by Max Brooks
“Vikasnagar: Secure.”
“Bilaspur: Secure.”
“Jawala Mukhi: Secure.”
“All passes report secure: Over!”
Am I dreaming, I thought, am I insane?
The monkey didn’t help matters any. He was sitting on top of the microbus, just watching the undead plunge to their end. His face appeared so serene, so intelligent, as if he truly understood the situation. I almost wanted him to turn to me and say, “This is the turning point of the war! We’ve finally stopped them! We’re finally safe!” But instead his little penis popped out and he peed in my face.
HOME FRONT USA
Taos, New Mexico
[Arthur Sinclair, Junior, is the picture of an old-world patrician: tall, lean, with close-cropped white hair and an affected Harvard accent. He speaks into the ether, rarely making eye contact or pausing for questions. During the war, Mister Sinclair was director of the U.S. government’s newly formed DeStRes, or Department of Strategic Resources.]
I don’t know who first thought of the acronym “DeStRes” or if they consciously knew how much it sounded like “distress,” but it certainly could not have been more appropriate. Establishing a defensive line at the Rocky Mountains might have created a theoretical “safe zone,” but in reality that zone consisted mainly of rubble and refugees. There was starvation, disease, homelessness in the millions. Industry was in shambles, transportation and trade had evaporated, and all of this was compounded by the living dead both assaulting the Rocky Line and festering within our safe zone. We had to get our people on their feet again-clothed, fed, housed, and back to work-otherwise this supposed safe zone was only forestalling the inevitable. That was why the DeStRes was created, and, as you can imagine, I had to do a lot of on-the-job training.
Those first months, I can’t tell you how much information I had to cram into this withered old cortex; the briefings, the inspection tours… when I did sleep, it was with a book under my pillow, each night a new one, from Henry J. Kaiser to Vo Nguyen Giap. I needed every idea, every word, every ounce of knowledge and wisdom to help me fuse a fractured landscape into the modern American war machine. If my father had been alive, he probably would have laughed at my frustration. He’d been a staunch New Dealer, working closely with FDR as comptroller of New York State. He used methods that were almost Marxist in nature, the kind of collectivization that would make Ayn Rand leap from her grave and join the ranks of the living dead. I’d always rejected the lessons he’d tried to impart, running as far away as Wall Street to shut them out. Now I was wracking my brains to remember them. One thing those New Dealers did better than any generation in American history was find and harvest the right tools and talent.
Tools and talent?
A term my son had heard once in a movie. I found it described our reconstruction efforts rather well. “Talent” describes the potential workforce, its level of skilled labor, and how that labor could be utilized effectively. To be perfectly candid, our supply of talent was at a critical low. Ours was a postindustrial or service-based economy, so complex and highly specialized that each individual could only function within the confines of its narrow, compartmentalized structure. You should have seen some of the “careers” listed on our first employment census; everyone was some version of an “executive,” a “representative,” an “analyst,” or a “consultant,” all perfectly suited to the prewar world, but all totally inadequate for the present crisis. We needed carpenters, masons, machinists, gunsmiths. We had those people, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were necessary. The first labor survey stated clearly that over 65 percent of the present civilian workforce were classified F-6, possessing no valued vocation. We required a massive job re-training program. In short, we needed to get a lot of white collars dirty.
It was slow going. Air traffic was nonexistent, roads and rail lines were a shambles, and fuel, good Lord, you couldn’t find a tank of gas between Blaine, Washington, and Imperial Beach, California. Add to this the fact that prewar America not only had a commuter-based infrastructure, but that such a method also allowed for severe levels of economic segregation. You would have entire suburban neighborhoods of upper-middle-class professionals, none of whom had possessed even the basic know-how to replace a cracked window. Those with that knowledge lived in their own blue-collar “ghettos,” an hour away in prewar auto traffic, which translated to at least a full day on foot. Make no mistake, bipedal locomotion was how most people traveled in the beginning.
Solving this problem-no, challenge, there are no problems-was the refugee camps. There were hundreds of them, some parking-lot small, some spreading for miles, scattered across the mountains and coast, all requiring government assistance, all acute drains on rapidly diminishing resources. At the top of my list, before I tackled any other challenge, these camps had to be emptied. Anyone F-6 but physically able became unskilled labor: clearing rubble, harvesting crops, digging graves. A lot of graves needed to be dug. Anyone A-l, those with war-appropriate skills, became part of our CSSP, or Community Self-Sufficiency Program. A mixed group of instructors would be tasked with infusing these sedentary, overeducated, desk-bound, cubicle mice with the knowledge necessary to make it on their own.
It was an instant success. Within three months you saw a marked drop in requests for government aid. I can’t stress how vital this was to victory. It allowed us to transition from a zero-sum, survival-based economy, into full-blown war production. This was the National Reeducation Act, the organic outgrowth of the CSSP. I’d say it was the largest jobs training program since the Second World War, and easily the most radical in our history.
