by Max Brooks
You say ADS models. Was there more than one type?
We had a bunch: civilian, military, old, new … well … relatively new. We couldn’t build any wartime models, so we had to work with what was already available. Some of the older ones dated back to the seventies, the JIMs and SAMs. I’m really glad I never had to operate any of those. They only had universal joints and portholes instead of a face bowl, at least on the early JIMs. I knew one guy, from the British Special Boat Service. He had these mondo blood blisters all along his inner thighs from where the JIM’s leg joints pinched his skin. Kick-ass divers, the SBS, but I’d never swap jobs with them.
We had three basic U.S. Navy models: the Hardsuit 1200, the 2000, and the Mark 1 Exosuit. That was my baby, the exo. You wanna talk about sci-fi, this thing looked like it was made to fight giant space termites. It was much slimmer than either of the two hardsuits, and light enough that you could even swim. That was the major advantage over the hardsuit, actually over all other ADS systems. To be able to operate above your enemy, even without a power sled or thruster packs, that more than made up for the fact that you couldn’t scratch your itches. The hardsuits were big enough to allow your arms to be pulled into the central cavity to allow you to operate secondary equipment.
What kind of equipment?
Lights, video, side scanning sonar. The hardsuits were full-service units, exos were the bargain basement. You didn’t have to worry about a lot of readouts and machinery. You didn’t have any of the distractions or the multitasking of the hardsuits. The exo was sleek and simple, allowing you to focus on your weapon and the field in front of you.
What kind of weapons did you use?
At first we had the M-9, kind of a cheap, modified, knockoff of the Russian APS. I say “modified” because no ADS had anything close to resembling hands. You either had four-pronged claws or simple, industrial pincers. Both worked as hand-to-hand weapons—just grab a G’s head and squeeze—but they made it impossible to fire a gun. The M-9 was fixed to your forearm and could be fired electrically. It had a laser pointer for accuracy and air-encased cartridges that fired these four-inch-long steel rods. The major problem was that they were basically designed for shallow water operations. At the depth we needed, they imploded like eggshells. About a year in we got a much more efficient model, the M-11, actually invented by the same guy who invented both the hardsuit and exo. I hope that crazy Canuck got an assload of medals for what he’s done for us. The only problem with it was that DeStRes thought production was too expensive. They kept telling us that between our claws and preexisting construction tools, we had more than enough to handle Zack.
What changed their minds?
Troll. We were in the North Sea, repairing that Norwegian natural gas platform, and suddenly there they were … We’d expected some kind of attack—the noise and light of the construction site always attracted at least a handful of them. We didn’t know a swarm was nearby. One of our sentries sounded off, we headed for his beacon, and we were suddenly inundated. Horrible thing to fight hand-to-hand underwater. The bottom churns up, your visibility is shot, like fighting inside a glass of milk. Zombies don’t just die when you hit them, most of the time they disintegrate, fragments of muscle, organ, brain matter, mixed up with the silt and swirling around you. Kids today … fuckin’ A, I sound like my pops, but it’s true, the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this “ZeVDeK”—Zero Visibility Detection Kit—with color-imaging sonar and low-light optics. The picture is relayed through a heads-up display right on your face bowl like a fighter plane. Throw in a pair of stereo hydrophones and you’ve got a real sensory advantage over Zack. That was not the case when I first went exo. We couldn’t see, we couldn’t hear—we couldn’t even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind.
Why was that?
Because the one fundamental flaw of an ADS is complete tactile blackout. The simple fact that the suit is hard means you can’t feel anything from the outside world, even if a G has his hands right on you. Unless Zack is actively tugging, trying to pull you back or flip you around, you may not know he’s there until his face is right up against yours. That night at Troll … our helmet lights only made the problem worse by throwing up a glare that was only broken by an undead hand or face. That was the only time I was ever spooked … not scared, you understand, just spooked, swinging in this liquid chalk and suddenly a rotting face is jammed against my face bowl.
