets told me not to blame myself, and no matter what, not to let it distract me
from the job I had to do. She said, "Stay alive, stay alive and do your job." Then
she added, "And stop using up your weekend minutes."
She was talking about battery power-she didn't miss a trick-so I signed off and
started moving north across the swamp. My brain was now on full burner, all my
lessons from die Creek came rolling back. I stepped, I halted, I listened. I stuck to
dry ground where I could, and I made sure to pace myself very carefully. I had to
swim a couple times, that really made me nervous. Twice I swear I could feel a
hand just brush against my leg. Once, I found a road, small, barely two lanes and
in horrible disrepair.
Still, it was better than trudging through the mud. I reported to Mets what I'd
found and asked if it would take me right to the freeway. She warned me to stay
off it and every other road that crisscrossed the basin. "Roads mean cars," she said,
"and cars mean Gs." She was talking about any bitten human drivers who died of
their wounds while still behind the wheel and, because a ghoul doesn't have the IQ
points to open a door or unbuckle a seatbelt, would be doomed to spend the rest of
their existence trapped in their cars.
I asked her what the danger of that was. Since they couldn't get out, and as long as
I didn't let them reach through an open window to grab me, what did it matter how
many "abandoned" cars I passed along the road. Mets reminded me that a trapped
G was still able to moan and therefore still able to call for others. Now I was really
confused. If I was going to waste so much time ducking a few back roads with a
couple Zack-tilled cars, why was I heading for a freeway that was sure to be
jammed with them'
She said, "You'll be up above the swamp. How are more zombies gonna get to
you?" Because it was built several stories above the swamp, this sec-tion of the
1*10 was the safest place in the whole basin. I confessed I hadn't thought
o{
that.
She laughed and said, "Don't worry, honey. I have. Stick with me and I'll get you
home."
And I did. I stayed away from anything even resembling a road and stuck to as
pure a wilderness track as I could. I say "pure" but the truth was you couldn't avoid
all signs of humanity or what could have been humanity a long time ago. There
were shoes, clothes, bits of garbage, and tattered suitcases and hiking gear. I saw a
lot of bones on the patches of raised mud.
I couldn't cell it thev were human or animal. One time I found this rib cage; I'm
guessing it was a gator, a big one. I didn't want to think about how many Gs it took
to bring that bastard down.
The first G I saw was small, probably a kid, I couldn't tell. Its face was eaten off,
the skin, nose, eyes, lips, even the hair and ears . . . not completely gone, but
partially hanging or stuck in patches to the exposed skull. Maybe there were more
wounds, I couldn't tell. It was stuck inside one of those long civilian hiker's packs,
stuffed in there Tight with the drawstring
178       MAX BROOKS
pulled right up around its neck. The shoulder straps had gotten tangled on the roots
of a tree, it was splashing around, half submerged. Its brain must have been intact,
and even some of the muscle fibers connecting the jaw. That jaw started snapping
as I approached. I don't know how it knew I was there, maybe some of the nasal
cavity was still intact, maybe the ear canal.
It couldn't moan, its throat had been too badly mangled, but the splashing might
have attracted attention, so I put it out of its misery, if it really was miserable, and
tried not to think about it. That was another thing they
Taught us at Willow Creek: don't write their eulogy, don't try to imagine who they
used to be, how they came to be here, how they came to be this. I know, who
doesn't do that, right? Who doesn't look at one of those things and just naturally
start to wonder? It's like reading the last page of a book . . . your imagination just
naturally spinning. And that's when you get distracted, get sloppy, let your guard
down and end up leaving someone else to wonder what happened to you. I tried to
put her, it, out of my mind. Instead, I found myself wondering why it had been the
only one I'd seen.
That was a practical survival question, not just idle musings, so I got on the radio
and asked Mets if there was something I was missing here, if maybe there was
some area I should be careful to avoid. She reminded me that this area was, for the
most part, depopulated because the Blue Zones of Baton Rouge and Lafayette
were pulling most of the Gs in either direction. That was bittersweet comfort,
being right between two of the heaviest clusters for miles. She laughed, again . . .
"Don't worry about it, you'll be fine."
I saw something up ahead, a lump that was almost a thicket, but too boxy and
shining in places. I reported it to Mets. She warned me not to go near it, keep on
going and keep my eyes on the prize. I was feeling pretty good by this point, a
little of the old me coming back.
As I got closer, I could see that it was a vehicle, a Lexus Hybrid SUV. It was
covered in mud and moss and sitting in the water up to its doors. I could see that
the rear windows were blocked with survival gear: tent, sleeping bag, cooking
utensils, hunting rifle with boxes and boxes of shells, all
new, some srill in their plastic. I came around the driver's side window and caught
the glint of a .357. It was still clutched in the driver's brown, shriveled hand. He
was still sitting upright, looking straight ahead. There was light coming through
the side of his skull. He was badly decomposed, at least a year, maybe more. He
wore survival khakis, the kind you'd order from one of those upscale,
hunting/safari catalogs. They were still clean and crisp, the only blood was from
the head wound. I couldn't see any other wound, no bites, nothing. That hit me
hard, a lot harder than the little faceless kid. This guy had had everything he
needed to survive, everything except the will. I know that's supposition. Maybe
there was a wound I couldn't see, hidden by his clothes or the advanced
decomposition. But I knew it, leaning there with my face against the glass, looking
at this monument to how easy it was to give up.
