by Max Brooks
It was an instant success. Within three months you saw a marked drop in requests for government aid. I can’t stress how vital this was to victory. It allowed us to transition from a zero-sum, survival-based economy, into full-blown war production. This was the National Reeducation Act, the organic outgrowth of the CSSP. I’d say it was the largest jobs training program since the Second World War, and easily the most radical in our history.
You’ve mentioned, on occasion, the problems faced by the NRA…
I was getting to that. The president gave me the kind of power I needed to meet any physical or logistical challenge. Unfortunately, what neither he nor anyone on Earth could give me was the power to change the way people thought. As I explained, America was a segregated workforce, and in many cases, that segregation contained a cultural element. A great many of our instructors were first-generation immigrants. These were the people who knew how to take care of themselves, how to survive on very little and work with what they had. These were the people who tended small gardens in their backyards, who repaired their own homes, who kept their appliances running for as long as mechanically possible. It was crucial that these people teach the rest of us to break from our comfortable, disposable consumer lifestyle even though their labor had allowed us to maintain that lifestyle in the first place.
Yes, there was racism, but there was also classism. You’re a high-powered corporate attorney. You’ve spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering deals, talking on the phone. That’s what you’re good at, that’s what made you rich and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to keep talking on the phone. The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That’s the way the world works. But one day it doesn’t. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.
Once, on a fact-finding tour through LA, I sat in the back of a reeducation lecture. The trainees had all held lofty positions in the entertainment industry, a mélange of agents, managers, “creative executives,” whatever the hell that means. I can understand their resistance, their arrogance. Before the war, entertainment had been the most valued export of the United States. Now they were being trained as custodians for a munitions plant in Bakersfield, California. One woman, a casting director, exploded. How dare they degrade her like this! She had an MFA in Conceptual Theater, she had cast the top three grossing sitcoms in the last five seasons and she made more in a week than her instructor could dream of in several lifetimes! She kept addressing that instructor by her first name. “Magda,” she kept saying, “Magda, enough already. Magda, please.” At first I thought this woman was just being rude, degrading the instructor by refusing to use her title. I found out later that Mrs. Magda Antonova used to be this woman’s cleaning lady. Yes, it was very hard for some, but a lot of them later admitted that they got more emotional satisfaction from their new jobs than anything closely resembling their old ones.
I met one gentleman on a coastal ferry from Portland to Seattle. He had worked in the licensing department for an advertising agency, specifically in charge of procuring the rights to classic rock songs for television commercials. Now he was a chimney sweep. Given that most homes in Seattle had lost their central heat and the winters were now longer and colder, he was seldom idle. “I help keep my neighbors warm,” he said proudly. I know it sounds a little too Norman Rockwell, but I hear stories like that all the time. “You see those shoes, I made them,” “That sweater, that’s my sheep’s wool,” “Like the corn? My garden.” That was the upshot of a more localized system. It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor, it gave them a sense of individual pride to know they were making a clear, concrete contribution to victory, and it gave me a wonderful feeling that I was part of that. I needed that feeling. It kept me sane for the other part of my job.
So much for “talent.” “Tools” are the weapons of war, and the industrial and logistical means by which those weapons are constructed.
[He swivels in his chair, motioning to a picture above his desk. I lean closer and see that it’s not a picture but a framed label.]
Ingredients:
molasses from the United States
anise from Spain
licorice from France
vanilla (bourbon) from Madagascar
cinnamon from Sri Lanka
cloves from Indonesia
wintergreen from China
pimento berry oil from Jamaica
balsam oil from Peru
And that’s just for a bottle of peacetime root beer. We’re not even talking about something like a desktop PC, or a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
Ask anyone how the Allies won the Second World War. Those with very little knowledge might answer that it was our numbers or generalship. Those without any knowledge might point to techno-marvels like radar or the atom bomb. [Scowls.] Anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of that conflict will give you three real reasons: first, the ability to manufacture more materiel: more bullets, beans, and bandages than the enemy; second, the natural resources available to manufacture that materiel; and third, the logistical means to not only transport those resources to the factories, but also to transport the finished products out to the front lines. The Allies had the resources, industry, and logistics of an entire planet. The Axis, on the other hand, had to depend on what scant assets they could scrape up within their borders. This time we were the Axis. The living dead controlled most of the world’s landmass, while American war production depended on what could be harvested within the limits of the western states specifically. Forget raw materials from safe zones overseas; our merchant fleet was crammed to the decks with refugees while fuel shortages had dry-docked most of our navy.
