Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

[veteranMortal]

Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

So, the book's out. As I promised when his… enlightening report for the UN was released and our serious journo friend went to the press and said he'd be writing a book, I'll be reading through it.

For the uninitiated - I'm an exile in Cuba! A regular Lenin, sitting in coffee shops, waiting for the revolution in the Home Country. Got asylum when the government started rumbling about us; what was that? Seven years ago? They'd barely stopped using us to clear those fucking tunnels in London before they started talking about the need for political normalisation. I spent my teenage years in the Years of Zed, and then most of a decade talking to people from all over in the bars and cafes in Havana, so I think I'm qualified to critique, here.

It's an interesting prospect; he's an unimaginative patsy of the American government, but between his ideological outbursts, the man managed to interview some people with a lot to say.

And some with absolutely nothing of value, but we'll get to them.

Article:

It goes by many names: "The Crisis," "The Dark Years," "The Walking Plague," as well as newer and more "hip" titles such as "World War Z" or "Z War One." I personally dislike this last moniker as it implies an inevitable "Z War Two." For me, it will always be "The Zombie War," and while many may protest the scientific accuracy of the word zombie, they will be hard-pressed to discover a more globally accepted term for the creatures that almost caused our extinction. Zombie remains a devastating word, unrivaled in its power to conjure up so many memories or emotions, and it is these memories, and emotions, that are the subject of this book.

Starting as he means to go on here, by relating global concepts through an almost exclusively American lens.

Article:

I presented this argument, perhaps less professionally than was appropriate, to my "boss," who after my final exclamation of "we can't let these stories die" responded immediately with, "Then don't. Write a book. You've still got all your notes, and the legal freedom to use them. Who's stopping you from keeping these stories alive in the pages of your own (expletive deleted) book?""

This is more or less fiction. This book wasn't created as a labour of love. He walked out of the UN headquarters and directly into the arms of the State Department. Inasmuch as the UN maintains independence from America's hegemony - and the expulsion of Mexico last year put paid to that - they baulked at some of the claims he made in this book. This is a weird framing device, and it sort of falls by the wayside as he gets more actively partisan as time goes on.

Article:

Some critics will, no doubt, take issue with the concept of a personal history book so soon after the end of worldwide hostilities. After all, it has been only twelve years since VA Day was declared in the continental United States, and barely a decade since the last major world power celebrated its deliverance on "Victory in China Day."

I will have thoughts about how he frames this, but I'll save them for later in the book.

Article:

"It is no great secret that global life expectancy is a mere shadow of its former prewar figure. Malnutrition, pollution, the rise of previously eradicated ailments, even in the United States, with its resurgent economy and universal health care are the present reality; there simply are not enough resources to care for all the physical and psychological casualties."

"Resurgent economy" [link 1] "Universal health care" [link 2]. If you don't want to click through - the US economy is a basket case propped up entirely by the military and the construction work they're doing to rebuild their infrastructure. That's tailing off now, and the whole rotten edifice is making alarming creaking noises. Universal health care is true enough, I suppose, so long as you're willing to sign up as a military reservist.

This is where he really starts with his pretty unpleasant beating the drum for the American Junta, but we aren't at "The Death Squads are based" yet, so please count your blessings at the moment.

Article:

Although this is primarily a book of memories, it includes many of the details, technological, social, economic, and so on, found in the original Commission Report, as they are related to the stories of those voices featured in these pages. This is their book, not mine, and I have tried to maintain as invisible a presence as possible. Those questions included in the text are only there to illustrate those that might have been posed by readers. I have attempted to reserve judgment, or commentary of any kind, and if there is a human factor that should be removed, let it be my own.

Some of them are fiction, most of them are biased, and all of them are filtered through his own beliefs. But so it goes.

Anyway, that was the introduction - there's not a lot to it, honestly. I'll have more for you next update? I've spoken to some people about posting this up for me on the European Intranet, so keep an ear out.

AN: So I'm trying something weird. This is an in-universe let's read of Max Brooks' WWZ, because some of the stuff he put in this book is uh. Interesting? Revelatory about his politics. Also some of it is extremely silly.

 

[veteranMortal]

Warnings

Article:

GREATER CHONGQING, THE UNITED FEDERATION OF CHINA

The United Federation of China, for the uninitiated, is more commonly referred to as "Hainan" and does not hold Chongqing, but you wouldn't expect anything else from an American, would you?

Article:

[At its prewar height, this region boasted a population of over thirty-five million people. Now, there are barely fifty thousand. Reconstruction funds have been slow to arrive in this part of the country, the government choosing to concentrate on the more densely populated coast. There is no central power grid, no running water besides the Yangtze River. But the streets are clear of rubble and the local "security council" has prevented any postwar outbreaks. The chairman of that council is Kwang Jingshu, a medical doctor who, despite his advanced age and wartime injuries, still manages to make house calls to all his patients.]

There are twenty million people in Chongqing, and there's power, just no consolidated grid - can't say I blame them for being wary of centralisation; not everyone had to nuke their pre-war government to get through it, after all.

This is one of those things - it is absolutely imperative for the Americans to insist everyone else did much worse than them, because otherwise, people'll start asking questions. But I digress.

Article:

The first outbreak I saw was in a remote village that officially had no name. The residents called it "New Dachang," but this was more out of nostalgia than anything else. Their former home, "Old Dachang," had stood since the period of the Three Kingdoms, with farms and houses and even trees said to be centuries old. When the Three Gorges Dam was completed, and reservoir waters began to rise, much of Dachang had been disassembled, brick by brick, then rebuilt on higher ground.

In contrast to everything we've seen thus far, he hasn't twisted this old boy's words too much. Hardly a huge surprise, though - disdain for the pre-war Chinese government is pretty bipartisan! Pretty hypocritical from the Americans, but what do you expect?

Article:

What could I say? The younger doctors, the kids who think medicine is just a way to pad their bank accounts, they certainly weren't going to go help some "nongmin" just for the sake of helping. I guess I'm still an old revolutionary at heart. "Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people."[1] Those words still mean something to me . . . and I tried to remember that as my Deer[2] bounced and banged over dirt roads the government had promised but never quite gotten around to paving.

Now this is interesting! I'm not sure why he left the Mao quote in, from the Chairman of the Provincial Council - he later tries to convince everyone China has joined the West in their sins, but things just don't fit. Maybe he just thinks his audience is stupid?

Article:

I was still lost in my grand, cultural criticism when I knelt to examine the first patient. She was running a high fever, forty degrees centigrade, and she was shivering violently. Barely coherent, she whimpered slightly when I tried to move her limbs. There was a wound in her right forearm, a bite mark. As I examined it more closely, I realized that it wasn't from an animal. The bite radius and teeth marks had to have come from a small, or possibly young, human being.

Some of the early evidence of the zombies being able to survive underwater, but he seems to think the cases started under the Three Gorges Dam - that's just not true, though. There's all sorts of articles about "China's Secret Plague" - evidence would seem to suggest it started in Yan'an, and spread from there, despite the best efforts of the Ministry of Health.

Article:

I found "Patient Zero" behind the locked door of an abandoned house across town. He was twelve years old. His wrists and feet were bound with plastic packing twine. Although he'd rubbed off the skin around his bonds, there was no blood. There was also no blood on his other wounds, not on the gouges on his legs or arms, or from the large dry gap where his right big toe had been. He was writhing like an animal; a gag muffled his growls.

Fuck, but I still get chills reading about the damn things. Can't understand the insistence that they're purely scientific - the fucking things walk along the bottom of lakes and bite kids' toes off. Say what you will about the American, but he can spin testimony into gold when he puts the work in.

I've skipped a bunch - the zombie kid does zombie stuff, the doctor is, obviously, just completely terrified, the kid got bit in the lake - because it's just a straight recounting, and I haven't got anything to add.

Article:

I reached for my cell phone and dialed the number of Doctor Gu Wen Kuei, an old comrade from my army days who now worked at the Institute of Infectious Diseases at Chongqing University.[3] We exchanged pleasantries, discussing our health, our grandchildren; it was only proper. I then told him about the outbreak and listened as he made some joke about the hygiene habits of hillbillies. I tried to chuckle along but continued that I thought the incident might be significant. Almost reluctantly he asked me what the symptoms were. I told him everything: the bites, the fever, the boy, the arm . . . his face suddenly stiffened. His smile died

The PRC did not fuck around with their disease control. They didn't have a hope of containing it - no one could - but they knew what they were doing. The disease simmered for a fair amount of time - some put it at almost 18 months - before it got out.

Article:

They were there in less than one [hour], fifty men in large army Z-8A helicopters; all were wearing hazardous materials suits. They said they were from the Ministry of Health. I don't know who they thought they were kidding. With their bullying swagger, their intimidating arrogance, even these backwater bumpkins could recognize the Guoanbu.

And here we reach the crux of the failure of the PRC's response; they gave the work to the Guoanbu. They did a good enough job, those StateSec creeps, but spooks never met a crisis they wouldn't exploit. It didn't take long for them to start purging dissidents - Uighurs and the like - under the guise of their counter-ghoul protocols.

And that meant no one took the protocols seriously - not in China, and certainly not in the West. The consequences of that… well, we're living them.

Article:

It was something he had said . . . a phrase he hadn't used in a very long time, not since those "minor" border clashes with the Soviet Union. That was back in 1969. We had been in an earthen bunker on our side of the Ussuri, less than a kilometer downriver from Chen Bao. The Russians were preparing to retake the island, their massive artillery hammering our forces.

Less than a thousand people died in the Sino-Soviet border clashes. This embellishment being a factor of the Americans wanting to exaggerate China's antipathy towards the Soviets I find extremely unlikely. More probably, I think, it's a factor of the present border conflicts between the Worker's Republic of China and various Russian warlords.

Article:

[Kwang Jingshu was arrested by the MSS and incarcerated without formal charges. By the time he escaped, the outbreak had spread beyond China's borders.]

"Escaped" - did he bollocks. Kwang has never been shy about admitting it; sympathetic factions within the MSS released him.

Anyway - not an especially controversial start, but stick with me. The next section is WILD. "China caused the whole apocalypse because of smugglers" wild.

Article:

LHASA, THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF TIBET

Ahh, the PRT. The name is a hangover of the fact that armies loyal to the Politburo seized Tibet after it became clear they'd lost, and it stuck even after those armies demobilised in the conditional amnesty, which makes relations awkward with China, so I gather? Not as frosty as Hainan, obviously, but not as close as Korea.

Article:

[The world's most populous city is still recovering from the results of last week's general election. The Social Democrats have smashed the Llamist Party in a landslide victory and the streets are still roaring with revelers. I meet Nury Televaldi at a crowded sidewalk café. We have to shout over the euphoric din.]

I'm going to be yelled at by Tibetan maoists, but this is essentially correct - not about Lhasa being the world's most populous city; Lhasa is at 12,000 feet, you daft prick, come up with a more convincing lie - but that the Communist Party of Tibet are social democrats at best, and market liberals with a welfare state at the most accurate. Call yourselves adherents of MZT all you want, dipshits, it doesn't make it true.

Article:

Before the outbreak started, overland smuggling was never popular. To arrange for the passports, the fake tour buses, the contacts and protection on the other side all took a lot of money. Back then, the only two lucrative routes were into Thailand or Myanmar. Where I used to live, in Kashi, the only option was into the ex-Soviet republics. No one wanted to go there, and that is why I wasn't initially a shetou. I was an importer: raw opium, uncut diamonds, girls, boys, whatever was valuable from those primitive excuses for countries.

Charming fellows, the ones our journalist chooses to interview.

Article:

We'd heard the rumors. We'd even had an outbreak somewhere in Kashi. The government had hushed it up pretty quickly. But we guessed, we knew something was wrong.

One of the commonalities across almost every arsehole you'll meet is that he'll tell you he "knew something was wrong"

You know, like a liar. Maybe he thought there was a disease, maybe he thought there was some sort of political purge, or the government was planning to ramp up their mistreatment of the Uighur people - evidence suggests without the apocalypse, they were headed in a familiar and deeply awful direction, but I can assure you he wasn't sitting there saying "You know, I think the dead are reanimating"

Article:

Didn't the government try to shut you down?

Officially they did. Penalties on smuggling were hardened; border checkpoints were strengthened. They even executed a few shetou, publicly, just to make an example. If you didn't know the true story, if you didn't know it from my end, you'd think it was an efficient crackdown.

The PRC did not execute people in public at this stage. Once they were fighting the zombies in anger, sure. Once they were in a civil war, absolutely. Once they were losing that civil war? Mass executions of defeatists were fairly common. During the coverup? No. He's blowing smoke up our journalist's arse.

But on the whole, he's not lying. As I mentioned, the act of letting the MSS run their ghoul purges meant no one took them seriously; letting people go for enough money was commonplace.

Every country, more or less, made this mistake. Secret Police and Special Forces are very good at killing specific civilians, so it makes sense to give them the job, but they therefore don't consider it a matter of public health, they consider it a matter of, well, state security. And those are more flexible.

Article:

Air smuggling became big business in the eastern provinces. These were rich clients, the ones who could afford prebooked travel packages and firstclass tourist visas. They would step off the plane at London or Rome, or even San Francisco, check into their hotels, go out for a day's sightseeing, and simply vanish into thin air. That was big money. I'd always wanted to break into air transport.

This is true. Sort of. A lot of people were trafficked out of China by air - thousands, maybe? It isn't an area of expertise for me, my pre-war study largely focuses on "How'd they fuck it" not on "What other shit were they doing" - The trafficked people were almost never infected. In the more populated regions of China, they were already firefighting enough actual outbreaks that they knew what they were fighting? Chinese citizens who'd been bitten would be arrested and liquidated. I couldn't tell you how many slipped through that net, but it wasn't many.

Article:

But what about infection? Wasn't there a risk of being discovered?

That was only later, after Flight 575. Initially there weren't too many infected taking these flights. If they did, they were in the very early stages. Air transport shetou were very careful. If you showed any signs of advanced infection, they wouldn't go near you. They were out to protect their business. The golden rule was, you couldn't fool foreign immigration officials until you fooled your shetou first. You had to look and act completely healthy, and even then, it was always a race against time.

Flight 575. God. Plane goes down over the Pacific, the black box recording indicates the passengers have suffered a mass delusion, are rushing the cockpit. Mentions that one of the flight attendants is holding the door, but that one of the passengers had bitten him before he got in, then the captain doesn't note anything else, because… Well, you know what the because is.

Article:

I heard this one story about a couple, a very well-to-do businessman and his wife. He had been bitten. Not a serious one, you understand, but one of the "slow burns," where all the major blood vessels are missed. I'm sure they thought there was a cure in the West, a lot of the infected did. Apparently, they reached their hotel room in Paris just as he began to collapse. His wife tried to call the doctor, but he forbade it. He was afraid they would be sent back. Instead, he ordered her to abandon him, to leave now before he lapsed into coma. I hear that she did, and after two days of groans and commotion, the hotel staff finally ignored the DO NOT DISTURB sign and broke into the room. I'm not sure if that is how the Paris outbreak started, though it would make sense.

This is one of those stories which is very "neat" - I'm sure you've heard similar. Oh yes, the London outbreak began when a Chinese businessman turned in the middle of a business meeting, the New York outbreak started with a Chinese tourist mauling his tour guide, the Russian outbreak with a Chinese student ripping the throat out of her lecturer.

It's all bullshit. Maybe a couple of dozen Chinese infected ever got on a plane, and they were mostly headed for Australia, because it's closer, and they just wanted to avoid being shot; they didn't think there was a "cure in the West" - how primitive do people think China's healthcare system was? The PRC wasn't the last days of the Soviet fucking Union, they didn't mythologise "The West" like this. They fled China to avoid being shot, because they knew - these scant handfuls who got out with bites - that the west was shitting the bed on dealing with infections.

And they knew this because of the real reason the plague spread so fast. Because the infection came to Paris along a recognised, known vector. Pierre Duval, a student at one of the universities in Paris, on an exchange in Shanghai to improve his Cantonese, was bitten on the hand by a homeless woman before the woman was shot dead.

Pierre ran to the French Consulate in Shanghai, and got himself on the first flight back to Paris. He got stitches and a dressing on his hand, got on the plane, left Paris Charles De Gaulle and disappeared into the city. It was about 2 days later that Paris police forces started receiving reports of "rabid" homeless people attacking people in the streets.

Of course, there was already a smouldering outbreak in Marseilles that France was more or less ignoring, but the Paris outbreak started with Pierre Duval.

This was common - the MSS could not and would not touch foreign nationals, but they wouldn't be treated in Chinese hospitals either, and so almost without fail, the consulates would send them home, and they'd land in major western cities with minutes on the hour before they turned. I'd bet good money that's what happened to Flight 575, though it's impossible to tell, exactly.

Article:

The low-income areas?

If that's what you want to call them. What better place to hide than among that part of society that no one else even wants to acknowledge. How else could so many outbreaks have started in so many First World ghettos?

I skipped ahead; he's still blaming Chinese refugees, when the truth is that outbreaks started where the police response was to do absolutely fuck all. No yellow peril needed. It is genuinely absurd, but our journalist friend truly does hang his hat on "Chinese smugglers caused the global apocalypse" even when it is a matter of historical fact that this is not true.

Article:

What does that mean?

If western Europe has increased its security, go through eastern Europe. If the U.S. won't let you in, go through Mexico. I'm sure it helped make the rich white countries feel safer, even though they had infestations already bubbling within their borders. This is not my area of expertise, you remember, I was primarily land transport, and my target countries were in central Asia.

This is for the domestic American and Western European audiences. It is essentially untrue, but it stirs up the sort of resentment and border grumbling that the US Government, especially, is deeply invested in.

Article:

Were they easier to enter?

They practically begged us for the business. Those countries were in such economic shambles, their officials were so backward and corrupt, they actually helped us with the paperwork in exchange for a percentage of our fee. There were even shetou, or whatever they called them in their barbarian babble, who worked with us to get renshe across the old Soviet republics into countries like India or Russia, even Iran, although I never asked or wanted to know where any of the renshe were going. My job ended at the border. Just get their papers stamped, their vehicles tagged, pay the guards off, and take my cut.

There is an awful lot of Central Asian blood on the hands of men like Nury Televaldi. The outbreaks in Europe, America and the like were not due to smugglers from China, but in Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Tajikstan… those poor bastards.

Article:

My associates from the coastal provinces were the ones who had to contend with the possibility of an infected breaking its bonds and contaminating the entire hold. What did they do? I've heard of various "solutions." Sometimes ships would pull up to a stretch of deserted coast—it didn't matter if it was the intended country, it could have been any coast—and "unload" the infected renshe onto the beach. I've heard of some captains making for an empty stretch of open sea and just tossing the whole writhing lot overboard. That might explain the early cases of swimmers and divers starting to disappear without a trace, or why you'd hear of people all around the world saying they saw them walking out of the surf.

