A Zombie's History of the United States

by Worm Miller

  Several different openly hybrid organizations formed during this period, each with slightly different goals. The Living Love League was a counterculture collection of hybrids (some of whom willingly chose to be hybridized) that worked primarily to change attitudes surrounding hybrids. They thought the terms “undead” and “Carrie” were negative and offensive; instead, they asked that hybrids be referred to as “differently animated.” Carries for Independence (CFI) petitioned to get their own territory within the United States, similar to Native American reservations, where they might live in peace and govern themselves. Of all the hybrid organizations, the most polarizing and publicized was the Hybrid Power Front (HPF), led by its charismatic and equally polarizing founder, David Z. The HPF did not seek equal rights with humans—they sought superior rights to humans.

  Born David Bailey in 1930, David had lived an un-spectacular life, working as a middle-school teacher in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, when he became a hybrid in 1959. When his school discovered his hybridity, he was fired and forced to flee town after he was blamed for the disappearance of a child (something he refuted for the remainder of his animation). By 1960, David had traveled to Chicago where he happened to meet some members of the hybrid underground who were anonymously publishing The Carrie Nation, a prohybrid newsletter meant to educate the human public on the undead. Here David was to form many of the reactionary ideas that would soon catapult him to celebrity and infamy.

  ART IS DEAD

  During the height of the hybrid rights movement, a hybrid art subculture rose up from the Los Angeles art scene. There were hybrid painters, such as Mikal Gregoire, and hybrid musicians, such as T. D. Denman, and the rock band The Carrie-Ons. Most prominent was hybrid filmmaker John Bungert.

  Outspoken and controversial, Bungert was known for films that often portrayed humans as the villains, and that unconventionally glorified zombies (most hybrids looked down on their animalistic forbearers). He broke onto the American underground film scene in 1964, when film critic Manny Farber championed Bungert’s Humunkind in an article for Film Culture. Bungert quickly became a darling of the art cinema world, championed as a visionary by other experimental filmmakers, including Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas. Bungert resented the attention, knowing he was being embraced more as a novelty because of his hybridity than as an actual artist.

  In 1968, human filmmaker George A. Romero released the extremely anti-zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, which Bungert said was “as hate filled and grotesque as Birth of the Nation,” referring to D. W. Griffith’s pro-Ku Klux Klan silent film.

  Bungert immediately put together a film meant as a response to Romero’s film. Titled Night of the Dead Living, the film told the story of a group of hybrids who became trapped in a remote country house while a mob of humans try to break in and terminate them.

  The film was never finished, unfortunately. On December 18, 1968, Bungert was found terminated in his small Santa Monica office. The crime was, of course, not investigated. Bungert had no particular enemies, but many of his friends believed that he had possibly gotten involved with some sordid investors while financing his films.

  The name David Z was a pseudonym he used writing for The Carrie Nation, but eventually he embraced the name on a philosophical level. Bailey had been a human; David Z was more than human. By 1962, David had abandoned the anonymity of the newsletter completely. He was now traveling around the country making public speeches anywhere people would listen—and surprisingly, he was finding audiences, human audiences, rapt by his bravado. He was also developing a following of diehard hybrid devotees.

  An interview televised on August 27, 1962, with former New York Times reporter Michael Cagle, catapulted David Z to national awareness. Here David Z laid out his beliefs for tens of millions of Americans. The interview opened with this David Z statement:I would like to point something out so that we will better understand each other. I don’t want you to think from the statements I have made that I’m being disrespectful towards humans. I’m being frank. And I think that my statements will give you a better insight into the mind of a true hybrid man than a majority of statements you get from other hybrids, other hybrids who will tell you what you to hear with the pathetic hope that it will make them draw closer to you and create a better possibility of getting from you some of the crumbs that you might let fall from your table. Well, I’m not looking for your crumbs.

  Throughout the interview, David Z shocked America with his rhetoric, which clearly implied that he felt hybrids were superior to humans, and some subtle but palpable insinuations that the end of the human race was imminent. While the majority of the hybrid rights movement fought against mortal segregation, David Z advocated a complete separation of hybrids from humans, but in an inverted fashion. He espoused a system where hybrids were the top tier of society, with humans essentially existing as their servants and food source. David Z also rejected the larger hybrid rights movement’s strategy of nonviolence:I am not saying to go out and get violent, but you should never be nonviolent unless you are confronted with nonviolence. I’m nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But if you drop that violence on me, you had better get prepared to have your face chewed right off. I will suck your brain out through your eyes.

  David Z’s speeches had a powerful effect on his audiences, especially among hybrids who were tired of being told to wait peaceably for equality and respect. Of course, the things David Z said alarmed most humans, and many hybrids too—he was described as a hatemonger and a threat to improved human-hybrid relations. Both Carries for Independence and the Living Love League denounced him as an irresponsible extremist whose views were not representative of hybrid Americans.

