The Essential Max Brooks: The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z

by Max Brooks

  I stood there for a moment, long enough for Mets to ask me what was happening. I told her what I was seeing, and without pause, she told me to keep on going.

  I started to argue. I thought I should at least search the vehicle, see if there was anything I needed. She asked me, sternly, if there was anything I needed, not wanted. I thought about it, admitted there wasn’t. His gear was plentiful, but it was civilian, big and bulky; the food needed cooking, the weapons weren’t silenced. My survival kit was pretty thorough, and, if for some reason I didn’t find a helo waiting at the I-10, I could always use this as an emergency supply cache.

  I brought up the idea of maybe using the SUV itself. Mets asked if I had a tow truck and some jumper cables. Almost like a kid, I answered no. She asked, “Then what’s keeping you?” or something like that, pushing me to get a move on. I told her to just wait a minute, I leaned my head against the driver’s side window, I sighed and felt beat again, drained. Mets got on my ass, pushing me. I snapped back for her to shut the fuck up, I just needed a minute, a couple seconds to…I don’t know what.

  I must have kept my thumb on the “transmit” button for a few seconds too long, because Mets suddenly asked, “What was that?” “What?” I asked. She’d heard something, something on my end.

  She’d heard it before you?

  I guess so, because in another second, once I’d cleared my head and opened my ears, I began to hear it too. The moan…loud and close, followed by the splashing of feet.

  I looked up, through the car’s window, the hole in the dead man’s skull, and the window on the other side, and that’s when I saw the first one. I spun around and saw five more coming at me from all directions. And behind them were another ten, fifteen. I took a shot at the first one, the round went wild.

  Mets started squawking at me, demanding a contact report. I gave her a head count and she told me to stay cool, don’t try to run, just stay put and follow what I’d learned at Willow Creek. I started to ask how she knew about Willow Creek when she shouted for me to shut up and fight.

  I climbed to the top of the SUV—you’re supposed to look for the closest physical defense—and started to measure ranges. I lined up my first target, took a deep breath, and dropped him. To be a fighter jock is to be able to make decisions as fast as your electrochemical impulses can carry them. I’d lost that nanosecond timing when I hit the mud, now it was back. I was calm, I was focused, all the doubt and weakness were gone. The whole engagement felt like ten hours, but I guess in reality, it was more like ten minutes. Sixty-one in total, a nice thick ring of submerged corpses. I took my time, checked my remaining ammo and waited for the next wave to come. None did.

  It was another twenty minutes before Mets asked me for an update. I gave her a body count and she told me to remind her never to piss me off. I laughed, the first time since I’d hit the mud. I felt good again, strong and confident. Mets warned me that all these distractions had erased any chance of making it to the I-10 before nightfall, and that I should probably start thinking about where I was gonna catch my forty.

  I got as far away from the SUV as I could before the sky started to darken and found a decent enough perch in the branches of a tall tree. My kit had this standard-issue microfiber hammock; great invention, light and strong and with clasps to keep you from rolling out. That part was also supposed to help calm you down, help you get to sleep faster…yeah, right! It didn’t matter that I’d already been up for close to forty-eight hours, that I’d tried all the breathing exercises they taught us at the Creek, or that I even slipped two of my Baby-Ls.38 You’re only supposed to take one, but I figured that was for lightweight wussies. I was me again, remember, I could handle it, and hey, I needed to sleep.

  I asked her, since there was nothing else to do, or think about, if it was okay to talk about her. Who was she, really? How’d she end up in this isolated cabin in the middle of Cajun country? She didn’t sound Cajun, she didn’t even have a southern accent. And how did she know so much about pilot training without ever going through it herself? I was starting to get my suspicions, starting to piece together a rough outline of who she really was.

  Mets told me, again, that there would be plenty of time later for an episode of The View. Right now I needed my sleep, and to check in with her at dawn. I felt the Ls kick in between “check” and “in.” I was out by “dawn.”