You’ve mentioned, on occasion, the problems faced by the NRA…
I was getting to that. The president gave me the kind of power I needed to meet any physical or logistical challenge. Unfortunately, what neither he nor anyone on Earth could give me was the power to change the way people thought. As I explained, America was a segregated workforce, and in many cases, that segregation contained a cultural element. A great many of our instructors were first-generation immigrants. These were the people who knew how to take care of themselves, how to survive on very little and work with what they had. These were the people who tended small gardens in their backyards, who repaired their own homes, who kept their appliances running for as long as mechanically possible. It was crucial that these people teach the rest of us to break from our comfortable, disposable consumer lifestyle even though their labor had allowed us to maintain that lifestyle in the first place.
Yes, there was racism, but there was also classism. You’re a highpowered corporate attorney. You’ve spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering deals, talking on the phone. That’s what you’re good at, that’s what made you rich and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to keep talking on the phone. The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That’s the way the world works. But one day it doesn’t. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.
Once, on a fact-finding tour through LA, I sat in the back of a reeducation lecture. The trainees had all held lofty positions in the entertainment industry, a melange of agents, managers, “creative executives,” whatever the hell that means. I can understand their resistance, their arrogance. Before the war, entertainment had been the most valued export of the United States. Now they were being trained as custodians for a munitions plant in Bakersfield, California. One woman, a casting director, exploded. How-dare they degrade her like this! She had an MFA in Conceptual Theater, she had cast the top three grossing sitcoms in the last five seasons and she made more in a week than her instructor could dream of in several lite-times! She kept addressing that instructor by her first name. “Magda,” she kept saying, “Magda, enough already. Magda, please.” At first I thoug
ht this woman was just being rude, degrading the instructor by refusing to use her title. I found out later that Mrs. Magda Antonova used to be this woman’s cleaning lady. Yes, it was very hard for some, but a lot of them later admitted that they got more emotional satisfaction from their new jobs than anything closely resembling their old ones.
I met one gentleman on a coastal ferry from Portland to Seattle. He had worked in the licensing department for an advertising agency, specifically in charge of procuring the rights to classic rock songs for television commercials. Now he was a chimney sweep. Given that most homes in Seattle had lost their central heat and the winters were now longer and colder, he was seldom idle. “I help keep my neighbors warm,” he said proudly. I know it sounds a little too Norman Rockwell, but I hear stories like that all the time. “You see those shoes, I made them,” “That sweater, that’s my sheep’s wool,” “Like the corn? My garden.” That was the upshot of a more localized system. It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor, it gave them a sense of individual pride to know they were making a clear, concrete contribution to victory, and it gave me a wonderful feeling that I was part of that. I needed that feeling. It kept me sane for the other part of my job.
So much for “talent.” “Tools” are the weapons of war, and the industrial and logistical means by which those weapons are constructed.
[He swivels in his chair, motioning to a picture above his desk. I lean closer and see that it’s not a picture but a framed label.]
Ingredients:
molasses from the United States
anise from Spain
licorice from France
vanilla (bourbon) from Madagascar cinnamon from Sri Lanka cloves from Indonesia wintergreen from China pimento berry oil from Jamaica balsam oil from Peru
And that’s just for a bottle of peacetime root beer. We’re not even talk’ ing about something like a desktop PC, or a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
Ask anyone how the Allies won the Second World War. Those with very little knowledge might answer that it was our numbers or generalship. Those without any knowledge might point to techno-marvels like radar or the atom bomb. (Scowls.) Anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of that conflict will give you three real reasons: first, the ability to manufacture more materiel: more bullets, beans, and bandages than the enemy; second, the natural resources available to manufacture that materiel; and third, the logistical means to not only transport those resources to the factories, but also to transport the finished products out to the front lines. The Allies had the resources, industry, and logistics of an entire planet. The Axis, on the other hand, had to depend on what scant assets they could scrape up within their borders. This time we were the Axis. The living dead controlled most of the world’s landmass, while American war production depended on what could be harvested within the limits of the western states specifically. Forget raw materials from safe zones overseas; our merchant fleet was crammed to the decks with refugees while fuel shortages had dry-docked most of our navy.
We had some advantages. California’s agricultural base could at least erase the problem of starvation, if it could be restructured. The citrus growers didn’t go quietly, neither did the ranchers. The beef barons who controlled so much prime potential farmland were the worst. Did you ever hear of Don Hill? Ever see the movie Roy Elliot did on him? It was when the infestation hit the San Joaquin Valley, the dead swarming over his fences, attacking his cattle, tearing them apart like African driver ants. And there he was in the middle of it all, shooting and hollering like Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun. I dealt with him openly and honestly. As with everyone else, I gave him the choice. I reminded him that winter was coming and there were still a lot of very hungry people out there. I warned him that when the hordes of starving refugees showed up to finish what the living dead started, he’d have no government protection whatsoever. Hill was a brave, stubborn bastard, but he wasn’t an idiot. He agreed to surrender his land and herd only on the condition that his and everyone else’s breeding stock remained untouched. We shook on that.