  David Z was equally critical of the rest of the hybrid rights movement. He described other leaders as “mummies” for the human establishment and said that the Living Love League was “a bunch of stupid hippies who became zombies to piss of their parents.” When Carries for Independence gave a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, David Z told the Los Angeles Times, “I don’t see why any hybrid should be excited over a speech set in front of a statue of a dead human and who didn’t even like us when he was alive.”

  In 1965, David Z formed the Hybrid Power Front to consolidate his nationwide pockets of followers. The FBI had opened a file on him long before then, but now they took particular interest. There was growing concern that David Z would try and stage an attack on humans of some kind. The public was already calling him a terrorist before any event had even taken place. In humanity’s defense, these fears were not just unfounded “mortalism,” as hybrid activists called bigotry toward hybrids. When David Z made comments such as, “Humans are our food. I look at you now the same way I looked at a roast chicken when I was human,” it was hard for humans to react any differently. The FBI was actually making moves to arrest David Z, when he was suddenly terminated on March 3, 1966.

  David Z was giving a speech before a crowd of hybrids at the Conservatory Ballroom in Miami when a disturbance erupted in the crowd. “Gun!” someone yelled. As David Z’s bodyguards moved to protect him, a woman rushed forward and shot David Z in the face with a sawed-off shotgun. A man then charged the stage and fired a handgun at David Z, hitting him seven times, twice in what remained of his head. Furious onlookers literally ripped the woman apart, while slightly calmer onlookers merely beat the man.

  Initial reports in the press suggested that humans had finally terminated David Z. Many were shocked when the assassins turned out to be hybrids. The woman, Maria Sholts, and the man, Devon Lester, were both hybrids and members of Carries for Independence. Lester claimed that he and Sholts had acted of their own volition and not on orders from CFI. Their motive, Lester told reporters, was that David Z “had been endangering the hopes of all Carries by pushing America toward a mortal war, one that the hybrids stood no chance of winning, we know.” The CFI publicly denounced the actions of Sholts and Lester, though they also reiterated Lester’s points about David Z.
Since killing a hybrid was not a crime in Florida, Lester was not arrested. Outraged, Lester demanded that he and David Z be treated like humans and that he be prosecuted for his crime of murder. The CFI marched outside a Miami police station, refusing to leave until Lester was arrested. In an act of both contrition and condescension, Lester was finally arrested, though not for murder. For firing his gun inside the Conservatory Ballroom, Lester was charged with disturbing the peace and fined $400.

  For those who study undead history, the hybrid rights movement came to a somewhat predictable end. With David Z out of the picture, CFI made some headway to secure a private hybrid reservation. A bill allotting several hundred acres in Wyoming to CFI was about to go before Congress when, on October 1, 1971, one of CFI’s leaders, Robert Bizek, was caught devouring a homeless man in a motel room in Detroit, Michigan.

  The FBI had received information that implicated all the top men and women of CFI in dozens of homeless kidnappings and murders throughout the 1960s. A raid of CFI’s Boston headquarters on October 18 led to a bloody battle between the FBI and the hybrids living and working within the complex. The live news reports of the daylong bloodbath caused a stir in several other cities. Humans mobbed up and attacked known hybrids in their neighborhoods, and ex-members of the disbanded HPF seized the moment to go on small killing and infecting sprees in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Houston.

  After over a hundred years of ambiguity, on February 20, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the Human Safety Act, which officially recognized hybrids as “non-beings” and a danger to regular citizens. Being a hybrid was still not a crime. There were no arrests, no trials. Now an officer of the law’s duty was to terminate a hybrid upon sight. Normal citizens were also encouraged to do the same.

  Once more the hybrids went into hiding.

  Secret War of the Undead

  There is no secret zombie war.

  —President Ronald Reagan, 1985

  On December 27, 1979, Soviet special forces swooped into Kabul, Afghanistan, and occupied several key governmental and military facilities, including the Tajbeg Presidential Palace. This was not technically an invasion—the Soviets had been asked to come by the Afghan government. The Russians would soon regret accepting the invitation, as thus began the Soviet-Afghan War, which is often, and aptly, referred to as the Soviet Union’s Vietnam War.

  In 1978, the Afghan Communist Party established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan after a bloody military coup known as the Saur Revolution. The new communist government immediately ran into violent conflict with the local, anticommunist mujahideen (Muslim guerilla fighters). By 1979, the conflict was proving impossible for the Republic to contain, so President Hafizullah Amin begged the Soviet Union for assistance. So the Soviets moved in. Finding Amin unsatisfactory, they had him killed and replaced him with the more Soviet-friendly Babrak Karmal. Regrettably for the Soviets, they did not find the mujahideen any easier to suppress.

  In typical Cold War fashion, the anticommunist rebels were able to garner financial and weapons support from the United States (unofficially, of course). On April 2, 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed a secret executive order authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct covert operations against the communist regime in Afghanistan, though Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, flatly denied that any such order had been issued when questioned about it mere weeks later. Carter had supplied funding for the CIA program known as Operation Dustup, which included the arming of Afghanistan’s mujahideen with zombie weaponry.

