World War Z_An Oral History of the Zombie War

by Max Brooks

  The burst was angled upward, connecting just under and behind the chin and spraying its brains across the ceiling above us. I’d been the only one in the tunnel when it happened. I was the only witness …

  [He pauses.]

  “Exposure to unknown chemical agents.” That’s what they told me back in Edmonton, that or an adverse reaction to our own prophylactic medication. They threw in a healthy dose of PTSD[*Post-traumatic stress disorder] for good measure. I just needed rest, rest and long-term “evaluation” …

  “Evaluation” … that’s what happens when it’s your own side. It’s only “interrogation” when it’s the enemy. They teach you how to resist the enemy, how to protect your mind and spirit. They don’t teach you how to resist your own people, especially people who think they’re trying to “help” you see “the truth.” They didn’t break me, I broke myself. I wanted to believe them and I wanted them to help me. I was a good soldier, well trained, experienced; I knew what I could do to my fellow human beings and what they could do to me. I thought I was ready for anything. [He looks out at the valley, his eyes unfocused.] Who in his right mind could have been ready for this?

  THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST, BRAZIL

  [I arrive blindfolded, so as not to reveal my “hosts’” location. Outsiders call them the Yanomami, “The Fierce People,” and it is unknown whether this supposedly warlike nature or the fact that their new village hangs suspended from the tallest trees was what allowed them to weather the crisis as well, if not better, than even the most industrialized nation. It is not clear whether Fernando Oliveira, the emaciated, drug-addicted white man “from the edge of the world,” is their guest, mascot, or prisoner.]

  I was still a doctor, that’s what I told myself. Yes, I was rich, and getting richer all the time, but at least my success came from performing necessary medical procedures. I wasn’t just slicing and dicing little teenage noses or sewing Sudanese “pintos” onto sheboy pop divas.[*It has been alleged that, before the war, the sexual organs of Sudanese men convicted of adultery were severed and sold on the world black market.] I was still a doctor, I was still helping people, and if it was so “immoral” to the self-righteous, hypocritical North, why did their citizens keep coming?

  The package arrived from the airport an hour before the patient, packed in ice in a plastic picnic cooler. Hearts are extremely rare. Not like livers or skin tissue, and certainly not like kidneys, which, after the “presumed consent” law was passed, you could get from almost any hospital or morgue in the country.

  Was it tested?

  For what? In order to test for something, you have to know what you’re looking for. We didn’t know about Walking Plague then. We were concerned with conventional ailments—hepatitis or HIV/AIDS—and we didn’t even have time to test for those.

  Why is that?

  Because the flight had already taken so long. Organs can’t be kept on ice forever. We were already pushing our luck with this one.

  Where had it come from?

  China, most likely. My broker operated out of Macau. We trusted him. His record was solid. When he assured us that the package was “clean,” I took him at his word; I had to. He knew the risks involved, so did I, so did the patient. Herr Muller, in addition to his conventional heart ailments, was cursed with the extremely rare genetic defect of dextrocardia with situs in-versus. His organs lay in their exact opposite position; the liver was on the left side, the heart entryways on the right, and so on. You see the unique situation we were facing. We couldn’t have just transplanted a conventional heart and turned it backward. It just doesn’t work that way. We needed another fresh, healthy heart from a “donor” with exactly the same condition. Where else but China could we find that kind of luck?

  It was luck?

  [Smiles.] And “political expediency.” I told my broker what I needed, gave him the specifics, and sure enough, three weeks later I received an e-mail simply titled “We have a match.”

  So you performed the operation.

  I assisted, Doctor Silva performed the actual procedure. He was a prestigious heart surgeon who worked the top cases at the Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein in São Paulo. Arrogant bastard, even for a cardiologist. It killed my ego to have to work with … under … that prick, treating me like I was a first-year resident. But what was I going to do … Herr Muller needed a new heart and my beach house needed a new herbal Jacuzzi.

