World War Z

Taos, New Mexico

[Arthur Sinclair, Junior, is the picture of an old-world patrician: tall, lean, with close-cropped white hair and an affected Harvard accent. He speaks into the ether, rarely making eye contact or pausing for questions. During the war, Mister Sinclair was director of the U.S. government’s newly formed DeStRes, or Department of Strategic Resources.]

I don’t know who first thought of the acronym “DeStRes” or if they consciously knew how much it sounded like “distress,” but it certainly could not have been more appropriate. Establishing a defensive line at the Rocky Mountains might have created a theoretical “safe zone,” but in reality that zone consisted mainly of rubble and refugees. There was starvation, disease, homelessness in the millions. Industry was in shambles, transportation and trade had evaporated, and all of this was compounded by the living dead both assaulting the Rocky Line and festering within our safe zone. We had to get our people on their feet again-clothed, fed, housed, and back to work-otherwise this supposed safe zone was only forestalling the inevitable. That was why the DeStRes was created, and, as you can imagine, I had to do a lot of on-the-job training.

Those first months, I can’t tell you how much information I had to cram into this withered old cortex; the briefings, the inspection tours… when I did sleep, it was with a book under my pillow, each night a new one, from Henry J. Kaiser to Vo Nguyen Giap. I needed every idea, every word, every ounce of knowledge and wisdom to help me fuse a fractured landscape into the modern American war machine. If my father had been alive, he probably would have laughed at my frustration. He’d been a staunch New Dealer, working closely with FDR as comptroller of New York State. He used methods that were almost Marxist in nature, the kind of collectivization that would make Ayn Rand leap from her grave and join the ranks of the living dead. I’d always rejected the lessons he’d tried to impart, running as far away as Wall Street to shut them out. Now I was wracking my brains to remember them. One thing those New Dealers did better than any generation in American history was find and harvest the right tools and talent.

Tools and talent?

A term my son had heard once in a movie. I found it described our reconstruction efforts rather well. “Talent” describes the potential workforce, its level of skilled labor, and how that labor could be utilized effectively. To be perfectly candid, our supply of talent was at a critical low. Ours was a postindustrial or service-based economy, so complex and highly specialized that each individual could only function within the confines of its narrow, compartmentalized structure. 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. We had those people, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were necessary. The first labor survey stated clearly that over 65 percent of the present civilian workforce were classified F-6, possessing no valued vocation. We required a massive job re-training program. In short, we needed to get a lot of white collars dirty.

It was slow going. Air traffic was nonexistent, roads and rail lines were a shambles, and fuel, good Lord, you couldn’t find a tank of gas between Blaine, Washington, and Imperial Beach, California. Add to this the fact that prewar America not only had a commuter-based infrastructure, but that such a method also allowed for severe levels of economic segregation. You would have entire suburban neighborhoods of upper-middle-class professionals, none of whom had possessed even the basic know-how to replace a cracked window. Those with that knowledge lived in their own blue-collar “ghettos,” an hour away in prewar auto traffic, which translated to at least a full day on foot. Make no mistake, bipedal locomotion was how most people traveled in the beginning.

Solving this problem-no, challenge, there are no problems-was the refugee camps. There were hundreds of them, some parking-lot small, some spreading for miles, scattered across the mountains and coast, all requiring government assistance, all acute drains on rapidly diminishing resources. At the top of my list, before I tackled any other challenge, these camps had to be emptied. Anyone F-6 but physically able became unskilled labor: clearing rubble, harvesting crops, digging graves. A lot of graves needed to be dug. Anyone A-l, those with war-appropriate skills, became part of our CSSP, or Community Self-Sufficiency Program. A mixed group of instructors would be tasked with infusing these sedentary, overeducated, desk-bound, cubicle mice with the knowledge necessary to make it on their own.

It was an instant success. Within three months you saw a marked drop in requests for government aid. I can’t stress how vital this was to victory. It allowed us to transition from a zero-sum, survival-based economy, into full-blown war production. This was the National Reeducation Act, the organic outgrowth of the CSSP. I’d say it was the largest jobs training program since the Second World War, and easily the most radical in our history.

You’ve mentioned, on occasion, the problems faced by the NRA…

I was getting to that. The president gave me the kind of power I needed to meet any physical or logistical challenge. Unfortunately, what neither he nor anyone on Earth could give me was the power to change the way people thought. As I explained, America was a segregated workforce, and in many cases, that segregation contained a cultural element. A great many of our instructors were first-generation immigrants. These were the people who knew how to take care of themselves, how to survive on very little and work with what they had. These were the people who tended small gardens in their backyards, who repaired their own homes, who kept their appliances running for as long as mechanically possible. It was crucial that these people teach the rest of us to break from our comfortable, disposable consumer lifestyle even though their labor had allowed us to maintain that lifestyle in the first place.

Yes, there was racism, but there was also classism. You’re a highpowered corporate attorney. You’ve spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering deals, talking on the phone. That’s what you’re good at, that’s what made you rich and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to keep talking on the phone. 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.

Once, on a fact-finding tour through LA, I sat in the back of a reeducation lecture. The trainees had all held lofty positions in the entertainment industry, a melange of agents, managers, “creative executives,” whatever the hell that means. I can understand their resistance, their arrogance. Before the war, entertainment had been the most valued export of the United States. Now they were being trained as custodians for a munitions plant in Bakersfield, California. One woman, a casting director, exploded. How-dare they degrade her like this! She had an MFA in Conceptual Theater, she had cast the top three grossing sitcoms in the last five seasons and she made more in a week than her instructor could dream of in several lite-times! She kept addressing that instructor by her first name. “Magda,” she kept saying, “Magda, enough already. Magda, please.” At first I thought this woman was just being rude, degrading the instructor by refusing to use her title. I found out later that Mrs. Magda Antonova used to be this woman’s cleaning lady. Yes, it was very hard for some, but a lot of them later admitted that they got more emotional satisfaction from their new jobs than anything closely resembling their old ones.

I met one gentleman on a coastal ferry from Portland to Seattle. He had worked in the licensing department for an advertising agency, specifically in charge of procuring the rights to classic rock songs for television commercials. Now he was a chimney sweep. Given that most homes in Seattle had lost their central heat and the winters were now longer and colder, he was seldom idle. “I help keep my neighbors warm,” he said proudly. I know it sounds a little too Norman Rockwell, but I hear stories like that all the time. “You see those shoes, I made them,” “That sweater, that’s my sheep’s wool,” “Like the corn? My garden.” That was the upshot of a more localized system. It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor, it gave them a sense of individual pride to know they were making a clear, concrete contribution to victory, and it gave me a wonderful feeling that I was part of that. I needed that feeling. It kept me sane for the other part of my job.

So much for “talent.” “Tools” are the weapons of war, and the industrial and logistical means by which those weapons are constructed.

[He swivels in his chair, motioning to a picture above his desk. I lean closer and see that it’s not a picture but a framed label.]

Ingredients:

molasses from the United States

anise from Spain

licorice from France

vanilla (bourbon) from Madagascar cinnamon from Sri Lanka cloves from Indonesia wintergreen from China pimento berry oil from Jamaica balsam oil from Peru

And that’s just for a bottle of peacetime root beer. We’re not even talk’ ing about something like a desktop PC, or a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

Ask anyone how the Allies won the Second World War. Those with very little knowledge might answer that it was our numbers or generalship. Those without any knowledge might point to techno-marvels like radar or the atom bomb. (Scowls.) 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. The Allies had the resources, industry, and logistics of an entire planet. The Axis, on the other hand, had to depend on what scant assets they could scrape up within their borders. This time we were the Axis. The living dead controlled most of the world’s landmass, while American war production depended on what could be harvested within the limits of the western states specifically. Forget raw materials from safe zones overseas; our merchant fleet was crammed to the decks with refugees while fuel shortages had dry-docked most of our navy.

We had some advantages. 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. Did you ever hear of Don Hill? Ever see the movie Roy Elliot did on him? It was when the infestation hit the San Joaquin Valley, the dead swarming over his fences, attacking his cattle, tearing them apart like African driver ants. And there he was in the middle of it all, shooting and hollering like Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun. I dealt with him openly and honestly. As with everyone else, I gave him the choice. I reminded him that winter was coming and there were still a lot of very hungry people out there. I warned him that when the hordes of starving refugees showed up to finish what the living dead started, he’d have no government protection whatsoever. Hill was a brave, stubborn bastard, but he wasn’t an idiot. He agreed to surrender his land and herd only on the condition that his and everyone else’s breeding stock remained untouched. We shook on that.

