History research essay

Document #1 of 3

Objective of reading Intro: • Max Brooks’ introduction to World War Z serves as an example of how you

might frame your own individual paper that captures your team’s experience with the zombie outbreak. You are not required to follow Brooks’ format!

Guiding question hy has the author chosen to recount the events of the zombie outbreak?

2. Do you think that the desire to record history is a fundamental human attribute? 3. What is at stake if human events are not recorded?

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright© 2006 by Max Brooks

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the

Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, B \ D \ W \ Y, are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006, and subsequently

in paperback in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,

New York, in 2007.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data BroQks, Max.

World War Z: an oral history of the zombie war/ Max Brooks.-lst ed. 1. War-Humor. I. Title. PN6231. W 28B76 2006

813' .6-dc22 2006009517

ISBN 978-0-307-34661-2

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Maria Elias

50 49 48 4 7 46 45 44

First Paperback Edition

For Henry Michael Brooks,

who makes me want to change the world

INTRODUCTION

It goes by many names: "The Crisis," "The Dark Years," "The Walking

Plague," as well as newer and more "hip" titles such as "World War Z" or "Z

War One." I personally dislike this last moniker as it implies an inevitable

"Z War Two." For me, it will always be "The Zombie War," and while many

may protest the scientific accuracy of the word zombie, they will be hard­

pressed to discover a more globally accepted term for the creatures that al­

most caused our extinction. Zombie remains a devastating word, unrivaled

in its power to conjure up so many memories or emotions, and it is these

memories, and emotions, that are the subject of this book.

This record of the greatest conflict in human history owes its genesis to

a much smaller, much more personal conflict between me and the chair­

person of the United Nation's Postwar Commission Report. My initial

work for the Commission could be described as nothing short of a labor

of love. My travel stipend, my security access, my battery of translators,

both human and electronic, as well as my small, but nearly priceless voice­

activated transcription "pal" (the greatest gift the world's slowest typist

could ask for), all spoke to the respect and value my work was afforded on

this project. So, needless to say, it came as a shock when I found almost

half of that work deleted from the report's final edition.

"It was all too intimate," the chairperson said during one of our many

"animated" discussions. "Too many opinions, too many feelings. That's not

what this report is about. We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the

human factor." Of course, she was right. The official report was a collec­

tion of cold, hard data, an objective "after-action report" that would allow

future generations to study the events of that apocalyptic decade without

2 MAX BROOKS

being influenced by "the human factor." But isn't the human factor what

connects us so deeply to our past? Will future generations care as much for

chronologies and casualty statistics as they would for the personal accounts

of individuals not so different from themselves? By excluding the human

factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from a history

that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't

the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we

now refer to as "the living dead"? I presented this argument, perhaps less

professionally than was appropriate, to my "boss," who after my final excla­

mation of "we can't let these stories die" responded immediately with,

"Then don't. Write a book. You've still got all your notes, and the legal

freedom to use them. Who's stopping you from keeping these stories alive

in the pages of your own ( expletive deleted) book?"

Some critics will, no doubt, take issue with the concept of a personal

history book so soon after the end of worldwide hostilities. After all, it has

been only twelve years since VA Day was declared in the continental

United States, and barely a decade since the last major world power cele­

brated its deliverance on "Victory in China Day." Given that most people

consider VC Day to be the official end, then how can we have real per­

spective when, in the words of a UN colleague, "We've been at peace

about as long as we were at war." This is a valid argument, and one that

begs a response. In the case of this generation, those who have fought and

suffered to win us this decade of peace, time is as much an enemy as it is an

ally. Yes, the coming years will provide hindsight, adding greater wisdom to

memories seen through the light of a matured, postwar world. But many of

those memories may no longer exist, trapped in bodies and spirits too dam­

aged or infirm to see the fruits of their victory harvested. It is no great se­

cret that global life expectancy is a mere shadow of its former prewar

figure. Malnutrition, pollution, the rise of previously eradicated ailments,

even in the United States, with its resurgent economy and universal

health care are the present reality; there simply are not enough resources

to care for all the physical and psychological casualties. It is because of this

enemy, the enemy of time, that I have forsaken the luxury of hindsight and

published these survivors' accounts. Perhaps decades from now, someone

WORLD WAR z 3

will take up the task of recording the recollections of the much older,

much wiser survivors. Perhaps I might even be one of them. Although this is primarily a book of memories, it includes many of the

·· details, technological, social, economic, and so on, found in the original Commission Report, as they are related to the stories of those voices fea­

tured in these pages. This is their book, not mine, and I have tried to main­

tain as invisible a presence as possible. Those questions included in the

text are only there to illustrate those that might have been posed by read­

ers. I have attempted to reserve judgment, or commentary of any kind, and

if there is a human factor that should be removed, let it be my own.

WARNINGS

GREATER CHONGQING, THE UNITED FEDERATION OF CHINA

!At its prewar height, this region boasted a population of over

thirty-five million people. Now, there are barely fifty thousand.

Reconstruction funds have been slow to arrive in this part of the

country, the government choosing to concentrate on the more

densely populated coast. There is no central power grid, no run­

ning water besides the Yangtze River. But the streets are clear

of rubble and the local "security council" has prevented any

postwar outbreaks. The chairman of that council is Kwang Jing­

shu, a medical doctor who, despite his advanced age and

wartime injuries, still manages to make house calls to all his

patients.I

The first outbreak I saw was in a remote village that officially had no name. The residents called it "New Dachang," but this was more out of nostalgia than anything else. Their former home, "Old Dachang," had stood since the period of the Three Kingdoms, with farms and houses and

WORLD WAR Z 5

even trees said to be centuries old. When the Three Gorges Dam was com­

pleted, and reservoir waters began to rise, much of Dachang had been dis­

assembled, brick by brick, then rebuilt on higher ground. This New Dachang,

· however, was not a town anymore, but a "national historic museum." It

must have been a heartbreaking irony for those poor peasants, to see their

town saved but then only being able to visit it as a tourist. Maybe that is

why some of them chose to name their newly constructed hamlet "New

Dachang" to preserve some connection to their heritage, even if it was

only in name. I personally didn't know that this other New Dachang ex­

isted, so you can imagine how confused I was when the call came in.

The hospital was quiet; it had been a slow night, even for the increasing

number of drunk-driving accidents. Motorcycles were becoming very pop­

ular. We used to say that your Harley-Davidsons killed more young Chi­

nese than all the Gls in the Korean War. That's why I was so grateful for a

quiet shift. I was tired, my back and feet ached. I was on my way out to

smoke a cigarette and watch the dawn when I heard my name being paged.

The receptionist that night was new and couldn't quite understand the di­

alect. There had been an accident, or an illness. It was an emergency, that

part was obvious, and could we please send help at once.

What could I say? The younger doctors, the kids who think medicine is

just a way to pad their bank accounts, they certainly weren't going to go

help some "nongmin" just for the sake of helping. I guess I'm still an old

revolutionary at heart. "Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the

people." 1

Those words still mean something to me . .. and I tried to re­

member that as my Deer 2

bounced and banged over dirt roads the govern­

ment had promised but never quite gotten ·around to paving.

I had a devil of a time finding the place. Officially, it didn't exist and

therefore wasn't on any map. I became lost several times and had to ask di­

rections from locals who kept thinking I meant the museum town. I was in

an impatient mood by the time I reached the small collection of hilltop

l. From "Quotations from Chairman Maozedong," originally from "The Situation and Our

Policy After the Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan," August 13, 1945.

2. A prewar automobile manufactured in the People's Republic.

6 MAX BROOKS

homes. I remember thinking, This had better be damned serious. Once I saw their faces, I regretted my wish.

There were seven of them, all on cots, all barely conscious. The villagers had moved them into their new communal meeting hall. The walls and floor were bare cement. The air was cold and damp. Of course they're sick, I thought. I asked the villagers who had been taking care of these people. They said no one, it wasn't "safe." I noticed that the door had been locked from the outside. The villagers were clearly terrified. They cringed and whispered; some kept their distance and prayed. Their behavior made me angry, not at them, you understand, not as indi�iduals, but what they rep­ resented about our country. After centuries of foreign oppression, exploita­ tion, and humiliation, we were finally reclaiming our rightful place as humanity's middle kingdom. We were the world's richest and most dy­ namic superpower, masters of everything from outer space to cyber space. It was the dawn of what the world was finally acknowledging as "The Chi­ nese Century" and yet so many of us still lived like these ignorant peasants, as stagnant and superstitious as the earliest Yangshao savages.

I was still lost in my grand, cultural criticism when I knelt to examine the first patient. She was running a high fever, forty degrees centigrade, and she was shivering violently. Barely coherent, she whimpered slightly when I tried to move her limbs. There was a wound in her right forearm, a bite mark. As I examined it more closely, I realized that it wasn't from an animal. The bite radius and teeth marks had to have come from a small, or possibly young, human being. Although I hypothesized this to be the source of the infection, the actual injury was surprisingly clean. I asked the villagers, again, who had been taking care of these people. Again, they told me no one. I knew this could not be true. The human mouth is packed with bacteria, even more so than the most unhygienic dog. If no one had cleaned this woman's wound, why wasn't it throbbing with infection?