There are all sorts of things I could say about this, but like… this mostly didn't happen. Obviously. Occasionally someone being trafficked for unrelated reasons in some shipping container would've been bitten, but most seaborn infections were due to Cruise Ships, which have always been essentially plague ships. Americans love blaming the PRC for every fucking disaster in the rise of the plague, though, so here we go again.

Article:

I did have one similar incident, the one that convinced me it was time to quit. There was this truck, a beat-up old jalopy. You could hear the moans from the trailer. A lot of fists were slamming against the aluminum. It was actually swaying back and forth. In the cab there was a very wealthy investment banker from Xi'an. He'd made a lot of money buying up American credit card debt. He had enough to pay for his entire extended family. The man's Armani suit was rumpled and torn. There were scratch marks down the side of his face, and his eyes had that frantic fire I was starting to see more of every day. The driver's eyes had a different look, the same one as me, the look that maybe money wasn't going to be much good for much longer. I slipped the man an extra fifty and wished him luck. That was all I could do.

This was essentially semi-officially endorsed biological warfare, and it was only able to happen because by this point the PRC was changing tactics, shifting from hoping to contain the plague to hoping to use it as a distraction. They couldn't keep it contained, and chasing runners like these was taking too many resources they needed to deal with the infected within China itself, so they though they'd just let the rest of the world deal with them.

I don't think the Politburo really knew what they were dealing with, and once they did… That's a matter for a later chapter.

Article:

Where was the truck headed?

Kyrgyzstan.

Tibet does not currently recognise any of the cliques or provisional governments which squabble in Central Asia, but they are in discussions with the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic, which has governed Kyrgyzstan since about a year after everything started to collapse. Once they've completed discussions - which should go faster - they'll likely sign an extradition treaty.

Men like Nury are running out of places to run in central asia, which is no doubt why he gave an interview to an American Journalist which confirmed so many of the US Government's broadly incorrect assertions.

Article:

METEORA, GREECE

[The monasteries are built into the steep, inaccessible rocks, some buildings sitting perched atop high, almost vertical columns. While originally an attractive refuge from the Ottoman Turks, it later proved just as secure from the living dead. Postwar staircases, mostly metal or wood, and all easily retractable, cater to the growing influx of both pilgrims and tourists. Meteora has become a popular destination for both groups in recent years. Some seek wisdom and spiritual enlightenment, some simply search for peace. Stanley MacDonald is one of the latter. A veteran of almost every campaign across the expanse of his native Canada, he first encountered the living dead during a different war, when the Third Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry was involved in drug interdiction operations in Kyrgyzstan.]

Stanley MacDonald is a serious advocate for veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, especially amongst the surviving pre-War troops; he's given speeches about how they got absolutely flogged to death by a government that first gaslit them [LINK] then blamed them [LINK] then asked them to die for it [LINK]. Not a bad guy at all, honestly. It is currently illegal for him to return to Canada.

Article:

Please don't confuse us with the American "Alpha teams." This was long before their deployment, before "the Panic," before the Israeli selfquarantine . . . this was even before the first major public outbreak in Cape Town. This was just at the beginning of the spread, before anybody knew anything about what was coming.

The fucking Alpha teams, sweet Christ. Hasn't the man been through enough without accusing him of being on the fucking Alpha teams?

Article:

These new tracks were very different from the old. They were slower, closer together. His right foot was dragging, clearly why he'd lost his shoe, an old, worn-out Nike high-top. The drag marks were sprinkled with fluid. Not blood, not human, but droplets of hard, black, crusted ooze that none of us recognized. We followed these and the drag marks to the entrance of the cave.

It's interesting how repulsive the ghouls are. They literally drip a black ichor instead of blood! There's not a lot to say in this chapter; Stanley's recounted this story before, I expect we've all heard it. They followed the trail of this ghoul to a cave where the gang inside - presumably the same gang that the ghoul was in before? It isn't the clearest story, Stanley's recollections aren't precise - took the zombie to their doctor at the back of their complex, whereupon they got, uh, devoured. Stanley was then attacked by a zombie - and was extremely lucky to kill it, under the circumstances - and then…

Article:

"Exposure to unknown chemical agents." That's what they told me back in Edmonton, that or an adverse reaction to our own prophylactic medication. They threw in a healthy dose of PTSD[2] for good measure. I just needed rest, rest and long-term "evaluation" . . . "Evaluation" . . . that's what happens when it's your own side. It's only "interrogation" when it's the enemy. They teach you how to resist the enemy, how to protect your mind and spirit. They don't teach you how to resist your own people, especially people who think they're trying to "help" you see "the truth." They didn't break me, I broke myself. I wanted to believe them and I wanted them to help me. I was a good soldier, well trained, experienced; I knew what I could do to my fellow human beings and what they could do to me. I thought I was ready for anything.

[He looks out at the valley, his eyes unfocused.]

Who in his right mind could have been ready for this?

This is not an uncommon experience amongst soldiers who fought in the various imperial wars America spearheaded before the apocalypse. They would stumble across this, and they'd either be bullied and gaslit into 'forgetting' or be sectioned by the military.

Stanley is currently one of the spokespeople of a campaign to force Canada, America and much of the former NATO to compensate the soldiers treated like this, which you can donate to [HERE] if you want.

Article:

THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST, BRAZIL

[I arrive blindfolded, so as not to reveal my "hosts' " location. Outsiders call them the Yanomami, "The Fierce People," and it is unknown whether this supposedly warlike nature or the fact that their new village hangs suspended from the tallest trees was what allowed them to weather the crisis as well, if not better, than even the most industrialized nation. It is not clear whether Fernando Oliveira, the emaciated, drug-addicted white man "from the edge of the world," is their guest, mascot, or prisoner.]

Maybe they blindfolded you so you couldn't bring any more racist morons along to talk about how their inherently warlike and uncivilised nature is why they survived the zombie apocalypse, as opposed to, say, living in the fucking Amazon rainforest, not a city. If I had to guess why a trauma surgeon is allowed to live with them, I'd say it's because he's a trauma surgeon, not because the inscrutable natives are keeping him as a mascot. Jesus Christ, my guy.

Article:

The package arrived from the airport an hour before the patient, packed in ice in a plastic picnic cooler. Hearts are extremely rare. Not like livers or skin tissue, and certainly not like kidneys, which, after the "presumed consent" law was passed, you could get from almost any hospital or morgue in the country.

Pre-emptively; this sort of thing did happen, though the most common source of infected organs would, as ever, be from the country in which the organ was being implanted. I tell you this because there is a narrative our esteemed journalist is pushing, here, that all the outbreaks came from some corrupt Chinese official. It's not true. By this point, Brazil was already dealing with outbreaks, they were just generally small enough to not make the noise.

Something like this - a heart - will have come from Rio De Janeiro itself. They can't keep for long enough to come from far away, especially not to then sit on ice for an hour in some backalley clinic.

Article:

Where had it come from?

China, most likely. My broker operated out of Macau. We trusted him. His record was solid. When he assured us that the package was "clean," I took him at his word; I had to. He knew the risks involved, so did I, so did the patient. Herr Muller, in addition to his conventional heart ailments, was cursed with the extremely rare genetic defect of dextrocardia with situs inversus. His organs lay in their exact opposite position; the liver was on the left side, the heart entryways on the right, and so on. You see the unique situation we were facing. We couldn't have just transplanted a conventional heart and turned it backward. It just doesn't work that way. We needed another fresh, healthy heart from a "donor" with exactly the same condition. Where else but China could we find that kind of luck?

This specific situation, perversely, was pretty common. If you got an illicit organ transplant anywhere in the world with any sort of rare or niche organ, you were taking your life into your own hands - it wasn't just China; he's pretending it was, because he doesn't want to admit that his organs almost certainly came from the hospital where he did his day job, not China.

Any country which bothered to conduct studies on the infected or the undead proper, you'd end up with corpses with no obvious diseases, usually dead from trauma, with startlingly detailed medical records. All sorts of low level bureaucrats in all sorts of countries made money carving up those infected with the misfortune to have died with some genetic divergence or another.

Article:

I arrived to find Graziela trying to comfort a hysterical Rosi, one of my nurses. The poor girl was inconsolable. I gave her a good one across the cheek—that calmed her down—and asked her what was going on. Why were there spots of blood on her uniform? Where was Doctor Silva? Why were some of the other patients out of their rooms, and what the hell was that goddamn banging noise? She told me that Herr Muller had flat-lined, suddenly, and unexpectedly. She explained that they had been trying to revive him when Herr Muller had opened his eyes and bitten Doctor Silva on the hand. The two of them struggled; Rosi tried to help but was almost bitten herself. She left Silva, ran from the room, and locked the door behind her.

For the transformation to be so sudden, the surgeons must've been negligent; a heart that killed him this fast would've had to come not just from some unfortunate infected, but like, an actual no shit ghoul. That fucking thing must've been, like, grey. This is my problem, I think, and here is a nice, politically uncontroversial place to air it - our esteemed journalist doesn't question these people. He's not even a friendly interviewer, he's a passive interviewer. It's infuriating.

Article:

I went back to Herr Muller's room, I knocked several times. I heard nothing. I whispered his and Silva's names. No one responded. I noticed blood seeping out from under the door. I entered and found it covering the floor. Silva was lying in the far corner, Muller crouching over him with his fat, pale, hairy back to me. I can't remember how I got his attention, whether I called his name, uttered a swear, or did anything at all but just stand there. Muller turned to me, bits of bloody meat falling from his open mouth. I saw that his steel sutures had been partially pried open and a thick, black, gelatinous fluid oozed through the incision. He got shakily to his feet, lumbering slowly toward me.

I raised my pistol, aiming at his new heart. It was a "Desert Eagle," Israeli, large and showy, which is why I'd chosen it. I'd never fired it before, thank God. I wasn't ready for the recoil. The round went wild, literally blowing his head off. Lucky, that's all, this lucky fool standing there with a smoking gun, and a stream of warm urine running down my leg. Now it was my turn to get slapped, several times by Graziela, before I came to my senses and telephoned the police.

This section is interesting because of how closely it lies next to something of substantial interest to me, which, of course, our esteemed journalist says nothing about - How much, exactly, did the police know?

Article:

Were you arrested?

Are you crazy? These were my partners, how do you think I was able to get my homegrown organs. How do you think I was able to take care of this mess? They're very good at that. They helped explain to my other patients that a homicidal maniac had broken into the clinic and killed both Herr Muller and Doctor Silva. They also made sure that none of the staff said anything to contradict that story.

Like, they wouldn't have let this slide. My apologies to Doctor Oliveira, but a heart surgeon and an Austrian businessman getting killed doesn't just disappear under the radar. The cops must've known I think - they respond to all sorts of violent disturbances. I know there's some evidence the Met back home knew long before anyone else did, and I can't imagine the BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais), fascist pigs that they were, were less well informed than the Met. This is important, because it recontextualises…

Article:

They listed Silva as the victim of a probable "car jacking." I don't know where they put his body; maybe some ghetto side street in the City of God, a drug score gone bad just to give the story more credibility. I hope they just burned him, or buried him . . . deep.

Do you think he . . .

I don't know. His brain was intact when he died. If he wasn't in a body bag . . . if the ground was soft enough. How long would it have taken to dig out?

This. It's well known that the police in Rio were fighting a war with the favella gangs, and not doing well. Combine this with reports of massive ghoul outbreaks throughout various favellas…

None of the records of the BOPE at the time survived the crisis, and the Brazilian government denies these allegations whenever they're raised, but it does make you think, no?

Article:

And Mister Muller?

No explanation, not to his widow, not to the Austrian embassy. Just another kidnapped tourist who'd been careless in a dangerous town. I don't know if Frau Muller ever believed that story, or if she ever tried to investigate further. She probably never realized how damn lucky she was.

Why was she lucky?

Are you serious? What if he hadn't reanimated in my clinic? What if he'd managed to make it all the way home?

She was lucky! If you'd done more due diligence with the heart, paradoxically, this could've been much worse. The heart is in the circulatory system, but it doesn't really… interact with the blood that much? It's a pump. A dodgy heart transplant could ordinarily take hours to give someone the munchies for human flesh. This one must've been, as mentioned, teeming with the fucking stuff.

Article:

Is that possible?

Of course it is! Think about it. Because the infection started in the heart, the virus had direct access to his circulatory system, so it probably reached his brain seconds after it was implanted. Now you take another organ, a liver or a kidney, or even a section of grafted skin. That's going to take a lot longer, especially if the virus is only present in small amounts.

He's covering his arse. The kidneys and liver interface directly with the bloodstream, filtering it and releasing the filtered blood back out; they'd dump the virus straight in there. The heart usually takes longer, because it's just a pump, so almost the whole thing needs to be compromised before it starts leaching virus into the blood. I know this, our heart surgeon knows this, he's just banking on our journalistic friend not knowing this, and not pushing.

A skin graft is unlikely to come from a corpse, obviously.

Article:

But whoever is removing the organ . . .

. . . may not know what he's dealing with. I didn't. These were the very early stages, when nobody knew anything yet. Even if they did know, like elements in the Chinese army . . . you want to talk about immoral . . . Years before the outbreak they'd been making millions on organs from executed political prisoners. You think something like a little virus is going to make them stop sucking that golden tit?

This is Falun Gong conspiratorialising - the idea that China's been secretly engaging in mass organ harvesting, somehow without having more than the expected level of organ transplants or immunosuppressant usage.

Our drug addict doctor, it seems, is something of a conspiracist, and he's ascribing an awful lot of malice to everyone but himself, here. A lot of people even "in the know" in China assumed most of the people being killed were political dissidents, not actual ghouls, and even then, any organ harvesting was rare.

This specific heart I expect was expedited by whoever harvested it because of its rarity, so the fact that the donor was growling wasn't a concern to them.

Article:

You remove the heart not long after the victim's died . . . maybe even while he's still alive . . . they used to do that, you know, remove living organs to ensure their freshness . . . pack it in ice, put it on a plane for Rio . . . China used to be the largest exporter of human organs on the world market. Who knows how many infected corneas, infected pituitary glands . . . Mother of God, who knows how many infected kidneys they pumped into the global market. And that's just the organs! You want to talk about the "donated" eggs from political prisoners, the sperm, the blood? You think immigration was the only way the infection swept the planet? Not all the initial outbreaks were Chinese nationals. Can you explain all those stories of people suddenly dying of unexplained causes, then reanimating without ever having been bitten? Why did so many outbreaks begin in hospitals? Illegal Chinese immigrants weren't going to hospitals. Do you know how many thousands of people got illegal organ transplants in those early years leading up to the Great Panic? Even if 10 percent of them were infected, even 1 percent . . .

This is hot nonsense. People didn't harvest live organs outside of very niche circumstances, very few organs came from the infected anyway, fewer would pass even basic muster, and the conspiratorial nonsense about donated eggs and sperm… doesn't need to be discussed to be dismissed.

The reason the initial outbreaks were not Chinese nationals, the reason they happened in hospitals? Could it be that this apocalypse was not solely down to the Chinese government? No, of course not, it must've been the evil organ harvesting.

I'm sure Doctor Oliveira believes it, but, well… I suppose there's a reason our journalist traipsed all the way out to the rainforest to talk to him, rather than talking to, oh, any other transplant surgeon.

This feels like a good enough place to stop; the dividing line between the extremely early days and the first experiences of no shit uncontrolled outbreaks. Early warnings and warning warnings, if you like.

I'm in talks with a friend in the US about copying this across, but that'll be harder than it is to get this on the European Intra - the French at least are still willing to let us talk over email, and the Italians are getting downright friendly, but the yanks screen all mail from Cuba.

AN: I like diegetic criticism, and WWZ is a weird, weird book, deeply worthy of criticism. This section is mostly just a laundry list of "and that's why everything was China's fault" honestly, so the, ah, reviewer is mostly focusing on that. Next time she'll be talking about Israel. Oh no.

Anyway, apologies if this is, like, too long. I won't post the section after this one today. I've completed up to "The Great Panic" if anyone but me still has this book.

 

[veteranMortal]

Lots to cover this time, from Cape Town to Israel. He, uh… basically lies about the Israeli Civil War? Its part of a broad sanitisation which consequently kinda entails framing it as a religious war rather than a political one.

Article:

BRIDGETOWN HARBOR, BARBADOS, WEST INDIES FEDERATION

[I was told to expect a "tall ship," although the "sails" of IS Imfingo refer to the four vertical wind turbines rising from her sleek, trimaran hull. When coupled with banks of PEM, or proton exchange membrane, fuel cells, a technology that converts seawater into electricity, it is easy to see why the prefix "IS" stands for "Infinity Ship." Hailed as the undisputed future of maritime transport, it is still rare to see one sailing under anything but a government flag. The Imfingo is privately owned and operated. Jacob Nyathi is her captain.]

LMFAO, the fucking infinity ships. Proton exchange membranes and fuel cells and wind turbine sails all so you can quarter way charge the batteries before you have to turn on the diesel generators in the hold to finish charging them.

Who'd have thought tech bros would survive the fucking apocalypse. If you want an "Infinity Ship" put a nuclear reactor on it. Solved problem. These things got a lot of attention about a year ago - America and Brazil both bought a couple, as did a handful of private companies, then as it sunk in that you were paying an awful lot of money for a ship that ran on diesel rather than HFO. I suppose it is informative to date when exactly he interviewed this guy.

Article:

I was born about the same time as the new, postapartheid South Africa. In those euphoric days, the new government not only promised the democracy of "one man, one vote," but employment and housing to the entire country. My father thought that meant immediately. He didn't understand that these were long-term goals to be achieved after years— generations—of hard work.
He thought that if we abandoned our tribal homeland and relocated to a city, there would be a brand-new house and high-paying jobs just sitting there waiting for us. My father was a simple man, a day laborer. I can't blame him for his lack of formal education, his dream of a better life for his family. And so we settled in Khayelitsha, one of the four main townships outside of Cape Town. It was a life of grinding, hopeless, humiliating poverty. It was my childhood.

I remember the Cape Town outbreak. The Khayelitsha Outbreak, I suppose, but we always called it "The Cape Town Outbreak" so forgive me for continuing to do so. I was 10, and it was on the news, just before Doctor Who. A riot in Cape Town, caused by a new strain of Rabies. Pictures of people staggering through the smoke.

It wasn't even the headline - that was some further pathetic capitulation by the Liberal Democrats towards the Tories - but I remember it, and I wasn't even there. That was a year before things really started to go to shit. The last normal year.

