World War Z_An Oral History of the Zombie War

by Max Brooks

  As soon as it came over the horizon I could tell that its orbit had shifted radically. As I closed the distance, I could see why. Their escape pod had blown its hatch, and because it was still docked to the primary airlock, the entire station had depressurized in seconds. As a precaution, I requested docking clearance. I got nothing. As I came aboard, I could see that even though the station was clearly large enough for a crew of seven or eight, it only had the bunk space and personal kits for two. I found the Yang packed with emergency supplies, enough food, water, and O2 candles for at least five years. What I couldn’t figure out at first was why. There was no scientific equipment aboard, no intelligence-gathering assets. It was almost like the Chinese government had sent these two men into space for no other purpose than to exist. Fifteen minutes into my floatabout, I found the first of several scuttling charges. This space station was little more than a giant Orbital Denial Vehicle. If those charges were to detonate, the debris from a four-hundred-metric-ton space station would not only be enough to damage or destroy any other orbiting platform, but any future space launch would be grounded for years. It was a “Scorched Space” policy, “if we can’t have it, neither can anyone else.”

  All the station’s systems were still operational. There had been no fire, no structural damage, no reason I could see to cause the accident of the escape pod’s hatch. I found the body of a lone taikonaut with his hand still clinging to the hatch release. He was wearing one of their pressurized escape suits, but the faceplate had been shattered by a bullet. I’m guessing the shooter was blown out into space. I’d like to believe that the Chinese revolution wasn’t just restricted to Earth, that the man who’d blown the hatch was also the one who had attempted to signal us. His mate must have stuck by the old guard. Maybe Mister Loyalist had been ordered to set off the scuttling charges. Zhai—that was the name on his personal effects—Zhai had tried to blast his mate into space and had caught a round in the process. Makes for a good tale, I think. That’s how I’m going to remember it.

  Is that how you were able to extend your endurance? By using the supplies aboard the Yang?

  [He gives me a thumbs-up.]We cannibalized every inch of it for spares and materials. We would have liked to have merged the two platforms together but we didn’t have the tools or manpower for such an undertaking. We might been able to use the escape pod to return to Earth. It had a heat shield and room for three. It was very tempting. But the station’s orbit was decaying rapidly, and we had to make a choice then and there, escape to Earth or resupply the ISS. You know which choice we made.

  Before we finally abandoned her, we laid our friend Zhai to rest. We strapped his body into its bunk, brought his personal kit back to the ISS, and said a few words in his honor as the Yang burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere. For all we knew he might have been the loyalist, not the rebel, but either way, his actions allowed us to stay alive. Three more years we remained in orbit, three more years that wouldn’t have been possible without the Chinese consumables.

  I still think it’s one of the war’s great ironies that our replacement crew ended up arriving in a privately owned civilian vehicle. Spacecraft Three, the ship originally designed for prewar orbital tourism. The pilot, with his cowboy hat and big, confident Yankee grin. [He tries his best Texas accent.] “Anyone order takeout?” [He laughs, then winces and self-medicates again.]

  Sometimes I’m asked if we regretted our decision to stay aboard. I can’t speak for my mates. On their deathbeds they both said they’d do it all over again. How can I disagree? I don’t regret the physical therapy that followed, getting to know my bones again and remembering why the good Lord gave us legs in the first place. I don’t regret being exposed to so much cosmic radiation, all those unprotected EVAs, all that time with inadequate shielding in the ISS. I don’t regret this.[He motions to the hospital room and machinery attached to his body.] We made our choice, and, I’d like to think, we made a difference in the end. Not bad for the son of an Andamooka opal miner.

  [Terry Knox died three days after this interview.]

  ANCUD, ISLA GRANDE DE CHILOE, CHILE

  [While the official capital has returned to Santiago, this one-time refugee base now remains the economic and cultural center of the country. Ernesto Olguin calls the beach house on the island’s Peninsula de Lacuy home, although his duties as a merchant ship’s master keep him at sea for most of the year.]

