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

by Max Brooks

  Most of my excursions were to the ASTRO,61 which was basically just a petrol station in space. Satellites, the military, surveillance type, sometimes have to change orbit in order to acquire new targets. They do that by firing their maneuvering thrusters and using up their small amount of hydrazine fuel. Before the war, the American military realized it was more cost-effective to have a refueling station already in orbit rather than sending up a lot of manned missions. That’s where ASTRO came in. We modified it to refuel some of the other satellites as well, the civilian models that need just the occasional top-off to boost back up from a decaying orbit. It was a marvelous machine: a real time-saver. We had a lot of technology like that. There was the “Canadarm,” the fifty-foot robotic inchworm that performed necessary maintenance tasks along the station’s outer skin. There was “Boba,” the VR-operated robonaut we fitted with a thruster pack so he could work both around the station and away from it on a satellite. We also had a little squadron of PSAs,62 these free-floating robots, about the shape and size of a grapefruit. All of this wondrous technology was designed to make our jobs easier. I wish they hadn’t worked so well.

  We had maybe an hour a day, maybe even two, where there was nothing to do. You could sleep, you could exercise, you could reread the same books, you could listen to Radio Free Earth or to the music we’d brought with us (over and over and over again). I don’t know how many times I listened to that Redgum song: “God help me, I was only nineteen.” It was my father’s favorite, reminded him of his time in Vietnam. I prayed that all that army training was helping to keep him and my mum alive now. I hadn’t heard anything from him, or anyone else in Oz since the government had relocated to Tasmania. I wanted to believe they were all right, but watching what was happening on Earth, as most of us did during our off-duty hours, made it almost impossible to have hope.

  They say that during the cold war, American spy birds could read the copy of Pravda in a Soviet citizen’s hands. I’m not sure if that’s entirely true. I don’t know the tech specs of that generation of hardware. But I can tell you that these modern ones whose signals we pirated from their relay birds—these could show muscles tear and bones snap. You could read the lips of victims crying out for mercy, or the color of their eyes when they bulged with their last breath. You could see at what point red blood began to turn brown, and how it looked on gray London cement as opposed to white, Cape Cod sand.

  We had no control over what the spy birds chose to observe. Their targets were determined by the U.S. military. We saw a lot of battles—Chongqing, Yonkers; we watched a company of Indian troops try to rescue civilians trapped in Ambedkar Stadium in Delhi, then become trapped themselves and retreat to Gandhi Park. I watched their commander form his men into a square, the kind the Limeys used in colonial days. It worked, at least for a little while. That was the only frustrating part about satellite surveillance; you could only watch, not listen. We didn’t know that the Indians were running out of ammunition, only that the Zed Heads were starting to close in. We saw a helo hover overhead and watched as the commander argued with his subordinates. We didn’t know it was General Raj-Singh, we didn’t even know who he was. Don’t listen to what the critics say about that man, about how he buggered off when things got too hot. We saw it all. He did try to put up a fight, and one of his blokes did smash him in the face with a rifle butt. He was out cold when they hauled him into that waiting chopper. It was a horrible feeling, seeing it all so close and yet unable to do anything.

  We had our own observation gear, both the civilian research birds and the equipment right there on the station. The images they gave us weren’t half as powerful as the military versions, but they were still frighteningly clear. They gave us our first look at the mega swarms over central Asia and the American Great Plains. Those were truly massive, miles across, like the American buffalo must have once been.

  We watched the evacuation of Japan and couldn’t help but marvel at the scale. Hundreds of ships, thousands of small boats. We lost count of how many helicopters buzzed back and forth from the rooftops to the armada, or how many jetliners made their final run north to Kamchatka.

  We were the first ones to discover zombie holes, the pits that the undead dig when they’re going after burrowing animals. At first we thought they were just isolated incidents until we noticed that they were spreading all over the world; sometimes more than one would appear in close proximity to the next. There was a field in southern England—I guess there must have been a high concentration of rabbits—that was just riddled with holes, all different depths and sizes. Many of them had large, dark stains around them. Although we couldn’t zoom in close enough, we were pretty sure it was blood. For me that was the most terrifying example of our enemy’s drive. They displayed no conscious thought, just sheer biological instinct. I once watched a Zed Head go after something, probably a golden mole, in the Namib Desert. The mole had burrowed deep in the slope of a dune. As the ghoul tried to go after it, the sand kept pouring down and filling the hole. The ghoul didn’t stop, didn’t react in any way, it just kept going. I watched it for five days, the fuzzy image of this G digging, and digging, and digging, then suddenly one morning just stopping, getting up, and shuffling away as if nothing had happened. It must have lost the scent. Good on the mole.