  The CUS had new zombie toys for the rebels to play with. Head of the class were the Chicken Hawk, a small rocket launcher that deployed a tear gas-like shell of zombie contagion, and the Z-2, a hand grenade that sent out a shower of sharp pellets coated in zombie contagion that could pierce clothing and light armor. Both were incredibly effective. The Soviets had their own toys too, such as the B-75, a machine gun that fired zombie contagion- coated bullets, and the PLO-20, which resembled a flame-thrower, and could spray foam contagion up to a hundred yards. Afghanistan’s rough terrain was soon swarming with the undead.

  The infestation actually served the rebels well, as the zombies were a far greater problem for the Soviets and their Afghani allies than for the mujahideen, who were relatively secure from the undead in their mountain safeguards. Then the game completely changed in 1984, when the CIA began receiving rebel reports that there were zombies attacking other zombies. Several samples of these new zombie-eating zombies were shipped back to Fort Dead, where the CUS scientists discovered that the Soviets had figured out a way to genetically alter the zombie contagion, creating a strain of zombies that also hungered for the flesh of natural zombies. The Soviets had found a shrewd gimmick for cleaning up Afghanistan’s zombie-beset deserts.

  Needless to say, it was not long until CUS produced its own variant of the Soviet strain, with zombies designed to target the Soviets’ new strain. Now a surreal and secret war was being fought without rebels or Soviets, but with American zombies and Soviet zombies. Before long it became clear to both the rebels and the Soviets that this was a futile strategy. Creating zombies for the purpose of fighting other zombies was not pushing the conflict toward victory for either side, and with both sides overzealously building up a zombie fighting force, the zombie population actually increased, despite the fact that these new zombies were fully willing to devour each other, as well as humans.

  In March 1985, the United States adopted National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 166, which changed our strategy from simply mucking things up for the Soviets, to supporting a clear victory for the mujahideen. Under direct orders from CIA Director William Casey (son of Project Phantom’s founder, Lt. Gen. Patrick Casey), the CIA began training the Afghans in tactics such as car bombs, bombs affixed to zombies, and cross-border raids outside of Afghanistan. By February 1989, after ten years of fighting, the Soviets had finally withdrawn all their troops.

  The long and costly war had mortally wounded an already ailing USSR. In the end, the Cold War was won not with A- or Z-bombs, but with bank accounts. The Soviets had overspent for far too long and their empire was crumbling around them, plagued by a bad economy and political unrest. On November 9, 1989, the Communist East German government announced the opening, or “fall,” of the Berlin Wall. Then on December 21, 1991, representatives from all of the Soviet republics (except Georgia), signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, ratifying the Belavezha Accords from earlier in the month, and dissolving the Soviet Union.

  The once mighty and fearsome Soviet Union was now the Commonwealth of Independent States. On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the president of the USSR and turned power over to Boris Yeltsin, president of Russia. After five decades, the United States had won. That long-held, nervous breath could finally be released. We were safe again…

  Or so we thought at the time.

  Conclusion of the Living Dead

  THE FUTURE HAS A PULSE

  I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

  —Thomas Jefferson, August 1816

  The quote above is a telling one. Those are the words of an idealist, a man more interested in possibilities than realities. Thomas Jefferson is undeniably an important figure in the American narrative. He did great things for our country when it was at its most fragile. Yet he also willfully misled the American public about the Lewis and Clark mission. Whether Jefferson’s subversion of the truth was intended to protect his own interests or the public’s is debatable, but in either case, it is as important to remember his actions as it is to remember what really befell Meriwether Lewis. Just as we must not overlook the fact that Jefferson was a lifelong slave owner, we also must not overlook the fact that he and Dr. Benjamin Rush accidentally released the zombie-human hybrid contagion into the world. Jefferson was a complicated and fascinating man—we do him far more justice by remembering him warts and all, than we do attempting to sugarcoat his story. />
  The same can be said for America itself. Some historians choose to paint our country with impressionistic strokes, but history should be a stark photograph. Even the smallest of white lies, minor distortions, and withheld details have a way of building up over time to conceal vast sections of the truth. These omissions and fudged facts are purportedly done in America’s interests, but lying rarely helps anyone except the liar. Maybe you rest easier at night thinking there are no zombies out there in the world, but that ignorance ultimately makes you less safe.

  During the Soviet-Afghan War, there were many Muslims from around the world who believed in the Afghani rebels’ cause and joined the mujahideen. These volunteers were known as Afghan Arabs, and one of the most prominent members was a wealthy Saudi oil prince named Osama bin Laden. When the war was over, bin Laden assembled the al-Qaeda organization for the purpose of continuing jihad against new enemies, primarily the United States. Though the CIA attempted to de-animate the zombies left in Afghanistan after the war, there was simply no way to ensure the de-animation of the entire force. Now, over two decades later, zombies spawned from those zombies are being used against our own brave men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces serving in the Middle East.