world war z 2

82       MAX BROOKS
jogging, or even "speed walking"; yes, they actually told us to consider this as a
low-impact alternative. The point is to get far enough way to give you time to plan
your next move. According to my map, the I-10 was close enough for me to make
a run for it, be spotted by a rescue chopper, and be lifted off before these stink
bags would ever catch up. I got on the radio, reported my situation to Mets, and
cold her to signal S&R for an immediate pickup. She told me to be careful. I
crouched, I jumped, and cracked my ankle on a submerged rock.
I hit the water, facedown. Its chill was the only thing that kept me from blacking
out from the pain. I came up spluttering, choking, and the first
thing I saw was the whole swarm coming at me. Mets must have known
something was up by the fact that I didn't report my safe landing. Maybe she asked
me what had happened, although I don't remember. I just remember her yelling at
me to get up and run. I tried putting weight on my ankle, but lightning shot up
through my leg and spine. It could bear the weight, but... I screamed so loud, I'm
sure she heard me through her cabin's window. "Get out of there," she was yelling
. . . "GO!" I started limping, splashing away with upwards of a hundred Gs on my
ass. It must have been comical, diis frantic race of cripples.
Mets yelled, "If you can stand on it, you can run on it! It's not a weight-bearing
bone! You can do this!"
"But it hurts!" I actually said that, with tears running down my face, with Zack
behind me howling for his lunch. I reached the freeway, looming above the swamp
like the ruins of a Roman aqueduct. Mets had been right about its relative safety.
Only neither of us had counted on my injury or my undead tail. There was no
immediate entrance so I had to limp to one of the small, adjoining roads that Mets
had originally warned me to avoid. I could see why as I began to get close.
Wrecked and rusting cars were piled up by the hundreds and every tenth one had
at least one G locked inside. They saw me and started to moan, the sound carried
for miles in every direction.
Mets shouted, "Don't worry about that now! Just get on the on-ramp and watch the
fucking grabbers!"
Grabbers?
The ones reaching through broken windows. On the open road, I at least had a
chance of dodging them, but on the on-ramp, you're hemmed in on either side.
That was the worst part, by far, diose few minutes trying to get up onto the
freeway. I had to go in between the cars; my ankle wouldn't let me get on top of
them. These rotting hands would reach out for me, grabbing my flight suit or my
wrist. Every head shot cost me seconds that I didn't have. The steep incline was
already slowing me down. My ankle was throbbing, my lungs were aching, and
the swarm was now gaining on me fast. If it hadn't been for Mets . . .
She was shouting at me the whole time. "Move your ass, you fuckin' bitch!" She
was getting pretty raw by then. "Don't you dare quit. . . don't you DARE crap out
on me!" She never let up, never gave me an inch. "What are you, some weak little
victim'" At that point I thought I was. I knew I could never make it. The
exhaustion, the pain, more than anything, I think, the anger at fucking up so badly.
I actually considered turning my pistol around, wanting to punish myself for . . .
you know. And then Mets really hit me. She roared, "What are you, your fucking
mother! ?!"
That did it. I hauled ass right up onto the interstate.
I reported to Mets that I'd made it, then asked, "Now what the fuck do
i dor
Her voice suddenly got very soft. She told me to look up. A black dot was heading
at me from out of the morning sun. It was following the freeway and grew very
quickly into the form of a UH-60.1 let out a whoop and popped my signal flare.
The first thing I saw when they winched me aboard was diat it was a civil' ian
chopper, not government Search and Rescue. The crew chief was a big Cajun with
a thick goatee and wraparound sunglasses. He asked, "Where de' hell you come
from?" Sorry if I butchered the accent. I almost cried and punched him in his
thigh-sized bicep. I laughed and said that they work fast. He shot me a look like I
didn't know what I was talking about. It turned out later that this wasn't the rescue
team but just a routine air shuttle between
I 84       MAX BROOKS
Baton Rouge and Lafayette. I didn't know at that moment, and I didn't care. I
reported to Mets that I got my pickup, that I was safe. I thanked her for everything
she'd done for me, and . . . and so I wouldn't really start bawling, I tried to cover
with a joke about finally getting that episode of
The View.
I never got a response.
She
sounds like a bell of a Skywatcber.
She was a hell of a woman.
You said you had your "suspicions" by this point.
No civilian, even a veteran Skywatcher, could know so much about what goes into
wearing those wings. She was just too savvy, too informed, the kind of baseline
knowledge of someone who had to have gone through it herself.
So she was a pilot.
Definitely; not air force-I would have known her-but maybe a squid or a jarhead.
They'd lost as many pilots as the air force on resupply hops like mine, and eight
out of ten were never accounted for. I'm sure that she must have run into a
situation like mine, had to ditch, lost her crew, maybe even blamed herself for it
like me. Somehow she managed to find that cabin and spent the rest of the war as
one kick-ass Skywatcher.
That makes sense.
Doesn't it?
[There is an awkward pause. I search her face, waiting for more.]
What?
They never found her.
No.
Or the cabin.
No.
And Honolulu never had any record of a Skywatcher with the call sign Mets Fan.
You've done your homework.
I.. .
You probably also read my after-action report, right'
yes.
And the psych evaluation they tacked on after my official debriefing.
Well.. .
Well, it's bullshit, okay? So what if everything she told me was information I'd
already been briefed on, so what if the psych team "claim" my radio was
knocked out before I hie the mud, and so the tuck what if Mets is short for Metis,
the mother of Athena, the Greek goddess with the stormy gray eyes. Oh, the
shrinks had a ball with that one, especially when they "discovered" that mv mother
grew up in the Bronx.
And that remark she made about your mother?
Who the hell doesn't have mother issues? If Mets was a pilot, she was a natural
gambler. She knew she had a good chance of scoring a hit with
I 86       MAX BROOKS
"mom." She knew the risk, took her shot. . . Look, if they thought I'd cracked up,
why didn't I lose my flight status? Why did they let me have this job* Maybe she
wasn't a pilot herself, maybe she was married to one, maybe she'd wanted to be
one but never made it as far as I did. Maybe she was just a scared, lonely voice
that did what she could to help another scared lonely voice from ending up like
her. Who cares who she was, or is: She was there when I needed her, and for the
rest
o{
my life, she'll always be with me.
AROUND   THE   WORLD, AND   ABOV E
PROVINCE OF BOHEMIA, THE EUROPEAN UNION
[It is called Kost, "the Bone," and what it lacks in beauty it more than makes up foi in
strength. Appearing to grow out of its solid rock foundation, this fourteenth-century
Gothic "Hrad" casts an intimidating shadow over the Plakanek Valley, an image David
Allen Forbes is keen to capture with his pencil and paper. This will be his second book,
Castles of the Zombie War: The Continent.
The Englishman sits under a tree, his
patchwork clothing and long Scottish sword already adding to this Arthurian setting. He
abruptly switches gears as I arrive, from serene artist to painfully nervous storyteller.]
When I say that the New World doesn't have our history of fixed fortifi' cations,
I'm only referring co North America. There are the Spanish coastal fortresses,
naturally, along the Caribbean, and the ones we and the French built in the Lesser
Antilles. Then there are the Inca ruins in the
I 88       MAX BROOKS
Andes, although they never experienced direct sieges. Also, when I say "North
America," that does not include the Mayan and Aztec ruins in Mexico-that
business with the Battle of Kukulcan, although I suppose that's Toltec, now, isn't
it, when those chaps held off so many Zed Heads on the steps of that bloody great
pyramid. So when I say "New World," I'm really referring to the United States and
Canada.
This isn't an insult, you understand, please don't take it as such. You're both young
countries, you don't have the history of institutional anarchy we Europeans
suffered after the fall of Rome. You've always had standing, national governments
with the forces capable of enforcing law and order.
I know that wasn't true during your westward expansion or your civil war, and
please, I'm not discounting those pre-Civil War fortresses or the experiences of
those defending them. I'd one day like to visit Fort Jef-
ferson. I hear those who survived there had quite a time of it. All I'm saying is, in
Europe's history, we had almost a millennia of chaos where sometimes the concept of
physical safety stopped at the battlements of your lord's castle. Does that make sense? I'm
not making sense; can we start again?
Wo,
no, this is fine. Please, continue.
You'll edit out all the daft bits.
You got it.
Right then. Castles. Well... I don't want for a moment to overstate their importance for
the general war effort. In fact, when you compare them to any other type of fixed
fortification, modern, modified, and so forth, their
contribution does seem quite negligible, unless you're like me, and that contribution was
what saved your life.
1. Although Machu Picchu was quiet throughout the war, the survivors at Vilcahamha did
see a minor, internal outbreak.
This doesn't mean that a mighty fortress was naturally our God. For starters, you
must understand the inherent difference between a castle and a palace. A lot of so-
called castles were really nothing more than just great impressive homes, or else
had been converted to such after their defensive value had become obsolete. These
once impregnable bastions now had so many windows cut into the ground floor
that it would have taken forever to brick them all up again. You'd be better off in a
modern block of flats with the staircase removed. And as far as those palaces that
were built as nothing more than status symbols, places like Chateau Usse or
Prague "Castle," they were little more than death traps.
Just look at Versailles. That was a first-rate cock-up. Small wonder the French
government chose to build their national memorial on its ashes. Did you ever read
that poem by Renard, about the wild roses that now grow in the memorial garden,
their petals stained red with the blood of the damned ?
Not that a high wall was all you needed for long-term survival. Like any static
defense, castles had as many internal as external dangers. Just look at Muiderslot
in Holland. One case of pneumonia, that's all it took. Throw in a wet, cold autumn,
poor nutrition, and lack of any genuine medications . . . Imagine what that must
have been like, trapped behind those high stone walls, those around you fatally ill,
knowing your time was coming, knowing the only slim hope you had was to
escape. The journals written by some of the dying tell of people going mad with
desperation, leaping into that moat choked with Zed Heads.
And then there were fires like the ones at Braubach and Pierrefonds;
hundreds trapped with nowhere to run, just waiting to be charred by the flames or
asphyxiated by the smoke. There were also accidental explosions, civilians who
somehow found themselves in possession of bombs but had no idea how to handle
or even store them. At Miskolc Diosgyor in Hungary, as I understand it, someone
got their hands on a cache of military-grade, sodiunv-based explosives. Don't ask
me what exactly it was or why they had it, but nobody seemed to know that water,
not fire, was the cat' alytic agent. The story goes that someone was smoking in the
armory, caused some small fire or whatnot. The stupid sods thought they were
preventing
190       MAX BROOKS
an explosion by dousing the crates in water. It blew a hole right through the wall
and the dead surged in like water through a breached dam.
At least that was a mistake based on ignorance. I can't even begin to forgive what
happened at Chateau de Fougeres. They were running low on supplies, thought
that they could dig a tunnel under dieir undead attack' ers. What did they think this
was,
The
Great
Escape!
Did they have any professional surveyors with them? Did
they even understand the basics of trigonometry? The bloody tunnel exit fell short
by over half a kilometer, came up right in a nest of the damn things. Stupid
wankers hadn't even
thought to equip their tunnel with demolition charges.
Yes, there were cock-ups aplenty, but there were also some noteworthy triumphs.
Many were subjected to only short-term sieges, the good fortune of being on the
right side of the line. Some in Spain, Bavaria, or Scotland above the Antonine only
had to hold out for weeks, or even days. For some, like Kisimul, it was only a
question of getting through one rather dodgy night. But then there were the true
tales
o{
victory, like Chenoiv ceau in France, a bizarre little Disneyesque castle
built on a bridge over the Cher River. With both connections to land severed, and
the right amount of strategic forethought, they managed to hold their position for
years.
They had enough supplies for years?
Oh good lord, no. They simply waited tor first snowfall, then raided the
surrounding countryside. This was, I should imagine, standard procedure for
almost anyone under siege, castle or not. I'm sure those in your strate-gic "Blue
Zones," at least those above the snowline, operated in much the same manner. In
that way we were fortunate that most of Europe freezes in winter. Many
o{
the
defenders Pve spoken to have agreed that the inevitable onset of winter, long and
brutal as it was, became a lifesaving reprieve. As long as they didn't freeze to
death, many survivors took the opportunity of frozen Zed Heads to raid the
surrounding countryside for everything they'd need for the warmer months.
2. The main British line of defense was fixed along the site of the old Roman
Antonine Wall.
It's not surprising how many defenders chose to remain in their strongholds even
with the opportunity to flee, be it Bouillon in Belgium or Spis in Slovakia or even
back home like Beaumaris in Wales. Before the war, the place had been nothing
but a museum piece, a hollow shell of roofless chambers and high concentric
walls. The town council should be given the VC for their accomplishments,
pooling resources, organizing citizens, restoring this ruin to its former glory. They
had just a few months before the crisis engulfed their part of Britain. Even more
dramatic is the story of Conwy, both a castle and medieval wall that protected the
entire town. The inhabitants not only lived in safety and relative comfort during
the stalemate years, their access to the sea allowed Conwy to become a spring­
board for our forces once we began to retake our country. Have you ever read
Camelot
Mine?
[I shake my head.]
You must find yourself a copy. It's a cracking good novel, based on the author's
own experiences as one of the defenders of Caerphilly. He began the crisis on the
second floor of his flat in Ludlow, Wales. As his supplies ran out and the first
snow fell, he decided to strike out in search
o{
more permanent lodgings. He came
upon the abandoned ruin, which had already been the si^ht of a halfhearted, and
ultimately fruitless, defense. He buried the bodies, smashed the frozen Zed Heads,
and set about restoring the castle on his own. He worked tirelessly, in the most
brutal winter on record. By May, Caerphilly was prepared for the summer siege,
and by the
following winter, it became a haven for several hundred other survivors.
[He shows me some of his sketches.! A masterpiece, isn't it, second largest in the
British Isles.
What's the first?
[He hesitates.]
192       MAX BROOKS Windsor.
Windsor was your castle.
Well, not mine personally.
I mean, you were there.
[Another pause.]
IT was, from a defensive standpoint, as close as one could come to perfection.
Before the war, it was the largest inhabited castle in Europe, almost thirteen acres.
It had its own well for water, and enough storage space to house a decade's worth
of rations. The fire of 1992 led to a state-of-the-art suppression system, and the
subsequent terrorist threats upgraded security measures to rival any in the UK. Not
even the general public knew what their tax dollars were paying for: bulletproof
glass, reinforced walls, retractable bars, and steel shutters hidden so cleverly in
windowsills and door frames.
But of all our achievements at Windsor, nothing can rival the siphoning of crude
oil and natural gas from the deposit several kilometers beneath the castle's
foundation. It had been discovered in the 1990s but never exploited for a variety of
political and environmental reasons. You can believe we exploited it, diough. Our
contingent of royal engineers rigged a scaffolding up and over our wall, and
extended it to the drilling site. It was quite an achievement, and you can see how it
became the precursor to our fortified motorways. On a personal level, I was just
grateful for the warm rooms, hot food, and, in a pinch . . . the Molotovs and
flaming ditch. It's not the most efficient way to stop a Zed Head, I know, but as
long as you've got them stuck and can keep them in the fire .. . and besides, what
else could we do when the bullets ran out and we were left with nothing else but
an odd lot of medieval hand weapons?
There were quite a bit of those about, in museums, personal collections ... and not
a decorative dud among them. These were real, tough and tested.
They became part of British life again, ordinary citizens traipsing about with a
mace or halberd ordouble-bladed battle-axe. I myself became rather adept with
this claymore, although you wouldn't think of it to look at me.
[He gestures, slightly embarrassed, to the weapon almost as long as himself.]
It's not really ideal, takes a lot of skill, but eventually you learn what you can do,
what you never thought you were capable of, what others around you are capable
of.
[David hesitates before speaking. He is clearly uncomfortable. I hold out my
hand.]
Thank you so much for taking the time...
There's .. . more.
If you're not comfortable. . .
No, please, it's quite all right.
[Takes a breath.] She .. . she wouldn't leave, you see. She insisted, over the
objections of Parliament, to remain at Windsor, as she put it, "for the duration." I
thought maybe it was misguided nobility, or maybe fear-based paralysis. I tried to
make her see reason, begged her almost on my knees. Hadn't she done enough
with the Balmoral Decree, turning all her estates
into protected zones for any who could reach and defend them* Why not join her
family in Ireland or the Isle of Man, or, at least, if she was insisting on remaining
in Britain, supreme command HQ north above the Antonine.
What did she say?
"The highest of distinctions is service to others." [He clears his throat, his upper
Up quivers tor a second.] Her father had said that; it was the reason
I 94       MAX BROOKS
he had refused to run to Canada during the Second World War, the reason her
mother had spent the blitz visiting civilians huddled in the tube sta-tions beneath
London, the same reason, to this day, we remain a United
Kingdom.
Their task,
their mandate, is to personify all that is great in our national spirit. They must
forever be an example to the rest of us, the strongest, and bravest, and absolute
best of us. In a sense, it is they who are ruled by us, instead of the other way
around, and they must sacrifice everything,
everything,
to shoulder the weight of
this godlike burden. Otherwise what's the flipping point? Just scrap the whole
damn tradition, roll out the
bloody guillotine, and be done with it altogether. They were viewed very much
like castles, I suppose: as crumbling, obsolete relics, with no real modern function
other than as tourist attractions. But when the skies darkened and the nation called,
both reawoke to the meaning of their existence. One shielded our bodies, the other,
our souls.
ULITHI ATOLL, FEDERATED STATES OF MICRONESIA
[During World War II, this vast coral atoll served as the main forward base lor the United
States Pacific Fleet. During World War Z, it sheltered not only American naval vessels,
but hundreds of civilian ships as well. One of those ships was the UNS
Ui.il <http://Ui.il>
the first broadcast hub of Radio Free Earth. Now a museum to the achievements of the
project, she is the focus of the British documentary
Won!-, at War.
One of the subjects
interviewed for this documentary is Barati Palshigar.l
Ignorance was the enemy. Lies and superstition, misinformation, disinformation.
Sometimes, no information at all. Ignorance killed billions of people. Ignorance
caused the Zombie War. Imagine if we had known then what we know now.
Imagine if the undead virus had been as understood as,
say, tuberculosis was. Imagine if the world's citizens, or at least those charged with
protecting diose citizens, had known exactly what they were facing. Ignorance was
the real enemy, and cold, hard facts were the weapons.
When I first joined Radio Free Earth, it was still called the International Program
for Health and Safety Information. The title "Radio Free Earth" came from the
individuals and communities who monitored our broadcasts.
It was the first real international venture, barely a few months after the South
African Plan, and years before the conference at Honolulu. Just like the rest of the
world based their survival strategies on Redeker, our genesis was routed in Radio
Ubunye.
What was Radio Ubunye?
South Africa's broadcasts to its isolated citizens. Because they didn't have the
resources for material aid, the only assistance the government could render was
information. They were the first, at least, to my knowledge, to begin these regular,
multilingual broadcasts. Not only did they offer practi-cal survival skills, they
went so far as to collect and address each and every falsehood circulating among
their citizens. What we did was take the template of Radio Ubunye and adapt it for
the global community.
I came aboard, literally, at the very beginning, as the
Urals
reactors were just
being put back online. The
Ural
was a former vessel of the Soviet, then the
Russian, Federal Navy. Back then the SSV-33 had been many things: a command
and control ship, a missile tracking platform, an electronic surveillance vessel.
Unfortunately, she was also a white elephant,
because her systems, they cell me, were Too complicated even for her own crew.
She had spent the majority of her career tied to a pier at the Vladivostok naval
base, providing additional electrical power for the facility. I am not an engineer, so
I don't how they managed to replace her spent fuel rods or convert her massive
communication facilities to interface with the global satellite network. I specialize
in languages, specifically those of the
1.  Ubunye: a word of Zulu origin tor Unity.
I 96       MAX BROOKS
Indian Subcontinent. Myself and Mister Verma, just the two of us to cover a
billion people . . . well... at that point it was still a billion.
Mister Verma had found me in the refugee camp in Sri Lanka. He was a
Translator, I was an interpreter. We had worked together several years before at
our country's embassy in London. We thought it had been hard work then; we had
no idea. It was a maddening grind, eighteen, sometimes rwenry hours a day. I don't
know when we slept. There was so much raw data, so many dispatches arriving
every minute. Much of it had to do with basic survival: how to purify water, create
an indoor greenhouse, culture
and process mold spore for penicillin. This mind-numbing copy would often be
punctuated with facts and terms that I had never heard of before. I'd never heard
the term "quisling" or "feral"; I didn't know what a "Lobo" was or the false miracle
cure of Phalanx. All I knew was that suddenly there was a uniformed man shoving
a collection of words before my eyes and telling me "We need this in Marathi, and
ready to record in fifteen minutes."
What kind of misinformation were you combating?
Where do you want me to begin* Medical' Scientific' Military' Spiritual'
Psychological? The psychological aspect I found the most maddening. People
wanted so badly to anthropomorphize the walking blight. In war, in a conventional
war that is, we spend so much time trying to dehumanize the enemy, to create an
emotional distance. We would make up stories or derogatory titles . . . when I
think about what my father used to call Muslims . . . and now in this war it seemed
that everyone was trying desperately to find some shred of a connection to their
enemy, to put a human face on something that was so unmistakably inhuman.
Can you give me some examples?
There were so many misconceptions: zombies were somehow intelligent; they
could feel and adapt, use tools and even some human weapons; they carried
memories of their former existence; or they could be communi-
cated with and trained like some kind of pet. It was heartbreaking, having to
debunk one misguided myth after another. The civilian survival guide helped, but
was still severely limited.
Ob really?
Oh yes. You could see it was clearly written by an American, the references to
SUVs and personal firearms. There was no taking into account the cultural
differences . . . the various indigenous solutions people believed would save them
from the undead.
Such
as?
I'd rather not give too many details, not without tacitly condemning the entire
people group from which this "solution" originated. As an Indian, I had to deal
with many aspects of my own culture that had turned self-destructive. There was
Varanasi, one of the oldest cities on Earth, near the place where Buddha
supposedly preached his first sermon and where thousands of Hindu pilgrims
came each year to die. In normal, prewar conditions, the road would be littered
with corpses. Now these corpses were rising to attack. Varanasi was one of the
hottest White Zones, a nexus of living death. This nexus covered almost the entire
length of the Ganges. Its healing powers had been scientifically assessed decades
before the war, some-
thing To do with the high oxygenation rate of the waters." Tragic. Millions flocked to its
shores, serving only to feed the flames. Even after the government's withdrawal to the
Himalayas, when over 90 percent of the country was officially overrun, the pilgrimages
continued. Even- country had a similar story. Every one of our international crew had at
least one moment when they were forced to confront an example of suicidal ignorance.
An American told us about how the religious sect known as "God's Lambs" believed that
2. Although opinion is divided on the subject, many prewar scientific studies have proven
that the high oxygenation retention of the Ganges has been the source of its long-revered
"miracle" cures.
198       MAX BROOKS
the rapture had finally come and the quicker they were infected, the quicker they would
go to heaven. Another woman-I won't say what country she belonged to-tried her best to
dispel the notion that sexual intercourse with a virgin could "cleanse" the "curse." I don't
know how-many women, or little girls, were raped as a result of this "cleansing."
Everyone was furious with his own people. Everyone was ashamed. Our one Belgian
crewmember compared it to the darkening skies. He used to
call ic "the evil of our collective soul."
I guess I have no right
to
complain. My life was never in danger, my belly was
always full. I might not have slept often but at least I could sleep without fear.
Most importantly, I never had had to work in the Ural's IR department.
IR?
Information Reception. The data we were broadcasting did not originate aboard
the
Ural.
It came from all around the world, from experts and think tanks in
various government safe zones. They would transmit their findings to our IR
operators who, in turn, would pass it along to us. Much of this data was
transmitted to us over conventional, open, civilian bands, and many of these bands
were crammed with ordinary people's cries for help. There were millions of
wretched souls scattered throughout our planet, all screaming into their private
radio sets as their children starved or their temporary fortress burned, or the living
dead overran their defenses. Even if you didn't understand the language, as many
of the operators didn't, there was no mistaking the human voice of anguish. They
weren't allowed to answer back, either; there wasn't time. All transmissions had to
be devoted to official business. I don't want to know what that was like for the IR
operators.
When the last broadcast came from Buenos Aires, when that famous Latin singer
played that Spanish lullaby, it was too much for one of our op' erators. He wasn't
from Buenos Aires, he wasn't even from South America.
He was just an eighteen-year-old Russian sailor who blew his brains out all over
his instruments. He was the first, and since the end of the war, the rest
WORLD WAR Z          199
of the IR operators have followed suit. Not one of them is alive today. The last
was my Belgian friend. "You carry those voices with you," he told me one
morning. We were standing on the deck, looking into that brown haze, waiting for
a sunrise we knew we'd never see. "Those cries will be with me the rest of my life,
never resting, never fading, never ceasing their call to join them."
THE DEMILITARIZED ZONE: SOUTH KOREA
IHyungchol Choi, deputy director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, gestures to
the diy, hilly, unremarkable landscape to our north. One might mistake it for Southern
California, if
not for the deserted pillboxes, fading banners, and rusting, barbed wire fence that runs
to either horizon.]
What happened? No one knows. No country was better prepared to repel the
infestation than North Korea. Rivers to the north, oceans to the east and west,
and to the south [he gestures to the Demilitarized Zone], the most heavily
fortified border on Earth. You can see how mountainous the terrain is, how
easily defensible, but what you can't see is that those mountains are
honeycombed with a titanic military-industrial infrastructure. The North
Korean government learned some very hard lessons from your bombing
campaign of the 1950s and had been laboring ever since to create a
subterranean system that would allow their people to wage another war from
a secure location.
Their population was heavily militarized, marshaled to a degree of readiness that
made Israel look like Iceland. Over a million men and women were actively
under arms with a further five in reserve. That is over a quarter of the entire
population, not to mention the fact that almost everyone in the country had,
at some point in their lives, undergone basic military
training. More important than this training, though, and most important for this
kind of warfare was an almost superhuman degree
o{
national discipline. North
Koreans were indoctrinated from birth to believe that their lives were meaningless,
that they existed only to serve the State, the Revolution, and the Great Leader.
This is almost the polar opposite of what we experienced in the South. We were an
open society. We had to be. International trade was our lifeblood. We were
individualists, maybe not as much as you Americans, hut we had more than our
share of protests and public disturbances. We were such a free and fractured
society that we barely managed to implement the Chang Doctrine during the Great
Panic. That kind of internal crisis would have been inconceivable in the North.
They were a people who, even when their government caused a near genoctdal
famine, would rather resort to eating children* than raise even a whisper of
defiance. This was die kind of subservience Adolf Hitler could have only dreamed
of. If you had given each citizen a gun, a rock, or even their bare hands, pointed
them at approaching zombies and said "Fight!" they would have done so down to
the oldest woman and smallest tot. This was a country bred for war, planned,
prepared, and poised for it since July 27, 1953. If you were going to invent a
country to not only survive hut triumph over the apocalypse we faced, it would
have been the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
So what happened? About a month before our troubles started, before the first
outbreaks were reported in Pusan, the North suddenly, and inexplicably, severed
all diplomatic relations. We weren't told why the rail line,
the only overland link between our two sides, was suddenly closed, or why some
of our citizens who'd been waiting decades to see long lost relatives in the North
had their dreams abruptly shattered by a rubber stamp. No explanation of any kind
was given. All we got was their standard "matter of state security" brush-off.
1.  The Chang Doctrine: South Korea s version of the Redeker Plan.
2.  There have been reports of alleged cannibalism during the famine of 1992 and that
some of the victims were children.
WORLD WAR Z         201
Unlike many others, I wasn't convinced that this was a prelude to war. Whenever
the North had threatened violence, they always rang the same bells. No satellite
data, ours or the Americans, showed any hostile intent. There were no troop
movements, no aircraft fueling, no ship or submarine deployment. If anything, our
forces along the Demilitarized Zone began noticing their opposite numbers
disappearing. We knew them all, the border troops. We'd photographed each one
over the years, given them nicknames like Snake Eyes or Bulldog, even compiled
dossiers on their supposed ages, backgrounds, and personal lives. Now they were
gone, vanished behind
shielded trenches and dugouts.
Our seismic indicators were similarly silent. If the North had begun tunneling
operations or even massed vehicles on the other side of "Z," we would have heard
it like the National Opera Company.
Panmunjom is the only area along the DMZ where opposing sides can meet for
face-to-face negotiations. We share joint custody of the conference rooms, and our
troops posture for each other over several meters of open courtyard. The guards
were changed on a rotating basis. One night, as the North Korean detachment
marched into their barracks, no replacement unit marched out. The doors were
shut. The lights were extinguished. And we never saw them again.
We also saw a complete halt to human intelligence infiltration. Spies from the
North were almost as regular and predictable as the seasons. Most of the time they
were easy to spot, wearing out-of-date clothes or asking the price of goods that
they should have already known. We used to pick them up all the time, but since
die outbreaks began, their numbers had dwindled to zero.
What about your spies in the North?
Vanished, all of them, right about the same time all our electronic surveillance
assets went dark. I don't mean there was no disturbing radio traffic, I mean there
was no traffic at all. One by one, all the civilian and military channels began
shutting down. Satellite images showed fewer farmers in their fields, less foot
traffic in city streets, even fewer "volunteer" laborers
on many public works projects, which is something that has
never
happened
before. Before we knew it, there wasn't a living soul left from the Yalu to the
DMZ. From a purely intelligence standpoint, it appeared as if the entire country,
every man, woman, and child in North Korea, had simply vanished.
This mystery only stoked our growing anxiety, given what we had to deal with at
home. By now there were outbreaks in Seoul, P'ohang, Tae-jon. There was the
evacuation of Mokpo, the isolation of Kangnung, and, of course, our version of
Yonkers at Inchon, and all of it compounded by the need to keep at least half our
active divisions along our northern bor-der. Too many in the Ministry of National
Defense were convinced that the Pyongyang was just aching for war, waiting
eagerly for our darkest moment to come thundering across the 38th Parallel. We in
the intelligence community couldn't disagree more. We kept telling them that if
they were waiting for our darkest hour, then that hour had most certainly arrived.
Tae Han Min'guk was on the brink of national collapse. Plans were being secretly
drafted for a Japanese-style resettlement. Covert teams were already scouting
locations in Kamchatka. If the Chang Doctrine hadn't worked . . . if just a few
more units had broken, if a few more safe zones had collapsed . . .
Maybe we owe our survival to the North, or at least to the fear of it. My generation
never really saw the North as a threat. I'm speaking of the civilians, you
understand, those
o{
my age who saw them as a backward, starving, failed nation.
My generation had grown up their entire lives in peace and prosperity. The only
thing they feared was a German-style reunification that would bring millions of
homeless ex-communists looking for a handout.
That wasn't the case with those who came before us ... our parents and
grandparents . . . those who lived with the very real specter of invasion hanging
over them, the knowledge that at any moment the alarms might sound, the lights
might dim, and the bankers, schoolteachers, and taxi drivers might be called to
pick up arms and fight to defend their homeland. Their hearts and minds were ever
vigilant, and in the end, it was them, not us, who rallied the national spirit.
I'm still pushing for an expedition to the North. I'm still blocked at
WORLD WAR Z         203
every turn. There's too much work to do, they tell me. The country is still in
shambles. We also have our international commitments, most importantly the
repatriation of our refugees to Kyushu. . . . (Snorts.l Those Japs are gonna owe us
big-time.
I'm not asking for a recon in force. Just give me one helicopter, one fishing boat;
just open the gates at Panmunjom and let me walk through on foot. What if you
trigger some booby trap? they counter. What if it's nuclear? What if you open the
door to some underground city and twenty-three million zombies come spewing
out? Their arguments aren't without merit. We know the DMZ is heavily mined.
Last month a cargo plane
nearing their airspace was fired on by a surface-to-air missile. The launcher was an
automated model, the type they'd designed as a revenge weapon in case the
population had already been obliterated.
