by Max Brooks
ICE CITY, GREENLAND
[From the surface, all that is visible are the funnels, the massive, carefully sculpted wind catchers that continue to bring fresh, albeit cold, air to the three-hundred-kilometer maze below. Few of the quarter million people who once inhabited this hand-carved marvel of engineering have remained. Some stay to encourage the small but growing tourist trade. Some are here as custodians, living on the pension that goes with UNESCO’s renewed World Heritage Program. Some, like Ahmed Farahnakian, formerly Major Farahnakian of the Iranian Revolution Guards Corps Air Force, have nowhere else to go.]
India and Pakistan. Like North and South Korea or NATO and the old Warsaw Pact. If two sides were going to use nuclear weapons against each other, it had to be India and Pakistan. Everyone knew it, everyone expected it, and that is exactly why it didn’t happen. Because the danger was so omnipresent, all the machinery had been put in place over the years to avoid it. The hotline between the two capitals was in place, ambassadors were on a first-name basis, and generals, politicians, and everyone involved in the process was trained to make sure the day they all feared never came. No one could have imagined—I certainly didn’t—that events would unfold as they did.
The infection hadn’t hit us as hard as some other countries. Our land was very mountainous. Transportation was difficult. Our population was relatively small; given the size of our country and when you consider that many of our cities could be easily isolated by a proportionately large military, it is not difficult to see how optimistic our leadership was.
The problem was refugees, millions of them from the east, millions! Streaming across Baluchistan, throwing our plans into disarray. So many areas were already infected, great swarms slouching toward our cities. Our border guards were overwhelmed, entire outposts buried under waves of ghouls. There was no way to close the border and at the same time deal with our own outbreaks.
We demanded that the Pakistanis get control of their people. They assured us they were doing all they could. We knew they were lying.
The majority of refugees came from India, just passing through Pakistan in an attempt to reach someplace safe. Those in Islamabad were quite willing to let them go. Better to pass the problem along to another nation than have to deal with it themselves. Perhaps if we could have combined our forces, coordinated a joint operation at some appropriately defensible location. I know the plans were on the table. Pakistan’s south central mountains: the Pab, the Kirthar, the Central Brahui range. We could have stopped any number of refugees, or living dead. Our plan was refused. Some paranoid military attaché at their embassy told us outright that any foreign troops on their soil would be seen as a declaration of war. I don’t know if their president ever saw our proposal; our leaders never spoke to him directly. You see what I mean about India and Pakistan. We didn’t have their relationship. The diplomatic machinery was not in place. For all we know this little shit-eating colonel informed his government that we were attempting to annex their western provinces!
But what could we do? Every day hundreds of thousands of people crossed our border, and of those perhaps tens of thousands were infected! We had to take decisive action. We had to protect ourselves!
There is a road that runs between our two countries. It is small by your standards, not even paved in most places, but it was the main southern artery in Baluchistan. To cut it at just one place, the Ketch River Bridge, would have effectively sealed off 60 percent of all refugee traffic. I flew the mission myself, at night with a heavy escort. You didn’t need image intensifiers. You could see the headlights from miles away, a long, thin white trail in the darkness. I could even see small-arms flashes. The area was heavily infested. I targeted the bridge’s center foundation, which would be the hardest part to repair. The bombs separated cleanly. They were high-explosive, conventional ordnance, just enough to do the job. American aircraft, from when we used to be your allies of convenience, used to destroy a bridge built with American aid for the same purpose. The irony was not lost on the high command. Personally, I could have cared less. As soon as I felt my Phantom lighten, I hit my burners, waited for my observer plane’s report, and prayed with all my might that the Pakistanis wouldn’t retaliate.
