World War Z

Taos, New Mexico. The narrator is speaking to Arthur Sinclair, Junior, who was director of the U.S. government’s Department of Strategic Resources or DeStRes. Sinclair says that DeStRes sounds a lot like “distress,” which was very appropriate since the safe zone behind the Rockies faced the problems of “starvation, disease, [and] homelessness.” In addition to this, the living dead kept attacking the Rocky Line and were also present within it. He had to do “a lot of on-the-job training” to get these refugees on their feet, and to do this, he had to read and learn a lot, too. Like his father, who had been a New Dealer with communist leanings, he tried to “find and harvest the right tools and talent.”

Sinclair admits that their pool of talent was very low as most of the refugees had held white-collar office positions, and what they needed now were people who could build and make things, like carpenters and machinists.  All those with no skills became F6 or “unskilled labor” and were given grunt work like “clearing rubble, harvesting crops, digging graves.” Those with “war-appropriate skills” became part of the Community Self-Sufficiency Program (CSSP), and also trained the “cubicle mice” to do useful jobs. This program, which became known as the National Reeducation Act (NRA), was an instant success and the refugees began claiming less government aid. 

One of the biggest challenges Sinclair faced was trying “to change the way people thought”—racism and classism were ingrained into America’s prewar segregated workforce. Most of the members of the CSSP and the instructors in the NRA were first-generation immigrants and blue-collar workers, and the formerly wealthy found it hard to stomach this. However, with time, many of them came to enjoy their new work more than they had ever liked their old, pre-war jobs.

Sinclair says they began recycling and reusing their old goods, and took apart cars for parts and tools. It was easy for them to find the materials since, before the war, 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 army was resistant to the DeStRes taking apart their bombers and tanks, but Sinclair got his way because they no longer had any fuel to make their technology work.

Sinclair says he was willing to fight the military for the DeStRes, but was glad he didn’t have to, especially after Travis D’Ambrosia became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Sinclair trusted his advice. Also, soldiers began to adapt to the program, too, and began seeing the value of reusing and adapting to their changed circumstances. He points proudly to a tool that hangs on his wall, a steel rod that ends in a fusion between a shovel and a battle-axe. It is called the “Lobotimizer” or the “Lobo,” and Sinclair proudly tells the narrator that they manufactured 23 million of these weapons during the war, using steel from recycled cars.

Burlington, Vermont. The narrator is interviewing the former vice-president who insists on calling himself “the Whacko” because everyone else calls him that. He says that unlike most politicians, he said what he felt, which made him perfect to be the president’s copilot. He says that the president was “the light” while he was “the heat.” They had different personalities and different skin colors, and he knows this was one of the reasons he was chosen since America didn’t want “another one of ‘those people’” to be leading the country. He says this was “stupid, ignorant, and infuriatingly Neolithic,” and yet, he wasn’t surprised by it.

Even in the chaos of those times, the president had insisted on elections, which had surprised the Whacko. The president had said calmly that it was a “time for high ideals because those ideals [were] all that [they had].” He had said that America “only existed because people believed in it,” and it couldn’t have a future if they lost their freedom. The Whacko tells the narrator that he saw “a lot of weakness, a lot of filth” among people in those times, but that the president “was a great man” and they were lucky to have him.  

Many of the president’s ideas seemed “crazy at first glance,” but were all very logical. For instance, he said that as punishment for crimes, people should be put in stocks and whipped in public, and while this sounded barbaric, there was no infrastructure to maintain prisons and people who were locked away couldn’t contribute in any way to society. The public humiliation of this punishment ended up serving as an effective deterrent.

Some of the problems the government faced from their own people were from the Fundies or religious fundamentalists who believed they were acting against god’s will. One of them tried to murder the president. There were also the Greenies, ecoterrorists who tried to protect trees from being cut down. The most dangerous were the Rebs, armed political secessionists, who existed within the safe zone. The president was most worried about the Rebs. In public he said they were just another “issue” like the shortage of food, but in private, he said that they must be “eliminated swiftly.”