  I slept hard. The sky was already light by the time I opened my eyes. I’d been dreaming about, what else, Zack. His moans were still echoing in my ears when I woke up. And then I looked down and realized they weren’t dreams. There must have been at least a hundred of them surrounding the tree. They were all reaching excitedly, all trying to climb over each other to get up to me. At least they couldn’t ramp up, the ground wasn’t solid enough. I didn’t have the ammo to take all of them out, and since a firefight might also buy time for more to show up, I decided it was best to pack up my gear and execute my escape plan.

  You had planned for this?

  Not really planned, but they’d trained us for situations like this. It’s a lot like jumping from an aircraft: pick your approximate landing zone, tuck and roll, keep loose, and get up as quick as you can. The goal is to put some serious distance between you and your attackers. You take off running, jogging, or even “speed walking”; yes, they actually told us to consider this as a low-impact alternative. The point is to get far enough way to give you time to plan your next move. According to my map, the I-10 was close enough for me to make a run for it, be spotted by a rescue chopper, and be lifted off before these stink bags would ever catch up. I got on the radio, reported my situation to Mets, and told her to signal S&R for an immediate pickup. She told me to be careful. I crouched, I jumped, and cracked my ankle on a submerged rock.

  I hit the water, facedown. Its chill was the only thing that kept me from blacking out from the pain. I came up spluttering, choking, and the first thing I saw was the whole swarm coming at me. Mets must have known something was up by the fact that I didn’t report my safe landing. Maybe she asked me what had happened, although I don’t remember. I just remember her yelling at me to get up and run. I tried putting weight on my ankle, but lightning shot up through my leg and spine. It could bear the weight, but…I screamed so loud, I’m sure she heard me through her cabin’s window. “Get out of there,” she was yelling…“GO!” I started limping, splashing away with upwards of a hundred Gs on my ass. It must have been comical, this frantic race of cripples.

  Mets yelled, “If you can stand on it, you can run on it! It’s not a weight-bearing bone! You can do this!”

  “But it hurts!” I actually said that, with tears running down my face, with Zack behind me howling for his lunch. I reached the freeway, looming above the swamp like the ruins of a Roman aqueduct. Mets had been right about its relative safety. Only neither of us had counted on my injury or my undead tail. There was no immediate entrance so I had to limp to one of the small, adjoining roads that Mets had originally warned me to avoid. I could see why as I began to get close. Wrecked and rusting cars were piled up by the hundreds and every tenth one had at least one G locked inside. They saw me and started to moan, the sound carried for miles in every direction.

  Mets shouted, “Don’t worry about that now! Just get on the on-ramp and watch the fucking grabbers!”

  Grabbers?

  The ones reaching through broken windows. On the open road, I at least had a chance of dodging them, but on the on-ramp, you’re hemmed in on either side. That was the worst part, by far, those few minutes trying to get up onto the freeway. I had to go in between the cars; my ankle wouldn’t let me get on top of them. These rotting hands would reach out for me, grabbing my flight suit or my wrist. Every head shot cost me seconds that I didn’t have. The steep incline was already slowing me down. My ankle was throbbing, my lungs were aching, and the swarm was now gaining on me fast. If it hadn’t been for Mets…

  She was shouting at me the whole time. “Move your ass, you fuckin
’ bitch!” She was getting pretty raw by then. “Don’t you dare quit…don’t you DARE crap out on me!” She never let up, never gave me an inch. “What are you, some weak little victim?” At that point I thought I was. I knew I could never make it. The exhaustion, the pain, more than anything, I think, the anger at fucking up so badly. I actually considered turning my pistol around, wanting to punish myself for…you know. And then Mets really hit me. She roared, “What are you, your fucking mother!?!”

  That did it. I hauled ass right up onto the interstate.

  I reported to Mets that I’d made it, then asked, “Now what the fuck do I do?”

  Her voice suddenly got very soft. She told me to look up. A black dot was heading at me from out of the morning sun. It was following the freeway and grew very quickly into the form of a UH-60. I let out a whoop and popped my signal flare.