Tender, juicy steaks-can you think of a better icon of our prewar artificial standard of living’ And yet it was that standard that ended up being our second great advantage. The only way to supplement our resource base was recycling. This was nothing new. The Israelis had started when they sealed their borders and since then each nation had adopted it to one degree or another. None of their stockpiles, however, could even compare to what we had at our disposal. Think about what life was like in the prewar America. Even those considered middle class enjoyed, or took for granted, a level of material comfort unheard of by any other nation at any other time in human history. The clothing, the kitchenware, the electronics, the automobiles, just in the Los Angeles basin alone, outnumbered the prewar population by three to one. The cars poured in by the millions, every house, every neighborhood. We had an entire industry of over a hundred thousand employees working three shifts, seven days a week: collecting, cataloging, disassembling, storing, and shipping parts and pieces to factories all over the coast. There was a little trouble, like with the cattle ranchers, people not wanting to turn over their Hummers or vintage Italian midlife crisis mobiles. Funny, no gas to run them but they still hung on anyway. It didn’t bother me too much. They were a pleasure to deal with compared to the military establishment.
Of all my adversaries, easily the most tenacious were the ones in uniform. I never had direct control over any of their R D, they were free to green light whatever they wanted. But given that almost all their programs were farmed out to civilian contractors and that those contractors depended on resources controlled by DeStRes, I had de facto control. “You cannot mothball our Stealth bombers,” they would yell. “Who the Blank do you think you are to cancel our production of tanks?” At first I tried to reason with them: “The M-l Abrams has a jet engine. Where are you going to find that kind of fuel ? Why do you need Stealth aircraft against an enemy that doesn’t have radar?” I tried to make them see that given what we had to work with, as opposed to what we were facing, we simply had to get the largest return on our investment or, in their language, the most bang for our buck. They were insufferable, with their all-hours phone calls, or just showing up at my office unannounced. I guess I can’t really blame them, not after how we all treated them after the last brushfire war, and certainly not after almost having their asses handed to them at Yonkers. They were teetering on the edge of total collapse, and a lot of them just needed somewhere to vent.
[He grins confidently.]
I started my career trading on the floor of the NYSE, so I can yell as hard and long as any professional drill sergeant. After each “meeting,” I’d expect the call, the one Pd been both dreading and hoping for: “Mister Sinclair, this is the president, I just want to thank you for your service and we’ll no longer be requiring…” [Chuckles.] It never came. My guess is no one else wanted the job.
[His smile fades.]
I’m not saying that I didn’t make mistakes. I know I was too anal about the air force’s D-Corps. I didn’t understand their safety protocols or what dirigibles could really accomplish in undead warfare. All I knew was that with our negligible helium supply, the only cost-effective lift gas was hydrogen and no way was I going to waste lives and resources on a fleet of modern day Hindenburgs. I also had to be persuaded, by the president, no less, to reopen the experimental cold fusion project at Livermore. He argued that even though a breakthrough was, at best, still decades away, “planning for the future lets our people know there will be one.” I was too conservative with some projects, and with others I was far too liberal.
Project Yellow Jacket-I still kick myself when I think about that one. These Silicon Valley eggheads, all of them geniuses in their own field, convinced me that they had a “wonder weapon” that could win the war, theoretically, within forty-eight hours of deployment. They could build micro missiles, millions of them, about the size of a .22 rimfire bullet,
that could be scattered from transport aircraft, then guided by satellites to the brain of every zombie in North America. Sounds amazing, right? It did to me.
[He grumbles to himself.]
When I think of what we poured down that hole, what we could have produced instead… ahhh… no point in dwelling on it now.
I could have gone head-to-head against the military for the duration of the war, but I’m grateful, in the end, that I didn’t have to. When Travis D’Ambrosia became chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he not only invented the resource-to-kill ratio, but developed a comprehensive strategy to employ it. I always listened to him when he told me a certain weapons system was vital. I trusted his opinion in matters like the new Battle Dress Uniform or the Standard Infantry Rifle.
What was so amazing to see was how the culture of RKR began to take hold among the rank and file. You’d hear soldiers talking on the street, in bars, on the train; “Why have X, when for the same price you could have ten Ys, which could kill a hundred times as many Zs.” Soldiers even began coming up with ideas on their own, inventing more cost-effective tools than we could have envisioned. I think they enjoyed it-improvising, adapting, outthinking us bureaucrats. The marines surprised me the most. I’d always bought into the myth of the stupid jarhead, the knuckle-dragging, locked-jaw, testosterone-driven Neanderthal. I never knew that because the Corps always has to procure its assets through the navy, and because admirals are never going to get too fired up about land warfare, that improvisation has had to be one of their most treasured virtues.
[Sinclair points above my head to the opposite wall. On it hangs a heavy steel rod ending in what looks like a fusion of shovel and double-bladed battle-axe. Its official designation is the Standard Infantry Entrenchment Tool, although, to most, it is known as either the “Lobotomizer,” or simply, the “Lobo.”]