We had some advantages. California’s agricultural base could at least erase the problem of starvation, if it could be restructured. The citrus growers didn’t go quietly, neither did the ranchers. The beef barons who controlled so much prime potential farmland were the worst. Did you ever hear of Don Hill? Ever see the movie Roy Elliot did on him? It was when the infestation hit the San Joaquin Valley, the dead swarming over his fences, attacking his cattle, tearing them apart like African driver ants. And there he was in the middle of it all, shooting and hollering like Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun. I dealt with him openly and honestly. As with everyone else, I gave him the choice. I reminded him that winter was coming and there were still a lot of very hungry people out there. I warned him that when the hordes of starving refugees showed up to finish what the living dead started, he’d have no government protection whatsoever. Hill was a brave, stubborn bastard, but he wasn’t an idiot. He agreed to surrender his land and herd only on the condition that his and everyone else’s breeding stock remained untouched. We shook on that.
Tender, juicy steaks—can you think of a better icon of our prewar artificial standard of living? And yet it was that standard that ended up being our second great advantage. The only way to supplement our resource base was recycling. This was nothing new. The Israelis had started when they sealed their borders and since then each nation had adopted it to one degree or another. None of their stockpiles, however, could even compare to what we had at our disposal. Think about what life was like in the prewar America. Even those considered middle class enjoyed, or took for granted, a level of material comfort unheard of by any other nation at any other time in human history. The clothing, the kitchenware, the electronics, the automobiles, just in the Los Angeles basin alone, outnumbered the prewar population by three to one. The cars poured in by the millions, every house, every neighborhood. We had an entire industry of over a hundred thousand employees working three shifts, seven days a week: collecting, cataloging, disassembling, storing, and shipping parts and pieces to factories all over the coast. There was a little trouble, like with the cattle
ranchers, people not wanting to turn over their Hummers or vintage Italian midlife crisis mobiles. Funny, no gas to run them but they still hung on anyway. It didn’t bother me too much. They were a pleasure to deal with compared to the military establishment.
Of all my adversaries, easily the most tenacious were the ones in uniform. I never had direct control over any of their R&D, they were free to green light whatever they wanted. But given that almost all their programs were farmed out to civilian contractors and that those contractors depended on resources controlled by DeStRes, I had de facto control. “You cannot mothball our Stealth bombers,” they would yell. “Who the Blank do you think you are to cancel our production of tanks?” At first I tried to reason with them: “The M-1 Abrams has a jet engine. Where are you going to find that kind of fuel? Why do you need Stealth aircraft against an enemy that doesn’t have radar?” I tried to make them see that given what we had to work with, as opposed to what we were facing, we simply had to get the largest return on our investment or, in their language, the most bang for our buck. They were insufferable, with their all-hours phone calls, or just showing up at my office unannounced. I guess I can’t really blame them, not after how we all treated them after the last brushfire war, and certainly not after almost having their asses handed to them at Yonkers. They were teetering on the edge of total collapse, and a lot of them just needed somewhere to vent.
[He grins confidently.]
I started my career trading on the floor of the NYSE, so I can yell as hard and long as any professional drill sergeant. After each “meeting,” I’d expect the call, the one I’d been both dreading and hoping for: “Mister Sinclair, this is the president, I just want to thank you for your service and we’ll no longer be requiring…” [Chuckles.] It never came. My guess is no one else wanted the job.