I examined the six other patients. All showed similar symptoms, all had similar wounds on various parts of their bodies. I asked one man, the most lucid of the group, who or what had inflicted these injuries. He told me it had happened when they had tried to subdue "him."

"Who?" I asked.

WoRLD WAR Z 7

I found "Patient Zero" behind the locked door of an abandoned house

across town. He was twelve years old. His wrists and feet were bound

with plastic packing twine. Although he'd rubbed off the skin around his

bonds, there was no blood. There was also no blood on his other wounds,

not on the gouges on his legs or arms, or from the large dry gap where his

right big toe had been. He was writhing like an animal; a gag muffled his

growls. At first the villagers tried to hold me back. They warned me not to touch

him, that he was "cursed." I shrugged them off and reached for my mask

and gloves. The boy's skin was as cold and gray as the cement on which he

lay. I could find neither his heartbeat nor his pulse. His eyes were wild,

wide and sunken back in their sockets. They remained locked on me like a

predatory beast. Throughout the examination he was inexplicably hostile,

reaching for me with his bound hands and snapping at me through his gag.

His movements were so violent I had to call for two of the largest vil­

lagers to help me hold him down. Initially they wouldn't budge, cowering

in the doorway like baby rabbits. I explained that there was no risk of in­

fection if they used gloves and masks. When they shook their heads, I

made it an order, even though I had no lawful authority to do so.

That was all it took. The two oxen knelt beside me. One held the boy's

feet while the other grasped his hands. I tried to take a blood sample and

instead extracted only brown, viscous matter. As I was withdrawing the

needle, the boy began another bout of violent struggling.

One of my "orderlies," the one responsible for his arms, gave up trying to

hold them and thought it might safer if he just braced them against the

floor with his knees. But the boy jerked again and1 heard his left arm snap.

Jagged ends of both radius and ulna bones stabbed through his gray flesh.

Although the boy didn't cry out, didn't even seem to notice, it was enough

for both assistants to leap back and run from the room.

I instinctively retreated several paces myself. I am embarrassed to admit

this; I have been a doctor for most of my adult life. I was trained and .. .

you could even say "raised" by the People's Liberation Army. I've treated

more than my share of combat injuries, faced my own death on more than

one occasion, and now I was scared, truly scared, of this frail child.

I,

I I.

8 MAX BROOKS

The boy began to twist in my direction, his arm ripped completely free.

Flesh and muscle tore from one another until there was nothing except the

stump. His now free right arm, still tied to the severed left hand, dragged

his body across the floor.

I hurried outside, locking the door behind me. I tried to compose myself,

control my fear and shame. My voice still cracked as I asked the villagers

how the boy had been infected. No one answered. I began to hear banging

on the door, the boy's fist pounding weakly against the thin wood. It was

all I could do not to jump at the sound. I prayed they would not notice the

color draining from my face. I shouted, as much from fear as frustration,

that I had to know what happened to this child.

A young woman came forward, maybe his mother. You could tell that

she had been crying for days; her eyes were dry and deeply red. She admit­

ted that it had happened when the boy and his father were "moon fishing,"

a term that describes diving for treasure among the sunken ruins of the

Three Gorges Reservoir. With more than eleven hundred abandoned vil­

lages, towns, and even cities, there was always the hope of recovering

something valuable. It was a very common practice in those days, and also

very illegal. She explained that they weren't looting, that it was their own

village, Old Dachang, and they were just trying to recover some heirlooms

from the remaining houses that hadn't been moved. She repeated the

point, and I had to interrupt her with promises not to inform the police.

She finally explained that the boy came up crying with a bite mark on his

foot. He didn't know what had happened, the water had been too dark and

muddy. His father was never seen again.

I reached for my cell phone and dialed the number of Doctor Gu Wen

Kuei, an old comrade from my army days who now worked at the Institute

of Infectious Diseases at Chongqing University. 3

We exchanged pleas­

antries, discussing our health, our grandchildren; it was only proper. I then

told him about the outbreak and listened as he made some joke about the

3. The Institute of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases of the First Affiliated Hospital, Chongqing Medical University.

WORLD WAR Z 9

hygiene habits of hillbillies. I tried to chuckle along but continued that I

thought the incident might be significant. Almost reluctantly he asked me

what the symptoms were. I told him everything: the bites, the fever, the

boy, the arm .. . his face suddenly stiffened. His smile died.

He asked me to show him the infected. I went back into the meeting

hall and waved the phone's camera over each of the patients. He asked me

to move the camera closer to some of the wounds themselves. I did so and

when I brought the screen back to my face, I saw that his video image had

been cut.

"Stay where you are," he said, just a distant, removed voice now. "Take

the names of all who have had contact with the infected. Restrain those

already infected. If any have passed into coma, vacate the room and secure

the exit." His voice was flat, robotic, as if he had rehearsed this speech or

was reading from something. He asked me, "Are you armed?" "Why would

I be?" I asked. He told me he would get back to me, all business again. He

said he had to make a few calls and that I should expect "support" within

several hours.

They were there in less than one, fifty men in large army Z-8A helicop­

ters; all were wearing hazardous materials suits. They said they were from

the Ministry of Health. I don't know who they thought they were kidding.

With their bullying swagger, their intimidating arrogance, even these

backwater bumpkins could recognize the Guoanbu. 4

Their first priority was the meeting hall. The patients were carried out

on stretchers, their limbs shackled, their mouths gagged. Next, they went

for the boy. He came out in a body bag. His mother was wailing as she and

the rest of the village were rounded up for "examinations." Their names

were taken, their blood drawn. One by one they were stripped and pho­

tographed. The last one to be exposed was a withered old woman. She had

a thin, crooked body, a face with a thousand lines and tiny feet that had to

have been bound when she was a girl. She was shaking her bony fist at the

4. Guokia Anquan Bu: The prewar Ministry of State Security.

10 MAX BROOKS

"doctors." "This is your punishment!" she shouted. "This is revenge for Fengdu!"

She was referring to the City of Ghosts, whose temples and shrines were dedicated to the underworld. Like Old Dachang, it had been an unlucky obstacle to China's next Great Leap Forward. It had been evacuated, then demolished, then almost entirely drowned. I've never been a superstitious person and I've never allowed myself to be hooked on the opiate of the people. I'm a doctor, a scientist. I believe only in what I can see and touch. I've never seen Fengdu as anything but a cheap, kitschy tourist trap. Of course this ancient crone's words had no effect on me, but her tone, her anger . . . she had witnessed enough calamity in her years upon the earth: the warlords, the Japanese, the insane nightmare of the Cultural Revolu­ tion ... she knew that another storm was coming, even if she didn't have the education to understand it.

My colleague Dr. Kuei had understood all too well. He'd even risked his neck to warn me, to give me enough time to call and maybe alert a few others before the "Ministry of Health" arrived. It was something he had said . . . a phrase he hadn't used in a very long time, not since those "minor" border clashes with the Soviet Union. That was back in 1969. We had been in an earthen bunker on our side of the Ussuri, less than a kilo­ meter downriver from Chen Bao. The Russians were preparing to retake the island, their massive artillery hammering our forces.

Gu and I had been trying to remove shrapnel from the belly of this sol­ dier not much younger than us. The boy's lower intestines had been torn open, his blood and excrement were all over our gowns. Every seven sec­ onds a round would land close by and we would have to bend over his body to shield the wound from falling earth, and every time we would be close enough to hear him whimper softly for his mother. There were other voices, too, rising from the pitch darkness just beyond the entrance to our bunker, desperate, angry voices that weren't supposed to be on our side of the river. We had two infantrymen stationed at the bunker's entrance. One of them shouted "Spetsnaz!" and started firing into the dark. We could hear other shots now as well, ours or theirs, we couldn't tell.

WORLD WAR z II

Another round hit and we bent over the dying boy. Gu's face was only a

few centimeters from mine. There was sweat pouring down his forehead.

Even in the dim light of one paraffin lantern, I could see that he was shak­

ing and pale. He looked at the patient, then at the doorway, then at me, and suddenly he said, "Don't worry, everything's going to be all right."

Now, this is a man who has never said a positive thing in his life. Gu was a

worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. Ifhe had a headache, it was a brain tumor;

if it looked like rain, this year's harvest was ruined. This was his way of controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always coming out ahead.

Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalistic predictions,

he had no choice but to turn tail and charge in the opposite direction. "Don't worry, everything's going to be all right." For the first time every­

thing turned out as he predicted. The Russians never crossed the river and

we even managed to save our patient.

For years afterward I would tease him about what it took to pry out a little ray of sunshine, and he would always respond that it would take a hell

of a lot worse to get him to do it again. Now we were old men, and some­

thing worse was about to happen. It was right after he asked me if I was

armed. "No," I said, "why should I be?" There was a brief silence, I'm

sure other ears were listening. "Don't worry," he said, "everything's going

to be all right." That was when I realized that this was not an isolated out­

break. I ended the call and quickly placed another to my daughter in

Guangzhou. Her husband worked for China Telecom and spent at least one week of

every month abroad. I told her it would be a good idea to accompany him

the next time he left and that she should take my granddaughter and stay

for as long as they could. I didn't have time to explain; my signal was

jammed just as the first helicopter appeared. The last thing I managed to

say to her was "Don't worry, everything's going to be all right."