I stood there for a moment, long enough for Mets to ask me what was happening. I
told her what I was seeing, and without pause, she told me to keep on going.
I started to argue. I thought I should at least search the vehicle, see if there was
anything I needed. She asked me, sternly, if there was anything I needed, not
wanted. I thought about it, admitted there wasn't. His gear was plentiful, but it was
civilian, big and bulky; the food needed cooking, the weapons weren't silenced.
My survival kit was pretty thorough, and, if for some reason I didn't find a helo
waiting at the I-10, I could always use this as an emergency supply cache.
I brought up the idea of maybe using the SUV itself. Mets asked if I had a tow
truck and some jumper cables. Almost like a kid, I answered no. She
asked, 'Then what's keeping you?" or something like that, pushing me to get a
move on. I told her to just wait a minute, I leaned my head against the driver's side
window, I sighed and felt beat again, drained. Mets got on my ass, pushing me. I
snapped back for her to shut the fuck up, I just needed a minute, a couple seconds
to ... I don't know what.
I must have kept my thumb on the "transmit" button for a few seconds too long,
because Mets suddenly asked, "What was that?" "What?" I asked. She'd heard
something, something on my end.
I 80       MAX BROOKS
She'd heard it before you?
I guess so, because in another second, once I'd cleared my head and opened my
ears, I began to hear it too. The moan . . . loud and close, followed by the
splashing of feet.
I looked up, through the car's window, the hole in the dead man's skull, and the
window on the other side, and that's when I saw the first one. I spun around and
saw five more coming at me from all directions. And be-hind them were another
ten, fifteen. I took a shot at the first one, the
round went wild.
Mets started squawking at me, demanding a contact report. I gave her a head count
and she told me to stay cool, don't try to run, just stay put and follow what I'd
learned at Willow Creek. I started to ask how she knew about Willow Creek when
she shouted for me to shut up and tight.
I climbed to the top of the SUV-you're supposed to look for the clos-est physical
defense-and started to measure ranges. I lined up my first target, took a deep
breath, and dropped him. To be a fighter jock is to be able to make decisions as
fast as your electrochemical impulses can carry them. I'd lost that nanosecond
timing when I hit the mud, now it was back. I was calm, I was focused, all the
doubt and weakness were gone. The whole en-gagement felt like ten hours, but I
guess in reality, it was more like ten minutes. Sixty-one in total, a nice thick ring
of submerged corpses. I took my time, checked my remaining ammo and waited
for die next wave to come. None did.
It was another twenty minutes before Mets asked me for an update. I gave her a
body count and she told me to remind her never to piss me off. I laughed, the first
time since I'd hit the mud. I felt good again, strong and confident. Mets warned me
that all these distractions had erased any chance of making it to the I-10 before
nightfall, and that I should probably start thinking about where I was gonna catch
my forty.
I got as far away from the SUV as I could before the sky started to darken and
found a decent enough perch in the branches of a tall tree. My kit had this
standard-issue microfiber hammock; great invention, light and strong and with
clasps to keep you from rolling out. That part was also sup-
posed to help calm you down, help you get to sleep faster. .. yeah, right! It didn't
matter that I'd already been up for close to forty-eight hours, that I'd tried all the
breathing exercises they taught us at the Creek, or that I even slipped two of my
Baby-Ls. You're only supposed to take one, but I figured that was for lightweight
wussies. I was me again, remember, I could handle it, and hey, I needed to sleep.
I asked her, since there was nothing else to do, or think about, if it was okay to talk
about her. Who was she, really* How'd she end up in this isolated cabin in the
middle of Cajun country? She didn't sound Cajun, she didn't even have a southern
accent. And how did she know so much about pilot training without ever going
through it herself? I was starting to get my suspicions, starting to piece together a
rough outline of who she really was.
Mets told me, again, that there would be plenty of time later for an episode of
The
View.
Right now I needed my sleep, and to check in with her at dawn. I felt die Ls
kick in between "check" and "in." I was out by "dawn."
I slept hard. The sky was already light by the time I opened my eyes. I'd been
dreaming about, what else, Zack. His moans were still echoing in my ears when I
woke up. And then I looked down and realized they weren't dreams. There must
have been at least a hundred of them surrounding the tree. They were all reaching
excitedly, all trying to climb over each other to get up to me. At least they couldn't
ramp up, the ground wasn't solid enough. I didn't have the ammo to take all of
them out, and since a fire-fight might also buy time for more
to
show up, I decided
it was best
to
pack up my gear and execute my escape plan.
you
had planned for this?
Not really planned, but they'd trained us for situations like this. It's a lot like
jumping from an aircraft: pick your approximate landing zone, tuck and roll, keep
loose, and get up as quick as you can. The goal is to put some serious distance
between you and your attackers. You take off running,
r>   "Baby-Ls": Officially a pain reliever but used by many military personnel as a
sleep aid.
I