  For all our enhanced optics, nothing had quite the same impact as the naked eye. To just look through the view port down on our fragile little biosphere. To see the massive ecological devastation makes one understand how the modern environmental movement began with the American space program. There were so many fires, and I don’t just mean the buildings, or the forests, or even the oil rigs blazing out of control—bleeding Saudis actually went ahead and did it63 —I mean the campfires as well, what had to be at least a billion of them, tiny orange specks covering the Earth where electric lights had once been. Every day, every night, it seemed like the whole planet was burning. We couldn’t even begin to calculate the ash count but we guesstimated it was equivalent to a low-grade nuclear exchange between the United States and former Soviet Union, and that’s not including the actual nuclear exchange between Iran and Pakistan. We watched and recorded those as well, the flashes and fires that gave me eye spots for days. Nuclear autumn was already beginning to set in, the gray-brown shroud thickening each day.

  It was like looking down on an alien planet, or on Earth during the last great mass extinction. Eventually conventional optics became useless in the shroud, leaving us with only thermal or radar sensors. Earth’s natural face vanished behind a caricature of primary colors. It was through one of these systems, the Aster sensor aboard the Terra Satellite, that we saw the Three Gorges Dam collapse.

  Roughly ten trillion gallons of water, carrying debris, silt, rocks, trees, cars, houses, and house-sized pieces of the dam itself! It was alive, a brown and white dragon racing to the East China Sea. When I think of the people in its path…trapped in barricaded buildings, unable to escape the tidal wave because of the Zed Heads right outside their doors. No one knows how many people died that night. Even today, they’re still finding bodies.

  [One of his skeletal hands balls into a fist, the other presses the “self-medicate” button.]

  When I think about how the Chinese leadership tried to explain it all away…Have you ever read a transcript of the Chinese president’s speech? We actually watched the broadcast from a pirated signal off their Sinosat II. He called it an “unforeseen tragedy.” Really? Unforeseen? Was it unforeseen that the dam had been built on an active fault line? Was it unforeseen that the increased weight of a giant reservoir had induced earthquakes in the past64 and that cracks had already been detected in the foundation months before the dam was completed?

  He called it an “unavoidable accident.” Bastard. They had enough troops to wage open warfare in almost every major city, but they couldn’t spare a couple of traffic cops to protect against a catastrophe waiting to happen? No one could imagine the repercussions of abandoning both the seism
ic warning stations and the emergency spillway controls? And then to try to change their story halfway through, to say that they’d actually done everything they could to protect the dam, that, at the time of the disaster, valiant troops of the PLA had given their lives to defend it. Well, I’d been personally observing Three Gorges for over a year leading up to the disaster and the only PLA soldiers I ever saw had given their lives a long, long time ago. Did they really expect their own people to buy such a blatant lie? Did they really expect anything less than all-out rebellion?

  Two weeks after the start of the revolution, we received our first and only signal from the Chinese space station, Yang Liwei. It was the only other manned facility in orbit, but couldn’t compare to such an exquisite masterpiece as ours. It was more of a slapdash job, Shenzhou modules and Long March fuel tanks cobbled together like a giant version of the old American Skylab.

  We’d been trying to contact them for months. We weren’t even sure if there was a crew. All we got was a recorded message in perfect Hong Kong English to keep our distance lest we invite a response of “deadly force.” What an insane waste! We could have worked together, traded supplies, technical expertise. Who knows what we could have accomplished if we had only chucked the politics and come together as human bloody beings.

  We’d convinced ourselves that the station had never been inhabited at all, that their deadly force warning was just a ruse. We couldn’t have been more surprised when the signal came over our ham radio.65 It was a live human voice, tired, frightened, and cutting out after only a few seconds. It was all I needed to board the Verne and head over to the Yang.

  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 onetime 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 warfighting 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.66 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, s
uffer even one more unnecessary casualty 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 you 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.