The civilian oil workers, they wouldn’t go back to work, even under threat of reprisals, until we, their escorts, were better armed. They’d lost enough of their people already, ambushed out of the darkness. Can’t imagine what that must have been like. You’re in this dry suit, working in near pitch-black, eyes stinging from the light of the welding torch, body numb from the cold or else burning from the hot water pumped through the system. Suddenly you feel these hands, or teeth. You struggle, call for help, try to fight or swim as they pull you up. Maybe a few body parts will rise to the surface, maybe they’ll just pull up a severed lifeline. That was how the DSCC came into being as an official outfit. Our first mission was to protect the rig divers, keep the oil flowing. Later we expanded to beachhead sanitation and harbor clearing.
What is beachhead sanitation?
Basically, helping the jarheads get ashore. What we learned during Bermuda, our first amphibious landing, was that the beachhead was coming under constant attack by Gs walking out of the surf. We had to establish a perimeter, a semicircular net around the proposed landing area that was deep enough for ships to pass over, but high enough to keep out Zack.
That’s where we came in. Two weeks before the landings took place, a ship would anchor several miles offshore and start banging away with their active sonar. That was to draw Zack away from the beach.
Wouldn’t that sonar also lure in zombies from deeper water?
The brass told us that was an “acceptable risk.” I think they didn’t have anything better. That’s why it was an ADS op, too risky for mesh divers. You knew that masses were gathering under that pinging ship, and that once they went silent, you’d be the brightest target out there. It actually turned out to be the closest thing we ever had to a cakewalk. The attack frequency was the lowest by far, and when the nets were up, they had an almost perfect success rate. All you needed was a skeleton force to keep a constant vigil, maybe snipe the occasional G that tried to climb the fence. They didn’t really need us for this kind of op. After the first three landings, they went back to using mesh divers.
And harbor clearing?
That was not a cakewalk. That was in the final stages of the war, when it wasn’t just about opening a beachhead, but reopening harbors for deepwater shipping. That was a massive, combined operation: mesh divers, ADS units, even civilian volunteers with nothing but a scuba rig and a spear gun. I helped clear Charleston, Norfolk, Boston, freakin’ Boston, and the mother of all subsurface nightmares, the Hero City. I know grunts like to bitch about fighting to clear a city, but imagine a city underwater, a city of sunken ships and cars and planes and every kind of debris imaginable. During the evacuation, when a lot of container ships were trying to make as much room as they could, a lot of them dumped their cargo overboard. Couches, toaster ovens, mountains and mountains of clothes. Plasma TVs always crunched when you walked over them. I always imagined it was bone. I also imagined I could see Zack behind each washer and dryer, climbing over each pile of smashed air conditioners. Sometimes it was just my imagination, but sometimes … The worst … the worst was having to clear a sunken ship. There were always a few that had gone down within the harbor boundaries. A couple, like the Frank Cable, big sub tender turned refugee ship, had gone down right at the mouth of the harbor. Before she could be raised, we had to do a compartment-by-compartment sweep. That was the only time the exo ever felt bulky, unwieldy. I didn’t smack my head in every passageway, but it sure as hell felt like it. A lot of the hatches were blocked by debris. We either had to cut our way through
them, or through the decks and bulkheads. Sometimes the deck had been weakened by damage or corrosion. I was cutting through a bulkhead above the Cable’s engine room when suddenly the deck just collapsed under me. Before I could swim, before I could think … there were hundreds of them in the engine room. I was engulfed, drowning in legs and arms and hunks of meat. If I ever had a recurring nightmare, and I’m not saying I do, because I don’t, but if I did, I’d be right back in there, only this time I’m completely naked … I mean I would be.
[I am surprised at how quickly we reach the bottom. It looks like a desert wasteland, glowing white against the permanent darkness. I see the stumps of wire coral, broken and trampled by the living dead.]
There they are.
[I look up to see the swarm, roughly sixty of them, walking out of the desert night.]
And here we go.
[Choi maneuvers us above them. They reach up for our searchlights, eyes wide and jaws slack. I can see the dim red beam of the laser as it settles on the first target. A second later, a small dart is fired into its chest.]