  Herr Muller never came out of the anesthesia. As he lay in the recovery room, barely minutes after closing, his symptoms began to appear. His temperature, pulse rate, oxygen saturation … I was worried, and it must have tickled my more “experienced colleague.” He told me that it was either a common reaction to the immunosuppressant medication, or the simple, expected complications of an overweight, unhealthy, sixty-seven-year-old man who’d just gone through one of the most traumatic procedures in modern medicine. I’m surprised he didn’t pat me on the head, the prick. He told me to go home, take a shower, get some sleep, maybe call a girl or two, relax. He’d stay and watch him and call me if there was any change.

  [Oliveira purses his lips angrily and chews another wad of the mysterious leaves at his side.]

  And what was I supposed to think? Maybe it was the drugs, the OKT 3. Or maybe I was just being a worrier. This was my first heart transplant. What did I know? Still … it bothered me so much that the last thing I wanted to do was sleep. So I did what any good doctor should do when his patient is suffering; I hit the town. I danced, I drank, I had salaciously indecent things done to me by who knows who or what. I wasn’t even sure it was my phone vibrating the first couple of times. It must have been at least an hour before I finally picked up. Graziela, my receptionist, was in a real state. She told me that Herr Muller had slipped into a coma an hour before. I was in my car before she could finish the sentence. It was a thirty-minute drive back to the clinic, and I cursed both Silva and myself every second of the way. So I did have reason to be concerned! So I was right! Ego, you could say; even though to be right meant dire consequences for me as well, I still relished tarnishing the invincible Silva’s reputation.

  I arrived to find Graziela trying to comfort a hysterical Rosi, one of my nurses. The poor girl was inconsolable. I gave her a good one across the cheek—that calmed her down—and asked her what was going on. Why were there spots of blood on her uniform? Where was Doctor Silva? Why were some of the other patients out of their rooms, and what the hell was that goddamn banging noise? She told me that Herr Muller had flat-lined, suddenly, and unexpectedly. She explained that they had been trying to revive him when Herr Muller had opened his eyes and bitten Doctor Silva on the hand. The two of them struggled; Rosi tried to help but was almost bitten herself. She left Silva, ran from the room, and locked the door behind her.

  I almost laughed. It was so ridiculous. Maybe Superman had slipped up, misdiagnosed him, if that was possible. Maybe he’d just risen from the bed, and, in a stupor, had tried to grab on to Doctor Silva to steady himself. There had to be a reasonable explanation … and yet, there was the blood on her uniform and the muffled noise from Herr Muller’s room. I went back to the car for my gun, more so to calm Graziela and Rosi than for myself.

  You carried a gun?

  I lived in Rio. What do you think I carried, my “pinto”? I went back to Herr Muller’s room, I knocked several times. I heard nothing. I whispered his and Silva’s names. No one responded. I noticed blood seeping out from under the door. I entered and found it covering the floor. Silva was lying in the far corner, Muller crouching over him with his fat, pale, hairy back to me. I can’t remember how I got his attention, whether I called his name, uttered a swear, or did anything at all but just stand there. Muller turned to me, bits of bloody meat falling from his open mouth. I saw that his steel sutures had been partially pried open and a thick, black, gelatinous fluid oozed through the incision. He got shakily to his feet, lumbering slowly toward me.

  I raised my pistol, aiming at his new heart. It was a
“Desert Eagle,” Israeli, large and showy, which is why I’d chosen it. I’d never fired it before, thank God. I wasn’t ready for the recoil. The round went wild, literally blowing his head off. Lucky, that’s all, this lucky fool standing there with a smoking gun, and a stream of warm urine running down my leg. Now it was my turn to get slapped, several times by Graziela, before I came to my senses and telephoned the police.

  Were you arrested?

  Are you crazy? These were my partners, how do you think I was able to get my homegrown organs. How do you think I was able to take care of this mess? They’re very good at that. They helped explain to my other patients that a homicidal maniac had broken into the clinic and killed both Herr Muller and Doctor Silva. They also made sure that none of the staff said anything to contradict that story.

  What about the bodies?

  They listed Silva as the victim of a probable “car jacking.” I don’t know where they put his body; maybe some ghetto side street in the City of God, a drug score gone bad just to give the story more credibility. I hope they just burned him, or buried him … deep.