  The first thing I saw when they winched me aboard was that it was a civilian chopper, not government Search and Rescue. The crew chief was a big Cajun with a thick goatee and wraparound sunglasses. He asked, “Where de’ hell you come from?” Sorry if I butchered the accent. I almost cried and punched him in his thigh-sized bicep. I laughed and said that they work fast. He shot me a look like I didn’t know what I was talking about. It turned out later that this wasn’t the rescue team but just a routine air shuttle between Baton Rouge and Lafayette. I didn’t know at that moment, and I didn’t care. I reported to Mets that I got my pickup, that I was safe. I thanked her for everything she’d done for me, and…and so I wouldn’t really start bawling, I tried to cover with a joke about finally getting that episode of The View. I never got a response.

  She sounds like a hell of a Skywatcher.

  She was a hell of a woman.

  You said you had your “suspicions” by this point.

  No civilian, even a veteran Skywatcher, could know so much about what goes into wearing those wings. She was just too savvy, too informed, the kind of baseline knowledge of someone who had to have gone through it herself.

  So she was a pilot.

  Definitely; not air force—I would have known her—but maybe a squid or a jarhead. They’d lost as many pilots as the air force on resupply hops like mine, and eight out of ten were never accounted for. I’m sure that she must have run into a situation like mine, had to ditch, lost her crew, maybe even blamed herself for it like me. Somehow she managed to find that cabin and spent the rest of the war as one kick-ass Skywatcher.

  That makes sense.

  Doesn’t it?

  [There is an awkward pause. I search her face, waiting for more.]

  What?

  They never found her.

  No.

  Or the cabin.

  No.

  And Honolulu never had any record of a Skywatcher with the call sign Mets Fan.

  You’ve done your homework.

  I…

  You probably also read my after-action report, right?

  Yes.

  And the psych evaluation they tacked on after my official debriefing.

  Well…

  Well, it’s bullshit, okay? So what if everything she told me was information I’d already been briefed on, so what if the psych team “claim” my radio was knocked out before I hit the mud, and so the fuck what if Mets is short for Metis, the mother of Athena, the Greek goddess with the stormy gray eyes. Oh, the shrinks had a ball with that one, especially when they “discovered” that my mother grew up in the Bronx.

  And that remark she made about your mother?

  Who the hell doesn’t have mother issues? If Mets was a pilot, she was a natural gambler. She knew she had a good chance of scoring a hit with “mom.” She knew the risk, took her shot…Look, if they thought I’d cracked up, why didn’t I lose my flight status? Why did they let me have this job? Maybe she wasn’t a pilot herself, maybe she was married to one, maybe she’d wanted to be one but never made it as far as I did. Maybe she was just a scared, lonely voice that did what she could to help another scared lonely voice from ending up like her. Who cares who she was, or is? She was there when I needed her, and for the rest of my life, she’ll always be with me.

  PROVINCE OF BOHEMIA, THE EUROPEAN UNION

  [It is called Kost, “the Bone,” and what it lacks in beauty it more than makes up for in strength. Appearing to grow out of its solid rock foundation, this fourteenth-century Gothic “Hrad” casts an intimidating shadow over the Plakanek Valley, an image David Allen Forbes is keen to capture with his pencil and paper. This will be his second book, Castles of the Zombie War: The Continent. The Englishman sits under a tree, his patchwork clothing and long Scottish sword already adding to this Arthurian setting. He abruptly switches gears as I arrive, from serene artist to painfully nervous storyteller.]

  When I say that the New World doesn’t have our history of fixed fortifications, I’m only referring to North America. There are the Spanish coastal fortresses, naturally, along the Caribbean, and the ones we and the French built in the Lesser Antilles. Then there are the Inca ruins in the Andes, although they never experienced direct sieges.39 Also, when I say “North America,” that does not include the Mayan and Aztec ruins in Mexico—that business with the Battle of Kukulcan, although I suppose that’s Toltec, now, isn’t it, when those chaps held off so many Zed Heads on the steps of that bloody great pyramid. So when I say “New World,” I’m really referring to the United States and Canada.