Of course my prayers went unanswered. Three hours later their garrison at Qila Safed shot up our border station. I know now that our president and Ayatollah were willing to stand down. We’d gotten what we wanted, they’d gotten their revenge. Tit for tat, let it go. But who was going to tell the other side? Their embassy in Tehran had destroyed its codes and radios. That sonofabitching colonel had shot himself rather than betray any “state secrets.” We had no hotline, no diplomatic channels. We didn’t know how to contact the Pakistani leadership. We didn’t even know if there was any leadership left. It was such a mess, confusion turning to anger, anger turning on our neighbors. Every hour the conflict escalated. Border clashes, air strikes. It happened so fast, just three days of conventional warfare, neither side having any clear objective, just panicked rage.
[He shrugs.]
We created a beast, a nuclear monster that neither side could tame … Tehran, Islamabad, Qom, Lahore, Bandar Abbas, Ormara, Emam Khomeyni, Faisalabad. No one knows how many died in the blasts or would die when the radiation clouds began to spread over our countries, over India, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, over America.
No one thought it could happen, not between us. For God’s sake, they helped us build our nuclear program from the ground up! They supplied the materials, the technology, the third party brokering with North Korea and Russian renegades … we wouldn’t have been a nuclear power if it wasn’t for our fraternal Muslim brothers. No one would have expected it, but then again, no one would have expected the dead to rise, now would they? Only one could have foreseen this, and I don’t believe in him anymore.
DENVER, COLORADO, USA
[My train is late. The western drawbridge is being tested. Todd Wainio doesn’t seem to mind waiting for me at the platform. We shake hands under the station’s mural of Victory, easily the most recognizable image of the American experience in World War Z. Originally taken from a photograph, it depicts a squad of soldiers standing on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, their backs turned to us as they watch dawn break over Manhattan. My host looks very small and frail next to these towering, two-dimensional icons. Like most men of his generation, Todd Wainio is old before his time. With an expanding paunch, receding, graying hair, and three, deep, parallel scars down the side of his right cheek, it would be difficult to guess that this former U.S. Army infantryman is still, at least chronologically, at the beginning of his life.]
The sky was red that day. All the smoke, the crap that’d been filling the air all summer. It put everything in an amber red light, like looking at the world through hell-colored glasses. That’s how I first saw Yonkers, this little, depressed, rust-collar burb just north of New York City. I don’t think anybody ever heard of it. I sure as hell hadn’t, and now it’s up there with, like, Pearl Harbor … no, not Pearl … that was a surprise attack. This was more like Little Bighorn, where we … well … at least the people in charge, they knew what was up, or they should have. The point is, it wasn’t a surprise, the war … or emergency, or whatever you want to call it … it was already on. It had been, what, three months since everyone jumped on the panic train.
You remember what it was like, people just freaking out … boarding up their houses, stealing food, guns, shooting everything that moved. They probably killed more people, the Rambos and the runaway fires, and the traffic accidents and just the … the whole shit storm that we now call “the Great Panic”; I think that killed more people at first than Zack.
I guess I can see why the powers that be thought that one big stand-up battle was such a good idea. They wanted to show the people that they were still in charge, get them to calm the hell down so they could deal with the real problem. I get it, and because they needed a propaganda smackdown, I ended up in Yonkers.
It actually wasn�
�t the worst place to make a stand. Part of the town sat right in this little valley, and right over the west hills you had the Hudson River. The Saw Mill River Parkway ran right through the center of our main line of defense and the refugees streaming down the freeway were leading the dead right to us. It was a natural choke point, and it was a good idea … the only good idea that day.
[Todd reaches for another “Q,” the homegrown, American variety cigarette so named for its one-quarter tobacco content.]
Why didn’t they put us on the roofs? They had a shopping center, a couple of garages, big buildings with nice flat tops. They could have put a whole company right above the A&P. We could have seen the whole valley, and we would have been completely safe from attack. There was this apartment building, about twenty stories, I think … each floor had a commanding view of the freeway. Why wasn’t there a rifle team in each window?