Conventional wisdom is that they must have evacuated to their subterranean
complexes. If that is true, then our estimates of the size and depth of those
complexes were grossly inaccurate. Maybe the entire population is underground,
tooling away on endless war projects, while their "Great Leader" continues to
anesthetize himself with Western liquor and American pornography. Do they even
know the war is over* Have their leaders lied to them, again, and told them that
the world as they know it has ceased to be? Maybe the rise of the dead was a
"good" thing in their eyes, an excuse to tighten the yoke even further in a society
built on blind subjugation. The Great Leader always wanted to be a living God,
and now, as master not only of the food his people eat, the air they breathe, but the
very light of their artificial suns, maybe his twisted fantasy has finally become a
reality. Maybe that was the original plan, but somediing went disastrously wrong.
Look what happened to the "mole city" underneath Paris. What if that occurred in
the North on a national level* Maybe those caverns are teeming with twenty-three
million zombies, emaciated automatons howling in the darkness and just waiting
to be unleashed.
KYOTO, JAPAN
[The old photo of Kondo Tatsumi shows a skinny, acne-laced teenager with dull led eyes
and bleached blond highlights streaking his unkempt hair. The man I am speaking to has
no hair at all. Clean-shaven, tanned and toned, his clear, sharp gaze never leaves mine.
Although his manner is cordial and his mood light, this warrior monk retains the
composure of a predatory animal at rest.l
I was an "otaku." I know that term has come to mean a great many things to a
great many people, but for me it simply meant "outsider." I know Americans,
especially young ones, must feel trapped by societal pressure. All humans do.
However, if I understand your culture correctly, individualism is something to be
encouraged. You revere the "rebel," the "rogue," those who stand proudly apart
from the masses. For you, individuality is a badge of honor. For us, it is a ribbon
of shame. We lived, particularly before the war, in a complex and seemingly
infinite labyrinth of external judgments. Your appearance, your speech, everything
from the ca-reer you held to the way you sneezed had to be planned and
orchestrated to follow rigid Confucian doctrine. Some either have the strength, or
lack thereof, to accept this doctrine. Others, like myself, chose exile in a better
world. That world was cyber space, and it was tailor-made for Japanese otaku.
I can't speak for your educational system, or, indeed, for that of any
other country, but ours was based almost entirely on fact retention. From the day
we first set foot in a classroom, prewar Japanese children were injected with
volumes upon volumes of facts and figures that had no practi-cal application in our
lives. These facts had no moral component, no social context, no human
connection to the outside world. They had no reason
WORLD WAR Z         205
for existence other than that their mastery allows ascension. Prewar Japanese
children were not taught to think, we were taught to memorize.
You can understand how this education would easily lend itself to an ex-istence in
cyberspace. In a world of information without context, where status was
determined on its acquisition and possession, those of my gener-ation coukl rule
like gods. I was a sensei, master over all I surveyed, be it discovering the blood
type of the prime ministers cabinet, or the tax receipts of Matsumoto and Hamada,
or the location and condition of all shin-gunto swords of the Pacific War. I didn't
have to worry about my appearance, or my social etiquette, my grades, or my
prospects for the future. No one could judge me, no one could hurt me. In this
world I was powerful, and more importantly, I was safe!
When the crisis reached Japan, my clique, as with all the others, forgot our
previous obsessions and devoted our energies entirely to the living dead. We
studied dieir physiology, behavior, weaknesses, and the global re-sponse to their
attack upon humanity. The last subject was my clique's specialty, the possibility of
containment within the Japanese home islands. I collected population statistics,
transport networks, police doctrine. I mem-orized everything from the size of the
Japanese merchant fleet, to how many rounds the army's Type 89 assault rifle
held. No fact was too small or obscure. We were on a mission, we barely slept.
When school was eventually cancelled, it gave us the ability to be wired in almost
twenty-four hours a day. I was the first to hack into Doctor Komatsu's personal
hard drive and read the raw data a full week before he presented his findings to the
Diet. This was a coup. It further elevated my status among those who already
worshipped me.
Doctor Komatsu first recommended the evacuation?
He did. Like us, he'd been compiling the same facts. But whereas we'd been
memorizing them, he'd been analyzing them. Japan was an overcrowded
1. Hitoshi Matsumoto and Masatoshi Hamada were Japan's most successful
prewar improv-isational comedians.
nation: one hundred and twenty*eight million people jammed into less than three
hundred and seventy thousand square kilometers of either mountainous or
overurbanized islands. Japan's low crime rate gave it one of the relatively smallest
and most lightly armed police forces in the industrialized world. Japan was pretty
much also a demilitarized state. Because of American "protection," our self-
defense forces had not seen actual combat since 1945. Even those token troops
who were deployed to the Gulf almost never saw any serious action and spent
most of their occupation duty within the protected walls of their isolated
compound. We had access to all these hits of information, hut not the wherewithal
to see where they were pointing. So it took us all by complete surprise when
Doctor Komatsu publicly declared that the situation was hopeless and that Japan
had to be immediately evacuated.
That must have been terrifying.
Not at all! It set off an explosion of frenzied activity, a race to discover where our
population might resettle. Would it be the South, the coral atolls of the Central arid
South Pacific, or would we head north, colonizing the Kuriles, Sakhalin, or maybe
somewhere in Siberia? Whoever could uncover the answer would be the greatest
otaku in cyber history.
And there was no concern for your personal safety?
Of course not. Japan was doomed, but I didn't live in Japan. 1 lived in
a world of free-floating information. The siafu, that's what we were calling the
infected now, weren't something to be feared, they were some-thing to be studied.
You have no idea the kind
of
disconnect I was
suffering. My culture, my upbringing, and now my otaku lifestyle all combined to
completely insulate me. Japan might be evacuated, Japan might
2. "Siafu" is the nickname for the African driver ant. The term was first used by
Doctor Ko-matsu Yukio in his address to the Diet.
WORLD WAR Z         207
be destroyed, and I would watch it all happen from the safety of my digital
mountaintop.
What about your parents?
What about them? We lived in the same apartment, but I never really conversed
with them. I'm sure they thought I was studying. Even when school closed I told
them I still had to prepare for exams. They never questioned it. My father and I
rarely spoke. In the mornings my mother would leave a
breakfast tray at my door, at night she would leave dinner. The first time she didn't
leave a tray, I thought nothing of it. I woke up that morning, as I always did;
gratified myself, as I always did; logged on, as I always did. It was midday before
I started to feel hungry. I hated those feelings, hunger or fatigue or, the worst,
sexual desire. Those were physical distractions. They annoyed me. I reluctantly
turned away from my computer and opened my bedroom door. No food. I called
for my mother. No answer. I went into the kitchen area, grabbed some raw ramen,
and ran back to my desk. I did it again, that night, and again the next morning.
You never questioned where your parents were?
The only reason I cared was because of the precious minutes I was wasting having
to feed myself. In my world too many exciting things were happening.
What about the other otaku? Didn't they discuss their fears?
We shared facts not feelings, even when they started to disappear. I'd notice that
someone had stopped returning e-mail or else hadn't posted for a while. I'd see that
they hadn't logged on in a day or that their servers were no longer active.
And that didn't scare you?
It annoyed me. Not only was I losing a source of information, I was losing
potential praise for my own. To post some new factoid about Japanese
evacuation ports and to have fifty, instead of sixty, responses was upsetting, then
to have those fifty drop to forty-five, then
to
thirty . . .
How long did this go on for?
About three days. The last post, from another otaku in Sendai, stated that the dead
were now flowing out of Tohoku University Hospital, in the same
cho
as his
apartment.
And that didn't worry you?
Why should it' I was too busy trying to learn all I could about the evacuation
process. How was it going to be executed, what government organizations were
involved? Would the camps be in Kamchatka or Sakhalin, or both' And what was
this I was reading about the rash of suicides that was sweeping the country?" So
many questions, so much data to mine. I cursed myself for having to go to sleep
that night.
When I woke up, the screen was blank. I tried to sign on. Nothing. I tried
rebooting. Nothing. I noticed that I was on backup battery. Not a problem. I had
enough reserve power for ten hours at full use. I also noticed that my signal
strength was zero. I couldn't believe it. Kokura, like all Japan, had a state-of-the-
art wireless network that was supposed to be failsafe. One server might go down,
maybe even a few, but the whole net? I realized it must be my computer. It had to
be. I got out my laptop and tried to sign on. No signal. I cursed and got up to tell
my parents that I had to use their desktop. They still weren't home. Frustrated, I
tried to pick up the
phone to call my mother's cell. It was cordless, dependent on wall power. I tried
my cell. I got no reception.
Do you know what happened to them?
No, even to this day, I have no idea. I know they didn't abandon me, I'm sure of it.
Maybe my father was caught out at work, my mother trapped
3. It has been established that Japan suffered the largest percentage of suicides
during the Great Panic.
WORLD WAR Z         209
while trying to go grocery shopping. They could have been lost together, going to
or coming back from the relocation office. Anything could have happened. There
was no note, nothing. I've been trying to find out ever since.
I went hack into my parents' room, just to make sure they weren't there. I tried the
phones again. It wasn't bad yet. I was still in control. I tried to go back online. Isn't
that funny' All I could think about was trying to escape again, getting back to my
world, being safe. Nothing. I started to panic. "Now," I started to say, trying to
command my computer by force of will.
"Now, now, NOW! NOW! NOW!" I started beating the monitor. My knuckles
split, die sight of my own blood terrified me. I'd never played sports as a child,
never been injured, it was all too much. I picked up the monitor and threw it
against the wall. I was crying like a baby, shouting, hyperventilating. I started to
wretch and vomited all over the floor. I got up and staggered to the front door. I
don't know what I was looking for, just that I had to get out. I opened the door and
stared into darkness.
Did you try knocking at the neighbor's door?
No. Isn't that odd? Even at the height of my breakdown, my social anxiety was so
great that actually risking personal contact was still taboo. I took a few steps,
slipped, and tell into something soft. It was cold and slimy, all over my hands, my
clothes. It stank. The whole hallway stank. I suddenly became aware of a low,
steady scraping noise, like something was dragging itself across the hallway
toward me.
I called out, "Hello?" I heard a soft, gurgling groan. My eyes were just beginning
to adjust to the darkness. I began to make out a shape, large, hu-manoid, crawling
on its belly. I sat there paralyzed, wanting to run but at the same time wanting to ...
to know for sure. My doorway was casting a narrow rectangle of dim gray light
against the far wall. As the thing moved into that light, I finally saw its face,
perfectly intact, perfectly human, except for the right eye that hung by die stem.
The left eye was locked on mine and its gurgling moan became a choked rasp. I
jumped to my feet, sprang back inside my apartment, and slammed the door
behind me.
My mind was finally clear, maybe for the first time in years, and I suddenly
realized that I could smell smoke and hear faint screams. I went over to the
window and threw the curtains open.
Kokura was engulfed in hell. The fires, the wreckage . . . the siafu were
everywhere. I watched them crash through doors, invade apartments, de-vour
people cowering in corners or on balconies. I watched people leap to their deaths
or break their legs and spines. They lay on the pavement, unable to move, wailing
in agony as die dead closed in around them. One man in the apartment directly
across from me tried to fight them off with a golf club. It bent harmlessly around a
zombie's head before five others pulled him to the floor.
Then ... a pounding at the door. My door. This . . . (shakes his fist] bom-bombom-
bom . . . from the bottom, near the floor. I heard the thing groaning outside. I
heard other noises, too, from the other apartments. These were my neighbors, the
people I'd always tried to avoid, whose faces and names I could barely remember.
They were screaming, pleading, struggling, and sobbing. I heard one voice, either
a young woman or a child on the floor above me, calling someone by name,
begging them to stop. But the voice was swallowed in a chorus of moans. The
hanging at my door became louder. More siafu had shown up. 1 tried to move the
living room furniture against the door. It was a waste of effort. Our apartment was,
by your standards, pretty bare. The door began to crack. I could see its hinges
straining. I figured I had maybe a few minutes to escape.
Escape? But if the door was jammed
. . .
Out the window, onto die balcony of the apartment below. I thought I coukl tie
bedsheets into a rope . . . [smiles sheepishly!. . . Pd heard about it from an otaku
who studied American prison breaks. It would be the first time I ever applied any
o{
my archived knowledge.
Fortunately the linen held. I climbed out of my apartment and started to lower
myself down to the apartment below. Immediately my muscles started cramping.
Pd never paid much attention to them and now they
WORLD WAR Z        211
were reaping their revenge. I struggled to control my motions, and to not think
about the fact that I was nineteen floors up. The wind was terrible, hot and dry
from all the fires. A gust picked me up and slammed me against the side of the
building. I bounced off the concrete and almost lost my grip. I could feel the
bottom of my feet bumping against the balcony's railing and it took all the courage
I had to relax enough to climb down just those few extra feet. I landed on my ass,
panting and coughing from the smoke. I coukl hear sounds from my apartment
above, the dead that had broken through the front door. I looked up at my balcony
and saw a head, the one-eyed siafu was squeezing himself through the opening
between the
rail and the balcony floor. Ir hung there for a moment, half out, halt in, then gave
another lurch toward me and slid over the side. I'll never forget that it was still
reaching for me as it fell, this nightmare flash of it suspended in midair, arms out,
hanging eyeball now flying upward against its forehead.
I could hear the other siafu groaning on the balcony above and turned to see if
there were any in this apartment with me. Fortunately, I saw that the front door
had been barricaded like mine. However, unlike mine, diere weren't any sounds of
attackers outside. I was also comforted by the layer of ash on the carpet. It was
deep and unbroken, telling me that no one or nothing had walked across diis floor
for a couple days. For a moment 1 thought I might be alone, and then I noticed the
smell.
I slid the bathroom door open and was blown back by this invisible, putrid cloud.
The woman was in her tub. She had slit her wrists, long, vertical slices along the
arteries to make sure the job was done right. Her name was Reiko. She was the
only neighbor I'd made any effort to know. She was a high-priced hostess at a club
for foreign businessmen. I'd always fantasized about what she'd look like naked.
Now I knew.
Strangely enough, what bothered me most was that I didn't know any prayers for
the dead. I'd forgotten what my grandparents had tried to teach me as a little kid,
rejected it as obsolete data. It was a shame, how out of touch I was with my
heritage. All I could do was stand there like an idiot and whisper an awkward
apology for taking some of her sheets.
Her sheets?
For more rope. I knew I couldn't stay there for very long. Besides the health
hazard of a dead body, there was no telling when the siafu on that floor would
sense my presence and attack the barricade. I had to get out of this building, get
out of the city, and hopefully try to find a way to get out of Japan. I didn't have a
fully thought-out plan yet. I just knew I had to keep going, one floor at a time,
until I reached the street. I figured stopping at a few
o{
the apartments would give
me a chance to gather supplies, and as dangerous as my sheet-rope method was, it
couldn't be any worse than the statu that would almost certainly be lurking in the
building's hallways and stairwells.
Wouldn't it be more dangerous once you reached the streets?
No, safer. [Catches my expression.] No, honestly. That was one of the
things I'd learned online. The living dead were slow and easy to outrun or even
outwalk. Indoors, I might run the risk of being trapped in some narrow choke
point, but out in the open, I had infinite options. Better still, I'd learned from
online survivor reports that the chaos of a full-blown outbreak could actually work
to one's advantage. With so many other frightened, disorganized humans to
distract the siafu, why would they even notice me? As long as I watched my step,
kept up a brisk pace, and didn't have the misfortune to be hit by a fleeing motorist
or stray bullet, I figured I had a pretty good chance
o{
navigating my way through
the chaos on the streets below. The real problem was getting there.
IT took me Three days to make it all The way down To rhe ground floor. This was
partially due to my disgraceful physical stamina. A trained athlete would have
found my makeshift rope antics a challenge so you can imagine what they were for
me. In retrospect it's a miracle I didn't plunge to my death or succumb to infection
with all the scrapes and scratches I endured. My body was held together with
adrenaline and pain medication. I was exhausted, nervous, horribly sleep deprived.
I couldn't rest in the conventional sense. Once it got dark I would move everything
I could against
WORLD WAR Z          213
the door, then sit in a corner, crying, nursing my wounds, and cursing my frailty
until the sky began to lighten. I did manage to close my eyes one night, even drift
off to sleep for a few minutes, but then the banging of a siafu against the front
door sent me scurrying out the window. I spent the remainder of that night
huddled on the balcony of the next apartment. Its sliding glass door was locked
and I just didn't have the strength to kick it in.
My second delay was mental, not physical, specifically my otaku's obsessive-
compulsive drive to find just the right survival gear, no matter how long it took.
My online searches had taught me all about the right
weapons, clothing, food, and medicine. The problem was finding chem in an
apartment complex of urban salarymen.
[Laughs.]
I made quite a sight, shimmying down that sheet-rope in a businessman's raincoat
and Reiko's bright, pink, vintage "Hello Kitty" schoolbag. It had taken a long time,
but by the third day I had almost everything I needed, everything except a reliable
weapon.
There wasn't anything?
[Smiles.] This was not America, where there used
u<
be more firearms than
people. True fact-an otaku in Kobe hacked this information directly from your
National Rifle Association.
I meant a hand tool, a hammer, a crowbar . . .
What salary man does his own home maintenance? I thought of a golf club-there
were many of those-but I saw what the man across the way had tried to do. I did
find an aluminum baseball bat, but it had seen so much action that it was too bent
out of shape to be effective. I looked everywhere, believe me, but there was
nothing hard or strong or sharp enough I could use to defend myself. I also
reasoned that once I made it to
the street, I might have better hick-a truncheon from a dead policeman or even a
soldier's firearm.
Those were the thoughts that almost got me killed. I was four floors from the
ground, almost, literally, at the end of my rope. Each section 1 made extended for
several floors, just enough length to allow me to gather more sheets. This time I
knew would he the last. By now I had my entire escape plan worked out: land on
the fourth-floor balcony, break into the apartment for a new set of sheets (I'd given
up looking for a weapon by then), slide down to the sidewalk, steal the most
convenient motorcycle (even though I had no idea how to ride one), streaking off
like some old-timey
bosozoku,
and maybe even grab a girl or two along the way.
[Laughs.] My mind was barely functional by that point. If even the first part of the
plan had worked and I did manage to make it to the ground in that state . . . well,
what matters is that I didn't.
I landed on the fourth-floor balcony, reached for the sliding door, and looked up
right into the face of a siafu. It was a young man, midtwenties, wearing a torn suit.
His nose had been bitten off, and he dragged his bloody face across the glass. I
jumped hack, grabbed on to my rope, and tried to climb back up. My arms
wouldn't respond, no pain, no burning-I mean they had just reached their limit.
The siafu began howling and beating his fists against the glass. In desperation, I
tried to swing myself from side to side, hoping to maybe rappel against the side of
the building and land on the balcony next to me. The glass shattered and the siafu
charged for my legs. I pushed off from the building, letting go of the rope and
launching myself with all my might. . . and I missed.
The only reason we are speaking now is that my diagonal fall carried me
onto the balcony below my target. I landed on my feet, stumbled forward, and
almost went toppling oft the other side. I stumbled into the apartment and
immediately looked around for any siafu. The living room was empty, the only
piece of furniture a small traditional table propped up against the door. The
occupant must have committed suicide like the others. I didn't
4.
Bosozoku:
Japanese youth-oriented motorcycle gangs that reached their popular
peak in the 1980s and 1990s.
WORLD WAR Z          215
smell anything foul so I guessed he must have thrown himself out
o{
the window. I
reasoned that I was alone, and just this small measure of relief was enough to
cause my legs to give out from under me. I slumped against the living room wall,
almost delirious with fatigue. I found myself looking at a collection of
photographs decorating the opposite wall. The apartment's owner had been an old
man, and the photographs told of a very rich life. He'd had a large family, many
friends, and had traveled to what seemed every exciting and exotic locale around
the world. I'd never even imagined leaving my bedroom, let alone even leading
that kind of life. I promised myself that if I ever made it out of this nightmare, I
wouldn't just
survive, I would
Uvel
My eyes fell on the only other irem in the room, a Kami Dana, or traditional
Shinto shrine. Something was on the floor beneath it, I guessed a suicide note. The
wind must have blown it oft when I entered. I didn't teel right just leaving it there.
I hobbled across the room and stooped to pick it up. Many Kami Dana have a
small mirror in the center. My eye caught a reflection in that mirror of something
shambling out of the bedroom.
The adrenaline kicked in just as I wheeled around. The old man was still there, the
bandage on his face telling me that he must have reanimated not too long ago. He
came at me; I ducked. My legs were still shaky and he managed to catch me by the
hair. I twisted, trying to free myself. He pulled my face toward his. He was
surprisingly fit for his age, muscle equal to, if not superior to, mine. His bones
were brittle though, and I heard them crack as I grabbed the arm that caught me. I
kicked him in the chest, he flew back, his broken arm was still clutching a tuft of
my hair. He knocked against the wall, photographs falling and showering him with
glass. He snarled and came at me again. I backed up, tensed, then grabbed him by
his one good arm. I jammed it into his back, clamped my other hand around the
back of his neck, and with a roaring sound I didn't even know I could make, I
shoved him, ran him, right onto the balcony and over the side. He landed face up
on the pavement, his head still hissing up at me from his otherwise broken body.
Suddenly there was a pounding on the front door, more siafu that'd heard our
scuffle. I was operating on full instinct now. I raced into the old
man's bedroom and began ripping the sheets off his bed. I figured it wouldn't take
too many, just three more stories and then . . . then I stopped, frozen, as motionless
as a photograph. That's what had caught my attention, one last photograph that
was on the bare wall in his bedroom. It was black and white, grainy, and showed a
traditional family. There was a mother, father, a little boy, and what I guessed had
to be the old man as a teenager in uniform. Something was in his hand, something
that almost stopped my heart. I bowed to the man in the photograph and said an
almost tearful "Arigato."
What was in his hand?
I found it at the bottom of a chest in his bedroom, underneath a collection of
bound papers and the ragged remains of the uniform from the photo. The scabbard
was green, chipped, army-issue aluminum and an improvised, leather grip had
replaced the original sharkskin, but the steel. . . bright like silver, and folded, not
machine stamped ... a shallow, tort curvature with a long, straight point. Flat, wide
ridge lines decorated with the kiku-sui, the Imperial chrysanthemum, and an
authentic, not acid-stained, river bordering the tempered edge. Exquisite
workmanship, and clearly forged for battle.
[I motioned to the sword at his side. Tatsumi smiles.]
KYOTO, JAPAN
ISensei Tomonaga Ijiro knows exactly who I am seconds before I enter the room.
Apparently I walk, smell, and even breathe like an American. The founder of Japan's
Tatenokai, or "Shield Society," greets me with both a bow and handshake, then
invites me
WORLD WAR Z          217
to sit before him like a student. Kondo Tatsumi, Tomonaga's second in command,
serves us tea then sits beside the old master.
Tomonaga begins our interview with an apology lor any discomfort I might feel about his
appearance. The sensei's lifeless eyes have not functioned since his adolescence.]
I am "hibakusha." I lost my sight at 11:02 A.M., August 9, 1945, by your calendar.
I was standing on Mount Kompira, manning the air-raid warning station with
several other boys from my class. It was overcast that day, so I heard, rather than
saw, the B-29 passing close overhead. It was only a single
B'San,
probably a
reconnaissance flight, and not even worth report-Lng. I almost laughed when my
classmates jumped into our slit trench. I
kept my eyes fixed above the Urakami Valley, hoping to maybe catch a glimpse of
the American bomber. Instead, all I saw was die flash, the last thing I would ever
see.
In Japan, hibakusha, "survivors of the bomb," occupied a unique rung in our
nation's social ladder. We were treated with sympathy and sorrow: vic-Tims and
heroes and symbols for every political agenda. And yet, as human beings, we were
little more than social outcasts. No family would allow their child to marry us.
Hibakusha were unclean, blood in Japans otherwise pristine genetic onsen. I felt
diis shame on a deeply personal level. Not only was I hibakusha, but my blindness
also made me a burden.
Out the sanatorium's windows I could hear the sounds of our nation struggling to
rebuild itself. And what was my contribution to this effort, nothing!
So many times I tried inquiring about some manner of employment, some work no
matter how small or demeaning. No one would have me. I was still hibakusha, and
I learned so many polite ways to be rejected. My brother begged me to come and
stay with him, insisting that he and his wife would take care of me and even find
some "useful" task around the house. For me that was even worse than the
sanatorium. He had just gotten back from the army and they were trying to have
another baby. To
1. Onsen: A natural hot spring often used as a communal bath.
impose on them at such a time was unthinkable. Of course, I considered ending
my own life. I even attempted it on many occasions. Something prevented me,
staying my hand each time I groped for the pills or broken glass. I reasoned it was
weakness, what else could it be? A hibakusha, a par-asite, and now a dishonorable
coward. There was no end to my shame in those days. As the emperor had said in
his surrender speech to our people, I was truly "enduring the unendurable."
I left the sanatorium without informing my brother. I didn't know where I was
heading, only that I had to get as far from my life, my memories, myself, as
possible. I traveled, begged mostly ... I had no more honor to lose . . . until I
settled in Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido. This cold, northern wilderness has
always been Japan's least populated prefecture, and with the loss of Sakhalin and
the Kuriles, it became, as the Western saying goes, "the end of the line."
In Sapporo, I met an Ainu gardener, Ota Hideki. The Ainu are Japan's oldest
indigenous group, and even lower on our social ladder than the Koreans.
Maybe that is why he took pity on me, another pariah cast out by the tribe of
Yamato. Maybe it was because he had no one to pass his skills along to. His own
son had never returned from Manchuria. Ota-san worked at the Akakaze, a former
luxury hotel that now served as a repatri-ation center for Japanese settlers from
China. At first the administration complained that they had no more funds to hire
another gardener. Ota-san paid me out of his own pocket. He was my teacher and
only friend, and when he died, I considered following him. But, coward that I was.
1 could not bring myself to do it. Instead 1 simply continued to exist.
working silently in the earth as the Akakaze went from a repatriation center to a
luxury hotel and Japan went from conquered rubble to economic superpower.
I was still working at the Akakaze when I heard of the first domestic outbreak. I
was trimming the Western-style hedges near the restaurant, when I overheard
several of die guests discussing the Nagumo murders. According to their
conversation, a man had slain his wife, then set upon the corpse like some kind of
wild dog. This was the first time I had heard
WORLD WAR Z        219
the term "African rabies." I tried to ignore it and get on with my work, but the next
day there were more conversations, more hushed voices across the lawn and
beside the pool. Nagumo was old news compared to the much more serious
outbreak at Sumitomo Hospital in Osaka. And the next day there was Nagoya,
then Sendai, then Kyoto. I tried to push their conversations from my mind. I had
come to Hokkaido to escape from the world, to live out my days in shame and
ignominy.
The voice that finally convinced me of danger came from the hotel's manager, a
stiff, no-nonsense salaryman with a very formal manner of speech. After the
outbreak in Hirosaki, he held a staff meeting to try to
debunk, once and for all, these wild rumors about dead bodies coming back to life.
I had only his voice to rely on, and you can tell everything about a person by what
happens when he opens his mouth. Mister Sugawara was pronouncing his words
far too carefully, particularly his hard, sharp consonants. He was
overcompensating for a previously conquered speech impediment, a condition that
only threatened to rise in the presence of great anxiety. I had listened to this verbal
defense mechanism before from the seemingly unflappable Sugawara-san, first
during the '95 quake, and again in '98 when North Korea had sent a long-range,
nuclear-capable "test missile" streaking over our homeland. Sugawara-san's
articulation had been almost imperceptible then, now it shrieked louder than the
air-raid sirens of my youdi.
And so, for the second time in my life, I fled. I considered warning my brother, but
so much time had passed, I had no idea how to reach him or even it he was still
alive. That was the last, and probably the greatest of all my dishonorable acts, the
heaviest weight I will earn- to my grave.
Why did you run? Were you afraid for your life?
Of course not! If anything I welcomed it! To die, to finally be put out of my
lifelong misery was almost too good to be true . . . What I feared was, once again,
becoming a burden to those around me. To slow someone down, to take up
valuable space, to put other lives in danger if they tried to save an old blind man
who wasn't worth saving . . . and what if those rumors about
the dead returning to life were true? What if I were to find myself infected and
awake from death to threaten the lives of my fellow countrymen? No, that was not
going to be the fate of this disgraced hibakusha. If I was to meet my death, it
should be in the same manner as I had lived my life. Forgotten, isolated, and
alone.
I left at night and began hitchhiking south down Hokkaido's DOO Expressway.
All I had with me was a water bottle, a change of clothes, an J my ikupasuy," a
long, flat shovel similar to a Shaolin spade but which also served for many years
as my walking stick. There was still a sizable amount of road traffic in those days-
our oil from Indonesia and the Gulf was still flowing-and many truck drivers and
private motorists were kind enough to give me a "ride." With each and every one,
our conversation turned to the crisis: "Did you hear that the Self Defense Force has
been mobilized?"; "The government's going to have to declare a state of
emergency"; "Did you hear there was an outbreak last night, right here in
Sapporo'" No one was sure what the next day would bring, how far the calamity
would spread, or who would be its next victim, and yet, no matter whom I spoke
to or how terrified they sounded, each conversation would inevitably end with
"But I'm sure the authorities will tell us what to do." One truck driver said, "Any
day now, you'll see, if you just wait patiently and don't make a public fuss." That
was the last human voice I heard, the day before I left civilization and trekked into
the Hiddaka Mountains.
I was very familiar with this national park. Ota-san had taken me here every year
to collect sansai, the wild vegetables that attract botanists, hikers, and gourmet
chefs from all over the home islands. As a man who
often rises in the middle of the night knows die exact location of every item in his
darkened bedroom, I knew every river and every rock, every
2. Ikupasuy:The technical term for a small. Ainu prayer stick. When later questioned
about this discrepancy. Mister Tomonaga answered that the name was given to him by
his teacher, Mister Ota. Whether Ota intended to bestow some spiritual connection to this
gardening implement or was simply so out of touch with his own culture (as many Ainu
of his generation were), we will never know.
WORLD WAR Z         221
tree and patch of moss. I even knew every onsen that bubbled to the surface, and
therefore never wanted for a naturally hot and cleansing mineral bath. Every day I told
myself "This is die perfect place to die, soon I will have an accident, a fall of some kind,
or perhaps I will become ill, contract some sickness or eat a poisoned root, or maybe I
will finally do the honorable thing and just stop eating altogether." And yet, every day, I
for-aged and bathed, dressed warmly and minded my steps. As much as I longed for
death, I continued to take whatever measures necessary to pre-vent it.
I had no way of knowing what was happening to the rest of my country. I could
hear distant sounds, helicopters, fighter planes, the steady, high-altitude whine of
civilian jetliners. Perhaps I was wrong, I thought, perhaps the crisis was over. For
all I knew, the "authorities" had been victorious, and the danger was rapidly fading
into memory. Perhaps my alarmist depar-ture had done nothing more than create a
welcome job opening back at the Akakaze and perhaps, one morning, I would be
roused by the barking voices of angry park rangers, or die giggles and whispers of
schoolchildren on a nature hike. Something did arouse me from my sleep one
morning, but not a collection of giggling students, and no, it wasn't one of
them
either.
It was a bear, one of the many large, brown higuma roaming the Hokkaido
wilderness. The higuma had originally migrated from the Kamchatka Peninsula
and bore the same ferocity and raw power of their Siberian cousins. This one was
enormous, I could tell by the pitch and resonance of his breathing. I judged him to
be no more than four or five meters from me. I rose slowly, and without fear. Next
to me lay my ikupasuy. It was the closest thing I had to a weapon, and, I suppose,
if I had thought to use it as such, it might have made a formidable defense.
You didn't use it.
Nor did I want it. This animal was much more than just a random, hungry
predator. This was fate, I believed. This encounter could only be the will of
the kami.
Who is Kami?
What
is kami. The kami are the spirits that inhabit each and every facet of our
existence. We pray to them, honor them, hope to please them and curry their favor.
They are the same spirits that drive Japanese corpora-tions to bless the site of a
soon-to-be constructed factory, and the Japanese of my generation to worship die
emperor as a god. The kami are the foundation of Shinto, literally "The Way of the
Gods," and worship of nature is one of its oldest, and most sacred principles.