[Kwang Jingshu was arrested by the MSS and incarcerated with­

out formal charges. By the time he escaped, the outbreak had

spread beyond China's borders.I

12 MAX BROOKS

�··

LHASA, THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF TIBET

!The world's most populous city is still recovering from the re­

sults of last week's general election. The Social Democrats have

smashed the Llamist Party in a landslide victory and the streets

are still roaring with revelers .. I meet Nury Televaldi at a

crowded sidewalk cafe. We have to shout over the euphoric din.I

Before the outbreak started, overland smuggling was never popular. To arrange for the passports, the fake tour buses, the contacts and protection on the other side all took a lot of money. Back then, the only two lucrative routes were into Thailand or Myanmar. Where I used to live, in Kashi, the only option was into the ex-Soviet republics. No one wanted to go there, and that is why I wasn't initially a shetou. 1 I was an importer: raw opium, uncut diamonds, girls, boys, whatever was valuable from those primitive excuses for countries. The outbreak changed all that. Suddenly we were besieged with offers, and not just from the liudong renkou,2 but also, as you say, from people on the up-and-up. I had urban professionals, private farm­ ers, even low-level government officials. These were people who had a lot to lose. They didn't care where they were going, they just needed to get out.

Did you know what they were fleeing?

We'd heard the rumors. We'd even had an outbreak somewhere in Kashi. The government had hushed it up pretty quickly. But we guessed, we knew something was wrong.

1. Shetou: A "snake head," the smuggler of "renshe" or "human snake" of refugees. 2. Liudong renkou: China's "floating population" of homeless labor.

WORLD WAR Z 13

Didn't the governmen t try to shut you down?

Officially they did. Penalties on smuggling were hardened; border check­

points were strengthened. They even executed a few s�etou, �u�licly, ju�t

to make an example. If you didn't know the true story, 1f you d1dn t know tt

from my end, you'd think it was an efficient crackdown.

You're saying it wasn't?

I'm saying I made a lot of people rich: border guards, bureaucrats, police,

even the mayor. These were still good times for China, where the best way

to honor Chairman Mao's memory was to see his face on as many hundred

yuan notes as possible.

You were that successful.

Kashi was a boomtown. I think 90 percent, maybe more, of all westbound,

overland traffic came through with even a little left over for air travel.

Air travel?

Just a little. I only dabbled in transporting renshe by air, a few cargo flights

now and then to Kazakhstan or Russia. Small-time jobs. It wasn't like the

east, where Guangdong or J iangsu were getting thousands of people out every week.

Could you elaborate?

Air smuggling became big business in the eastern provinces. These were

rich clients, the ones who could afford prebooked travel packages and first­

class tourist visas. They would step off the plane at London or Rome, or

even San Francisco, check into their hotels, go out for a day's sightseeing, and simply vanish into thin air. That was big money. I'd always wanted to break into air transport.

I

,I I,

14 MAX BROOKS

But what about infection? Wasn't there a risk of being discovered?

That was only later, after Flight 575. Initially there weren't too many in­

fected taking these flights. If they did, they were in the very early stages.

Air transport shetou were very careful. If you showed any signs of advanced

infection, they wouldn't go near you. They were out to protect their busi­

ness. The golden rule was, you couldn't fool foreign immigration officials

until you fooled your shetou first. You had to look and act completely

healthy, and even then, it was always a race against time. Before Flight 575,

I heard this one story about a couple, a very well-to-do businessman and his

wife. He had been bitten. Not a serious one, you understand, but one of

the "slow burns," where all the major blood vessels are missed. I'm sure

they thought there was a cure in the West, a lot of the infected did. Appar­

ently, they reached their hotel room in Paris just as he began to collapse.

His wife tried to call the doctor, but he forbade it. He was afraid they

would be sent back. Instead, he ordered her to abandon him, to leave now

before he lapsed into coma. I hear that she did, and after two days of groans

and commotion, the hotel staff finally ignored the DO NOT DISTURB sign

and broke into the room. I'm not sure if that is how the Paris outbreak

started, though it would make sense.

You say they didn't call for a doctor, that they were afraid they'd be sent

back, but then why try to find a cure in the West?

You really don't understand a refugee's heart, do you? These people were

desperate. They were trapped between their infections and being rounded

up and "treated" by their own government. If you had a loved one, a fam­

ily member, a child, who was infected, and you thought there was a shred

of hope in some other country, wouldn't you do everything in your power

to get there? Wouldn't you want to believe there was hope?.

You said that man's wife, along with the other renshe, vanished into thin air.

It has always been this way, even before the outbreaks. Some stay with

family, some with friends. Many of the poorer ones had to work off their

WORLD WAR Z 15

bao 3

to the local C.hinese mafia. The majority of them sim ply melted into

the host country's underbe lly.

The low-income areas?

If that's what you want to call them. What bett er place to hide than among

that part of society that no one else even wants to acknowledge. How else

could so many outbreaks have started in so many Fi rst World ghettos?

It's been said that many shetou propagated the myt h of a miracle cure in

other countries.

Some.

Did you?

[Pause.I

No.

[Another pause.I

How did Flight 575 change air smuggling?

Restrictions were tightened, but only in certain countries. Airline shetou

were careful but they were also resourceful. They used to have this saying,

"every rich man's house has a servant's entrance."

What does that mean?

If western Europe has increased its security, go through eastern Europe. If

the U.S. won't let you in, go through Mexico. I'm sure it helped make the

3. Bao: The debt many refugees incurred during their exodus.

16 MAX BROOKS

rich white countries feel safer, even though they had infestations already bubbling within their borders. This is not my area of expertise, you remem­ ber, I was primarily land transport, and my target countries were in cen­ tral Asia.

Were they easier to enter?

They practically begged us for the business. Those countries were in such economic shambles, their officials were so backward and corrupt, they ac­ tually helped us with the paperwork in exchange for a percentage of our fee. There were even shetou, or whatever they called them in their barbar­ ian babble, who worked with us to get renshe across the old Soviet repub­ lics into countries like India or Russia, even Iran, although I never asked or wanted to know where any of the renshe were going. My job ended at the border. Just get their papers stamped, their vehicles tagged, pay the guards off, and take my cut.

Did you see many infected?

Not in the beginning. The blight worked too fast. It wasn't like air travel. It might take weeks to reach Kashi, and even the slowest of bums, I've been told, couldn't last longer than a few days. Infected clients usually reanimated somewhere on the road, where they would be recognized and collected by the local police. Later, as the infestations multiplied and the police became overwhelmed, I began to see a lot of infected on my route.

Were they dangerous?

Rarely. Their family usually had them bound and gagged. You'd see some­ thing moving in the back of a car, squirming softly under clothing or heavy blankets. You'd hear banging from a car's boot, or, later, from crates with airholes in the backs of vans. Airholes ... they really didn't know what was happening to their loved ones.

WORLD WAR z 17

Did you?

By then, yes, but I knew trying to explain it to them would be a hopeless

cause. I just took their money and sent them on their way. I was lucky. I

never had to deal with the problems of sea smuggling.

That was more difficult?

And dangerous. My associates from the coastal provinces were the ones who had to contend with the possibility of an infected breaking

. its bonds

and contaminating the entire hold.

What did they do?

I've heard of various "solutions." Sometimes ships would pull up to a stretch of deserted coast-it didn't matter if it was the intended country, it could have been any coast-and "unload" the infected renshe onto the beach. I've heard of some captains making for an empty stretch of open sea and just tossing the whole writhing lot overboard. That might explain the early cases of swimmers and divers starting to disappear without a trace, or why you'd hear of people all around the world saying they saw them walk­ ing out of the surf. At least I never had to deal with that.

I did have one similar incident, the one that convinced me it was time to quit. There was this truck, a beat-up old jalopy. You could hear the moans from the trailer. A lot of fists were slamming against the aluminum. It was actually swaying back and forth. In the cab there was a very wealthy investment banker from Xi'an. He'd made a l�t of money buying up Amer­ ican credit card debt. He had enough to pay for his entire extended family. The man's Armani suit was rumpled and tom. There were scratch marks down the side of his face, and his eyes had that frantic fire I was starting to see more of every day. The driver's eyes had a different look, the same one as me, the look that maybe money wasn't going to be much good for much longer. I slipped the man an extra fifty and wished him luck. That was all I could do.

18 MAX BROOKS

Where was the truck headed?

Kyrgyzstan.