  The history books call it “The Honolulu Conference,” but really it should have been called the “Saratoga Conference” because that’s all any of us had a chance to see. We spent fourteen days in those cramped compartments and dank stuffy passageways. USS Saratoga: from aircraft carrier, to decommissioned hulk, to evacuee transport barge, to floating United Nations HQ.

  It also shouldn’t have been called a conference. If anything, it was more like an ambush. We were supposed to be exchanging war fighting tactics and technology. Everyone was anxious to see the British method of fortified motorways, which was almost as exciting as that live demonstration of Mkunga Lalem.[*"The Eel and the Sword", the world's premier anti-zombie martial art.] We were also supposed to be attempting to reintroduce some measure of international trade. That was my task, specifically, to integrate the remnants of our navy into the new international convoy structure. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from my time aboard Super Sara. I don’t think anyone could have expected what actually happened.

  On the first day of the conference, we’d assembled for the introductions. I was hot and tired and wishing to God we could just get on without all the tiresome speeches. And then the American ambassador rose, and the whole world came to a screeching halt.

  It was time to go on the attack, he said, to all get out from behind our established defenses and begin retaking infested territory. At first I thought he simply meant isolated operations: securing more inhabitable islands or, perhaps, even reopening the Suez/Panama canal zones. My supposition didn’t last very long. He made it very clear that this was not going to be a series of minor tactical incursions. The United States intended to go permanently on the offensive, marching forward every day, until, as he put it, “every trace was sponged, and purged, and, if need be, blasted from the surface of the Earth.” Maybe he thought ripping off Churchill would give it some kind of emotional punch. It didn’t. Instead, the room spontaneously combusted into argument.

  One side asked why in hell should we risk even more lives, suffer even one more unnecessary casualties when all we had to do was remain safe and sedentary while our enemy simply rotted away. Wasn’t it happening already? Weren’t the earliest cases starting to show signs of advanced decomposition? Time was on our side, not theirs. Why not let nature do all the work for us?

  The other side countered that not all the living dead were rotting away. What about the later cases, the ones still strong and healthy? Couldn’t just one restart the plague all over again? And what about those who prowled countries above the snowline? How long would we have to wait for them? Decades? Centuries? Would refugees from these countries ever have a chance of returning home?

  And that’s when it got ugly. Many of the colder countries were what you used to call “First World.” One of the delegates from a prewar “developing” country suggested, rather hotly, that maybe this was their punishment for raping and pillaging the “victim nations of the south.” Maybe, he said, by keeping the “white hegemony” distracted with their own problems, the undead invasion might allow the rest of the world to develop “without imperialist intervention.” Maybe the living dead had brought more than just devastation to the world. Maybe in the end, they had brought justice for the future. Now, my people have little love for the northern gringos, and my family suffered enough under Pinochet to make that animosity personal, but there comes a point where private emotions must give way to objective facts. How could there be a “white hegemony” when the most dynamic prewar economies were China and India, and the largest wartime economy was unquestionably Cuba? How could yo
u call the colder countries a northern issue when so many people were just barely surviving in the Himalayas, or the Andes of my own Chile? No, this man, and those who agreed with him, weren’t talking about justice for the future. They just wanted revenge for the past.

  [Sighs.] After all we’d been through, we still couldn’t take our heads from out of our asses or our hands from around each other’s throats.

  I was standing next to the Russian delegate, trying to prevent her from climbing over her seat, when I heard another American voice. It was their president. The man didn’t shout, didn’t try to restore order. He just kept going in that calm, firm tone that I don’t think any world leader has since been able to duplicate. He even thanked his “fellow delegates” for their “valued opinions” and admitted that, from a purely military perspective, there was no reason to “push our luck.” We’d fought the living dead to a stalemate and, eventually, future generations might be able to reinhabit the planet with little or no physical danger. Yes, our defensive strategies had saved the human race, but what about the human spirit?