That is why I believed their will was at work that day. By exiling myself into the
wilderness, I had polluted nature's purity. After dishonoring myself, my family,
my country, I had at last taken that final step and dishonored the gods. Now they
had sent an assassin to do what I had been unable to for so long, to erase my stink.
I thanked the gods for their mercy. I wept as I prepared myself for the blow.
It never came. The bear stopped panting then released a high, almost childlike
whimper. "What is wrong with you:" I actually said to a three-hundred-kilogram
carnivore. "Go on and finish me!" The bear continued to whine like a frightened
dog, then tore away from me with the speed of hunted prey. It was then that I
heard the moan. I spun, tried to focus my ears. From the height of his mouth, I
could tell he was taller than me. I heard one foot dragging across the soft, moist
earth and air bubbling from a gaping wound in its chest.
I could hear it reaching out to me, groaning and swiping at empty air. I managed to
dodge its clumsy attempt and snatched up my ikupasuy. I centered my attack on
the source of the creature's moan. I struck quickly, and
the crack vibrated up through my arms. The creature fell back upon the earth as I
released a triumphant shout of "Ten Thousand Years!"
It is difficult for me to describe my feelings at this moment. Fury had ex-ploded
within my heart, a strength and courage that drove away my shame as die sun
drives the night from heaven. I suddenly knew the gods had favored me. The bear
hadn't been sent to kill me, it had been sent to warn me. I didn't understand the
reason right then, but I knew I had to survive until the day when that reason was
finally revealed.
WORLD WAR Z         223
And that is what I did for the next few months: I survived. I mentally divided the
Hiddaka range into a series of several hundred chi-tai/ Each chi-tai contained some
object of physical security-a tree or tall, flat rock-some place I could sleep in peace
without the danger of immediate attack. I slept always during the day, and only
traveled, foraged, or hunted at night. I did not know if the beasts depended on their
sight as much as human beings, but I wasn't going to give them even the most
infinitesimal advantage.
Losing my vision had also prepared me for the act of ever-vigilant mobility. Those
with sight have a tendency to take walking for granted; how
else could they trip over something they've clearly seen? The fault lies not in the
eyes, but in the mind, a lazy thought process spoiled by a lifetime of optic nerve
dependency. Not so for those like me. I already had to be on guard for potential
danger, to be focused, alert, and "watching my step," so to speak. Simply adding
one more threat was no bother at all. Every time I walked, it was for no longer
than several hundred paces. I would halt, listen to and smell the wind, perhaps
even press my ear to the ground. This method never failed me. I was never
surprised, never caught off guard.
Was there ever a problem with long-range detection, not being able to see an
attacker several miles away?
My nocturnal activity would have prevented the use of healthy eyesight, and any
beast several kilometers away was no more a threat to me than 1 was to it. There
was no need to be on my guard until they entered what you might call my "circle
of sensory security," the maximum range of my ears, nose, fingertips, and feet. On
the best of days, when the conditions were right and Haya-ji was in a helpful
mood, that circle extended as far as half a kilometer. On the worst of days, that
range might drop to no more than thirty, possibly fifteen paces. These incidents
were infrequent at best,
3. Chi-tai: Zone.
4- To this day. it is unknown how much the living dead depend on sight.
5. Haya-ji: God of the wind.
occurring if I had done something to truly anger the kami, although I can't possibly
imagine what that would be. The beasts were a great help as well, always being
courteous enough to warn me before attacking.
That howling alarm that ignites the moment they detect prey would not only alert
me to the presence of an attacking creature, but even to the direction, range, and
exact position of the attack. I would hear that moan wafting across the hills and
fields and know that, in perhaps half an hour or so, one of the living dead would
be paying me a visit. In instances such as these I would halt, then patiently prepare
myself for the attack. I would unclasp my pack, stretch my limbs, sometimes just
find a place to sit quietly and meditate. I always knew when they were getting
close enough to strike. I always took the time to bow and thank them for being so
courteous to warn me. I almost felt sorry for the poor mindless filth, to come all
this way, slowly and methodically, only to end their journey with a split skull or
severed neck.
Did you always kill your enemy on the first strike?
Always.
[He gestures with an imaginary ikupasuy.l
Thrust forward, never swing. At first I would aim for the base of the neck. Later,
as my skills grew with time and experience, I learned to strike here ...
[He places his hand horizontally against the indentation between the forehead and
nose.]
IT was a tttrte harder than simple decapitation, all that thick tough bone, but it did
serve to destroy the brain, as opposed to decapitation where the Living head would
always require a secondary blow.
WORLD WAR Z        225
What about multiple attackers? Was that more of a
problem?
Yes, in the beginning. As their numbers swelled, I began to find myself in­
creasingly surrounded. Those early battles were . . . "untidy." 1 must admit, I
allowed my emotions to rule my hand. I was the typhoon, not the lightning bolt.
During one melee at "Tokachi-dake," I dispatched forty-one in as many minutes. I
was washing bodily fluids from my clothes for a fortnight. Later, as I began to
exercise more tactical creativity, I allowed the gods to join me on the battlefield. I
would lead groups of beasts to die base of a tall rock, where I would crush their
skulls from above. I might even find a rock that allowed them to climb up after
me, not all at once, you understand, one by
one, so I could knock them back into the jagged outcroppings below. I was sure to
thank the spirit of each rock, or cliff, or waterfall that carried them over thousand-
meter drops. This last incident was not something I cared to make a habit of. It
was a long and arduous climb to retrieve the body.
You went after the corpse?
To bun- it. I couldn't just leave it there, desecrating the stream. It would not have
been . . . "proper."
Did you retrieve all the bodies?
Even- last one. That time, after Tokachi-dake, I dug for three days. The heads I
always separated; most of the time I just burned them, but at Tokachi-dake, I
threw them into the volcanic crater where Oyamatsumi's rage could purge their
stench. I did not completely understand why I committed these acts. It just felt
correct, to separate the source of the eviL
The answer came to me on the eve of my second winter in exile. This would be
my last night in the branches of a tall tree. Once the snow fell, I would return
to
the cave where I had spent the previous winter. I had just
6. Oyamatsumi: Ruler of mountains and volcanoes.
settled in comfortably, watting for dawn's warmth to lull me to sleep, when I heard
the sound of footsteps, too quick and energetic to be a beast. Haya-ji had decided
to be favorable that night. He brought the smell of what could only be a human
being. I had come to realize that the living dead were surprisingly bereft of odor.
Yes, there was the subtle hint of decomposition, stronger, perhaps, if the body had
been turned for some time, or if chewed flesh had pushed through its bowels and
collected in a rotting heap in its undergarments. Other than this, though, the living
dead possessed what I refer to as a "scentless stink." They produced no sweat, no
urine, or conventional feces. They did not even carry the bacteria within their
stomach or teeth that, in living humans, would have fouled their breath. None of
this was true of the two-legged animal rapidly approaching my position. His
breath, his body, his clothes, all had clearly not been washed for some time.
It was still dark so he did not notice me. I could tell that his path would take him
directly underneath the limbs of my tree. I crouched slowly, qui-etly. I wasn't sure
if he was hostile, insane, or even recently bitten. I was taking no chances.
[At this point, Kondo chimes in.]
KONDO: He was on me before I knew it. My sword went flying, my feet collapsed
from under me.
TOMONAGA: I landed between his shoulder blades, not hard enough to do any
permanent damage, but enough to knock the wind out of his slight,
malnourished frame. KONDO: He had me on my stomach, my face in the dirt, the
blade of his
shovel-thing pressed tightly against the back of my neck. TOMONAGA: I told
him to lie still, that I would kill him it he moved. KONDO: I tried to speak,
gasping between coughs that I was friendly, that I
didn't even know he was there, that all I wanted to do was pass along and
be on my way. TOMONAGA: I asked him where he was going.
WORLD WAR Z         227
KONDO: I told him Nemuro, the main Hokkaido port of evacuation, where
there might still be one last transport, or fishing boat, or... something
that might still be left to get me to Kamchatka. TOMONAGA: I did not
understand. I ordered him to explain. KONDO: I described everything, about the
plague, the evacuation. I cried
when I told him that Japan had been completely abandoned, that Japan
was nai. TOMONAGA: And suddenly I knew. I knew why the gods had taken my
sight,
why they sent me to Hokkaido to learn how to care for the land, and why
they had sent the bear to warn me.
KONDO: He began to laugh as he let me up and helped to brush the dirt from my
clothing.
TOMONAGA: I told him that Japan had not been abandoned, not by those whom the
gods had chosen to be its gardeners.
KONDO: At first I didn't understand . . .
TOMONAGA : So I explained that, like any garden, Japan could not be allowed to
wither and die. We would care tor her, we would preserve her, we would
annihilate the walking blight that infested and defiled her and we would restore her
beauty and purity for the day when her children would return to her.
KONDO: I thought he was insane, and told him so right to his face. The two of us
against millions of siafu?
TOMONAGA: I handed his sword back to him; its weight and balance felt fa­
miliar to the touch. I told him that we might be facing fifty million monsters, but
those monsters would be facing the gods.
CIENFUEGOS, CUBA
[Seryosha Garcia Alvarez suggests I meet him at his office. "The view is
breathtaking," he promises. "You will not be disappointed." On the sixty-ninth
floor of the Malpica Savings and
Loans building, the second-tallest building in Cuba after Havana's lose Marti
Towers, Senor Alvarez's corner office overlooks both the glittering metropolis and
bustling harbor below. It is the "magic hour" tor energy-independent buildings like
the Malpica, that time of the day when it's photovoltaic windows capture the
setting sun with their almost imperceptible magenta hue. Senor Alvarez was right. I
am not disappointed.]
Cuba won the Zombie War; maybe that's not the most humble of state-ments,
given what happened to so many other countries, but just look at where we were
twenty years ago as opposed to where we are now.
Before the war, we lived in a state of quasi-isolation, worse than during the height
of the cold war. At least in my father's day you could count on what amounted to
economic welfare from the Soviet Union and their ComEcon puppets. Since the
fall
o{
the communist bloc, though, our exis-tence was one of constant
deprivation. Rationed food, rationed fuel. . . the closest comparison I can make is
that of Great Britain during the Blitz, and like that other besieged island, we too
lived under the dark cloud of an ever-present enemy.
The U.S. blockade, while not as constricting as during the cold war, nonetheless
sought to suffocate our economic lifeblood by punishing any nation that attempted
free and open trade. As successful as the U.S. strategy was, its most resounding
triumph was allowing Fidel to use our northern oppressor as an excuse to remain
in power. "You see how hard your life is," he would say. "The blockade has done
this to you, the Yankees have done this to you, and without me, they would he
storming our beaches
even now!" He was brilliant, Machiavelli's most favored son. He knew we would
never remove him while the enemy was at the gates. And so we endured the
hardships and the oppression, the long lines and the hushed voices. This was the
Cuba I grew up in, the only Cuba I could ever imagine. That is, until the dead
began to rise.
Cases were small and immediately contained, mostly Chinese refugees and a few
European businessmen. Travel from the United States was still largely prohibited,
so we were spared die initial blow of first-wave mass mi-
WORLD WAR Z         229
gration. The repressive nature of our fortress society allowed the government to
take steps to ensure that the infection was never allowed to spread. All internal
travel was suspended, and both the regular army and territorial militias were
mobilized. Because Cuba had such a high percentage of doctors per capita, our
leader knew the true nature of the infection weeks after the first outbreak was
reported.
By the time of the Great Panic, when the world finally woke up to the nightmare
breaking down their doors, Cuba had already prepared itself for war.
The simple fact of geography spared us the danger of large-scale, over-
land swarms. Our invaders came from the sea, specifically from an armada of boat
people. Not only did they bring the contagion, as we have seen throughout the
world, there were also those who believed in ruling their new homes as modern-
day conquistadors.
Look at what happened in Iceland, a prewar paradise, so safe and secure they
never found the need to maintain a standing army. What could they do when the
American military withdrew' How could they stop the torrent of refugees from
Europe and western Russia? Is it no mystery how that once idyllic arctic haven
became a cauldron of frozen blood, and why, to this day, it is still the most heavily
infested White Zone on the planet? That could have been us, easily, had it not been
for the example set by our brothers in the smaller Windward and Leeward Islands.
Those men and women, from Anguilla to Trinidad, can proudly take their place as
some of the greatest heroes of the war. They first eradicated multiple outbreaks
along their archipelago, then, with barely a moment to catch their collective
breaths, repelled not only seaborne zombies, but an endless flood of human
invaders, too. They spilled their blood so that we did not have to. They forced our
would-be latifundista to reconsider their plans for conquest, and realize that if a
few civilians armed with nothing but small arms and machetes could defend their
homelands so tenaciously, what would they find on the shores of a country armed
with everything from main battle tanks to radar-guided antiship missiles?
Naturally, the inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles were not fighting for the best
interests of the Cuban people, but their sacrifices did allow us the
Luxury of setting our own terms. Any seeking sanctuary would find them' selves
greeted with the saying so common among Norteamericano parents, "While under
my roof, you will obey my rules."
Not all of the refugees were Yankees; we had our share from mainland Latin
America, from Africa, and western Europe, Spain especially-many Spaniards and
Canadians had visited Cuba either on business or holiday. I had gotten to know a
few of them before the war, nice people, polite, so different from the East
Germans of my youth who used to toss handfuls of candy in the air and laugh
while we children scrambled for it like rats.
The majority of our boat people, however, originated from the United States.
Every day more would arrive, by large ship or private craft, even on homemade
rafts that brought an ironic smile to our faces. So many of them, a total of five
million, equal to almost half of our indigenous population, and along with all the
other nationalities, they were placed under the jurisdiction of the government's
"Quarantine Resettlement Program."
I would not go so far as to call the Resettlement Centers prison camps. They could
not compare to the lives suffered by our political dissidents; the writers and
teachers ... I had a "friend" who was accused of being a homosexual. His stories
from prison cannot compare to even the harshest Resettlement Center.
It was not easy Living, however. These people, no matter what their pre-war
occupation or status, were initially put to work as field hands, twelve to fourteen
hours a day, growing vegetables in what had once been our state-run sugar
plantations. At least the climate was on their side. The temperature was dropping,
the skies were darkening. Mother Nature was kind to them. The guards, however,
were not. "Be glad you're alive," they'd
shout after each slap or kick. "Keep complaining and we'll throw you to the
zombies!"
Even- camp had a rumor about the dreaded "zombie pits," the hole in which they'd
throw the "troublemakers." The DGI (the General Intelligence Directorate! had
even planted prisoners in the general population to spread stories about how they
personally witnessed men being lowered, headfirst, into the boiling lake of ghouls.
This was all just to keep everyone in line, you see, none of it was actually true . . .
though . . . there were stories about
WORLD WAR Z         231
the "Miami whites." The majority of American Cubanos were welcomed home
with open arms. I myself had several relatives living in Daytona who just barely
escaped with their lives. The tears of so many reunions in those early, frantic days
could have filled the Caribbean Sea. But that first wave of postrevolution
immigrants-the affluent elite who had flourished under the old regime and who
spent the rest of their lives trying to topple everything we'd worked so hard to
build-as far as those aristos were concerned ... I am not saying there is any proof
that they were thrown to the ghouls by their fat, reactionary, Bacardi blanka
drinking asses . . . But if they were, they can suck Batista's balls in hell.
[A thin, satisfied smile crosses his lips.]
Of course, we couldn't have actually attempted this kind of punishment with your
people. Rumors and threats were one thing, but physical ac-tion . . . push a people,
any people too far, and you risk the possibility of re-volt. Five million Yankees, all
rising in open revolution* Unthinkable. It already took too many troops to
maintain the camps, and that was the initial success of the Yankee invasion of
Cuba.
We simply didn't have the manpower to guard five million detainees and almost
four thousand kilometers of coastline. We couldn't fight a war on two fronts. And
so the decision was made to dissolve the centers and allow 10 percent of the
Yankee detainees to work outside the wire on a spe-cialized parole program. These
detainees would do the jobs Cubanos no longer wanted-day laborers, dish washers,
and street cleaners-and while their wages would be next to nothing, their labor
hours would go to a point system that allowed them to buy the freedom of other
detainees.
It was an ingenious idea-some Florida Cubano came up with it-and the camps
were drained in six months. At first the government tried to keep track of all of
them, but that soon proved impossible. Within a year they had almost fully
integrated, the "Nortecubanos," insinuating themselves into every facet of our
society.
Officially the camps had been created to contain the spread of "infec-tion," but
that wasn't the kind spread by the dead.
You couldn't see this infection at first, not when we were still under siege. It was
still behind closed doors, still spoken in whispers. Over the next several years
what occurred was not so much a revolution as an evolution, an economic reform
here, a legalized, privately owned newspaper there. People began to think more
boldly, talk more boldly. Slowly, quietly, the seeds began to take root. I'm sure
Fidel would have loved to bring his iron fist crashing down on our fledgling
freedoms. Perhaps he might have, if world events had not shifted in our favor. It
was when the world governments decided to go on the attack that everything
changed forever.
Suddenly we became "the Arsenal of Victory." We were the breadbasket, the
manufacturing center, the training ground, and the springboard. We became the air
hub for both North and South America, the great dry dock for ten thousand ships.
We had money, lots of it, money that created an overnight middle class, and a
thriving, capitalist economy that needed the refined skills and practical experience
of the Nortecubanos.
We shared a bond I don't think can ever be broken. We helped them reclaim their
nation, and they helped us reclaim ours. They showed us the meaning of
democracy . . . freedom, not just in vague, abstract terms, but on a very real,
individually human level. Freedom isn't just something you have for the sake of
having, you have to want something else first and then want the freedom to fight
for it. That was the lesson we learned from the Nortecubanos. They all had such
grand dreams, and they'd lay down their lives for the freedom to make those
dreams come true. Why else would El Jefe be so damned afraid of them?
I'm nor surprised char Fidel knew the rides of freedom were coming to sweep him
out of power. I am surprised at how well he rode the wave.
[He laughs, gesturing to a photo on the wall of an aged Castro
speaking in the Parque Central.]
1. The exact number of allied and neutral ships that anchored in Cuban ports during the
war is still unknown.
WORLD WAR Z          233
Can you believe the cojones of that son of a bitch, to not only embrace the
country's new democracy, but to actually take credit for it? Genius. To personally
preside over the first free elections of Cuba where his last official act was to vote
himself out of power. That is why his legacy is a statue and not a bloodstain
against a wall. Of course our new Latin superpower is anything but idyllic. We
have hundreds of political parties and more special-interest groups than sands on
our beaches. We have strikes, we have riots, we have protests, it seems, almost
every day. You can see why Che ducked out right after the revolution. It's a lot
easier to blow up trains
than to make them run on time. What is it that Mister Churchill used to say?
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." [He
laughs.]
PATRIOT'S MEMORIAL, THE FORBIDDEN CITY, BEIJING, CHINA
[I suspect Admiral Xu Zhicai has chosen this particular spot on the off chance that a
photographer would be present. Although no one since the war has ever remotely
questioned either his or his crew's patriotism, he is taking no chances for the eyes of
"foreign readers." Initially defensive, he consents to this interview only on the condition
that I listen objectively to "his" side of the story, a demand he clings to even after I
explain that there is no other.]
[Note: For the sake of clarity, Western naval designations have replaced the authentic
Chinese.]
We were not traitors-I say this before I'll say anything else. We loved our country,
we loved our people, and while we may not have loved those who ruled both, we
were unwaveringly loyal to our leadership.
We never would have imagined doing what we did had not the situation become
so desperate. By the time Captain Chen first voiced his proposal, we were already
on the brink. They were in every city, every village. In the nine and a half million
square kilometers that made up our country, you couldn't find one centimeter of
peace.
The army, arrogant bastards that they were, kept insisting that they had the
problem under control, that every day was the turning point and be-fore the next
snow fell upon the earth they would have the entire country pacified. Typical army
thinking: overaggressive, overconfident. All you need is a group of men, or
women, give them matching clothes, a few hours training, something that passes
for a weapon, and you have an army, not the best army, but still an army
nonetheless.
That can't happen with the navy, any navy. Any ship, no matter how crude,
requires considerable energy and materials to create. The army can replace its
cannon fodder in hours; for us, it might take years. This tends to make us more
pragmatic than our compatriots in green. We tend to look at a situation with a bit
more ... I don't want to say caution, but perhaps more strategic conservatism.
Withdraw, consolidate, husband your resources. That was the same philosophy as
the Redeker Plan, but of course, the army wouldn't listen.
They rejected Redeker?
Without the slightest consideration or internal debate. How could the army ever
lose' With their vast stockpiles of conventional armaments,
with their "bottomless well" of manpower . . . "bottomless well," unforgivable. Do
you know why we had such a population explosion during the 1950s* Because
Mao believed it was the only way to win a nuclear war. This is truth, not
propaganda. It was common knowledge that when the atomic dust eventually
settled, only a few thousand American or Soviet survivors would be overwhelmed
by tens of millions ot Chinese. Numbers, that was the philosophy
o{
my
grandparents' generation, and it was the
WORLD WAR Z         235
strategy the army was quick to adopt once our experienced, professional troops
were devoured in the outbreak's early stages. Those generals, sick, twisted old
criminals sitting safely in their bunker and ordering wave after wave of
conscripted teenagers into battle. Did they even think that every dead soldier was
now a live zombie? Did they ever realize that, instead of drowning them in our
bottomless well, we were the ones drowning, chok-ing to death as the most
populous nation on Earth found itself, for the first time in history, in danger of
becoming fatally outnumbered*
That was what pushed Captain Chen over the edge. He knew what would happen
it the war continued along its course, and what our chances for sur-
vival would be. If he thought that there was any hope, he would have grabbed a
rifle and hurled himself at the living dead. He was convinced that soon there
would be no more Chinese people, and perhaps, eventually, no more people
anywhere. That was why he made his intentions known to his senior officers,
declaring that we might be the only chance of preserving something of our
civilization.
Did you agree with his proposal?
I didn't even believe it at first. Escape in our boat, our nuclear submarine: This
wasn't just desertion, slinking out in the middle of a war to save our own pathetic
skins. This was stealing one of the motherland's most valuable national assets. The
Admiral
Zheng He
was only one
o{
three ballistic missiles subs and the newest of
what the West referred to as the Type 94. She was the child of four parents:
Russian assistance, black-market technology, the fruits of anti-American
espionage, and, let us not forget, the culmination of nearly five thousand years of
continuous Chinese history. She was the most expensive, die most advanced, die
most powerful machine our nation had ever constructed. To simply steal her, like a
lifeboat from the sinking ship of China, was inconceivable. It was only Captain
Chen's force of personality, his deep, fanatical patriotism that convinced me of our
onlv alternative.
How long did it take to prepare?
Three months. It was hell. Qingdao, our home port, was in a constant state of
siege. More and more army units were called in to maintain order, and each was
just a little less trained, a little less equipped, a little younger, or older, than the
one that came before it. Some of the surface ship captains had to donate
"expendable" crew to shore up base defenses. Our perimeter was under attack
almost every day. And through all of this we had to pre-pare and provision the
boat for sea. It was supposed to be a routinely scheduled patrol; we had to smuggle
on board both emergency supplies and family members.
Family members?
Oh yes, that was the cornerstone of the plan. Captain Chen knew the crew
wouldn't leave port unless their families could come with them.
How was that possible?
To find them or to smuggle them aboard?
Both.
Finding them was difficult. Most
o{
us had family scattered throughout the
country. We did our best to communicate with them, get a phone line work-
ing or send word with an army unit headed in that direction. The message was
always die same: we'd be heading back out on patrol soon and their presence was
required at the ceremony. Sometimes we'd try to make it more urgent, as if
someone was dying and needed to see them. That was the best we could do. No
one was allowed to go out and physically get them: too risky. We didn't have
multiple crews like you do on your missile boats. Every rating would be missed at
sea. I pitied my shipmates, the agony of their waiting. I was lucky that my wife
and children ...
WORLD WAR Z          237
Children? I thought. . .
That we were only allowed one child? That law was modified years before the
war, a practical solution to the problem of an unbalanced nation of only-child
sons. I had twin daughters. I was lucky. My wife and children were already on
base when the trouble started.
What about the captain? Did he have family?
His wife had left him in the early eighties. It was a devastating scandal, es-
pecially in those days. It still astounds me how he managed to both salvage his
career and raise his son.
He
had a son? Did he come with you?
IXu evades the question.]
The worst part for many others was the waiting, knowing that even it they
managed to make it to Qingdao, there was a very good chance that we might have
already sailed. Imagine the guilt. You ask your family to come to you, perhaps
leave the relative safety of their preexisting hideout, and arrive only to be
abandoned at the dock.
Did many of them show up?
More than one would have guessed. We smuggled them aboard at night, wearing
uniforms. Some-children and the elderly-were carried in supply crates.
Did the families know what was happening? What you were intending to do?
I don't believe so. Every member of our crew had strict orders to keep silent. Had
the MSS even had a whiff of what we were up to, the living
dead would have been the least of our fears. Our secrecy also forced us to depart
according to our routine patrol schedule. Captain Chen wanted so badly to watt for
stragglers, family members who might be perhaps only a few days, a few hours,
away! He knew it might have jeopardized everything, however, and reluctantly
gave the order to cast off. He tried to hide his feelings and 1 think, in front
o{
most, he might have gotten away with it. I could see it in his eyes though,
reflecting the receding fires of Qingdao.
Where were you beaded?
First to our assigned patrol sector, just so everything would initially seem normal.
After that, no one knew.
A new home, at least for the time being, was out of the question. By this point die
blight had spread to every corner of die planet. No neutral country, no matter how
remote, could guarantee our safety.
What about coming over to our side, America, or another Western country?
[He flashes a cold, haid stare.]
Would you ? The
Zheng
carried sixteen JL-2 ballistic missiles; all but one carried
four multiple reentry warheads, with a ninety-kiloton yield. That made her
equivalent to one of the strongest nations in the world, enough power to murder
entire cities with just the turn of a key. Would you turn that power over to another
country, die one country up until that point that had used nuclear weapons in
anger? Again, and for the last time, we
were
not
traitors. No matter how criminally insane our leadership might have
been, we were still Chinese sailors.
So you were alone.
All alone. No home, no friends, no safe harbor no matter how harsh the storm. The
Admiral
Zheng He
was our entire universe: heaven, earth, sun, and moon.
WORLD WAR Z        239
That must have been very difficult.
The first few months passed as though it was merely a regular patrol. Missile subs
are designed to hide, and that's what we did. Deep and silent. We weren't sure if
our own attack subs were out looking for us. In all probability our government had
other worries. Still, regular battle drills were conducted and the civilians trained in
the art of noise discipline. The chief of the boat even rigged special soundproofing
for the mess hall so it could be both a schoolroom and play area for the children.
The children, especially the younger ones, had no idea what was happening. Many
of them had
even traveled with their families across infested areas, some barely escaping with
their lives. All they knew was that the monsters were gone, banished to their
occasional nightmares. They were safe now, and that's all that mattered. I guess
that is how we all felt those first few months. We were alive, we were together, we
were safe. Given what was happening to the rest of the planet, what more could
we want'
Did you have some way of monitoring the crisis?
Not immediately. Our goal was stealth, avoiding both commercial shipping lanes
and submarine patrol sectors . . . ours, and yours. We speculated, though. How fast
was it spreading? Which countries were the most affected? Was anyone using the
nuclear option? If so, that would be the end for all of us. In a radiated planet, the
walking dead might be the only creatures left "alive." We weren't sure what high
doses of radiation would do to a zombie's brain. Would it eventually kill them,
riddling their gray matter with multiple, expanding tumors? That would be the
case for a regular human brain, but since the living dead contradicted every other
law of nature, why should this reaction be any different? Some nights in the ward­
room, speaking in low voices over our off-duty tea, we conjured images of
zombies as fast as cheetahs, as agile as apes, zombies with mutated brains that
grew and throbbed and burst from the confines of their skulls. Lieutenant
Commander Song, our reactor officer, had brought aboard his water-colors and
had painted the scene of a city in ruins. He tried to say that it
wasn't any city in particular but we all recognized the twisted remains of the
Pudong skyline. Song had grown up in Shanghai. The broken horizon glowed a
dull magenta against the pitch-black sky of nuclear winter. A rain of ash peppered
the islands of debris that rose from lakes of melted glass. Snaking through the
center of this apocalyptic backdrop was a river, a greenish-brown snake that rose
up into a head of a thousand interconnected bodies: cracked skin, exposed brain,
flesh dripping from bony arms that reached out from openmouthed faces with red,
glowing eyes. I don't know when Commander Song began his project, only that he
secretly unveiled it to a few of us after our third month at sea. He never intended
to show it to Captain Chen. He knew better. But someone must have talked and
the Old Man soon put a stop to it.
Song was ordered to paint over his work with something cheerful, a summer
sunset over Lake Dian. He then followed up with several more "positive" murals
on any space of exposed bulkhead. Captain Chen also ordered a halt to all off-duty
speculation. "Detrimental to the morale of the crew." I think it pushed him,
though, to reestablish some semblance of contact with the outside world.
Semblance as in active communication, or passive surveillance?
The latter. He knew Song's painting and our apocalyptic discussions were the
result of our long-term isolation. The only way to quell any further "dangerous
thought" was to replace speculation with hard facts. We'd been in total blackout
for almost a hundred days and nights. We needed to know what was happening,
even if it was as dark and hopeless as Song's painting.
Up until this point, our sonar officer and his team were the only ones with any
knowledge of the world beyond our hull. These men listened to the sea: the
currents, the "biologies" such as fish and whales, and the distant thrashing of
nearby propellers. I said before that our course had taken us to the most remote
recesses of the world's oceans. We had intentionally chosen areas where no ship
would normally be detected. Over the previous months, however, Liu's team had
been collecting an increasing number of
WORLD WAR Z        241
random contacts. Thousands of ships were now crowding the surface, many of
them with signatures that did not match our computer archive.
The captain ordered the boat to periscope depth. The ESM mast went up and was
flooded with hundreds of radar signatures; the radio mast suffered a similar
deluge. Finally the scopes, both the search and main attack periscopes, broke the
surface. It's not like you see in die movies, a man flipping down the handles and
staring through a telescopic eyepiece. These scopes don't penetrate the inner hull.
Each one is a video camera with its signal relayed to monitors throughout the boat.
We couldn't believe what we were seeing. It was as if humanity was putting
everything they had to
sea. We spotted tankers, freighters, cruise ships. We saw tugboats towing barges,
we saw hydrofoils, garbage scows, bottom dredgers, and all
of
this within the first
hour.
Over the next few weeks, we observed dozens of military vessels, too, any of
which could have probably detected us, but none of which seemed to care. You
know the USS
Saratoga?
We saw her, being towed across the South Atlantic, her
flight deck now a tent city. We saw a ship that had to be HMS Victor)', plying the
waves under a forest of improvised sails. We saw the
Aurora,
the actual World
War I-era heavy cruiser whose mutiny had sparked the Bolshevik Revolution. I
don't know how they got her out of Saint Petersburg, or how they found enough
coal to keep her boilers lit.
There were so many beat-up hulks that should have been retired years ago: skiffs,
ferries, and lighters that had spent their careers on quiet lakes or inland rivers,
coastal crafts that should have never left the harbor for which they'd been
designed. We saw a floating dry dock the size of an over-turned skyscraper, her
deck now stuffed with construction scaffolding that served as makeshift
apartments. She was drifting aimlessly, no tug or support vessel in sight. I don't
know how those people survived, or even if they survived. There were a lot of
drifting ships, their fuel bunkers dry, no way to generate power.
We saw many small private boats, yachts, and cabin cruisers that had lashed
themselves together to form giant directionless rafts. We saw many purpose-built
rafts as well, made from logs or tires.
We even came across a nautical shantytown constructed atop hundreds of garbage
bags filled with Styrofoam packing peanuts. It reminded us all of the "Ping-Pong
Navy," the refugees who, during the Cultural Revolution, had tried to float to
Hong Kong on sacks filled with Ping-Pong balls.
We pitied these people, pitied what could only be their hopeless fate. To be adrift
in the middle of the ocean, and prey to hunger, thirst, sunstroke, or the sea herself.
