Max Brooks - World War Z

Wouldn’t the light tend to attract even more of them?

Yes, definitely. Night attacks almost doubled once mariners began leaving their lights on. The civilians never complained though, and neither did the island’s council. I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.

How long did you stay in Manihi?

Several months. I don’t know it you would call them the best months of our lives, but at the time it certainly felt that way. We began to let our guard down, to stop thinking of ourselves as fugitives. There were even some Chinese families, not Diaspora or Taiwanese, but real citizens of the Peoples Republic. They told us that the situation had gotten so bad that the government was barely keeping the country together. They couldn’t see how, when over half the population was infected and the army’s reserves were continuing to evaporate, they had the time or assets to devote any energy to find one lost sub. For a little while, it looked as if we could make this small island community our home, reside here until the end of the crisis or, perhaps, the end of the world.

[He looks up at the monument above us, built on the very spot where, supposedly, the last zombie in Beijing had been destroyed.]

Song and I had shore patrol duty, the night it happened. We’d stopped by a campfire to listen to the islanders’ radio. There was some broadcast about a mysterious natural disaster in China. No one knew what it was yet, and there were more than enough rumors to keep us guessing. I was looking at the radio, my back to the lagoon, when the sea in front of me suddenly began to glow. I turned just in time to see the Madrid Spirit explode. I don’t know how much natural gas she still carried, but the fireball skyrocketed high into the night, expanding and incinerating all life on the two closest motus. My first thought was “accident,” a corroded valve, a careless deckhand. Commander Song had been looking right at it though, and he’d seen the streak of the missile. A half second later, the Admiral Zheng’s foghorn sounded.

As we raced back to the boat, my wall of calm, my sense of security, came crashing down around me. I knew that missile had come from one of our subs. The only reason it had hit the Madrid was because she sat much higher in water, presenting a larger radar outline. How many had been aboard? How many were on those motus? I suddenly realized that every second we stayed put the civilian islanders in danger of another attack. Captain Chen must have been thinking the same thing. As we reached the deck, the orders to cast off were sounded from the bridge. Power lines were cut, heads counted, hatches dogged. We set course for open water and dived at battle stations.

At ninety meters we deployed our towed array sonar and immediately detected hull popping noises of another sub changing depth. Not the flexible “pop-groooaaan-pop” of steel but the quick “pop-pop-pop” of brittle titanium. Only two countries in the world used titanium hulls in their attack boats: the Russian Federation and us. The blade count confirmed it was ours, a new Type 95 hunter-killers. Two were in service by the time we left port. We couldn’t tell which one.

Was that important?

[Again, he does not answer.]

At first, the captain wouldn’t fight. He chose to bottom the boat, set her down on a sandy plateau at the bare limit of our crush depth. The Type 95 began banging away with its active sonar array. The sound pulses echoed through the water, but couldn’t get a fix on us because of the ocean floor. The 95 switched to a passive search, listening with its powerful hydrophone array for any noise we made. We reduced the reactor to a marginal output, shut down all unnecessary machinery, and ceased all crew movement within the boat. Because passive sonar doesn’t send out any signals, there was no way of knowing where the 95 was, or even if it was still around. We tried to listen for her propeller, but she’d gone as silent as us. We waited for half an hour, not moving, barely breathing.

I was standing by the sonar shack, my eyes on the overhead, when Lieutenant Liu tapped me on the shoulder. He had something on our hull-mounted array, not the other sub, something closer, all around us. I plugged in a pair of headphones and heard a scraping noise, like scratching rats. I silently motioned for the captain to listen. We couldn’t make it out. It wasn’t bottom flow, the current was too mild for that. If it was sea life, crabs or some other biologic contact, there would have to be thousands of them. I began to suspect something … I requested a scope observation, knowing the transient noise might alert our hunter. The captain agreed. We gritted our teeth as the tube slid upward. Then, the image.

Zombies, hundreds of them, were swarming over the hull. More were arriving each second, stumbling across the barren sand, climbing over each other to claw, scrape, actually bite the Zheng’s steel.

Could they have gotten in? Opened a hatch or…

No, all hatches are sealed from the inside and torpedo tubes are protected by external bow caps. What concerned us, however, was the reactor. It was cooled by circulating seawater. The intakes, although not large enough for a man to fit through, can easily be blocked by one. Sure enough, one of our warning lights began to silently flash over the number four intake. One of them had ripped the guard off and was now thoroughly lodged in the conduit. The reactor’s core temperature began to rise. To shut it down would leave us powerless. Captain Chen decided that we had to move.

We lifted off the bottom, trying to be as slow and quiet as possible. It wasn’t enough. We began to detect the sound of the 95’s propeller. She’d heard us and was moving in to attack. We heard her torpedo tubes being flooded, and the click of her outer doors opening. Captain Chen ordered our own sonar to “go active,” pinging our exact location but giving us a perfect firing solution on the 95.

We fired at the same time. Our torpedoes passed each other, as both subs tried to get away. The 95 was a little bit faster, a little more maneuverable,

but the one thing they didn’t have was our captain. He knew exactly how-to avoid the oncoming “fish,” and we ducked them easily right about the time our own found their targets.

We heard the 95’s hull screech like a dying whale, bulkheads collapsing as compartments imploded one after the other. They tell you it happens too fast for the crew to know; either the shock of the pressure change renders them unconscious or the explosion can actually cause the air to ignite. The crew dies quickly, painlessly, at least, that’s what we hoped. One thing that wasn’t painless was to watch the light behind my captains eyes die with the sounds of the doomed sub.

[He anticipates my next question, clenching his fist and exhaling hard through his nose.]

Captain Chen raised his son alone, raised him to be a good sailor, to love and serve the state, to never question orders, and to be the finest officer the Chinese navy had ever seen. The happiest day of his life was when Commander Chen Zhi Xiao received his first command, a brand-new Type 95 hunter-killer.

The kind that attacked you?

[Nods.] That was why Captain Chen would have done anything to avoid our fleet. That was why it was so important to know which sub had attacked us. To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be. He had already betrayed his oath, betrayed his homeland, and now to believe that that betrayal might have led him to murder his own son…

The next morning when Captain Chen did not appear for first watch, I went to his cabin to check on him. The lights were dim, I called his name. To my relief, he answered, but when he stepped into the light. . . his hair had lost its color, as white as prewar snow. His skin was sallow, his eyes sunken. He was truly an old man now, broken, withered. The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts.