Max Brooks - World War Z

[He places his hand horizontally against the indentation between the forehead and nose.]

It was a little harder than simple decapitation, all that thick tough bone, but it did serve to destroy the brain, as opposed to decapitation where the Living head would always require a secondary blow.

What about multiple attackers? Was that more of a problem?

Yes, in the beginning. As their numbers swelled, I began to find myself increasingly surrounded. Those early battles were… “untidy.” I must admit, I allowed my emotions to rule my hand. I was the typhoon, not the lightning bolt. During one melee at “Tokachi-dake,” I dispatched forty-one in as many minutes. I was washing bodily fluids from my clothes for a fortnight. Later, as I began to exercise more tactical creativity, I allowed the gods to join me on the battlefield. I would lead groups of beasts to the base of a tall rock, where I would crush their skulls from above. I might even find a rock that allowed them to climb up after me, not all at once, you understand, one by one, so I could knock them back into the jagged outcroppings below. I was sure to thank the spirit of each rock, or cliff, or waterfall that carried them over thousand-meter drops. This last incident was not something I cared to make a habit of. It was a long and arduous climb to retrieve the body.

You went after the corpse?

To burry it. I couldn’t just leave it there, desecrating the stream. It would not have been… “proper.”

Did you retrieve all the bodies?

Everry last one. That time, after Tokachi-dake, I dug for three days. The heads I always separated; most of the time I just burned them, but at Tokachi-dake, I threw them into the volcanic crater where Oyamatsumi’s rage could purge their stench. I did not completely understand why I committed these acts. It just felt correct, to separate the source of the evil.

The answer came to me on the eve of my second winter in exile. This would be my last night in the branches of a tall tree. Once the snow fell, I would return to the cave where I had spent the previous winter. I had just settled in comfortably, watting for dawn’s warmth to lull me to sleep, when I heard the sound of footsteps, too quick and energetic to be a beast. Haya-ji had decided to be favorable that night. He brought the smell of what could only be a human being. I had come to realize that the living dead were surprisingly bereft of odor. Yes, there was the subtle hint of decomposition, stronger, perhaps, if the body had been turned for some time, or if chewed flesh had pushed through its bowels and collected in a rotting heap in its undergarments. Other than this, though, the living dead possessed what I refer to as a “scentless stink.” They produced no sweat, no urine, or conventional feces. They did not even carry the bacteria within their stomach or teeth that, in living humans, would have fouled their breath. None of this was true of the two-legged animal rapidly approaching my position. His breath, his body, his clothes, all had clearly not been washed for some time.

It was still dark so he did not notice me. I could tell that his path would take him directly underneath the limbs of my tree. I crouched slowly, quietly. I wasn’t sure if he was hostile, insane, or even recently bitten. I was taking no chances.

[At this point, Kondo chimes in.]

KONDO: He was on me before I knew it. My sword went flying, my feet collapsed from under me.

TOMONAGA: I landed between his shoulder blades, not hard enough to do any permanent damage, but enough to knock the wind out of his slight, malnourished frame.

KONDO: He had me on my stomach, my face in the dirt, the blade of his shovel-thing pressed tightly against the back of my neck.

TOMONAGA: I told him to lie still, that I would kill him it he moved.

KONDO: I tried to speak, gasping between coughs that I was friendly, that I didn’t even know he was there, that all I wanted to do was pass along and be on my way.

TOMONAGA: I asked him where he was going.

KONDO: I told him Nemuro, the main Hokkaido port of evacuation, where there might still be one last transport, or fishing boat, or… something that might still be left to get me to Kamchatka.

TOMONAGA: I did not understand. I ordered him to explain.

KONDO: I described everything, about the plague, the evacuation. I cried when I told him that Japan had been completely abandoned, that Japan was nai.

TOMONAGA: And suddenly I knew. I knew why the gods had taken my sight, why they sent me to Hokkaido to learn how to care for the land, and why they had sent the bear to warn me.

KONDO: He began to laugh as he let me up and helped to brush the dirt from my clothing.

TOMONAGA: I told him that Japan had not been abandoned, not by those whom the gods had chosen to be its gardeners.

KONDO: At first I didn’t understand…

TOMONAGA: So I explained that, like any garden, Japan could not be allowed to wither and die. We would care for her, we would preserve her, we would annihilate the walking blight that infested and defiled her and we would restore her beauty and purity for the day when her children would return to her.

KONDO: I thought he was insane, and told him so right to his face. The two of us against millions of siafu?

TOMONAGA: I handed his sword back to him; its weight and balance felt familiar to the touch. I told him that we might be facing fifty million monsters, but those monsters would be facing the gods.

[Seryosha Garcia Alvarez suggests I meet him at his office. “The view is breathtaking,” he promises. “You will not be disappointed.” On the sixty-ninth floor of the Malpica Savings and Loans building, the second-tallest building in Cuba after Havana’s lose Marti Towers, Senor Alvarez’s corner office overlooks both the glittering metropolis and bustling harbor below. It is the “magic hour” for energy-independent buildings like the Malpica, that time of the day when it’s photovoltaic windows capture the setting sun with their almost imperceptible magenta hue. Senor Alvarez was right. I am not disappointed.]

Cuba won the Zombie War; maybe that’s not the most humble of statements, given what happened to so many other countries, but just look at where we were twenty years ago as opposed to where we are now.

Before the war, we lived in a state of quasi-isolation, worse than during the height of the cold war. At least in my father’s day you could count on what amounted to economic welfare from the Soviet Union and their ComEcon puppets. Since the fall of the communist bloc, though, our existence was one of constant deprivation. Rationed food, rationed fuel. . . the closest comparison I can make is that of Great Britain during the Blitz, and like that other besieged island, we too lived under the dark cloud of an ever-present enemy.

The U.S. blockade, while not as constricting as during the cold war, nonetheless sought to suffocate our economic lifeblood by punishing any nation that attempted free and open trade. As successful as the U.S. strategy was, its most resounding triumph was allowing Fidel to use our northern oppressor as an excuse to remain in power. “You see how hard your life is,” he would say. “The blockade has done this to you, the Yankees have done this to you, and without me, they would he storming our beaches even now!” He was brilliant, Machiavelli’s most favored son. He knew we would never remove him while the enemy was at the gates. And so we endured the hardships and the oppression, the long lines and the hushed voices. This was the Cuba I grew up in, the only Cuba I could ever imagine. That is, until the dead began to rise.

Cases were small and immediately contained, mostly Chinese refugees and a few European businessmen. Travel from the United States was still largely prohibited, so we were spared the initial blow of first-wave mass migration. The repressive nature of our fortress society allowed the government to take steps to ensure that the infection was never allowed to spread. All internal travel was suspended, and both the regular army and territorial militias were mobilized. Because Cuba had such a high percentage of doctors per capita, our leader knew the true nature of the infection weeks after the first outbreak was reported.