Article:

Maybe those thoughts were what distracted me at first, maybe it was simply being so knackered, but I felt my body instinctively react before I consciously heard the shots. Gunfire was not unusual, not in my neighborhood, not in those days. "One man, one gun," that was the slogan of my life in Khayelitsha. Like a combat veteran, you develop almost genetic survival skills. Mine were razor sharp. I crouched, tried to triangulate the sound, and at the same time look for the hardest surface to hide behind. Most of the homes were just makeshift shanties, wood scraps or corrugated tin, or just sheets of plastic fastened to barely standing beams. Fire ravaged these lean-tos at least once a year, and bullets could pass through them as easily as open air.

The South African government did not need to let this happen. They knew there was a medical crisis brewing in Khayelitsha, and they just let it boil over. Even if it had just been an ordinary disease, that would've been negligent, but it wasn't.

His instincts are good though. I imagine that's what kept him alive after this.

Article:

Now there were screams, shouts. I began to smell smoke. I heard the stirrings of a crowd. I peeked out from around the corner. Dozens of people, most of them in their nightclothes, all shouting "Run! Get out of there! They're coming!" House lamps were lighting all around me, faces poking out of shanties. "What's going on here?" they asked. "Who's coming?" Those were the younger faces. The older ones, they just started running. They had a different kind of survival instinct, an instinct born in a time when they were slaves in their own country. In those days, everyone knew who "they" were, and if "they" were ever coming, all you could do was run and pray

It's funny he mentions this, however oblique he decides to be about it. I suppose if you're a Black South African, you've got good reason to remember the bad old days; they've wrangled themselves a nasty little enclave along the west coast in case anyone ever forgets.

Article:

Did you run?

I couldn't. My family, my mother and two little sisters, lived only a few "doors" down from the Radio Zibonele station, exactly where the mob was fleeing from. I wasn't thinking. I was stupid. I should have doubled back around, found an alley or quiet street.

I remember someone theorised - I don't know who, some American maybe - that we have a panic response to the ghouls, like dogs do. That we get irrational, fearful, stupid in the face of incomprehensible horror.

I think this theoretician must've never seen any other sort of natural disaster. People are just like this, in the presence of the animate dead or not.

Article:

I got to my feet, my head swam, my body ached all over. Instinctively I began to withdraw, backing into the "doorway" of the closest shack. Something grabbed me from behind, pulled at my collar, tore the fabric. I spun, ducked, and kicked hard. He was large, larger and heavier than me by a few kilos. Black fluid ran down the front of his white shirt.

The ghouls aren't biological. There's an animating force here beyond just a virus, I don't care what anyone says.

He beats it to death, btw. I'm being sparse with quotes because I know a lot of people are still getting over being in situations like this.

Article:

I ran through a shanty where a woman was hiding in the corner. Her two children were huddled against her, crying. "Come with me!" I said. "Please, come, we have to go!" I held out my hands, moved closer to her. She pulled her children back, brandishing a sharpened screwdriver. Her eyes were wide, scared. I could hear sounds behind me . . . smashing through shanties, knocking them over as they came. I switched from Xhosa to English. "Please," I begged, "you have to run!" I reached for her but she stabbed my hand. I left her there. I didn't know what else to do. She is still in my memory, when I sleep or maybe close my eyes sometimes. Sometimes she's my mother, and the crying children are my sisters.

Somewhere between a hundred and two hundred people died in Khayelitsha, mostly of smoke inhalation, bullet wounds and from the crush. This was caused by 10 ghouls, who cumulatively killed around 12 people before being contained.

We didn't know what the fuck we were dealing with, and people overwhelmingly just panicked, even before we knew our governments couldn't handle it.

Article:

I saw the man in the bed next to me frantically wheeled out as soon as his breathing stopped. I didn't even care when I overheard them talking about the outbreak of "rabies."

Who was talking about it?

I don't know. Like I said, I was as high as the stars. I just remember voices in the hallway outside my ward, loud voices angrily arguing. "That wasn't rabies!" one of them yelled. "Rabies doesn't do that to people!" Then . . . something else . . . then "well, what the hell do you suggest, we've got fifteen downstairs right here! Who knows how many more are still out there!"

South Africa would never properly contain this outbreak, and after a while, they stopped trying. We all know why, but I'll talk about that later. Believe me when I say I will talk about that. Vile little fascist.

Article:

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

[Jurgen Warmbrunn has a passion for Ethiopian food, which is our reason for meeting at a Falasha restaurant. With his bright pink skin, and white, unruly eyebrows that match his "Einstein" hair, he might be mistaken for a crazed scientist or college professor. He is neither. Although never acknowledging which Israeli intelligence service he was, and possibly still is, employed by, he openly admits that at one point he could be called "a spy."]

I mean, he's Mossad? I don't really get why they're playing coy here. He was Mossad before the plague, he's probably still Mossad. Like, we know Mossad mostly went this way whilst Shin Bet went the other, and Aman wouldn't be looking into this shit.

Article:

The first warning I had of the plague was from our friends and customers over in Taiwan. They were complaining about our new software decryption program. Apparently it was failing to decode some e-mails from PRC sources, or at least decoding them so poorly that the text was unintelligible. I suspected the problem might not be in the software but in the translated messages themselves. The mainland Reds . . . I guess they weren't really Reds anymore but . . . what do you want from an old man? The Reds had a nasty habit of using too many different computers from too many different generations and countries.

By my understanding, at this point it was increasingly an open secret in China, and they were fairly confident they could handle them, so they were getting increasingly blase. To be fair, the PLA was pretty sure they had it in hand - they did, come to that. So it isn't a huge surprise they let it slip to the Taiwanese.

Article:

Before I suggested this theory to Taipei, I thought it might be a good idea to review the scrambled messages myself. I was surprised to find that the characters themselves were perfectly decoded. But the text itself . . . it all had to do with a new viral outbreak that first eliminated its victim, then reanimated his corpse into some kind of homicidal berzerker. Of course, I didn't believe this was true, especially because only a few weeks later the crisis in the Taiwan Strait began and any messages dealing with rampaging corpses abruptly ended.

China made, like, the most catastrophic mistake any state has ever made with the whole Taiwan situation. I guess they managed to put the five-star Red over Taipei in the end, for what that was worth.

Article:

As soon as he mentioned reanimating human bodies, I asked for the man's number. It turns out he had been in Cape Town on one of those "Adrenaline Tours," shark feeding I think it was.

[He rolls his eyes.]

Apparently the shark had obliged him, right in the tuchus, which is why he had been recovering at Groote Schuur when the first victims from Khayelitsha township were brought in. He hadn't seen any of these cases firsthand, but the staff had told him enough stories to fill my old Dicta-phone. I then presented his stories, along with those decrypted Chinese e-mails, to my superiors.

It's funny how this is presented as, like… happenstance and luck giving him just enough information to piece it together? There were already infections simmering in most major countries by now - there was certainly already shit going down in the West Bank. Most police forces in most major cities knew there was something "going around" in their homeless population.

Article:

And that is what I did, I dug. At first it wasn't easy. With China out of the picture . . . the Taiwan crisis put an end to any intelligence gathering . . . I was left with very few sources of information. A lot of it was chaff, especially on the Internet; zombies from space and Area 51 . . . what is your country's fetish for Area 51, anyway? After a while I started to uncover more useful data: cases of "rabies" similar to Cape Town . . . it wasn't called African rabies until later. I uncovered the psychological evaluations of some Canadian mountain troops recently returned from Kyrgyzstan. I found the blog records of a Brazilian nurse who told her friends all about the murder of a heart surgeon.

Right, like this. Everyone could've known. Everyone should've known - Israel was ahead of everyone else, but still behind where they would've been if they'd been paying fucking attention to the poor even in their own fucking back garden.

Article:

You mean human beings?

[He nods.]

Isn't that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vulnerable machine we call the body? The brain cannot survive if just one part of the machine is destroyed or even deprived of such necessities as food or oxygen. That is the only measurable difference between us and "The Undead." Their brains do not require a support system to survive, so it is necessary to attack the organ itself.

[His right hand, in the shape of a gun, rises to touch his temple.]

A simple solution, but only if we recognized the problem! Given how quickly the plague was spreading, I thought it might be prudent to seek confirmation from foreign intelligence circles.

It remains unclear - not just to me, but to an awful lot of people - why this was just "so I dropped round my friend's house" as opposed to "so Mossad sent a dossier to the Five Eyes to see what they made of it". Even intelligence agencies have anxiety about looking stupid in front of their buddies, I guess.

Article:

And that is how the "Warmbrunn-Knight" report was written.

I wish people would stop calling it that. There were fifteen other names on that report: virologists, intelligence operatives, military analysts, journalists, even one UN observer who'd been monitoring the elections in Jakarta when the first outbreak hit Indonesia. Everyone was an expert in his or her field, everyone had come to their own similar conclusions before ever being contacted by us. Our report was just under a hundred pages long. It was concise, it was fully comprehensive, it was everything we thought we needed to make sure this outbreak never reached epidemic proportions.

It's a badly written report. I've read it - they're trying to get across all the evidence as fast as they can, and that section is compelling enough, but it's unfocused, and then the recommendations are skimmed over. You cannot summarise all this evidence in 100 pages.

The evidence is compelling, though. If they'd fucking published it so people could see it, maybe we'd be in better shape, but they have Alphabet Soup brain, so they just, like… decided it must be classified? Why?

Article:

I know a lot of credit has been heaped upon the South African war plan, and deservedly so, but if more people had read our report and worked to make its recommendations a reality, then that plan would have never needed to exist.

I am going to have to address the South African war plan, but with God as my witness, I won't be doing it here. The Warmbrunn-Knight Report's own plans were not great either. Nothing about informing the public, no preparations for how hospitals should manage the situation, how to keep infrastructure running. No, it's all just so… military.

Article:

But some people did read and follow your report. Your own government . . .

Barely, and just look at the cost.

Israeli Civil War! I'll warn you I'm not an expert on Israeli politics, and certainly not pre war Israeli politics.

Article:

BETHLEHEM, PALESTINE

[With his rugged looks and polished charm, Saladin Kader could be a movie star. He is friendly but never obsequious, self-assured but never arrogant. He is a professor of urban planning at Khalil Gibran University, and, naturally, the love of all his female students. We sit under the statue of the university's namesake. Like everything else in one of the Middle East's most affluent cities, its polished bronze glitters in the sun.]

It's odd, talking about "Palestine" and "Israel" as though they're still distinct, I think. They have the same government now, since the Civil War Compromise, which… works? I think it works, though a lot of people had to die first. I suppose they're officially still legally distinct, though, to keep the remaining hardliners happy.

Article:

I was born and raised in Kuwait City. My family was one of the few "lucky" ones not to be expelled after 1991, after Arafat sided with Saddam against the world. We weren't rich, but neither were we struggling. I was comfortable, even sheltered, you might say, and oh did it show in my actions.

I wouldn't call Palestinians in Kuwait "sheltered" but Saladin's pretty aggressive about condemning his younger self, which I understand is a commonality amongst many younger Israelis and Palestinians? It's a sort of defensive measure, to declare all previous grievances were the complaints of spoiled children.

Article:

Of course we thought it was a Zionist lie, who didn't? When the Israeli ambassador announced to the UN General Assembly that his country was enacting a policy of "voluntary quarantine," what was I supposed to think? Was I supposed to really believe his crazy story that African rabies was actually some new plague that transformed dead bodies into bloodthirsty cannibals? How can you possibly believe that kind of foolishness, especially when it comes from your most hated enemy?

I remember this; everyone at school was talking about it. We all believed them implicitly, though I don't think anyone over the age of 14 did. Again, though, they had the report - they could have just published it!

There's a vein running through this book - and through a lot of his interviews - that the fault various governments had before the war was not trying to cover up the fact that, like, the dead were rising, here's all the evidence, but that they were ineffectual whilst keeping it hidden, that the public didn't have any right to know these things.

Article:

Here's what I thought: The Zionists have just been driven out of the occupied territories, they say they left voluntarily, just like Lebanon, and most recently the Gaza Strip, but really, just like before, we knew we'd driven them out. They know that the next and final blow would destroy that illegal atrocity they call a country, and to prepare for that final blow, they're attempting to recruit both foreign Jews as cannon fodder and . . . and—I thought I was so clever for figuring this part out—kidnapping as many Palestinians as they could to act as human shields! I had all the answers. Who doesn't at seventeen?

Israel was in retreat at this point, that's a known fact. This wasn't down to the zombies - or, wasn't just down to the zombies. There were outbreaks in the West Bank smouldering out of control, and the ruling Israeli government had wanted to just leave it to burn, which splintered their support base, on account of being a bad idea.

The new government was a teeth gritting compromise of everyone with any sense, and everyone invested in the survival of anyone in the West Bank.

The reason I am boring you with this is that our intrepid journalist does not do so.

Article:

I'd show the images from Al Jazeera, the images coming out of the new West Bank state of Palestine; the celebrations, the demonstrations. Anyone with eyes could see total liberation was at hand. The Israelis had withdrawn from all the occupied territory and were actually preparing to evacuate Al Quds, what they call Jerusalem! All the factional fighting, the violence between our various resistance organizations, I knew that would die down once we unified for the final blow against the Jews. Couldn't my father see this? Couldn't he understand that, in a few years, a few months, we would be returning to our homeland, this time as liberators, not as refugees.

As I understand it, Jerusalem was the final straw for the Israeli… right wing? I don't know that this is an accurate description. Nativists, I suppose. The ones who wanted to plug their ears and leave the West Bank to consume itself. They denounced the governing coalition and began preparing for a civil war. This was already in progress before Saladin made his way to Israel, and the Israeli government knew as well as their opposition did that they couldn't win this war and still survive the undead.

Article:

There were no direct flights to Israel from Kuwait, not even from Egypt once the Arab League imposed its travel restrictions. We had to fly from Kuwait to Cairo, then take a bus across the Sinai Desert to the crossing at Taba. As we approached the border, I saw the Wall for the first time. It was still unfinished, naked steel beams rising above the concrete foundation. I'd known about the infamous "security fence"—what citizen of the Arab world didn't—but I'd always been led to believe that it only surrounded the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Out here, in the middle of this barren desert, it only confirmed my theory that the Israelis were expecting an attack along their entire border. Good, I thought. The Egyptians have finally rediscovered their balls.

Egypt had a tough old war, but they pulled through in the end, and had the Israeli wall to thank, paradoxically - a third of the ghouls in Egypt died against that wall, slouching towards Israeli guns whilst the Egyptian army dropped artillery into the desert and turned them to paste. Strange sort of cooperation without acknowledgement.

Article:

At Taba, we were taken off the bus and told to walk, single file, past cages that held very large and fierce-looking dogs. We went one at a time. A border guard, this skinny black African—I didn't know there were black Jews[3]—would hold out his hand. "Wait there!" he said in barely recognizable Arabic. Then, "you go, come!" The man before me was old. He had a long white beard and supported himself on a cane. As he passed the dogs, they went wild, howling and snarling, biting and charging at the confines of their cages.

Israel was, as I understand it, sterilising Ethiopian Jews at this time, though they were relaxing that policy in view of the encroaching end of the world. Interestingly, Ethiopia itself did fine - weathered the apocalypse more or less intact.

I'm not sure how the Israelis worked out the dog thing - I expect I don't want to - but it was invaluable.
Once they pass the checkpoint, Israel sends them all to a camp - any descriptor I put on that will be ideologically charged, so I won't.

Article:

We stayed at Yeroham for three weeks, until our papers were processed and our medical examinations finally cleared. You know, the whole time they barely even glanced at our passports. My father had done all this work to make sure our official documents were in order. I don't think they even cared. Unless the Israeli Defense Force or the police wanted you for some previous "unkosher" activities, all that mattered was your clean bill of health.

The Israel Civil War had started by now, and the governmental forces were reaching out to some profoundly unlikely allies, so they more or less just let the Palestinians go, yes.

Article:

The Ministry of Social Affairs provided us with vouchers for subsidized housing, free schooling, and a job for my father at a salary that would support the entire family. This is too good to be true, I thought as we boarded the bus for Tel Aviv. The hammer is going to fall anytime now. It did once we entered the city of Beer Sheeba. I was asleep, I didn't hear the shots or see the driver's windscreen shatter. I jerked awake as I felt the bus swerve out of control. We crashed into the side of a building. People screamed, glass and blood were everywhere. My family was close to the emergency exit. My father kicked the door open and pushed us out into the street.

Beersheba burned before it was secured, and the Israelis were terribly fortunate they didn't end up with a major internal outbreak in the South, like they had up north.

Article:

Suddenly a door at the back of the Starbucks swung open, the soldier turned in its direction and fired. A bloody corpse hit the floor right beside us, a grenade rolled out of his twitching hand. The soldier grabbed the bomb and tried to hurl it into the street. It exploded in midair. His body shielded us from the blast. He tumbled back over the corpse of my slain Arab brother. Only he wasn't an Arab at all. As my tears dried I noticed that he wore payess and a yarmulke and bloody tzitzit snaked out from his damp, shredded trousers. This man was a Jew, the armed rebels out in the street were Jews! The battle raging all around us wasn't an uprising by Palestinian insurgents, but the opening shots of the Israeli Civil War.

Our Journalist presents this war as a religious one - that the Ultra-Orthodox rose up en masse and so on.

America desperately wants to keep Israel sweet, now that by and large it doesn't rely on American protection, and part of that is helping to launder their government as far more committed to "saving everyone" than it really was.

Saladin fought in the Israeli Civil War, even; he served in the Palestinian Auxiliary. That was a large part of why Israel accepted Palestinian refugees back to the country - that and needing to keep the Arab List and PLO inside the tent pissing out - they needed more troops than they had available. The decision was purely cynical. It worked, though, so I can't be too harsh.

Article:

In your opinion, what do you believe was the cause of that war?

I think there were many causes. I know the repatriation of Palestinians was unpopular, so was the general pullout from the West Bank. I'm sure the Strategic Hamlet Resettlement Program must have inflamed more than its share of hearts. A lot of Israelis had to watch their houses bulldozed in order to make way for those fortified, self-sufficient residential compounds. Al Quds, I believe . . . that was the final straw. The Coalition Government decided that it was the one major weak point, too large to control and a hole that led right into the heart of Israel. They not only evacuated the city, but the entire Nablus to Hebron corridor as well. They believed that rebuilding a shorter wall along the 1967 demarcation line was the only way to ensure physical security, no matter what backlash might occur from their own religious right.