And one …
[He centers his beam on a second subject.]
And two …
[He moves down the swarm, tagging each one with a nonlethal shot.]
Kills me not to kill them. I mean, I know the whole point is to study their movements, set up an early warning network. I know that if we had the resources to clear them all we would. Still …
[He darts a sixth target. Like all the others, this one is oblivious to the small hole in its sternum.]
How do they do it? How are they still around? Nothing in the world corrodes like saltwater. These Gs should have gone way before the ones on land. Their clothes sure did, anything organic like cloth or leather.
[The figures below us are practically naked.]
So why not the rest of them? Is it the temperature at these depths, is it the pressure? And why do they have such a resistance to pressure anyway? At this depth the human nervous system should be completely Jell-O-ized. They shouldn’t even be able to stand, let alone walk and “think” or whatever their version of thinking is. How do they do it? I’m sure someone real high up has all the answers and I’m sure the only reason they don’t tell me is …
[He is suddenly distracted by a flashing light on his instrument panel.]
Hey, hey, hey. Check this out.
[I look down at my own panel. The readouts are incomprehensible.]
We got a hot one, pretty healthy rad count. Must be from the Indian Ocean, Iranian or Paki, or maybe that ChiCom attack boat that went down off Manihi. How about that?
[He fires another dart.]
You’re lucky. This is one of the last manned recon dives. Next month it’s all ROV, 100 percent Remotely Operated Vehicles.
There’s been a lot of controversy over the use of ROVs for combat.
Never happen. The Sturge’s[*"The Sturgeon General": The old civilian nickname tor the present commander of the DSCC] got way too much star power. She’d never let Congress go ’droid on us.
Is there any validity to their argument?
What, you mean if robots are more efficient fighters than ADS divers? Hell no. All that talk about “limiting human casualties” is bullshit. We never lost a man in combat, not one! That guy they keep talking about, Chernov, he was killed after the war, on land, when he got wasted and passed out on a tram line. Fuckin’ politicians.
Maybe ROVs are more cost-effective, but one thing they’re not is better. I’m not just talking about artificial intelligence; I’m talking heart, instinct, initiative, everything that makes us us. That’s why I’m still here, same with the Sturge, and almost all the other vets who took the plunge during the war. Most of us are still involved because we have to be, because they still haven’t yet come up with a collection of chips and bits to replace us. Believe me, once they do, I’ll not only never look at an exosuit again, I’ll quit the navy and pull a full-on Alpha November Alpha.
What’s that?
Action in the North Atlantic, this old, black-and-white war flick. There’s a guy in it, you know the “Skipper” from Gilligan’s Island, his old man.[*Alan Hale, Senior] He had a line … “I’m putting an oar on my shoulder and I’m starting inland. And the first time a guy says to me What’s that on your shoulder?’ that’s where I’m settling for the rest of my life.”
QUEBEC, CANADA
[The small farmhouse has no wall, no bars on the windows, and no lock on the door. When I ask the owner about his vulnerability he simply chuckles and resumes his lunch. Andre Renard, brother of the legendary war hero Emil Renard, has requested that I keep his exact location secret. “I don’t care if the dead find me,” he says without feeling, “but I care very little for the living.” The former French national immigrated to this place after the official end of hostilities in western Europe. Despite numerous invitations from the French government, he has not returned.]
Everyone else is a liar, everyone who claims that their campaign was “the hardest of the entire war.” All those ignorant peacocks who beat their chests and brag about “mountain warfare” or “jungle warfare” or “urban warfare.” Cities, oh how they love to brag about cities! “Nothing more terrifying than fighting in a city!” Oh really? Try underneath one.
Do you know why the Paris skyline was devoid of skyscrapers, I mean the prewar, proper Paris skyline? Do you know why they stuck all those glass and steel monstrosities out in La Defense, so far from the city center? Yes, there’s aesthetics, a sense of continuity and civic pride … not like that architectural mongrel called London. But the truth, the logical, practical, reason for keeping Paris free from American-style monoliths, is that the earth beneath their feet is simply too tunneled to support it.