  The living dead had taken more from us than land and loved ones. They’d robbed us of our confidence as the planet’s dominant life-form. We were a shaken, broken species, driven to the edge of extinction and grateful only for a tomorrow with perhaps a little less suffering than today. Was this the legacy we would leave to our children, a level of anxiety and self-doubt not seen since our simian ancestors cowered in the tallest trees? What kind of world would they rebuild? Would they rebuild at all? Could they continue to progress, knowing that they had been powerless to reclaim their future? And what if that future saw another rise of the living dead? Would our descendants rise to meet them in battle, or simply crumple in meek surrender and accept what they believe to be their inevitable extinction? For this reason alone, we had to reclaim our planet. We had to prove to ourselves that we could do it, and leave that proof as this war’s greatest monument. The long, hard road back to humanity, or the regressive ennui of Earth’s once-proud primates. That was the choice, and it had to be made now.

  So typically Norteamericano, reaching for the stars with their asses still stuck in the mud. I guess, if this was a gringo movie, you’d see some idiot get up and start clapping slowly, then the others would join in and then we’d see a tear roll down someone’s cheek or some other contrived bullshit like that. Everyone was silent. No one moved. The president announced that we would recess for the afternoon to consider his proposal, then reconvene at dusk for a general vote.

  As naval attaché, I wasn’t allowed to participate in that vote. While the ambassador decided the fate of our beloved Chile, I had nothing to do but enjoy the Pacific sunset. I sat on the flight deck, wedged in between the windmills and solar cells, killing time with my opposite numbers from France and South Africa. We tried not to talk shop, searching for any common subject as far from the war as we could get. We thought we were safe with wine. As luck might have it, each of us had either lived near, worked on, or had family connected with a vineyard: Aconcagua, Stellenboch, and Bordeaux. Those were our bonding points and, as with everything else, they led right back to the war.

  Aconcagua had been destroyed, burned to the ground during our country’s disastrous experiments with napalm. Stellenboch was now growing subsistence crops. Grapes were considered a luxury when the population was close to starvation. Bordeaux was overrun, the dead crushing its soil underfoot like almost all of continental France. Commander Emile Renard was morbidly optimistic. Who knows, he said, what the nutrients of their corpses would do for the soil? Maybe it would even improve on the overall taste once Bordeaux was retaken, if it was retaken. As the sun began to dip, Renard took something from his kit bag, a bottle of Chateau Latour, 1964. We couldn’t believe our eyes. The ’64 was an extremely rare prewar vintage. By sheer chance, the vineyard had had a bumper crop that season and had chosen to harvest its grapes in late August as opposed to the traditional early September. That September was marked by early, devastating rains, which inundated the other vineyards and elevated Chateau Latour to almost Holy Grail status. The bottle in Renard’s hand might be the last of its kind, the perfect symbol of a world we might never see again. It was the only personal item he’d managed to save during the evacuation. He carried it with him everywhere, and was planning to save it for … ever, possibly, seeing as it looked like none of any vintage would ever be made again. But now, after the Yankee president’s speech …

  [He involuntarily licks his lips, tasting the memory.]

  It hadn’t traveled that well, and the plastic mugs didn’t help. We didn’t care. We savored every sip.

  You were pretty confident about the vote?

  Not that it would be unanimous, and I was damn right. Seventeen “No” votes and thirty-one “Abstain.” At least the no voters were willing to suffer the long-term consequences of their decision … and they did. When you think that the new UN only consisted of seventy-two delegates, the showing of support was pretty poor. Not that it mattered for me or my other two amateur “sommeliers.” For us, our countries, our children, the choice had been made: attack.

  TOTAL WAR

  ABOARD THE MAURO ALTIERI, THREE THOUSAND FEET ABOVE VAALAJARVI, FINLAND

  [I stand next to General D’Ambrosia in the CIC, the Combat Information Center, of Europe’s answer to the massive U.S. D-29 command and control dirigible. The crew work silently at their glowing monitors. Occasionally, one of them speaks into a headset, a quick, whispered acknowledgment in French, German, Spanish, or Italian. The general leans over the video chart table, watching the entire operation from the closest thing to a God’s-eye view.]

  “Attack”—when I first heard that word, my gut reaction was “oh shit.” Does that surprise you?