METEORA, GREECE

[The monasteries are built into the steep, inaccessible rocks,

some buildings sitting perched atop high, almost vertical

columns. While originally an attractive refuge from the Ottoman

Turks, it later proved just as secure from the living dead. Post­

war staircases, mostly metal or wood, and all easily retractable,

cater to the growing influx of both pilgrims and tourists. Mete­

ora has become a popular destination for both groups in recent

years. Some seek wisdom and spiritual enlightenment, some sim­

ply search for peace. Stanley MacDonald is one of the latter. A

veteran of almost every campaign across the expanse of his native

Canada, he first encountered the living dead during a different

war, when the Third Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian

Light Infantry was involved in drug interdiction operations in

Kyrgyzstan.I

Please don't confuse us with the American "Alpha teams." This was long before their deployment, before "the Panic," before the Israeli self­ quarantine ... this was even before the first major public outbreak in Cape Town. This was just at the beginning of the spread, before anybody knew anything about what was coming. Our mission was strictly conventional, opium and hash, the primary export crop of terrori,sts around the world. That's all we'd ever encountered in that rocky wasteland. Traders and thugs and locally hired muscle. That's all we expected. That's all we were ready for.

WORLD WAR Z 19

The cave entrance was easy to find. We'd tracked it back from the blood

trail leading to the caravan. Right away we knew something was wrong.

There were no bodies. Rival tribes always left their victims laid out and

mutilated as a warning to others. There was plenty of blood, blood and bits

of brown rotting flesh, but the only corpses we found were the pack mules.

They'd been brought down, not shot, by what looked like wild animals.

Their bellies were torn out and large bite wounds covered their flesh. We

guessed it had to be wild dogs. Packs of those damn things roamed the val­

leys, big and nasty as Arctic wolves.

What was most puzzling was the cargo, still in their saddlebags, or just

scattered about the bodies. Now, even if this wasn't a territorial hit, even if

it was a religious or tribal revenge killing, no one just abandons fifty kilos

of prime, raw, Bad Brown, 1

or perfectly good assault rifles, or expensive

personal trophies like watches, mini disc players, and OPS locaters.

The blood trail led up the mountain path from the massacre in the wadi.

A lot of blood. Anyone who lost that much wouldn't be getting up again.

Only somehow he did. He hadn't been treated. There were no other track

marks. From what we could tell, this man had run, bled, fallen facedown­

we still could see his bloody face-mark imprinted in the sand. Somehow,

without suffocating, without bleeding to death, he'd lain there for some

time, then just gotten up again and started walking. These new tracks were

very different from the old. They were slower, closer together. His right

foot was dragging, clearly why he'd lost his shoe, an old, worn-out Nike

high-top. The drag marks were sprinkled with fluid. Not blood, not human,

but droplets of hard, black, crusted ooze that none of us recognized. We fol­

lowed these and the drag marks to the entrance of the cave.

There was no opening fire, no reception of any kind. We found the tun­

nel entrance unguarded and wide open. Immediately we began to see bodies,

men killed by their own booby traps. They looked like they'd been try­

ing ... running ... to get out.

Beyond them, in the first chamber, we saw our first evidence of a

1. Bad Brown: A nickname for the type of opium grown in the Badakhshan Province of

Afghanistan.

20 MAX BROOKS

one-sided firefight, one-sided because only one wall of the cavern was pockmarked by small arms. Opposite that wall were the shooters. They'd been torn apart. Their limbs, their bones, shredded and gnawed ... some still clutching their weapons, one of those severed hands with an old Makarov still in the grip. The hand was missing a finger. I found it across the room, along with the body of another unarmed man who'd been hit over a hundred times. Several rounds had taken the top of his head off. The finger was still stuck between his teeth.

Every chamber told a similar story. We found smashed barricades, dis­ carded weapons. We found more bodies, or pieces of them. Only the intact ones died from head shots. We found meat, chewed, pulped flesh bulging from their throats and stomachs. You could see by the blood trails, the footprints, the shell casings, and pockmarks that the entire battle had orig­ inated from the infirmary.

We discovered several cots, all bloody. At the end of the room we found a headless ... I'm guessing, doctor, lying on the dirt floor next to a cot with soiled sheets and clothes and an old, left-footed, worn-out Nike high-top.

The last tunnel we checked had collapsed from the use of a booby­ trapped demolition charge. A hand was sticking out of the limestone. It was still moving. I reacted from the gut, leaned forward, grabbed the hand, felt that grip. Like steel, almost crushed my fingers. I pulled back, tried to get away. It wouldn't let me go. I pulled harder, dug my feet in. First the arm came free, then the head, the torn face, wide eyes and gray lips, then the other hand, grabbing my arm and squeezing, then came the shoulders. I fell back, the thing's top half coming with me. The waist down was still jammed under the rocks, still connected to the upper torso by a line of en­ trails. It was still moving, still clawing me, trying to pull my arm into its mouth. I reached for my weapon.

The burst was angled upward, connecting just un.der and behind the chin and spraying its brains across the ceiling above us. I'd been the only one in the tunnel when it happened. I was the only witness ...

!He pauses.I

WORLD WAR z 21

"Exposure to unknown chemical agents." That's what they told me back in Edmonton, that or an adverse reaction to our own prophylactic medica­ tion. They threw in a healthy dose of PTSD2 for good measure. I just �eeded rest, rest and long-term "evaluation" ...

"Evaluation" ... that's what happens when it's your own side. It's only "interrogation" when it's the enemy. They teach you how to resist the enemy, how to protect your mind and spirit. They don't teach you how to resist your own people, especially people who think they're trying to "help" you see "the truth." They didn't break me, I broke myself. I wanted to be­ lieve them and I wanted them to help me. I was a good soldier, well trained, experienced; I knew what I could do to my fellow human beings and what they could do to me. I thought I was ready for anything. !He looks out at the valley, his eyes unfocused.I Who in his right mind could have been ready for this?

THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST, BRAZIL

lI arrive blindfolded, so as not to reveal my "hosts'" location.

Outsiders call them the Yanomami, "The Fierce People," and it

is unknown whether this supposedly warlike nature or the fact

that their new village hangs suspended from the tallest trees

was what allowed them to weather the crisis as well, if not bet­

ter, than even the most industrialized nation. It is not clear

whether Fernando Oliveira, the emaciated, drug-addicted w�ite

man "from the edge of the world," is their guest, mascot, or

prisoner.I

I was still a doctor, that's what I told myself. Yes, I was rich, and getting richer all the time, but at least my success came from performing necessary

2. PTSD: Post-traumatic stress disorder.

22 MAX BROOKS

medical procedures. I wasn't just slicing and dicing little teenage noses or

sewing Sudanese "pintos" onto sheboy pop divas. 1

I was still a doctor, I was

still helping people, and if it was so "immoral" to the self-righteous, hypo­

critical North, why did their citizens keep coming?

The package arrived from the airport an hour before the patient, packed

in ice in a plastic picnic cooler. Hearts are extremely rare. Not like livers or

skin tissue, and certainly not like kidneys, which, after the "presumed con­

sent" law was passed, you could get from almost any hospital or morgue in

the country.

Was it tested?

For what? In order to test for something, you have to know what you're

looking for. We didn't know about Walking Plague then. We were con­

cerned with conventional ailments-hepatitis or HIV/AIDS-and we didn't

even have time to test for those.

Why is that?

Because the flight had already taken so long. Organs can't be kept on ice

forever. We were already pushing our luck with this one.

Where had it come from?

China, most likely. My broker operated out of Macau. We trusted him. His

record was solid. When he assured us that the package was "clean," I took

him at his word; I had to. He knew the risks involved, so did I, so did the

patient. Herr Muller, in addition to his conventional heart ailments, was

cursed with the extremely rare genetic defect of dextrocardia with situs in­

versus. His organs lay in their exact opposite position; the liver was on the

left side, the heart entryways on the right, and so on. You see the unique

situation we were facing. We couldn't have just transplanted a conven-

1. It has been alleged that, before the war, the sexual organs of Sudanese men convicted of

adultery were severed and sold on the world black market.

WORLD WAR z 23

tional heart and turned it backward. It just doesn't work that way. We

needed another fresh, healthy heart from a "donor" with exactly the same

condition. W here else but China could we find that kind of luck?

It was luck?

[Smiles.I And "political expediency." I told my broker what I needed, gave

him the specifics, and sure enough, three weeks later I received an e-mail

simply titled "We have a match."

So you performed the operation.

I assisted, Doctor Silva performed the actual procedure. He was a presti­

gious heart surgeon who worked the top cases at the Hospital Israelita Al­

bert Einstein in Sao Paulo. Arrogant bastard, even for a cardiologist. It

killed my ego to have to work with ... under ... that prick, treating me

like I was a first-year resident. But what was I going to do ... Herr Muller

needed a new heart and my beach house needed a new herbal Jacuzzi.

Herr Muller never came out of the anesthesia. As he lay in the recovery

room, barely minutes after closing, his symptoms began to appear. His tem­

perature, pulse rate, oxygen saturation . .. I was worried, and it must have

tickled my more "experienced colleague." He told me that it was either a

common reaction to the immunosuppressant medication, or the simple,

expected complications of an overweight, unhealthy, sixty-seven-year-old

man who'd just gone through one of the most traumatic procedures in

modem medicine. I'm surprised he didn't pat me on the head, the prick.

He told me to go home, take a shower, get some sleep, maybe call a girl or

two, relax. He'd stay and watch him and call me if there was any change.

!Oliveira purses his lips angrily and chews another wad of the

mysterious leaves at his side.I

And what was I supposed to think? Maybe it was the drugs, the OKT 3.

Or maybe I was just being a worrier. This was my first heart transplant.

