World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

by Max Brooks

a lot of controversy over the use of ROVs for combat. Never happen. The Sturge’s85 got way too much star power. She’d never let Congress go ’droid on us.

All that talk about “limiting human casualties” is bullshit. We never lost a man in combat, not one! That guy they keep talking about, Chernov, he was killed after the war, on land, when he got wasted and passed out on a tram line. Fuckin’ politicians.

Most of us are still involved because we have to be, because they still haven’t yet come up with a collection of chips and bits to replace us. Believe me, once they do, I’ll not only never look at an exosuit again, I’ll quit the navy and pull a full-on Alpha November Alpha. What’s that? Action in the North Atlantic,

Andre Renard, brother of the legendary war hero Emil Renard,

Everyone else is a liar, everyone who claims that their campaign was “the hardest of the entire war.” All those ignorant peacocks who beat their chests and brag about “mountain warfare” or “jungle warfare” or “urban warfare.” Cities, oh how they love to brag about cities! “Nothing more terrifying than fighting in a city!” Oh really? Try underneath one.

Do you know why the Paris skyline was devoid of skyscrapers, I mean the prewar, proper Paris skyline? Do you know why they stuck all those glass and steel monstrosities out in La Defense, so far from the city center? Yes, there’s aesthetics, a sense of continuity and civic pride…not like that architectural mongrel called London. But the truth, the logical, practical, reason for keeping Paris free from American-style monoliths, is that the earth beneath their feet is simply too tunneled to support it.

I don’t think I can blame the civilians who tried to survive in that subterranean world. They didn’t have the civilian survival manual back then, they didn’t have Radio Free Earth. It was the Great Panic.

We had to use hardwired sets, you see, because airwave transmissions were too unreliable. We used old telephone wire, copper, not fiber optic.

It was so easy to become lost. All the maps were prewar and didn’t take into account the modifications the survivors had made,

You would lose your way, at least once a day, sometimes more, and then have to trace your way back down the communications wire, check your location on the map, and try to figure out what had gone wrong.

The acoustics were evil; they taunted you.

No standard equipment; whatever one believed would suit him. There were no firearms, you understand. The air, the gas, it was too flammable. The fire from a gun…

the Beretta-Grechio, the Italian air carbine. It was a wartime model of a child’s carbon dioxide pellet gun. You got maybe five shots, six or seven if it was pressed right up to their heads. Good weapon, but always not enough of them. And you had to be careful! If you missed, if the ball struck the stone, if the stone was dry, if you got a spark…entire tunnels would catch, explosions that buried men alive, or fireballs that melted their masks right to their faces. Hand to hand is always better. Here…

The weapon’s handle is encased in a semicircular steel ball. Protruding from this ball are two 8-inch steel spikes at right angles from each other.]

My own design, a modern version of my great-grandfather’s at Verdun,

Everyone was armored in some way…chain mail or heavy leather…almost always it was too heavy, too suffocating, wet leather jackets and trousers, heavy metal chain-link shirts. You try to fight, you are already exhausted, men would tear off their masks, gasping for air, inhaling the stink. Many died before you could get them to the surface. I used greaves, protection here (gestures to his forearms) and gloves, chain-covered leather, easy to remove when not in combat. They were my own design.

we did have your marsh covers, the long, high waterproof boots with the bite-proof fiber sewn into the lining. We needed those.

Drowning was the least of your worries. Men would be splashing, struggling to stay afloat with all that heavy gear, and suddenly their eyes would bulge, and you’d hear their muffled cries.

the Cousteaus, the scuba divers trained to work and fight specifically in those flooded tunnels. With only a searchlight and a shark suit, if they were lucky to get one, and, at most, two hours of air. They were supposed to wear a safety line, but most of them refused to do so. The lines tended to get tangled and slow up the diver’s progress. Those men, and women, had a one in twenty chance of survival, the lowest ratio of any branch of any army, I don’t care what anyone says.87 Is it any wonder they received an automatic Legion of Honor?

Fifteen thousand dead or missing. Not just the Cousteaus, all of us, the entire core. Fifteen thousand souls in just three months.

It didn’t have to be that way. How long did it take the English to clear all of London? Five years, three years after the war was officially over? They went slow and safe, one section at a time, low speed, low intensity, low casualty rate. Slow and safe, like most major cities.

English general, what he said about “Enough dead heroes for the end of time…” “Heroes,” that’s what we were, that’s what our leaders wanted, that’s what our people felt they needed. After all that has happened,

We understood what the American president said about “reclaiming our confidence”; we understood it more than most. We needed heroes, new names and places to restore our pride.

An advance team broke through without realizing what was on the other side. They could have withdrawn, blown the tunnel, sealed them in again…One squad against three hundred zombies. One squad led by my baby brother. His voice was the last thing we heard before their radio went silent. His last words: “On ne passé pas!”

The fact that not one sighting has been recorded this spring gives everyone even more reason to celebrate.

We had three main Army Groups: North, Center, and South. The grand strategy was to advance as one across the Great Plains, across the Midwest, then break off at the Appalachians, the wings sweeping north and south, shoot for Maine and Florida, then grind across the coast and link up with AG Center as they slogged it over the mountains. It took three years.

Why so slow? Dude, take your pick: foot transport, terrain, weather, enemies, battle doctrine…Doctrine was to advance as two solid lines, one behind the other, stretching from Canada to Aztlan…No, Mexico, it wasn’t Aztlan yet.

Whenever you spotted Zack, either in a group or just on his own, a FAR unit would halt… FAR? Force Appropriate Response.

You’d halt a section, a platoon, maybe even a company depending on how many you encountered, just enough to take ’em down and sanitize the battlefield. The hole your FAR unit left in the battle line was replaced by an equal force from the secondary line a click and a half behind you. That way the front was never broken. We leapfrogged this way all the way across the country.