[His smile fades.]
I’m not saying that I didn’t make mistakes. I know I was too anal about the air force’s D-Corps. I didn’t understand their safety protocols or what dirigibles could really accomplish in undead warfare. All I knew was that with our negligible helium supply, the only cost-effective lift gas was hydrogen and no way was I going to waste lives and resources on a fleet of modern-day Hindenburgs. I also had to be persuaded, by the president, no less, to reopen the experimental cold fusion project at Livermore. He argued that even though a breakthrough was, at best, still decades away, “planning for the future lets our people know there will be one.” I was too conservative with some projects, and with others I was far too liberal.
Project Yellow Jacket—I still kick myself when I think about that one. These Silicon Valley eggheads, all of them geniuses in their own field, convinced me that they had a “wonder weapon” that could win the war, theoretically, within forty-eight hours of deployment. They could build micro missiles, millions of them, about the size of a .22 rimfire bullet, that could be scattered from transport aircraft, then guided by satellites to the brain of every zombie in North America. Sounds amazing, right? It did to me.
[He grumbles to himself.]
When I think of what we poured down that hole, what we could have produced instead…ahhh…no point in dwelling on it now.
I could have gone head-to-head against the military for the duration of the war, but I’m grateful, in the end, that I didn’t have to. When Travis D’Ambrosia became chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he not only invented the resource-to-kill ratio, but developed a comprehensive strategy to employ it. I always listened to him when he told me a certain weapons system was vital. I trusted his opinion in matters like the new Battle Dress Uniform or the Standard Infantry Rifle.
What was so amazing to see was how the culture of RKR began to take hold among the rank and file. You’d hear soldiers talking on the street, in bars, on the train; “Why have X, when for the same price you could have ten Ys, which could kill a hundred times as many Zs.” Soldiers even began coming up with ideas on their own, inventing more cost-effective tools than we could have envisioned. I think they enjoyed it—improvising, adapting, outthinking us bureaucrats. The marines surprised me the most. I’d always bought into the myth of the stupid jarhead, the knuckle-dragging, locked-jaw, testosterone-driven Neanderthal. I never knew that because the Corps always has to procure its assets through the navy, and because admirals are never going to get too fired up about land warfare, that improvisation has had to be one of their most treasured virtues.
[Sinclair points above my head to the opposite wall. On it hangs a heavy steel rod ending in what looks like a fusion of shovel and double-bladed battle-axe. Its official designation is the Standard Infantry Entrenchment Tool, although, to most, it is known as either the “Lobotomizer,” or simply, the “Lobo.”]
The leathernecks came up with that one, using nothing but the steel of recycled cars. We made twenty-three million during the war.
[He smiles with pride.]
And they’re still making them today.
BURLINGTON, VERMONT
[Winter has come later this season, as it has every year since the end of the war. Snow blankets the house and surrounding farmland and frosts the trees that shade the dirt track by the river. Everything about this scene is peaceful, except for the man with me. He insists on calling himself “the Whacko,” because “everyone else calls me that, why shouldn’t you?” His stride is fast and purposeful, the cane given to him by his doctor (and wife) serves only to stab at the air.]
To be honest, I wasn’t surprised to be nominated for vice president. Everyone knew a coalition party was inevitable. I’d been a rising star, at least until I “self-destructed.” That’s what they said about me, right? All the cowards and hypocrites who’d rather die than see a real man express his passion. So what if I wasn’t the world’s best politician? I said what I felt, and I wasn’t afraid to say it loud and clear. That’s one of the main reasons I was the logical choice for copilot. We made a great team; he was the light, I was the heat. Different parties, different personalities, and, let’s not kid ourselves, different skin colors as well. I knew I wasn’t the first choice. I know who my party secretly wanted. But America wasn’t ready to go that far, as stupid, ignorant, and infuriatingly Neolithic as it sounds. They’d rather have a screaming radical for a VP than another one of “those people.” So I wasn’t surprised at my nomination. I was surprised at everything else.