The thing about the pullout from the West Bank was that it made odd bedfellows for this Coalition - the Arab List and the Israeli Settlements in the West Bank were both absolutely spitting furious about the Israeli government deciding to just let the West Bank die; the same goes for everyone smart enough to know that the border between the West Bank and Israel proper was essentially porous, and zombies in the West Bank meant zombies in Israel - and anyone with enough understanding of mathematics to know that there were 3 million people in the West Bank, and if they didn't make some efforts to protect them, to give them a safe and sane means of evacuation, they'd be swamped by three million ghouls.

It was only after this bizarre coalition took power that they were able to take stock and realise they would need to build residential compounds for the massive influx of refugees they were about to ask for, and that's when they started bulldozing, and started discussing seriously how to approach Jerusalem. The final choice - to fortify it as a siege city isolated from the rest of Israel, governed through an agreement with the PNA - was indeed the last straw, and honestly more of the IDF abandoned them than they thought.

Which was when they started accepting Palestinians from outside Palestine; it appears to have been in good faith, even, and they were rewarded by these Palestinians by and large serving as a loyal auxiliary in the civil war.

The Israeli Civil War is fascinating, and I don't completely understand it, but they've come out the other side as a single state loudly proclaiming to be two states, which seems to work for them.

Article:

I was running with my family into the back of an Israeli tank,[5] when one of those unmarked vans came around the corner. A handheld rocket slammed right into its engine. The van catapulted into the air, crashed upside down, and exploded into a brilliant orange fireball. I still had a few steps to go before reaching the doors of the tank, just enough time to see the whole event unfold. Figures were climbing out of the burning wreckage, slow-moving torches whose clothes and skin were covered in burning petrol.

I don't believe Israel ever explained what they did with the zombies in these vans, and of course our journalist doesn't ask anyone about it - I would've asked my Mossad spy friend about the black vans full of ghouls being driven around Israel, if I were him. Skill issue, maybe.

Anyway, that's Warnings finished. Next up, a CIA agent stares directly down the camera and says "The CIA is unfairly and falsely accused of performing coups in South America."

AN: Israeli Civil War. I hope(?) it isn't, like, offensively awful, I had to work with what I was given.

 

[veteranMortal]

Blame

Article:

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA, USA

[The office of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency could belong to a business executive or doctor or an everyday, small-town high school principal. There are the usual collection of reference books on the shelf, degrees and photos on the wall, and, on his desk, an autographed baseball from Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench. Bob Archer, my host, can see by my face that I was expecting something different. I suspect that is why he chose to conduct our interview here.]

It is something to behold that he sits across from the architect of the final death of American Democracy, the man who built the crucifix and left it waiting for the General-President to nail that bloody and beaten corpse to it, and goes "wow, he's so down to earth, his office has a baseball in it".

I suppose if my boss's boss wanted to be in a book I was writing, I'd probably call him a cool salt of the Earth realist or whatever, too.

Article:

When you think about the CIA, you probably imagine two of our most popular and enduring myths. The first is that our mission is to search the globe for any conceivable threat to the United States, and the second is that we have the power to perform the first.

The mission of the CIA was to attempt to maintain American - and thus, capitalist - Supremacy, and because they're murderous sociopaths, they did this by drowning the world in blood, and once America won the Cold War, they went insane and started to just fuck around trying to further American Imperial ambitions, to limited success.

Article:

This myth is the by-product of an organization, which, by its very nature, must exist and operate in secrecy. Secrecy is a vacuum and nothing fills a vacuum like paranoid speculation. "Hey, did you hear who killed so and so, I hear it was the CIA. Hey, what about that coup in El Banana Republico, must have been the CIA. Hey, be careful looking at that website, you know who keeps a record of every website anyone's ever looked at ever, the CIA!"

It is so funny - and by funny I mean infuriating - that he says "there's so much paranoid speculation about the CIA, like that it does coups in Banana Republics"

Like, dude. Why do you think we call them Banana Republics? Fuck off.

Anyway, the CIA has never been as subtle or as secretive as they think they are, and this sort of pathetic double bluff to pretend that 1) the CIA doesn't assassinate people, 2) the CIA doesn't perform coups and 3) the American Intelligence Community didn't spy on your internet usage is just… pathetic.

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The only disadvantage was that our own people believed in that image as well, so whenever anything, anywhere occurred without any warning, where do you think the finger was pointed: "Hey, how did that crazy country get those nukes? Where was the CIA? How come all those people were murdered by that fanatic? Where was the CIA? How come, when the dead began coming back to life, we didn't know about it until they were breaking through our living room windows? Where the hell was the goddamn CIA!?!"

What people don't understand is that the CIA typically doesn't give a shit about these things. They only say a country probably has nukes if they want to put boots on the ground, they don't care about civilians being murdered, and they've always been too fucking arrogant for their own good about things like the zombie crisis.

Article:

We're not some shadow superpower with ancient secrets and alien technology. We have very real limitations and extremely finite assets, so why would we waste those assets chasing down each and every potential threat? That goes to the second myth of what an intelligence organization really does. We can't just spread ourselves thin looking for, and hoping to stumble on, new and possible dangers. Instead, we've always had to identify and focus on those that are already clear and present. If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can't be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly it's the Arab in your backyard, you can't be worrying about the People's Republic of China, and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you're going to do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse.

This is very funny. If you fight the soviets by funding Islamist terrorist groups, then celebrate beating the soviets by putting a bomb under your own economy, you can't really be surprised when first Islamist terrorists and then the PRC crop up as problems for you, and the zombies were fucking obvious! Any intelligence agency worth dickall should've been able to tell if they'd done, like, a handful of intelligence work.

Article:

But didn't the plague originate in China?

It did, as well as did one of the greatest single Maskirovkas in the history of modern espionage.

God, I love this cope. It's the official American party line and it's hysterical.

You see, the American position is…

Article:

It was deception, a fake out. The PRC knew they were already our number one surveillance target. They knew they could never hide the existence of their nationwide "Health and Safety" sweeps. They realized that the best way to mask what they were doing was to hide it in plain sight. Instead of lying about the sweeps themselves, they just lied about what they were sweeping for.

The dissident crackdown?

Bigger, the whole Taiwan Strait incident: the victory of the Taiwan National Independence Party, the assassination of the PRC defense minister, the buildup, the war threats, the demonstrations and subsequent crackdowns were all engineered by the Ministry of State Security and all of it was to divert the world's eye from the real danger growing within China. And it worked! Every shred of intel we had on the PRC, the sudden disappearances, the mass executions, the curfews, the reserve call-ups— everything could easily be explained as standard ChiCom procedure. In fact, it worked so well, we were so convinced that World War III was about to break out in the Taiwan Strait, that we diverted other intel assets from countries where undead outbreaks were just starting to unfold.

… that the PRC faked Chinese-Taiwanese relations for 3 years just to fuck with them. That the MSS was so powerful, so fucking perfect an intelligence agency that they could do this entire fucking charade without it breaking, ever, and that this was all it ever was, and nevermind the actual invasion they actually did during the Great Panic, that was just committing to the bit.

I'll just quote him himself on this:

Article:

The truth was, neither the Central Intelligence Agency nor any of the other official and unofficial U.S. intelligence organizations have ever been some kind of all-seeing, all-knowing, global illuminati. For starters, we never had that kind of funding. Even during the blank check days of the cold war, it's just not physically possible to have eyes and ears in every back room, cave, alley, brothel, bunker, office, home, car, and rice paddy across the entire planet.

He goes from "intelligence organisations aren't this powerful" to "the MSS convincingly faked a war to cover up something they weren't even covering up"

Like, again, it was very clear there was a disease outbreak in China. They weren't hiding it.

Article:

The Chinese were that good.

And we were that bad. It wasn't the Agency's finest hour. We were still reeling from the purges . . .

You mean the reforms?

No, I mean the purges, because that's what they were. When Joe Stalin either shot or imprisoned his best military commanders, he wasn't doing half as much damage to his national security as what that administration did to us with their "reforms."

Note that they lay blame for the CIA falling asleep at the wheel squarely at the feet of the civilian government. Note the framing of that civilian government of being as negligent and borderline traitorous as Joseph Stalin in preparing for the war to come. Putting a pin in these notes. For later.

Article:

The last brushfire war was a debacle and guess who took the fall. We'd been ordered to justify a political agenda, then when that agenda became a political liability, those who'd originally given the order now stood back with the crowd and pointed the finger at us. "Who told us we should go to war in the first place? Who mixed us up in all this mess? The CIA!" We couldn't defend ourselves without violating national security.

The age old refrain of the intelligence agency caught fucking around - "actually we're doing important work, our obvious malfeasance was actually good, it's just… classified."

It's repulsive. You lied to justify a failson Republican going to war to avenge his pappy's unfinished business, got a million people killed - and that's assuming we grant the charity of pretending Iraq's utter capitulation to the outbreak had nothing to do with America skullfucking their military, and then you have the fucking gall to go "Actually no we were right, it's just classified"

We will make no apologies for the terror when our turn comes, shitstain.

Article:

Why stick around and be the victim of a political witch hunt when you could escape to the private sector: a fatter paycheck, decent hours, and maybe, just maybe, a little respect and appreciation by the people you work for. We lost a lot of good men and women, a lot of experience, initiative, and priceless analytical reasoning. All we were left with were the dregs, a bunch of brownnosing, myopic eunuchs.

This is the excuse they give for why they brutally - lethally, in fact - purged their ranks just after bemoaning being purged. Also, for why they jumped into bed with various sociopath "Private Intelligence Advisors" at the first opportunity.

Article:

So you knew what was really happening.

No . . .no . . .I couldn't. There was no way to confirm . . .

But you had suspicions.

I had .. . doubts.

Could you be more specific?

No, I'm sorry. But I can say that I broached the subject a number of times to my coworkers.

What happened?

The answer was always the same, "Your funeral."

And was it?

[Nods.] I spoke to . . . someone in a position of authority . . . just a five-minute meeting, expressing some concerns. He thanked me for coming in and told me he'd look into it right away. The next day I received transfer orders: Buenos Aires, effective immediately.

The poor, brave CIA agent, reassigned to South America just for asking the wrong questions.

Everyone who knows what, exactly, those questions were? Is dead now. Some of them survived the whole war, usually in places like Richmond, before being killed in tragic misunderstandings. Blue-on-blue is, I believe, the preferred euphemism. So sad.

Article:

Did you ever hear of the Warmbrunn-Knight report?

Sure now, but back then . . . the copy that was originally hand delivered by Paul Knight himself, the one marked "Eyes Only" for the director . . . it was found at the bottom of the desk of a clerk in the San Antonio field office of the FBI, three years after the Great Panic.

Hammering the "why did they not FUCKING PUBLISH this shit" button. Why did it need to be eyes-only?

People panicked because they didn't know what was happening, didn't know if there was any hope, most especially once the Americans played stupid games at Yonkers. A report and recommendations… that could've changed the game.

Article:

VAALAJARVI, FINLAND

[It is spring, "hunting season." As the weather warms, and the bodies of frozen zombies begin to reanimate, elements of the UN N-For (Northern Force) have arrived for their annual "Sweep and Clear." Every year the undead's numbers dwindle. At current trends, this area is expected to be completely "Secure" within a decade. Travis D'Ambrosia, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, is here to personally oversee operations. There is a softness to the general's voice, a sadness. Throughout our interview, he struggles to maintain eye contact.]

This sick cunt? Really? I suppose if we have listened to the crossmaker for the death of America's bourgeoisie republic, we must listen to the Longinus, the man who struck the final blow.

Also the "We're in Finland to keep the ghouls down" shit. Oh, of course. Nothing to do with Murmansk, I'm sure.

Article:

I won't deny mistakes were made. I won't deny we could have been better prepared. I'll be the first one to admit that we let the American people down. I just want the American people to know why.
"What if the Israelis are right?" Those were the first words out of the chairman's mouth the morning after Israel's UN declaration. "I'm not saying they are," he made sure to stress that point, "I'm just saying, what if?" He wanted candid, not canned, opinions. He was that type of man, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He kept the conversation "hypothetical," indulging in the fantasy that this was just some intellectual exercise. After all, if the rest of the world wasn't ready to believe something so outrageous, why should the men and women in this room?

The deification of men like the Chair of the Joint Chiefs as, like, good men? Brave men trying to do their best, woefully constrained?

Is - and I mean this as an insult - deeply unsurprising. Had our boy Travis not lost some factional squabbles with his notional inferiors in Navy and Army, his old boss would probably be sitting in the White House right now. Instead he got an arrest for conduct unbecoming, and Travis got dumped in the literal wilderness.

As I understand it, Travis gave these interviews to try and reclaim some political cache. Time will tell how that works for him, I guess.

Article:

Your own what?

Our proposal to the White House. We outlined a fully comprehensive program, not only to eliminate the threat within the United States, but to roll back and contain it throughout the entire world.

Oh yes, you would've beaten those dang ghouls, I'm sure.

Given what we know of their plans - from before and after the crisis boiled over - I'm not so sure. Could it be done, militarily? Sure.

Could it be done by this military? I have my doubts.

Article:

What happened?

The White House loved Phase One. It was cheap, fast, and if executed properly, 100 percent covert. Phase One involved the insertion of Special Forces units into infested areas. Their orders were to investigate, isolate, and eliminate.

Eliminate?

With extreme prejudice.

So interesting how many of these infested areas were Black, or queer meccas, or apartment blocks where union organisers or black bloc agitators lived.

Article:

Those were the Alpha teams?

Yes, sir, and they were extremely successful. Even though their battle record is sealed for the next 140 years, I can say that it remains one of the most outstanding moments in the history of America's elite warriors.

Their records are sealed because they acted - and continue to act - as death squads for the US Government. You do not need to seal "So we went and killed some ghouls" but you do need to seal "So we performed a no knock execution raid on community organisers in LA" or "We killed union reps in Bolivia"

The Alpha Teams are the hidden knife that the American Junta uses to maintain their death grip on the subjects both internal and external.

Article:

So what went wrong?

Nothing, with Phase One, but the Alpha teams were only supposed to be a stopgap measure. Their mission was never to extinguish the threat, only delay it long enough to buy time for Phase Two.

The Alpha Teams barely killed ghouls. Ever. There's no evidence the spread of ghouls ever slowed, so even if they did kill ghouls, it turns out trying to stop a plague by getting Fort Bragg sociopaths to do sicko shit on a handful of the infected does, like, absolutely nothing.

Article:

But Phase Two was never completed.

Never even begun, and herein lies the reason why the American military was caught so shamefully unprepared.

Not because it was a corrupt institution of bureaucratic bloat with supply lines splattered across America as bribes for every jackass senator of every state. Not because the men and women running it decided at approximately this stage that they were going to fuck around some. Not because treating the American public like idiot babies who couldn't be trusted with any information was a bad idea. No, the reason they fucked it was…

Article:

Phase Two required a massive national undertaking, the likes of which hadn't been seen since the darkest days of the Second World War. That kind of effort requires Herculean amounts of both national treasure and national support, both of which, by that point, were nonexistent. The American people had just been through a very long and bloody conflict. They were tired. They'd had enough. Like the 1970s, the pendulum was swinging from a militant stance to a very resentful one.
In totalitarian regimes—communism, fascism, religious fundamental-ism—popular support is a given. You can start wars, you can prolong them, you can put anyone in uniform for any length of time without ever having to worry about the slightest political backlash. In a democracy, the polar opposite is true.

Because the public, you see, didn't love the military enough. In America. In the 2000s and 2010s. What America could've done with, to save them, he suggests, is authoritarianism.

Put a pin in this, like with the CIA goon earlier. Lots of pins making up a web of self justification.

Article:

America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings on a backlash like the perception of defeat. I say "perception" because America is a very all-or-nothing society. We like the big win, the touchdown, the knockout in the first round. We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn't only uncontested, it was positively devastating. If not . . . well . . . look at where we were before the Panic. We didn't lose the last brushfire conflict, far from it. We actually accomplished a very difficult task with very few resources and under extremely unfavorable circumstances. We won, but the public didn't see it that way because it wasn't the blitzkrieg smackdown that our national spirit demanded.

You went into Afghanistan to depose the Taliban. When the plague hit and you had to pull out, the Taliban returned within a handful of weeks, tops. They're still in power. But sure, you "won". The other one has bells on it.

And you spent $300 million a day for the privilege, so miss me with that "very few resources" shit.

Article:

Even if the coffers hadn't been empty, if we'd had all the money to make all the uniforms we needed to implement Phase Two, who do you think we could have conned into filling them? This goes to the heart of America's war weariness. As if the "traditional" horrors weren't bad enough—the dead, the disfigured, the psychologically destroyed—now you had a whole new breed of difficulties, "The Betrayed."

Ah yes, the noble warrior, betrayed by the government when he came home. The pre-war army, shackled by corrupt civilian authority, could not do right by them.

Article:

After Vietnam, when I was a young platoon leader in West Germany, we'd had to institute an incentives program just to keep our soldiers from going AWOL. After this last war, no amount of incentives could fill our depleted ranks, no payment bonuses or term reductions, or online recruiting tools disguised as civilian video games.[2] This generation had had enough, and that's why when the undead began to devour our country, we were almost too weak and vulnerable to stop them.

This is just fascist shit. The youth was too weak and vulnerable to stop them, the military too battered and reviled…

Article:

I'm not blaming the civilian leadership and I'm not suggesting that we in uniform should be anything but beholden to them.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

They can't help it, these American generals. They get a platform and within minutes they're talking about the weak, corrupt civilian government, and how much more effective authoritarianism is, and then they catch themselves and mumble about how they don't blame the civilian government.

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This is our system and it's the best in the world. But it must be protected, and defended, and it must never again be so abused.

The civilian government had become too venal, too corrupt, and that's why the military had to protect and defend it so it can never again be abused - and recall that his view of "abused" is 'people were too critical of the military' and 'the military didn't get enough credit for all the weddings we dronestruck in the Middle East'

Murderous pig.

Article:

VOSTOK STATION: ANTARCTICA

[In prewar times, this outpost was considered the most remote on Earth. Situated near the planet's southern geomagnetic pole, atop the four-kilometer ice crust of Lake Vostok, temperatures here have been recorded at a world record negative eighty-nine degrees Celsius, with the highs rarely reaching above negative twenty-two. This extreme cold, and the fact that overland transport takes over a month to reach the station, were what made Vostok so attractive to Breckinridge "Breck" Scott.
We meet in "The Dome," the reinforced, geodesic greenhouse that draws power from the station's geothermal plant. These and many other improvements were implemented by Mister Scott when he leased the station from the Russian government. He has not left it since the Great Panic.]

The favoured son of American Capitalism, its malign selfishness laid bare.