. . Commander Song called it "humanity's great regression." "We came from the
sea," he would say, "and now we're running back." Running was an accurate term.
These people clearly hadn't put any thought into what they would do once they
reached the "safety" of the waves. They just figured it was better than being torn
apart back on land. In their panic they probably didn't realize they were just
prolonging the inevitable.
Did you ever try to help them? Give them food or water, maybe tow them . . .
To where? Even if we had some idea where the safe ports might have been, the
captain wouldn't dare take the risk of detection. We didn't know who had a radio,
who might be listening to that signal. We still didn't know if we were a hunted
boat. And there was another danger: the immediate threat of the undead. We saw a
lot of infested ships, some where the crews were still fighting for their lives, some
where the dead were the only crew left. One time off Dakar, Senegal, we came
across a forty-five-thousand-ton luxury liner called the
Nordic
Empress. Our
search scope's optics were powerful enough to see every bloody handprint
smeared on the ballroom's windows, everv flv that settled on the deck's bones and
flesh. Zombies were
tailing into the ocean, one every couple of minutes. They would see some-Thing in
the distance, a low-flying aircraft, I think, or even the feather of our scope, and try
to reach for it. It gave me an idea. If we surfaced a few hundred meters away, and
did everything we could to lure them over the side, we might be able to clear the
ship without firing a shot. Who knows what the refugees might have brought
aboard with them? The Nordic
Empress
might turn out to be a floating
replenishment depot. I presented my proposal
to
the master at arms and together
we approached the captain.
WORLD WAR Z          243
What did he say?
"Absolutely not." There was no way of knowing how many zombies were onboard
the dead liner. Even worse, he motioned to the video screen and pointed to some
of the zombies falling overboard. "Look," he said, "not all of them are sinking."
He was right. Some had reanimated wearing life jackets, while others were
beginning to bloat up with decomposition gases. That was the first time I had ever
seen a floating ghoul. I should have realized then that they would become a
common occurrence. Even it 10 percent of the refugee ships were infested, that
was still 10 percent of several hun-
dred thousand vessels. There were millions of zombies falling randomly into the
sea, or else pouring in by the hundreds when one of those old hulks capsized in
rough weather. After a storm, they would blanket the surface to the horizon, rising
waves of bobbing heads and flailing arms. Once we raised the search scope and
were confronted with this distorted, greenish-gray haze. At first we thought it was
an optical malfunction, as if we'd hit some floating debris, but then the attack
scope confirmed that we'd speared one of them right under the rib cage. And it was
still struggling, probably even after we lowered the scope. If ever something
brought the threat home . . .
But you were underwater? How could they . . .
If we surfaced and one was caught on deck, or on the bridge. The first time I
cracked the hatch, a fetid, waterlogged claw darted in and had me by the sleeve. I
lost my footing, fell onto the lookout below me, and landed on the deck with the
severed arm still clamped to my uniform. Above me, silhouetted in the bright disc
of the open hatch, I could see the arm's owner. I reached for my sidearm, tired
straight up without thinking. We were showered in bone and bits of brain. We
were lucky ... if any of us had had any kind of open wound ... I deserved the
reprimand I got, although I de-served worse. From that point on, we always did a
thorough scope sweep after surfacing. I would say that, at least one in every three
instances, a few of them were crawling about on the hull.
Those were the observation days, when all we did was look and listen to the world
around us. Besides the scopes we could monitor both civilian radio traffic and
even some satellite television broadcasts. It wasn't a pretty picture. Cities were
dying, whole countries. We listened to the last report from Buenos Aires, the
evacuation of the Japanese home islands, too. We heard sketchy information about
mutinies in the Russian military. We heard after reports of the "limited nuclear
exchange" between Iran and Pakistan, and we marveled, morbidly, at how we had
been so sure that either you, or the Russians, would be the ones to turn the key.
There were no reports from China, no illegal or even official government
broadcasts. We were still detecting naval transmissions, but all the codes had been
shifted since our departure. While this presented something of a personal threat-we
didn't know if our fleet had orders to hunt down and sink us-at least it proved our
whole nation hadn't disappeared into the stomachs of the un-dead. At this point in
our exile any news was welcome.
Food was becoming an issue, not immediately, but soon enough to begin
considering options. Medicine was a bigger problem; both our Western' style
drugs and various traditional herb remedies were beginning to run low because of
the civilians. Many of them had special medical needs.
Mrs. Pei, the mother of one of our torpedo men, was suffering from chronic
bronchial problems, an allergic reaction to something on the boat, the paint or
perhaps machine oil, something you couldn't simply remove from the
environment. She was consuming our decongestants at an alarming rate.
Lieutenant Chin, the boat's weapons officer suggested, matter-of-factly, that the
old woman be euthanized. The captain responded by confining him to quarters, for
a week, on half-rations, with all but the most
lite-Threatening sickness to go untreated by the boat's pharmacist. Chin was a
coldhearted bastard, but at least his suggestion brought our options into the light.
We had to prolong our supply of consumables, if not find a way of recycling them
altogether.
Raiding derelicts was still strictly forbidden. Even when we spotted what looked
like a deserted vessel, at least a few zombies could be heard banging belowdecks.
Fishing was a possibility, but we had neither the ma-
WORLD WAR Z          245
terial to rig any kind of net, nor were we willing to spend hours on the surface
dropping hooks and lines over the side.
The solution came from die civilians, not the crew. Some of them had been
farmers or herbalists before the crisis, and a few had brought little bags of seeds. If
we could provide them with the necessary equipment, they might be able to start
raising enough food to stretch our existing provisions for years. It was an
audacious plan, but not completely without merit. The missile room was certainly
large enough for a garden. Pots and troughs could be hammered out of existing
materials, and the ultraviolet lamps we used for the crews vitamin D treatment
could serve as artificial sunlight.
The only problem was soil. None of us knew anything about hydroponics,
aeroponics, or any other alternate agricultural method. We needed earth, and there
was only one way to get it. The captain had to consider this carefully. Trying to
deploy a shore party was as dangerous as, if not more than, attempting to board an
infested ship. Before the war, more than half of all human civilization lived at or
near the world's coastlines. The infestation only increased this number as refugees
sought to flee by water.
We began our search off the mid-Atlantic coast of South America, from
Georgetown, Guyana, then down the coasts of Surinam, and French Guyana. We
found several stretches of uninhabited jungle, and at least by periscope
observation, the coast appeared to be clear. We surfaced and made a second, visual
sweep from the bridge. Again, nothing. I requested permission to take a landing
party ashore. The captain was not yet convinced. He ordered the foghorn blown . .
. loud and long . . . and then they came.
Just a few at first, tattered, wide-eyed, stumbling out of the jungle. They didn't
seem to notice the shoreline, the waves knocking them over, pushing them back up
on die beach or pulling them out to sea. One was dashed against a rock, his chest
crushed, broken ribs stabbing through the flesh. Black foam shot from his mouth
as he howled at us, still trying to walk, to crawl, in our direction. More came, a
dozen at a time; within minutes we had over a hundred plunging into the surf. This
was the case everywhere we surfaced. All those refugees who'd been too unlucky
to make it to the open ocean now formed a lethal barrier along every stretch of
coastline we visited.
Did you ever try to land a shore party?
[Shakes his head.] Too dangerous, even worse than the infested ships. We decided
that our only choice was to find soil on an offshore island.
But you must have known what was happening on the world's islands.
You would be surprised. After leaving our Pacific patrol station, we restricted our
movements to either die Atlantic or die Indian Ocean. We'd heard transmissions or
made visual observations of many of those specks of land. We learned about the
overcrowding, the violence .. . we saw the gun flashes from the Windward Islands.
That night, on the surface, we could smell the smoke as it drifted east from the
Caribbean. We could also hear islands that weren't so lucky. The Cape Verdes, off
the coast of Senegal, we didn't even see them before we heard die wails. Too many
refugees, too little discipline; it only takes one infected soul. How many islands re­
mained quarantined after the war* How many frozen, northern rocks are still
deeply and dangerously in the white'
Returning to the Pacific was our most likely option, but that would also bring us
right back up to our country's front door.
Again, we still did not know it the Chinese navy was hunting us or even if there
was still a Chinese navy. All we knew was that we needed stores and that we
craved direct contact with other human beings. It took some time to convince the
captain. The last thing he wanted was a confrontation with our navy.
We was
still loyal to the government?
Yes. And then there was ... a personal matter.
Personal? Why?
[He skirts the question.]
WORLD WAR Z        247
Have you ever been to Manihi?
[I shake my head.]
You couldn't ask for a more ideal image of a prewar tropical paradise. Flat,
palnvcovered islands or "motus" form a ring around a shallow, crystal-clear
lagoon. It used to be one of the few places on Earth where they cultured authentic
black pearls. I had bought a pair for my wife when we visited Tuamotus for our
honeymoon, so my firsthand knowledge made this atoll the most likely
destination.
Manihi had changed utterly since I was a newly married ensign. The pearls were
gone, die oysters were eaten, and the lagoon was crowded with hundreds of small,
private boats. The motus themselves were paved with either tents or ramshackle
huts. Dozens of improvised canoes either sailed or rowed back and forth between
the outer reef and the dozen or so large ships that were anchored in deeper water.
The whole scene was typical of what, I guess, postwar historians are now calling
"the Pacific Continent," the refugee island culture that stretched from Palau to
French Polynesia. It was a new society, a new nation, refugees from all over the
world uniting under the common flag of survival.
How did you integrate yourself into that society?
Through trade. Trade was the central pillar of the Pacific Continent. If your boat
had a large distillery, you sold fresh water. If it had a machine shop, you became a
mechanic. The
Madrid Spirit,
a liquefied natural gas carrier, sold its cargo off for
cooking fuel. That was what gave Mister Song his idea for our "market niche." He
was Commander Song's father, a hedge-fund broker from Shenzhen. He came up
with the idea of running floating power lines into the lagoon and leasing the
electricity from our reactor.
[He smiles.]
We became millionaires, or . . . at least die barter equivalent: food, medicine, any
spare part we needed or the raw materials to manufacture them. We got our
greenhouse, along with a miniature waste recovery plant to turn our own night soil
into valuable fertilizer. We "bought" equipment for a gymnasium, a full wet bar,
and home entertainment systems for both the enlisted mess and wardroom. The
children were lavished with tovs and candy, whatever was left, and most
importantly, continuing education from several of the barges diat had been
converted into international schools. We were welcomed into any home, onto any
boat. Our enlisted men, and even some of the officers, were given free credit on
any one of the five "comfort" boats anchored in the lagoon. And why not? We lit
up their nights, we powered their machinery. We brought back long forgotten
luxuries like air conditioners and refrigerators. We brought computers back online
and gave most of them the first hot shower they'd had in months. We were so
successful that the island council even allowed us a reprieve, although we politely
refused, from taking part in the island's perimeter security.
Against seaborne zombies?
They were always a danger. Every night they would wander up onto the motus or
try to drag themselves up die anchor line of a low-lying boat. Part of the
"citizenship dues" for staying at Manihi was to help patrol the beaches and boats
for zombies.
You mentioned anchor lines. Aren't zombies poor climbers?
Not when water counteracts gravity. Most of them only have to follow an anchor
chain tip to the surface. If that chain leads
to
a boat whose deck is only centimeters
above the water line . . . there were at least as many lagoon as beach attacks.
Nights were always worse. That was another reason we were so welcome. We
could take back the darkness, both above and below the surface. It is a chilling
sight to point a flashlight at the water and see the bluish-green outline of a zombie
crawling up an anchor line.
WORLD WAR Z        249
Wouldn't the light tend to attract even more of them?
Yes, definitely. Night attacks almost doubled once mariners began leaving their
lights on. The civilians never complained though, and neither did the island's
council. I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than
the darkness of their imagined fears.
How long did you stay in Manihi?
Several months. I don't know it you would call them the best months of
our lives, but at the time iT certainly tele char way. We began to let our guard
down, to stop thinking of ourselves as fugitives. There were even some Chinese
families, not Diaspora or Taiwanese, but real citizens of the Peoples Republic.
They told us that the situation had gotten so bad that the government was barely
keeping the country together. They couldn't see how, when over half the
population was infected and the army's re-serves were continuing to evaporate,
they had the time or assets to devote any energy to find one lost sub. For a little
while, it looked as if we could make this small island community our home, reside
here until the end of the crisis or, perhaps, the end of the world.
[He looks up at the monument above us, built on the very spot where, supposedly, the
last zombie in Beijing had been destroyed.]
Song and I had shore patrol duty, the night it happened. We'd stopped by a
campfire to listen to the islanders' radio. There was some broadcast about a
mysterious natural disaster in China. No one knew what it was yet, and there were
more than enough rumors to keep us guessing. I was look' ing at the radio, my
back to the lagoon, when the sea in front of me suddenly began to glow. I turned
just in time to see the
Madrid Spirit
explode. I don't know how much natural gas
she still carried, but the fireball skyrocketed high into the night, expanding and
incinerating all life on the two closest motus. My first thought was "accident," a
corroded valve, a
careless deckhand. Commander Song had been looking right at it though, and he'd
seen the streak of the missile. A halt second later, the
Admired
Zheng's foghorn
sounded.
As we raced back to the boat, my wall of calm, my sense of security, came
crashing down around me. I knew that missile had come from one of our subs. The
only reason it had hit the
Madrid
was because she sat much higher in water,
presenting a larger radar outline. How many had been aboard? How many were on
diose motus? 1 suddenly realized that every second we stayed put the civilian
islanders in danger of another attack. Captain Chen must have been thinking the
same thing. As we reached the deck, the orders to cast off were sounded from the
bridge. Power lines were cut, heads counted, hatches dogged. We set course for
open water and dived at battle stations.
At ninety meters we deployed our towed array sonar and immediately detected
hull popping noises of another sub changing depth. Not the flex-ible "pop-
groooaaan-pop" of steel but the quick "pop-pop-pop" of brittle titanium. Only two
countries in the world used titanium hulls in their attack boats: the Russian
Federation and us. The blade count confirmed it was ours, a new Type 95 hunter-
killers. Two were in service by the time we left port. We couldn't tell which one.
Was that important?
[Again, he does not answer.]
At first, the captain wouldn't fight. He chose to bottom the boat, set her
down on a sandy plateau at the bare limit of our crush depth. The Type 95 began
banging away with its active sonar array. The sound pulses echoed through the
water, but couldn't get a fix on us because of the ocean floor. The 95 switched to a
passive search, listening with its powerful hydrophone array for any noise we
made. We reduced the reactor to a marginal output, shut down all unnecessary
machinery, and ceased all crew movement within the boat. Because passive sonar
doesn't send out any signals, there was no way of knowing where the 95 was, or
even if it was still
WORLD WAR Z         251
around. We tried to listen for her propeller, but she'd gone as silent as us. We
waited for half an hour, not moving, barely breathing.
I was standing by the sonar shack, my eyes on the overhead, when Lieutenant Liu
tapped me on the shoulder. He had something on our hull-mounted array, not the
other sub, something closer, all around us. I plugged in a pair of headphones and
heard a scraping noise, like scratching rats. I silently motioned for the captain to
listen. We couldn't make it out. It wasn't bottom flow, the current was too mild for
that. If it was sea life, crabs or some other biologic contact, there would have to be
thousands of them. I began to suspect something ... I requested a scope
observation,
knowing the transient noise might alert our hunter. The captain agreed. We gritted
our teeth as the tube slid upward. Then, the image.
Zombies, hundreds of them, were swarming over the hull. More were arriving
each second, stumbling across the barren sand, climbing over each other to claw,
scrape, actually bite the Zheng's steel.
Could they have gotten in? Opened a hatch or . . .
No, all hatches are sealed from the inside and torpedo tubes are protected by
external bow caps. What concerned us, however, was the reactor. It was cooled by
circulating seawater. The intakes, although not large enough for a man to fit
through, can easily be blocked by one. Sure enough, one of our warning lights
began to silently flash over the number four intake. One of them had ripped the
guard off and was now thoroughly lodged in the conduit. The reactor's core
temperature began to rise. To shut it down would leave us powerless. Captain
Chen decided that we had to move.
We lifted oft the bottom, trying to be as slow and quiet as possible. It wasn't
enough. We began to detect the sound of the 95's propeller. She'd heard us and
was moving in to attack. We heard her torpedo tubes being flooded, and the click
of her outer doors opening. Captain Chen ordered our own sonar to "go active,"
pinging our exact location but giving us a perfect firing solution on the 95.
We fired at the same time. Our torpedoes passed each other, as both subs tried to
get away. The 95 was a little bit faster, a little more maneuverable,
but the one thing they didn't have was our captain. He knew exactly how-to avoid
the oncoming "fish," and we ducked them easily right about the time our own
found their targets.
We heard the 95's hull screech like a dying whale, bulkheads collapsing as
compartments imploded one after the other. They tell you it happens too fast for
the crew to know; either the shock of the pressure change renders them
unconscious or the explosion can actually cause the air to ignite. The crew dies
quickly, painlessly, at least, that's what we hoped. One thing that wasn't painless
was to watch the light behind my captains eyes die with the sounds of the doomed
sub.
[He anticipates my next question, clenching his fist and exhaling
hard through his nose.]
Captain Chen raised his son alone, raised him to be a good sailor, to love and serve
the state, to never question orders, and to be the finest officer the Chinese navy
had ever seen. The happiest day of his life was when Commander Chen Zhi Xiao
received his first command, a brand-new Type 95 hunter-killer.
The kind that attacked you?
[Nods.] That was why Captain Chen would have done anything to avoid our fleet.
That was why it was so important to know which sub had attacked us. To know is
always better, no matter what the answer might be. He had already betrayed his
oath, betrayed his homeland, and now to be-
lieve that that betrayal
might
have led him to murder his own son . . .
The next morning when Captain Chen did not appear for first watch, I went to his
cabin to check on him. The lights were dim, I called his name. To my relief, he
answered, but when he stepped into die light. . . his hair had lost its color, as white
as prewar snow. His skin was sallow, his eyes sunken. He was truly an old man
now, broken, withered. The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing
compared to the ones we carry in our hearts.
WORLD WAR Z         253
From that day on, we ceased all contact with the outside world. We headed for the
arctic ice, the farthest, darkest, most desolate void we could find. We tried to
continue with our day-to-day life: maintaining the boat; growing food; schooling,
raising, and comforting our children as best we could. With the captain's spirit
gone, so went the spirit of the
Admiral
Zheng's crew. I was the only one who ever
saw him during those days. I delivered his meals, collected his laundry, briefed
him daily on the condition of the boat, then relayed his orders to the rest of the
crew. It was routine, day in, day out.
Our monotony was only broken one day when sonar detected the ap-
proaching signature of another 95-class attack sub. We went to battle sta-tions, and
for the first time we saw Captain Chen leave his cabin. He took his place in the
attack center, ordered a firing solution plotted, and tubes one and two loaded.
Sonar reported that the enemy sub had not responded in kind. Captain Chen saw
this as our advantage. There was no question' ing in his mind this time. This
enemy would die before it fired. Just before he gave the order, we detected a signal
on the "gertrude," the American term for an underwater telephone. It was
Commander Chen, the captain's son, proclaiming peaceful intentions and
requesting that we stand down from GQ. He told us about the Three Gorges Dam,
the source of all the "natural disaster" rumors we'd heard about in Manihi. He
explained that our battle with the other 95 had been part of a civil war that the
dam's de-struction had sparked. The sub that attacked us had been part of the
loyalist forces. Commander Chen had sided with the rebels. His mission was to
find us and escort us home. I thought the cheer was going to carry us right to the
surface. As we broke through the ice and the two crews ran to each other under the
arctic twilight, I thought, finally, we can go home, we can reclaim our country and
drive out the living dead. Finally, it's over.
But it wasn't.
There was still one last duty to perform. The Politburo, those hated old men who
had caused so much misery already, were still holed up in their
leadership bunker in Xilinhot, still controlling at least half of our country's
dwindling ground forces. They would never surrender, everyone knew this; they
would keep their mad hold on power, squandering what was left of our military. If
the civil war dragged on any longer, the only beings left in China would be the
living dead.
And you decided to end the fighting.
We were the only ones who could. Our land-based silos were overrun, our air
force was grounded, our two other missile boats had been caught still tied to the
piers, watting for orders like good sailors as the dead swarmed through their
hatches. Commander Chen informed us that we were the only nuclear asset left in
the rebellion's arsenal. Every second we delayed wasted a hundred more lives, a
hundred more bullets that could be thrown against the undead.
So you fired on your homeland, in order to save it.
One last burden to shoulder. The captain must have noticed me shaking the
moment before we launched. "My order," he declared, "my responsibility." The
missile carried a single, massive, multi-megaton warhead. It was a prototype
warhead, designed to penetrate the hardened surface of your NORAD facility in
Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. Ironically, the Politburo's bunker had been
designed to emulate Cheyenne Mountain in almost every detail. As we prepared to
get under way, Commander Chen informed us that Xilinhot had taken a direct hit.
As we slid beneath the surface, we heard that the loyalist forces had surrendered
and reunified
with the rebels to fight the real enemy.
Did you know they had begun instituting their own version of the South African Plan?
We heard the day we emerged from under the ice pack. That morning I came on
watch and found Captain Chen already in the attack center. He was in his
command chair, a cup of tea next to his hand. He looked so
WORLD WAR Z          255
tired, silently watching the crew around him, smiling as a father smiles at the
happiness of his children. I noticed his tea had grown cold and asked if he would
like another cup. He looked up at me, still smiling, and shook his head slowly.
"Very good, sir," I said, and prepared to resume my station. He reached out and
took my hand, looked up into, but did not recognize, my face. His whisper was so
soft I could barely hear it.
What?
"Nice boy, Zhi Xiao, such a good boy." He was still holding my hand when he
closed his eyes forever.
*<
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
[Clearwater Memorial is the newest hospital to be constructed in Australia and the
largest one built since the end of the war. Terry Knox's room is on the seventeenth floor,
the "Presidential Suite." His luxurious surroundings and expensive, almost unobtainable
medication aie the least his government can do tor the first and, to date, only Australian
commander of the International Space Station. In his words, "Not bad for the son of an
Andamooka opal miner."
His withered body seems to liven during our conversation. His face regains some of its
color.]
I wish some of the stories they tell about us were true. Makes us sound all the
more heroic. [Smiles.] Truth is, we weren't "stranded," not in Terms of being
suddenly or unexpectedly trapped up there. Nobody had a better view of what was
happening than us. No one was surprised when the
replacement crew from Baikonur failed to launch, or when Houston ordered us to
pile into die X-38 for evacuation. I wish I could say that we violated orders or
physically fought with one another over who should stay. What really happened
was much more mundane and reasonable. I ordered the scientific team, and any
other nonessential personnel, back to Earth, then gave the rest of the crew the
choice to remain behind. With the X-38 reentry "lifeboat" gone, we would be
technically stranded, but when you think of what was at stake then, I can't imagine
any of us wanting to leave.
The ISS is one of the greatest marvels
at
human engineering. We're talking about
an orbital platform so large it could be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It'd
taken sixteen countries over ten years, a couple hundred space walks, and more
money than anyone without job security would admit to finally complete her.
What would it take to build another one, if another one could ever be built ?
Even more important than the station was the incalculable, and equally
irreplaceable, value of our planet's satellite network. Back then there were over
three thousand in orbit, and humanity depended on them for everything from
communications to navigation, from surveillance to something even as mundane
yet vital as regular and reliable weather prediction. This network was as important
to the modern world as roads had been in ancient times, or rail lines during the
industrial age. What would happen to humanity it these all-important links just
started dropping out of the sky?
Our plan was never to save them all. That was unrealistic and unnecessary. All we
had to do was concentrate on the systems most vital to the war effort, just a few
dozen birds that had to remain aloft. That alone was worth the risk of staying.
Were you ever promised a rescue?
No, and we didn't expect it. The issue wasn't how we were going to get back to
Earth, it was how we could manage to stay alive up there. Even
1. The station's reentry "lifeboat."
WORLD WAR Z         257
with all our tanked
02
and emergency perchlorate candles," even with our water
recycling system operating at peak capacity, we only had enough food for roughly
twenty-seven months, and that was including the test animals in the lab modules.
None of them were being used to test any kind of vaccines so their flesh was still
edible. I can still hear their little shrieks, still see the spots of blood floating in
micro gravity. Even up there, you couldn't escape the blood. I tried
to
be scientific
about it, calculating the nutritional value of every floating red globule I sucked out
of the air. I kept insisting that it was all for the good of the mission and not my
own ravenous hunger.
Tell me more about the mission. If you were trapped on the station, how did you
manage to keep the satellites in orbit?
We used the "Jules Verne Three" ATV, the last supply pod launched before French
Guyana was overrun. It was originally designed as a one-way vehicle, to be filled
with trash after depositing its cargo, then sent back to Earth to burn up in the
atmosphere. We modified it with manual flight controls and a pilot's couch. I wish we
could have fixed it with a proper viewport. Navigating by video wasn't fun; neither
was having to do my Extra Vehicular Activities, my space walks, in a reentry suit
because there wasn't room for a proper EVA kit.
Most of my excursions were to the ASTRO, which was basically just a petrol station
in space. Satellites, the military, surveillance type, some-times have to change orbit in
order to acquire new targets. They do that by firing their maneuvering thrusters and
using up their small amount of hydrazine fuel. Before the war, the American military
realized it was more cost-effective to have a refueling station already in orbit rather
than
2.   The ISS ceased using electrolysis to generate oxygen as a way of conserving water.
3.   Prewar specs put the ISS water recycling capability at 95 percent.
4.   ATV: Automated Transfer Vehicle.
5.   A secondary task of the disposable ATV was to use its booster to maintain the
station's orbit.
6.   ASTRO: Autonomous Space Transfer and Robotic Orbiter.
sending up a lot or manned missions. That's where ASTRO came in. We modified
it to refuel some of the odier satellites as well, the civilian models that need just
the occasional top-off to boost back up from a decaying orbit. It was a marvelous
machine: a real time-saver. We had a lot of tech-nology like that. There was the
"Canadarm," the fifty-foot robotic inch-worm that performed necessary
maintenance tasks along the station's outer skin. There was "Boba," the VR-
operated robonaut we fitted with a thruster pack so he could work bodi around the
station and away from it on a satellite. We also had a little squadron of PSAs,
these free-floating robots, about the shape and size of a grapefruit. All of this
wondrous technology was designed to make our jobs easier. I wish they hadn't
worked so well.
We had maybe an hour a day, maybe even two, where there was nothing to do.
You could sleep, you could exercise, you could reread the same books, you could
listen to Radio Free Earth or to the music we'd brought with us (over and over and
over again). I don't know how many times 1 listened to that Redgum song: "God
help me, I was only nineteen." It was my father's favorite, reminded him of his
time in Vietnam. I prayed that all that army training was helping
to
keep him and
my mum alive now. I hadn't heard anything from him, or anyone else in Oz since
the government had relocated to Tasmania. I wanted to believe they were all right,
but watching what was happening on Earth, as most of us did during our off-duty
hours, made it almost impossible to have hope.
They say that during the cold war, American spy birds could read the copy of
Pravda
in a Soviet citizen's hands. I'm not sure if that's entirely true. I don't know
the tech specs of that generation of hardware. But I can
tell you chat these modern ones whose signals we pirated from their relay birds-
these could show muscles tear and bones snap. You could read the lips of victims
crying out for mercy, or die color of their eyes when they bulged with their last
breath. You could see at what point red blood began to turn brown, and how it
looked on gray London cement as opposed to white, Cape Cod sand.
7.  PSA: Personal Satellite Assistance.
WORLD WAR Z         259
We had no control over what the spy birds chose to observe. Their targets were
determined by the U.S. military. We saw a lot of battles- Chongqing, Yonkers; we
watched a company of Indian troops try to rescue civilians trapped in Ambedkar
Stadium in Delhi, then become trapped themselves and retreat to Gandhi Park. 1
watched their commander form his men into a square, the kind the Limeys used in
colonial days. It worked, at least for a little while. That was the only frustrating
part about satellite surveillance; you could only watch, not listen. We didn't know
that the Indians were running out of ammunition, only that the Zed Heads were
starting to close in. We saw a helo hover overhead and watched as the
commander argued with his subordinates. We didn't know it was General Raj-
Singh, we didn't even know who he was. Don't listen to what the critics say about
that man, about how he buggered oft when things got too hot. We saw it all. He
did
try to put up a fight, and one of his blokes
did
smash him in the face with a
rifle butt. He was out cold when they hauled him into that watting chopper. It was
a horrible feeling, seeing it all so close and yet unable to do anything.
We had our own observation gear, both the civilian research birds and the
equipment right there on the station. The images they gave us weren't half as
powerful as the military versions, but they were still frighteningly clear. They gave
us our first look at the mega swarms over central Asia and the American Great
Plains. Those were truly massive, miles across, like the American buffalo must
have once been.
We watched the evacuation of Japan and couldn't help but marvel at the scale.
Hundreds of ships, thousands of small boats. We lost count of how many
helicopters buzzed back and forth from the rooftops to the armada, or how many
jetliners made their final run north to Kamchatka.
We were the first ones to discover zombie holes, the pits that the un-dead dig
when they're going after burrowing animals. At first we thought they were just
isolated incidents until we noticed that they were spreading all over the world;
sometimes more than one would appear in close proximity to the next. There was
a field in southern England-I guess diere must have been a high concentration of
rabbits-that was just riddled with holes, all different depths and sizes. Many of
diem had large, dark
stains around them. Although we couldn't zoom in close enough, we were pretty
sure it was blood. For me that was the most terrifying example of our enemy's
drive. They displayed no conscious thought, just sheer biological instinct. I once
watched a Zed Head go after something, probably a golden mole, in the Namib
Desert. The mole had burrowed deep in the slope of a dune. As the ghoul tried to
go after it, die sand kept pouring down and filling the hole. The ghoul didn't stop,
didn't react in any way, it just kept going. I watched it for five days, the fuzzy
image of this G digging, and dig' ging, and digging, then suddenly one morning
just stopping, getting up, and shuffling away as if nothing had happened. It must
have lost the scent. Good on the mole.
For all our enhanced optics, nothing had quite the same impact as the naked eye.
To just look through the view port down on our fragile little biosphere. To see the
massive ecological devastation makes one understand how the modern
environmental movement began with the Ameri-can space program. There were so
many fires, and I don't just mean the buildings, or the forests, or even the oil rigs
blazing out of control-bleeding Saudis actually went ahead and did it^-I mean the
campfires as well, what had to be at least a billion of them, tiny orange specks
covering the Earth where electric lights had once been. Every day, every night, it
seemed like the whole planet was burning. We couldn't even begin to calculate the
ash count but we guesstimated it was equivalent to a low-grade nuclear exchange
between the United States and former Soviet Union, and that's not including the
actual nuclear exchange between Iran and Pakistan. We watched and recorded
those as well, the flashes and fires that gave me eye spots for days. Nuclear
autumn was already beginning to set in, the gray-
brown shroud thickening each day.
It was like looking down on an alien planet, or on Earth during the last great mass
extinction. Eventually conventional optics became useless in the shroud, leaving
us with only thermal or radar sensors. Earth's natural face vanished behind a
caricature of primary colors. It was through one of
8. To this day. no one knows why the Saudi royal family ordered the ignition of
their king-dom'soil fields.
WORLD WAR Z         261
these systems, the Aster sensor ahoard the Terra Satellite, that we saw the Three
Gorges Dam collapse.
Roughly ten
trillion
gallons of water, carrying debris, silt, rocks, trees, cars,
houses, and house-sized pieces of the dam itself! It was alive, a brown and white
dragon racing to the East China Sea. When I think
at
the people in its path . . .
trapped in barricaded buildings, unable to escape the tidal wave because of the Zed
Heads right outside their doors. No one knows how many people died that night.
Even today, they're still finding bodies.
[One of his skeletal hands balls into a fist, the other presses the "self-medicate" button.]
When I think about how the Chinese leadership tried to explain it all away . . .
Have you ever read a transcript of che Chinese president's speech? We actually
watched the broadcast from a pirated signal off their Sinosat II. He called it an
"unforeseen tragedy." Really? Unforeseen? Was it unforeseen that the dam had
been built on an active fault line? Was it unforeseen that the increased weight of a
giant reservoir had induced earthquakes in the past and that cracks had already
been detected in the foundation months before the dam was completed?