You mean the elections?
Elections? Honolulu was still a madhouse; soldiers, congressmen, refugees, all bumping into one another trying to find something to eat or a place to sleep or just to find out what the hell was going on. And that was paradise next to the mainland. The Rocky Line was just being established; everything west of it was a war zone. Why go through all the trouble of elections when you could have Congress simply vote for extended emergency powers? The attorney general had tried it when he was mayor of New York, almost got away with it, too. I explained to the president that we didn’t have the energy or resources to do anything but fight for our very existence.
What did he say?
Well, let’s just say he convinced me otherwise.
Can you elaborate?
I could, but I don’t want to mangle his words. The old neurons aren’t firing like they used to.
Please try.
You’ll fact-check with his library?
I promise.
Well…we were in his temporary office, the “presidential suite” of a hotel. He’d just been sworn in on Air Force Two. His old boss was sedated in the suite next to us. From the window you could see the chaos on the streets, the ships at sea lining up to dock, the planes coming in every thirty seconds and ground crew pushing them off the runway once they landed to make room for new ones. I was pointing to them, shouting and gesturing with the passion I’m most famous for. “We need a stable government, fast!” I kept saying. “Elections are great in principle but this is no time for high ideals.”
The president was cool, a lot cooler than me. Maybe it was all that military training…he said to me, “This i
s the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren’t just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don’t have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don’t have a common heritage, we don’t have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have…[struggling to remember]…all we have is what we want to be.” You see what he was saying. Our country only exists because people believed in it, and if it wasn’t strong enough to protect us from this crisis, then what future could it ever hope to have? He knew that America wanted a Caesar, but to be one would mean the end of America. They say great times make great men. I don’t buy it. I saw a lot of weakness, a lot of filth. People who should have risen to the challenge and either couldn’t or wouldn’t. Greed, fear, stupidity, and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it today. My boss was a great man. We were damn lucky to have him.
The business of elections really set the tone for his entire administration. So many of his proposals looked crazy at first glance, but once you peeled back the first layer, you realized that underneath there existed a core of irrefutable logic. Take the new punishment laws, those really set me off. Putting people in stocks? Whipping them in town squares!?! What was this, Old Salem, the Taliban’s Afghanistan? It sounded barbaric, un-American, until you really thought about the options. What were you going to do with thieves and looters, put them in prison? Who would that help? Who could afford to divert able-bodied citizens to feed, clothe, and guard other able-bodied citizens? More importantly, why remove the punished from society when they could serve as such a valuable deterrent? Yes, there was the fear of pain—the lash, the cane—but all of that paled when compared to public humiliation. People were terrified of having their crimes exposed. At a time when everyone was pulling together, helping each other out, working to protect and take care of one another, the worst thing you could do to someone was to march them up into the public square with a giant poster reading “I Stole My Neighbor’s Firewood.” Shame’s a powerful weapon, but it depended on everyone else doing the right thing. No one is above the law, and seeing a senator given fifteen lashes for his involvement in war profiteering did more to curb crime than a cop on every street corner. Yes, there were the work gangs, but those were the recidivists, those who’d been given chances time and time again. I remember the attorney general suggesting that we dump as many of them into the infested zones as possible, rid ourselves of the drain and potential hazard of their continued presence. Both the president and I opposed this proposition; my objections were ethical, his were practical. We were still talking about American soil, infested yes, but, hopefully one day to be liberated. “The last thing we needed,” he said “was to come up against one of these ex-cons as The New Grand Warlord of Duluth.” I thought he was joking, but later, as I saw the exact thing happen in other countries, as some exiled criminals rose to command their own isolated, and in some cases, powerful fiefdoms, I realized we’d dodged one hell of a speeding bullet. The work gangs were always an issue for us, politically, socially, even economically, but what other choice did we have for those who just refused to play nice with others?