  [Before I can answer … ]

  Sure it does. You probably expected “the brass” to be just champing at the bit, all that blood and guts, “hold ’em by the nose while we kick ’em in the ass” crap.

  [Shakes his head.] I don’t know who created the stereotype of the hard-charging, dim-witted, high school football coach of a general officer. Maybe it was Hollywood, or the civilian press, or maybe we did it to ourselves by allowing those insipid, egocentric clowns—the MacArthurs and Halseys and Curtis E. LeMays—to define our image to the rest of the country. Point is, that’s the image of those in uniform, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. I was scared to death of taking our armed forces on the offensive, more so because it wouldn’t be my ass hanging out in the fire. I’d only be sending others out to die, and here’s what I’d be sending them up against.

  [He turns to another screen on the far wall, nodding to an operator, and the image dissolves into a wartime map of the continental United States.]

  Two hundred million zombies[*It has been confirmed at least twenty-five million of this number include reanimated refugees from Latin America who were killed attempting to reach the Canadian north.] Who can even visualize that type of number, let alone combat it? At least this time around we knew what we were combating, but when you added up all the experience, all the data we’d compiled on their origin, their physiology, their strengths, their weaknesses, their motives, and their mentality, it still presented us with a very gloomy prospect for victory.

  The book of war, the one we’ve been writing since one ape slapped another, was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.

  All armies, be they mechanized or mountain guerilla, have to abide by three basic restrictions: they have to be bred, fed, and led. Bred: you need warm bodies, or else you don’t have an army; fed: once you’ve got that army, they’ve got to be supplied; and led: no matter how decentralized that fighting force is, there has to be someone among them with the authority to say “follow me.” Bred, fed, and led; and none of these restrictions applied to the living dead.

  Did you ever read All Quiet on the Western Front? Remarque paints a vivid picture of Germany becoming “empty,” meaning that towar
d the end of the war, they were simply running out of soldiers. You can fudge the numbers, send the old men and little boys, but eventually you’re going to hit the ceiling … unless every time you killed an enemy, he came back to life on your side. That’s how Zack operated, swelling his ranks by thinning ours! And it only worked one way. Infect a human, he becomes a zombie. Kill a zombie, he becomes a corpse. We could only get weaker, while they might actually get stronger.

  All human armies need supplies, this army didn’t. No food, no ammo, no fuel, not even water to drink or air to breathe! There were no logistics lines to sever, no depots to destroy. You couldn’t just surround and starve them out, or let them “wither on the vine.” Lock a hundred of them in a room and three years later they’ll come out just as deadly.

  It’s ironic that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain, because, as a group, they have no collective brain to speak of. There was no leadership, no chain of command, no communication or cooperation on any level. There was no president to assassinate, no HQ bunker to surgically strike. Each zombie is its own, self-contained, automated unit, and this last advantage is what truly encapsulates the entire conflict.

  You’ve heard the expression “total war”; it’s pretty common throughout human history. Every generation or so, some gasbag likes to spout about how his people have declared “total war” against an enemy, meaning that every man, woman, and child within his nation was committing every second of their lives to victory. That is bullshit on two basic levels. First of all, no country or group is ever 100 percent committed to war; it’s just not physically possible. You can have a high percentage, so many people working so hard for so long, but all of the people, all of the time? What about the malingerers, or the conscientious objectors? What about the sick, the injured, the very old, the very young? What about when you’re sleeping, eating, taking a shower, or taking a dump? Is that a “dump for victory”? That’s the first reason total war is impossible for humans. The second is that all nations have their limits. There might be individuals within that group who are willing to sacrifice their lives; it might even be a relatively high number for the population, but that population as a whole will eventually reach its maximum emotional and physiological breaking point. The Japanese reached theirs with a couple of American atomic bombs. The Vietnamese might have reached theirs if we’d dropped a couple more,[*It has been alleged that several members of the American military establishment openly supported the use of thermonuclear weapons during the Vietnam conflict] but, thank all holy Christ, our will broke before it came to that. That is the nature of human warfare, two sides trying to push the other past its limit of endurance, and no matter how much we like to talk about total war, that limit is always there … unless you’re the living dead.