He called it an "unavoidable accident." Bastard. They had enough troops to wage
open warfare in almost every major city, but they couldn't spare a couple of traffic
cops to protect against a catastrophe waiting to happen? No one could imagine the
repercussions of abandoning both the seismic warning stations and the emergency
spillway controls? And then to try to change their story halfway through, to say
that they'd actually done everything they could to protect the dam, that, at the time
of the disaster, valiant troops of the PLA had given their lives to defend it. Well,
I'd been personally observing Three Gorges for over a year leading up to the
disaster and the only PLA soldiers I ever saw had given their lives a long,
9. The reservoir of Lesotho's Katse Dam was confirmed to cause numerous
seismic disturbances since its completion in 1995.
long time ago. Did they really expect their own people to buy such a blatant lie*
Did they really expect anything less than all-out rebellion'
Two weeks after the start of the revolution, we received our first and only signal
from the Chinese space station, Yang Liwei. It was the only other manned facility
in orbit, but couldn't compare to such an exquisite masterpiece as ours. It was
more of a slapdash job, Shenzhou modules and Long March fuel tanks cobbled
together like a giant version of the old American Skylab.
We'd been trying to contact them for months. We weren't even sure if there was a
crew. All we got was a recorded message in perfect Hong Kong English to keep
our distance lest we invite a response of "deadly force." What an insane waste! We
could have worked together, traded supplies, technical expertise. Who knows what
we could have accomplished if we had only chucked the politics and come
together as human bloody beings.
We'd convinced ourselves that the station had never been inhabited at all, that their
deadly force warning was just a ruse. We couldn't have been more surprised when
the signal came over our ham radio. It was a live human voice, tired, frightened,
and cutting out after only a few seconds. It was all I needed to board the Verne and
head over to the Yang.
As soon as it came over the horizon I could tell that its orbit had shifted radically.
As I closed the distance, I could see why. Their escape pod had blown its hatch,
and because it was still docked to the primary airlock, the entire station had
depressurized in seconds. As a precaution, I requested docking clearance. I got
nothing. As I came aboard, I could see that even though the station was clearly
large enough for a crew of seven or eight, it only had the bunk space and personal
kits for two. I found the Yang
packed with emergency supplies, enough food, water, and
Q2
candles for at least
five years. What I couldn't figure out at first was why. There was no scientific
equipment aboard, no intelligence-gathering assets. It was almost like the Chinese
government had sent these two men into space for no other purpose than to exist.
Fifteen minutes into my floatabout, I found
10.The International Space Station is equipped with a Chilian ham radio,
originally, to allow the crew to talk to schoolchildren.
WORLD WAR Z         263
the first of several scuttling charges. This space station was little more than a giant
Orbital Denial Vehicle. If those charges were to detonate, the debris from a four-
hundred-metric-ton space station would not only be enough to damage or destroy
any other orbiting platform, but any future spate launch would ho grounded for
years. It was a "Scorched Space" policy, "if we can't have it, neither can anyone
else."
All the station's systems were still operational. There had been no fire, no
structural damage, no reason I could see to cause the accident of the escape pod's
hatch. I found the body of a lone taikonaut with his hand still clinging to the hatch
release. He was wearing one of their pressurized es-
cape suits, but the faceplate had been shattered by a bullet. I'm guessing the
shooter was blown out into space. I'd like to believe that the Chinese revolution
wasn't just restricted to Earth, that the man who'd blown the hatch was also the one
who had attempted to signal us. His mate must have stuck by the old guard.
Maybe Mister Loyalist had been ordered to set off the scuttling charges. Zhai-that
was the name on his personal ef-fects-Zhai had tried to blast his mate into space
and had caught a round in the process. Makes for a good tale, I think. That's how
I'm going to remember it.
Is that how you were able to extend your endurance? By using the supplies aboard
the Yang?
IHe gives me a thumbs-up.] We cannibalized every inch of it for spares and
materials. We would have liked to have merged the two platforms together but we
didn't have the tools or manpower for such an undertaking. We might been able to
use the escape pod to return to Earth. It had a heat shield and room for three. It
was very tempting. But the station's orbit was decaying rapidly, and we had to
make a choice then and there, escape to Earth or resupply the ISS. You know
which choice we made.
Before we finally abandoned her, we laid our friend Zhai to rest. We strapped his
body into its bunk, brought his personal kit back to the ISS, and said a few words
in his honor as the Yang burned up in the Earth's atmosphere. For all we knew he
might have been the loyalist, not the
rebel, but either way, his actions allowed us to stay alive. Three more years we
remained in orbit, three more years that wouldn't have been possible without the
Chinese consumables.
I still think it's one of the war's great ironies that our replacement crew-ended up
arriving in a privately owned civilian vehicle. Spacecraft
Three,
the ship originally
designed for prewar orbital tourism. The pilot, with his cowboy hat and big,
confident Yankee grin. [He tries his best Texas accent.] "Anyone order takeout?"
[He laughs, then winces and self-medicates again.]
Sometimes I'm asked if we regretted our decision to stay aboard. I can't speak for
my mates. On their deathbeds they both said they'd do it all over again. How can I
disagree? I don't regret the physical therapy diat followed, getting to know my
bones again and remembering why the good Lord gave us legs in the first place. I
don't regret being exposed to so much cosmic radiation, all those unprotected
EVAs, all that time with inadequate shielding in the ISS. I don't regret this. [He
motions to the hospital room and machinery attached to his body.l We made our
choice, and, I'd like to think, we made a difference in the end. Not bad for the son
of an Andamooka opal miner.
[Terry Knox died three days after this interview.]
ANCUD, ISLA GRANDE DE CHILOE, CHILE
[While the official capital has returned to Santiago, this onetime refugee base now
remains the economic and cultural center of the country. Ernesto Olguin calls the
beach house on the island's Peninsula de Lacuy home, although his duties as a mer­
chant ship's master keep him at sea for most of the year.]
The history books call it "The Honolulu Conference," but really it should have
been called the "Saratoga Conference" because that's all any
WORLD WAR Z          265
of us had a chance to see. We spent fourteen days in those cramped com'
partments and dank stuffy passageways. USS
Saratoga:
from aircraft carrier, to
decommissioned hulk, to evacuee transport barge, to floating United Nations HQ.
It also shouldn't have been called a conference. If anything, it was more like an
ambush. We were supposed to be exchanging warfighting tactics and technology.
Everyone was anxious to see the British method of fortified motorways, which
was almost as exciting as that live demon'
stration of Mkunga Lalem. We were also supposed to be attempting to reintroduce
some measure of international trade. That was my task, specif' ically, to integrate
the remnants of our navy into the new international convoy structure. I wasn't
really sure what to expect from my time aboard Super Sara. I don't think anyone
could have expected what actually happened.
On the first day of the conference, we'd assembled for the introductions. I was hot
and tired and wishing to God we could just get on without all the tiresome
speeches. And then the American ambassador rose, and the whole world came to a
screeching halt.
It was time to go on the attack, he said, to all get out from behind our established
defenses and begin retaking infested territory. At first I thought he simply meant
isolated operations: securing more inhabitable islands or, perhaps, even reopening
the Suez/Panama canal zones. My supposition didn't last very long. He made it
very clear that this was not going to be a series of minor tactical incursions. The
United States intended to go per-manently on the offensive, marching forward
every day, until, as he put it, "every trace was sponged, and purged, and, if need
be, blasted from the surface of the Earth." Maybe he thought ripping off Churchill
would give it some kind of emotional punch. It didn't. Instead, the room
spontaneously combusted into argument.
One side asked why in hell should we risk even more lives, suffer even one more
unnecessary casualties when all we had to do was remain safe and sedentary while
our enemy simply rotted away. Wasn't it happening
1. Mkunga Lalem: (The Eel and the Sword), rhe world s premier antizombie
martial art.
266       MAX BROOKS
already? Weren't the earliest cases starting to show signs of advanced
decomposition? Time was on our side, not theirs. Why not let nature do all the
work for us?
The other side countered that not all the living dead were rotting away. What about
the later cases, die ones still strong and healthy? Couldn't just one restart the
plague all over again? And what about those who prowled countries above the
snowline? How long would we have to watt for them: Decades? Centuries? Would
refugees from these countries ever have a chance of returning home?
And that's when it
got
ugly. Many of the colder countries were what you used to
call "First World." One of the delegates from a prewar "developing" country
suggested, rather hotly, that maybe this was their punishment for raping and
pillaging the "victim nations of the south." Maybe, he said, by keeping the "white
hegemony" distracted with their own problems, the undead invasion might allow
the rest of the world to develop "without imperialist intervention." Maybe the
living dead had brought more than just devastation to the world. Maybe in the end,
they had brought justice for
the future. Now, my people have little love for the northern gringos, and my
family suffered enough under Pinochet to make that animosity personal, but there
comes a point where private emotions must give way to objective facts. How
could there be a "white hegemony" when the most dynamic prewar economies
were China and India, and the largest wartime economy was unquestionably Cuba'
How could you call the colder countries a northern issue when so many people
were just barely surviving in the Himalayas, or the Andes of my own Chile? No,
this man, and those who agreed with him, weren't talking about justice for the
future. They just wanted revenge for the past.
[Sighs.] After all we'd been through, we still couldn't take our heads from out of
our asses or our hands from around each other's throats.
I was standing next to the Russian delegate, trying to prevent her from climbing
over her seat, when I heard another American voice. It was their president. The
man didn't shout, didn't try to restore order. He just kept going in that calm, firm
tone that I don't think any world leader has since
WORLD WAR Z        267 been able to duplicate. He even thanked his "fellow
delegates" for their
"valued opinions" and admitted that, from a purely military perspective, there was
no reason to "push our luck." We'd fought the living dead to a stalemate and,
eventually, future generations might be able to reinhabtt the planet with little or no
physical danger. Yes, our defensive strategies had saved the human race, but what
about the human spirit'
The living dead had taken more from us than land and loved ones. They'd robbed
us of our confidence as the planet's dominant life-form. We were a shaken, broken
species, driven to the edge of extinction and grateful only for a tomorrow with
perhaps a little less suffering than today. Was this the legacy we would leave to
our children, a level of anxiety and self-doubt not seen since our simian ancestors
cowered in the tallest trees? What kind of world would they rebuild' Would they
rebuild at all? Could they continue to progress, knowing that they had been
powerless to reclaim their future? And what if that future saw another rise of the
living dead' Would our descendants rise to meet them in battle, or simply crumple
in meek surrender and accept what they believe to be their inevitable extinction'
For this reason alone, we had to reclaim our planet. We had to prove to ourselves
that we
could
do it, and leave that proof as this war's greatest monument. The long,
hard road back to humanity, or the regressive ennui of Earth's once-proud
primates. That was the choice, and it had to be made now.
So typically Norteamericano, reaching for the stars with their asses still stuck in
the mud. I guess, if this was a gringo movie, you'd see some idiot get up and start
clapping slowly, then the others would join in and then we'd see a tear roll down
someone's cheek or some other contrived bullshit
like that. Everyone was silent. No one moved. The president announced that we
would recess for the afternoon to consider his proposal, then reconvene at dusk for
a general vote.
As naval attache, I wasn't allowed to participate in that vote. While the
ambassador decided the fate of our beloved Chile, I had nothing to do but enjoy
die Pacific sunset. I sat on the flight deck, wedged in between the windmills and
solar cells, killing time with my opposite numbers from France
268       MAX BROOKS
and South Africa. We tried not to talk shop, searching for any common subject as
far from the war as we could get. We thought we were safe with wine. As luck
might have it, each of us had either lived near, worked on, or had family connected
with a vineyard: Aconcagua, Stellenboch, and Bordeaux. Those were our bonding
points and, as with everything else, they led right back to the war.
Aconcagua had been destroyed, burned to the ground during our country's
disastrous experiments with napalm. Stellenboch was now growing subsistence
crops. Grapes were considered a luxury when the population was close to
starvation. Bordeaux was overrun, the dead crushing its
soil underfoot like almost all of continental France. Commander Emile Renard
was morbidly optimistic. Who knows, he said, what the nutrients of their corpses
would do for the soil? Maybe it would even improve on the overall taste once
Bordeaux was retaken, if it was retaken. As the sun began to dip, Renard took
something from his kit bag, a bottle of Chateau Latour, 1964. We couldn't believe
our eyes. The '64 was an ex-tremely rare prewar vintage. By sheer chance, the
vineyard had had a bumper crop that season and had chosen to harvest its grapes
in late August as opposed to the traditional early September. That September was
marked by early, devastating rains, which inundated the other vineyards and
elevated Chateau Latour to almost Holy Grail status. The bottle in Renard's hand
might be the last of its kind, the perfect symbol of a world we might never see
again. It was die only personal item he'd managed to save during the evacuation.
He carried it with him everywhere, and was planning to save it for . . . ever,
possibly, seeing as it looked like none of any vintage would ever be made again.
But now, after the Yankee presi' dent's speech . . .
[He involuntarily licks his lips, tasting the memory.]
It hadn't traveled that well, and the plastic mugs didn't help. We didn't care. We
savored every sip.
You were pretty confident about the vote?
Not that it would be unanimous, and I was damn right. Seventeen "No" votes and
thirty-one "Abstain." At least the no voters were willing to suffer the long-term
consequences of their decision ... and they did. When you think that the new UN
only consisted of seventy-two delegates, the showing of support was pretty poor.
Not that it mattered for me or my other two amateur "sommeliers." For us, our
countries, our children, the choice had been made: attack.
TOTAL   WAR
ABOARD THE
MAURO ALTIERI,
THREE THOUSAND FEET ABOVE VAALAJARVI, FINLAND
[I stand next to General D'Ambrosia in the CIC, the Combat Information Center, of
Europe's answer to the massive U.S. D-29 command and control dirigible. The crew
work silently at their glowing monitors. Occasionally, one of them speaks into a head­
set, a quick, whispered acknowledgment in French, German, Spanish, or Italian. The
general leans over the video chart table, watching the entire operation from the closest
thing to a God's-eye view.]
"Attack"-when I first heard that word, my gut reaction was "oh shit." Does that
surprise you?
[Before I can answer . . .1
WORLD WAR Z           271
Sure it does. You probably expected "the brass" to be just champing at the bit, all
that blood and guts, "hold 'em by the nose while we kick 'em in the ass" crap.
[Shakes his head.] I don't know who created the stereotype of the hard-charging,
dim-witted, high school football coach of a general officer. Maybe it was
Hollywood, or the civilian press, or maybe we did it to ourselves by allowing
those insipid, egocentric clowns-the MacArthurs and Halseys and Curtis E.
LeMays-to define our image to the rest of the country. Point is, that's the image of
those in uniform, and it couldn't be further from the truth. I was scared to death of
taking our armed forces on the offensive, more so because it wouldn't be my ass
hanging out in the fire. I'd only be sending others out to die, and here's what I'd be
sending them up against.
[He turns to another screen on the far wall, nodding to an operator, and the image
dissolves into a wartime map of the conti-
nental United States.]
Two hundred million zombies . Who can even visualize that type of number, let
alone combat it? At least this time around we knew what we were combating, but
when you added up all the experience, all the data we'd compiled on their origin,
their physiology, their strengths, their weaknesses, their motives, and their
mentality, it still presented us with a very gloomy prospect for victory.
The book of war, the one we've been writing since one ape slapped another, was
completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.
All armies, be they mechanized or mountain guerilla, have to abide by three basic
restrictions: they have to be bred, fed, and led. Bred: you need warm bodies, or
else you don't have an army; fed: once you've got that army, they've got to be
supplied; and led: no matter how decentralized that fighting force is, there has to
be someone among them with the authority
1. It has been confirmed at least twenty'five million of this number include
reanimated refugees from Latin America who were killed attempting to reach the
Canadian north.
to say "follow me." Bred, fed, and led; and none of these restrictions applied To
the Living dead.
Did you ever read
All Quiet on the Western
Front? Remarque paints a vivid picture
of Germany becoming "empty," meaning that toward the end of the war, they were
simply running out of soldiers. You can fudge the numbers, send the old men and
little boys, but eventually you're going to hit the ceiling . . . unless every time you
killed an enemy, he came back to life on your side. That's how Zack operated,
swelling his ranks by thinning ours! And it only worked one way. Infect a human,
he becomes a zombie. Kill a zombie, he becomes a corpse. We could only get
weaker, while they might actually get stronger.
All human armies need supplies, this army didn't. No food, no ammo, no fuel, not
even water to drink or air to breathe! There were no logistics lines to sever, no
depots to destroy. You couldn't just surround and starve them out, or let them
"wither on the vine." Lock a hundred of them in a room and three years later
they'll come out just as deadly
It's ironic that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain, because, as a
group, they have no collective brain to speak of. There was no leadership, no chain
of command, no communication or cooperation on any level. There was no
president to assassinate, no HQ bunker to surgically strike. Each zombie is its
own, self-contained, automated unit, and this last advantage is what truly
encapsulates the entire conflict.
You've heard the expression "total war"; it's pretty common throughout human
history. Every generation or so, some gasbag likes to spout about how his people
have declared "total war" against an enemy, meaning that
every man, woman, and child within his nation was committing every second of
their lives to victory. That is bullshit on two basic levels. First of all, no country or
group is ever 100 percent committed to war; it's just not physically possible. You
can have a high percentage, so many people working so hard for so long, but all of
the people, all of the time? What about the malingerers, or the conscientious
objectors? What about the sick, the injured, the very old, the very young? What
about when you're sleeping, eating, taking a shower, or taking a dump? Is that a
"dump for victory"?
WORLD WAR Z         273
That's the first reason total war is impossible for humans. The second is that all
nations have their limits. There might be individuals within that group who are
willing to sacrifice their lives; it might even be a relatively high number for the
population, but that population as a whole will eventually reach its maximum
emotional and physiological breaking point. The Japanese reached theirs with a
couple of American atomic bombs. The Vietnamese might have reached theirs if
we'd dropped a couple more," but, thank all holy Christ, our will broke before it
came to that. That is the nature of human warfare, two sides trying to push the
other past its limit of
endurance, and no matter how much we like to talk about total war, that limit is always
there . . . unless you're the living dead.
For the first time in history, we faced an enemy that was actively waging total war. They
had no limits of endurance. They would never negotiate, never surrender. They would
fight until the very end because, unlike us, every single one of them, every second of
every day, was devoted to consuming all life on Earth. That's the kind of enemy that was
waiting for us beyond the Rockies. That's the kind of war we had to fight.
DENVER, COLORADO, USA
[We have just finished dinner at the Wainios. Allison, Todd's wife, is upstairs helping
their son, Addison, with his homework. Todd and I are downstairs in the kitchen, doing
the dishes.]
It was kinda like stepping back in time, the new army, I mean. It couldn't have been any
more different from the one I'd fought, and almost died with, at Yonkers. We weren't
mechanized anymore-no tanks, no
2. It has been alleged that several members of the American military establishment
openly supported the use of thermonuclear weapons during the Vietnam conflict.
arty, no tread jobs at all, not even the Bradleys. Those were still in reserve, being
modified for when we'd have to take back the cities. No, the only wheeled vehicles
we had, the Humvees and a few M-trip-Seven ASVs, were used to carry ammo
and stuff. We hoofed it, all the way, marching in column like you see in Civil War
paintings. There was a lot of references to "the Blue" versus "the Gray," mainly
because of Zack's skin color and the shade of our new BDUs. They didn't bother
with camo schemes anymore; in any case, what was the point? And, I guess, navy
blue was the cheapest dye they had back then. The BDU itself looked more like a
SWAT team's coverall. It was light and comfortable and interwoven with Kevlar, I
think it was Kevlar, bite-proof threads. It had the option of gloves and a hood that
would cover your whole face. Later, in urban hand-to-hand, that option saved a lot
of lives.
Even-thing had kind of a retro feel about it. Our Lobos looked like something out
o{,
I don't know,
Lord of the
Rings? Standard orders were to use it only when
necessary, but, trust me, we made it necessary a
lot.
It just felt good, you know,
swingin' that solid hunk a' steel. It made it personal, empowering. You could feel
the skull split. A real rush, like you were taking back your life, you know? Not
that I minded pulling the trigger.
Our primary weapon was the SIR, standard infantry rifle. The wood furniture
made it look like a World War II gun; I guess composite materials were too hard
to mass-produce. I'm not sure where the SIR supposedly came from. I've heard it
was a modcop of the AK. I've also heard that it was a stripped-down version of the
XM 8, which the army was already planning as its next-gen assault weapon. I've
even heard that it was in-
vented, tested, and first produced during the siege of the Hero City, and the plans
were transmitted to Honolulu. Honestly, I don't know, and I so don't care. It might
have kicked hard, and it only fired on semi, but it was super accurate and it never,
ever jammed! You could drag it through the mud, leave it in the sand, you could
drop it in saltwater and let it sit there for days. No matter what you did to this
baby, it just wouldn't let you down.
1.  Tread jobs: wartime slang for vehicles chat traveled on treads.
2.   M-trip-Seven: The Cadillac Gauge Mill? Armored Security Vehicle.
3.   The chemical composition of the army's battle dress uniform (BDU) is still classified.
WORLD WAR Z         275
The only bells and whistles it had was a conversion kit of extra parts, furniture,
and additional barrels of different lengths. You could go long-range sniper, in id
range rifle, or close-combat carbine, all in the same hour, and without reaching
farther than your ruck. It also had a spike, this little flip-out job, about eight inches
long, that you could use in a pinch if your Lobo wasn't handy. We used to joke
"careful, you'll poke somebody's eye out," which, of course, we did plenty. The
SIR made a pretty good close combat weapon, even without the spike, and when
you add all the other things that made it so awesome, you can see why we always
referred to it, respect-
fully, as "Sir."
Our staple ammo was the NATO 5.56 "Cherry PIE." PIE stands for pyro-
technically initiated explosive. Outstanding design. It would shatter on entry into
Zack's skull and fragments would fry its brain. No risk of spreading infected gray
matter, and no need for wasteful bonfires. On BS duty, you didn't even have to
decap before you buried them. Just dig the trench and roll the whole body in.
Yeah, it was a new army, as much the people as anything else. Recruitment had
changed, and being a grunt meant something very different now. You still had the
old requirements-physical stamina, mental competence, the motivation and
discipline to master difficult challenges in extreme conditions-but all that was
mouse farts if you couldn't hack long-term Z-shock. I saw a lot of good friends just
lose it under the strain. Some of them collapsed, some turned their weapons on
themselves, some on their buddies. It didn't have anything to do with being brave
or anything like that. I once read this British SAS survival guide that talked all
about the "warrior" personality, how your family's supposed to be emotionally and
financially stable, and how you're not even supposed to be attracted to girls when
you're real young. [Grunts.] Survival guides . . . [Jerks his hand in a masturbatory
movement.]
But the new faces, they could have been from anywhere: your neighbor, your aunt,
that geeky substitute teacher, or that fat, lazy slob at the DMV. From former
insurance salesmen to a guy who I'm damn sure was Michael
4.  BS: Battlefield Sanitization.
Stipe, although I never got him to admit it. I guess it all made sense; anyone who
couldn't roll wouldn't have made it this far in the first place. Everyone was already
a veteran in some sense. My battle buddy, Sister Montoya, fifty-two years old,
she'd been a nun, still was I guess. Five three and a buck even, she'd protected her
whole Sunday school class for nine days with nothing but a six-foot iron
candlestick. I don't know how she managed to hump that ruck, but she did, without
complaining, from our assembly area in Needles, all the way to our contact site
just outside of Hope, New Mexico.
Hope. I'm not kidding, the town was actually named Hope.
They say the brass chose it because of the terrain, clear and open with the desert in
front and the mountains in back. Perfect, they said, for an opening engagement,
and that the name had nothing to do with it. Right.
The brass really wanted this test-op to go smoothly. It'd be the first major ground
engagement we'd fought since Yonkers. It was that moment, you know, like, when
a lot of different things all come together.
Watershed?
Yeah, I think. All the new people, the new stuff, the new training, the new-plan-
everything was supposed to sort of mix together for this one first big kickoff.
We'd encountered a couple dozen Gs en route. Sniffer dogs would find them, and
handlers with silenced weapons would drop them. We didn't want to attract too
many till we were set. We wanted this to be on our terms.
We started planting our "garden": shelter stakes with orange Day-Glo tape in rows
every ten meters. They were our range markers, showing us exactly where to zero
our sights. For some of us there was also some light duty like clearing the brush or
arranging die ammo crates.
For the rest of us, there was nothing to do except wait, just grab some chow,
recharge our camel packs, or even snag some bag time, if it was pos-sible to sleep.
We'd learned a lot since Yonkers. The brass wanted us rested. The problem was, it
gave us all too much time to think.
Did you see the movie, the one Elliot made about us? That scene with
WORLD WAR Z         277
the campfire and the grunts all jawing in this witty dialogue, the stories and the
dreams for the future, and even that guy with the harmonica. Dude, it was so not
like that. First of all, it was the middle of the day, no campf ires, no harmonica
under the stars, and also everyone was really quiet. You knew what everyone was
thinking though, "What the hell are we doing here?" This was Zack's house now,
and as far as we were concerned, he could have it. We'd all had plenty of pep talks
about "The Future of the Human Spirit." We'd seen the president's speech God
knows how many times, but the prez wasn't out here on Zack's front lawn. We had
a
good thing going behind the Rockies. What the hell were we doing out here?
Around 1300 hours, die radios started squawking, it was the K-handlers whose
dogs had made contact. We locked and loaded and took our place on the firing
line.
That was the centerpiece of our whole new battle doctrine, back into the past like
everything else. We massed in a straight line, two ranks: one active, one reserve.
The reserve was so when anyone in the front rank needed a weapon recharge, their
fire wouldn't be missed on the line. Theoretically, with everyone either firing or
reloading, we could keep Zack falling as long as the ammo held out.
We could hear the barking, the Ks were bringing them in. We started seeing Gs on
the horizon, hundreds. I started shaking even though it wasn't the first time I'd had
to face Zack since Yonkers. I'd been in the clean and sweep operations in LA. I'd
done my time in the Rockies when the sum-mer thawed the passes. Each time I got
major shakes.
The dogs were recalled, racing behind our lines. We switched over to our Primary
Enticement Mechanism. Every army had one by now. The Brits would use
bagpipes, the Chinese used bugles, the Sou'fricans used to smack their rifles with
their assegais and belt out these Zulu war chants. For us, it was hard-core Iron
Maiden. Now, personally, I've never been a metal fan. Straight classic rock's my
thing, and Hendrix's "Driving South"
5. The assegai: An alUsteel. multipurpose implement named alter the traditional
Zulu short spear.
is about as heavy as I get. But I had to admit, standing there in that desert wind,
with "The Trooper" thumping in my chest, I got it. The PEM wasn't really for
Zack's benefit. It was to psych us up, take away some of Zack's mojo, you know,
"take the piss out," as the Brits say. Right about the time Dickinson was belting
"As you plunge into a certain death" I was pumped, SIR charged and ready, eyes
fixed on this growing, closing horde. I was, like, "Cmon, Zack, let's fuckin' do
this!"
Just before they reached the front range marker, the music began to fade. The
squad leaders shouted, "Front rank, ready!" and die first line knelt. Then came the
order to "take aim!" and then, as we all held our breath, as the music clicked off,
we heard "FIRE!"
The front rank just rippled, cracking like a SAW on full auto and dropping every
G that crossed the first markers. We had strict orders, only the ones crossing the
line. Wait for the others. We'd trained this way for months. By now it was pure
instinct. Sister Montoya raised her weapon above her head, the signal for an empty
mag. We switched positions, I flipped off my safety, and sighted my first target.
She was a noob, couldn't have been dead more dian a year or so. Her dirty blond
hair hung in patches from her tight, leadiery skin. Her swollen belly puffed
through a faded black T-shirt that read G IS FOR GANGSTA. I centered my sight
between her shrunken, milky blue eyes . . . you know it's not really the eyes that
make them look all cloudy, it's actually tiny dust scratches on the surface,
thousands of them, because Zack doesn't make any tears. Those scratched-up baby
blues were looking right at me when I pulled the trigger. The round knocked her
on her back, steam coming from the hole in her forehead. I took a breath, sighted
my next target, and that was that, I was
locked in.
Doctrine calls for one shot every full second. Slow, steady, mechanical-like.
[He begins snapping his fingers.)
6. Noob: Short tor "newbies," zombies that have reanimated after the Great Panic.
WORLD WAR Z          279
On the range we practiced with metronomes, all the time the instructors saying "they ain't
in no hurry, why are you?" It was a way of keeping calm, pacing yourself. We had to be
as slow and robotic as them. "Out G the G," they used to say.
[His fingers snap in perfect rhythm.]
Shooting, switching, reloading, grabbing sips from your camel pack, grabbing clips from
the "Sandlers."
Sandlers?
Yeah, the Recharge Teams, this special reserve unit char did nothing hue make
sure we never ran dry. You only had a certain number of clips on you and it would
take a lot more time to reload each individual clip. The Sandlers ran up and down
the line collecting empty clips, recharging them from crated ammo, and then
passing them out to anyone who signaled. The story is that when the army started
training with RTs, one of the guys started doin' an Adam Sandler impression, you
know, "Water Boy"-"Ammo Boy." The officers weren't too jazzed with the tag,
hut the Recharge Teams loved it. Sandlers were lifesavers, drilled like a fuckin'
ballet. I don't think anyone that day or night ever found themselves one round
short.
That night?
They just kept coming, full on Chain Swarm.
That's
a large-scale attack?
More than that. One G sees you, comes after you, and moans. A click away,
another G hears that moan, comes after it, and moans himself, then another one
anodier click away, then another. Dude, if the area's thick enough, if the chain's
unbroken, who knows how far you can pull them in from. And we're just talking
one after the other here. Try ten every click, a hundred, a thousand.
They starred piling up, forming this artificial palisade at the first range marker, this
ridge of corpses that got higher and higher each minute. We were actually building
an undead fortification, creating a situation where all we had
to
do was pop every
head that popped over the top. The brass had planned for this. They had a
periscope tower thingy that let officers see right over the wall. They also had real-
time downlinks from satellites and recon drones, although we, the grunts, had no
idea what they were seeing. Land Warrior was gone for now so all we had to do
was concentrate on what was in front of our faces.
We started getting contacts from all sides, either coming around the wall or else
being drawn in from our flanks and even rear. Again, the brass was waiting for
this and ordered us to form an RS.
A Reinforced Square.
Or a "Raj-Singh," I guess after the guy who reinvented it. We formed a tight
square, still two ranks, with our vehicles and whatnot in the center. That was a
dangerous gamble, cutting us off like that. I mean, yeah, it didn't work that first
time in India only 'cause the ammo ran out. But there was no guarantee it wouldn't
happen again to us. What if the brass had goofed, hadn't packed enough rounds or
underestimated how strong Zack would be that day* It could have been Yonkers
all over again; worse, because no one would be getting out of there alive.
But you did have enough ammunition.
More than enough. The vehicles were packed to their roofs. We had water.
we had replacements. If you needed a fiver, you just raised your weapon and one
of the Sandlers would jump in and take our place on the firing
o
line. You'd grab a bite of I-Rations, soak your face, stretch, drain the weasel. No
one would ever volunteer for a fiver, but they had these KO   teams,
7.   M43 Combat Observation Aid.
8.   I-Rations: short for Intelligent Rations, they were designed tor maximum nutritional
efficiency.
9.   KO: short for "Knock Out."
WORLD WAR Z         281
combat shrinks who were observing everyone's performance. They'd been with us
since our early days on the range, knew us each by name and face, and knew, don't
ask me how, when the stress of battle was starting to de-grade our performance.
We didn't know, I certainly didn't. There were a couple times I'd miss a shot or
maybe take a half second instead of a full. Then suddenly I'd get this tap on my
shoulder and I knew I was out of it for five. It really worked. Before I knew it, I
was back on the line, bladder empty, stomach quiet, a few less kinks and muscle
cramps. It made a world of difference, and anyone who thinks we could have
lasted without it should try hitting a moving bull's-eye every second for fifteen
hours.