However, there were some secessionists east of the Rockies and the government didn’t know what to do with them since they had abandoned those people. They couldn’t blame them for not wanting anything to do with the government. Later, when they began reclaiming these territories, they gave these secessionists the opportunity to reintegrate. However, there ended up being a lot of violence, and the Whacko admits he still has nightmares thinking about it. This ultimately destroyed the president’s spirit and killed him.

Wenatchee, Washington. Joe Muhammad is most famous for the bronze statue he made for the Neighborhood Security Memorial, which shows “two standing citizens, and one seated in a wheelchair.” The narrator notes that Muhammad is disabled. Muhammad tells the narrator that when he went to volunteer for the Neighborhood Security Team, the recruiter was nervous and didn’t know how to tell him he might not be a suitable candidate because he was in a wheelchair. He laughed at her because he knew all that would be expected of him and knew that he could do them all. He yelled at her to call her CO, and he immediately was recruited and got his orange vest.

Neighborhood Security was a quasi-military outfit and its members attended lectures and training. They had mostly hand-to-hand weapons like hatchets and crowbars, but no Lobos yet. Three people in each team had to carry guns, and Muhammad was one of those on his team. The night shift was difficult, and they patrolled with flashlights, checking in at each house. With the resettlement program from the camps, people were assigned new housemates all the time. Muhammad says that he hadn’t realized how much space and comfort they’d had before the war. Now, he had to share his house with a family of six. He got used to it pretty quickly, however. One of the new rules was that each house had to have one night watchman, and having more people in the house made this easier.

That first year, when there were a lot of deserted houses, Neighborhood Security put police tape across the windows and doors. If it snapped, it could mean there was a zombie in the house, which had happened a few times. One time, Muhammad almost got bitten by a zombie when his team was inside checking out an abandoned house, and his wheelchair had helped him escape it. The only time he’d got hurt was when a looter had shot at him, and it was the only time Muhammad had killed anyone. There were also ferals sometimes, homeless kids who had lost their parents, who’d often run away when they were discovered.

Muhammad says that the biggest problem they faced were the quislings—people who went crazy and started acting like zombies. He says that some people are drawn to the things they are afraid of, and instead “of resisting it, they want to please it, join it, try to be like it.” The quislings not only acted like the zombies, they also began attacking and trying to eat other people. Some people thought they were immune because they’d been bitten by quislings, not zombies, and others even thought that Phalanx worked. Quislings were in some way more dangerous than zombies because they didn’t freeze and became stronger from eating people. Oddly, they didn’t seem to feel pain even when shot at because they had convinced themselves they were zombies.

Malibu, California. The narrator meets the famous director Roy Elliot for coffee in Malibu. Elliot tells him that he tried to combat ADS, which stood for Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome or Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome, depending on whom one spoke to. He says that “in those early stalemate months,” ADS killed as many people “as hunger, disease, interhuman violence, or the living dead.” They had plenty of people commit suicide, but this was different. People with ADS simply went to sleep one night and wouldn’t wake up in the morning. They felt helpless and were filled with despair, and just lost the will to live. Elliot says that he understood that feeling of helplessness because he’d been hailed as a genius director all his life, and he was now suddenly designated as F6 or unskilled labor.

Elliot went to the government with a proposal to make movies to fight ADS, and he was immediately turned down. He told the DeStRes rep that he would use his own camera and resources. All they would have to do was give him access to the military so he could show people what they were doing to stop the zombies and give them something to believe in. He was refused again because they said the military had no time to pose for the camera. So, Elliot took a DV camera and his son as his assistant, and they traveled on bikes looking for stories.

Elliot found his first story quickly. Just outside LA, 300 students from five colleges had turned the Women’s College at Scripps into a fortified settlement. They had garden tools and ROTC rifles, and had planted gardens and dug wells. They had managed to hold off 10,000 zombies, and Elliot got there just in time to capture the victorious final battle on film, before the area was declared a safe zone. He quickly took the footage home and edited it, with his wife doing the narration. He named the movie Victory at Avalon: The Battle of the Five Colleges, and screened it at camps and shelters over LA. He initially thought it was a flop because the viewers didn’t react to it.

Two weeks later, a psychiatrist visited Elliot and told him they’d seen an instant drop in ADS cases after the movie screening. He wanted copies of the film so he could screen it. None of the government authorities had bothered to inform Elliot about it, although they were continuing to screen it, too. Elliot was happy that it had worked, and immediately gathered volunteers to make more films. They made hundreds of films and screened them wherever possible. Soon, they saw a 10% drop in ADS in the entire western safe zone.

Soon, ADS was down by 23%, and the government finally became interested in what Elliot was doing. He then made Fire of the Gods, a movie about the military’s sophisticated laser weapons. The movie was a huge hit, and people lined up to watch it every night. The movie saved the laser programs, which DeStRes had deemed to be “a gross waste of resources.” Elliot admits that this was true as they were not the most effective weapons against zombies. Still, Elliot knew these weapons would dazzle Americans since they “worship technology,” which is why he focused his movie on them. The movie was such a hit that Elliot made a whole series on the military’s technology, called “Wonder Weapons.” None of these weapons made any difference in the war against the zombies, but they “were psychological war winners.”

The narrator asks Elliot if that wasn’t a lie, and Elliot says it was. He says it was the kind of lie that kept people warm when the cold truth of the zombies froze them. He says the “word for that kind of lie” is “Hope.”

Parnell Air National Guard Base, Tennessee. Gavin Blaire takes the narrator to meet his squadron commander, Colonel Christina Eliopolis, who has a reputation for being very tough. She tells the narrator that she was extremely skilled at flying a Raptor, but that in this zombie war, that meant nothing. The DeStRes had said that the air force’s RKR (resource to kill ratio) was among the worst, which was very frustrating for pilots like her. Rather than being a fighter pilot, her job became “Continental Airlift”—she carried supplies to the small military and civilian outposts that remained outside the safe zones. It was the “largest undertaking in air force history” since they had to stay in touch with all these little islands and procure and prioritize all their demands.

Eliopolis’ team sometimes dropped food and medicine, but Sinclair asked them to prioritize delivery of tools and spare parts that would help these little islands become self-sufficient. Sometimes, they dropped specialists like engineers and doctors into Blue (civilian) Zones when they needed special help. Eliopolis says that the specialists they dropped in were very brave since they knew they wouldn’t be picked up—they would be stuck there until the war ended. They went anyway. The narrator says the pilots were also very brave, and Eliopolis agrees, saying they had to fly over hundreds or thousands of miles of infested territory.

On one such mission, the plane that Eliopolis was on crashed, and she still doesn’t understand what exactly happened. They were headed from Phoenix to a Blue Zone outside Tallahassee. It was October and already winter, and the government wanted to squeeze in as many drops as possible before the weather got worse. Eliopolis’ team was exhausted. They were all on stims or “tweeks” that kept them going. This made Eliopolis want to urinate frequently, and her other team members (who were all men) teased her about having to pee frequently like a girl. When she took a bathroom break, the plane suddenly exploded. She opened her chute as she fell out and tried to contact her crew on her radio but got no response. On her way down, she saw that only one other chute was making its way down from the plane.

Eliopolis guessed she was somewhere over swampy Louisiana, but she found it hard to think straight. She checked to see that she was unhurt and had her essential supplies and gun. The narrator asks if the air force had trained them for situations like these, and she says they did have a survival program which even included real zombies. Eliopolis had never been worried about “being alone in hostile territory,” and says she even survived her four years at Colorado Springs. The narrator asks her if there weren’t any other women, and Eliopolis says there were only “other competitors who happen[ed] to have the same genitalia.” She had always been “self-reliant” and “unquestionably self-assured.”

