Zombies: The Recent Dead (30 page)

By that time, we had almost finished our section of the Great Wall, but the isolated attacks were ending, and the massive, ceaseless, million-strong assault swarms began. If we had had to contend with those numbers in the beginning, if the heroes of the southern cities hadn’t shed their blood to buy us time . . .

The new government knew it had to distance itself from the one it had just overthrown. It had to establish some kind of legitimacy with our people, and the only way to do that was to speak the truth. The isolated zones weren’t “tricked” into becoming decoys like in so many other countries. They were asked, openly and honestly, to remain behind while others fled. It would be a personal choice, one that every citizen would have to make for themselves. My mother, she made it for me.

We had been hiding on the second floor of what used to be our five-bedroom house in what used to be one of Taiyuan’s most exclusive suburban enclaves. My little brother was dying, bitten when my father had sent him out to look for food. He was lying in my parent’s bed, shaking, unconscious. My father was sitting by his side, rocking slowly back and forth. Every few minutes he would call out to us. “He’s getting better! See, feel his forehead. He’s getting better!” The refugee train was passing right by our house. Civil Defense Deputies were checking each door to find out who was going and who was staying. My mother already had a small bag of my things packed; clothes, food, a good pair of walking shoes, my father’s pistol with the last three bullets. She was combing my hair in the mirror, the way she used to do when I was a little girl. She told me to stop crying and that some day soon they would rejoin me up north. She had that smile, that frozen, lifeless smile she only showed for father and his friends. She had it for me now, as I lowered myself down our broken staircase.

[Liu pauses, takes a breath, and lets her claw rest on the hard stone.]

Three months, that is how long it took us to complete the entire Great Wall. From Jingtai in the western mountains to the Great Dragon head on the Shanhaiguan Sea. It was never breached, never overrun. It gave us the breathing space we needed to finally consolidate our population and construct a wartime economy. We were the last country to adopt the Redeker Plan, so long after the rest of the world, and just in time for the Honolulu Conference. So much time; so many lives, all wasted. If the Three Gorges Dam hadn’t collapsed, if that other wall hadn’t fallen, would we have resurrected this one? Who knows. Both are monuments to our shortsightedness, our arrogance, our disgrace.

They say that so many workers died building the original walls that a human life was lost for every mile. I don’t know if that it was true of that time . . .

[Her claw pats the stone.]

But it is now.

About the Author

Max Brooks
is the author of the two bestsellers
The Zombie Survival Guide
(2003) and
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
(2006) He has also written for
Saturday Night Live
, for which he won an Emmy. His graphic novel
The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks
was published in 2009. A movie of
World War Z
is planned.

Story Notes

Inspired by Romero zombies and Studs Turkel’s oral history of World War II, Brooks stuck to the “laws” of his first book,
The Zombie Survival Guide
, in the writing of
World War Z
. Through a series of “interviews,” Brooks provides a “history” of humanity’s struggle against a worldwide outbreak of zombiism which, like a disease, mindlessly consumed, multiplied, and spread. Just as Romero used zombies for socio-political commentary pertinent to his era, so does Brooks. His zombie plague incorporates modern fears of terrorism, biological warfare, overwhelming natural catastrophes, climate change, and global disease. Since there are survivors left to be interviewed, humanity obviously triumphs, but the author’s globally implemented solution can also be viewed as somewhat horrific.

Nik Houser

My mother says I’m handsome. I believe her. It’s something she’s always said and it’s always done me, more or less, the same amount of good.

“You’re so lucky to be so smart and handsome!” she hollered from the porch as I waited for the bus to my new school. I remember the air was drastically cool for the tail end of summer, but I didn’t want to go back in that house for a jacket and risk a second hug, a second kiss goodbye. I’d lost track of how many times Mom had said, “Don’t worry, you’ll make friends in no time!” but I could stand no more of those either. It was one of her favorite phrases, as though the clay of creation was mine to shape and mold into a brand-new clique of ostracized freaks with whom I had nothing in common save the fact that the social trapeze had snapped between our fingers somewhere between our eleventh and twelfth years.

So I stood at the curb, freezing like an idiot. I looked back at my mom standing in the open doorway, unwavering optimism painted over her face in great broad strokes. One of her legs hovered at a forty-five-degree angle from the other, so that Mouselini, our cat, wouldn’t bolt out the door.

I smiled thinly, then looked back across the street where my best friend Art White snickered as he waited for our bus. At the sight of him, my head snapped back like a spider had swung in front of my face. I squished my eyes shut, then opened them, like a cartoon, which is what I must have looked like to the casual passerby, staring in astonishment as I was at the empty sidewalk across the street where my dead friend had stood only a moment before.

The morning after Art let all his blood run down the bathtub drain (rumor has it his mom kept running into the bathroom with cups, pitchers, and ice cube trays, trying to save some of it, some of him, before it all got away), the school bus stopped in front of his house. For years it had always stopped in front of his house and I’d always crossed the street to get on, just as I did that morning. Like always, I lurched to the back row of seats and propped myself against the window, reflexively leaving room for my pal, though I knew he would not be joining me.