What about at night?
We used searchlights from the vehicles, powerful, red-coated beams so it didn't
mess with your night vision. The only creepy thing about night fighting, other than
the redness from the lights, is the glow a round makes when it enters the head.
That's why we called them "Cherry PIES," because if the bullet's chemcomp
wasn't mixed right, it would burn so bright it made their eyes glow red. That was a
cure for constipation, especially later on, on nights when you pulled guard duty,
and one would come at you out of the dark. Those glowing red eyes, frozen in
time the second before it falls. [Shivers.]
How did you know the battle was over?
When we stopped shooting? I Laughs. I No, that's actually a good question.
Around, I don't know, 0400, it started to taper off. Heads weren't poking out as
much. The moan was dying down. The officers didn't tell us that the attack was
almost over, but you could see them looking through their scopes, talking on their
radios. You could see the relief in their faces. I think the last shot was fired just
before dawn. After that, we just waited for first light.
It was kinda eerie, the sun rising over this mountainous ring of corpses. We were
totally walled in, all sides were piled at least twenty feet high and
over a hundred feet deep. Pm not sure how many we killed that day, stats always
vary depending on who you get it from.
The dozer-blade Humvees had to push a path through the corpse ring just to let us
get out. There were still living Gs, some slow ones who were late to the party or
who had tried to climb up and over their dead friends and had slid back down into
the mound. When we started burying the bodies they came tumbling out. That was
the only time Senor Lobo saw any action.
At least we didn't have to stick around for BS duty. They had another unit waiting
in reserve to clean up. I guess the brass figured we'd done enough for one day. We
marched ten miles to the east, set up a bivouac with watchtowers and concertainer
walls. I was so damn beat. I don't re-member the chem shower, turning in my gear
to
be disinfected, turning in my weapon for inspection: not one jam, not the whole
unit. I don't even remember slipping into my bag.
They let us sleep as late as we wanted the next day. That was pretty sweet.
Eventually the voices woke me up; everyone jawing, laughing, telling stories. It
was a different vibe, one-eighty from two days ago. I couldn't really put a finger
on what I was feeling, maybe it was what the president said about "reclaiming our
future." I just knew I felt good, better than I had the entire war. I knew it was
gonna be a real, long-ass road. I knew our campaign across America was just
beginning, but, hey, as the prez said later that first night, it was finally the
beginning of the end.
AINSWORTH, NEBRASKA, USA
[Darnell Hackworth is a shy, soft-spoken man. He and his wife run a retirement farm for
the tour-legged veterans of the army's
lO.Concertainer: A prefabricated, hollow barrier constructed of Kevlar and tilled with
earth and/or debris.
WORLD WAR Z          283
K-9 Corps. Ten years ago farms like these could be found in almost every state in the
union. Now, this is the only one left.]
They never get enough credit, I chink. There is that story
Dax,
nice little children's
book, but it's pretty simplistic, and it's only about one Dalmatian that helped an
orphan kid find his way to safety. "Dax" wasn't even in the military, and helping
lost children was a tiny fraction of dogs' over-all contribution to the fight.
The first thing they used dogs for was triage, letting them sniff for who was
infected. Most countries were just copying the Israeli method of sending people
past dogs in cages. You always had to keep them in cages, other-
wise they might attack die person, or each other, or even their handler. There was
a lot of that, early in the war, dogs just going ballistic. It didn't matter if they were
police or military. It's that instinct, that involuntary, almost genetic terror. Fight or
flight, and those dogs were bred to fight. A lot of handlers lost hands, arms, a lot
of throats got torn out. Can't blame the dogs for it. In fact, that instinct was what
the Israelis were counting on, and it probably saved millions of lives.
It was a great program, but, again, just a fraction of what dogs were truly capable
of. Whereas the Israelis and, after them, a lot of other countries only tried to
exploit that terror instinct, we thought we could integrate it into their regular
training. And why not, we learned to do it for ourselves, and are we really that
much more evolved?
It all came down to training. You had to start young; even the most disciplined,
prewar veterans were hardwired berserkers. The pups born after the crisis came
out of the womb literally smelling the dead. It was in the air, not enough for us to
detect, but just a few molecules, an introduction on a subconscious level. That's
not to say it made all of them automatic warriors. The initial induction was the
first and most important phase. You took a group of pups, a random group, or even
a whole litter, put them in a room divided by a wire mesh. They're on one side,
Zack's on the other. You didn't have to wait long for a reaction. The first group we
called Bs. They'd start whimpering or howling. They'd lost it. They were nothing
like the As. Those pups would lock eyes with Zack, that was the key. They'd stand
their ground, bare their teeth, and let out this low growl that said, "Back the tuck
off!" They could control themselves, and that was the foundation of our program.
Now, just because they could control themselves didn't mean that we could control
them. Basic training was pretty much like the standard, pre-war program. Could
they handle PT? Could they follow orders? Did they have the intelligence, and the
discipline, to make soldiers? It was hard going, and we had a 60 percent washout
rate. It wasn't uncommon for a recruit to be badly injured, perhaps even killed. A
lot of people nowadays call that inhumane, though they don't seem to have the
same sympathy for the handlers. Yeah, we had to do it, too, right alongside the
dogs, right from day one of Basic, through ten more weeks of AIT. It was hard
training, especially the Live Enemy Exercises. You know we were the first ones to
use Zack in our field training, before the infantry, before the Special Forces, even
before the Zoomies at Willow Creek? It was the only way to really know if you
could hack it, both as an individual and as a team.
How else could you have sent them on so many different missions? There were
Lures, the kind that the Battle of Hope made famous. Pretty simple stuff; your
partner hunts for Zack, then leads him into our firing line. Ks on early missions
used to be fast, run in, bark, then jam it for the kill zone. Later, they got more
comfortable. They learned to stay just a few-feet ahead, backing away slowly,
making sure they herded the maximum amount of targets. In that way, they
actually called the shots.
There were also Decoys. Let's say you were setting up a firing line but you didn't
want Zack to show up too early. Your partner would circle around the infested
zone and only start barking on the far side. That
worked with a lot of engagements, and it opened the door for the "Lemming"
tactic.
During the Denver push, there was a tall building where a couple hundred refugees
had accidentally been locked in with the infection and were now completely
reanimated. Before our guys could storm the entrance, one
1.   PT: Physical Training.
2.   AIT: Advanced Individual Training.
WORLD WAR Z         285
of the Ks had his own idea to run up to the roof of a building across the street and
start barking to draw Zack up onto the higher floors. It worked like a dream. The
Gs made it up to the roof, saw their prey, made for him, and went spilling over the
side. After Denver, Lemming went right into the playbook. Even the infantry
started using it when Ks weren't available. It wasn't uncommon to see a grunt
standing on the roof of a building, calling out to an infested building close by.
But the primary and most common mission of any K team was scouting, both SC
and LRP. SC is Sweep and Clear, just attached to a regular unit, like conventional
warfare. That's where training really paid off. Not only
could they sniff Zack out miles before us, but the sounds they made always Told
you exactly what to expect. You could tell everything you needed to know by the
pitch of the growl, and the frequency of the bark. Sometimes, when silence was
required, body language worked just as well. The arch of the K's back, die raising
of dander was all you needed to see. After a few missions, any competent handler,
and we had no other kind, could read his partner's every signal. Scouts finding a
ghoul half submerged in mud or legless among tall grass saved a lot of lives. I
can't tell you how many times a grunt would thank us personally for spotting a
concealed G that might have taken his foot off.
LRP was Long Range Patrol, when your partner would scout tar beyond your
lines, sometimes even traveling for days, to recon an infested area. They wore a
special harness with a video uplink and GPS tracker that gave you real-time intel
on the exact number and position of your targets. You could overlay Zack's
position on a preexisting map, coordinating what your partner saw with his
position on the GPS. I guess, from a technical side, it was pretty amazing, real-
time hard intel like we used
to
have before the war. The brass loved it. I didn't; I
was always too concerned with my partner. I can't tell you how stressful that was,
to
be standing in some computer-filled, air-conditioned room-safe, comfortable,
and totally helpless. Later harness models had radio uplinks, so a handler could
relay orders or, at least, abort the mission. I never worked with them. Teams had to
be trained on those from the beginning. You couldn't go back and retrain a
seasoned K. You couldn't teach an old dog new tricks. Sorry, bad joke. I heard a
lot
of those from the intel pukes; standing behind them as they watched the damn
monitor, mentally stroking it to the wonders
ot
their new "Data Orientation Asset."
They thought they were so witty. Real fun for us to have DOA as an acronym.
[He shakes his head.]
I just had to stand there, thumb up my ass, watching my partner's POV as she crept
through some forest, or marsh, or town. Towns and cities, that was die hardest.
That was my team's specialty. Hound Town. You ever heard of that ?
The K-9 Uiban Warfare School?
That's it, a real town: Mitchell, Oregon. Sealed off, abandoned, and still tilled with
active Gs. Hound Town. It actually should have been called Terry town, because
most of the breeds at Mitchell were small terriers. Little cairns and Norwiches and
JRs, good for rubble and narrow choke points. Personally, the hound in Hound
Town suited me just fine. I worked with a dachle. They were, by far, the ultimate
urban war fighters. Tough, smart, and, especially the minis, completely at home in
confined spaces. In fact, that's what they were originally bred for; "badger dog,"
that's what dachshund means in German. That's why they had that hot dog look, so
they could hunt in low, narrow badger burrows. You see how that kind of breed-
ing already made them suited to the ducts and crawl spaces of an urban
battleground. The ability to go through a pipe, an airshaft, in between walls,
whatever, without losing their cool, was a major survival asset.
[We are interrupted. As if on cue, a dog limps over to Darnell's side. She is old. Her
muzzle is white, the fur on her ears and tail
is worn to leather.]
[To the dog.] Hey, little miss.
WORLD WAR Z          287
[Darnell gingerly lifts hei to his lap. She is small, no more than eight 01 nine pounds.
Although she bears some resemblance to a smooth-haired, miniature dachshund, her
back is shorter than the standard breed.)
[To the dog.] You Join' okay, Maze? You teel all n-lit' [To me.] I lor lull name's
Maisey, but we never used it. "Maze" was pretty fitting, don't you
think'
[With one hand he massages her back legs while with the other he rubs under her
neck. She looks up at him with milky eyes. She licks his palm.l
Pure bloods were a total washout. Too neurotic, too many health problems,
everything you'd expect from breeding an animal for just its aesthetic qualities.
The new generation [he gestures to the mutt on his lap] was always a mix,
whatever would increase both physical constitution and mental stability.
[The dog has gone to sleep. Darnell lowers his voice.]
They were tough, took a lot of training, not just individually but for working in
groups on LRP missions. Long range, especially over wild terrain, was always
risky. Not just from Zack, but also from feral Ks. Remember how bad they were*
All those pets and strays that degenerated into killer packs. They were always a
concern, usually in transition through low-infestation zones, always looking for
something to eat. A lot of LRP missions were aborted in the beginning before we
deployed escort dogs.
[He refers to the sleeping dog.]
She had two escorts. Pongo, who was a pit-rot mix, and Perdy ... I don't really
know what Perdy was, part shepherd, part stegosaurus. I wouldn't
have let her anywhere near them if I hadn't gone through basic with their handlers.
They turned out to be first-rate escorts. Fourteen times they chased oft feral packs,
twice they really got into it. I watched Perdy go after this two-hundred-pound
mastiff, grab its skull in her jaws, you could actu-ally hear the crack over the
harness's surveillance mtc.
The toughest part for me was making sure Maze stuck to the mission. She always
wanted to fight. [Smiles down at the sleeping dachshund.] They were good
escorts, always made sure she ^»t to her target objective, waited for her, and
always got her home safely. You know they even took down a few Gs in transit.
But isn't Z flesh toxic?
Oh yeah . . . no, no, no, they never bit. That would have been fatal. You'd see a lot
of dead Ks in the beginning of the war, just lying there, no wounds, and you knew
they'd bitten infected flesh. That's one of the reasons training was so important.
They had to know how to defend themselves. Zaek s L;ot a lot of physical
advantages, bur balance isn't one of them. The bigger Ks could always hit between
the shoulder blades or the small of the back, just knock them on their faces. The
minis had the option of tripping, getting underfoot, or launching themselves at the
knee-pit. Maze always preferred that, dropped 'em right on their backs!
[The dog stirs.]
[To Maze.l Oh, sorry, little miss. [Strokes the back of hei neck.l [To me.l By the
time Zack got back up, you'd bought yourself five, maybe ten, fifteen seconds.
We had our share of casualties. Some Ks would have a fall, break a bone ... If they
were close to friendly forces, their handler could pick them up pretty easily, get
them to safety. Most of the time they even returned to active duty.
WORLD WAR Z        289
What about the other times?
If they were too far, a Lure or an LRP . .. too far for rescue and too close to Zack
... we petitioned for Mercy Charges, little explosive packs strapped to the harness
so we could detonate them if it looked like there wasn't any chance of rescue. We
never got them. "A waste of valuable resources." Cocksuckers. Putting a wounded
soldier out of his misery was a waste but turning them into Fragmuts, now, that
they'd consider!
Excuse
me?
"Fragmuts." Thar was the unofficial name for the program that almost,
almost
got
the green light. Some staff asshole'd read that the Russians had used "mine dogs"
during World War II, strapped explosives to their backs and trained them to run
under Nazi tanks. The only reason Ivan ended his program was the same reason
we never began ours: the situation was no longer desperate enough. How fucking
desperate do you have to be?
They'll never say it, but I think what stopped them was the threat of another
Eckhart incident. That really woke 'em up. You know about that, right? Sergeant
Eckhart, God bless her. She was a senior handler, operated up with AGN. I never
met her. Her partner was pulling a Lure mission outside Little Rock, fell in a ditch,
broke his leg. The swarm was only a few steps away. Eckhart grabbed a rifle, tried
to go out after him. Some officer got in her face, started spouting regs and half-
assed justifications. She emptied half a clip in his mouth. MPs tackled her ass,
held her on the ground. She could hear everything as the dead surrounded her
partner.
What happened?
They hung her, public execution, real high profile. I understand, no, I really do.
Discipline was everything, rule of law, that's all we had. But you better
3. AGN: Army Group North.
fucking believe there were some changes. Handlers were allowed to go after their
partners, even if it meant risking their own lives. We weren't considered assets
anymore, we were half-assets. For the first time the army saw us as teams, that a
dog wasn't just a piece of machinery you could replace when "broken." They
started looking at statistics of handlers who offed themselves after losing a partner.
You know we had the highest rate of suicide among any branch of the sendee.
More than Special Forces, more than Graves Registration, even more than those
sick fucks at China Lake. At Hound Town I met handlers from thirteen other
countries. They all said the same thing. It didn't matter where you were from, what
your culture or background, the feelings were still the same. Who could suffer that
kind of loss and come out in one piece? Anyone who could wouldn't have made a
handler in the first place. That's what made us our own breed, that ability to bond
so strongly with something that's not even our own species. The very thing that
made so many of my friends take the bullets way out was what made us one of the
most successful outfits in the whole fucking U.S. military.
The army saw it in me that day on a stretch of deserted road somewhere in the
Colorado Rockies. I'd been on foot since escaping my apartment in Atlanta, three
months of running, hiding, scavenging. I had rickets, fever, I was down to ninety-
six pounds. I found these two guys under a tree. They were making a fire. Behind
them was this little mutt. His paws and snout were bound with shoelaces. Dried
blood was caked on his face. He was just lying there, glassy-eyed, whimpering
softly.
What happened?
You know, I honestly don't remember. I must have hit one of them with my bat.
They found it cracked over his shoulder. They found me on the other guy, just
pounding his face in. Ninety-six pounds, half dead myself, and I beat this guy to
within an inch of his life. The Guardsmen had to pull me off, cuff me to a car hulk,
smack me a couple times to get me to refocus. That, I remember. One of the guys I
attacked was holding his arm, the
4- China Lake weapoas research facility.
WORLD WAR Z         291
other one was just lying there bleeding. "Calm the fuck down," the LT said, trying
to question me, "What's wrong with you? Why'd you do that to your friends?"
"He's not our friend!" the one with the broken arm yelled, "he's fuckin' crazy!"
And all I kept saying was "Don't hurt the dog! Don't hurt the dog!" 1 remember the
Guardsmen just laughed. "Jesus Christ," one of them said looking down at the two
guys. The LT nodded, then looked at me. "Buddy," he said, "I think we got a job
for you." And that's how I got recruited. Sometimes you find your path, sometimes
it finds you.
[Darnell pets Maze. She cracks one eyelid. Her leathery tail wags.]
What happened to the dog?
I wish I could give you a Disney ending, like he became my partner or ended up
saving a whole orphanage from a fire or something. They'd hit him with a rock to
knock him out. Fluid built up in his ear canals. He lost all hearing in one and
partial hearing in the other. But his nose still worked and he did make a pretty
good ratter once I found him a home. He hunted enough vermin to keep that
family fed all winter. That's kind of a Disney ending, I guess, Disney with Mickey
stew. [Laughs softly.] You wanna know something crazy? I used to hate dogs.
Really?
Despised them; dirty, smelly, slobbering germ bags that humped your leg and
made the carpet smell like piss. God, I hated them. I was that guy who'd come
over to your house and refuse to pet the dog. I was the guy at work who always
made fun of people with dog pictures on their desk. You know that guy who'd
always threaten to call Animal Control when your pooch barked at night'
[Motions to himself.]
I lived a block away from a pet store. I used to drive by it every day on my way to
work, confounded by how these sentimental, socially incompetent losers could
shell out so much money on oversized, barking hamsters. During die Panic, the
dead started to collect around that pet shop. I don't know where the owner was.
He'd pulled down the gates but left the animals inside. I could hear them from my
bedroom window. All day, all night. Just puppies, you know, a couple of weeks
old. Scared little babies screaming for their mommies, for anyone, to please come
and save them.
I heard them die, one by one as their water bottles ran out. The dead never got in.
They were still massed outside the gate when I escaped, ran right past without
stopping to look. What could I have done? I was unarmed, untrained. I couldn't
have taken care of them. I could barely take care of myself. What could I have
done?. . . Something.
[Maze sighs in her sleep. Darnell pats her gently.]
I could have done something.
SIBERIA, THE HOLY RUSSIAN EMPIRE [The people who exist in this shantytown do
so under the most
primitive conditions. There is no electricity, no running water. The huts are grouped
together behind a wall cut from the surrounding trees. The smallest hovel belongs to
Father Sergei Ryzhkov. It is a miracle to see how the old cleric is still able to function.
His walk reveals the numeious wartime and postwar injuries. The handshake reveals
that all his fingers have been broken. His attempt at a smile reveals that those teeth not
black with decay have been knocked out a long time ago.)
WORLD WAR Z          293
In order to understand how we became a "religious scare," and how that state
began with a man like me, you have to understand the nature of our war against
the undead.
As with so many other conflicts, our greatest ally was General Winter. The biting
cold, lengthened and strengthened by the planet's darkened skies, gave us the time
we needed to prepare our homeland for liberation. Unlike the United States, we
were fighting a war on two fronts. We had the Ural barrier in the west, and the
Asian swarms from the southeast. Siberia had been stabilized, finally, but was by
no means completely secure.
We had so many refugees from India and China, so many frozen ghouls that
chawed, and continue To thaw, each spring. We needed those winter months to
reorganize our forces, marshal our population, inventory and distribute our vast
stocks of military hardware.
We didn't have the war production of other countries. There was no Department of
Strategic Resources in Russia: no Industry other than finding enough food to keep
our people alive. What we did have was our legacy of a military industrial state. I
know you in the West have always laughed at us for this "folly." "Paranoid
Ivan"-that's what you called us- "building tanks and guns while his people cry out
for cars and butter." Yes, the Soviet Union was backward and inefficient and yes,
it did bankrupt our economy on mountains of military might, but when the
motherland needed them, those mountains were what saved her children.
[He refers to the faded poster on the wall behind him. It shows the ghostly image of an
old Soviet soldier reaching down from heaven to hand a crude submachine gun to
a grateful young Russian. The caption underneath reads "Dyedooshka, Spaciba"
(Thank you, Grandfather).!
I was a chaplain with the Thirty'Second Motor Rifle division. We were a Category
D unit; fourth-class equipment, the oldest in our arsenal. We looked like extras in
an old Great Patriotic War movie with our PPSH submachine guns and our bolt-
action Mosin-Nagant rifles. We didn't have
your fancy, new battle dress uniform. We wore the tunics of our grandfathers:
rough, moldy, moth-eaten wool that could barely keep the cold out, and did
nothing to protect against bites.
We had a very high casualty rate, most of it in urban combat, and most of that due
to faulty ammunition. Those rounds were older than us; some of them had been
sitting in crates, open to die elements, since before Stalin breathed his last. You
never knew when a "Cugov" would happen, when your weapon would "click" at
the moment a ghoul was upon you. That happened a lot in the Thirty-second
Motor Rifle division.
We weren't as neat and organized as your army. We didn't have your tight, light
little Raj-Singh squares or your frugal "one shot, one kill" combat doctrine. Our
battles were sloppy and brutal. We plastered the enemy in DShK heavy machine-
gun fire, drowned them with flamethrowers and Katyusha rockets, and crushed
them under the treads of our prehistoric T-34 tanks. It was inefficient and wasteful
and resulted in too many needless deaths.
Ufa was the first major battle of our offensive. It became the reason we stopped
going into the cities and started walling them up during winter. We learned a lot of
lessons those first months, charging headlong into the rubble after hours of
merciless artillery, fighting block by block, house by house, room by room. There
were always too many zombies, too many misfires, and always too many bitten
boys.
We didn't have L pills like in your army. The only way to deal with infection was
a bullet. But who was going to pull the trigger* Certainly not the other soldiers. To
kill your comrade, even in cases as merciful as infection, was too reminiscent of
the decimations. That was the irony of it all.
The decimations had given our armed forces the strength and discipline to do
anything we asked of them, anything but that. To ask, or even order, one soldier to
kill another was crossing a line that might have sparked another mutiny.
For a while the responsibility rested with the leadership, the officers and
1. L (Lethal) pill: A term to describe any poison capsule and one of the options
available to infected U.S. military combatants during World War Z.
WORLD WAR Z         295
senior sergeants. We couldn't have made a more damaging decision. To have to
look into the faces of these men, these boys whom you were responsible for,
whom you fought with side by side, shared bread and blankets, saved his lite or
have htm save yours. Who can focus on the monumental burden of leadership after
having to commit such an act?
We began to see a noticeable degradation among our field commanders.
Dereliction of duty, alcoholism, suicide-suicide became almost epidemic among
the officer corps. Our division lost four experienced leaders, three junior
lieutenants, and a major, all during the first week of our first cam-
paign. Two of the lieutenants shot themselves, one right after committing the deed,
and the other later that night. The third platoon leader chose a more passive
method, what we began to call "suicide by combat." He volunteered for
increasingly dangerous missions, acting more like a reckless enlisted man than a
responsible leader. He died trying to take on a dozen ghouls with nothing but a
bayonet.
Major Kovpak just vanished. No one knows exactly when. We knew he couldn't
have been taken. The area was thoroughly swept and no one, absolutely no one left
the perimeter without an escort. We all knew what probably happened. Colonel
Savichev put out an official statement that the major had been sent on a long-range
recon mission and had never returned. He even went so far as to recommend him
for a first-class Order of the Rodina. You can't stop the rumors, and nothing is
worse for a unit's morale than to know that one of their officers had deserted. I
could not blame the man, I still cannot. Kovpak was a good man, a strong leader.
Before the crisis he had done three tours in Chechnya and one in Dagestan. When
the dead began to rise, he not only prevented his company from revolting, but led
them all, on foot, carrying both supplies and wounded from Curta in the Salib
Mountains all the way to Manaskent on the Caspian Sea. Sixty-five days, thirty-
seven major engagements. Thirty-seven! He could have become an instructor-he'd
more than earned the right-and had even been asked by STAVKA because of his
extensive combat experience. But no, he volunteered for an immediate return to
action. And now he was a deserter. They used to call this "the Second
Decimation," the fact
that almost one in every ten officers killed themselves in those days, a decimation
that almost brought our war effort to a crushing halt.
The logical alternative, the only one, was to therefore let the boys commit the act
themselves. I can still remember their faces, dirty and pimply, their red-rimmed
eyes wide as they closed their mouths around their titles. What else could be done?
It wasn't long before they began to kill themselves in groups, all those who'd been
bitten in a battle gathering at the field hospital to synchronize the moment when
they would all pull the trigger. I guess it was comforting, knowing that they
weren't dying alone. It was probably the only comfort they could expect. They
certainly didn't get it from me.
I was a religious man in a country that had long since lost its faith. Decades of
communism followed by materialistic democracy had left this generation of
Russians with little knowledge of, or need for, "the opium of the masses." As a
chaplain, my duties were mainly to collect letters from the condemned boys to
their families, and to distribute any vodka I managed to find. It was a next-to-
useless existence, I knew, and the way our country was headed, I doubted anything
would occur to change that.
It was right after the battle for Kostroma, just a few weeks before the official
assault on Moscow. I had come to the field hospital to give last rights to the
infected. They had been set apart, some badly mauled, some still healthy and lucid.
The first boy couldn't have been older than seventeen. He wasn't bitten, that would
have been merciful. The zombie had had its forearms ripped off by the treads of an
SU-152 self-propelled gun. All that remained was hanging flesh and broken
humerus bones, jagged at the
edges, sharp like spears. They stabbed right through the boy's tunic where whole
hands would have just grabbed him. He was lying on a cot, bleeding from his
belly, ashen-faced, rifle quivering in his hand. Next to him was a row of five other
infected soldiers. I went through the motions of telling them I would pray for their
souls. They either shrugged or nodded politely. I took their letters, as I'd always
done, gave them a drink, and even passed out a couple cigarettes from their
commanding officer. Even though I'd done this many times, somehow I felt
strangely different. Something was stirring within me, a tense, tingling sensation
that began to work its way
WORLD WAR Z         297
up through my heart and lungs. I began to feel my whole body tremble as the
soldiers all placed the muzzles of their weapons underneath their chins. "On
three," die oldest of them said. "One . . . two . . ." That was as far as they got. The
seventeen-year-old flew backward and hit the ground. The others stared
dumbfounded at the bullet hole in his forehead, then up to the smoking pistol in
my hand, in God's hand.
God was speaking to me, I could feel his words ringing in my head. "No more
sinning," he told me, "no more souls resigned to hell." It was so clear, so simple.
Officers killing soldiers had cost us too many good officers, and
soldiers killing themselves had cost the Lord too many good souls. Suicide was a
sin, and we, his servants-those who had chosen to be his shepherds upon the earth-
were the
only
ones who should bear the cross of releasing trapped souls from
infected bodies! That is what I told division commander after he discovered what
I'd done, and that is the message that spread first to every chaplain in the field and
then to every civilian priest throughout Mother Russia.
What later became known as the act of "Final Purification" was only the first step
of a religious fervor that would surpass even the Iranian revolution of the 1980s.
God knew his children had been dented his love for too long. They needed
direction, courage, hope! You could say that it is the reason we emerged from that
war as a nation of faith, and have continued to rebuild our state, on the basis of
that faith.
Is there any truth to the
stories
of that philosophy being perverted for political
reasons?
[Pause.] I don't understand.
The president declared himself head of the Church . . .
Can't a national leader feel God's love?
But what about organizing priests into "death squads," and assassinating people
under the premise of "purifying infected victims"?
[Pause.] I don't know what you're Talking about.
Isn't that why you eventually fell out with Moscow? Isn't that why you're here?
[There is a long pause. We hear the sounds ol footsteps approaching. Someone knocks
at the door. Father Sergei opens it to find a small, ragged child. Mud stains his pale,
frightened face. He speaks in a frantic, local dialect, shouting and pointing up the road.
The old priest nods solemnly, pats the boy on the shoulder, then turns to me.l
Thank you for coming. Will you excuse me, please'
[As I rise to leave, he opens a large wooden chest at the foot of his bed, removing both a
bible and a World War II-era pistol.]
ABOARD USS
HOLO KAI,
OFF THE COAST OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS
[Deep Glider 7
looks more like a twin fuselage aircraft than a
minisub. I lie on my stomach in the starboard hull, looking out through a thick,
transparent nose cone. My pilot, Master Chief Petty Officer Michael Choi, waves at me
from the port hull. Choi is one of the "old-timers," possibly the most experienced diver in
the U.S. Navy's Deep Submergence Combat Corps 1DSCC). His gray temples and
weathered crow's-feet clash violently with his almost adolescent enthusiasm. As the
mother ship lowers us into the choppy Pacific, I detect a trace of "surfer dude" bleeding
through Choi's otherwise neutral accent.]
WORLD WAR Z          299
My war never ended. If anything, you could say it's still escalating. Every month
we expand our operations and improve our material and human assets. They say
there are still somewhere between twenty and thirty million of them, still washing
up on beaches, or getting snagged in fishermen's nets. You can't work an offshore
oil rig or repair a transatlantic cable without running into a swarm. That's what this
dive is about: trying to find them, track diem, and predict their movements so
maybe we can have some advance warning.
[We hit the whitecaps with a jarring thud. Choi grins, checks his instruments, and
shifts the channels on his radio from me to the
mother ship. The water before my observation dome froths white for a second, then gives way to
light blue as we submerge.]
You're not going to ask me about scuba gear or titanium shark suits, are you,
because that crap's got nothing to do with my war? Spear guns and bang sticks and
zombie river nets ... I can't help you with any of that. If you want civilians, talk to
civilians.
But the military did use those methods.
Only for brown water ops, and almost exclusively by army pukes. Personally, I've
never worn a mesh suit or a scuba rig . . . well . . . ac least not in combat. My war
was strictly ADS. Atmospheric Diving Suit. Kind of like a space suit and a suit of
armor all rolled into one. The technology actually goes back a couple hundred
years, when some guy invented a barrel with a faceplate and arm holes. After that
you had stuff like the Tritonia and the Neufeldt-Kuhnke. They looked like
something out of an old 1950s sci-fi movie, "Robby the Robot" and shit. It all
kinda tell by the wayside when ... do you reallv care about all this'
yes,
please.. .
1. John Lethbridge. circa 1715.
Well, that sort of technology fell by the wayside when scuba was invented. It only
made a comeback when divers had to go deep, real deep, to work on offshore oil
rigs. You see . . . the deeper you go, the greater the pressure; the greater the
pressure, the more dangerous it is for scuba or similar mixed-gas rigs. You've got
to spend days, sometimes weeks, in a decompression chamber, and if, for some
reason, you have to shoot up to the surface . . . you get the bends, gas bubbles in
the blood, in die brain . . . and we're not even talking about long-term health
hazards like bone necrosis, soaking your body with shit nature never intended
to
be there.
[He pauses to check his instruments.]
The safest way to dive, to go deeper, to stay down longer, was to enclose your
whole body in a bubble of surface pressure.
[He gestures to the compaitments around us.]
Just like we are now-safe, protected, still on the surface as far as our bodies'
concerned. That's what an ADS does, its depth and duration only limited by armor
and life support.
So
it's like a personal submarine?
"Submersible." A submarine can stay down for years, maintaining its own power,
making its own air. A submersible can onlv make short duration
dives, like World War II subs or what we're in now.
[The water begins to darken, deepening to a purplish ink.]
The very nature of an ADS, the fact that it's really just a suit of armor, makes it
ideal for blue and black water combat. I'm not knocking soft suits, you know,
shark or other mesh rigs. They've got ten times the maneuver-
WORLD WAR Z          301
ability, the speed, the agility, but they're strictly shallow water at best, and if for
some reason a couple of those fuckers get ahold of you . . . I've seen mesh divers
with broken arms, broken ribs, three with broken necks. Drowning . . . if your air
line was punctured or the regulator's ripped out of your mouth. Even in a hard
helmet on a mesh-lined dry suit, all they'd have to do is hold you down, let your
air run out. I've seen too many guys go out that way, or else try to race for the
surface and let an embolism finish what Zack started.