You know where they put us? Right down on the ground, right behind sandbags or in fighting holes. We wasted so much time, so much energy preparing these elaborate firing positions. Good “cover and concealment,” they told us. Cover and concealment? “Cover” means physical protection, conventional protection, from small arms and artillery or air-dropped ordnance. That sound like the enemy we were about to go up against? Was Zack now calling in air strikes and fire missions? And why the hell were we worried about concealment when the whole point of the battle was to get Zack to come directly at us! So backasswards! All of it!
I’m sure whoever was in charge must have been one of the last of the Fulda Fucktards, you know, those generals who spent their nard-drop years training to defend West Germany from Ivan. Tight-assed, narrow-minded … probably pissed off from so many years of brushfire war. He must have been an FF because everything we did freakin’ stunk of Cold War Static Defense. You know they even tried to dig fighting holes for the tanks? The engineers blasted them right out of the A&P parking lot.
You had tanks?
Dude, we had everything: tanks, Bradleys, Humvees armed with everything from fifty cals to these new Vasilek heavy mortars. At least those might have been useful. We had Avenger Humvee mounted Stinger surface-to-air missile sets, we had this AVLB portable bridge layer system, perfect for the three-inch-deep creek that ran by the freeway. We had a bunch of XM5 electronic warfare vehicles all crammed with radar and jamming gear and … and … oh yeah, and we even had a whole FOL, Family of Latrines, just plopped right there in the middle of everything. Why, when the water pressure was still on and toilets were still flushing in every building and house in the neighborhood? So much we didn’t need! So much shit that only blocked traffic and looked pretty, and that’s what I think they were really there for, just to look pretty.
For the press.
Hell yeah, there must have been at least one reporter for every two or three uniforms![*Although this is an exaggeration, prewar records have shown Yonkers to have the largest press-to-military ratio than any other battlefield in history.] On foot and in vans, I don’t know how many news choppers must have been circling … you’d think with so many they’d spare a few to try and rescue people from Manhattan … hell yeah, I think it was all for the press, show them our big green kill power … or tan … some were just back from the desert, they hadn’t even been repainted yet. So much of it was for show, not just the vehicles but us as well. They had us in MOPP 4, dude, Mission Oriented Protective Posture, big bulky suits and masks that are supposed to protect you from a radioactive or biochem environment.
Could your superiors have believed the undead virus was airborne?
If that’s true, why didn’t they protect the reporters? Why didn’t our “superiors” wear them, or anyone else immediately behind the line. They were cool and comfortable in their BDUs while we sweated under layers of rubber, charcoal, and thick, heavy body armor. And what genius thought to put us in body armor anyway? Because the press reamed ’em for not having enough in the last war? Why the hell do you need a helmet when you’re fighting a living corpse? They’re the ones who need the helmets, not us! And then you’ve got the Net Rigs … the Land Warrior combat integration system. It was this whole personal electronics suite that allowed each one of us to link up with each other and the higher-ups to link up with us. Through your eyepiece you could download maps, GPS data, real-time satellite recon. You could find your exact position on a battlefield, your buddies’ positions, the bad guys … you could actually look through the video camera on your weapon, or anyone else’s, to see what’s over a hedge or around a corner. Land Warrior allowed every soldier to have the information of an entire command post, and let the command post control those soldiers as a single unit. “Netrocentric,” that’s what I kept hearing from the officers in front of the cameras. “Netrocentric” and “hyperwar.” Cool terms, but they didn’t mean shit when you’re trying to dig a fighting hole with MOPP gear and body armor, and Land Warrior and standard combat load, and all of it on the hottest day in what was one of the hottest summers on record. I can’t believe I was still standing when Zack began to show up.