There are Roman tombs, quarries that supplied limestone for much of the city, even World War II bunkers used by the Resistance and yes, there was a Resistance! Then there is the modern Metro, the telephone lines, the gas mains, the water pipes … and through it all, you have the catacombs. Roughly six million bodies were buried there, taken from the prerevolution cemeteries, where corpses were just tossed in like rubbish. The catacombs contained entire walls of skulls and bones arranged in macabre patterns. It was even functional in places where interlocking bones held back mounds of loose remains behind them. The skulls always seemed to be laughing at me.
I don’t think I can blame the civilians who tried to survive in that subterranean world. They didn’t have the civilian survival manual back then, they didn’t have Radio Free Earth. It was the Great Panic. Maybe a few souls who thought they knew those tunnels decided to make a go of it, a few more followed them, then a few more. The word spread, “it’s safe underground.” A quarter million in all, that’s what the bone counters have determined, two hundred and fifty thousand refugees. Maybe if they had been organized, thought to bring food and tools, even had enough sense to seal the entrances behind them and make damn sure those coming in weren’t infected …
How can anyone claim that their experience can compare to what we endured? The darkness and the stink … we had almost no night vision goggles, just one pair per platoon, and that’s if you were lucky. Spare batteries were in short supply for our electric torches, too. Sometimes there was only one working unit for an entire squad, just for the point man, cutting the darkness with a red-coated beam.
The air was toxic with sewage, chemicals, rotting flesh … the gas masks were a joke, most of the filters had long expired. We wore anything we could find, old military models, or firefighting hoods that covered your entire head, made you sweat like a pig, made you deaf as well as blind. You never knew where you were, staring through that misty visor, hearing the muffled voices of your squad mates, the crackle of your radioman.
We had to use hardwired sets, you see, because airwave transmissions were too unreliable. We used old telephone wire, copper, not fiber optic. We would just rip it off the conduits and keep massive rolls with us to extend our range. It was the only w
ay to keep in contact, and, most of the time, the only way to keep from becoming lost.
It was so easy to become lost. All the maps were prewar and didn’t take into account the modifications the survivors had made, all the interconnecting tunnels and alcoves, the holes in the floor that would suddenly open up in front of you. You would lose your way, at least once a day, sometimes more, and then have to trace your way back down the communications wire, check your location on the map, and try to figure out what had gone wrong. Sometimes it was only a few minutes, sometimes hours, or even days.
When another squad was being attacked, you would hear their cries over the radio or echoing through the tunnels. The acoustics were evil; they taunted you. Screams and moans came from every direction. You never knew where they were coming from. At least with the radio, you could try, maybe, to get a fix on your comrades’ position. If they weren’t panicked, if they knew where they were, if you knew where you were …
The running: you dash through the passageways, bash your head on the ceiling, crawl on your hands and knees, praying to the Virgin with all your might for them to hold for just a little longer. You get to their position, find it is the wrong one, an empty chamber, and the screams for help are still a long way off.
And when you arrive, maybe to find nothing but bones and blood. Maybe you are lucky to find the zombies still there, a chance for vengeance … if it has taken a long time to reach them, that vengeance must now include your reanimated friends. Close combat. Close like so …
[He leans across the table, pressing his face inches away from mine.]
No standard equipment; whatever one believed would suit him. There were no firearms, you understand. The air, the gas, it was too flammable. The fire from a gun …
[He makes the sound of an explosion.]
We had the Beretta-Grechio, the Italian air carbine. It was a wartime model of a child’s carbon dioxide pellet gun. You got maybe five shots, six or seven if it was pressed right up to their heads. Good weapon, but always not enough of them. And you had to be careful! If you missed, if the ball struck the stone, if the stone was dry, if you got a spark … entire tunnels would catch, explosions that buried men alive, or fireballs that melted their masks right to their faces. Hand to hand is always better. Here …