24 MAX BROOKS

What did I know? Still ... it bothered me so much that the last thing I

wanted to do was sleep. So I did what any good doctor should do when his

patient is suffering; I hit the town. I danced, I drank, I had salaciously in­

decent things done to me by who knows who or what. I wasn't even sure it

was my phone vibrating the first couple of times. It must have been at least

an hour before I finally picked up. Graziela, my receptionist, was in a real

state. She told me that Herr Muller had slipped into a coma an hour be­

fore. I was in my car before she could finish the sentence. It was a thirty­

minute drive back to the clinic, and I cursed both Silva and myself every

second of the way. So I did have reason to be concerned! So I was right!

Ego, you could say; even though to be right meant dire consequences for

me as well, I still relished tarnishing the invincible Silva's reputation.

I arrived to find Graziela trying to comfort a hysterical Rosi, one of my

nurses. The poor girl was inconsolable. I gave her a good one across the

cheek-that calmed her down-and asked her what was going on. Why

were there spots of blood on her uniform? Where was Doctor Silva? Why

were some of the other patients out of their rooms, and what the hell was

that goddamn banging noise? She told me that Herr Muller had flat-lined,

suddenly, and unexpectedly. She explained that they had been trying to re­

vive him when Herr Muller had opened his eyes and bitten Doctor Silva

on the hand. The two of them struggled; Rosi tried to help but was almost

bitten herself. She left Silva, ran from the room, and locked the door be­

hind her.

I almost laughed. It was so ridiculous. Maybe Superman had slipped up,

misdiagnosed him, if that was possible. Maybe he'd just risen from the bed,

and, in a stupor, had tried to grab on to Doctor Silva to steady himself. There

had to be a reasonable explanation ... and yet, there was the blood on her

uniform and the muffled noise from Herr Muller's room. I went back to the

car for my gun, more so to calm Graziela and Rosi than for myself.

You carried a gun?

I lived in Rio. What do you think I carried, my "pinto"? I went back to

Herr Muller's room, I knocked several times. I heard nothing. I whispered

WORLD WAR z 25

his and Silva's names. No one responded. I noticed blood seeping out from

under the door. I entered and found it covering the floor. Silva was lying in

the far comer, Muller crouching over him with his fat, pale, hairy back to

me. I can't remember how I got his attention, whether I called his name,

uttered a swear, or did anything at all but just stand there. Muller turned to

me, bits of bloody meat falling from his open mouth. I saw that his steel su­

tures had been partially pried open and a thick, black, gelatinous fluid

oozed through the incision. He got shakily to his feet, lumbering slowly

toward me.

I raised my pistol, aiming at his new heart. It was a "Desert Eagle," Is­

raeli, large and showy, which is why I'd chosen it. I'd never fired it before,

thank God. I wasn't ready for the recoil. The round went wild, literally

blowing his head off. Lucky, that's all, this lucky fool standing there with a

smoking gun, and a stream of warm urine running down my leg. Now it

was my turn to get slapped, several times by Graziela, before I came to my

senses and telephoned the police.

Were you arrested?

Are you crazy? These were my partners, how do you think I was able to get

my homegrown organs. How do you think I was able to take care of this

mess? They're very good at that. They helped explain to my other patients

that a homicidal maniac had broken into the clinic and killed both Herr

Muller and Doctor Silva. They also made sure that none of the staff said

anything to contradict that story.

What about the bodies?

They listed Silva as the victim of a probable "car jacking." I don't know

where they put his body; maybe some ghetto side street in the City of God,

a drug score gone bad just to give the story more credibility. I hope they

just burned him, or buried him ... deep.

Do you think he • . •

26 MAX BROOKS

I don't know. His brain was intact when he died. If he wasn't in a body bag ... if the ground was soft enough. How long would it have taken to dig out?

IHe chews another leaf, offering me some. I decline.I

And Mister Muller?

No explanation, not to his widow, not to the Austrian embassy. Just an­ other kidnapped tourist who'd been careless in a dangerous town. I don't know if Frau Muller ever believed that story, or if she ever tried to investi­ gate further. She probably never realized how damn lucky she was.

Why was she lucky?

Are you serious? What if he hadn't reanimated in my clinic? What if he'd managed to make it all the way home?

Is that possible?

Of course it is! Think about it. Because the infection started in the heart, the virus had direct access to his circulatory system, so it probably reached his brain seconds after it was implanted. Now you take another organ, a liver or a kidney, or even a section of grafted skin. That's going to take a lot longer, especially if the virus is only present in small amounts.

But the donor . . .

Doesn't have to be fully reanimated. What if he's just newly infected? The organ may not be completely saturated. It might only have an infinitesimal trace. You put that organ in another body, it might take days, weeks, before it eventually works its way out into the bloodstream. By that point the patient might be well on the way to recovery, happy and healthy and living

a regular life.

WORLD WAR z 27

· But whoever is removin g the organ . . .

. , . may not know what he's dealing with. I didn't. These were the very

early stages, when nobody knew anything yet. Even if they did know, like

elements in the Chinese army ... you want to talk about immoral ...

Years before the outbreak they'd been making millions on organs from ex­ ecuted political prisoners. You think something like a little virus is going to

make them stop sucking that golden tit?

But how ...

You remove the heart not long after the victim's died ... maybe even while he's still alive ... they used to do that, you know, remove living organs to ensure their freshness ... pack it in ice, put it on a plane for Rio ... China used to be the largest exporter of human organs on the world market. Who knows how many infected corneas, infected pituitary glands ... Mother of God, who knows how many infected kidneys they pumped into the global market. And that's just the organs! You want to talk about the "donated" eggs from political prisoners, the sperm, the blood? You think immigration was the only way the infection swept the

planet? Not all the initial outbreaks were Chinese nationals. Can you ex­ plain all those stories of people suddenly dying of unexplained causes, then reanimating without ever having been bitten? Why did so many outbreaks

begin in hospitals? Illegal Chinese immigrants weren't going to hospitals. Do you know how many thousands of people got illegal organ transplants in those early years leading up to the Great Panic? Even if 10 percent of them were infected, even 1 percent ...

Do you have any proof of this theory?

No ... but that doesn't mean it didn't happen! When I think about how many transplants I performed, all those patients from Europe, the Arab world, even the self-righteous United States. Few of you Yankees asked where your new kidney or pancreas was coming from, be it a slum kid from

28 MAX BROOKS

the City of God or some unlucky student in a Chinese political prison. You

didn't know, you didn't care. You just signed your traveler's checks, went

under the knife, then went home to Miami or New York or wherever.

Did you ever try to track these patients down, warn them?

No, I didn't. I was trying to recover from a scandal, rebuild my reputation,

my client base, my bank account. I wanted to forget what happened, not

investigate it further. By the time I realized the danger, it was scratching at

my front door.

BRIDGETOWN HARBOR, BARBADOS, WEST INDIES FEDERATION

II was told to expect a "tall ship," although the "sails" of IS

Imfingo refer to the four vertical wind turbines rising from her

sleek, trimaran hull. When coupled with banks of PEM, or proton

exchange membrane, fuel cells, a technology that converts sea­

water into electricity, it is easy to see why the prefix "IS"

stands for "Infinity Ship." Hailed as the undisputed future of

maritime transport, it is still rare to see one sailing under any­

thing but a government flag. The Imfingo is privately owned and

operated. Jacob Nyathi is her captain.I

I was born about the same time as the new, postapartheid South Africa.

In those euphoric days, the new government not only promised the

democracy of "one man, one vote," but employment and housing to the

entire country. My father thought that meant imlJlediately. He didn't

understand that these were long-term goals to be. achieved after years­

generations-of hard work. He thought that if we abandoned our tribal

homeland and relocated to a city, there would be a brand-new house and

WORLD WAR 2 29

high-paying jobs just sitting there waiting for us. My father was a simple

man, a day laborer. I can't blame him for his lack of formal education, his

dream of a better life for his family. And so we settled in Khayelitsha, one

of the four main townships outside of Cape Town. It was a life of grinding,

hopeless, humiliating poverty. It was my childhood.

The night it happened, I was walking home from the bus stop. It was

around five A.M. and I'd just finished my shift waiting tables at the T.G.I.

Friday's at Victoria Wharf. It had been a good night. The tips were big, and

news from the Tri Nations was enough to make any South African feel ten

feet tall. The Springboks were trouncing the All Blacks ... again! .

[He smiles with the memory.I

Maybe those thoughts were what distracted me at first, maybe it was

simply being so knackered, but I felt my body instinctively react before I

consciously heard the shots. Gunfire was not unusual, not in my neighbor­

hood, not in those days. "One man, one gun," that was the slogan of my

life in Khayelitsha. Like a combat veteran, you develop almost genetic sur­

vival skills. Mine were razor sharp. I crouched, tried to triangulate the

sound, and at the same time look for the hardest surface to hide behind.

Most of the homes were just makeshift shanties, wood scraps or corrugated

tin, or just sheets of plastic fastened to barely standing beams. Fire ravaged

these lean-tos at least once a year, and bullets could pass through them as

easily as open air.