Did that happen a lot to mesh suit divers?
Sometimes, especially in the beginning, but it never happened to us. There was no
risk of physical danger. Both your body and your life support are encased in a
cast-aluminum or high-strength composite shell. Most models' joints are steel or
titanium. No matter which way Zack turned your arms, even it he managed to get a
solid grip, which is hard considering how smooth and round everything is, it was
physically impossible to break oft a limb. If for some reason you need to jet up to
the surface, just jettison your ballast or your thruster pack, if you had one ... all
suits are positively buoyant. They pop right up like a cork. The only risk might be
if Zack were clinging to you during the ascent. A couple times I've had buddies
surface with uninvited passengers hanging on for dear life ... or undeath.
[Chuckles.]
Balloon ascents almost never happened in combat. Most ADS models have forty-
eight hours emergency life support. No matter how many Gs dog-piled you, no
matter if a hunk of debris came crumbling down or your leg got snagged in an
underwater cable, you could sit tight, snug and safe, and just wait for the cavalry.
No one ever dives alone, and I think the longest any ADS diver has ever had to
cool his heels was six hours. There were times, more than I can count on my
fingers, where one of us would get snagged, report it, then follow up by saying
that there was no immediate danger, and that the rest of the team should assist only
after
accomplishing their mission.
you say
ADS models. Was there more than one type?
We had a bunch: civilian, military, old, new . . . well. . . relatively new. We
couldn't build any wartime models, so we had to work with what was already
available. Some of the older ones dated back to the seventies, the JIMs and SAMs.
I'm really glad I never had to operate any of those. They only had universal joints
and portholes instead of a face bowl, at least on the early JIMs. I knew one guy,
from the British Special Boat Service. He had these mondo blood blisters all along
his inner thighs from where the JIM's leg joints pinched his skin. Kick-ass divers,
the SBS, but I'd never swap jobs with them.
We had three basic U.S. Navy models: the Hardsuit 1200, the 2000, and the Mark
1 Exosuit. That was my baby, the exo. You wanna talk about sci-fi, this thing
looked like it was made to fight giant space termites. It was much slimmer than
either of the two hardsuits, and light enough that you could even swim. That was
the major advantage over the hardsuit, actually over all other ADS systems. To be
able to operate above your enemy, even without a power sled or thruster packs,
that more than made up for the fact that you couldn't scratch your itches. The
hardsuits were big enough to allow your arms to he pulled into the central cavity
to allow you to operate secondary equipment.
What kind of equipment?
Lights, video, side scanning sonar. The hardsuits were full-service units, exos
were the bargain basement. You didn't have to worry about a lot of
readouts and machinery. You didn't have any of the distractions or the
multitasking of the hardsuits. The exo was sleek and simple, allowing you to focus
on your weapon and the field in front of you.
What kind of weapons did you use?
At first we had the M-9, kind of a cheap, modified, knockoff of the Russian APS. I
say "modified" because no ADS had anything close to resem-
WORLD WAR Z         303
bling hands. You either had four-pronged claws or simple, industrial pincers. Both
worked as hand-to-hand weapons-just grab a G's head and squeeze-but they made
it impossible to fire a gun. The M-9 was fixed to your forearm and could be fired
electrically. It had a laser pointer for accuracy and air-encased cartridges that fired
these four-inch-long steel rods. The major problem was that they were basically
designed for shallow water operations. At the depth we needed, they imploded like
eggshells. About a year in we got a much more efficient model, the M-ll, actually
invented by the same guy who invented both the hardsuit and exo. I hope that
crazy Canuck got an assload of medals for what he's done for us. The only prob-
lem with it was that DeStRes thought production was too expensive. They kept
telling us that between our claws and preexisting construction tools, we had more
than enough to handle Zack.
What changed their minds?
Troll. We were in the North Sea, repairing that Norwegian natural gas platform,
and suddenly there they were . . . We'd expected some kind of attack-the noise and
light of the construction site always attracted at least a handful
o{
them. We didn't
know a swarm was nearby. One of our sentries sounded off, we headed for his
beacon, and we were suddenly inundated. Horrible thing to fight hand-to-hand
underwater. The bottom churns up, your visibility is shot, like fighting inside a
glass of milk. Zombies don't just die when you hit them, most of the time they
disintegrate, fragments of muscle, organ, brain matter, mixed up with the silt and
swirling around you. Kids today . . . tuckin' A, I sound like my pops, but it's true,
the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this
"ZeVDeK"-Zero Visibility Detection Kit-with color-imaging sonar and low-light
optics. The picture is relayed through a heads-up display right on your face bowl
like a fighter plane. Throw in a pair of stereo hydrophones and you've got a real
sensory advantage over Zack. That was not the case when I first went exo. We
couldn't see, we couldn't hear-we couldn't even feel if a G was trying to grab us
from behind.
Why was that?
Because the one fundamental flaw of an ADS is complete tactile blackout. The
simple fact that the suit is hard means you can't feel anything from the outside
world, even if a G has his hands right on you. Unless Zack is actively tugging,
trying to pull you back or flip you around, you may not know he's there until his
face is right up against yours. That night at Troll. . . our helmet lights only made
the problem worse by throwing up a glare that was only broken by an undead hand
or face. That was the only time I was ever spooked . . . not scared, you understand,
just spooked, swinging in diis liquid chalk and suddenly a rotting face is jammed
against my face bowl.
The civilian oil workers, they wouldn't go back to work, even under threat of
reprisals, until we, their escorts, were better armed. They'd lost enough of their
people already, ambushed out of the darkness. Can't imagine what that must have
been like. You're in this dry suit, working in near pitch-black, eyes stinging from
the light of the welding torch, body numb from the cold or else burning from the
hot water pumped through the system. Suddenly you feel these hands, or teeth.
You struggle, call for help, try to fight or swim as they pull you up. Maybe a few
body parts will rise to the surface, maybe they'll just pull up a severed lifeline.
That was how the DSCC came into being as an official outfit. Our first mission
was to protect the rig divers, keep the oil flowing. Later we expanded to
beachhead sanitation and harbor clearing.
What is beachhead sanitation?
Basically, helping the jarheads get ashore. What we Learned during Bermuda, our
first amphibious landing, was that the beachhead was coming under constant
attack by Gs walking out of the surf. We had to establish a perimeter, a
semicircular net around the proposed landing area that was deep enough for ships
to pass over, but high enough to keep out Zack. That's where we came in. Two
weeks before the landings took place, a
WORLD WAR Z         305
ship would anchor several miles offshore and start banging away with their active
sonar. That was to draw Zack away from the beach.
Wouldn't that sonar also lure in zombies from deeper water?
The brass told us that was an "acceptable risk." I think they didn't have anything
better. That's why it was an ADS op, too risky for mesh divers. You knew that
masses were gathering under that pinging ship, and that once they went silent,
you'd be the brightest target out there. It actually
turned out to be the closest thing we ever had to a Cakewalk. The attack frequency
was the lowest by far, and when the nets were up, they had an ah most perfect
success rate. All you needed was a skeleton force to keep a constant vigil, maybe
snipe the occasional G that tried to climb the fence. They didn't really need us for
this kind of op. After the first three landings, they went back to using mesh divers.
And harbor clearing?
That was nor a cakewalk. That was in the final stages of the war, when it wasn't
just about opening a beachhead, but reopening harbors for deep-water shipping.
That was a massive, combined operation: mesh divers, ADS units, even civilian
volunteers with nothing but a scuba rig and a spear gun. I helped clear Charleston,
Norfolk, Boston, freakin' Boston, and the mother of all subsurface nightmares, the
Hero City. I know grunts like to bitch about fighting to clear a city, but imagine a
city underwater, a city of sunken ships and cars and planes and every kind of
debris imaginable. During the evacuation, when a lot of container ships were
trying to make as much room as they could, a lot of them dumped their cargo
overboard. Couches, toaster ovens, mountains and mountains of clothes. Plasma
TVs always crunched when you walked over them. I always imagined it was bone.
I also imagined I could see Zack behind each washer and dryer, climbing over
each pile of smashed air conditioners. Sometimes it was just my imagination, but
sometimes . . . The worst. . . the worst was having to
clear a sunken ship. There were always a few char had gone down within the
harbor boundaries. A couple, like the Frank
Cable,
big sub tender turned refugee
ship, had gone down right at the mouth of the harbor. Before she could be raised,
we had to do a compartment-by-compartment sweep. That was the only time the
exo ever felt bulky, unwieldy. I didn't smack my head in
every
passageway, but it
sure as hell felt like it. A lot of the hatches were blocked by debris. We either had
to cut our way through them, or through the decks and bulkheads. Sometimes the
deck had been weakened by damage or corrosion. I was cutting through a
bulkhead above the
Cablets
engine room when suddenly the deck just collapsed
under me. Before I could swim, before 1 could think . . . there were hundreds of
them in the engine room. I was engulfed, drowning in legs and arms and hunks of
meat. If I ever had a recurring nightmare, and I'm not saying I do, because I don't,
but if I did, I'd be right back in diere, only this time I'm completely naked ... I
mean I
would
be.
[I am surprised at how quickly we reach the bottom. It looks like a desert wasteland,
glowing white against the permanent darkness. I see the stumps of wire coral, broken
and trampled by the living dead.]
There thev are.
[I look up to see the swarm, roughly sixty of them, walking out of the desert night.l
And here we go.
[Choi maneuvers us above them. They reach up for oui searchlights, eyes wide and
jaws slack. I can see the dim red beam of the laser as it settles on the first target. A
second later, a small
dart is fired into its chest.1
And
one,..
WORLD WAR Z          307
[He centers his beam on a second subject.]
And two . . .
[He moves down the swarm, tagging each one with a nonlethal shot.]
Kills me not To kill rhem. I mean, I know the whole point is to study their
movements, set up an early warning network. I know that if we had the resources
to clear them all we would. Still. . .
[He darts a sixth target. Like all the others, this one is oblivious to the small hole in its
sternum.]
How do they do it? How are they still around ? Nothing in the world corrodes like
saltwater. These Gs should have gone way before the ones on land. Their clothes
sure did, anything organic like cloth or leather.
[The figures below us are practically naked.]
So why not the rest of them.' Is it the temperature at these depths, is it the
pressure? And why do they have such a resistance to pressure anyway? At this
depth the human nervous system should be completely Jell-O-ized. They shouldn't
even be able to stand, let alone walk and "think" or whatever their version of
thinking is. How do they do it? I'm sure someone real high up has all the answers
and I'm sure die only reason they don't tell me is ...
[He is suddenly distracted by a flashing light on his instrument
panel.]
Hey, hey, hey. Check this out.
[I look down at my own panel. The readouts are incomprehensible.]
We got a hot one, pretty healthy rad count. Must be from the Indian Ocean, Iranian
or Paid, or maybe that ChiCom attack boat that went down oft Manihi. How about
that'
[He fires another dart.I
You're lucky. This is one of the last manned recon dives. Next month it's all ROV,
100 percent Remotely Operated Vehicles.
There's been a lot of controversy over the use of ROVs for combat.
Never happen. The Sturge's got way too much star power. She'd never let
Congress go 'droid on us.
Is there any validity to their argument?
What, you mean if robots are more efficient fighters than ADS divers? Hell no. All
that talk about "limiting human casualties" is bullshit. We never lost a man in
combat, not one! That guy they keep talking about, Chernov, he was killed after
the war, on land, when he got wasted and passed out on a tram line. Fuckin'
politicians.
Maybe ROVs are more cost-effective, but one thing they're not is
better.
I'm not
just talking about artificial intelligence; I'm talking heart, instinct, initiative,
everything that makes us us. That's why I'm still here, same with the Sturge, and
almost all the other vets who took the plunge during the war. Most of us are still
involved because we have to be, because they still
haven't yet come up with a collection of chips and bits to replace us. Believe me,
once they do, I'll not only never look at an exosuit again, I'll quit the navy and pull
a full-on Alpha November Alpha.
2. "The Sturgeon General": The old civilian nickname tor the present commander
of the DSCC.
WORLD WAR Z         309
What's that?
Action
in the
North Atlantic, this old, black-and-white war flick. There's a guy in
it, you know the "Skipper" from
Gilligan's Island,
his old man. He had a line . . .
"I'm putting an oar on my shoulder and I'm starting inland. And the first time a guy
says to me 'What's that on your shoulder?' diat's where I'm settling for the rest of
my life."
QUEBEC, CANADA
[The small farmhouse has no wall, no bars on the windows, and no lock on the door.
When I ask the owner about his vulnerability he simply chuckles and resumes his lunch.
Andre Renaid, brother of the legendary war hero Emil Renard, has requested that I keep
his exact location secret. "I don't care if the dead find me," he says without feeling, "but I
care very little for the living." The former French national immigrated to this place after
the official end of hostilities in western Europe. Despite numerous invitations from the
French government, he has not returned.)
Everyone else is a liar, everyone who claims that their campaign was "the hardest
of the entire war." All chose ignorant peacocks who beat their chests and brag
about "mountain warfare" or "jungle warfare" or "urban warfare." Cities, oh how
they love to brag about cities! "Nothing more ter-rifying than fighting in a city!"
Oh really? Try underneath one.
3. Alan Hale, Senior.
Do you know why the Parts skyline was devoid of skyscrapers, I mean the prewar,
proper Paris skyline? Do you know why they stuck all those glass and steel
monstrosities out in La Defense, so far from the city center? Yes, there's
aesthetics, a sense of continuity and civic pride . . . not like that architectural
mongrel called London. But the truth, the logical, practical, reason for keeping
Paris free from American-style monoliths, is that the earth beneath their feet is
simply too tunneled to support it.
There are Roman tombs, quarries that supplied limestone for much of the city,
even World War II bunkers used by the Resistance and
yes,
there
was
a
Resistance! Then there is the modern Metro, the telephone lines, the gas mains, the
water pipes. .. and through it all, you have the catacombs. Roughly six million
bodies were buried there, taken from the pre-revolution cemeteries, where corpses
were just tossed in like rubbish. The catacombs contained entire walls of skulls
and bones arranged in macabre patterns. It was even functional in places where
interlocking bones held back mounds of loose remains behind them. The skulls
always seemed to be laughing at me.
I don't think I can blame the civilians who tried to survive in that subterranean
world. They didn't have the civilian survival manual back then, they didn't have
Radio Free Earth. It was the Great Panic. Maybe a few souls who thought they
knew those tunnels decided to make a go of it, a few more followed them, then a
few more. The word spread, "it's safe underground." A quarter million in all, that's
what the bone counters have determined, two hundred and fifty thousand refugees.
Maybe if they had been organized, thought to bring food and tools, even had
enough sense to
seal the entrances behind them and make damn sure those coming in weren't
infected . . .
How can anyone claim that their experience can compare to what we endured?
The darkness and the stink ... we had almost no night vision goggles, just one pair
per platoon, and that's if you were lucky. Spare batteries were in short supply for
our electric torches, too. Sometimes there was only one working unit for an entire
squad, just for the point man, cutting the darkness with a red-coated beam.
WORLD WAR Z          311
The air was toxic with sewage, chemicals, rotting flesh . . . the gas masks were a
joke, most of the filters had long expired. We wore anything we could find, old
military models, or firefighting hoods that covered your entire head, made you
sweat like a pig, made you deaf as well as blind. You never knew where you were,
staring through that misty visor, hearing the muffled voices of your squad mates,
the crackle of your radioman.
We had to use hardwired sets, you see, because airwave transmissions were too
unreliable. We used old telephone wire, copper, not fiber optic. We would just rip
it off the conduits and keep massive rolls with us to extend our range. It was the
only way to keep in contact, and, most of the
time, the only way to keep from becoming lost.
It was so easy to become lost. All the maps were prewar and didn't take into
account the modifications the survivors had made, all the intercoiv necting tunnels
and alcoves, the holes in the floor that would suddenly open up in front of you.
You would lose your way, at least once a day, some-times more, and then have to
trace your way back down the communications wire, check your location on the
map, and try to figure out what had gone wrong. Sometimes it was only a few
minutes, sometimes hours, or even days.
When another squad was being attacked, you would hear their cries over the radio
or echoing through the tunnels. The acoustics were evil; they taunted you. Screams
and moans came from every direction. You never knew where they were coming
from. At least with the radio, you could try, maybe, to get a fix on your comrades'
position. If they weren't panicked, if they knew where they were, if you knew
where you were . . .
The running: you dash through the passageways, bash your head on the ceiling,
crawl on your hands and knees, praying to the Virgin with all your might for them
to hold for just a little longer. You get to their position, find it is the wrong one, an
empty chamber, and the screams for help are still a long way off.
And when you arrive, maybe to find nothing but bones and blood. Maybe you are
lucky to find the zombies still there, a chance for vengeance ... if it has taken a
long time to reach them, that vengeance must now include your reanimated
friends. Close combat. Close like so . . .
[He leans across the table, pressing his face inches away from
mine.]
No standard equipment; whatever one believed would suit him. There were no
firearms, you understand. The air, the gas, it was too flammable. The fire from a
gun . . .
[He makes the sound of an explosion.]
We had the Beretta-Grechio, the Italian air carbine. It was a wartime model of a
child's carbon dioxide pellet gun. You got maybe five shots, six or seven if it was
pressed right up to their heads. Good weapon, but always not enough of them. And
you had to be careful! If you missed, if the ball struck the stone, if the stone was
dry, if you got a spark . . . entire tunnels would catch, explosions that buried men
alive, or fireballs that melted their masks right to their faces. Hand to hand is
always better. Here . . .
[He rises from the table to show me something on his mantelpiece. The weapon's handle
is encased in a semicircular steel ball. Protruding from this ball are two 8-inch steel
spikes at right angles from each other.)
You see why, eh? No room to swing a blade. Quick, through the eye, or over the
top of the head.
[He demonstrates with a quick punch and stab combination.]
My own design, a modern version of my great-grandfather's at Verdun, eh? You
know Verdun-
"On ne passe pas"
-They shall not pass!
[He resumes his lunch.]
No room, no warning, suddenly they are upon you, perhaps right in front of your
eyes, or grabbing from a side passage you didn't know was
WORLD WAR Z          313
there. Everyone was armored in some way .. . chain mail or heavy leather. ..
almost always it was too heavy, too suffocating, wet leather jackets and trousers,
heavy metal chain-link shirts. You try to fight, you are already exhausted, men
would tear oft their masks, gasping for air, inhaling the stink. Many died before
you could get them to the surface.
I used greaves, protection here (gestures to his forearms) and gloves, chain-
covered leather, easy to remove when not in combat. They were my own design.
We didn't have the American battle uniforms, but we did have your marsh covers,
the long, high waterproof boots with the bite-proof fiber sewn into the lining. We
needed those.
The water was high that summer; the rains were coming hard and the Seine was a
raging torrent. It was always wet. There was rot between your fingers, your toes,
in your crotch. The water was up to your ankles almost all the time, sometimes up
to your knees or waist. You would be on point, walking, or crawling-sometimes
we had to crawl in the stinking fluid up to our elbows. And suddenly the ground
would just fall away. You would splash, headfirst, into one
o{
those unmapped
holes. You only had a few seconds to right yourself before your gas mask flooded.
You kicked and thrashed, your comrades would grab you and haul fast. Drowning
was the least of your worries. Men would be splashing, struggling to stay afloat
with all that heavy gear, and suddenly their eyes would bulge, and you'd hear their
muffled cries. You might feel the moment they attacked: the snap or tear and
suddenly you fall over with the poor bastard on top of you. If he wasn't wearing
the marsh covers ... a foot is gone, the whole leg; if he had been crawling and went
in face-first. . . sometimes that face would be gone.
Those were times when we called a full retreat to a defensive position and waited
for the Cousteaus, the scuba divers trained to work and fight specifically in those
flooded tunnels. With only a searchlight and a shark suit, if they were lucky to get
one, and, at most, two hours of air. They were supposed to wear a safety line, but
most of diem refused to do so. The lines tended to get tangled and slow up the
diver's progress. Those men, and women, had a one in twenty chance of survival,
the lowest ratio of any
branch of any army, I don't care what
anyone
says. Is it any wonder they received
an automatic Legion of Honor?
And what was it all for* Fifteen thousand dead or missing. Not just the Cousteaus,
all of us, the entire core. Fifteen thousand souls in just three months. Fifteen
thousand at a time when the war was winding down all over the world. "Go! Go!
Fight! Fight!" It didn't have to be that way. How-long did it take the English to
clear all of London? Five years, three years after the war was officially over? They
went slow and safe, one section at a time, low speed, low intensity, low casualty
rate. Slow and safe, like most major cities. Why us? That English general, what he
said about "Enough dead heroes for the end of time . . ."
"Heroes," that's what we were, that's what our leaders wanted, that's what our
people felt they needed. After all that has happened, not just in this war, but in so
many wars before: Algeria, Indochina, the Nazis ... you understand what I am
saying . . . you see the sorrow and pity? We understood what the American
president said about "reclaiming our confidence"; we understood it more than
most. We needed heroes, new names and places to restore our pride.
The Ossuary, Port-Mahon Quarry, the Hospital. . . that was our shining moment. . .
the Hospital. The Nazis had built it to house mental patients, so the legend goes,
letting them starve to death behind the concrete walls. During our war it had been
an infirmary for the recently bitten. Later, as more began to reanimate and the
survivors' humanity faded like their electric lamps, they began throwing the
infected, and who knows who else, into that undead vault. An advance team broke
through without realizing what was on the odier side. They could have
withdrawn, blown the tunnel, sealed them in again . . . One squad against three hundred
zombies. One squad led by my baby brother. His voice was the last thing we heard before
their radio went silent. His last words: "On
ne passe past"
1. The highest fatality ratio of all allied forces is still hotly debated.
WORLD WAR Z          315
DENVER, COLORADO
[The weather is perfect tor the neighborhood picnic in Victory Park. The fact that
not one sighting has been recorded this spring gives everyone even more reason to
celebrate. Todd Wainio stands in the outfield, waiting for a high fly ball that he
claims "will never come." Perhaps he's right, as no one seems to
mind me standing next to him.]
They called it "the road to New York" and it was a long, long road. We had three
main Army Groups: North, Center, and South. The grand strategy was to advance
as one across the Great Plains, across the Midwest, then break off at the
Appalachians, the wings sweeping north and south, shoot for Maine and Florida,
then grind across the coast and link up with AG Center as they slogged it over the
mountains. It took three years.
Why so slow?
Dude, take your pick: foot transport, terrain, weather, enemies, battle doctrine . . .
Doctrine was to advance as two solid lines, one behind the other, stretching from
Canada to Aztlan . . . No, Mexico, it wasn't Aztlan yet. You know when a plane
goes down, how all these firemen or whoever would check a field for pieces of
wreckage ? They'd all go in a line, real slow, making sure not one inch of ground
was missed. That was us. We didn't skip one damn inch between the Rockies and
the Atlantic. Whenever you spotted Zack, eidier in a group or just on his own, a
FAR unit would halt. ..
FAR?
Force Appropriate Response. You couldn't stop, like, the whole Army Group, for
one or two zombies. A lot of the older Gs, the ones infected
early in the war, they were starting to get pretty grody, all deflated, parts of their
skulls starting to show, some bone poking through the flesh. Some of them
couldn't even stand anymore, and those are the ones you really had to watch for.
They'd be crawling on their bellies toward you, or just thrashing facedown in the
mud. You'd halt a section, a platoon, maybe even a company depending on how
many you encountered, just enough to take 'em down and sanitize the battlefield.
The hole your FAR unit left in the battle line was replaced by an equal force from
the secondary line a click and a half behind you. That way the front was never
broken. We leapfrogged this way all the way across the country. It worked, no
doubt, but man, it took its time. Night also put the brakes on. Once the sun dipped,
no matter how confident you felt or how sate the area seemed, the show was over
till dawn the next morning.
And there was fog. I didn't know fog could be so thick that far inland. I always
wanted to ask a climatologist or someone about that. The whole front might get
slammed, sometimes for days. Just sitting there in zero vis-ibility, occasionally
one of your Ks would start barking or a man down the line would shout "Contact!"
You'd hear the moan and then the shapes would appear. Hard enough just standing
still and waiting for them. I saw a movie once, this BBC documentary about how
because die UK was so foggy, the British army would never stop. There was a
scene, where the cameras caught a real firefight, just sparks from their weapons
and hazy silhouettes going down. They didn't need that extra creepy soundtrack. It
freaked me out just to watch.
It also slowed us down to have
to
keep pace with the other countries,
the Mexicans and Canucks. Neither army had the manpower to liberate their entire
country. The deal was that they'd keep our borders clear while we get our house in
order. Once the U.S. was secure, we'd give them everything they need. That was
the start of the UN multinational force, but I was discharged long before those
days. For me, it always felt like hurry up
1.  Lion's Roar, produced by Foreman Films tor the BBC.
2.   Instrumental cover of "How Soon Is Now," originally written by Morrissey and
Johnny Marr and recorded by the Smiths.
WORLD WAR Z          317
and wait, creeping along through rough terrain or built-up areas. Oh, and you
wanna talk about speed bumps, try urban combat.
The strategy was always to surround the target area. We'd set up semipermanent
defenses, recon with everything from satellites to sniffer Ks, do whatever we could
to call Zack out, and go in only after we were sure no more of them were coming.
Smart and safe and relatively easy. Yeah, right!
As far as surrounding the "area," someone wanna tell me where that area actually
begins? Cities weren't cities anymore, you know, they just grew out into this
suburban sprawl. Mrs. Ruiz, one of our medics, called it
"in-fill." She was in real estate before the war and explained that the hottest
properties were always the land between two existing cities. Freakin' "in-fill," we
all learned to hate that term. For us, it meant clearing block after block of burbland
before we could even think of establishing a quarantine perimeter. Fast-food
joints, shopping centers, endless miles of cheap, cookie-cutter housing.
Even in winter, it's not like everything was safe and snuggly. I was in Army Group
North. At first I thought we were golden, you know. Six months out of the year, I
wouldn't have to see a live G, eight months actually, given what wartime weather
was like. I thought, hey, once the temp drops, we're little more than garbage men:
find 'em, Lobo 'em, mark 'em for burial once the ground begins to thaw, no
problem. But I should be Lobo'd for thinking that Zack was the only bad guy out
there.
We had quislings, just like the real thing, but winterized. We had these Human
Reclamation units, pretty much just glorified animal control. They'd do their best
to dart any quislings we came across, tie 'em down, ship 'em to rehabilitation
clinics, back when we thought we could rehabilitate them.
Ferals were a much more dangerous threat. A lot
o{
them weren't kids anymore,
some were teenagers, some full grown. They were fast, smart, and if they chose
fight instead of flight, they could really mess up your day. Of course, HR would
always try and dart them, and, of course, that didn't always work. When a two-
hundred-pound feral bull is charging balls out for your ass, a couple CCs of tranq
ain't gonna drop him before he hits home. A lot of HRs got pretty badly smashed
up, a few had to be
tagged and bagged. The brass had to step in and assign a squad of grunts for
escort. If a dart didn't stop a feral, we sure as hell did. Nothing screams as high as
a feral with a PIE round burning in his gut. The HR pukes had a real problem with
that. They were all volunteers, all sticking to this code that human life, any
human's life, was worth trying to save. I guess history sorta backed them up now,
you know, seeing all those people that they managed to rehabilitate, all the ones
we just woulda shot on sight. If they had had the resources, they might have been
able to do the same for animals.
Man, feral packs, that freaked me out more than anything else. I'm not just talking
dogs. Dogs you knew how to deal with. Dogs always telegraphed their attacks. I'm
talking "Flies" : F-Lions, cats, like part mountain Lion, part ice age saberfuck.
Maybe they were mountain lions, some sure looked like them, or maybe just the
spawn
o{
house cats that had to be super badass just to make it. I've heard that they
grew bigger up north, some law of nature or evolution. I don't really get the whole
ecology thing, not past a few prewar nature shows. I hear it's because rats were,
like, the new cows; fast and smart enough to get away from Zack, livin' on
corpses, breeding by the millions in trees and ruins. They'd gotten pretty badass
themselves, so anything tough enough to hunt them has to be a whole lot badder.
That's an F-lion for you, about twice the size of a prewar puftball, teeth, claws, and
a real, real jonesing for warm blood.
That must have been a hazard for the sniffer dogs.
Are you kidding? They loved it, even die little dachmutts, made 'em feel like dogs again.
I'm calking about us, getting jumped from a tree limb, or a roof. They didn't charge you
like F-hounds, they just waited, took their sweet time until you were too close to raise a
weapon.
3.  Pronounced "flies" mainly because their pouncing attacks gave the illusion of flight.
4- At present, no scientific data exist to substantiate the application of Bergmann's Rule
during the war.
WORLD WAR Z          319
Outside of Minneapolis, my squad was clearing a strip mall. I was stepping through the
window of a Starbucks and suddenly three of them leap at me from behind the counter.
They knock me over, start tearing at my arms, my face. How do you think I got this?
[He refers to the scar on his cheek.]
I guess the only real casualty that day was my shorts. Between the bite-proof BDUs and
body armor we'd started wearing, the vest, the helmet. . .
I hadn't worn a hard cover in so long, you forget how uncomfortable it is when
you're used to going soft top.
Did ferals, feral people that is, know how to use firearms?
They didn't know how to do anything human, that's why they were ferals. No, the
body armor was for protection against some of the regular people we found. I'm
not talking organized rebels, just the odd LaMOE, Last Man on Earth. There was
always one or two in every town, some dude, or chick, who managed to survive. I
read somewhere that the United States had the highest number of them in the
world, something about our individualistic nature or something. They hadn't seen
real people in so long, a lot of the initial shooting was just accidental or reflex.
Most of the time we managed to talk them down. Those we actually called RCs,
Robinson Crusoes- that was the polite term for the ones who were cool.
The ones we called LaMOEs, those were the ones who were a little too used to
being king. King of what, I don't know, Gs and quislings and crazy F'Critters, but I
guess in their mind they were living the good life, and here we were to take it all
away. That's how I got nailed.
We were closing on die Sears Tower in Chicago. Chicago, that was enough
nightmares for three lifetimes. It was the middle of winter, wind whipping off the
lake so hard you could barely stand, and suddenly I felt
5.  LaMOE: pronounced Ltry-moh with a silent
e.
Thor's hammer smash me in the head. Slug from a high-powered hunting rifle. I
never complained about our hard covers anymore after that. The gang in the tower,
they had their little kingdom, and they weren't giving it up for anyone. That was
one of the few times we went full convent; SAWs, nades, that's when the Bradleys
started making a comeback.
After Chicago, the brass knew we were now in a full, multithreat envi-ronment. It
was back to hard covers and body armor, even in summer. Thanks, Windy City.
Each squad was issued pamphlets with the "Threat Pyramid,"
It was ranked according to probability, not lethality. Zack at the bottom, then
F'Crttters, ferals, quislings, and finally LaMOEs. I know a lot of guys from AG
South like to bitch about how they always had it tougher on their end, 'cause, for
us, winter took care of Zack's whole threat level. Yeah, sure, and replaced it with
another one: winter!
What do they say die average temperature's dropped, ten degrees, fifteen in some
areas? Yeah, we had it real easy, up to our ass in gray snow, knowing that for
every five Zacksicles you cracked there'd be at least as many up and at 'em at first
thaw. At least the guys down south knew that once they swept an area, it stayed
swept. They didn't have to worry about rear area attacks like us. We swept every
area at least three times. We used everything from ramrods and sniffer Ks to high-
tech ground radar. Over and over again, and all of this in the dead of winter. We
lost more guys to frostbite than to anything else. And still, every spring, you knew,
you just knew . . . it'd be like, "oh shit, here we go again." I mean, even today,
with all the sweeps and civilian volunteer groups, spring's like winter used to be,
nature leering us know the good life's over for now.
Tell me about liberating the isolated zones.