Breckinridge is so despised by the Americans because he refuses to replace the mask of humanity, he is a constant reminder of the evil heart of their ideology.

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Do you understand economics? I mean big-time, prewar, global capitalism. Do you get how it worked? I don't, and anyone who says they do is full of shit. There are no rules, no scientific absolutes. You win, you lose, it's a total crapshoot. The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. "Fear," he used to say, "fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe." That blew me away. "Turn on the TV," he'd say. "What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products." Fuckin' A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells. That was my mantra. "Fear sells."

Building an ideology, state and economy around trying to make people fearful, consumerist and unaware, in a black box none of you completely understand?

This is why we win. You have built an exceptionally efficient means of making capitalists wealthy, and within the bourgeoisie classes, making the most overtly wretched members the most successful.

Article:

When I first heard about the outbreaks, back when it was still called African rabies, I saw the opportunity of a lifetime. I'll never forget that first report, the Cape Town outbreak, only ten minutes of actual reporting then a full hour of speculating about what would happen if the virus ever made it to America. God bless the news. I hit speed dial thirty seconds later.

It is worth noting, before we get into the weeds with this fucking guy, that he's been living alone in a vast underground complex in Antarctica for almost 20 years.

And that's not even getting into the hypothesising.

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Plus, this was one of the most business-friendly administrations in American history. J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were getting wood from beyond the grave for this guy in the White House. His staff didn't even bother to read our cost assessment report. I think they were already looking for a magic bullet. They railroaded it through the FDA in two months. Remember the speech the prez made before Congress, how it had been tested in Europe for some time and the only thing holding it up was our own "bloated bureaucracy"? Remember the whole thing about "people don't need big government, they need big protection, and they need it big-time!" Jesus Christmas, I think half the country creamed their pants at that. How high did his approval rating go that night, 60 percent, 70? I just know that it jacked our IPO 389 percent on the first day! Suck on that, Baidu dot-com!

He's not all there, is what I'm saying, and even before the plague he had that particular sort of out of touch sociopathy these people get when the only people they've spoken to who don't have a net worth in the billions are the poor fucking staff they make a game of hiring and firing at a moment's notice.

Article:

And you didn't know if it would work?

We knew it would work against rabies, and that's what they said it was, right, just some weird strain of jungle rabies.

Who said that?

You know, "they," like, the UN or the . . . somebody. That's what everyone ended up calling it, right, "African rabies."

Was it ever tested on an actual victim?

Why? People used to take flu shots all the time, never knowing if it was for the right strain. Why was this any different?

I will say this for Breckinridge Scott - there aren't many people who will look you dead in the eye and say shit like this.

And this, specifically, I believe. There's other statements he's released to broadly this effect. He's just an awful piece of shit.

Article:

But if someone discovered . . .

Discovered what? We never lied, you understand? They told us it was rabies, so we made a vaccine for rabies. We said it had been tested in Europe, and the drugs it was based on had been tested in Europe. Technically, we never lied. Technically, we never did anything wrong.

Just remember this - his smug technicalities and caveats. It'll be important.

Article:

But the virus wasn't airborne.

It didn't matter! It still had the same brand name! "From the Makers of . . ." All I had to say was "May Prevent Some Viral Infections." That was it! Now I understand why it used to be illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater. People weren't going to say "Hey, I don't smell smoke, is there really a fire," no, they say "Holy shit, there's a fire! RUN!" [Laughs.] I made money on home purifiers, car purifiers; my biggest seller was this little doodad you wore around your neck when you got on a plane! I don't know if it even filtered ragweed, but it sold.

And then this, which reads like a child's understanding of the sort of technicalities you are covered by.

He did sell a necklace for wearing on a plane - it wasn't an air filter, it was notionally a scent neutraliser. You couldn't claim a necklace filtered anything - doesn't make sense, so Breckinridge never claimed that.

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Things got so good, I started setting up these dummy companies, you know, with plans to build manufacturing facilities all over the country. The shares from these dumbos sold almost as much as the real stuff. It wasn't even the idea of safety anymore, it was the idea of the idea of safety! Remember when we started to get our first cases here in the States, that guy in Florida who said he'd been bitten but survived because he was taking Phalanx? OH! [He stands, mimes the act of frantic fornication.] God freakin' bless that dumbass, whoever he was.

And then this, where he acts like a frat bro? Big pharma smuglords like Breckinridge Scott are not this kind of wretch.

Article:

But that wasn't because of Phalanx. Your drug didn't protect people at all.

It protected them from their fears. That's all I was selling. Hell, because of Phalanx, the biomed sector started to recover, which, in turn, jump-started the stock market, which then gave the impression of a recovery, which then restored consumer confidence to stimulate an actual recovery! Phalanx hands down ended the recession! I . . . I ended the recession!

This rings more true. It's almost subtle, the work done here.

Article:

And then? When the outbreaks became more serious, and the press finally reported that there was no wonder drug?

Pre-fucking cisely! That's the alpha cunt who should be shot, what's her name, who first broke that story! Look what she did! Pulled the fuckin' rug right out from under us all! She caused the spiral! She caused the Great Panic!

Lauren Ayers, freelancer and sometime gossip columnist in LA. Caught a clean recording of Breck saying "Of course Phalanx doesn't fucking work, asshole" in a club. She followed the lead, such as it was, discovered the story and shopped it around.

She's dead, by the by, that "alpha cunt" - she's a recipient of the CIA award for excellence in journalism.

Turns out there was a sudden outbreak in the offices of her paper, 2, maybe 3 years in. Alpha Teams had no choice, of course.

She was researching Redeker by then.

Article:

And you take no personal responsibility?

For what? For making a little fuckin' cash . . . well, not a little [giggles]. All I did was what any of us are ever supposed to do. I chased my dream, and I got my slice. You wanna blame someone, blame whoever first called it rabies, or who knew it wasn't rabies and gave us the green light anyway. Shit, you wanna blame someone, why not start with all the sheep who forked over their greenbacks without bothering to do a little responsible research. I never held a gun to their heads. They made the choice themselves. They're the bad guys, not me. I never directly hurt anybody, and if anybody was too stupid to get themselves hurt, boo-fuckin-hoo.

He didn't say this.

The Americans need a hate-sink, however. He's helpfully out of reach, and they can huff and puff about extraditing him, about how he's this vastly evil figure, gleeful about their deaths, cheering them on.

Article:

Of course . . .
If there's a hell . . . [giggles as he talks] . . . I don't want to think about how many of those dumb shits might be waiting for me. I just hope they don't want a refund.

I could see him saying this. I'm not sure why I differentiate, but there you go. He's a tremendously evil piece of shit.

Article:

AMARILLO, TEXAS, USA

[Grover Carlson works as a fuel collector for the town's experimental bioconversion plant. The fuel he collects is dung. I follow the former White House chief of staff as he pushes his wheelbarrow across the pie-laden pastures.]

I know propagandists who use subtlety and they're all cowards.

Article:

Of course we got our copy of the Knight-WarnJews report, what do you think we are, the CIA? We read it three months before the Israelis went public. Before the Pentagon started making noise, it was my job to personally brief the president, who in turn even devoted an entire meeting to discussing its message.

Grover Carlson was a wretched, bigoted piece of shit, but he was also a political operator at the highest level. He did not call the Warmbrunn-Knight Report the "Knight-WarnJews" report. Certainly not when speaking to a reporter.

Article:

Which was?

Drop everything, focus all our efforts, typical alarmist crap. We got dozens of these reports a week, every administration did, all of them claiming that their particular boogeyman was "the greatest threat to human existence." C'mon! Can you imagine what America would have been like if the federal government slammed on the brakes every time some paranoid crackpot cried "wolf " or "global warming" or "living dead"? Please. What we did, what every president since Washington has done, was provide a measured, appropriate response, in direct relation to a realistic threat assessment.

This is not, strictly speaking, inaccurate to what they did. The pre-war American government judged the threat from the ghouls to be minor, and that the military ought to be able to handle it.

They weren't wrong about that, in a vacuum.

Article:

And that was the Alpha teams.

Among others things. Given how low a priority the national security adviser thought this was, I think we actually gave it some pretty healthy table time. We produced an educational video for state and local law enforcement about what to do in case of an outbreak. The Department of Health and Human Services had a page on its website for how citizens should respond to infected family members. And hey, what about pushing Phalanx right through the FDA?

Say what you will about Britain, at least we came about our dogshit response to the ghouls honestly, through having done austerity to atrophy our state apparatus. The Americans just deliberately… didn't do anything?

Article:

But Phalanx didn't work.

Yeah, and do you know how long it would have taken to invent one that did? Look how much time and money had been put into cancer research, or AIDS. Do you want to be the man who tells the American people that he's diverting funds from either one of those for some new disease that most people haven't even heard of? Look at what we've put into research during and after the war, and we still don't have a cure or a vaccine. We knew Phalanx was a placebo, and we were grateful for it. It calmed people down and let us do our job.

No one in this government has ever admitted to knowing Phalanx was not effective. Even the ones in exile in fucking Switzerland still maintain they didn't know, and I'm meant to believe the White House Chief of Staff just… said it. The American government so desperately yearns for the pre-war civilian government to take all the blame for fucking it. Either he was compelled to say this, or he didn't fucking say it.

Article:

What, you would have rather we told people the truth? That it wasn't a new strain of rabies but a mysterious uber-plague that reanimated the dead? Can you imagine the panic that would have happened: the protest, the riots, the billions in damage to private property? Can you imagine all those wet-pants senators who would have brought the government to a standstill so they could railroad some high-profile and ultimately useless "Zombie Protection Act" through Congress? Can you imagine the damage it would have done to that administration's political capital? We're talking about an election year, and a damn hard, uphill fight.

This, on the other hand, is an almost universal refrain - people would panic! There would be riots! Private property would be at risk!

And besides, it was an election year!

What's worth noting is the almost drumbeat refrain that these problems are motivated by senators who want to look good, the government wanting to avoid looking bad, the political calculus of democracy.

And like, I don't think American democracy was good. Two political parties who serve the whims of Capital, who adore imperial adventurism, who blackmail the electorate with fears of their opponents despite sharing almost entirely the same ideology…

But it was better than what they have now.

Article:

We were the "cleanup crew," the unlucky bastards who had to mop up all the shit left by the last administration, and believe me, the previous eight years had piled up one tall mountain of shit! The only reason we squeaked back into power was because our new propped-up patsy kept promising a "return to peace and prosperity." The American people wouldn't have settled for anything less. They thought they'd been through some pretty tough times already, and it would have been political suicide to tell them that the toughest ones were actually up ahead.

The normalisation of the idea that the President is just a patsy is an interesting thing to note.

Article:

So you never really tried to solve the problem.

Oh, c'mon. Can you ever "solve" poverty? Can you ever "solve" crime? Can you ever "solve" disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no. All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get on with their lives. That's not cynicism, that's maturity. You can't stop the rain. All you can do is just build a roof that you hope won't leak, or at least won't leak on the people who are gonna vote for you.

This is, as I understand it, a fairly accurate summary of Republican politics before the crisis. It differed from Democratic politics only in that they both ensured the proverbial roof didn't leak on Republican voters. You know, in case they decided to vote for you next time.

Article:

What does that mean?

C'mon . . .

Seriously. What does that mean?

Fine, whatever, "Mister Smith goes to motherfuckin' Washington," it means that, in politics, you focus on the needs of your power base. Keep them happy, and they keep you in office.

Is that why certain outbreaks were neglected?

Jesus, you make it sound like we just forgot about them.

The fact that the US Government found their trouble with cities in the reclamation remotely surprising baffles me. Between the Alpha Teams shooting the places up and the ghouls lurching around utterly unbothered, it's a wonder they didn't have to flatten the lot of them.

Article:

Did local law enforcement request additional support from the federal government?

When have cops not asked for more men, better gear, more training hours, or "community outreach program funds"? Those pussies are almost as bad as soldiers, always whining about never having "what they need," but do they have to risk their jobs by raising taxes? Do they have to explain to Suburban Peter why they're fleecing him for Ghetto Paul?

I do not remotely believe that a pre war politician would truly say "I think cops and soldiers are greedy pussies" - it just isn't how America's political climate worked. America adores their jackboots.

Article:

So you never actually instigated a cover-up?

We didn't have to; they covered it up themselves. They had as much, or more, to lose than we did. And besides, they'd already gotten their stories the year before when the first cases were reported in America. Then winter came, Phalanx hit the shelves, cases dropped. Maybe they "dissuaded" a few younger crusading reporters, but, in reality, the whole thing was pretty much old news after a few months. It had become "manageable." People were learning to live with it and they were already hungry for something different. Big news is big business, and you gotta stay fresh if you want to stay successful.

Bullshit they didn't. You don't get a consensus of silence across all major news networks without any conversation about what is best for the economy or the public good will or what have you.

Article:

So, let me see if I understand your position.

The administration's position.

The administration's position, which is that you gave this problem the amount of attention that you thought it deserved.

Right.

Given that at any time, government always has a lot on its plate, and especially at this time because another public scare was the last thing the American people wanted.

Yep.

So you figured that the threat was small enough to be "managed" by both the Alpha teams abroad and some additional law enforcement training at home.

You got it.

Even though you'd received warnings to the contrary, that it could never just be woven into the fabric of public life and that it actually was a global catastrophe in the making.

[Mister Carlson pauses, shoots me an angry look, then heaves a shovelful of "fuel" into his cart.]

Grow up.

They aren't subtle, these Americans. They wanted to show that Grover Carlson is a contemptible bullshit peddling prick who - as part of the civilian government in the lead up to the crisis - deliberately ignored the outbreak, against the desperate pleading of the police and soldiers, and covered up the extent of the crisis. In short, that the entire crisis was his - and by extension, the civilian government's - fault. So they made him a literal bullshit shoveller, unrepentant about his misdeeds.

To be clear, Grover Carlson was reprehensible, and bears some responsibility, but this is a hit piece.

Within days of the publishing of this book, Grover Carlson was arrested by federal law enforcement for his part in the lead up to the ghoul crisis, tried for Sabotage and hanged in Time Square.

The American junta are not good at narrative forging, but they're trying.

Article:

TROY, MONTANA, USA

[This neighborhood is, according to the brochure, the "New Community" for the "New America." Based on the Israeli "Masada" model, it is clear just from first glance that this neighborhood was built with one goal in mind. The houses all rest on stilts, so high as to afford each a perfect view over the twenty-foot-high, reinforced concrete wall. Each house is accessed by a retractable staircase and can connect to its neighbor by a similarly retractable walkway. The solar cell roofs, the shielded wells, the gardens, lookout towers, and thick, sliding, steel-reinforced gate have all served to make Troy an instant success with its inhabitants, so much so that its developer has already received seven more orders across the continental United States. Troy's developer, chief architect, and first mayor is Mary Jo Miller.]

Ludicrous boondoggle. Catch me standing beneath my house hammering the release button on my stupid retractable stairs, which have jammed, whilst a horde of ghouls bears down on me (the sliding steel gate is out of charge). I want just a normal reinforced gate with a deadbolt in a normal town with a 9 foot wall, please.

Article:

Oh yeah, I was worried, I was worried about my car payments and Tim's business loan. I was worried about that widening crack in the pool and the new nonchlorinated filter that still left an algae film. I was worried about our portfolio, even though my e-broker assured me this was just first-time investor jitters and that it was much more profitable than a standard 401(k). Aiden needed a math tutor, Jenna needed just the right Jamie Lynn Spears cleats for soccer camp. Tim's parents were thinking of coming to stay with us for Christmas. My brother was back in rehab. Finley had worms, one of the fish had some kind of fungus growing out of its left eye. These were just some of my worries. I had more than enough to keep me busy.

Ah, the "relatable" petit bourgeoisie. Living a life unattainable to most people, she conjured worries to fill her days and ignored the world because nothing can ever trouble the middle American.

Living in the Imperial Core insulates people from so many consequences, it almost leaves them helpless, like a baby bird that never had to learn how to fly.

Article:

Did you watch the news?

Yeah, for about five minutes every day: local headlines, sports, celebrity gossip. Why would I want to get depressed by watching TV? I could do that just by stepping on the scale every morning.

What about other sources? Radio?

Morning drive time? That was my Zen hour. After the kids were dropped off, I'd listen to [name withheld for legal reasons]. His jokes helped me get through the day.

What about the Internet?

What about it? For me, it was shopping; for Jenna, it was homework; for Tim, it was . . . stuff he kept swearing he'd never look at again. The only news I ever saw was what popped up on my AOL welcome page.

I sometimes find myself wondering, like… how many people used to live like this? So profoundly alienated that they just cut off all meaningful knowledge of the world?

Article:

One time, around March or April, I came into work and found Mrs. Ruiz clearing out her desk. I thought she was being downsized or maybe outsourced, you know, something I considered a real threat. She explained that it was "them," that's how she always referred to it, "them" or "everything that's happening." She said that her family'd already sold their house and were buying a cabin up near Fort Yukon, Alaska. I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard, especially from someone like Inez. She wasn't one of the ignorant ones, she was a "clean" Mexican. I'm sorry to use that term, but that was how I thought back then, that was who I was.

My cousins were early movers - like Mrs Ruiz. Of course, Britain isn't America, we haven't got any convenient frozen wastelands to move to. They went to Shetland. I think they're still there, but we don't talk. Of all the groups, the people who moved in this stage - just before the Great Panic - have by far the best outcomes, statistically. No duh, right? But they even beat out the people who moved earlier, your paranoiacs who scanned the web for any blog posts or videos. Those people surprisingly often ended up killing themselves; a more profound sense of survivor's guilt, one will never find.

Article:

Did your husband ever show any concern?

No, but the kids did, not verbally, or consciously, I think. Jenna started getting into fights. Aiden wouldn't go to sleep unless we left the lights on. Little things like that. I don't think they were exposed to any more information than Tim, or I, but maybe they didn't have the adult distractions to shut it out.

I was a kid at this age. People sent around "Cape Town Compilations" and everyone seemed to know someone who knew someone who'd seen a zombie.

The kids had more information than you.

Article:

That was our way of being prepared . . . and Tim buying a gun. He kept promising to take me to the range to learn how to shoot. "Sunday," he'd always say, "we're goin' this Sunday." I knew he was full of it. Sundays were reserved for his mistress, that eighteen-footer, twin-engine bitch he seemed to sink all his love into. I didn't really care. We had our pills, and at least he knew how to use the Glock. It was part of life, like smoke alarms or airbags. Maybe you think about it once in a while, it was always just . . . "just in case." And besides, really, there was already so much out there to worry about, every month, it seemed, a new nail-biter. How can you keep track of all of it? How do you know which one is really real?