Tender, juicy steaks-can you think of a better icon of our prewar artificial standard of living’ And yet it was that standard that ended up being our second great advantage. The only way to supplement our resource base was recycling. This was nothing new. The Israelis had started when they sealed their borders and since then each nation had adopted it to one degree or another. None of their stockpiles, however, could even compare to what we had at our disposal. Think about what life was like in the prewar America. Even those considered middle class enjoyed, or took for granted, a level of material comfort unheard of by any other nation at any other time in human history. The clothing, the kitchenware, the electronics, the automobiles, just in the Los Angeles basin alone, outnumbered the prewar population by three to one. The cars poured in by the millions, every house, every neighborhood. We had an entire industry of over a hundred thousand employees working three shifts, seven days a week: collecting, cataloging, disassembling, storing, and shipping parts and pieces to factories all over the coast. There was a little trouble, like with the cattle ranchers, people not wanting to turn over their Hummers or vintage Italian midlife crisis mobiles. Funny, no gas to run them but they still hung on anyway. It didn’t bother me too much. They were a pleasure to deal with compared to the military establishment.

Of all my adversaries, easily the most tenacious were the ones in uniform. I never had direct control over any of their R D, they were free to green light whatever they wanted. But given that almost all their programs were farmed out to civilian contractors and that those contractors depended on resources controlled by DeStRes, I had de facto control. “You cannot mothball our Stealth bombers,” they would yell. “Who the Blank do you think you are to cancel our production of tanks?” At first I tried to reason with them: “The M-l Abrams has a jet engine. Where are you going to find that kind of fuel ? Why do you need Stealth aircraft against an enemy that doesn’t have radar?” I tried to make them see that given what we had to work with, as opposed to what we were facing, we simply had to get the largest return on our investment or, in their language, the most bang for our buck. They were insufferable, with their all-hours phone calls, or just showing up at my office unannounced. I guess I can’t really blame them, not after how we all treated them after the last brushfire war, and certainly not after almost having their asses handed to them at Yonkers. They were teetering on the edge of total collapse, and a lot of them just needed somewhere to vent.

[He grins confidently.]

I started my career trading on the floor of the NYSE, so I can yell as hard and long as any professional drill sergeant. After each “meeting,” I’d expect the call, the one Pd been both dreading and hoping for: “Mister Sinclair, this is the president, I just want to thank you for your service and we’ll no longer be requiring…” [Chuckles.] It never came. My guess is no one else wanted the job.

[His smile fades.]

I’m not saying that I didn’t make mistakes. I know I was too anal about the air force’s D-Corps. I didn’t understand their safety protocols or what dirigibles could really accomplish in undead warfare. All I knew was that with our negligible helium supply, the only cost-effective lift gas was hydrogen and no way was I going to waste lives and resources on a fleet of modern day Hindenburgs. I also had to be persuaded, by the president, no less, to reopen the experimental cold fusion project at Livermore. He argued that even though a breakthrough was, at best, still decades away, “planning for the future lets our people know there will be one.” I was too conservative with some projects, and with others I was far too liberal.

Project Yellow Jacket-I still kick myself when I think about that one. These Silicon Valley eggheads, all of them geniuses in their own field, convinced me that they had a “wonder weapon” that could win the war, theoretically, within forty-eight hours of deployment. They could build micro missiles, millions of them, about the size of a .22 rimfire bullet, that could be scattered from transport aircraft, then guided by satellites to the brain of every zombie in North America. Sounds amazing, right? It did to me.

[He grumbles to himself.]

When I think of what we poured down that hole, what we could have produced instead… ahhh… no point in dwelling on it now.

I could have gone head-to-head against the military for the duration of the war, but I’m grateful, in the end, that I didn’t have to. When Travis D’Ambrosia became chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he not only invented the resource-to-kill ratio, but developed a comprehensive strategy to employ it. I always listened to him when he told me a certain weapons system was vital. I trusted his opinion in matters like the new Battle Dress Uniform or the Standard Infantry Rifle.

What was so amazing to see was how the culture of RKR began to take hold among the rank and file. You’d hear soldiers talking on the street, in bars, on the train; “Why have X, when for the same price you could have ten Ys, which could kill a hundred times as many Zs.” Soldiers even began coming up with ideas on their own, inventing more cost-effective tools than we could have envisioned. I think they enjoyed it-improvising, adapting, outthinking us bureaucrats. The marines surprised me the most. I’d always bought into the myth of the stupid jarhead, the knuckle-dragging, locked-jaw, testosterone-driven Neanderthal. I never knew that because the Corps always has to procure its assets through the navy, and because admirals are never going to get too fired up about land warfare, that improvisation has had to be one of their most treasured virtues.

[Sinclair points above my head to the opposite wall. On it hangs a heavy steel rod ending in what looks like a fusion of shovel and double-bladed battle-axe. Its official designation is the Standard Infantry Entrenchment Tool, although, to most, it is known as either the “Lobotomizer,” or simply, the “Lobo.”]

The leathernecks came up with that one, using nothing but the steel of recycled cars. We made twenty-three million during the war.

[He smiles with pride.]

And they’re still making them today.

Burlington, Vermont

[Winter has come later this season, as it has every year since the end of the war. Snow blankets the house and surrounding farmland and frosts the trees that shade the dirt track by the river. Everything about this scene is peaceful, except for the man with me. He insists on calling himself “the Whacko,” because “everyone else calls me that, why shouldn’t you?” His stride is fast and purposeful, the cane given to him by his doctor land wife serves only to stab at the air.]

To be honest, I wasn’t surprised to be nominated for vice president. Everyone knew a coalition party was inevitable. I’d been a rising star, at least until I “self-destructed.” That’s what they said about me, right? All the cowards and hypocrites who’d rather die than see a real man express his passion. So what if I wasn’t the world’s best politician? I said what I felt, and I wasn’t afraid to say it loud and clear. That’s one of the main reasons I was the logical choice for copilot. We made a great team; he was the light, I was the heat. Different parties, different personalities, and, let’s not kid ourselves, different skin colors as well. I knew I wasn’t the first choice. I know who my party secretly wanted. But America wasn’t ready to go that far, as stupid, ignorant, and infuriatingly Neolithic as it sounds. They’d rather have a screaming radical for a VP than another one of “those people.” So I wasn’t surprised at my nomination. I was surprised at everything else.

You mean the elections?

Elections? Honolulu was still a madhouse; soldiers, congressmen, refugees, all bumping into one another trying to find something to eat or a place to sleep or just to find out what the hell was going on. And that was paradise next to the mainland. The Rocky Line was just being established; everything west of it was a war zone. Why go through all the trouble of elections when you could have Congress simply vote for extended emergency powers? The attorney general had tried it when he was mayor of New York, almost got away with it, too. I explained to the president that we didn’t have the energy or resources to do anything but fight for our very existence.

What did he say?

Well, let’s just say he convinced me otherwise.

Can you elaborate?

I could, but I don’t want to mangle his words. The old neurons aren’t firing like they used to.

Please try.

You’ll fact-check with his library?

I promise.

Well. . . we were in his temporary office, the “presidential suite” of a hotel. He’d just been sworn in on Air Force Two. His old boss was sedated in the suite next to us. From the window you could see the chaos on the streets, the ships at sea lining up to dock, the planes coming in every thirty seconds and ground crew pushing them off the runway once they landed to make room for new ones. I was pointing to them, shouting and gesturing with the passion I’m most famous for. “We need a stable government, fast!” I kept saying. “Elections are great in principle but this is no time for high ideals.”

The president was cool, a lot cooler than me. Maybe it was all that military training … he said to me, “This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren’t just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don’t have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don’t have a common heritage, we don’t have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have… [struggling to remember]… all we have is what we want to be.” You see what he was saying. Our country only exists because people believed in it, and if it wasn’t strong enough to protect us from this crisis, then what future could it ever hope to have? He knew that America wanted a Caesar, but to be one would mean the end of America. They say great times make great men. I don’t buy it. 1 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. My boss was a great man. We were damn lucky to have him.