Once the sun dipped, no matter how confident you felt or how safe the area seemed, the show was over till dawn the next morning. And there was fog.

It also slowed us down to have to keep pace with the other countries, the Mexicans and Canucks. Neither army had the manpower to liberate their entire country. The deal was that they’d keep our borders clear while we get our house in order. Once the U.S. was secure, we’d give them everything they need. That was the start of the UN multinational force,

you wanna talk about speed bumps, try urban combat. The strategy was always to surround the target area. We’d set up semipermanent defenses, recon with everything from satellites to sniffer Ks, do whatever we could to call Zack out, and go in only after we were sure no more of them were coming. Smart and safe and relatively easy. Yeah, right! As far as surrounding the “area,” someone wanna tell me where that area actually begins?

clearing block after block of burbland before we could even think of establishing a quarantine perimeter.

begins to thaw, no problem. But I should be Lobo’d for thinking that Zack was the only bad guy out there. We had quislings, just like the real thing, but winterized. We had these Human Reclamation units, pretty much just glorified animal control. They’d do their best to dart any quislings we came across, tie ’em down, ship ’em to rehabilitation clinics, back when we thought we could rehabilitate them. Ferals were a much more dangerous threat. A lot of them weren’t kids anymore, some were teenagers, some full grown. They were fast, smart, and if they chose fight instead of flight, they could really mess up your day. Of course, HR would always try and dart them, and, of course, that didn’t always work.

The brass had to step in and assign a squad of grunts for escort. If a dart didn’t stop a feral, we sure as hell did. Nothing screams as high as a feral with a PIE round burning in his gut. The HR pukes had a real problem with that. They were all volunteers, all sticking to this code that human life, any human’s life, was worth trying to save. I guess history sorta backed them up now, you know, seeing all those people that they managed to rehabilitate, all the ones we just woulda shot on sight. If they had had the resources, they might have been able to do the same for animals. Man, feral packs, that freaked me out more than anything else. I’m not just talking dogs. Dogs you knew how to deal with. Dogs always telegraphed their attacks. I’m talking “Flies”90 : F-Lions, cats, like part mountain lion, part ice age saberfuck.

I’ve heard that they grew bigger up north, some law of nature or evolution.91 I don’t really get the whole ecology thing,

That must have been a hazard for the sniffer dogs. Are you kidding? They loved it, even the little dachmutts, made ’em feel like dogs again.

They didn’t charge you like F-hounds, they just waited, took their sweet time until you were too close to raise a weapon.

the bite-proof BDUs and body armor we’d started wearing, the vest, the helmet…I

Did ferals, feral people that is, know how to use firearms? They didn’t know how to do anything human, that’s why they were ferals. No, the body armor was for protection against some of the regular people we found. I’m not talking organized rebels, just the odd LaMOE,92 Last Man on Earth. There was always one or two in every town, some dude, or chick, who managed to survive. I read somewhere that the United States had the highest number of them in the world, something about our individualistic nature or something. They hadn’t seen real people in so long, a lot of the initial shooting was just accidental or reflex. Most of the time we managed to talk them down. Those we actually called RCs, Robinson Crusoes—that was the polite term for the ones who were cool. The ones we called LaMOEs, those were the ones who were a little too used to being king. King of what, I don’t know,

The gang in the tower, they had their little kingdom, and they weren’t giving it up for anyone. That was one of the few times we went full convent; SAWs, nades, that’s when the Bradleys started making a comeback. After Chicago, the brass knew we were now in a full, multithreat environment. It was back to hard covers and body armor, even in summer. Thanks, Windy City. Each squad was issued pamphlets with the “Threat Pyramid.” It was ranked according to probability, not lethality. Zack at the bottom, then F-critters, ferals, quislings, and finally LaMOEs.

winter took care of Zack’s whole threat level. Yeah, sure, and replaced it with another one: winter!

At least the guys down south knew that once they swept an area, it stayed swept. They didn’t have to worry about rear area attacks like us. We swept every area at least three times. We used everything from ramrods and sniffer Ks to high-tech ground radar. Over and over again, and all of this in the dead of winter. We lost more guys to frostbite than to anything else. And still, every spring, you knew, you just knew…it’d be like, “oh shit, here we go again.” I mean, even today, with all the sweeps and civilian volunteer groups, spring’s like winter used to be, nature letting us know the good life’s over for now.

liberating the isolated zones. Always a hard fight, every single one. Remember these zones were still under siege, hundreds, maybe even thousands.

moat—that’s what we called them, moats—of at least a million Gs.

The military zones, that was pretty low-key. A lot of formal ceremonies, raising and lowering of flags, “I relieve you, sir—I stand relieved,” shit like that. There was also a little bit of wienie wagging.

the civilian zones? Different story entirely. We were so the shit! They’d be cheering and shouting. It was like what you’d think war was supposed to be,

there were exceptions. Yeah, I guess. Maybe not all the time but there’d be this one person, this angry face in the crowd screaming shit at you. “What the fuck took you so long?” “My husband died two weeks ago!” “My mother died waiting for you!” “We lost half our people last summer!” “Where were you when we needed you?” People holding up photos, faces.

Rarely, like, blue-moon rarely, we’d enter a zone where we were totally not welcome. In Valley City, North Dakota, they were like, “Fuck you, army! You ran out on us, we don’t need you!”

Was that a secessionist zone? Oh no, at least these people let us in. The Rebs only welcomed you with gunshots. I never got close to any of those zones. The brass had special units for Rebs. I saw them on the road once, heading toward the Black Hills. That was the first time since crossing the Rockies that I ever saw tanks. Bad feeling; you knew how that was gonna end.