  This isn’t an insult, you understand, please don’t take it as such. You’re both young countries, you don’t have the history of institutional anarchy we Europeans suffered after the fall of Rome. You’ve always had standing, national governments with the forces capable of enforcing law and order.

  I know that wasn’t true during your westward expansion or your civil war, and please, I’m not discounting those pre–Civil War fortresses or the experiences of those defending them. I’d one day like to visit Fort Jefferson. I hear those who survived there had quite a time of it. All I’m saying is, in Europe’s history, we had almost a millennia of chaos where sometimes the concept of physical safety stopped at the battlements of your lord’s castle. Does that make sense? I’m not making sense; can we start again?

  No, no, this is fine. Please, continue.

  You’ll edit out all the daft bits.

  You got it.

  Right then. Castles. Well…I don’t want for a moment to overstate their importance for the general war effort. In fact, when you compare them to any other type of fixed fortification, modern, modified, and so forth, their contribution does seem quite negligible, unless you’re like me, and that contribution was what saved your life.

  This doesn’t mean that a mighty fortress was naturally our God. For starters, you must understand the inherent difference between a castle and a palace. A lot of so-called castles were really nothing more than just great impressive homes, or else had been converted to such after their defensive value had become obsolete. These once impregnable bastions now had so many windows cut into the ground floor that it would have taken forever to brick them all up again. You’d be better off in a modern block of flats with the staircase removed. And as far as those palaces that were built as nothing more than status symbols, places like Chateau Ussé or Prague “Castle,” they were little more than death traps.

  Just look at Versailles. That was a first-rate cock-up. Small wonder the French government chose to build their national memorial on its ashes. Did you ever read that poem by Renard, about the wild roses that now grow in the memorial garden, their petals stained red with the blood of the damned?

  Not that a high wall was all you needed for long-term survival. Like any static defense, castles had as many internal as external dangers. Just look at Muiderslot in Holland. One case of pneumonia, that’s all it took. Throw in a wet, cold autumn, poor nutrition, and lack of any genuine medications…Imagine what that must have been like, trapped behind those high stone walls, those around you fatally ill, knowing your time was coming, knowing the only slim ho
pe you had was to escape. The journals written by some of the dying tell of people going mad with desperation, leaping into that moat choked with Zed Heads.

  And then there were fires like the ones at Braubach and Pierrefonds; hundreds trapped with nowhere to run, just waiting to be charred by the flames or asphyxiated by the smoke. There were also accidental explosions, civilians who somehow found themselves in possession of bombs but had no idea how to handle or even store them. At Miskolc Diosgyor in Hungary, as I understand it, someone got their hands on a cache of military-grade, sodium-based explosives. Don’t ask me what exactly it was or why they had it, but nobody seemed to know that water, not fire, was the catalytic agent. The story goes that someone was smoking in the armory, caused some small fire or whatnot. The stupid sods thought they were preventing an explosion by dousing the crates in water. It blew a hole right through the wall and the dead surged in like water through a breached dam.

  At least that was a mistake based on ignorance. I can’t even begin to forgive what happened at Chateau de Fougeres. They were running low on supplies, thought that they could dig a tunnel under their undead attackers. What did they think this was, The Great Escape? Did they have any professional surveyors with them? Did they even understand the basics of trigonometry? The bloody tunnel exit fell short by over half a kilometer, came up right in a nest of the damn things. Stupid wankers hadn’t even thought to equip their tunnel with demolition charges.

  Yes, there were cock-ups aplenty, but there were also some noteworthy triumphs. Many were subjected to only short-term sieges, the good fortune of being on the right side of the line. Some in Spain, Bavaria, or Scotland above the Antonine40 only had to hold out for weeks, or even days. For some, like Kisimul, it was only a question of getting through one rather dodgy night. But then there were the true tales of victory, like Chenonceau in France, a bizarre little Disneyesque castle built on a bridge over the Cher River. With both connections to land severed, and the right amount of strategic forethought, they managed to hold their position for years.