The business of elections really set the tone for his entire administration. So many of his proposals looked crazy at first glance, but once you peeled back the first layer, you realized that underneath there existed a core of irrefutable logic. Take the new punishment laws, those really set me off. Putting people in stocks? Whipping them in town squares! ?! What was this, Old Salem, the Taliban’s Afghanistan? It sounded barbaric, un-American, until you really thought about the options. What were you going to do with thieves and looters, put them in prison? Who would that help? Who could afford to divert able-bodied citizens to feed, clothe, and guard other able-bodied citizens? More importantly, why remove the punished from society when they could serve as such a valuable deterrent? Yes, there was the fear of pain-the lash, the cane-but all of that paled when compared to public humiliation. People were terrified of having their crimes exposed. At a time when everyone was pulling together, helping each other out, working to protect and take care of one another, the worst thing you could do to someone was to march them up into the public square with a giant poster reading “I Stole My Neighbor’s Firewood.” Shame’s a powerful weapon, but it depended on everyone else doing the right thing. No one is above the law, and seeing a senator given fifteen lashes for his involvement in war profiteering did more to curb crime than a cop on every street corner. Yes, there were the work gangs, but those were the recidivists, those who’d been given chances time and time again. I remember the attorney general suggesting that we dump as many of them into the infested zones as possible, rid ourselves of the drain and potential hazard of their continued presence. Both the president and I opposed this proposition; my objections were ethical, his were practical. We were still talking about American soil, infested yes, but, hopefully one day to be liberated. “The last thing we needed,” he said “was to come up against one of these ex-cons as The New Grand Warlord of Duluth.” I thought he was joking, but later, as I saw the exact thing happen in other countries, as some exiled criminals rose to command their own isolated, and in some cases, powerful fiefdoms, I realized we’d dodged one hell of a speeding bullet. The work gangs were always an issue for us, politically, socially, even economically, but what other choice did we have for those who just refused to play nice with others?

You did use 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?

We had our share of religious fundamentalists, what country didn’t? Many of them believed that we were, in some way, interfering with God’s will.

[He chuckles.]

I’m sorry, I’ve gotta learn to be more sensitive, but for cryin’ out loud, you really think the supreme creator of the infinite multiverse is going to have his plans unraveled by a few Arizona National Guardsmen?

[He waves the thought away.]

They got a lot more press than they should have, all because that nut-bird tried to kill the president. In reality, they were much more a danger to themselves, all those mass suicides, the “mercy” child killings in Med-ford… terrible business, same with the “Greenies,” the leftie version of the Fundies. They believed that since the living dead only consumed animals, but not plants, it was the will of the “Divine Goddess” to favor flora over fauna. They made a little trouble, dumping herbicide in a town’s water supply, booby-trapping trees so loggers couldn’t use them for war production. That kind of ecoterrorism eats up headlines but didn’t really threaten our national security. The Rebs, on the other hand: armed, organized political secessionists. That was easily our most tangible danger. It was also the only time I ever saw the president worried. He wouldn’t let on, not with that dignified, diplomatic veneer. In public, he treated it as just another “issue,” like food rationing or road repair. He’d say in private… “They must be eliminated swiftly, decisively, and by any means necessary.” Of course, he was only talking about those within the western safe zone. These diehard renegades either had some beef with the government’s wartime policy or had already planned to secede years before and were just using the crisis as their excuse. These were the “enemies of our country,” the domestic ones anyone swearing to defend our country mentions in his or her oath. We didn’t have to think twice about an appropriate response to them. But the secessionists east of the Rockies, in some of the besieged, isolated zones… that’s when it got “complicated.”

Why is that?

Because, as the saying went, “We didn’t leave America. America left us.” There’s a lot of truth to that. We deserted those people. Yes, we left some Special Forces volunteers, tried to supply them by sea and air, but from a purely moral standing, these people were truly abandoned. I couldn’t blame them for wanting to go their own way, nobody could. That’s why when we began to reclaim lost territory, we allowed every secessionist enclave a chance for peaceful reintegration.

But there was violence.

I still have nightmares, places like Bolivar, and the Black Hills. I never see the actual images, not the violence, or the aftermath. I always see my boss, this towering, powerful, vital man getting sicker and weaker each time. He’d survived so much, shouldered such a crushing burden. You know, he never tried to find out what had happened to his relatives in Jamaica? Never even asked. He was so fiercely focused on the fate of our nation, so determined to preserve the dream that created it. I don’t know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.

Wenatchee, Washington

[Joe Muhammad’s smile is as broad as his shoulders. While his day job is as the owner of the town’s bicycle repair shop, his spare time is spent sculpting molten metal into exquisite works of art. He is, no doubt, most famous for the bronze statue on the mall in Washington, D.C., the Neighborhood Security Memorial of two standing citizens, and one seated in a wheelchair.]

The recruiter was clearly nervous. She tried to talk me out of it. Had I spoken to the NRA representative first? Did I know about all the other essential war work? I didn’t understand at first; I already had a job at the recycling plant. That was the point of Neighborhood Security Teams, right? It was a part-time, volunteer service for when you were home from work. I tried explaining this to her. Maybe there was something I wasn’t getting. As she tried some other half-hearted, half-assed excuses, I saw her eyes flick to my chair.

[Joe is disabled.]

Can you believe that? Here we were with mass extinction knocking on the door, and she’s trying to be politically correct? I laughed. I laughed right in her face. What, did she think I just showed up without knowing what was expected of me? Didn’t this dumb bitch read her own security manual? Well, I’d read it. The whole point of the NST program was to patrol your own neighborhood, walking, or, in my case, rolling down the sidewalk, stopping to check each house. If, for some reason, you had to go inside, at least two members were always supposed to wait out in the street. [Motions to himself.] Hello! And what did she think we were facing anyway? It’s not like we had to chase them over fences and across backyards. They came to us. And if and when they did so, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, there was more than we could handle? Shit, if I couldn’t roll myself faster than a walking zombie, how could I have lasted this long? I stated my case very clearly and calmly, and I even challenged her to present a scenario in which my physical state could be an impediment. She couldn’t. There was some mumbling about having to check with her CO, maybe I could come back tomorrow. I refused, told her she could call her CO, and his CO and everyone right up to the Bear himself, but I wasn’t moving until I got my orange vest. I yelled so loud everyone in the room could hear. All eyes turned to me, then to her. That did it. I got my vest and was out of there faster than anyone else that day.

Like I said, 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. I carried an AMT Lightning, this little semiauto .22-caliber carbine. It had no kick so I could shoot without having to lock down my wheels. Good gun, especially when ammo became standardized and reloads were still available.

Teams changed depending on your schedule. It was pretty chaotic back then, DeStRes reorganizing everything. Night shift was always tough. You forget how dark the night really is without streetlights. There were barely any houselights, too. People went to bed pretty early back then, usually when it got dark, so except for a few candles or if someone had a license for a generator, like if they were doing essential war work from home, the houses were pitch-black. You didn’t even have the moon or the stars anymore, too much crap in the atmosphere. We patrolled with flashlights, basic civilian store-bought models; we still had batteries then, with red cellophane on the end to protect our night vision. We’d stop at each house,

knock, ask whoever was on watch if everything was okay. The early months were a little unnerving because of the resettlement program. So many people were coming out of the camps that each day you might get at least a dozen new neighbors, or even housemates.

I never realized how good we had it before the war, tucked away in my little Stepford suburbistan. Did I really need a three-thousand-square-foot house, three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen, living room, den, and home office? I’d lived alone for years and suddenly I had a family from Alabama, six of them, just show up at my door one day with a letter from the Department of Housing. It’s unnerving at first, but you get used to it quickly. I didn’t mind the Shannons, that was the family’s name. We got along pretty well, and I always slept better with someone standing watch. That was one of the new rules for people at home. Someone had to be the designated night watchman. We had all their names on a list to make sure they weren’t squatters and looters. We’d check their ID, their face, ask them if every-thing was all quiet. They usually said yes, or maybe reported some noise we’d have to check out. By the second year, when the refugees stopped coming and everyone got to know each other, we didn’t bother with lists and IDs anymore. Everything was calmer then. That first year, when the cops were still re-forming and the safe zones weren’t completely pacified…

[Shivers for dramatic effect.]

There were still a lot of deserted houses, shot up or broken into or just abandoned with the doors left wide open. We’d put police tape across all doorways and windows. If any of them were found snapped, that could mean a zombie was in the house. That happened a couple of times. I’d wait outside, rifle ready. Sometimes you’d hear shouts, sometimes shots. Sometimes, you’d just hear a moan, scuffling, then one of your teammates would come out with a bloody hand weapon and a severed head. I had to put a few down myself. Sometimes, when the team was inside, and I was watching the street, I’d hear a noise, a shuffling, a rasping, something dragging itself through the bushes. I’d hit it with the light, call for backup, then take it down.