I sprinted and crouched behind a barbershop, which had been con­

structed from a car-sized shipping container. It wasn't perfect, but it would

do for a few seconds, long enough to hole up and wait for the shooting to

die down. Only it didn't. Pistols, shotguns, and that clatter you never for­

get, the kind that tells you someone has a Kalashnikov. This was lasting

much too long to be just an ordinary gang row. Now there were screams,

shouts. I began to smell smoke. I heard the stirrings of a crowd. I peeked

out from around the comer. Dozens of people, most of them in their night­

clothes, all shouting "Run! Get out of there! They're coming!" House

lamps were lighting all around me, faces poking out of shanties. "What's

30 MAX BROOKS

going on here?" they asked. "Who's coming?" Those were the younger

faces. The older ones, they just started running. They had a different kind

of survival instinct, an instinct born in a time when they were slaves in

their own country. In tho�e days, everyone knew who "they" were, and if

"they" were ever coming, all you could do was run and pray.

Did you run?

I couldn't. My family, my mother and two little sisters, lived only a few

"doors" down from the Radio Zibonele station, exactly where the mob was

fleeing from. I wasn't thinking. I was stupid. I should have doubled back

around, found an alley or quiet street.

I tried to wade through the mob, pushing in the opposite direction. I

thought I could stay along the sides of the shanties. I was knocked into

one, into one of their plastic walls that wrapped around me as the whole

structure collapsed. I was trapped, I couldn't breathe. Someone ran over

me, smashed my head into the ground. I shook myself free, wriggled and

rolled out into the street. I was still on my stomach when I saw them: ten

or fifteen, silhouetted against the fires of the burning shanties. I couldn't

see their faces, but I could hear them moaning. They were slouching

steadily toward me with their arms raised.

I got to my feet, my head swam, my body ached all over. Instinctively

I began to withdraw, backing into the "doorway" of the closest shack.

Something grabbed me from behind, pulled at my collar, tore the fabric. I

spun, ducked, and kicked hard. He was large, larger and heavier than

me by a few kilos. Black fluid ran down the front of his white shirt. A

knife protruded from his chest, jammed between the ribs and buried to

the hilt. A scrap of my collar, which was clenched between his teeth,

dropped as his lower jaw fell open. He growled, he lunged. I tried to dodge.

He grabbed my wrist. I felt a crack, and pain shot up through my body. I

dropped to my knees, tried to roll and maybe trip �im up. My hand came

up against a heavy cooking pot. I grabbed it and swung hard. It smashed

into his face. I hit him again, and again, bashing his skull until the bone

split open and the brains spilled out across my feet. He slumped over. I

WORLD WAR z 31

freed myself just as another one of them appeared in the entrance. This

time the structure's flimsy nature worked to my advantage. I kicked the

back wall open, slinking out and bringing the whole hut down in the

process.

I ran, I didn't know where I was going. It was a nightmare of shacks and

fire and grasping hands all racing past me. I ran through a shanty where a

woman was hiding in the corner. Her two children were huddled against

her, crying. "Come with me!" I said. "Please, come, we have to go!" I held

out my hands, moved closer to her. She pulled her children back, bran­

dishing a sharpened screwdriver. Her eyes were wide, scared. I could hear

sounds behind me ... smashing through shanties, knocking them over as

they came. I switched from Xhosa to English. "Please," I begged, "you have

to run!" I reached for her but she stabbed my hand. I left her there. I didn't

know what else to do. She is still in my memory, when I sleep or maybe

close my eyes sometimes. Sometimes she's my mother, and the crying chil­

dren are my sisters.

I saw a bright light up ahead, shining between the cracks in the shanties.

I ran as hard as I could. I tried to call to them. I was out of breath. I crashed

through the wall of a shack and suddenly I was in open ground. The head­

lights were blinding. I felt something slam into my shoulder. I think I was

out before I even hit the ground.

I came to in a bed at Groote Schuur Hospital. I'd never seen the inside

of a recovery ward like this. It was so clean and white. I thought I might be

dead. The medication, I'm sure, helped that feeling. I'd never tried any

kind of drugs before, never even touched a drink of alcohol. I didn't want

to end up like so many in my neighborhood, like my father. All my life I'd

fought to stay clean, and now ...

The morphine or whatever they had pumped into my veins was deli­

cious. I didn't care about anything. I didn't care when they told me the po­

lice had shot me in the shoulder. I saw the man in the bed next to me

frantically wheeled out as soon as his breathing stopped. I didn't even care

when I overheard them talking about the outbreak of "rabies."

Who was talking about it?

32 MAX BROOKS

I don't know. Like I said, I was as high as the stars. I just remember voices

in the hallway outside my ward, loud voices angrily arguing. "That wasn't

rabies!" one of them yelled. "Rabies doesn't do that to people!" Then ...

something else ... then "well, what the hell do you suggest, we've got fif­

teen downstairs right here! Who knows how many more are still out

there!" It's funny, I go over that conversation all the time in my head, what

I should have thought, felt, done. It was a long time before I sobered up

again, before I woke up and faced the nightmare.

TEL Aviv, lsRAEL

[Jurgen Warmbrunn has a passion for Ethiopian food, which is

our reason for meeting at a Falasha restaurant. With his bright

pink skin, and white, unruly eyebrows that match his "Einstein"

hair, he might be mistaken for a crazed scientist or college pro­

fessor. He is neither. Although never acknowledging which Is­

raeli intelligence service he was, and possibly still is, employed

by, he openly admits that at one point he could be called "a spy."]

Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has.

That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature. I don't blame

anyone for not believing. I don't claim to be any smarter or better than

them. I guess what it really comes down to is the randomness of birth. I

happened to be born into a group of people who live in constant fear of ex­

tinction. It's part of our identity, part of our mind-set, and it has taught us

through horrific trial and error to always be on our guard.

The first warning I had of the plague was from our friends and customers

over in Taiwan. They were complaining about our rn;w software decryp­

tion program. Apparently it was failing to decode some e-mails from PRC

WORLD WAR 2 33

sources, or at least decoding them so poorly that the text was unintelli­ gible. I suspected the problem might not be in the software but in the translated messages themselves. The mainland Reds ... I guess they weren't really Reds anymore but ... what do you want from an old man? The Reds had a nasty habit of using too many different computers from too many different generations and countries.

Before I suggested this theory to Taipei, I thought it might be a good

idea to review the scrambled messages myself. I was surprised to find that the characters themselves were perfectly decoded. But the text itself ... it all had to do with a new viral outbreak that first eliminated its victim, then reanimated his corpse into some kind of homicidal berzerker. Of course: I didn't believe this was true, especially because only a few weeks later the crisis in the Taiwan Strait began and any messages dealing with rampaging corpses abruptly ended. I suspected a second layer of encryption, a code within a code. That was pretty standard procedure, going back to the first days of human communication. Of course the Reds didn't mean actual dead bodies. It had to be a new weapon system or ultrasecret war plan. I let

the matter drop, tried to forget about it. Still, as one of your great national heroes used to say: "My spider sense was tingling."

Not long afterward, at the reception for my daughter's wedding, I found myself speaking to one of my son-in-law's professors from Hebrew Univer­ sity. The man was a talker, and he'd had a little too much to drink. He was rambling about how his cousin was doing some kind of work in South Africa and had told him some stories about golems. You know about the Golem, the old legend about a rabbi who breathes life into an inanimate statue? Mary Shelley stole the idea for her book Frankenstein. I didn't say anything at first; just listened. The man went on blathering about how these golems weren't made from clay, nor were they docile and obedient. As soon as he mentioned reanimating human bodies, I asked for the man's number. It turns out he had been in Cape Town on one of those "Adrena­ line Tours," shark feeding I think it was.

!He rolls his eyes.I

34 MAX BROOKS

Apparently the shark had obliged him, right in the tuchus, which is why

he had been recovering at Groote Schuur when the first victims from

Khayelitsha township were brought in. He hadn't seen any of these cases

firsthand, but the staff had told him enough stories to fill my old Dicta­

phone. I then presented his stories, along with those decrypted Chinese

e-mails, to my superiors.

And this is where I directly benefited from the unique circumstances of

our precarious security. In October of 1973, when the Arab sneak attack

almost drove us into the Mediterranean, we had all the intelligence in

front of us, all the warning signs, and we had simply "dropped the ball." We

never considered the possibility of an all-out, coordinated, conventional

assault from several nations, certainly not on our holiest of holidays. Call it

stagnation, call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a

group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating

one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mir­

ror whose image shows the writing's true message. No one looks at the mir­

ror. No one thinks it's necessary. Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to

finish what Hitler started, we realized that not only was that mirror image

necessary, but it must forever be our national policy. From 1973 onward, if

nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of

the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility

might be, one must always dig deeper. If a neighbor's nuclear power plant

might be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, you dig; if a dictator was

rumored to be building a cannon so big it could fire anthrax shells across

whole countries, you dig; and if there was even the slightest chance that

dead bodies were being reanimated as ravenous killing machines, you dig

and dig until you stike the absolute truth.

