Max Brooks - World War Z

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.

[It is called Kost, “the Bone,” and what it lacks in beauty it more than makes up for in strength. Appearing to grow out of its solid rock foundation, this fourteenth-century Gothic “Hrad” casts an intimidating shadow over the Plakanek Valley, an image David Allen Forbes is keen to capture with his pencil and paper. This will be his second book, Castles of the Zombie War: The Continent. The Englishman sits under a tree, his patchwork clothing and long Scottish sword already adding to this Arthurian setting. He abruptly switches gears as I arrive, from serene artist to painfully nervous storyteller.]