One time I almost got tagged. We were clearing a two-story job: four bed, four bath, partially collapsed from where someone had driven a Jeep Liberty through the living room window. My partner asked if it was cool to take a powder break. I let her go behind the bushes. My bad. I was too distracted, too concerned with what was going on inside the house. I didn’t notice what was behind me. Suddenly there was this tug on my chair. I tried to turn, but something had the right wheel. I twisted, brought my light around. It was a “dragger,” the kind that’s lost its legs. It snarled up at me from the asphalt, trying to climb over the wheel. The chair saved my life. It gave me the second and a half I needed to bring my carbine around. If I’d been standing, it might have grabbed my ankle, maybe even taken a chunk. That was the last time I slacked off at my job.

Zombies weren’t the only problem we had to deal with back then. There were looters, not so much hardened criminals as just people who needed stuff to survive. Same with squatters; both cases usually ended well. We’d just invite them home, give them what they needed, take care of them until the housing folks could step in.

There were some real looters, though, professional bad guys. That was the only time I got hurt.

[He pulls down his shirt, exposing a circular scar the size of a prewar dime.]

Nine millimeter, right through the shoulder. My team chased him out of the house. I ordered him to halt. That was the only time I ever killed someone, thank God. When the new laws came in, conventional crime pretty much dried up altogether.

Then there were the ferals, you know, the homeless kids who’d lost their parents. We’d find them curled up in basements, in closets, under beds. A lot of them had walked from as far away as back east. They were in bad shape, all malnourished and sickly. A lot of times they’d run. Those were the only times I felt bad, you know, that I couldn’t chase them. Someone else would go, a lot of times they’d catch up, but not always.

The biggest problem were quislings.

Quislings?

Yeah, you know, the people that went nutballs and started acting like zombies.

Could you elaborate?

Well, I’m not a shrink, so I don’t know all the tech terms.

That’s all right.

Well, as I understand it, there’s a type of person who just can’t deal with a fight-or-die situation. They’re always drawn to what they’re afraid of. Instead of resisting it, they want to please it, join it, try to be like it. I guess that happens in kidnap situations, you know, like a Patty Hearst/Stockholm Syndrome-type, or, like in regular war, when people who are invaded sign up for the enemy’s army. Collaborators, sometimes even more die-hard than the people they’re trying to mimic, like those French fascists who were some of Hitler’s last troops. Maybe that’s why we call them quislings, like it’s a French word or something.

But you couldn’t do it in this war. You couldn’t just throw up your hands and say, “Hey, don’t kill me, I’m on your side.” There was no gray area in this fight, no in between. I guess some people just couldn’t accept that. It put them right over the edge. They started moving like zombies, sounding like them, even attacking and trying to eat other people. That’s how we found our first one. He was a male adult, midthirties. Dirty, dazed, shuffling down the sidewalk. We thought he was just in Z-shock, until he bit one of our guys in the arm. That was a horrible few seconds. I dropped the Q with a head shot then turned to check on my buddy. He was crumpled on the curb, swearing, crying, staring at the gash in his forearm. This was a death sentence and he knew it. He was ready to do himself until we discovered that the guy I shot had bright red blood pouring from his head. When we checked his flesh we found he was still warm! You should have seen our buddy lose it. It’s not every day you get a reprieve from the big governor in the sky. Ironically, he almost died anyway. The bastard had so much bacteria in his mouth that it caused a near fatal staph infection.

We thought maybe we stumbled onto some new discovery but it turned out it’d been happening for a while. The CDC was just about to go public. They even sent an expert up from Oakland to brief us on what to do if we encountered more of them. It blew our minds. Did you know that 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. Think about it. Someone’s on Phalanx, gets bit but survives. What else is he going to think? He probably wouldn’t know there was even such a thing as quislings. They’re just as hostile as regular zombies and in some cases even more dangerous.

How so?

Well, for one thing, they didn’t freeze. I mean, yeah, they would if they were exposed over time, but in moderate cold, it they’d gone under while wearing warm clothes, they’d be fine. They also got stronger from the people they ate. Not like zombies. They could maintain over time.

But you could kill them more easily.

Yes and no. You didn’t have to hit them in head; you could take out the lungs, the heart, hit them anywhere, and eventually they’d bleed to death. But if you didn’t stop them with one shot, they’d just keep coming until they died.

They don’t feel pain?

Hell no. It’s that whole mind-over-matter thing, being so focused you’re able to suppress relays to the brain and all that. You should really talk to an expert.

Please continue.

Okay, well, that’s why we could never talk them down. There was nothing left to talk to. These people were zombies, maybe not physically, but mentally you could not tell the difference. Even physically it might be hard, if they were dirty enough, bloody enough, diseased enough. Zombies don’t really smell that bad, not individually and not if they’re fresh. How do you tell one of these from a mimic with a whopping dose of gangrene? You couldn’t. It’s not like the military would let us have sniffer dogs or anything. You had to use the eye test.

Ghouls don’t blink, I don’t know why. Maybe because they use their senses equally, their brains don’t value sight as much. Maybe because they don’t have as much bodily fluid they can’t keep using it to coat the eyes. Who knows, but 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.

And if they did?

Well, our orders were to capture quislings if possible, and use deadly force only in self-defense. It sounded crazy, still does, but we rounded up a few, hog-tied them, turned them over to police or National Guard. I’m not sure what they did with them. I’ve heard stories about Walla Walla, you know, the prison where hundreds of them were fed and clothed and even med-ically cared for. [His eyes flick to the ceiling.]

You don’t agree.

Hey, I’m not going there. You want to open that can of worms, read the papers. Every year some lawyer or priest or politician tries to stoke that fire for whatever side best suits them. Personally, I don’t care. I don’t have any feelings toward them one way or the other. I think 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. Remember early in the war, when everybody was trying to work on a way to turn the living dead against one another? 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, California

[I don’t need a photograph to recognize Roy Elliot. We meet for coffee on the restored Malibu Pier Fortress. Those around us also instantly recognize him, but, unlike prewar days, keep a respectful distance.]

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. No one understood what was happening at first. We’d stabilized the Rockies, we’d sanitized the safe zones, and still we were losing upwards of a hundred or so people a day. It wasn’t suicide, we had plenty of those. No, this was different. 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. I understood that feeling. I directed movies all my adult life. They called me the boy genius, the wunderkind who couldn’t fail, even though I’d done so often.

Suddenly I was a nobody, an F-6. The world was going to hell and all my vaunted talents were powerless to stop it. When I heard about ADS, the government was trying to keep it quiet-I had to find out from a contact at Cedars-Sinai. When I heard about it, something snapped. Like the time I made my first Super 8 short and screened it for my parents. This I can do, I realized. This enemy I can fight!

And the rest is history.

[Laughs.] I wish. I went straight to the government, they turned me down.

Really? I would think, given your career…

What career? They wanted soldiers and farmers, real jobs, remember? It was like “Hey, sorry, no dice, but can I get your autograph?” Now, I’m not the surrendering type. When I believe in my ability to do something, there is no such word as no. I explained to the DeStRes rep that it wouldn’t cost Uncle Sam a dime. I’d use my own equipment, my own people, all I’d need from them was access to the military. “Let me show the people what you’re doing to stop this,” I told him. “Let me give them something to believe in.” Again, I was refused. The military had more important missions right now than “posing for the camera.”

Did you go over his head?

To who? There were no boats to Hawaii and Sinclair was racing up and down the West Coast. Anybody in any position to help was either physically unavailable or far too distracted with more “important” matters.

Couldn’t you have become a freelance journalist, gotten a government press pass?

It would have taken too long. Most mass media was either knocked out or federalized. What was left had to rebroadcast public safety announcemeats, to make sure anyone just tuning in would know what to do. Everything was still such a mess. We barely had passable roads, let alone the bureaucracy to give me full-time journalist status. It might have taken months. Months, with a hundred dying every day. I couldn’t wait. I had to do something immediately. I took a DV cam, some spare batteries, and a solar-powered charger. My oldest son came with me as my sound man and “first AD.” We traveled on the road for one week, just the two of us on mountain bikes, looking for stories. We didn’t have to go far.

Just outside of Greater Los Angeles, in a town called Claremont, are five colleges-Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont Mckenna. At the start of the Great Panic, when everyone else was running, literally, for the hills, three hundred students chose to make a stand. They turned the Women’s College at Scripps into something resembling a medieval city. They got their supplies from the other campuses; their weapons were a mix of landscaping tools and ROTC practice rifles. They planted gardens, dug wells, fortified an already existing wall. 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, until the Inland Empire could finally be pacified. We were lucky to get there just at the tail end, just in time to see the last of the undead fall, as cheering students and soldiers linked up under the oversized, homemade Old Glory fluttering from the Pomona bell tower. What a story! Ninety-six hours of raw footage in the can. I would have liked to have gone longer, but time was critical. One hundred a day lost, remember.

We had to get this one out there as soon as possible. I brought the footage back to my house, cut it together in my edit bay. My wife did the narration. We made fourteen copies, all on different formats, and screened them that Saturday night at different camps and shelters all over LA. I called it Victory at Avalon: The Battle of the Five Colleges.

The name, Avalon, comes from some stock footage one of the students had shot during the siege. It was the night before their last, worst attack, when a fresh horde from the east was clearly visible on the horizon. The kids were hard at work-sharpening weapons, reinforcing defenses, standing guard on the walls and towers. A song came floating across the campus from the loudspeaker that played constant music to keep morale up. A Scripps student, with a voice like an angel, was singing the Roxy Music song. It was such a beautiful rendition, and such a contrast with the raging storm about to hit. I laid it over my “preparing for battle” montage. I still get choked up when I hear it.

How did it play with the audience?

It bombed! Not just the scene, but the whole movie; at least, that’s what I thought. I’d expected a more immediate reaction. Cheering, applause. I would never have admitted this to anyone, even to myself, but I had this egotistical fantasy of people coming up to me afterward, tears in their eyes, grabbing my hands, thanking me for showing them the light at the end of the tunnel. They didn’t even look at me. I stood by the doorway like some conquering hero. They just filed past silently with their eyes on their shoes. I went home that night thinking, “Oh well, it was a nice idea, maybe the potato farm in MacArthur Park can use another hand.”

What happened?

Two weeks went by. I got a real job, helping to reopen the road at Topanga Canyon. Then one day a man rode up to my house. Just came in on horse-back as if out of an old Cecil B. De Mille western. He was a psychiatrist from the county health facility in Santa Barbara. They’d heard about the success of my movie and asked if I had any extra copies.

Success?

That’s what I said. As it turns out, 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!

And no one told you?

No one. [Laughs.] Not the military, not the municipal authorities, not even the people who ran the shelters where it was continuing to be screened without my knowledge. I don’t care. The point is it worked. It made a difference, and it gave me a job for the rest of the war. I got a few volunteers together, as much of my old crew as I could find. That kid who shot the Claremont stock footage, Malcolm Van Ryzin, yes, that Malcolm, he became my DP. We commandeered an abandoned dubbing house in West Hollywood and started cranking them out by the hundreds. We’d put them on every train, every caravan, every coastal ferry heading north. It took a while to get responses. But when they came…

[He smiles, holds his hands up in thanks.]

Ten percent drop throughout the entire western safe zone. I was already on the road by then, shooting more stories. Anacapa was already wrapped, and we were halfway through Mission District. By the time Dos Palmos hit screens, and ADS was down 23 percent. . . only then did the government finally take an interest in me.

Additional resources?

[Laughs.] No. I’d never asked for help and they sure weren’t going to give it. But I did finally get access to the military and that opened up a whole new world.

Is that when you made Fire of the Gods?

[Nods.] The army had two functioning laser weapons programs: Zeus and MTHEL. Zeus was originally designed for munitions clearing, zapping land mines and unexploded bombs. It was small and light enough to be mounted in a specialized Humvee. The gunner sighted a target through a coaxial camera in the turret. He placed the aim point on the intended surface, then fired a pulse beam through the same optical aperture. Is that too technical?

Not at all.

I’m sorry. I became extremely immersed in the project. The beam was a weaponized version of solid-state, industrial lasers, the kind used to cut steel in factories. It could either burn through a bomb’s outer casing or heat it to a point that detonated the explosive package. The same principle worked for zombies. On higher settings it punched right through their foreheads. On lower settings, it literally boiled their brain till it exploded through the ears, nose, and eyes. The footage we shot was dazzling, but Zeus was a popgun next to MTHEL.

The acronym stands for Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser, codesigned by the United States and Israel to take out small incoming projectiles. When Israel declared self-quarantine, and when so many terrorist groups were lobbing mortar rounds and rockets across the security wall, MTHEL was what knocked them down. About the size and shape of a World War II searchlight, it was, in fact, a deuterium fluoride laser, much more powerful than the solid state on Zeus. The effects were devastating. It blasted flesh from bones that then heated white before shattering into dust. When played at regular speed, it was magnificent, but at slo-mo… fire of the gods.

Is it true that 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.

Your program.

No, Zeus and MTHEL.

They were in jeopardy?

MTHEL was due to close a month after shooting. Zeus had already been chopped. We had to beg, borrow, and steal, literally, to get it reactivated just for our cameras. DeStRes had deemed both as a gross waste of resources.

Were they?

Inexcusably so. The “M” in MTHEUs “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 gunner still had to hold a beam in place, on a moving target, mind you, for several seconds. A good sharpshooter could get the job done in half the time with twice the kills. 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.

They were that bad?

Not for their original role. MTHEL kept Israel safe from terrorist bombardment, and Zeus actually came out of retirement to clear unexploded ordnance during the army’s advance. As purpose-built weapons, they were outstanding. As zombie killers, they were hopeless duds.

So why did you film them?

Because 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. We split the atom, we reached the moon, we’ve filled every household and business with more don’t know if that’s a good thing, I’m in no place to judge. But I do know that just like all those ex-atheists in foxholes, most Americans were still proving for the God of science to save them.

But it didn’t.

But it didn’t matter. 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 lies our government told us before the war, the ones that were supposed to keep us happy and blind, those were the ones that burned, because they prevented us from doing what had to be done. However, by the time I made Avalon, everyone was already doing everything they could possibly do to survive. The lies of the past were long gone and now 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 some-thing 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 of every other filmmaker during the war. Did you ever hear of The Hero City?

Of course.

Great film, right? Marty made it over the course of the Siege. Just him, shooting on whatever medium he could get his hands on. What a masterpiece: the courage, the determination, the strength, dignity, kindness, and honor. It really makes you believe in the human race. It’s better than anything I’ve ever done. You should see it.

I have.

Which version?

I’m sorry?

Which version did you see?

I wasn’t aware …

That there were two? You need to do some homework, young man. Marty made both a wartime and postwar version of The Hero City. The version you saw, it was ninety minutes?

I think.

Did it show the dark side of the heroes in The Hero City? Did it show the violence and the betrayal, the cruelty, the depravity, the bottomless evil in some of those “heroes’ “ hearts? No, of course not. Why would it? That was our reality and its what drove so many people to get snuggled in bed, blowout 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.

Parnell Air National Guard Base, Tennessee

[Gavin Blaire escorts me to the office of his squadron commander. Colonel Christina Eliopolis. As much a legend for her temper as for her outstanding war record, it is difficult to see how so much intensity can be compacted into her diminutive, almost childlike frame. Her long black bangs and delicate facial features only reinforce the picture of eternal youth. Then she removes her sunglasses, and I see the fire behind her eyes.]

I was a Raptor driver, the FA-22. It was, hands down, the best air superiority platform ever built. It could outfly and outfight God and all his angels. It was a monument to American technical prowess… and in this war, that prowess counted for shit.

That must have been frustrating.

Frustrating? Do you know what it feels like to suddenly be told that the one goal you’ve worked toward your whole life, that you’ve sacrificed and suffered for, that’s pushed you beyond limits you never knew you had is now considered “strategically invalid”?

Would you say this was a common feeling?

Let me put it this way; 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. Some DeStRes “experts” had determined that our resource-to-kill ratio, our RKR, was the most lopsided of all the branches.

Could you give me some example?

How about the JSOW, the Joint Standoff Weapon? It was a gravity bomb, guided by GPS and Inertial Nav, that could be released from as far as forty miles away. The baseline version carried one hundred and forty BLU-97B submunitions, and each bomblet carried a shaped charge against armored targets, a fragmented case against infantry, and a zirconium ring to set the entire kill zone ablaze. It had been considered a triumph, until Yonkers. Now we were told that the price of one JSOW kit-the materials, manpower, time, and energy, not to mention the fuel and ground maintenance needed for the delivery aircraft-could pay for a platoon of infantry pukes who could smoke a thousand times as many Gs. Not enough bang for our buck, like so many of our former crown jewels. They went through us like an industrial laser. The B-2 Spirits, gone; the B-l Lancers, gone; even the old BUFFs, the B-52 Big Ugly Fat Fellows, gone. Throw in the Eagles, the Falcons, the Tomcats, Hornets, JSFs, and Raptors, and you have more combat aircraft lost to the stroke of a pen than to all the SAMs, Flak, and enemy fighters in history. At least the assets weren’t scrapped, thank God, just mothballed in warehouses or that big desert graveyard at AMARC. “Long-term investment,” they called it. That’s the one thing you can always depend on; as we’re fighting one war, we’re always preparing for the next one. Our airlift capacity, at least the organization, was almost left intact.

Almost?

The Globemasters had to go, so did anything else powered by a “gas guzzling” jet. That left us with prop-powered aircraft. I went from flying the closest thing to an X-Wing fighter, to the next best thing to a U-Haul.

Was that the main mission of the air force?

Airborne resupply was our primary objective, the only one that really counted anymore.

[She points to a yellowed map on the wall.]

The base commander let me keep it, after what happened to me.

[The map is of the wartime continental United States. All land west of the Rockies is shadowed a light gray. Amongst this gray are a variety of colored circles.]

Islands in the Sea of Zack. Green denotes active military facilities. Some of them had been converted into refugee centers. Some were still contributing to the war effort. Some were well defended but had no strategic impact.

The Red Zones were labeled “Offensively Viable”: factories, mines, power plants. The army’d left custodial teams during the big pullback. Their job was to guard and maintain these facilities for a time when, if, we could add them to the overall war effort. The Blue Zones were civilian areas where people had managed to make a stand, carve out a little piece of real estate, and figure some way to live within its boundaries. All these zones were in need of resupply and that’s what the “Continental Airlift” was all about.

It was a massive operation, not just in terms of aircraft and fuel, but organization as well. Remaining in contact with all these islands, processing their demands, coordinating with DeStRes, then trying to procure and prioritize all the materiel for each drop made it the statistically largest undertaking in air force history.

We tried to stay away from consumables, things like food and medicine that required regular deliveries. These were classified as DDs, dependency drops, and they got a backseat to SSDs, self-sustaining drops, like tools, spare parts, and tools to make spare parts. “They don’t need fish,” Sinclair used to say, “they need fishing poles.” Still, every autumn, we dropped a lot of fish, and wheat, and salt, and dried vegetables and baby formula… Winters were hard. Remember how long they used to be? Helping people to help themselves is great in theory, but you still gotta keep ’em alive.

Sometimes you had to drop in people, specialists like doctors or engineers, people with the kind of training you just can’t get from a how-to manual. 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; a lot of the Blue Zones didn’t have airstrips, so they had to parachute in without any hope of pickup. Not all those Blue Zones remained secure. Some were eventually overrun. The people we dropped in knew the risks they were taking. A lotta heart, all of them.

That goes for the pilots as well.

Hey, I’m not minimizing our risks at all. Every day we had to fly over hundreds, in some cases thousands, of miles of infested territory. That’s why we had 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. A lot of the aircraft didn’t have the range to reach remote drop zones on the East Coast if in-flight refueling assets weren’t available. They helped reduce the number of ships and crews lost en-route. They brought our fleet survivability up to 92 percent. Unfortunately, I was part of the other eight.

I’ll never be sure what exactly brought us down: mechanical malfunction or metal fatigue combined with weather. It might have been the contents of our pay load, mislabeled or mishandled. That happened a lot more than anyone wanted to think about. Sometimes if hazardous materials weren’t packaged properly, or, God forbid, some shit-for-brains QC inspector let his people assemble their detonators before crating them for travel. . . that happened to a buddy of mine, just a routine flight from Palmdale to Vandenberg, not even across an infested area. Two hundred Type 38 detonators, all fully assembled with their power cells accidentally running, all set to blow on the same freq as our radio.

[She snaps her fingers.]

That could have been us. We were on a hop from Phoenix to the Blue Zone outside Tallahassee, Florida. It was late October, almost full winter back then. Honolulu was trying to squeeze out just a few more drops before the weather socked us in till March. It was our ninth haul that week. We were all on “tweeks,” these little blue stims that kept you going without hampering your reflexes or judgment. I guess they worked well enough, but they made me have to piss my kidneys out every twenty minutes. My crew, the “guys,” used to give me a lot of grief, you know, girls always having to go. I know they weren’t really putting the hate on, but I still tried to hold it as long as I could.

After two hours of banging around in some seriously heavy turbulence, I finally broke down and turned the stick over to my copilot. I’d just zipped up when suddenly there was this massive jolt like God had just drop-kicked our tail. . . and suddenly our nose was dipping. The head on our C-130 wasn’t even really a toilet, just a portable chempot with a heavy, plastic shower curtain. That’s probably what ended up saving my life. If I’d been trapped in a real compartment, maybe knocked out or unable to reach the latch… Suddenly there was this screech, this overpowering blast of high-pressure air and I was sucked out right through the rear of the aircraft, right past where the tail should have been.

I was spiraling, out of control. I could just make out my ship, this gray mass shrinking and smoking on its way down. I straightened myself out, hit my chute. I was still in a daze, my head swimming, trying to catch my breath. I fumbled for my radio and started hollering for my crew to punch out. I didn’t get an answer. All I could see was one other chute, the only other one that made it out.

That was the worst moment, right there, just hanging helplessly. I could see the other chute, above and north of me by about three and a half clicks. I looked for the others. I tried my radio again, but wasn’t able to get a signal. I figured it had been damaged during my “exit.” I tried to get my bearings, somewhere over southern Louisiana, a swampy wilderness that seemed to have no end. I wasn’t sure exactly, my brain was still misfiring. At least I had sense enough to check the bare essentials. I could move my legs, my arms, I wasn’t in pain or bleeding externally. I checked to make sure my survival kit was intact, still strapped to my thigh, and that my weapon, my Meg, was still jamming me in the ribs.

Did the air force prepare you for situations like these?

We all had to pass the Willow Creek Escape and Evade program in the Klamath Mountains in California. It even had a few real Gs in there with us, tagged and tracked and placed at specific marks to give us the “real feel.” It’s a lot like what they teach you in the civilian manual: movement, stealth, how to take out Zack before he can howl your position. We all “made it,” lived, I mean, although a couple of pilots washed out on a Section Eight. I guess they just couldn’t hack the real feel. That never bothered me, being alone in hostile territory. That was standard operating procedure for me.

Always?

You wanna talk about being alone in a hostile environment, try my four years at Colorado Springs.

But there were other women …

Other cadets, other competitors who happen to have the same genitalia. Trust me, when the pressure kicked in, sisterhood punched out. No, it was me, only me. Self-contained, self-reliant, and always, unquestionably self-assured. That’s the only thing that got me through four years of Academy hell, and it was the only thing I could count on as I hit the mud in the middle of G country.

I unclasped my chute-they teach you not to waste time concealing it-and headed in the direction of the other chute. It took me a couple hours, splashing through this cold slime that numbed everything below my knees. I wasn’t thinking clearly, my head was still spinning. No excuse, I know, but that’s why I didn’t notice that the birds had suddenly beat it in the opposite direction. I did hear the scream though, faint and far away. I could see the chute tangled in the trees. I started running, another no-no, making all that noise without stopping to listen for Zack. I couldn’t see anything, just all these naked gray branches until they were right on top of me. If it wasn’t for Rollins, my copilot, I’m sure I’da been a goner.

I found him dangling from his harness, dead, twitching. His flight suit had been torn open and his entrails were hanging… draped over five of them as they fed in this cloud of red-brown water. One of them had managed to get its neck entangled in a section of small intestine. Every time it moved it would jerk Rollins, ringing him like a fucking bell. They didn’t notice me at all. Close enough to touch and they didn’t even look.

At least I had the brains to snap on my suppressor. I didn’t have to waste a whole clip, another fuckup. I was so angry I almost started kicking their corpses. I was so ashamed, so blinded by self-hate…

Self-hate?

I screwed the pooch! My ship, my crew …

But it was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.

How do you know that? You weren’t there. Shit, I wasn’t even there. I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t doing my job. I was squatting over a bucket like a goddamn girl!

I found myself burning up, mentally. Fucking weakling, I told myself, fucking loser. I started to spiral, not just hating myself, but hating myself for hating myself. Does that make any sense? I’m sure I might have just stayed there, shaking and helpless and waiting for Zack.

But then my radio started squawking. “Hello? Hello? Is anyone out there? Anyone punch outta that wreck?” It was a woman’s voice, clearly civilian by her language and tone.

I answered immediately, identified myself, and demanded that she respond in kind. She told me she was a skywatcher, and her handle was “Mets Fan,” or just “Mets” for short. The Skywatch system was this ad hoc network of isolated ham radio operators. They were supposed to report on downed aircrews and do what they could to help with their rescue. It wasn’t the most efficient system, mainly because there were so few, but it looked like today was my lucky day. She told me that she had seen the smoke and falling wreckage of my Here’ and even though she was probably less than a day’s walk from my position, her cabin was heavily surrounded. Before I could say anything she told me not to worry, that she’d already reported my position to search and rescue, and the best thing to do was to get to open ground where I could rendezvous for pickup.

I reached for my GPS but it had been torn from my suit when I was sucked out of my ship. I had a backup survival map, but it was so big, so unspecific, and my hump took me over so many states that it was practically just a map of the U.S.… my head was still clouded with anger and doubt. I told her I didn’t know my position, didn’t know where to go …

She laughed. “You mean you’ve never made this run before? You don’t have every inch of it committed to memory? You didn’t see where you were as you were hanging by the silk?” She was so sure of me, trying to get me to think instead of just spoon-feeding me the answers. I realized that I did know this area well, that I had flown over it at least twenty times in the last three months, and that I had to be somewhere in the Atchafalaya basin. “Think,” she told me, “what did you see from your chute? Were there any rivers, any roads?” At first, all I could remember were the trees, the endless gray landscape with no distinguishable features, and then gradually, as my brain cleared, I remembered seeing both rivers and a road. I checked on the map and realized that directly north of me was the I-10 freeway. Mets told me that was the best place for an S R pickup. She told me it shouldn’t take any longer than a day or two at best if I got a move on and stopped burning daylight.

As I was about to leave, she stopped me and asked if there was anything I’d forgotten to do. I remember that moment clearly. I turned back to Rollins. He was just starting to open his eyes again. I felt like I should say something, apologize, maybe, then I put a round through his forehead.

Mets told me not to blame myself, and no matter what, not to let it distract me from the job I had to do. She said, “Stay alive, stay alive and do your job.” Then she added, “And stop using up your weekend minutes.”

She was talking about battery power-she didn’t miss a trick-so I signed off and started moving north across the swamp. My brain was now on full burner, all my lessons from the Creek came rolling back. I stepped, I halted, I listened. I stuck to dry ground where I could, and I made sure to pace myself very carefully. I had to swim a couple times, that really made me nervous. Twice I swear I could feel a hand just brush against my leg. Once, I found a road, small, barely two lanes and in horrible disrepair.

Still, it was better than trudging through the mud. I reported to Mets what I’d found and asked if it would take me right to the freeway. She warned me to stay off it and every other road that crisscrossed the basin. “Roads mean cars,” she said, “and cars mean Gs.” She was talking about any bitten human drivers who died of their wounds while still behind the wheel and, because a ghoul doesn’t have the IQ points to open a door or unbuckle a seatbelt, would be doomed to spend the rest of their existence trapped in their cars.

I asked her what the danger of that was. Since they couldn’t get out, and as long as I didn’t let them reach through an open window to grab me, what did it matter how many “abandoned” cars I passed along the road. Mets reminded me that a trapped G was still able to moan and therefore still able to call for others. Now I was really confused. If I was going to waste so much time ducking a few back roads with a couple Zack-tilled cars, why was I heading for a freeway that was sure to be jammed with them’

She said, “You’ll be up above the swamp. How are more zombies gonna get to you?” Because it was built several stories above the swamp, this sec-tion of the I-10 was the safest place in the whole basin. I confessed I hadn’t thought of that. She laughed and said, “Don’t worry, honey. I have. Stick with me and I’ll get you home.”

And I did. I stayed away from anything even resembling a road and stuck to as pure a wilderness track as I could. I say “pure” but the truth was you couldn’t avoid all signs of humanity or what could have been humanity a long time ago. There were shoes, clothes, bits of garbage, and tattered suitcases and hiking gear. I saw a lot of bones on the patches of raised mud.

I couldn’t cell if they were human or animal. One time I found this rib cage; I’m guessing it was a gator, a big one. I didn’t want to think about how many Gs it took to bring that bastard down.

The first G I saw was small, probably a kid, I couldn’t tell. Its face was eaten off, the skin, nose, eyes, lips, even the hair and ears… not completely gone, but partially hanging or stuck in patches to the exposed skull. Maybe there were more wounds, I couldn’t tell. It was stuck inside one of those long civilian hiker’s packs, stuffed in there Tight with the drawstring pulled right up around its neck. The shoulder straps had gotten tangled on the roots of a tree, it was splashing around, half submerged. Its brain must have been intact, and even some of the muscle fibers connecting the jaw. That jaw started snapping as I approached. I don’t know how it knew I was there, maybe some of the nasal cavity was still intact, maybe the ear canal.

It couldn’t moan, its throat had been too badly mangled, but the splashing might have attracted attention, so I put it out of its misery, if it really was miserable, and tried not to think about it. That was another thing they taught us at Willow Creek: don’t write their eulogy, don’t try to imagine who they used to be, how they came to be here, how they came to be this. I know, who doesn’t do that, right? Who doesn’t look at one of those things and just naturally start to wonder? It’s like reading the last page of a book… your imagination just naturally spinning. And that’s when you get distracted, get sloppy, let your guard down and end up leaving someone else to wonder what happened to you. I tried to put her, it, out of my mind. Instead, I found myself wondering why it had been the only one I’d seen.

That was a practical survival question, not just idle musings, so I got on the radio and asked Mets if there was something I was missing here, if maybe there was some area I should be careful to avoid. She reminded me that this area was, for the most part, depopulated because the Blue Zones of Baton Rouge and Lafayette were pulling most of the Gs in either direction. That was bittersweet comfort, being right between two of the heaviest clusters for miles. She laughed, again… “Don’t worry about it, you’ll be fine.”

I saw something up ahead, a lump that was almost a thicket, but too boxy and shining in places. I reported it to Mets. She warned me not to go near it, keep on going and keep my eyes on the prize. I was feeling pretty good by this point, a little of the old me coming back.

As I got closer, I could see that it was a vehicle, a Lexus Hybrid SUV. It was covered in mud and moss and sitting in the water up to its doors. I could see that the rear windows were blocked with survival gear: tent, sleeping bag, cooking utensils, hunting rifle with boxes and boxes of shells, all new, some still in their plastic. I came around the driver’s side window and caught the glint of a .357. It was still clutched in the driver’s brown, shriveled hand. He was still sitting upright, looking straight ahead. There was light coming through the side of his skull. He was badly decomposed, at least a year, maybe more. He wore survival khakis, the kind you’d order from one of those upscale, hunting/safari catalogs. They were still clean and crisp, the only blood was from the head wound. I couldn’t see any other wound, no bites, nothing. That hit me hard, a lot harder than the little faceless kid. This guy had had everything he needed to survive, everything except the will. I know that’s supposition. Maybe there was a wound I couldn’t see, hidden by his clothes or the advanced decomposition. But I knew it, leaning there with my face against the glass, looking at this monument to how easy it was to give up.

I stood there for a moment, long enough for Mets to ask me what was happening. I told her what I was seeing, and without pause, she told me to keep on going.

I started to argue. I thought I should at least search the vehicle, see if there was anything I needed. She asked me, sternly, if there was anything I needed, not wanted. I thought about it, admitted there wasn’t. His gear was plentiful, but it was civilian, big and bulky; the food needed cooking, the weapons weren’t silenced. My survival kit was pretty thorough, and, if for some reason I didn’t find a helo waiting at the I-10, I could always use this as an emergency supply cache.

I brought up the idea of maybe using the SUV itself. Mets asked if I had a tow truck and some jumper cables. Almost like a kid, I answered no. She asked, ’Then what’s keeping you?” or something like that, pushing me to get a move on. I told her to just wait a minute, I leaned my head against the driver’s side window, I sighed and felt beat again, drained. Mets got on my ass, pushing me. I snapped back for her to shut the fuck up, I just needed a minute, a couple seconds to … I don’t know what.

I must have kept my thumb on the “transmit” button for a few seconds too long, because Mets suddenly asked, “What was that?” “What?” I asked. She’d heard something, something on my end.

She’d heard it before you?

I guess so, because in another second, once I’d cleared my head and opened my ears, I began to hear it too. The moan… loud and close, followed by the splashing of feet.

I looked up, through the car’s window, the hole in the dead man’s skull, and the window on the other side, and that’s when I saw the first one. I spun around and saw five more coming at me from all directions. And behind them were another ten, fifteen. I took a shot at the first one, the round went wild.

Mets started squawking at me, demanding a contact report. I gave her a head count and she told me to stay cool, don’t try to run, just stay put and follow what I’d learned at Willow Creek. I started to ask how she knew about Willow Creek when she shouted for me to shut up and fight.