The bus driver idled in front of Art’s house. An uncomfortable silence fell over the crowded transport, something my English teacher Ms. Crane might refer to as a “pregnant pause.” The driver was the only one on board who didn’t already know. Everybody else had seen it on the news the previous night, had spread word via email and cell phones, text messages for the dead. Ask not for whom the cell tones, the cell tones for thee.

Gus the Bus looked up at me through the broad rearview mirror.

“I’m only waitin’ another minute.”

A month later, when I got the notice in the mail which informed me that I would be spending my latter three years of high school away from the boys and girls I had grown to love and loathe respectively, my mother was as positive as ever. It was June by then. School was out and Art was in the ground, missing his finals by a week.

“What a great opportunity!” Mom said when I was done reading the letter aloud at the dinner table. “You can meet new people and . . . ” I glared at her across the table as she struggled to maintain her unwavering optimism . . . make new friends.”

“You said the same thing to your cousin when he was sent to Riker’s Island,” Pop reminded her, looking over his glasses at the seven o’clock news on mute. My old man was nearsighted, but he loved the condescending erudition of looking over his tortoise-shell rims at whatever questionable piece of Creation happened to fall under his scrutiny.

“And he was so smart and handsome, too,” Mom replied absently.

When the ghost of Art White had come and gone, I pulled the Notice of School District Transfer out of my pocket. It read like a draft notice, or one of those letters you get with a folded American flag to inform you that your child has been killed in action:

Dear Mr. Henry,

As superintendent of the Northside Public School District, it is my responsibility to inform you that as of September 1st, 2004, in an effort to further integrate our public schools, your street address will no longer be included in our district’s educational zone roster and will henceforth be transferred to the Middle Plain School District. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Sincerely,

J.R. Sneider, Jr.

Superintendent, Northside Public School District

No sooner had I finished reading my own death sentence than the familiar, noisome expulsion of school bus air brakes sounded off at the far end of my street. I looked up for the bus, but saw nothing— only the familiar line of SUVs parked along the curbs and in driveways. A stiff breeze picked up and made me shiver with cold for the first time since last April when the previous winter exhaled its death rattle. Or maybe it was the sudden silence that ran that chill up my spine. The street was dead quiet, a far cry from the familiar din of leaf-blowers, garbage trucks, and protein shake blenders that usually accompanied Monday mornings on our fair boulev—

CREEEEEE-SWOOSH!

The door to the school bus swung open in front of me, coming within an inch of my face and exhaling a cloud of dusty, tomb-like air.

Startled by its sudden appearance, I backpedaled on the wet grass, tripped on a sprinkler, and fell flat on my back.

I lay there for a second, staring up at the overcast sky, trying to breathe. It had been a long time since I’d had the wind knocked out of me, and for a second I thought I was dying. At last the airlock in my chest opened up and I sat bolt upright, panting, and stared up at the great black school bus humming cantankerously in front of my house like a hearse built for group rates.

Where the fuck did that come from?

I looked up through the open door, at the driver staring ahead at the road, black jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt draped over his wire-hanger frame. The sweatshirt’s hood covered his eyes as he slowly turned his head toward me. The rest of his body remained frozen in place, both hands glued to the steering wheel.

I stood up, grabbed my sprinkler-soaked backpack, and looked back at my house, an are-you-seeing-what-I’m-seeing? face pointed at the empty doorway. Mom was gone. Only Mouselini stood on the front step, eyes wide and tail shocked-up, a tremulous rumble sounding from the depths of his twelve-year-old gut like a drawstring dolly that’s been buried alive.

Behind me, the bus’s engine revved, once. I turned and started up its steps, heard the door close behind me while the driver’s hands remained on the wheel. At the top step I paused and stared down at my chauffeur, at the empty black space where the shade of his hood covered his eyes.

“Morning.” I slipped on the thin, polite smile I saved for teachers, strangers, extended family.

I looked back at the empty bus. The seats and windows were in decent condition, but dusty and tired-looking, as though the great vehicle had only just been called back into service after decades of neglect.

“First to get on, last to get off, I guess.” Again that thin smile, more for myself than the driver now.

The driver turned his pale, expressionless face back to the road as the houses, cars, and trees began to slip slowly past the windows. The bus betrayed no perceptible shudder or lurch when we pulled away from my home, as though we remained still while the stage set of the neighborhood was drawn back to the flies.

When I first received the notice of transfer, I thought my folks were responsible. I wasn’t exactly inconsolable after Art leapfrogged over his elders into the Great Beyond, but I wasn’t the same either. I lost weight, stopped sleeping, stopped jerking off. I think the fact that I put down my penis worried the ’rents more than putting down my fork. They’d read that loss of libido was a common part of the grieving process for any close friend or relative. But they also knew that he was my
only
close friend, and that I was dreading the fall. More than any summer before, the phonetics of the forthcoming season sounded to me, and to them, like some dramatic plunge I was about to take, a forty-foot dive into a glass of water.