There is such powerful petit bourgeoisie energy here, and it makes me wonder why she was interviewed, rather than someone more broadly relatable, but I suppose to our Journalist, owning a small business and having the disposable income to drop on a boat is… unremarkable.

Article:

How did you know?

It had just gotten dark. The game was on. Tim was in the BarcaLounger with a Corona. Aiden was on the floor playing with his Ultimate Soldiers. Jenna was in her room doing homework. I was unloading the Maytag so I didn't hear Finley barking. Well, maybe I did, but I never gave it any thought. Our house was in the community's last row, right at the foot of the hills. We lived in a quiet, just developed part of North County near San Diego.

I think everyone remembers their first ghoul encounter. I was 12.

We were heading into town for lunch, me, Riley and Gretchen - my school friends. Our new school uniforms had just started rolling out - we had to wear shirts and blazers like the boys school over the road, but everyone thought it was unfair we didn't get ties.

We weren't meant to be out for lunch - schools were getting stricter about keeping track of all their students, but Gretch wanted a smoke, so we slipped out the front exit, through the maths block.

We'd made it maybe halfway into town - through a cul-de-sac, over the canal and most of our way down a back alley between two rows of derelict houses - before Mr Cole caught up with us. He was Head of Maths at our school, and in my memory he was a giant. 7 foot tall, about half that wide, with huge, hairy hands. I'd never seen him so furious, white with anger and fear.

"Girls!" He'd bellowed, "What on Earth do you think you're doing out of school?"

I don't remember what I was planning to say in response - "Sorry, sir," probably - because that was when one of the gates into the alleyway opened. She was a sight, that ghoul. Maybe 35, naked, pallid and sodden, with deep scores up both wrists, a delicate bite mark on her shoulder. She let out a rattling, wet moan as she wrapped her hand around Riley's neck, pulled her in, and Mr Cole exploded into motion. I've never seen such a big man move so fast, he crossed the space between us in seconds, grabbed the zombie and bore her to the ground.

There was starting to be movement in other houses, growls from other gardens, shadows in windows. Mr Cole came up, blood pouring freely from a bite on the side of his neck. The ghoul was broken on the ground, her skull pulverised - I remember thinking, dimly "He just did that with his fists?"

"Get back to school, girls." He just sounded tired, I remember. He didn't even seem to blame us, which bothers me more than if he had. I threw up in the canal before we ran back.

We should've had detention for weeks, but things were falling apart too fast by then; I think I only went to school once more before my parents decided to pull me and my sister out.

Apologies for the tangent.

Article:

It was about five foot ten, slumped, narrow shoulders with this puffy, wagging belly. It wasn't wearing a shirt and its mottled gray flesh was all torn and pockmarked. It smelled like the beach, like rotten kelp and saltwater. Aiden jumped up and ran behind me. Tim was out of the chair, standing between us and that thing. In a split second, it was like all the lies fell away. Tim looked frantically around the room for a weapon just as it grabbed him by the shirt.

It's interesting how she depersonalises the ghouls. They are "it" to her. Maybe it makes it easier, but I could never do it.

Article:

Another one, big, I'd say six and a half feet with giant shoulders and bulging arms. The window was broken and it had Jenna by the hair. She was screaming "Mommymommymommy!"

What did you do?

I . . . I'm not totally sure. When I try to remember, everything goes by too fast. I had it by the neck. It pulled Jenna toward its open mouth. I squeezed hard . . . pulled . . . The kids say I tore the thing's head off, just ripped it right out with all the flesh and muscle and whatever else hanging in tatters. I don't think that's possible. Maybe with all your adrenaline pumping . . . I think the kids just have built it up in their memories over the years, making me into SheHulk or something.

Hysterical Strength. If they'd already been injured in the neck, maybe that's where the bite was, the flesh had necrotised a little… I could see it.

Article:

He ran into the backyard as we headed for the garage. I heard his gun go off as I started the engine.

He uses this family as his touchstone for "normal Americans experience" and I don't think it is accidental; there's a lot of recrimination spread to herself. She as a civilian didn't pay enough attention, she as a civilian wasn't invested enough in her self defence, she as a civilian medicalised her kids… it's not really meaningful, though. Not doing those things wouldn't have made America do better, because, again, the government was lying about the danger.

The Great Panic is next. The governments of the world engage in Oedipal tragedy as their efforts to avoid a panic directly cause one.

On another note, please join me in wishing all support to our comrades in Chile in their protests against the regime there. I know it doesn't seem like it'll necessarily help much, but please donate what you can to their protest fund [HERE]. These funds go towards paying bail, buying gas masks and the like for the tear gas, and to help their various protest groups stay afloat. Literally anything you give will help.

AN: I really like this section. He just… justifies a coup that he doesn't think happened in his book (it did, even strictly textually). Incredible.

 

[veteranMortal]

The Great Panic

Article:

PARNELL AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE: MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, USA

[Gavin Blaire pilots one of the D-17 combat dirigibles that make up the core of America's Civil Air Patrol. It is a task well suited to him. In civilian life, he piloted a Fujifilm blimp.]

The fact that the Americans actually use blimps for combat baffles me. Like, for scouting, sure, we all do that, but they put fucking snipers on the floating bombs and just… mate you could not pay me. Mad brave morons.

Article:

It stretched to the horizon: sedans, trucks, buses, RVs, anything that could drive. I saw tractors, I saw a cement mixer. Seriously, I even saw a flatbed with nothing but a giant sign on it, a billboard advertising a "Gentlemen's Club." People were sitting on top of it. People were riding on top of everything, on roofs, in between luggage racks. It reminded me of some old picture of trains in India with people hanging on them like monkeys.

I often find people cannot quite understand, even now, how it got so suddenly bad? How it jumped from "small groups of zombies wandering the streets" to "we must flee the cities" with no intervening steps?

But why would there be a step? The panic began the moment people realised the government had lied to them, which was when they started seeing groups of ghouls. Across dozens of cities, over the course of about a month, everyone in America found out they'd been lied to about the fact that the dead were literally rising and planning to eat them. You can't blame them for deciding at that point that they had to get out.

Article:

All kinds of crap lined the road—suitcases, boxes, even pieces of expensive furniture. I saw a grand piano, I'm not kidding, just smashed like it was thrown off the top of a truck. There were also a lot of abandoned cars. Some had been pushed over, some were stripped, some looked burned out. I saw a lot of people on foot, walking across the plains or alongside the road. Some were knocking on windows, holding up all kinds of stuff. A few women were exposing themselves. They must have been looking to trade, probably gas. They couldn't have been looking for rides, they were moving faster than cars. It wouldn't make sense, but . . . [shrugs].

It was like this on our motorways. I remember walking down the motorway, passing car after car after car. Mostly deserted, but quite a few still had ghouls strapped up inside them.

Article:

Back down the road, about thirty miles, traffic was moving a little better. You'd think the mood would be calmer. It wasn't. People were flashing their lights, bumping the cars in front of them, getting out and throwing down. I saw a few people lying by the side of the road, barely moving or not at all. People were running past them, carrying stuff, carrying children, or just running, all in the same direction of the traffic. A few miles later, I saw why.

I remember watching stuff like this. We were sticking tight in our house - my parents thought things would basically turn out okay until it was almost too late - and there was constant footage from the motorways. Horns blaring, lights flashing, cars rammed together like sardines in a can, and it was so hot! People had their windows open that summer, almost by default, like they forgot.

Article:

Those creatures were swarming among the cars. Drivers on the outer lanes tried to veer off the road, sticking in the mud, trapping the inner lanes. People couldn't open their doors. The cars were too tightly packed. I saw those things reach in open windows, pulling people out or pulling themselves in. A lot of drivers were trapped inside. Their doors were shut and, I'm assuming, locked. Their windows were rolled up, it was safety tempered glass. The dead couldn't get in, but the living couldn't get out. I saw a few people panic, try to shoot through their windshields, destroying the only protection they had. Stupid. They might have bought themselves a few hours in there, maybe even a chance to escape. Maybe there was no escape, just a quicker end. There was a horse trailer, hitched to a pickup in the center lane. It was rocking crazily back and forth. The horses were still inside.

And once it began, the Great Panic was self perpetuating. People fled their homes and overwhelmed the decrepit infrastructure, and then were caught there with thousands of others, and then suddenly you have a swarm.

Article:

The swarm continued among the cars, literally eating its way up the stalled lines, all those poor bastards just trying to get away. And that's what haunts me most about it, they weren't headed anywhere. This was the I-80, a strip of highway between Lincoln and North Platte. Both places were heavily infested, as well as all those little towns in between. What did they think they were doing? Who organized this exodus? Did anyone? Did people see a line of cars and join them without asking? I tried to imagine what it must have been like, stuck bumper to bumper, crying kids, barking dog, knowing what was coming just a few miles back, and hoping, praying that someone up ahead knows where he's going.

This is such a needlessly harsh way to put this. What happened was that people knew that where they were was infested, not safe. They thought perhaps somewhere else was less so, or at the very least that the road would be clear going north from… one of the tiny towns between North Platte and Lincoln. My Nebraskan geography isn't good enough to know any, I'm afraid, but they must've had some.

The Great Panic was a societal collapse due to total loss of faith in the government combining with an existential threat to life in every city you care to mention. It was not personal failure. What were the civilians meant to do? Die in their homes, like in South Bend, where they were told the National Guard would be coming soon to restore order? To my knowledge, no one who obeyed that instruction survived.

Article:

ALANG, INDIA

[I stand on the shore with Ajay Shah, looking out at the rusting wrecks of once-proud ships. Since the government does not possess the funds to remove them and because both time and the elements have made their steel next to useless, they remain silent memorials to the carnage this beach once witnessed.]

God, India. Now there's a tragedy wrapped in a sin. A hundred million survivors, all told.

Article:

They tell me what happened here was not unusual, all around our world where the ocean meets the land, people trying desperately to board whatever floated for a chance of survival at sea.

Going to sea to escape the plague was a basically logical plan, and one where the first step is extremely easy - head to a port or shipyard, or failing that, just the coast - and so, unfortunately, more or less everyone thought this, more or less at once.

Article:

I didn't know what Alang was, even though I'd lived my entire life in nearby Bhavnagar. I was an office manager, a "zippy," white-collar professional from the day I left university. The only time I'd ever worked with my hands was to punch a keyboard, and not even that since all our software went voice recognition. I knew Alang was a shipyard, that's why I tried to make for it in the first place. I'd expected to find a construction site cranking out hull after hull to carry us all to safety. I had no idea that it was just the opposite. Alang didn't build ships, it killed them. Before the war, it was the largest breakers yard in the world. Vessels from all nations were bought by Indian scrap-iron companies, run up on this beach, stripped, cut, and disassembled until not the smallest bolt remained. The several dozen vessels I saw were not fully loaded, fully functional ships, but naked hulks lining up to die.

I can't imagine the gut wrench this must've been. Alang broke ferries, cargo ships and ocean liners. Thousands, tens of thousands of people could've taken to the sea if the ships weren't being gutted.

As it was, it became a mass grave.

Article:

There were no dry docks, no slipways. Alang was not so much a yard as a long stretch of sand. Standard procedure was to ram the ships up onto the shore, stranding them like beached whales. I thought my only hope was the half dozen new arrivals that still remained anchored offshore, the ones with skeleton crews and, I hoped, a little bit of fuel left in their bunkers. One of these ships, the Veronique Delmas, was trying to pull one of her beached sisters out to sea. Ropes and chains were haphazardly lashed to the stern of the APL Tulip, a Singapore container ship that had already been partially gutted. I arrived just as the Delmas fired up her engines. I could see the white water churning as she strained against the lines. I could hear some of the weaker ropes snap like gunshots.

The people who lived out the war on ships have my deepest respect. The people who lived it out on ships condemned for their age before the war even began have a little of my fear, too.

Article:

There was nothing anyone could do, the Delmas was already at flank speed, dragging the Tulip's stern out into deep water where it rolled over and sank within seconds. There must have been at least a thousand people aboard, packing every cabin and passageway and square inch of open deck space. Their cries were muffled by the thunder of escaping air.

It isn't mentioned here - he doesn't know, maybe - but the Veronique Delmas was wounded here too; she sheared a number of bulkheads, wallowed awfully, and eventually had to be defensively beached on the Manihi Atoll because she was taking on water. I believe they use her to host citizens' assemblies - she was amongst the first ships there.

Article:

Why didn't the refugees just wait aboard the beached ships, pull up the ladders, make them inaccessible?

Imagine being this guy. Someone tells you about a thousand people drowning in terror and you say "why didn't they just pull up the ladders? That would've been more logical?" Like… ick?

Also, though it isn't relevant - this would be very stupid. There's no food on these ships, several of the refugees are bitten and locking yourself in a ship with a thousand possibly infected strangers is a bad idea when you lack any means of disposal, and a lot of the beached ships were essentially porous to people. Not only is this deeply insensitive, it's also stupid. Much like our journalist.

Article:

You speak with rational hindsight. You weren't there that night. The yard was crammed right up to the shoreline, this mad dash of humanity backlit by inland fires. Hundreds were trying to swim out to the ships. The surf was choked with those who didn't make it. Dozens of little boats were going back and forth, shuttling people from shore to ships. "Give me your money," some of them would say, "everything you have, then I'll take you."

"You speak with rational hindsight."

He has more restraint than me, limiting himself to an extremely frosty shutdown. Me, I'd have punched him.

I had a relatively light collapse, with the real horrors only coming later, surviving in England's zombie infested south, so things like this, imagining living through this? That I find profoundly distressing.

Article:

Money was still worth something?

Money, or food, or anything they considered valuable. I saw one ship's crew that only wanted women, young women. I saw another that would only take light-skinned refugees. The bastards were shining their torches in people's faces, trying to root out darkies like me. I even saw one captain, standing on the deck of his ship's launch, waving a gun and shouting "No scheduled castes, we won't take untouchables!" Untouchables? Castes? Who the hell still thinks like that? And this is the crazy part, some older people actually got out of the queue! Can you believe that?

There's something very upsetting about the fact that - over and over, across the world, some people cling to their hideous prejudices. The world is ending and you continue this shit?

I can't imagine, either, being a young woman forced to make the choice between near certain death on the shore and… a boat that was specifically only taking on young women.

On a cheerier note on that topic, at least one of those sorts of boats became The Ship of Amazons which moored up in Ulithi after successfully mutinying.

Article:

I'm just highlighting the most extreme negative examples, you understand. For every one profiteer, or repulsive psychopath, there were ten good and decent people whose karma was still untainted. A lot of fishermen and small boat owners who could have simply escaped with their families chose to put themselves in danger by continuing to return to shore. When you think about what they were risking: being murdered for their boats, or just marooned on the beach, or else attacked from beneath by so many underwater ghouls . . .

This is important, too. I have endless respect for Ajay Shah here, for going through this, staring into the worst day, where humanity's most inhuman face is shown, and to still remember that good people outnumber the bad ten to one, that people showed a selfless desire to risk their lives to save others.

Article:

That was how I was saved. I was one of those who tried to swim. The ships looked much closer than they actually were. I was a strong swimmer, but after walking from Bhavnagar, after fighting for my life for most of that day, I barely had enough strength to float on my back. By the time I reached my intended salvation, there wasn't enough air in my lungs to call for help. There was no gangway. The smooth side towered over me. I banged on the steel, shouting up with the last bit of breath I had.
Just as I slipped below the surface, I felt a powerful arm wrap around my chest. This is it, I thought; any second, I thought I would feel teeth dig into my flesh. Instead of pulling me down, the arm hauled me back up to the surface. I ended up aboard the Sir Wilfred Grenfell, an ex-Canadian Coast Guard cutter. I tried to talk, to apologize for not having any money, to explain that I could work for my passage, do anything they needed. The crew-man just smiled. "Hold on," he said to me, "we're about to get under way." I could feel the deck vibrate then lurch as we moved.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find where the Sir Wilfred Grenfell went after Alang. She was a remarkably small ship to have been sent all the way to Alang from Canada; usually cutters like this were sold to smaller navies or sunk to form a reef. Honestly, she was pretty young to be there full stop. A good ship to be on if you got the choice. Sturdy.

But anyway, she more or less just disappears; his survival indicates the ship also survived, but she's not as large as the others mentioned thus far, she wouldn't be noteworthy to anyone else but the people on her.

Article:

That was the worst part, watching the other ships we passed. Some of the onboard infected refugees had begun to reanimate. Some vessels were floating slaughterhouses, others just burned at anchor. People were leaping into the sea. Many who sank beneath the surface never reappeared.

Something on the order of 300,000 people died at the Alang shipyard during the Great Panic - that's an estimate based on testimony like this and statistical modelling about how many corpses remain there compared to how many got up and walked away, or were washed away by the sea.

Article:

TOPEKA, KANSAS, USA

[Sharon could be considered beautiful by almost any standard— with long red hair, sparkling green eyes, and the body of a dancer or a prewar supermodel. She also has the mind of a four-year-old girl.
We are at the Rothman Rehabilitation Home for Feral Children. Doctor Roberta Kelner, Sharon's caseworker, describes her condition as "lucky."
"At least she has language skills, a cohesive thought process," she explains. "It's rudimentary, but at least it's fully functional." Doctor Kelner is eager for the interview, but Doctor Sommers, Rothman's program director, is not. Funding has always been spotty for this program, and the present administration is threatening to close it down altogether.
Sharon is shy at first. She will not shake my hand and seldom makes eye contact. Although Sharon was found in the ruins of Wichita, there is no way of knowing where her story originally occurred.]

I don't, uh, completely know why he takes the time to mention that she's hot? It is weird and creepy.

I think it's deeply depressing that even under their allegedly "progressive" military governance, the Americans still shit all over the mentally ill. They make better mouth noises about it than they used to, but they're still cutting funding for centres like this basically across the board. Dismal.

Article:

We were in church, Mommy and me. Daddy told us that he would come find us. Daddy had to go do something. We had to wait for him in church. Everybody was there. They all had stuff. They had cereal, and water, and juice, and sleeping bags and flashlights and . . . [she mimes a rifle]. Mrs. Randolph had one. She wasn't supposed to. They were dangerous. She told me they were dangerous. She was Ashley's mommy. Ashley was my friend. I asked her where was Ashley. She started to cry. Mommy told me not to ask her about Ashley and told Mrs. Randolph that she was sorry. Mrs. Randolph was dirty, she had red and brown on her dress. She was fat. She had big, soft arms.

Just a warning; Sharon's story is a whole sack of trauma. It took me an age to reread - I have seen people like Sharon. Worse, in a lot of cases. Hearing a story from a child is upsetting, but it's worse when that child shouldn't be a child any more.