I climbed to the top of the SUV-you’re supposed to look for the closest physical defense-and started to measure ranges. I lined up my first target, took a deep breath, and dropped him. To be a fighter jock is to be able to make decisions as fast as your electrochemical impulses can carry them. I’d lost that nanosecond timing when I hit the mud, now it was back. I was calm, I was focused, all the doubt and weakness were gone. The whole engagement felt like ten hours, but I guess in reality, it was more like ten minutes. Sixty-one in total, a nice thick ring of submerged corpses. I took my time, checked my remaining ammo and waited for the next wave to come. None did.

It was another twenty minutes before Mets asked me for an update. I gave her a body count and she told me to remind her never to piss me off. I laughed, the first time since I’d hit the mud. I felt good again, strong and confident. Mets warned me that all these distractions had erased any chance of making it to the I-10 before nightfall, and that I should probably start thinking about where I was gonna catch my forty.

I got as far away from the SUV as I could before the sky started to darken and found a decent enough perch in the branches of a tall tree. My kit had this standard-issue microfiber hammock; great invention, light and strong and with clasps to keep you from rolling out. That part was also supposed to help calm you down, help you get to sleep faster. … yeah, right! It didn’t matter that I’d already been up for close to forty-eight hours, that I’d tried all the breathing exercises they taught us at the Creek, or that I even slipped two of my Baby-Ls. You’re only supposed to take one, but I figured that was for lightweight wussies. I was me again, remember, I could handle it, and hey, I needed to sleep.

I asked her, since there was nothing else to do, or think about, if it was okay to talk about her. Who was she, really? How’d she end up in this isolated cabin in the middle of Cajun country? She didn’t sound Cajun, she didn’t even have a southern accent. And how did she know so much about pilot training without ever going through it herself? I was starting to get my suspicions, starting to piece together a rough outline of who she really was.

Mets told me, again, that there would be plenty of time later for an episode of The View. Right now I needed my sleep, and to check in with her at dawn. I felt the Ls kick in between “check” and “in.” I was out by “dawn.”

I slept hard. The sky was already light by the time I opened my eyes. I’d been dreaming about, what else, Zack. His moans were still echoing in my ears when I woke up. And then I looked down and realized they weren’t dreams. There must have been at least a hundred of them surrounding the tree. They were all reaching excitedly, all trying to climb over each other to get up to me. At least they couldn’t ramp up, the ground wasn’t solid enough. I didn’t have the ammo to take all of them out, and since a fire-fight might also buy time for more to show up, I decided it was best to pack up my gear and execute my escape plan.

You had planned for this?

Not really planned, but they’d trained us for situations like this. It’s a lot like jumping from an aircraft: pick your approximate landing zone, tuck and roll, keep loose, and get up as quick as you can. The goal is to put some serious distance between you and your attackers. You take off running, jogging, or even “speed walking”; yes, they actually told us to consider this as a low-impact alternative. The point is to get far enough way to give you time to plan your next move. According to my map, the I-10 was close enough for me to make a run for it, be spotted by a rescue chopper, and be lifted off before these stink bags would ever catch up. I got on the radio, reported my situation to Mets, and told her to signal S R for an immediate pickup. She told me to be careful. I crouched, I jumped, and cracked my ankle on a submerged rock.

I hit the water, facedown. Its chill was the only thing that kept me from blacking out from the pain. I came up spluttering, choking, and the first thing I saw was the whole swarm coming at me. Mets must have known something was up by the fact that I didn’t report my safe landing. Maybe she asked me what had happened, although I don’t remember. I just remember her yelling at me to get up and run. I tried putting weight on my ankle, but lightning shot up through my leg and spine. It could bear the weight, but… I screamed so loud, I’m sure she heard me through her cabin’s window. “Get out of there,” she was yelling… “GO!” I started limping, splashing away with upwards of a hundred Gs on my ass. It must have been comical, this frantic race of cripples.

Mets yelled, “If you can stand on it, you can run on it! It’s not a weight-bearing bone! You can do this!”

“But it hurts!” I actually said that, with tears running down my face, with Zack behind me howling for his lunch. I reached the freeway, looming above the swamp like the ruins of a Roman aqueduct. Mets had been right about its relative safety. Only neither of us had counted on my injury or my undead tail. There was no immediate entrance so I had to limp to one of the small, adjoining roads that Mets had originally warned me to avoid. I could see why as I began to get close. Wrecked and rusting cars were piled up by the hundreds and every tenth one had at least one G locked inside. They saw me and started to moan, the sound carried for miles in every direction.

Mets shouted, “Don’t worry about that now! Just get on the on-ramp and watch the fucking grabbers!”

Grabbers?

The ones reaching through broken windows. On the open road, I at least had a chance of dodging them, but on the on-ramp, you’re hemmed in on either side. That was the worst part, by far, those few minutes trying to get up onto the freeway. I had to go in between the cars; my ankle wouldn’t let me get on top of them. These rotting hands would reach out for me, grabbing my flight suit or my wrist. Every head shot cost me seconds that I didn’t have. The steep incline was already slowing me down. My ankle was throbbing, my lungs were aching, and the swarm was now gaining on me fast. If it hadn’t been for Mets…

She was shouting at me the whole time. “Move your ass, you fuckin’ bitch!” She was getting pretty raw by then. “Don’t you dare quit. . . don’t you DARE crap out on me!” She never let up, never gave me an inch. “What are you, some weak little victim’” At that point I thought I was. I knew I could never make it. The exhaustion, the pain, more than anything, I think, the anger at fucking up so badly. I actually considered turning my pistol around, wanting to punish myself for… you know. And then Mets really hit me. She roared, “What are you, your fucking mother! ?!”

That did it. I hauled ass right up onto the interstate.

I reported to Mets that I’d made it, then asked, “Now what the fuck do I do?”

Her voice suddenly got very soft. She told me to look up. A black dot was heading at me from out of the morning sun. It was following the freeway and grew very quickly into the form of a UH-60. I let out a whoop and popped my signal flare.

The first thing I saw when they winched me aboard was that it was a civilian chopper, not government Search and Rescue. The crew chief was a big Cajun with a thick goatee and wraparound sunglasses. He asked, “Where de’ hell you come from?” Sorry if I butchered the accent. I almost cried and punched him in his thigh-sized bicep. I laughed and said that they work fast. He shot me a look like I didn’t know what I was talking about. It turned out later that this wasn’t the rescue team but just a routine air shuttle between Baton Rouge and Lafayette. I didn’t know at that moment, and I didn’t care. I reported to Mets that I got my pickup, that I was safe. I thanked her for everything she’d done for me, and… and so I wouldn’t really start bawling, I tried to cover with a joke about finally getting that episode of The View. I never got a response.

She sounds like a hell of a Skywatcber.

She was a hell of a woman.

You said you had your “suspicions” by this point.

No civilian, even a veteran Skywatcher, could know so much about what goes into wearing those wings. She was just too savvy, too informed, the kind of baseline knowledge of someone who had to have gone through it herself.

So she was a pilot.

Definitely; not air force-I would have known her-but maybe a squid or a jarhead. They’d lost as many pilots as the air force on resupply hops like mine, and eight out of ten were never accounted for. I’m sure that she must have run into a situation like mine, had to ditch, lost her crew, maybe even blamed herself for it like me. Somehow she managed to find that cabin and spent the rest of the war as one kick-ass Skywatcher.

That makes sense.

Doesn’t it?

[There is an awkward pause. I search her face, waiting for more.]

What?

They never found her.

No.

Or the cabin.

No.

And Honolulu never had any record of a Skywatcher with the call sign Mets Fan.

You’ve done your homework.

I…

You probably also read my after-action report, right?

Yes.

And the psych evaluation they tacked on after my official debriefing.

Well…

Well, it’s bullshit, okay? So what if everything she told me was information I’d already been briefed on, so what if the psych team “claim” my radio was knocked out before I hit the mud, and so the fuck what if Mets is short for Metis, the mother of Athena, the Greek goddess with the stormy gray eyes. Oh, the shrinks had a ball with that one, especially when they “discovered” that my mother grew up in the Bronx.

And that remark she made about your mother?

Who the hell doesn’t have mother issues? If Mets was a pilot, she was a natural gambler. She knew she had a good chance of scoring a hit with “mom.” She knew the risk, took her shot. . . Look, if they thought I’d cracked up, why didn’t I lose my flight status? Why did they let me have this job? Maybe she wasn’t a pilot herself, maybe she was married to one, maybe she’d wanted to be one but never made it as far as I did. Maybe she was just a scared, lonely voice that did what she could to help another scared lonely voice from ending up like her. Who cares who she was, or is: She was there when I needed her, and for the rest of my life, she’ll always be with me.