Always a hard fight, every single one. Remember these zones were still under
siege, hundreds, maybe even thousands. The people holed up in the
6.  Figures on wartime weather patterns have yet to be officially determined.
WORLD WAR Z         321
twin forts of Comerica Park/Ford Field, they must have had a combined moat-
that's what we called them, moats-of at least a million Gs. That was a three-day
slugfest, made Hope look like a minor skirmish. That was the only time I ever
really thought we were gonna be overrun. They piled up so high I thought we'd be
buried, literally, in a landslide of corpses. Battles like that, they'd leave you so
fried, just wasted, body and mind. You'd want to sleep, nothing more, not eat or
bathe or even fuck. You'd just want to find someplace warm and dry, close your
eyes, forget every-thing.
What were the reactions of the people who you liberated?
Kind of a mix. The military zones, that was pretty low-key. A lot of formal
ceremonies, raising and lowering of flags, "I relieve you, sir-I stand relieved," shit
like that. There was also a little bit of wienie wagging. You know "we didn't need
any rescuing" and all. I understand. Every grunt wants to be the one riding over
the hill, no one likes to be the one in the fort. Sure you didn't need rescuing,
buddy.
Sometimes it was true. Like the zoomies outside of Omaha. They were a strategic
hub for airdrops, regular flights almost on the hour. They were actually living
better than us, fresh chow, hot showers, soft beds. It almost felt like
we
were being
rescued. On the other hand, you had the jarheads at Rock Island. They wouldn't let
on how rough they had it, and that was cool with us. For what they went through,
bragging rights was the least we could give them. Never met any of them
personally, but I've heard the stories.
What about the civilian zones?
Different story entirely. We were so the shit! They'd be cheering and shouting. It
was like what you'd think war was supposed to be, those old black-and-whites of
GIs marching into Paris or wherever. We were rock stars. I got more . . . well... if
there's a bunch of little dudes between here and the Hero City that happen to look
like me . . . [Laughs.]
But there were exceptions.
Yeah, I guess. Maybe not all the time but there'd be this one person, this angry
face in the crowd screaming shit at you. "What the fuck took you so long?" "My
husband died two weeks ago!" "My mother died waiting for you!" "We lost half
our people last summer!" "Where were you when we needed you?" People holding
up photos, faces. When we marched into Janesville, Wisconsin, someone was
holding up a sign with a picture of a smiling little girl. The words above it read
"Better late than never?" He got beat down by his own people; they shouldn't have
done that. That's the kind of shit we saw, shit that keeps you awake when you
haven't slept in five nights.
Rarely, like, blue-moon rarely, we'd enter a zone where we were totally not
welcome. In Valley City, North Dakota, they were like, "Fuck you, army! You ran
out on us, we don't need you!"
Was that a secessionist zone?
Oh no, at least these people let us in. The Rebs only welcomed you with gunshots.
I never got close to any of diose zones. The brass had special units tor Rebs. I saw
them on the road once, heading toward the Black Hills. That was the first time
since crossing the Rockies that I ever saw tanks. Bad feeling; you knew how that
was gonna end.
There's been a lot of stories about questionable survival methods used by certain
isolated zones.
Yeah, so? Ask them about it.
Did you see any?
Nope, and I didn't want to. People tried to tell me about it, people we liberated.
They were so wound up inside, they just wanted to get it off their chests. You
know what I used to say to them, "Keep it on your chest, your war's over." I didn't
need any more rocks in my ruck, you know?
WORLD WAR Z        323
What about afterward? Did you talk to any of those
people?
Yeah, and I read a lot about the trials.
How did they make you feel?
Shit, I don't know. Who am I to judge those people? I wasn't there, I didn't have to
deal with that. This conversation we're having now, this question of "what if," I
didn't have time for that back then. I still had a job
to do.
I know historians like to talk about how the U.S. Armv had such a low casualty
rate during the advance. Low, as in compared to other countries, China or maybe
the Russkies. Low, as in only counting the casualties caused by Zack. There were
a million ways to get it on that road and over two-thirds weren't on that pyramid.
Sickness was a big one, the kinds of diseases that were supposed to be gone, like,
in the Dark Ages or something. Yeah, we took our pills, had our shots, ate well,
and had regular checkups, but there was just so much shit everywhere, in the dirt,
the water, in the rain, and the air we breathed. Every time we entered a city, or
liberated a zone, at least one guy would be gone, if not dead then removed for
quarantine. In Detroit, we lost a whole platoon to Spanish flu. The brass really
freaked on that one, quarantined the whole battalion for two weeks.
Then there were mines and booby traps, some civilian, some laid during our
bugout west. Made a lot of sense back then, just seed mile after mile and wait for
Zack to blow himself up. Only problem is, mines don't work that way. They don't
blow up a human body, they take off a leg or ankle or the family jewels. That's
what they're designed for, not to kill people, but to wound 'em so the army will
spend valuable resources keeping them alive, and then send 'em home in a
wheelchair so Ma and Pa Civilian can be reminded every time they see 'em that
maybe supporting this war isn't such a good idea. But Zack has no home, no Ma
and Pa Civilian. All conventional mines do is create a bunch of crippled ghouls
that, if anything, just makes your job that much harder because you
want
them
upright and
easy to spot, not crawling around the weeds waiting to be stepped on like land
mines themselves. You couldn't know where most mines were; a lot of the units
that set them during the retreat hadn't marked them correctly or had lost their
coordinates or simply weren't alive anymore to tell you. And then you had all
those stupid fuckin' LaMOE jobs, the punji stakes and trip'Wired shotgun shells.
I lost a buddy of mine that way, in a Wal-Mart in Rochester, New York. He was
born in El Salvador but grew up in Cali. You ever heard of the Boyle Heights
Boyz? They were these hard-core LA bangers who were deported back to El
Salvador because they were technically illegal. My buddy was plopped there right
before the war. He fought his way back up through Mexico, all during the worst
days of the Panic, all on foot with nothing but a machete. He didn't have any
family left, no friends, just his adopted home. He loved this country so much.
Reminded me of my grandpa, you know, the whole immigrant thing. And then to
catch a twelve-gauge in the face, probably set by a LaMOE who'd stopped
breathing years before. Fuckin' mines and booby traps.
And then you just had accidents. So many buildings had been weakened from the
fighting. Throw in years of neglect, and foot after foot of snow. Whole roofs
collapsed, no warning, whole structures just tumbling down, I lost someone else
like that. She had a contact, a feral running at her across an abandoned auto
garage. She fired her weapon, that's all it took. I don't know how many pounds of
snow and ice brought that roof down. She was . . . we were . . . close, you know.
We never did anything about it. I guess we thought that would make it "official." I
guess we thought it would
make it easier in case something happened to one of us. [He looks over at the
bleachers, smiling at his wife.]
Didn't work.
IHe takes a moment, a long breath.]
And then there were psych casualties. More than anything else combined.
Sometimes we'd march into barricaded zones and find nothing but
WORLD WAR Z         325
rat-gnawed skeletons. I'm talking about the zones that weren't overrun, the ones
that fell to starvation or disease, or just a feeling that tomorrow wasn't worth
seeing. We once broke into a church in Kansas where it was clear the adults killed
all the kids first. One guy in our platoon, an Amish guy, used to read all their
suicide notes, commit them to memory, then give himself this little cut, this tiny
half-inch nick somewhere on his body so he would "never forget." Crazy bastard
was sliced from his neck to the bottom of his toes. When the LT found out about
it.. . sectioned eight his ass right outa there.
Most
o{
the Eight Balls were later in the war. Not from the stress, though, you
understand, but from the lack of it. We all knew it would be over soon, and I think
a lot of people who'd been holding it together for so long mustVe had that little
voice that said, "Hey, buddy, it's cool now, you can let go."
I knew diis one guy, massive Yoidasaurus, he'd been a professional wrestler before
the war. We were walking up the freeway near Pulaski, New York, when the wind
picked up the scent of a jackknifed big rig. It'd been loaded with bottles of
perfume, nothing fancy, just cheap, strip mall scent. He froze and started bawlin'
like a kid. Couldn't stop. He was a monster with a two grand body count, an ogre
who'd once picked up a G and used it as a club for hand-to-hand combat. Four of
us had
to
carry him out on a stretcher. We figured the perfume must have
reminded him of someone. We never found out who.
Another guy, nothing special about him, late forties, balding, bit of a paunch, as
much as anyone could have back then, the kinda face you'd see in a prewar
heartburn commercial. We were in Hammond, Indiana, scouting defenses for the
siege of Chicago. He spied a house at the end of a deserted street, completely
intact except for boarded-up windows and a crashed-in front door. He got a look
on his face, a grin. We should have known way before he dropped out of
formation, before we heard the shot. He was sitting in the living room, in this
worn, old easy chair, SIR be-tween his knees, that smile still on his face. I looked
up at the pictures on the mantelpiece. It was his home.
Those were extreme examples, ones that even I could have guessed. A
lot of the others, you just never knew. For me, it wasn't just who was crack' ing up,
but who wasn't. Does that make sense?
One night in Portland, Maine, we were in Deering Oaks Park, policing piles of
bleached bones that had been there since the Panic. Two grunts pick up these
skulls and start doing a skit, the one from Free
to
Be, You
and
Me, the two babies.
I only recognized it because my big brother had the record, it was a little before
my time. Some of the older Grunts, the Xers, they loved it. A little crowd started
gathering, everyone laughing and howling at these two skulls. "Hi-Hi-I'm a baby.-
Well what do you think I am, a loaf a bread?" And when it was over, everyone
spontaneously burst into song, "There's a land that I see . . ." playing femurs like
goddamn banjos. I looked across the crowd to one of our company shrinks. I could
never pronounce his real name, Doctor Chandra-something. I made eye contact
and gave him this look, like "Hey, Doc, they're all nut jobs, right?" He must have
known what my eyes were asking because he just smiled back and shook his head.
That really spooked me; I mean, if the ones who were acting loopy weren't, then
how did you know who'd really lost it?
Our squad leader, you'd probably recognize her. She was in
The
Battle
of the Five
Colleges.
Remember the tall, amazon chick with the ditch blade, the one who'd
sung that song? She didn't look like she used
to
in the movie. She'd burned off her
curves and a crew cut replaced all that long, thick, shiny black hair. She was a
good squad leader, "Sergeant Avalon." One day we found a turtle in a field.
Turtles were like unicorns back then, you hardly saw them anymore. Avalon got
this look, I don't know, like a kid. She smiled. She never smiled. I heard her
whisper something to the
turtle, I thought it was gibberish: "Mitakuye Oyasin." I found out later that it was
Lakota for "all my relations." I didn't even know she was part Sioux. She never
talked about it, about anything about her. And suddenly, like a ghost, there was
Doctor Chandra, with that arm he always put around their shoulders and that soft,
no-big-deal offer of "C'mon, Sarge, let's grab a cup of coffee."
7.  Major Ted Chandrasekhar.
WORLD WAR Z         327
That was the same day the president died. He must have also heard that little
voice. "Hey, buddy, it's cool now, you can let go." I know a lot of people weren't
so into the VP, like there was no way he could replace the Big Guy. I really felt for
him, mainly 'cause I was now in the same position. With Avalon gone, I was squad
leader.
It didn't matter that the war was almost over. There were still so many battles
along the way, so many good people to say good-bye to. By the time we reached
Yonkers, I was the last of the old gang from Hope. I don't know how I felt, passing
all that rusting wreckage: the abandoned tanks, the
crushed news vans, the human remains. I don't think I felt much of anything. Too
much to do when you're squad leader, too many new faces to take care of. I could
feel Doctor Chandra's eyes boring into me. He never came over though, never let
on that there was anything wrong. When we boarded the barges on the banks of
the Hudson, we managed to lock eyes. He just smiled and shook his head. I'd made
it.
GOOD-BYES
BURLINGTON, VERMONT
[Snow has begun falling. Reluctantly, "the Whacko" turns back for the house.l
You ever heard of Clement Attlee? Of course not, why should you' Man was a
loser, a third-rate mediocrity who only slipped into the history books because he
unseated Winston Churchill before World War II officially ended. The war in
Europe was over, and to the British people, there was this feeling that they'd
suffered enough, but Churchill kept pushing to help the United States against
Japan, saying the fight wasn't finished until it was finished everywhere. And look
what happened to the Old Lion. That's what we didn't want to happen to our
administration. That's exactly why we decided to declare victory once the
continental U.S. had been secured.
Everyone knew the war wasn't really over. We still had to help out our
allies and clear whole parts
o{
the world that were entirely ruled by the dead.
There was still so much work to do, but since our own house was in order, we had
to give people the option to go home. That's when the UN multinational force was
created, and we were pleasantly surprised how
WORLD WAR Z         329
many volunteers signed up in the first week. We actually had to turn some of them
away, put them on the reserve list or assign them to train all the young bucks who
missed the drive across America. I know I caught a lot of flak for going UN
instead of making it an all-American crusade, and to be totally honest, I really
couldn't give a damn. America's a fair country, her people expect a fair deal, and
when that deal ends with the last boots on Atlantic beaches, you shake their hands,
pay them off, and let anyone who wants to reclaim their private lives do so.
Maybe it's made the overseas campaigns a little slower. Our allies are on their feet
again, but we still have a few White Zones to clear: mountain ranges, snowline
islands, the ocean floor, and then there's Iceland . . . Iceland's gonna be tough. I
wish Ivan would let us help out in Siberia, but, hey, Ivan's Ivan. And we still have
attacks right here at home as well, even-spring, or every so often near a lake or
beach. The numbers are declining,
thank heavens, hue it doesn't mean people should let down their guard. We're still
at war, and until every trace is sponged, and purged, and, if need he, blasted from
the surface of the Earth, everybody's still gotta pitch in and do their job. Be nice if
that was the lesson people took from all this misery. We're all in this together, so
pitch in and do your job.
[We stop by an old oak tree. My companion looks it up and down, taps it lightly with his
cane. Then, to the tree .. .1
You're doin' a good job.
m
KHUZHIR, OLKHON ISLAND, LAKE BAIKAL, THE HOLY RUSSIAN EMPIRE
[A nurse interrupts our interview to make sure Maria Zhuganova takes her prenatal
vitamins. Maria is four months pregnant. This will be her eighth child.]
My only regret was char I couldn't remain in the army for the "liberation" of our
former republics. We'd purged the motherland of the undead filth, and now it was
time to carry the war beyond our borders. I wish I could have been there, the day
we formally reabsorbed Belarus back into the empire. They say it will be the
Ukraine soon, and after that, who knows. I wish I could still have been a
participant, but I had "other duties" . . .
[Gently, she pats her womb.]
I don't know how many clinics like this there are throughout the Ro-dtna. Not
enough, I'm sure. So few of us, young, fertile women who didn't succumb to
drugs, or AIDS, or the stink of die living dead. Our leader says that the greatest
weapon a Russian woman can wield now is her uterus. If that means not knowing
my children's fathers, or . . .
[Her eyes momentarily hit the floor.)
. . . my children, so be it. I serve the motherland, and I serve with all my heart.
[She catches my eye.]
You're wondering how this "existence" can be reconciled with our new
fundamentalist state? Well, stop wondering, it can't. All that religious dogma,
that's for die masses. Give them their opium and keep them paci' fied. I don't think
anyone in the leadership, or even the Church, really be-
Lieves what they're preaching, maybe one man, old Father Ryzhkov before they
chucked him out into the wilderness. He had nothing left to offer, unlike me. I've
got at least a few more children to give the motherland. That's why I'm treated so
well, allowed to speak so freely.
[Maria glances at the one-way glass behind me.l
What are they going to do to me? By the time I've exhausted my usefulness, 1 will
have already outlived the average woman.
WORLD WAR Z          331
[She presents the glass with an extremely rude fingei gesture.]
And besides, they
want
you to hear this. That is why they've let you into our
country, to hear our stories, to ask your questions. You're being used, too, you
know. Your mission is to tell your world of ours, to make them see what will
happen if anyone ever tries to fuck with us. The war drove us back to our roots,
made us remember what it means to be Russian. We are strong again, we are
feared again, and to Russians, that only means one thing, we are finally
safe
again!
For die first time in almost a hundred years,
we can finally warm ourselves in the protective fist of a Caesar, and I'm sure you
know the word for Caesar in Russian.
BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOS, WEST INDIES FEDERATION
[The bar is almost empty. Most of the pations have either left by their own power, or
been carried out by the police. The last of the night stall clean the broken chairs, broken
glass, and pools of blood off the floor. In the corner, the last of the South Africans
sings an emotional, inebriated version of Johnny Clegg's wartime rendition of
"Asimbonaga." T. Sean Collins absentmind-edly hums a few bars, then downs his
shot of rum, and hurriedly signals for another.)
I'm addicted to murder, and that's about the nicest way I can put it. You might say
that's not technically true, that since they're already dead I'm not really killing.
Horseshit; it's murder, and it's a rush like nothing else. Sure, I can dis those prewar
mercenaries all I want, the 'Nam vets and Hell's Angels, but at this point I'm no
different from diem, no different from those jungle humpers who never came
home, even when they did, or those World War II fighter jocks who traded in their
Mustangs for hogs.
You're living on such a high, so keyed up all the time, rhat anything else seems
like death.
I tried to fit in, settle down, make some friends, get a job and do my part to help
put America back together. But not only was I dead, I couldn't think about
anything else but killing. I'd start to study people's necks, their heads. I'd think,
"Hmmmm, that dude's probably got a thick frontal lobe, I gotta go in through the
eye socket." Or "hard blow to the occipital'd drop that chick pretty fast." It was
when the new prez, "the Whacko"-Jesus, who the hell am I to call anybody else
that'-when I heard him speak at a rally, I must have thought of at least fifty ways to
bring him down. That's when I got out, as much for everyone else's sake as my
own. I knew one day I'd hit my limit, get drunk, get in a fight, lose control. I knew
once I started, I couldn't stop, so I said good-bye and joined the Impisi, same name
as the South African Special Forces. Impisi: Zulu for Hyena, the one who cleans
up the dead.
We're a private outfit, no rules, no red tape, which is why I chose them over a
regular gig with the UN. We set our own hours, choose our own weapons.
[He motions to what looks like a sharpened steel paddle at his
side.]
"Pouwhenua"-got it from a Maori brother who used to play for the All Blacks
before the war. Bad motherfuckers, the Maori. That battle at One Tree Hill, five
hundred of them versus half of reanimated Auckland. The pouwhenua's a tough
weapon to use, even if this one's steel instead of
wood. But that's the other perk of being a soldier of fortune. Who can get a rush
anymore from pulling a trigger? It's gotta be hard, dangerous, and the more Gs you
gotta take on, the better. Of course, sooner or later there's not gonna be any of
them left. And when that happens . . .
[At that point the
Imfingo
rings its cast-off bell.l
There's my ride.
WORLD WAR Z          333
IT. Sean signals to the waiter, then flips a few silver zand on the
tabte.l
I still got hope. Sounds crazy, but you never know. That's why I save most of my
fees instead of giving back to the host country or blowing it on who knows what.
It can happen, finally getting the monkey off your back. A Canadian brother,
"Mackee" Macdonald, right after clearing Baffin Island, he just decided he'd had
enough. I hear he's in Greece now, some monastery or something. It can happen.
Maybe there's still a life out there for me. Hey, a man can dream, right? Of course,
if it doesn't work out that
way, if one day there's sTill a monkey but no more Zack . . . [He rises to leave,
shouldering his weapon.!
Then the last skull I crack'll probably be my own.
SAND LAKES PROVINCIAL WILDERNESS PARK, MANITOBA, CANADA
[Jesika Hendiicks loads the last of the day's "catch" into the sled, fifteen bodies and a
mound of dismembered parts.]
I try not to be angry, bitter at the unfairness of it all. I wish I could make sense of
it. I once met an ex-Iranian pilot who was traveling through Canada looking for a
place to settle down. He said that Americans are the only people he's ever met who
just can't accept that bad things can happen to good people. Maybe he's right. Last
week I was listening to the radio and just happened to hear [name withheld for
legal reasons]. He was doing his usual thing-fart jokes and insults and adolescent
sexuality-and I remember thinking, "This man survived and my parents didn't."
No, I try not to be bitter.
TROY, MONTANA, USA
[Mrs. Miller and I stand on the back deck, above the children playing in the central
courtyard.)
You can blame the politicians, die businessmen, the generals, die "machine/' but
really, if you're looking to blame someone, blame me. I'm the American system,
I'm the machine. That's the price of living in a democracy; we all gotta take the
rap. I can see why it took so long for China to finally embrace it, and why Russia
just said "fuck it" and went back to whatever they call their system now. Nice to
be able to say, "Hey, don't look at me, it's not my fault." Well, it is. It is my fault,
and the fault of everyone of my generation.
[She looks down at the children.!
I wonder what future generations will say about us. My grandparents suffered
through the Depression, World War II, then came home to build the greatest
middle class in human history. Lord knows they weren't perfect, but they sure
came closest
to
the American dream. Then my parents' geiv eration came along
and fucked it all up-the baby boomers, the "me" gen-eration. And then you got us.
Yeah, we stopped the zombie menace, but we're the ones who let it become a
menace in the first place. At least we're cleaning up our own mess, and maybe
that's the best epitaph to hope for. "Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess."
CHONGQING, CHINA
[Kwang Jingshu does his final house call for the day, a little boy with some kind
of respiratory illness. The mother fears it's another case of tuberculosis. The color
returns to her face when the doctor assures her it's just a chest cold. Her tears and
gratitude follow us down the dusty street.]
It's comforting to see children again, I mean those who were born after the war,
real children who know nothing hut a world that includes the living dead. They
know not to play near water, not to go out alone or after dark in the spring or
summer. They don't know to he afraid, and that is the greatest gift, the only gift we
can leave to them.
Sometimes I think of that old woman at New Dachang, what she lived through, the
seemingly unending upheaval that defined her generation. Now that's me, an old
man who's seen his country torn to shreds many times over. And yet, every time,
we've managed to pull ourselves together, to rebuild and renew our nation. And so
we will again-China, and the world. I don't really believe in an afterlife-the old
revolutionary to the end-but if there is, I can imagine my old comrade Gu laughing
down at me when I say, with all honesty, that everything's going to be all right.
WENATCHEE, WASHINGTON, USA
[Joe Muhammad has just finished his latest masterpiece, a thirteen-inch statuette of a
man in midshuffle, wearing a torn Baby Bjorn, staring ahead with lifeless eyes.]
336       MAX BROOKS
I'm not going to say the war was a good thing. Pin not that much of a sick fuck,
but you've got to admit that it did bring people together. My parents never stopped
talking about how much they missed the sense of community back in Pakistan.
They never calked to their American neighbors, never invited them over, barely
knew their names unless it was to complain about loud music or a barking dog.
Can't say that's the kind of world we live in now. And it's not just the
neighborhood, or even the country. Anywhere around the world, anyone you talk
to, all of us have this powerful shared experience. I went on a cruise two years
ago, the Pan Pacific Line across the islands. We had people from everywhere, and
even though the details might have been different, the stories themselves were all
pretty much the same. I know I come off as a little too optimistic, because I'm sure
diat as soon as things really get back to "normal," once our kids or
grandkids grow up in a peaceful and comfortable world, they'll probably go right
back to being as selfish and narrow-minded and generally shitty to one anodier as
we were. But then again, can what we all went through really just go away? I once
heard an African proverb, "One cannot cross a river without getting wet." I'd like
to believe that.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like I don't miss some things about the old world,
mainly just stuff, things I used
to
have or things I used to think I could have one
day. Last week we had a bachelor party for one of the young guys on the block.
We borrowed the only working DVD player and a few prewar skin flicks. There
was one scene where Lusty Canyon was getting reamed by three guys on the hood
of this pearl gray BMW Z4 convertible, and all I coukl think was
Wow, they sure
don't make cars like that anymore.
TAOS, NEW MEXICO, USA
[The steaks are almost done. Arthur Sinclair flips the sizzling slabs, relishing the smoke.I
Of all the jobs I've done, being a money cop was best. When the new president
asked me to step back into my role as SEC chairman, I practi-cally kissed her on
the spot. I'm sure, just like my days at DeStRes, I only have the job because no one
else wants it. There's still so many challenges ahead, still so much of the country
on the "turnip standard." Getting people away from barter, and to trust the
American dollar again . . . not easy. The Cuban peso is still king, and so many of
our more affluent citizens still have their bank accounts in Havana.
Just trying to solve the surplus bill dilemma is enough for any administration. So
much cash was scooped up after the war, in abandoned vaults, houses, on dead
bodies. How do you tell those looters apart from the people who've actually kept
their hard-earned greenbacks hidden, especially when records of ownership are
about as rare as petroleum? That's why being a money cop is the most important
job I've ever had. We have to nail the bastards who're preventing confidence from
returning to the American economy, not just the penny-ante looters but the big fish
as well, the sleazebags who're trying to buy up homes before survivors can reclaim
them, or lobbying to deregulate food and other essential survival commodities . . .
and that bastard Breckinridge Scott, yes, the Phalanx king, still hiding like a rat in
his Antarctic Fortress of Scumditude. He doesn't know it yet, but we've been in
talks with Ivan not to renew his lease. A lot of people back home are waiting to
see him, particularly the IRS.
[He grins and rubs his hands together.]
Confidence, its the fuel chat drives the capitalist machine. Our economy can only
run if people believe in it; like FDR said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear
itself." My father wrote that for him. Well, he claimed he did.
It's already starting, slowly but surely. Every day we get a few more registered
accounts with American banks, a few more private businesses opening up, a few
more points on the Dow. Kind of like the weather. Every year the summer's a little
longer, the skies a little bluer. Its getting better. Just wait and see.
338       MAX BROOKS IHe reaches into a cooler of ice, pulling out two brown
bottles.1
Root beer?
KYOTO, JAPAN
[It is a historic day for the Shield Society. They have finally been accepted as an
independent branch of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. Their main duty will be to
teach Japanese civilians how to protect themselves from the living dead. Their ongoing
mission will also involve learning both armed and unarmed techniques from non-
Japanese organizations, and helping to foster those techniques around the world. The
Society's anti-firearm as well as prointernational message have already been hailed as
an instant success, drawing journalists and dignitaries from almost all UN nations.
Tomonaga Ijiro stands at the head of the receiving line, smiling and bowing as he greets
his parade of guests. Kondo Tatsumi smiles as well, looking at his teacher from across
the room.]
You know I don't really believe any of this spiritual "BS," right? As far as I'm
concerned, Tomonaga's just a crazy old hibakusha, but he has started something
wonderful, something I think is v ital for the future of Japan. His generation
wanted to rule the world, and mine was content to let the world, and by the world I
mean your country, rule us. Both paths led to the near destruction of our
homeland. There has to be a better way, a middle path where we take
responsibility for our own protection, but not so much that it inspires anxiety and
hatred among our fellow nations. I can't tell
you if this is the right path; the future is too mountainous to see too far
WORLD WAR Z          339
ahead. But I will follow Sensei Tomonaga down this path, myself and the many
others who join our ranks even- day. Only "the gods" know what awaits us at its
end.
ARMAGH, IRELAND
[Philip Adlei finishes his drink, and rises to leave.]
We lost a hell of a lot more than just people when we abandoned them to the dead.
That's all I'm going to say.
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL
[We finish our lunch as lurgen aggressively snatches the bill fiom my hand.]
Please, my choice of food, my treat. I used to hate this stuff, thought it looked like
a buffet of vomit. My staff had to drag me here one after-noon, these young Sabras
with their exotic tastes. "Just try it, you old yekke," they'd say. That's what they
called me, a "yekke." It means tight ass, but the official definition is German Jew.
They were right on both counts.
I was in the "Kindertransport," the last chance to get Jewish children out of
Germany. That was the last time I saw any of my family alive. There's a little
pond, in a small town in Poland, where they used to dump the ashes. The pond is
still gray, even half a century later.
340       MAX BROOKS
I've heard it said that the Holocaust has no survivors, that even those who
managed to remain technically alive were so irreparably damaged, that their spirit,
their soul, the person that they were supposed to be, was
gone forever. I'd like to chink char's not crue. Bur if it is, then no one on Earth
survived this war.
0
ABOARD USS
TRACY BOWDEN
[Michael Choi leans against the fantail's railing, staring at the
horizon.]
You wanna know who lost World War Z' Whales. I guess they never really had
much of a chance, not with several million hungry boat people and half the world's
navies converted to fishing fleets. It doesn't take much, just one helo-dropped torp,
not so close as to do any physical damage, but close enough to leave them deaf
and dazed. They wouldn't notice the factory ships until it was too late. You could
hear it for miles away, the warhead detonations, the shrieks. Nothing conducts
sound energy like water.
Hell of a loss, and you don't have to be some patchouli stinking crunch-head to
appreciate it. My dad worked at Scripps, not the Claremont girl's school, the
oceanographic institute outside of San Diego. That's why I joined the navy in the
first place and how I first learned to love the ocean. You couldn't help but see
California grays. Majestic animals, they were finally making a comeback after
almost being hunted to extinction. They'd
stopped being afraid of us and sometimes you could paddle out close enough to
touch them. They could have killed us in a heartbeat, one smack of a twelve-foot
tail fluke, one lunge of a thirtysomething-ton body. Early whalers used to call
them devilfish because of the fierce fights they'd put up when cornered. They
knew we didn't mean them any harm, though. They'd even let us pet them, or,
maybe if they were feeling protec-
WORLD WAR Z        341
tive of a calf, just brush us gently away. So much power, so much potential for
destruction. Amazing creatures, the California grays, and now they're all gone,
along with the blues, and finbacks, and humpbacks, and rights. I've heard of
random sightings of a few belugas and narwhals that survived under the Arctic ice,
but there probably aren't enough for a sustainable gene pool. I know there are still
a few intact pods of orcas, but with pollution levels the way they are, and less fish
than an Arizona swimming pool, I wouldn't be too optimistic about their odds.
Even if Mama Nature does give those killers some kind of reprieve, adapt them
like she did with some of the dinosaurs, the gentle giants are gone forever. Kinda
like that movie
Oh God
where the All Mighty challenges Man to try and make a
mackerel from scratch. "You can't," he says, and unless some genetic archivist got
in
there ahead of the torpedoes, you also can't make a California gray.
[The sun dips below the horizon. Michael sighs.]
So the next time someone tries to tell you about how the true losses of this war are
"our innocence" or "part of our humanity" . . .
[He spits into the water.]
Whatever, bro. Tell it to the whales.
m
DENVER, COLORADO, USA
[Todd Wainio walks me to the train, savoring the 100 percent
tobacco Cuban cigarettes I've bought him as a parting gift.]
Yeah, I lose it sometimes, for a few minutes, maybe an hour. Doctor Chandra told
me it was cool though. He counsels right here at the VA. He
Told me once that it's a totally healthy thing, like little earthquakes releasing
pressure off of a fault. He says anyone who's not having these "minor Tremors"
you really gotta watch out for.
It doesn't take much to set me off. Sometimes I'll smell something, or somebody's
voice will sound really familiar. Last month at dinner, the radio was playing this
song, I don't think it was about my war, I don't even think it was American. The
accent and some of the terms were all different, but the chorus . . . "God help me, I
was only nineteen."
[The chimes announce my train's departure. People begin boarding around us.]
Funny thing is, my most vivid memory kinda got turned into the national icon of
the victory.
[He motions behind us to the giant mural.]
That was us, standing on the Jersey riverbank, watching the dawn over New York.
We'd just got the word, it was VA Day. There was no cheering, no celebration. It
just didn't seem real. Peace? What the hell did that mean? I'd been afraid for so
long, fighting and killing, and waiting to die, that I guess I just accepted it as
normal for the rest of my life. I thought it was a dream, sometimes it still feels like
one, remembering that day, that sunrise over the Hero City.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A special chank-you to my wife, Michelle, for all her love and support.
To Ed Victor, for starting it all.
To Steve Ross, Luke Dempsey, and the entire Crown Publishers team.
To T M. for watching my back.
To Brad Graham at the
Washington
Post; Drs. Cohen, Whiteman, and Hayward;
Professors Greenberger and Tongun; Rabbi Andy; Father Fraser; STS2SS
Bordeaux (USN fair); "B" and "E"; Jim; Jon; Julie; Jessie; Gregg; Honupo; and
Dad, for "the human factor."
And a final thank-you to the three men whose inspiration made this book possible:
Studs Terkel, the late General Sir John Hackett, and, of course, the genius and
terror of George A. Romero.
I love you, Mom.