It was just a trickle at first, ones and twos staggering between the abandoned cars that jammed the deserted freeway. At least the refugees had been evacuated. Okay, that was another thing they did right. Picking a choke point and clearing the civilians, great job. Everything else …
Zack started entering the first kill zone, the one designated for the MLRS. I didn’t hear the rockets launch, my hood muffled the noise, but I saw them streak toward the target. I saw them arch on their way down, as their casings broke away to reveal all those little bomblets on plastic streamers. They’re about the size of a hand grenade, antipersonnel with a limited antiarmor capacity. They scattered amongst the Gs, detonating once they hit the road or an abandoned car. Their gas tanks went up in like little volcanoes, geysers of fire and debris that added to the “steel rain.” I got to be honest, it was a rush, dudes were cheering in their mikes, me too, watching ghouls start to tumble. I’d say there were maybe thirty, maybe forty or fifty, zombies spread out all across this half mile stretch of freeway. The opening bombardment took out at least three-quarters of them.
Only three-quarters.
[Todd finishes his cigarette in one long, angry drag. Immediately, he reaches for another.]
Yep, and that’s what should have made us worry right then and there. “Steel rain” hit each and every single one of them, shredded their insides; organs and flesh were scattered all over the damn place, dropping from their bodies as they came toward us … but head shots … you’re trying to destroy the brain, not the body, and as long as they got a working thinker and some mobility … some were still walking, others too thrashed to stand were crawling. Yeah, we should have worried, but there wasn’t time.
The trickle was now turning into a stream. More Gs, dozens now, thick among the burning cars. Funny thing about Zack … you always think he’s gonna be dressed in his Sunday best. That’s how the media portrayed them, right, especially in the beginning … Gs in business suits and dresses, like, a cross section of everyday America, only dead. That’s not what they looked like at all. Most infected, the early infected, the ones who went in that first wave, they either died under treatment or at home in their own beds. Most were either in hospital gowns, or pajamas and nightshirts. Some were in sweats or their undies … or just naked, a lot of them completely buck bare. You could see their wounds, the dried marks on their bodies, the gouges that made you shiver even inside that sweltering gear.
The second “steel rain” didn’t have half the impact of the first, no more gas tanks to catch, and now the more tightly packed Gs just happened to be shielding each other from a possible head wound. I wasn’t scared, not yet. Maybe my wood was gone, but I was pretty sure it’d be back when Zack entered the Army’s kill zone.
Again, I couldn’t hear the Paladins, too far back up the hill, but I sure heard, and saw, their shells land. These were standard HE 155s, a high explosive core with a fragmentation case. They did even less da
mage than the rockets!
Why is that?
No balloon effect for one. When a bomb goes off close to you, it causes the liquid in your body to burst, literally, like a freakin’ balloon. That doesn’t happen with Zack, maybe because he carries less bodily fluid than us or because that fluid’s more like a gel. I don’t know. But it didn’t do shit, neither did the SNT effect.
What is SNT?
Sudden Nerve Trauma, I think that’s what you call it. It’s another effect of close-in high explosives. The trauma is so great sometimes that your organs, your brain, all of it, just shuts down like God flickin’ your life switch. Something to do with electrical impulses or whatnot. I don’t know, I’m not a fuckin’ doctor.
But that didn’t happen.
Not once! I mean … don’t get me wrong … it’s not like Zack just skipped through the barrage unscathed. We saw bodies blown to shit, tossed into the air, ripped to pieces, even complete heads, live heads with eyes and jaws still moving, popping sky high like freakin’ Cristal corks … we were taking them down, no doubt, but not as many or as fast as we needed to!
The stream was now like a river, a flood of bodies, slouching, moaning, stepping over their mangled bros as they rolled slowly and steadily toward us like a slow-motion wave.
The next kill zone was direct fire from the heavy arms, the tank’s main 120s and Bradleys with their chain guns and FOTT missiles. The Humvees also began to open up, mortars and missiles and the Mark-19s, which are, like, machine guns, but firing grenades. The Comanches came whining in at what felt like inches above our heads with chains and Hellfires and Hydra rocket pods.
It was a fuckin’ meat grinder, a wood chipper, organic matter clouding like sawdust above the horde.
Nothing can survive this, I was thinking, and for a little while, it looked like I was right … until the fire started to die.
