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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.]
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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
