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I don’t know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.
the Neighborhood Security Memorial of two standing citizens, and one seated in a wheelchair.]
Neighborhood Security literally means patrolling the neighborhood. It’s a quasi-military outfit; we attended lectures and training courses. There were designated leaders and fixed regulations, but you never had to salute or call people “sir” or shit like that. Armament was pretty nonregulation as well. Mostly hand-to-hand jobs—hatchets, bats, a few crowbars and machetes—we didn’t have Lobos yet. At least three people in your team had to have guns.
You didn’t even have the moon or the stars anymore, too much crap in the atmosphere.
Someone had to be the designated night watchman.
It was a “dragger,” the kind that’s lost its legs.
Zombies
looters,
squat...
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real looters,
the ferals,
quislings.
quislings were the reason some people used to think they were immune? They were also the reason all those bullshit wonder drugs got so much hype.
They’re just as hostile as regular zombies and in some cases even more dangerous.
the eye test. Ghouls don’t blink, I don’t know why.
they don’t blink and quislings do. That’s how you spotted them; back up a few paces, and wait a few seconds. Darkness was easier, you just shone a beam in their faces. If they didn’t blink, you took them down.
the saddest thing about them is that they gave up so much and in the end lost anyway. Why is that? ’Cause even though we can’t tell the difference between them, the real zombies can.
There was all this “documented proof” about infighting—eyewitness accounts and even footage of one zombie attacking another. Stupid. It was zombies attacking quislings, but you never would have known that to look at it. Quislings don’t scream. They just lie there, not even trying to fight, writhing in that slow, robotic way, eaten alive by the very creatures they’re trying to be.
Malibu Pier Fortress.
ADS, that was my enemy: Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome, or, Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome, depending on who you were talking to. Whatever the label, it killed as many people in those early stalemate months as hunger, disease, interhuman violence, or the living dead.
It wasn’t suicide, we had plenty of those.
Some people had minimal wounds or easily treatable ailments; some were in perfect health. They would simply go to sleep one night and not wake up the next morning. The problem was psychological, a case of just giving up, not wanting to see tomorrow because you knew it could only bring more suffering. Losing faith, the will to endure, it happens in all wars. It happens in peacetime, too, just not on this scale. It was helplessness, or at least, the perception of helplessness.
While the mountains burned behind them, and the surrounding suburbs descended into violence, those three hundred kids held off ten thousand zombies! Ten thousand, over the course of four months,
the very night after Avalon made its “debut,” ADS cases dropped in LA by a whole 5 percent! At first they thought it might just be a statistical anomaly, until a further study revealed that the decline was drastically noticeable only among communities where the movie was shown!
Ten percent drop throughout the entire western safe zone.
ADS was down 23 percent…only then did the government finally take an interest in me.
Fire of the Gods? [Nods.] The army had two functioning laser weapons programs: Zeus and MTHEL.
the number of ADS cases were halved a month after the movie’s release? I think that might be an overstatement, but people were lined up on their off-hours. Some saw it every night. The poster campaign showed a close-up of a zombie being atomized. The image was lifted right from a frame in the movie, the one classic shot when the morning fog actually allowed you to see the beam. The caption underneath read simply “Next.” It single-handedly saved the program.
DeStRes had deemed both as a gross waste of resources. Were they? Inexcusably so. The “M” in MTHEL’s “Mobile” really meant a convoy of specialized vehicles, all of which were delicate, none truly all-terrain and each one completely dependent on the other. MTHEL also required both tremendous power and copious amounts of highly unstable, highly toxic chemicals for the lasering process. Zeus was a little more economical. It was easier to cool, easier to maintain, and because it was Humvee-mounted, it could go anywhere it was needed. The problem was, why would it be needed? Even on high power, the
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That erased the potential for rapid fire, which was exactly what you needed in swarm attacks. In fact, both units had a squad of riflemen permanently assigned to them, people protecting a machine that is designed to protect people.
Americans worship technology. It’s an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist. Whether we realize it or not, even the most indefatigable Luddite can’t deny our country’s technoprowess.
The movie was such a hit that I was asked to do a whole series. I called it “Wonder Weapons,” seven films on our military’s cutting-edge technology, none of which made any strategic difference, but all of which were psychological war winners.
Isn’t that… A lie? It’s okay. You can say it. Yes, they were lies and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they’re used.
the truth was everywhere, shambling down their streets, crashing through their doors, clawing at their throats. The truth was that no matter what we did, chances were most of us, if not all of us, were never going to see the future. The truth was that we were standing at what might be the twilight of our species and that truth was freezing a hundred people to death every night. They needed something to keep them warm. And so I lied, and so did the president, and every doctor and priest, every platoon leader and every parent. “We’re going to be okay.” That was our message. That was the message
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Marty made both a wartime and postwar version of The Hero City.
That was our reality and it’s what drove so many people to get snuggled in bed, blow out their candles, and take their last breath. Marty chose, instead, to show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they’re going to be okay. There’s a word for that kind of lie. Hope.
the Russian army wasn’t the only service to be decimated by their own government. The Armed Forces Reconstruction Act basically neutered the air force.
our resource-to-kill ratio, our RKR, was the most lopsided of all the branches.
Not enough bang for our buck, like so many of our former crown jewels. They went through us like an industrial laser.
as we’re fighting one war, we’re always preparing for the next one.
Others differ regarding last war's legacy
the main mission of the air force? Airborne resupply was our primary objective,
Islands in the Sea of Zack.
DDs, dependency drops,
SSDs, self-sustaining drops,
The Blue Zones got a lot of Special Forces instructors, not only to teach them how better to defend themselves, but to prepare them for the day they might have to go on the offensive. I have a lot of respect for those guys. Most of them knew it was for the duration;
Purple Zones. [She refers to the last color on the map. The purple circles are few and far between.] We set these up as refuel and repair facilities.
movement, stealth, how to take out Zack before he can howl your position.
a couple of pilots washed out on a Section Eight. I guess they just couldn’t hack the real feel.
when the pressure kicked in, sisterhood punched out.
the birds had suddenly beat it in the opposite direction.