Article:

There were other kids, Jill and Abbie, and other kids. Mrs. McGraw was watching them. They had crayons. They were coloring on the wall. Mommy told me to go play with them. She told me it was okay. She said Pastor Dan said it was okay.
Pastor Dan was there, he was trying to make people listen to him. "Please everyone . . ." [she mimics a deep, low voice] "please stay calm, the 'thorties' are coming, just stay calm and wait for the 'thorties.' " No one was listening to him. Everyone was talking, nobody was sitting. People were trying to talk on their things [mimes holding a cell phone], they were angry at their things, throwing them, and saying bad words. I felt bad for Pastor Dan. [She mimics the sound of a siren.] Outside. [She does it again, starting soft, then growing, then fading out again multiple times.]

Of course, this is the other side of the "Great Panic," and part of what makes me angry about the whole thing - civilians fled, and died in their cars, and we are to blame them for fleeing. Civilians held tight, waited for the authorities to come to their aid, and we are to blame them for staying.

America's - and the rest's - unwillingness to accept that civilians died en masse in the early stages of the collapse because in violent collapses of state authority without a parallel state structure pre-formed, lots of people die. All these deaths are the fault of the pre-war governments and state organs.

Article:

Mommy was talking to Mrs. Cormode and other mommies. They were fighting. Mommy was getting mad. Mrs. Cormode kept saying [in an angry drawl], "Well what if? What else can you do?" Mommy was shaking her head. Mrs. Cormode was talking with her hands. I didn't like Mrs. Cormode. She was Pastor Dan's wife. She was bossy and mean.
Somebody yelled . . . "Here they come!" Mommy came and picked me up. They took our bench and put it next to the door. They put all the benches next to the door. "Quick!" "Jam the door!" [She mimics several different voices.] "I need a hammer!" "Nails!" "They're in the parking lot!" "They're coming this way!" [She turns to Doctor Kelner.] Can I?

It beggars belief that they didn't already secure the doors, but I saw worse defended places during the war. One of our early stops once we left our house, someone had tried to hole up in the petrol station on the outskirts. I remember this big pile of barricades around the door, blocking it completely, and I remember a broken window next to it, and blood on the walls. People got to somewhere they hoped was safe and just stopped at this point. We got lucky, my family - ran into a larger group of survivors, heading onto the M40.

That's a motorway, by the by. Called the "AM40" now and mostly a colossal never to be finished boondoggle of a concept.

Article:

[Doctor Sommers looks unsure. Doctor Kelner smiles and nods. I later learn that the room is soundproofed for this reason.]

[Sharon mimics the moan of a zombie. It is undoubtedly the most realistic I have ever heard. Clearly, by their discomfort, Sommers and Kelner agree.]

They were coming. They came bigger. [Again she moans. Then follows up by pounding her right fist on the table.] They wanted to come in. [Her blows are powerful, mechanical.] People screamed. Mommy hugged me tight. "It's okay." [Her voice softens as she begins to stroke her own hair.] "I won't let them get you. Shhhh. . . ."
[Now she bangs both fists on the table, her strikes becoming more chaotic as if to simulate multiple ghouls.] "Brace the door!" "Hold it! Hold it!" [She simulates the sound of shattering glass.] The windows broke, the windows in the front next to the door. The lights got black. Grown-ups got scared. They screamed.

It's unconscionable, what they did here, but horribly understandable.

If you want to avoid explicitly reading it - I know quite a lot of people have trauma around this topic, understandably, you can skip to the end; this is the last interview I am including in this update.

Article:

[Her voice returns to her mother's.] "Shhhh . . . baby. I won't let them get you." [Her hands go from her hair to her face, gently stroking her forehead and cheeks. Sharon gives Kelner a questioning look. Kelner nods. Sharon's voice suddenly simulates the sound of something large breaking, a deep phlegm-filled rumble from the bottom of her throat.] "They're coming in! Shoot 'em, shoot 'em!" [She makes the sound of gunfire then . . .] "I won't let them get you, I won't let them get you." [Sharon suddenly looks away, over my shoulder to something that isn't there.] "The children! Don't let them get the children!" That was Mrs. Cormode. "Save the children! Save the children!" [Sharon makes more gunshots. She balls her hands into a large double fist, bringing it down hard on an invisible form.] Now the kids started crying. [She simulates stabbing, punching, striking with objects.] Abbie cried hard. Mrs. Cormode picked her up. [She mimes lifting something, or someone, up and swinging them against the wall.] And then Abbie stopped. [She goes back to stroking her own face, her mother's voice has become harder.] "Shhh . . . it's okay, baby, it's okay . . ." [Her hands move down from her face to her throat, tightening into a strangling grip.] "I won't let them get you. I WON'T LET THEM GET YOU!"

I can't really add much here. This was not a uniquely American phenomenon - it happened at a Church, and so lots of people tie things like this in with the Ghoul Cults, the people who believed the reason the ghouls are so mindless is that to be bitten by a ghoul is to be Enraptured into God's Heavenly Host, with your mortal flesh being left behind as a recruiting tool - but this is not that. Obviously.

This is closer to what happened in pre-schools across Britain. There is nothing religious or unique about the idea that it is better to kill the innocent rather than let them be taken by the ghouls.

Article:

[Sharon begins to gasp for air.]

[Doctor Sommers makes a move to stop her. Doctor Kelner puts up a hand. Sharon suddenly ceases, throwing her arms out to the sound of a gunshot.]

Warm and wet, salty in my mouth, stinging my eyes. Arms picked me up and carried me. [She gets up from the table, mimicking a motion close to a football.] Carried me into the parking lot. "Run, Sharon, don't stop!" [This is a different voice now, not her mother's.] "Just run, run-run- run!" They pulled her away from me. Her arms let me go. They were big, soft arms.

This makes me cry, but it also… she didn't need to be put through this, surely? I'm not a doctor but this seems to be retraumatising her, no? She clearly experiences these events very viscerally when she recounts them?

It's an odd cruelty.

The remaining interviews in his "Great Panic" section are military or paramilitary, so this felt a good place to stop.

I think I've worked out means of getting this into America. Let me know if you can read this (you cannot let me know, I have no way of hearing your responses).

Wishing all support to our comrades in Chile in their struggle. I know it doesn't seem like it'll help much, but please donate what you can to the cause [HERE]. Santiago Libre!

Donate to the Sámi communities restoring the arctic ecosystem [HERE].

AN: The Great Panic is some of his better writing, but his interviewer looks like a complete asshole in this section, like, repeatedly? One of the limitations of the interview concept is that sometimes to get the story to be transcribed as something from someone deeply broken by the experience, your interviewer has to look like someone who would poke a deeply broken person into essentially a meltdown.

 

[veteranMortal]

The Great Panic, Part 2

Article:

KHUZHIR, OLKHON ISLAND, LAKE BAIKAL, THE HOLY RUSSIAN EMPIRE

[The room is bare except for a table, two chairs, and a large wall mirror, which is almost sure to be one-way glass. I sit across from my subject, writing on the pad provided for me (my transcriber has been forbidden for "security reasons"). Maria Zhuganova's face is worn, her hair is graying, her body strains the seams of the fraying uniform she insists on wearing for this interview. Technically we are alone, although I sense watching eyes behind the room's one-way glass.]

The Holy Russian Empire. Recognised by America as the legitimate successor state to the pre-war Russian government, they cling to the far end of the Trans-Siberian Railroad like a foul smell. As of this writing, they have lost control of Tulun, and thus the Baikal-Amur Railroad. Irkutsk is their most westerly city.

Article:

We didn't know that there was a Great Panic. We were completely isolated. About a month before it began, about the same time as that American newswoman broke the story, our camp was placed on indefinite communication blackout. All the televisions were removed from the barracks, all the personal radios and cell phones, too. I had one of those cheap disposable types with five prepaid minutes. It was all my parents could afford. I was supposed to use it to call them on my birthday, my first birthday away from home.

The Russian Government knew it didn't have a fucking prayer of surviving this, as and when it went completely off the charts awful, which they knew it would, so they started working on securing what they could; they bribed the Spetsnaz, the people who already knew about the zombies. Their families were moved out east, to Krasnoyarsk, to Novosibirsk and Sverdlovsk - that is, I suppose, Yekaterinburg. Safe cities, cities they'd be able to hold. Then they closed their military bases to any news.

Article:

We were stationed in North Ossetia, Alania, one of our wild southern republics. Our official duty was "peacekeeping," preventing ethnic strife between the Ossetia and Ingush minorities. Our rotation was up about the same time they cut us off from the world. A matter of "state security" they called it.

Who were "they"?

Everyone: our officers, the Military Police, even a plain-clothed civilian who just seemed to appear one day out of nowhere. He was a mean little bastard, with a thin, rat face. That's what we called him: "Rat Face."

FSB.

Article:

Did you ever try to find out who he was?

What, me personally? Never. Neither did anyone else. Oh, we griped; soldiers always gripe. But there also wasn't time for any serious complaints. Right after the blackout was put into effect, we were placed on full combat alert. Up until then it had been easy duty—lazy, monotonous, and broken only by the occasional mountain stroll. Now we were in those mountains for days at a time with full battle dress and ammo. We were in every village, every house. We questioned every peasant and traveler and . . . I don't know . . . goat that crossed our path.

Questioned them? For what?

I didn't know. "Is everyone in your family present?" "Has anyone gone missing?" "Has anyone been attacked by a rabid animal or man?" That was the part that confused me the most. Rabid? I understood the animal part, but man? There were a lot of physical inspections, too, stripping these people to their bare skin while the medics searched every inch of their bodies for . . . something . . . we weren't told what.

At this stage, the Russian Federation was trying to determine which of their border regions was compromised, so they could work out how to juggle their troops. This rapidly ceased to be their main concern.

Article:

It didn't make sense, nothing did. We once found a whole cache of weapons, 74s, a few older 47s, plenty of ammo, probably bought from some corrupt opportunist right in our battalion. We didn't know who the weapons belonged to; drug runners, or the local gangsters, maybe even those supposed "Reprisal Squads" that were the reason for our deployment in the first place. And what did we do? We left it all. That little civilian, "Rat Face," he had a private meeting with some of the village elders. I don't know what was discussed, but I can tell you that they looked scared half to death: crossing themselves, praying silently.

I couldn't swear to it, but if you told me the Russians had already decided to abandon places like the Caucasus Mountains for the duration, I'd believe you. Their plans mostly seemed to anticipate a military failure due to low morale, and leaving places like the Caucasus to fend for themselves would've possibly helped with this? I don't know.

Article:

We didn't understand. We were confused, angry. We didn't understand what the hell we were doing out there. We had this one old veteran in our platoon, Baburin. He'd fought in Afghanistan and twice in Chechnya. It was rumored that during Yeltsin's crackdown, his BMP[1] was the first to fire on the Duma.

Prick.

Article:

He was always goodnatured, always drunk . . . when he thought he could get away with it. He changed after the incident with the weapons. He stopped smiling, there were no more stories. I don't think he ever touched a drop after that, and when he spoke to you, which was rare, the only thing he ever said was, "This isn't good. Something's going to happen." Whenever I tried to ask him about it, he would just shrug and walk away. Morale was pretty low after that. People were tense, suspicious. Rat Face was always there, in the shadows, listening, watching, whispering into the ears of our officers.

Records from Moscow indicate that this was part of the strategic calculus of the pre-war government; they sent FSB agents to pretty well every military base in Russia, hoping to prevent the expected desertions as and when they were forced to abandon their major cities, through the bribing, blackmailing or otherwise co-option of the various officers.

It failed, by and large. People didn't care about their officers.

Article:

He was with us the day we swept a little no-name town, this primitive hamlet at what looked like the edge of the world. We'd executed our standard searches and interrogations. We were just about to pack it in. Suddenly this child, this little girl came running down the only road in town. She was crying, obviously terrified. She was chattering to her parents . . . I wish I could have taken the time to learn their language . . . and pointing across the field. There was a tiny figure, another little girl, staggering across the mud toward us. Lieutenant Tikhonov raised his binoculars and I watched his face lose its color. Rat Face came up next to him, gave a look through his own glasses, then whispered something in the lieutenant's ear. Petrenko, platoon sharpshooter, was ordered to raise his weapon and center the girl in his sights. He did. "Do you have her?" "I have her." "Shoot." That's how it went, I think. I remember there was a pause. Petrenko looked up at the lieutenant and asked him to repeat the order. "You heard me," he said angrily. I was farther away than Petrenko and even I'd heard him. "I said eliminate the target, now!" I could see the tip of his rifle was shaking. He was a skinny little runt, not the bravest or the strongest, but suddenly he lowered his weapon and said he wouldn't do it. Just like that. "No, sir." It felt like the sun froze in the sky. No one knew what to do, especially Lieutenant Tikhonov. Everyone was looking at one another, then we were all looking out at the field.

It is moments like this which inadvertently screwed this regiment. Petrenko getting arrested - probably executed, frankly - and then the MPs having their excuse to lock them all down…

Article:

That night . . . lying awake in my bunk, I tried not to think about what had happened. I tried not to think about the fact that the MPs had taken Petrenko away, or that our weapons had been locked in the armory. I knew I should have felt bad for the child, angry, even vengeful toward Rat Face, and maybe even a little bit guilty because I didn't lift a finger to stop it. I knew those were the kinds of emotions I should have been feeling; at that point the only thing I could feel was fear. I kept thinking about what Baburin had said, that something bad was going to happen. I just wanted to go home, see my parents. What if there'd been some horrible terrorist attack? What if it was a war? My family lived in Bikin, almost within sight of the Chinese border. I needed to speak to them, to make sure they were okay. I worried so much that I started throwing up, so much so that they checked me into the infirmary. That's why I missed the patrol that day, that's why I was still on bed rest when they came back the following afternoon.

And then they stew in it, scared and paranoid.

Article:

I was in my bunk, rereading an outdated copy of Semnadstat.[2] I heard a commotion, vehicle engines, voices. A crowd was already assembled on the parade ground. I pushed my way through and saw Arkady standing in the center of the mob. Arkady was the heavy machine gunner from my squad, a big bear of a man. We were friends because he kept the other men away from me, if you understand what I mean. He said I reminded him of his sister. [Smiles sadly.] I liked him.
There was someone crawling at his feet. It looked like an old woman, but there was a burlap hood over her head and a chain leash wrapped around her neck. Her dress was torn and the skin of her legs had been scraped clean off. There was no blood, just this black pus. Arkady was well into a loud, angry speech. "No more lies! No more orders to shoot civilians on sight! And that's why I put the little zhopoliz down . . ."
I looked for Lieutenant Tikhonov but I couldn't see him anywhere. I got a ball of ice in my stomach.

They fucked up their mutiny. They left it too long, didn't secure their armoury. I don't say this to be cruel, I say this because its interesting; had Petrenko not gotten himself arrested the day before, had Arkady been a little smarter…

Article:

". . . because I wanted you all to see!" Arkady lifted the chain, pulling the old babushka up by her throat. He grabbed the hood and ripped it off. Her face was gray, just like the rest of her, her eyes were wide and fierce. She snarled like a wolf and tried to grab Arkady. He wrapped one powerful hand around her throat, holding her at arm's length. "I want you all to see why we are here!" He grabbed the knife from his belt and plunged it into the woman's heart. I gasped, we all did. It was buried up to the hilt and she continued to squirm and growl. "You see!" he shouted, stabbing her several more times. "You see! This is what they're not telling us! This is what they have us breaking our backs to find!" You could see heads start to nod, a few grunts of agreement. Arkady continued, "What if these things are everywhere? What if they're back home, with our families right now!" He was trying to make eye contact with as many of us as possible. He wasn't paying enough attention to the old woman. His grip loosened, she pulled free and bit him on the hand. Arkady roared. His fist caved in the old woman's face. She fell to his feet, writhing and gurgling that black goo. He finished the job with his boot. We all heard her skull crack.
Blood was trickling down the gouge in Arkady's fist. He shook it at the sky, screaming as the veins in his neck began to bulge. "We want to go home!" he bellowed. "We want to protect our families!" Others in the crowd began to pick it up. "Yes! We want to protect our families! This is a free country! This is a democracy! You can't keep us in prison!" I was shouting, too, chanting with the rest. That old woman, the creature that could take a knife in the heart without dying . . . what if they were back home? What if they were threatening our loved ones . . . my parents? All the fear, all the doubt, every tangled, negative emotion all fused into rage. "We want to go home! We want to go home!" Chanting, chanting, and then . . . A round cracked past my ear and Arkady's left eye imploded. I don't remember running, or inhaling the tear gas. I don't remember when the Spetznaz commandos appeared, but suddenly they were all around us, beating us down, shackling us together, one of them stepping on my chest so hard I thought I was going to die right then and there.

This was a toothless protest, and they got done like it was. Elsewhere, things went… worse, for the governmental forces.

"We have lost control of the Murmansk Oblast" worse.

Article:

Was that the Decimation?

No, that was the beginning. We weren't the first army unit to rebel. It had actually started about the time the MPs first closed down the base. About the time we staged our little "demonstration," the government had decided how to restore order.

Ah, the decimation. Whoever came up with this idea after Murmansk must've been trying to destroy the Federation, it's the only explanation I can think of. That or he was a moron. Whichever.

Article:

Our new commanding officer gave a speech about duty and responsibility, about our sworn oath to protect the motherland, and how we had betrayed that oath with our selfish treachery and individual cowardice. I'd never heard words like that before. "Duty?" "Responsibility?" Russia, my Russia, was nothing but an apolitical mess. We lived in chaos and corruption, we were just trying to get through the day. Even the army was no bastion of patriotism; it was a place to learn a trade, get food and a bed, and maybe even a little money to send home when the government decided it was convenient to pay its soldiers. "Oath to protect the motherland?" Those weren't the words of my generation. That was what you'd hear from old Great Patriotic War veterans, the kind of broken, demented geezers who used to besiege Red Square with their tattered Soviet banners and their rows and rows of medals pinned to their faded, moth-eaten uniforms. Duty to the motherland was a joke.

… Or a fascist. I suppose.

The soviet veterans being depicted as "broken, demented geezers" I suppose played well with her audience of whichever Okhrana sociopath was behind that one way glass, considering.

Ironic, though.

Article:

"You spoiled children think democracy is a God-given right. You expect it, you demand it! Well, now you're going to get your chance to practice it." His exact words, stamped behind my eyelids for the rest of my life.

What did he mean?

We would be the ones to decide who would be punished. Broken up into groups of ten, we would have to vote on which one of us was going to be executed. And then we . . . the soldiers, we would be the ones to personally murder our friends. They rolled these little pushcarts past us. I can still hear their creaking wheels. They were full of stones, about the size of your hand, sharp and heavy. Some cried out, pleaded with us, begged like children. Some, like Baburin, simply knelt there silently, on this knees, staring right into my face as I brought the rock down into his.