And that is what I did, I dug. At first it wasn't easy. With China out of

the picture . .. the Taiwan crisis put an end to any intelligence gather­

ing ... I was left with very few sources of information. A lot of it was chaff,

especially on the Internet; zombies from space and Area 51 ... what is

your country's fetish for Area 51, anyway? Aftef a while I started to un­

cover more useful data: cases of "rabies" similar to Cape Town ... it wasn't

called African rabies until later. I uncovered the psychological evaluations

WORLD WAR Z 35

of some Canadian mountain troops recently returned from Kyrgyzstan. I

found the blog records of a Brazilian nurse who told her friends all about

the murder of a heart surgeon.

The majority of my information came from the World Health Organiza­

tion. The UN is a bureaucratic masterpiece, so many nuggets of valuable

data buried in mountains of unread reports. I found incidents all over the

world, all of them dismissed with "plausible" explanations. These cases al­

lowed me to piece together a cohesive mosaic of this new threat. The sub­

jects in question were indeed dead, they were hostile, and they were

undeniably spreading. I also made one very encouraging discovery: how to

terminate their existence.

Going for the brain.

[He chuckles.I We talk about it today as if it is some feat of magic, like holy

water or a silver bullet, but why wouldn't destruction of the brain be the

only way to annihilate these creatures? Isn't it the only way to annihilate

us as well?

You mean human beings?

[He nods.I Isn't that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vul­ nerable machine we call the body? The brain cannot survive if just one part of the machine is destroyed or even deprived of such necessities as food or oxygen. That is the only measurable difference between us and "The Undead." Their brains do not require a support system to survive, so it is necessary to attack the organ itself. [His right hand, in the shape of a gun, rises to touch his temple.I A simple solution, but only if we recog­ nized the problem! Given how quickly the plague was spreading, I thought it might be prudent to seek confirmation from foreign intelligence circles.

Paul Knight had been a friend of mine for a long time, going all the way back to Entebbe. The idea to use a double of Amin's black Mercedes, that was him. Paul had retired from government service right before his agency's "reforms" and gone to work for a private consulting firm in Bethesda, Maryland. When I visited him at his home, I was shocked to find that not only had he been working on the very same project, on his own time, of

36 MAX BROOKS

course, but that his file was almost as thick and heavy as mine. We sat up the whole night reading each other's findings. Neither of us spoke. I don't think we were even conscious of each other, the world around us, anything except the words before our eyes. We finished almost at the same time, just as the sky began to lighten in the east.

Paul turned the last page, then looked to me and said very matter-of­ factly, "This is pretty bad, huh?" I nodded, so did he, then followed up with "So what are we going to do about it?"

And that is how the "Warmbrunn-Knight" report was written.

I wish people would stop calling it that. There were fifteen other names on that report: virologists, intelligence operatives, military analysts, journal­ ists, even one UN observer who'd been monitoring the elections in Jakarta when the first outbreak hit Indonesia. Everyone was an expert in his or her field, everyone had come to their own similar conclusions before ever being contacted by us. Our report was just under a hundred pages long. It was concise, it was fully comprehensive, it was everything we thought we needed to make sure this outbreak never reached epidemic proportions. I know a lot of credit has been heaped upon the South African war plan, and de­ servedly so, but if more people had read our report and worked to make its recommendations a reality, then that plan would have never needed to exist.

But some people did read and follow your report. Your own government . . .

Barely, and just look at the cost.

BETHLEHEM, PALESTINE

!With his rugged looks and polished charm, Saladin Kader could

be a movie star. He is friendly but never obsequious, self-

WORLD WAR 2 37

assured but. never arrogant. He is a professor of urban planning

at Khalil Gibran University, and, naturally, the love of all his

female students. We sit under t.he statue of the university's name­

sake. Like everything else in one of the Middle East's most afflu­

ent cities, its polished bronze glitters in the sun.I

I was born and raised in Kuwait City. My family was one of the few

"lucky" ones not to be expelled after 1991, after Arafat sided with Saddam

against the world. We weren't rich, but neither were we struggling. I was

comfortable, even sheltered, you might say, and oh did it show in my actions.

I watched the Al Jazeera broadcast from behind the counter at the Star­

bucks where I worked every day after school. It was the afternoon rush

hour and the place was packed. You should have heard the uproar, the jeers

and catcalls. I'm sure our noise level matched that on the floor of the

General Assembly.

Of course we thought it was a Zionist lie, who didn't? When the Israeli

ambassador announced to the UN General Assembly that his country was

enacting a policy of "voluntary quarantine," what was I supposed to think?

Was I supposed to really believe his crazy story that African rabies was ac­

tually some new plague that transformed dead bodies into bloodthirsty

cannibals? How can you possibly believe that kind of foolishness, espe­

cially when it comes from your most hated enemy?

I didn't even hear the second part of that fat bastard's speech, the part

about offering asylum, no questions asked, to any foreign-born Jew, any for­

eigner of Israeli-born parents, any Palestinian living in the formerly occu­

pied territories, and any Palestinian whose family had once lived within

the borders of Israel. The last part applied to my family, refugees from the

'67 War of Zionist aggression. At the heeding of the PLO leadership, we

had fled our village believing we could return as soon as our Egyptian and

Syrian brothers had swept the Jews into the sea. I had never been to Israel,

or what was about to be absorbed into the new state of Unified Palestine.

What did you think was behind the Israeli ruse?

38 MAX BROOKS

Here's what I thought: The Zionists have just been driven out of the occu­ pied territories, they say they left voluntarily, just like Lebanon, and most recently the Gaza Strip, but really, just like before, we knew we'd driven them out. They know that the next and final blow would destroy that ille­ gal atrocity they call a country, and to prepare for that final blow, they're attempting to recruit both foreign Jews as cannon fodder and . .. and-I thought I was so clever for figuring this part out-kidnapping as many Palestinians as they could to act as human shields! I had all the answers. Who doesn't at seventeen?

My father wasn't quite convinced of my ingenious geopolitical insights. He was a janitor at Amiri Hospital. He'd been on duty the night it had its first major African rabies outbreak. He hadn't personally seen the bodies rise from their slabs or the carnage of panicked patients and security guards, but he'd witnessed enough of the aftermath to convince him that staying in Kuwait was suicidal. He'd made up his mind to leave the same day Israel made their declaration.

That must have been difficult to hear.

It was blasphemy! I tried to make him see reason, to convince him with my adolescent logic. I'd show the images from Al Jazeera, the images coming out of the new West Bank state of Palestine; the celebrations, the demon­ strations. Anyone with eyes could see total liberation was at hand. The Is­ raelis had withdrawn from all the occupied territory and were actually preparing to evacuate Al Quds, what they call Jerusalem! All the factional fighting, the violence between our various resistance organizations, I knew that would die down once we unified for the final blow against the Jews. Couldn't my father see this? Couldn't he understand that, in a few years, a few months, we would be returning to our homeland, this time as libera­ tors, not as refugees.

How was your argument resolved?

"Resolved," what a pleasant euphemism. It was "resolved" after the second outbreak, the larger one at Al Jahrah. My father had just quit his job, cleared out our bank account, such as it was .. . our bags were packed ...

WORLD WAR z 39

our e-tickets confirmed. The TV was blaring in the background, riot police

storming the front entrance of a house. You couldn't see what they were

shooting at inside. The official report blamed the violence on "pro-Western

extremists." My father and I were arguing, as always. He tried to convince

me of what he'd seen at the hospital, that by the time our leaders acknowl-

edged the danger, it would be too late for any of us.

I, of course, scoffed at his timid ignorance, at his willingness to abandon

"The Struggle." What else could I expect from a man who'd spent his

whole life scrubbing toilets in a country that treated our people only

slightly better than its Filipino guest workers. He'd lost his perspective, his

self-respect. The Zionists were offering the hollow promise of a better life,

and he was jumping at it like a dog with scraps.

My father tried, with all the patience he could muster, to make me see

that he had no more love for Israel than the most militant Al Aqsa martyr,

but they seemed to be the only country actively preparing for the coming

storm, certainly the only one that would so freely shelter and protect our

family.

I laughed in his face. Then I dropped the bomb: I told him that I'd al­

ready found a website for the Children of Yassin 1

and was waiting for an

e-mail from a recruiter supposedly operating right in Kuwait City. I told my

father to go and be the yehud's whore if he wanted, but the next time we'd

meet was when I would be rescuing him from an internment camp. I was

quite proud of those words, I thought they sounded very heroic. I glared in

his face, stood from the table, and made my final pronouncement: "Surely

the vilest of beasts in Allah's sight are those who disbelieve! " 2

The dinner table suddenly became very silent. My mother looked down,

my sisters looked at each other. All you could hear was the TV, the frantic

words of the on-site reporter telling everyone to remain calm. My father

was not a large man. By that time, I think I was even bigger than him. He

1. Children of Yassin: A youth-based terrorist organization named for the late Sheikh

Yassin. Under strict recruitment codes, all martyrs could be no older than eighteen.

2. "Sure the vilest of beasts in Allah's sight are those who disbelieve, then they would not

believe." From the Holy Koran, part 8, Section 55.