  Do you think he …

  I don’t know. His brain was intact when he died. If he wasn’t in a body bag … if the ground was soft enough. How long would it have taken to dig out?

  [He chews another leaf, offering me some. I decline.]

  And Mister Muller?

  No explanation, not to his widow, not to the Austrian embassy. Just another kidnapped tourist who’d been careless in a dangerous town. I don’t know if Frau Muller ever believed that story, or if she ever tried to investigate further. She probably never realized how damn lucky she was.

  Why was she lucky?

  Are you serious? What if he hadn’t reanimated in my clinic? What if he’d managed to make it all the way home?

  Is that possible?

  Of course it is! Think about it. Because the infection started in the heart, the virus had direct access to his circulatory system, so it probably reached his brain seconds after it was implanted. Now you take another organ, a liver or a kidney, or even a section of grafted skin. That’s going to take a lot longer, especially if the virus is only present in small amounts.

  But the donor …

  Doesn’t have to be fully reanimated. What if he’s just newly infected? The organ may not be completely saturated. It might only have an infinitesimal trace. You put that organ in another body, it might take days, weeks, before it eventually works its way out into the bloodstream. By that point the patient might be well on the way to recovery, happy and healthy and living a regular life.

  But whoever is removing the organ …

  … may not know what he’s dealing with. I didn’t. These were the very early stages, when nobody knew anything yet. Even if they did know, like elements in the Chinese army … you want to talk about immoral … Years before the outbreak they’d been making millions on organs from executed political prisoners. You think something like a little virus is going to make them stop sucking that golden tit?

  But how …

  You remove the heart not long after the victim’s died … maybe even while he’s still alive … they used to do that, you know, remove living organs to ensure their freshness … pack it in ice, put it on a plane for Rio … China used to be the largest exporter of human organs on the world market. Who knows how many infected corneas, infected pituitary glands … Mother of God, who knows how many infected kidneys they pumped into the global market. And that’s just the organs! You want to talk about the “donated” eggs from political prisoners, the sperm, the blood? You think immigration was the only way the infection swept the planet? Not all the initial outbreaks were Chinese nationals. Can you explain all those stories of people suddenly dying of unexplained causes, then reanimating without ever having been bitten? Why did so many outbreaks begin in hospitals? Illegal Chinese immigrants weren’t going to hospitals. Do you know how many thousands of people got illegal organ transplants in those early years leading up to the Great Panic? Even if 10 percent of them were infected, even 1 percent …

  Do you have any proof of this theory?

  No … but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen! When I think about how many transplants I performed, all those patients from Europe, the Arab world, even the self-righteous United States. Few of you Yankees asked where your new kidney or pancreas was coming from, be it a slum kid from the City of God or some unlucky student in a Chinese political prison. You didn’t know, you didn’t care. You just signed your traveler’s checks, went under the knife, then went home to Miami or New York or wherever.

  Did you ever try to track these patients down, warn them?

  No, I didn’t. I was trying to recover from a scandal, rebuild my reputation, my client base, my bank account. I wanted to forget what happened, not investigate it further. By the time I realized the danger, it was scratching at my front door.

  BRIDGETOWN HARBOR, BARBADOS, WEST INDIES FEDERATION

  [I was told to expect a “tall ship,” although the “sails” of IS Imfingo refer to the four vertical wind turbines rising from her sleek, trimaran hull. When coupled with banks of PEM, or proton exchange membrane, fuel cells, a technology that converts seawater into electricity, it is easy to see why the prefix “IS” stands for “Infinity Ship.” Hailed as the undisputed future of maritime transport, it is still rare to see one sailing under anything but a government flag. The Imfingo is privately owned and operated. Jacob Nyathi is her captain.]

