World War Z_An Oral History of the Zombie War

by Max Brooks

  The army, arrogant bastards that they were, kept insisting that they had the problem under control, that every day was the turning point and before 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 of Chinese. Numbers, that was the philosophy of my grandparents’ generation, and it was the 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, choking 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 if the war continued along its course, and what our chances for survival 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 of 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, the most advanced, the 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 only 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 prepare 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 of us had family scattered throughout the country. We did our best to communicate with them, get a phone line working or send word with an army unit headed in that direction. The message was always the 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 …

  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 imbalanced 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, especially 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?

  [Xu evades the question.]

  The worst part for many others was the waiting, knowing that even if 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 wait 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 I think, in front of 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 headed?

  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 the blight had spread to every corner of the 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, hard 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, the 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.

&n
bsp; 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 wardroom, 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 watercolors 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 “biologics” 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 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 the 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 Victory, 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 overturned 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, every fly that settled on the deck’s bones and flesh. Zombies were falling into the ocean, one every couple of minutes. They would see something 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 cou
ld 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.

  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 if 10 percent of the refugee ships were infested, that was still 10 percent of several hundred 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, fired 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 deserved 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.