40 MAX BROOKS

was also not an angry man; I don't think he ever raised his voice. I saw something in his eyes, something I didn't recognize, and then suddenly he was on me, a lightning whirlwind that threw me up against the wall, slapped me so hard my left ear rang. "You WILL go!" he shouted as he grabbed my shoulders and repeatedly slammed me against the cheap dry­ wall. "I am your father! You WILL OBEY ME!" His next slap sent my vi­ sion flashing white. "YOU WILL LEAVE WITH THIS FAMILY OR YOU WILL NOT LEAVE THIS ROOM ALI VE!" More grabbing and shoving, shouting and slapping. I didn't understand where this man had come from, this lion who'd replaced my docile, frail excuse for a parent. A lion pro­ tecting his cubs. He knew that fear was the only weapon he had left to save my life and if I didn't fear the threat of the plague, then dammit, I was going to fear him!

Did it work?

!Laughs.I Some martyr I turned out to be, I think I cried all the way to Cairo.

Cairo?

There were no direct flights to Israel from Kuwait, not even from Egypt once the Arab League imposed its travel restrictions. We had to fly from Kuwait to Cairo, then take a bus across the Sinai Desert to the crossing at Taba.

As we approached the border, I saw the Wall for the first time. It was still unfinished, naked steel beams rising above the concrete foundation. I'd known about the infamous "security fence"-what citizen of the Arab world didn't-but I'd always been led to believe that it only surrounded the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Out here, in the middle of this barren desert, it only confirmed my theory that the Israelis were expecting an at­ tack along their entire border. Good, I thought. The Egyptians have finally rediscovered their balls.

At Taba, we were taken off the bus and told to walk, single file, past cages that held very large and fierce-looking dogs. We went one at a time.

WoR'LD WAR Z 41

A border guard, this skinny black African-I didn't know there were black

Jews 3 -would hold out his hand. "Wait there!" he said in barely recogniz­

able Arabic. Then, "you go, come!" The man before me was old. He had a

long white beard and supported himself on a cane. As he passed the dogs,

they went wild, howling and snarling, biting and charging at the confines

of their cages. Instantly, two large chaps in civilian clothing were at the

old man's side, speaking something in his ear and escorting him away. I

could see the man was injured. His dishdasha was tom at the hip and

stained with brown blood. These men were certainly no doctors, however,

and the black, unmarked van they escorted him to was certainly no ambu­

lance. Bastards, I thought, as the old man's family wailed after him. Weed­

ing out the ones too sick and old to be of any use to them. Then it was our tum

to walk the gauntlet of dogs. They didn't bark at me, nor the rest of my

family. I think one of them even wagged its tail as my sister held out her

hand. The next man after us, however ... again came the barks and

growls, again came the nondescript civilians. I turned to look at him and

was surprised to see a white man, American maybe, or Canadian ... no, he

had to be American, his English was too loud. "C'mon, I'm fine!" He shouted

and struggled. "C'mon, man, what the fuck?" He was well dressed, a suit

and tie, matching luggage that was tossed aside as he began to fight with

the Israelis. "Dude, c'mon, get the fuck off me! I'm one'a you! C'mon!"

The buttons on his shirt ripped open, revealing a bloodstained bandage

wrapped tightly around his stomach. He was still kicking and screaming as

they dragged him into the back of the van. I didn't understand it. Why

these people? Clearly, it wasn't just about being an Arab, or even about being

wounded. I saw several refugees with severe injuries pass through without

molestation from the guards. They were all escorted to waiting ambulances,

real ambulances, not the black vans. I knew it had something to do with

the dogs. Were they screening for rabies? That made the most sense to me,

and it continued to be my theory during our internment outside Yeroham.

3. By this point, the Israeli government had completed operation "Moses II," which trans­

ported the last of the Ethiopian "Falasha" into Israel.

42 MAX BROOKS

The resettlement camp?

Resettlement and quarantine. At that time, I just saw it as a prison. It wasexactly what I'd expected to happen to us: the tents, the overcrowding, theguards, barbed wire, and the seething, baking Negev Desert sun. We feltlike prisoners, we were prisoners, and although I would have never had thecourage to say to my father "I told you so," he could see it clearly in mysour face. What I didn't expect was the physical examinations; every day, from an army of medical personnel. Blood, skin, hair, saliva, even urine and feces4 •..it was exhausting, mortifying. The only thing that made it bearable, andprobably what prevented an all-out riot among some of the Muslim de­tainees, was that most of the doctors and nurses doing the examinationswere themselves Palestinian. The doctor who examined my mother and sisters was a woman, an American woman from a place called Jersey City.The man who examined us was from Jabaliya in Gaza and had himself beena detainee only a few months before. He kept telling us, "You made theright decision to come here. You'll see. I know it's hard, but you'll see it wasthe only way." He told us it was all true, everything the Israelis had said. Istill couldn't bring myself to believe him, even though a growing part ofme wanted to.

We stayed at Yeroham for three weeks, until our papers were processedand our medical examinations finally cleared. You know, the whole timethey barely even glanced at our passports. My father had done all this workto make sure our official documents were in order. I don't think they evencared. Unless the Israeli Defense Force or the police wanted you for someprevious "unkosher" activities, all that mattered was your clean bill of health.The Ministry of Social Affairs provided us with vouchers for subsidizedhousing, free schooling, and a job for my father at a salary that would sup­port the entire family. This is too good to be true, I thought as we boardedthe bus for Tel Aviv. The hammer is going to fall anytime now.

4. At the time, it was unsure whether the virus could survive in solid waste outside of the human body.

WORLD WAR z 43

·d we entered the city of Beer Sheeba. I was asleep, I didn'tIt d1 once . c 1 h h ts or see the driver's windscreen shatter. I Jerked awake as I 1e t hear t e s o f b 'Id' t Of control We crashed into the side o a m mg. the bus swerve ou · .

I med glass and blood were everywhere. My family was close to Peop e screa , d · exit My father kicked the door open and pushe us out the emergency

into the street. . There was shooting, from the windows, doorways. I could see that 1t ��s ld'ers versus civilians, civilians with guns or homemade bombs. This isso 1 1 th ht My heart felt like it was going to burst! This liberation hasw � · d, Before I could do anything, run out to join my comrades m battle, starte .

f h d me by my shirt and was pulling me through the doorway o a someone a Starbucks.

I was thrown on the floor next to my family, my sisters were crying as my mother tried to crawl on top of them. My father had a bullet wound in the shoulder. An IDF soldier shoved me on the ground, keeping my face a�ay from the window. My blood was boiling; I started looking for somethmg I could use as a weapon, maybe a large shard of glass to ram through the yehud's throat.

Suddenly a door at the back of the Starbucks swung open, the soldier turned in its direction and fired. A bloody corpse hit the floor right beside us, a grenade rolled out of his twitching hand. The soldier grabbed the bomb and tried to hurl it into the street. It exploded in midair. His body shielded us from the blast. He tumbled back over the corpse of my slain Arab brother. Only he wasn't an Arab at all. As my tears dried I noticed that he wore payess and a yarmulke and bloody tzitzit snaked out from his damp, shredded trousers. This man was a Jew, the armed rebels out in the street were Jews! The battle raging all around us wasn't an uprising by Palestinian insurgents, but the opening shots of the Israeli Civil War.

In your opinion, what do you believe was the cause of that war?

I think there were many causes. I know the repatriation of Palestinians was unpopular, so was the general pullout from the West Bank. I'm sure t�e Strategic Hamlet Resettlement Program must have inflamed more than its share of hearts. A lot of Israelis had to watch their houses bulldozed in

44 MAX BROOKS

order to make way for those fortified, self-sufficient residential compounds. Al Quds, I believe ... that was the final straw. The Coalition Government decided that it was the one major weak point, too large to control and a hole that led right into the heart of Israel. They not only evacuated the city, but the entire Nablus to Hebron corridor as well. They believed that rebuilding a shorter wall along the 1967 demarcation line was the only way to ensure physical security, no matter what backlash might occur from their own religious right. I learned all this much later, you understand, as well as the fact that the only reason the IDF eventually triumphed was because the majority of the rebels came from the ranks of the Ultra­ Orthodox and therefore most had never served in the armed forces. Did you know that? I didn't. I realized I practically didn't know anything about these people I'd hated my entire life. Everything I thought was true went up in smoke that day, supplanted by the face of our real enemy.

I was running with my family into the back of an Israeli tank,5 when one of those unmarked vans came around the corner. A handheld rocket slammed right into its engine. The van catapulted into the air, crashed up­ side down, and exploded into a brilliant orange fireball. I still had a few steps to go before reaching the doors of the tank, just enough time to see the whole event unfold. Figures were climbing out of the burning wreck­ age, slow-moving torches whose clothes and skin were covered in burning petrol. The soldiers around us began firing at the figures. I could see little pops in their chests where the bullets were passing harmlessly through. The squad leader next to me shouted "B'rosh! Yoreh B'rosh!" and the sol­ diers adjusted their aim. The figures' ... the creatures' heads exploded. The petrol was just burning out as they hit the ground, these charred black, headless corpses. Suddenly I understood what my father had been trying to warn me about, what the Israelis had been trying to warn the rest of the world about! What I couldn't understand was why the rest of the world wasn't listening.

5. Unlike most country's main battle tanks, the Israeli "Merkava" contains rear hatches for

troop deployment.