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special isolated zones. They were to be “human bait,”
these isolated, uninfected refugees must be kept alive, well defended and even resupplied, if possible, so as to keep the undead hordes firmly rooted to the spot.
“every zombie besieging those survivors will be one less zombie throwing itself against our defenses.”
ARMAGH, IRELAND [While not a Catholic himself, Philip Adler has joined the throngs of visitors to the pope’s wartime refuge.
the Prochnow Plan.
they’d learned from Zhitomir, and now they found a better use for their cold war stockpiles. How do you effectively separate the infected from the others? How do you keep evacuees from spreading the infection behind the lines? That’s one way.
was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of “experts” all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more “shocking” and “in depth” than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.
Because the living dead freeze solid, extreme cold is our only hope. That’s all we heard.
Mom tried to argue, tried to make him see reason. We lived above the snowline, we had all we needed. Why trek into the unknown when we could just stock up on supplies, continue to fortify the house, and just wait until the first fall frost?
was so caught up in the Great Panic.
That was when we still had trees, before the second and third waves starting showing up, when people were down to burning leaves and stumps, then finally whatever they could get their hands on.
Everyone was counting on winter freezing the dead.
But once the dead were frozen, how were you going to survive the winter? Good question. I don’t think most people thought that far ahead. Maybe they figured that the “authorities” would come rescue us or that they could just pack up and head home. I’m sure a lot of people didn’t think about anything except the day in front of them,
Money was still worth something. Everyone thought the banks would be reopening soon.
after the first month, when the food started running out, and the days got colder and darker, people started getting mean.
When it got cold enough to freeze the lake, when the last of the dead stopped showing up, a lot of people thought it was safe enough to try to walk home.
By Christmas Day there was plenty of food. [She holds up what looks like a miniature femur. It has been scraped clean by a knife.]
Gray Winter, when the filth in the sky started changing the weather.
By mid-July, spring was finally here, and so were the living dead.
Why do they come back after freezing? All human cells contain water, right? And when that water freezes, it expands and bursts the cell walls. That’s why you can’t just freeze people in suspended animation, so then why does it work for the living dead?
I knew, vaguely, that our retreat into the Himalayas had something to do with some kind of master plan, and that part of that plan meant closing all the mountain passes to the living dead.
“Shiva’s Wrath.”
During the war, Mister Sinclair was director of the U.S. government’s newly formed DeStRes, or Department of Strategic Resources.]
find and harvest the right tools and talent.
“Talent” describes the potential workforce, its level of skilled labor, and how that labor could be utilized effectively.
You should have seen some of the “careers” listed on our first employment census; everyone was some version of an “executive,” a “representative,” an “analyst,” or a “consultant,” all perfectly suited to the prewar world, but all totally inadequate for the present crisis. We needed carpenters, masons, machinists, gunsmiths.
The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That’s the way the world works. But one day it doesn’t. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.
“Tools” are the weapons of war, and the industrial and logistical means by which those weapons are constructed.
Anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of that conflict will give you three real reasons: first, the ability to manufacture more materiel: more bullets, beans, and bandages than the enemy; second, the natural resources available to manufacture that materiel; and third, the logistical means to not only transport those resources to the factories, but also to transport the finished products out to the front lines.
California’s agricultural base could at least erase the problem of starvation, if it could be restructured. The citrus growers didn’t go quietly, neither did the ranchers. The beef barons who controlled so much prime potential farmland were the worst.
The only way to supplement our resource base was recycling.
dirigibles
cold fusion
Project Yellow Jacket—I
he not only invented the resource-to-kill ratio, but developed a comprehensive strategy to employ it.
Battle Dress Uniform
Standard Infantry Rifle.
“Why have X, when for the same price you could have ten Ys, which could kill a hundred times as many Zs.”
Standard Infantry Entrenchment Tool, although, to most, it is known as either the “Lobotomizer,” or simply, the “Lobo.”]
[Winter has come later this season, as it has every year since the end of the war.
all we have is what we want to be.”
They say great times make great men. I don’t buy it. I saw a lot of weakness, a lot of filth. People who should have risen to the challenge and either couldn’t or wouldn’t. Greed, fear, stupidity, and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it today.
new punishment laws,
Shame’s a powerful weapon, but it depended on everyone else doing the right thing. No one is above the law,
the death penalty. Only in extreme cases: sedition, sabotage, attempted political secession. Zombies weren’t the only enemies, at least not in the beginning.
The Fundies?
the “Greenies,”
The Rebs,
secessionists east of the Rockies,
“We didn’t leave America. America left us.” There’s a lot of truth to that.