  I was born about the same time as the new, post apartheid South Africa. In those euphoric days, the new government not only promised the democracy of “one man, one vote,” but employment and housing to the entire country. My father thought that meant immediately. He didn’t understand that these were long-term goals to be achieved after years—generations—of hard work. He thought that if we abandoned our tribal homeland and relocated to a city, there would be a brand-new house and high-paying jobs just sitting there waiting for us. My father was a simple man, a day laborer. I can’t blame him for his lack of formal education, his dream of a better life for his family. And so we settled in Khayelitsha, one of the four main townships outside of Cape Town. It was a life of grinding, hopeless, humiliating poverty. It was my childhood.

  The night it happened, I was walking home from the bus stop. It was around five A.M. and I’d just finished my shift waiting tables at the T.G.I. Friday’s at Victoria Wharf. It had been a good night. The tips were big, and news from the Tri Nations was enough to make any South African feel ten feet tall. The Springboks were trouncing the All Blacks … again!

  [He smiles with the memory.]

  Maybe those thoughts were what distracted me at first, maybe it was simply being so knackered, but I felt my body instinctively react before I consciously heard the shots. Gunfire was not unusual, not in my neighborhood, not in those days. “One man, one gun,” that was the slogan of my life in Khayelitsha. Like a combat veteran, you develop almost genetic survival skills. Mine were razor sharp. I crouched, tried to triangulate the sound, and at the same time look for the hardest surface to hide behind. Most of the homes were just makeshift shanties, wood scraps or corrugated tin, or just sheets of plastic fastened to barely standing beams. Fire ravaged these lean-tos at least once a year, and bullets could pass through them as easily as open air.

  I sprinted and crouched behind a barbershop, which had been constructed from a car-sized shipping container. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do for a few seconds, long enough to hole up and wait for the shooting to die down. Only it didn’t. Pistols, shotguns, and that clatter you never forget, the kind that tells you someone has a Kalashnikov. This was lasting much too long to be just an ordinary gang row. Now there were screams, shouts. I began to smell smoke. I heard the stirrings of a crowd. I peeked out from around the corner. Dozens of people, most of them in their nightclothes, all shouting “Run! Get out of there! They’re coming!” House lamps were lighting all around me, faces poking out of shanties. “What’s going
on here?” they asked. “Who’s coming?” Those were the younger faces. The older ones, they just started running. They had a different kind of survival instinct, an instinct born in a time when they were slaves in their own country. In those days, everyone knew who “they” were, and if “they” were ever coming, all you could do was run and pray.

  Did you run?

  I couldn’t. My family, my mother and two little sisters, lived only a few “doors” down from the Radio Zibonele station, exactly where the mob was fleeing from. I wasn’t thinking. I was stupid. I should have doubled back around, found an alley or quiet street.

  I tried to wade through the mob, pushing in the opposite direction. I thought I could stay along the sides of the shanties. I was knocked into one, into one of their plastic walls that wrapped around me as the whole structure collapsed. I was trapped, I couldn’t breathe. Someone ran over me, smashed my head into the ground. I shook myself free, wriggled and rolled out into the street. I was still on my stomach when I saw them: ten or fifteen, silhouetted against the fires of the burning shanties. I couldn’t see their faces, but I could hear them moaning. They were slouching steadily toward me with their arms raised.

  I got to my feet, my head swam, my body ached all over. Instinctively I began to withdraw, backing into the “doorway” of the closest shack. Something grabbed me from behind, pulled at my collar, tore the fabric. I spun, ducked, and kicked hard. He was large, larger and heavier than me by a few kilos. Black fluid ran down the front of his white shirt. A knife protruded from his chest, jammed between the ribs and buried to the hilt. A scrap of my collar, which was clenched between his teeth, dropped as his lower jaw fell open. He growled, he lunged. I tried to dodge. He grabbed my wrist. I felt a crack, and pain shot up through my body. I dropped to my knees, tried to roll and maybe trip him up. My hand came up against a heavy cooking pot. I grabbed it and swung hard. It smashed into his face. I hit him again, and again, bashing his skull until the bone split open and the brains spilled out across my feet. He slumped over. I freed myself just as another one of them appeared in the entrance. This time the structure’s flimsy nature worked to my advantage. I kicked the back wall open, slinking out and bringing the whole hut down in the process.