When Eliopolis landed, she went looking for the other chute through the cold swamp. A couple hours later, she discovered the chute tangled in tree branches and her co-pilot being devoured by Zack. She was so angry that she shot them all, which was a mistake since she had wasted her ammunition. She says she was blinded by “self-hate” since she thought she was to blame for the plane blowing up. She had stepped away when it had happened, “squatting over a bucket like a goddamn girl,” instead of doing her job and flying the plane.

Just then, Eliopolis’ radio came on and a civilian voice asked if anyone had survived the wreck. Eliopolis answered immediately, and the voice on the radio said she was a skywatcher and her handle was “Mets.” The Skywatch system consisted of ham operators who reported on downed aircraft and tried to help their crews. Mets told her that she was about a day’s walk from Eliopolis, but that her cabin was heavily surrounded. Eliopolis should instead head for open ground where she could be picked up. Mets said she had already reported her position to search and rescue.

Eliopolis felt lost, but with Mets’ help, she began to figure out where she was and how she could make her way to the I-10 freeway where she could be picked up. Mets told her she would take a day or two to make it there, if she hurried. Right before she left, Mets asked her if there was something she’d forgotten to do, and Eliopolis turned to see that her co-pilot was reanimating. She put a bullet through his head. Mets told her not to blame herself, but to do her job and stay alive. She also signed off, asking Eliopolis not to waste her radio battery.

Eliopolis felt determined and focused as she made her way north, and all her training came back to her. Then she came across an SUV half-submerged in the swamp, and Mets warned her to stay away from it. Still, Eliopolis decided to inspect it and found survival gear in the backseat. The driver had blown his brains out and was decomposing. She felt sad thinking about how he had all the gear he needed in order to survive, but had given up. Mets insisted she keep moving, but Eliopolis felt drained of energy and rested against the SUV for a second. Suddenly, Mets asked her what that sound was and Eliopolis immediately heard a moan nearby. She saw about 20 Gs headed toward her. Mets told her not to run, but to stay calm and fight back.

Eliopolis climbed to the top of the SUV and started taking them down one by one. She shot 61 of them in 10 minutes, though it felt like 10 hours to her. Mets asked her to make a plan to spend the night somewhere safe since it was too late for her to get to the freeway before nightfall. Eliopolis walked away from the SUV and when it started to get dark, she hung her microfiber hammock up in a tree. She took some pills to help her sleep.

Eliopolis woke up to hear Zack’s moans and saw at least a hundred of them on the ground below, climbing over each other and trying to get her. She didn’t have enough ammo to take down this many of them, so she knew she had to escape. At training, she had been taught that in situations like this, she’d have to find a good spot to jump and land in, and then run as fast as she could. The freeway was pretty close, and she thought she could make it. However, when she jumped, she broke her ankle on a submerged rock. Mets screamed for her to get up and run, and Eliopolis started limping away.

Eliopolis made it to the freeway, but her injury prevented her from climbing it easily. As she got on the on ramp, the undead inside the cars on the roads started moaning and reaching for her. Mets kept screaming at her to keep going, and Eliopolis says that she might have lost her will to keep going if not for Mets. As soon as she got on the freeway, she saw a helicopter headed her way and signaled to it with her flare. It turned out to be a civilian chopper, not government Search and Rescue. When Eliopolis was safely on board, she thanked Mets but didn’t get a response.

Eliopolis tells the narrator that Mets wasn’t just a civilian—she must have been a pilot, too. She says that perhaps she found herself in a situation just like Eliopolis’—perhaps she, too, had lost her crew and blamed it on herself. Then she had managed to find that cabin and spent the war as a first-rate Skywalker. The narrator says that her theory makes sense, and then there is an awkward silence. Eliopolis admits that no one found Mets, or her cabin. The narrator says he knows that even the government had no record of a Skywalker named Mets. Eliopolis says that the psych evaluation they gave her when she returned wasn’t true. It didn’t matter that they said her radio hadn’t been functional the entire time. She says that Mets was there when she needed her, and that she’ll always be with her.