The ZOMBIE Survival Guide Complete Protection from the Living Dead

1923 A.D., COLOMBO, CEYLON

This account comes from The Oriental, an expatriate newspaper for Britons living in the Indian Ocean colony. Christopher Wells, a copilot for British Imperial Airways, was rescued from a life raft after fourteen days at sea. Before dying of exposure, Wells explained that he had been transporting a corpse discovered by a British expedition to Mount Everest. The corpse had been a European, his clothing of a century earlier, with no identifying documents. As he was frozen solid, the expedition leader had decided to fly him to Colombo for further study. While en route, the corpse thawed, reanimated, and attacked the airplane’s crew. The three men managed to destroy their assailant by crushing his skull with a fire extinguisher (as they did not realize what they were dealing with, the attempt may have been to simply incapacitate the zombie). While safe from this immediate danger, they now had to contend with a damaged aircraft. The pilot radioed a distress signal but had no time to send a position report. The three men parachuted into the ocean, the crew-chief not realizing that a bite he sustained would have dire consequences later. The following day, he expired, reanimated several hours later, and immediately attacked the other two men. While the pilot wrestled with the undead assailant, Wells, in a panic, kicked both of them overboard. After relating-some would say confessing-his story to the authorities, Wells lapsed into unconsciousness and died the next day. His story was reported as the ravings of a sunstroke maniac. A subsequent investigation produced no evidence of the plane, the crew, or the alleged zombie.

During Japan ’s initial advance, a platoon of Imperial Marines was sent to garrison Atuk, an island in the Caroline chain. Several days after landing, the platoon was attacked by a swarm of zombies from the inland jungle. Initial casualties were high. Without any information about the nature of their attackers or the correct means of destruction, the marines were driven to a fortified mountaintop on the north end of the island. Ironically, as the wounded were left to die, the surviving marines spared themselves the danger of taking infected comrades with them. The platoon remained stranded in their mountaintop fortress for several days, lacking food, low on water, and cut off from the outside world. All this time, the ghouls were besieging their position, unable to scale the steep cliffs but preventing any chance of escape. After two weeks of imprisonment, Ashi Nakamura, the platoon sniper, discovered that a head shot was fatal to a zombie. This knowledge allowed the Japanese to finally combat their attackers. After dispatching the surrounding ghouls with rifle fire, they advanced into the jungle for a complete sweep of the island. Eyewitness accounts have the commanding officer, Lieutenant Hiroshi Tomonaga, decapitating eleven zombies with nothing but his officer’s Katana (an argument for the use of this weapon). A postwar examination and comparison of records have shown that Atuk is in all probability the same island that Sir Francis Drake described as “the Isle of the Damned.” Tomonaga’s own testimony, given to American authorities after the war, states that once radio communication with Tokyo had been reestablished, the Japanese High Command sent specific instructions to capture, not kill, any remaining zombies. Once this was accomplished (four ghouls had been successfully bound and gagged), the Imperial Submarine I-58 was dispatched to retrieve the undead prisoners. Tomonaga confessed his lack of knowledge of what happened to the four zombies. He and his men were ordered not to discuss their experience, under penalty of death.

1942-45 A.D., HARBIN, JAPANESE PUPPET STATE OF MANCHUKUO (MANCHURIA)

In his 1951 book The Sun Rose on Hell, former U.S. Army Intelligence officer David Shore details a series of wartime biological experiments conducted by a unit of the Japanese military known as “Black Dragon.” One experiment, dubbed “Cherry Blossom,” was organized specifically for the breeding and training of zombies into an army. According to Shore, when Japanese forces invaded the Dutch East Indies in 1941-42, a copy of Jan Vanderhaven’s work was discovered in a medical library in Surabaya. The work was sent to Black Dragon headquarters in Harbin for further study. Although a theoretical plan was ordered, no sample of Solanum could be found (proof that the ancient zombie-killing “Brotherhood of Life” had done its job too well). All this changed six months later with the incident on Atuk Island. The four restrained zombies were delivered to Harbin. Experiments were performed on three of them, and one was used specifically to breed other zombies. Shore states that Japanese “dissidents” (anyone who disagreed with the military regime) were used as guinea pigs. Once a “platoon” of forty zombies had been reanimated, Black Dragon operatives attempted to train them like obedient drones. This met with dismal results: Bites turned ten of the sixteen instructors into zombies. After two years of fruitless attempts, the decision was made to release the force of the now fifty zombies against the enemy no matter what condition they were in. Ten ghouls were to be parachuted over British forces in Burma. The plane was hit by antiaircraft fire before reaching its target, exploding into a fireball that destroyed all traces of its undead cargo. A second attempt was made to deliver ten zombies by submarine to the American-held Panama Canal zone (it was hoped that the ensuing chaos would interrupt Atlantic-built, Pacific-bound American warships). The submarine was sunk en route. A third attempt was made (again by submarine) to release twenty zombies into the ocean off the West Coast of the United States. Halfway across the Northern Pacific, the submarine’s captain radioed that the zombies had broken free of their restraints and were attacking the crew, and that he had no choice but to scuttle the boat. As the war drew to a close, a fourth and final attempt was made to parachute the remaining zombies onto a nest of Chinese guerrillas in Yonnan Province. Nine of the parachuted zombies were dispatched by head shots from Chinese snipers. The sharpshooters did not realize the importance of their shots. Their orders had always been to go for the head. The final zombie was captured, restrained, and taken to Mao Zedong’s personal headquarters for further study. When the Soviet Union invaded Manchukuo in 1945, all records and evidence of the “Cherry Blossom” project disappeared.

Shore states that his book is based on the eyewitness accounts of two Black Dragon operatives, men whom he personally debriefed after they surrendered to the U.S. Army in South Korea at the end of the war. At first Shore found a publisher for his book, a small, independent company known as Green Brothers Press. Before it reached the shelves, the government ordered all copies confiscated. Green Brothers Press was directly charged by Senator Joseph McCarthy with publishing “obscene and subversive material.” Under the weight of legal fees, the company filed for bankruptcy. David Shore was charged with violating national security and sentenced to life imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was pardoned in 1961 but died of a heart attack two months after his release. His widow, Sara Shore, retained a secret and illegal copy of his manuscript until her death in 1984. Their daughter, Hannah, just recently won a lawsuit for the right to republish it.