This shit lost them Russia. Not all at once, but there's a reason they're squatting in fucking Vladivostok, blowing daddy America for a handful of M1 Abrams, and not in Leningrad or Moscow right now, and a large part of it is that once they quelled a mutinous episode - which could be as little as a protest, as we see here - they made the soldiers murder their fucking friends!

This did not, as they seem to have somehow hoped, break the spirit of the soldiers. Instead, in most cases, they lost the units they decimated, as soon as the soldiers rearmed from their armouries.

All told, they probably didn't actually manage to conduct all that many decimations before they lost control of their state; the news spread faster than they could respond, and their soon to be "Holy Emperor" fled for Sverdlovsk with piss running down his leg.

It wasn't a revolution yet, just a series of growing mutinies. The rest came later.

Article:

[She sighs softly, glancing over her shoulder at the one-way glass.]

Brilliance. Sheer fucking brilliance. Conventional executions might have reinforced discipline, might have restored order from the top down, but by making us all accomplices, they held us together not just by fear, but by guilt as well. We could have said no, could have refused and been shot ourselves, but we didn't. We went right along with it. We all made a conscious choice and because that choice carried such a high price, I don't think anyone ever wanted to make another one again. We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say "They told me to do it! It's their fault, not mine." The freedom, God help us, to say "I was only following orders."

I do have to give him props here, begrudgingly, our journalist friend. The Holy Russian Empire is one of America's more unpleasant allies - hence the odd games they play with it, to their domestic audience. His indication that she was spouting the party line here, that she was saying this for fear of her life from the fucking Okhrana, not because she believes this gibberish…

He did well enough. I suppose.

Article:

BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOS, WEST INDIES FEDERATION

[Trevor's Bar personifies the "Wild West Indies," or, more specifically, each island's "Special Economic Zone." This is not a place most people would associate with the order and tranquility of postwar Caribbean life. It is not meant to be. Fenced off from the rest of the island and catering to a culture of chaotic violence and debauchery, the Special Economic Zones are engineered specifically to separate "off-islanders" from their money. My discomfort seems to please T. Sean Collins. The giant Texan slides a shot of "kill-devil" rum in my direction, then swings his massive, boot-clad feet onto the table.]

The Windies play their games soaking foreigners for money and keep a little paddling pool of playing in the capitalist markets, and everyone nods along like it makes sense and won't eat their faces, because they're Cuba's nearest and dearest.

What is there to say about T. Sean Collins - notorious war criminal. [LINK], [LINK], [LINK].

I don't have a whole lot more to add about him, tbh? Stan MacDonald gave an interview [here] about how he felt about being interviewed in the same book as a guy who killed three kids in Iqaluit because they spat on him. I understand they knew each other once upon a time.

Article:

They haven't come up with a name for what I used to do. Not a real one, not yet. "Independent contractor" sounds like I should be layin' drywall and smearin' plaster. "Private security" sounds like some dumbass mall guard. "Mercenary" is the closest, I guess, but at the same time, about as far from the real me as you could have gotten. A mercenary sounds like some crazed-out 'Nam vet, all tats and handlestache, humpin' in some Third World cesspool 'cause he can't hack it back in the real world. That wasn't me at all.

Mercenary is exactly correct, jackass.

Article:

You don't mind if I don't mention any names, 'kay? Some of these people are still alive, or their estates are still active, and . . . can you believe, they're still threatening to sue. After all that's gone down? Okay, so I can't name names or places, but figure it's an island . . . a big island . . . a long island, right next to Manhattan. Can't sue me for that, right?

I mean, one, yes I'm pretty sure they could, and two… this is an annoyingly American book. I don't just mean that there's about a million American points of view for every one from outside the good ol' US of A, I also mean that when he's covering the point where the infestations are starting to overwhelm entire fucking major cities, he covers it by interviewing a mercenary prick who bitches about celebrities.

Anyway, lets read about some dead rich Americans, maybe that'll cheer me up.

Article:

Our client liked to know people who were known by all. His plan was to provide safety for those who could raise his image during and after the war, playing Moses to the scared and famous. And you know what, they fell for it. The actors, and singers, and rappers and pro athletes, and just the professional faces, like the ones you see on talk shows or reality shows, or even that little rich, spoiled, tired-looking whore who was famous for just being a rich, spoiled, tired-looking whore.

Pre-emptively, before anyone accuses me of being concerned about being sued by Americans (I called their government a military junta with death squads! They can try to sue me, or they can try to send their pathetic special forces to Cuba again to fail to kill a blogger this time, rather than the President, I don't give a shit) - the reason I don't identify any of these celebrities is that I neither know nor care enough about pre-war American pop culture.

Article:

Crazy, I know, but you kinda expected those people to be there, at least I did. What I didn't expect was all their "people." Every one of them, no matter who they were or what they did, had to have, at least, I don't know how many stylists and publicists and personal assistants. Some of them, I think, were pretty cool, just doing it for the money, or because they figured they'd be safe there.

A lot of these people survive. There's some claims to the contrary, for reasons I'll touch on later - the Long Island Mansion is genuinely quite interesting - but they mostly survive this, which is "neat" I suppose.

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He had enough dehydrated food to keep an army fed for years, as well as an endless supply of water from a desalinizer that ran right out into the ocean. He had wind turbines, solar panels, and backup generators with giant fuel tanks buried right under the courtyard. He had enough security measures to hold off the living dead forever: high walls, motion sensors, and weapons, oh the weapons. Yeah, our boss had really done his homework, but what he was most proud of was the fact that every room in the house was wired for a simultaneous webcast that went out all over the world 24/7. This was the real reason for having all his "closest" and "best" friends over. He didn't just want to ride out the storm in comfort and luxury, he wanted everyone to know he'd done it. That was the celebrity angle, his way of ensuring high-profile exposure.

Another thing I will be touching on later, FYI, but yes, the Long Island Mansion was kitted out well to survive the apocalypse.

I find the whole concept kind of weird, but this does seem to have been his actual plan. Until and unless someone discovers a satanic sacrifice chamber in his basement, I suppose we'll have to assume a billionaire asshole decided to just… brag like this. The bourgeoisie sow the seeds of their own destruction.

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The feed was live from New York's Upper East Side; the dead were coming right up Third Avenue, people were taking them on hand to hand, hammers and pipes, the manager of a Modell's Sporting Goods was handing out all his baseball bats and shouting "Get 'em in the head!" There was this one guy on rollerblades. He had a hockey stick in his hand, a big 'ole meat cleaver bolted to the blade. He was doing an easy thirty, at that speed he might have taken a neck or two. The camera saw the whole thing, the rotted arm that shot out of the sewer drain right in front of him, the poor guy back flipping into the air, coming down hard on his face, then being dragged, screaming, by his ponytail into the drain.

New York - the vaunted "Hero City" - being, like, all but consumed by zombies is just a footnote whilst he records a mercenary talk about the Long Island Mansion without discussing the interesting bits of the Long Island Mansion. Americans are odd.

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At that moment the camera in our living room swung back to catch the reactions of the watching celebs. There were a few gasps, some honest, some staged. I remember thinking I had less respect for the ones who tried to fake some tears than I did for the little spoiled whore who called the rollerblading guy a "dumbass." Hey, at least she was being honest. I remember I was standing next to this guy, Sergei, a miserable, sad-faced, hulking motherfucker. His stories about growing up in Russia convinced me that not all Third World cesspools had to be tropical. It was when the camera was catching the reactions of the beautiful people that he mumbled something to himself in Russian. The only word I could make out was "Romanovs" and I was about to ask him what he meant when we all heard the alarm go off.

This is hilarious for being more prescient than he will admit.

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I flipped the safety off my weapon and flipped the guards off my sight. It was one of the newest Gen's, a fusion of light amplification and thermal imaging. I didn't need the second part because Gs gave off no body heat. So when I saw the searing, bright green signatures of several hundred runners, my throat tightened. Those weren't living dead.
"There it is!" I heard them shout. "That's the house on the news!" They were carrying ladders, guns, babies. A couple of them had these heavy satchels strapped to their backs. They were booking it for the front gate, big tough steel that was supposed to stop a thousand ghouls. The explosion tore them right off their hinges, sent them flipping into the house like giant ninja stars. "Fire!" the boss was screaming into the radio. "Knock 'em down! Kill 'em! Shootshootshoot!"

This isn't, like, quite the interesting bit? But it is, like, sick as hell.

And no, the steel doors did not fly like ninja stars into the house. I know this because I have watched the clip - it is [HERE] and fucking hilarious. Tremble before the strength of the working man.

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The "attackers," for lack of a better label, stampeded for the house. The courtyard was full of parked vehicles, sports cars and Hummers, and even a monster truck belonging to some NFL cat. Freakin fireballs, all of them, blowing over on their sides or just burning in place, this thick oily smoke from their tires blinding and choking everyone. All you could hear was gunfire, ours and theirs, and not just our private security team.

The fight didn't take long, maybe 15 minutes. Private Security Guards aren't great, and especially aren't great when they aren't anticipating being shot back at.

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We'd been paid to protect rich people from zombies, not against other not-so-rich people who just wanted a safe place to hide. You could hear them shouting as they charged in through the front door. Not "grab the booze" or "rape the bitches"; it was "put out the fire!" and "get the women and kids upstairs!"

He doesn't say much more, here - some juvenile political gossip about two extremely dead Americans I don't recognise, and baby's first rumination on Why Are The Rich Like This?

So I will instead talk about the Long Island Mansion for a little bit. The people who seized it were well organised, militant and well armed. They didn't kill anyone who was not shooting at them (that we know of? Most of the staffers survived, anyway.) They also practised extreme operational security - they disconnected the webcams and spent a month settling in, repairing the mansion and clearing the debris and bodies. They also allegedly deliberately drew in a swarm - a swarm which then stood essentially immobile and unable to break through the walls around them, a sort of moat-cum-ablative armour.

They turned on one of the webcams after Yonkers, and the party political broadcasts of a hardliner anarchist revolutionary movement were suddenly being sent out on the satellites specifically sent up and kept up by a (now dead) billionaire prick.

They gave out useful advice on how to fortify a position, how to develop and form a commune, and how to resist governmental attempts to destroy you in the aftermath. They even had some on surviving after a crackdown, rebuilding in secret. We had their seminars burned onto DVDs in Bristol and handed them out in crowds like a trot at a protest.

They themselves failed to abide by one of their rules, though - never stay in the same spot. They had become too married to their Long Island broadcasts by the time the US Government came knocking, and an artillery barrage destroyed the complex, let in their swarm-moat.

Article:

ICE CITY, GREENLAND

[From the surface, all that is visible are the funnels, the massive, carefully sculpted wind catchers that continue to bring fresh, albeit cold, air to the three-hundred-kilometer maze below. Few of the quarter million people who once inhabited this hand-carved marvel of engineering have remained. Some stay to encourage the small but growing tourist trade. Some are here as custodians, living on the pension that goes with UNESCO's renewed World Heritage Program. Some, like Ahmed Farahnakian, formerly Major Farahnakian of the Iranian Revolution Guards Corps Air Force, have nowhere else to go.]

Okay I do have to admit, Ice City fucks. I've never been, but I'd like to. It was an interesting place, though the quarter million figure was always more theoretical than real. Over the course of 10 years, approximately a quarter million people spent at least one night in the Ice City.

The actual standing population was about 20,000, and that required airlift supply from Canada, but it kept chugging.

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The infection hadn't hit us as hard as some other countries. Our land was very mountainous. Transportation was difficult. Our population was relatively small; given the size of our country and when you consider that many of our cities could be easily isolated by a proportionately large military, it is not difficult to see how optimistic our leadership was.

Iran did do well at first. They were overconfident, perhaps, but not entirely without reason. The problem was that they were also very selfish.

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The problem was refugees, millions of them from the east, millions! Streaming across Baluchistan, throwing our plans into disarray. So many areas were already infected, great swarms slouching toward our cities. Our border guards were overwhelmed, entire outposts buried under waves of ghouls. There was no way to close the border and at the same time deal with our own outbreaks.
We demanded that the Pakistanis get control of their people. They assured us they were doing all they could. We knew they were lying.

Of course they were lying! You were asking if they would pretty please take millions of infected refugees directly to the face. Why would they do that?

In contrast to Iran, Pakistan was not doing well at all. Between their native infestations and the refugees streaming in from India, Pakistan was struggling to remain a coherent state. Why would they accept Iran asking them to pretty please die so Iran could live?

Article:

]Perhaps if we could have combined our forces, coordinated a joint operation at some appropriately defensible location. I know the plans were on the table. Pakistan's south central mountains: the Pab, the Kirthar, the Central Brahui range.

The only other reliable source from within either military on this matter - Pakistani Colonel Yusuf Khan - maintains that Pakistan proposed such coordinated measures repeatedly, only for the Iranians to refuse any measures which would not cut them off from the swarms in Pakistan proper.

It is possible both are true; the Pakistanis wanted to prevent further ingress in the south, but not if the Iranians were going to put a cork in their border and leave the millions of ghouls already in Pakistan to devour them all, and the Iranians were willing to help Pakistan hold their other borders, but not if it meant abandoning Iran's own border to be overrun.

It is also possible both want to claim they were totally reasonable, and their opponent was not, when in reality no one proposed shit.

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There is a road that runs between our two countries. It is small by your standards, not even paved in most places, but it was the main southern artery in Baluchistan. To cut it at just one place, the Ketch River Bridge, would have effectively sealed off 60 percent of all refugee traffic.

Iran blew up a bridge that consequently trapped millions of infected refugees in Pakistan, and then feigned surprise that Pakistan was mad about it.

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Of course my prayers went unanswered. Three hours later their garrison at Qila Safed shot up our border station. I know now that our president and Ayatollah were willing to stand down. We'd gotten what we wanted, they'd gotten their revenge.

So Pakistan destroyed an Iranian border checkpoint that'd been completely unwilling to let anyone pass, even if they had a visa, leaving Pakistan with a growing hotspot on the border.

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Their embassy in Tehran had destroyed its codes and radios. That sonofabitching colonel had shot himself rather than betray any "state secrets." We had no hotline, no diplomatic channels. We didn't know how to contact the Pakistani leadership. We didn't even know if there was any leadership left. It was such a mess, confusion turning to anger, anger turning on our neighbors. Every hour the conflict escalated. Border clashes, air strikes. It happened so fast, just three days of conventional warfare, neither side having any clear objective, just panicked rage.

The Iranian embassy staff in Islamabad blew up their papers with a pre-set Semtex charge, then fled in a motorcade for the border. Which Iran had just closed. They probably never made it.

Iran and Pakistan only had "good" relations for like, maybe a decade, before the crisis. They both still had the mentality that the other might start fucking around with their Shi'a/Sunni minorities again, or just… start a war. It didn't help that Pakistan was shitting itself over suddenly having nuclear states on each side of them, and didn't know where Iran got the damn bomb - I gather they thought the Indians had armed them, maybe they assumed there was an alliance forming between the devil and the deep blue sea. All I know is that they were terrified.

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We created a beast, a nuclear monster that neither side could tame . . . Tehran, Islamabad, Qom, Lahore, Bandar Abbas, Ormara, Emam Khomeyni, Faisalabad. No one knows how many died in the blasts or would die when the radiation clouds began to spread over our countries, over India, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, over America.

Things could've gone a lot worse for Iran. The Pakistanis had only been able to launch a handful of their nukes before the first Agni IIIs from a panicked Indian Colonel slammed into Pakistani silos - the Indians were paying enough attention to Pakistan to know they were getting drowned in the undead, and assumed the Pakistanis had finally decided to take India with them, out of spite.

Losing Tehran, Qom and Bandar Abbas was not… great? But they still had most of their population centres, and no more refugees came into Iran. The Islamic Republic didn't survive the war - not with a decapitation strike like Tehran - but Iran did.

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No one thought it could happen, not between us. For God's sake, they helped us build our nuclear program from the ground up! They supplied the materials, the technology, the third party brokering with North Korea and Russian renegades . . . we wouldn't have been a nuclear power if it wasn't for our fraternal Muslim brothers. No one would have expected it, but then again, no one would have expected the dead to rise, now would they? Only one could have foreseen this, and I don't believe in him anymore.

Is he mocking the interviewer? He must be, right? Pakistan didn't help Iran get nuclear weapons! They barely tolerated Iran!

Iran got nukes from Russia, on the proviso that they not use them for a first-strike. Sources from both Iran and Pakistan have never admitted to firing first, and if anyone knows who did, they haven't told.

I'm calling it here, for now - next up is Yonkers, which will need to go all on its own, because after that is fucking Redeker.

Wishing all support to our comrades in Chile in their revolutionary struggle. I know it doesn't seem like it'll help much, but please donate what you can to the cause [HERE].

If your country has blocked monetary donation to Chile, you can donate to the solidarity strike funds in Spain [HERE], the UK [HERE] and even the USA itself [HERE]. Do not donate to strike funds in America if you live there, just FYI - it is considered seditious in the USA to provide funding to a strike if you are not a member of the striking union.

Donate to the Sámi communities restoring the arctic ecosystem [HERE].

AN: The second half of the Great Panic section is, imo, not as good? It all gets very military, and when Brooks gets military, Brooks gets worse. I also don't especially love the weird "bitching about celebrities" section. Its Max Brooks whining about celebrities he doesn't like. The in-character posts are further apart chronologically than my own.

 

[veteranMortal]

Yonkers

Article:

DENVER, COLORADO, USA

[My train is late. The western drawbridge is being tested. Todd Wainio doesn't seem to mind waiting for me at the platform. We shake hands under the station's mural of Victory, easily the most recognizable image of the American experience in World War Z. Originally taken from a photograph, it depicts a squad of soldiers standing on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, their backs turned to us as they watch dawn break over Manhattan. My host looks very small and frail next to these towering, two-dimensional icons. Like most men of his generation, Todd Wainio is old before his time. With an expanding paunch, receding, graying hair, and three, deep, parallel scars down the side of his right cheek, it would be difficult to guess that this former U.S. Army infantryman is still, at least chronologically, at the beginning of his life.]

Ahh, Todd Wainio. Fought in the Northern Campaigns of the American Crusade, and is lauded for being one of their latter day heroes who was, like, an actual soldier before the crisis.

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The sky was red that day. All the smoke, the crap that'd been filling the air all summer. It put everything in an amber red light, like looking at the world through hell-colored glasses. That's how I first saw Yonkers, this little, depressed, rust-collar burb just north of New York City. I don't think anybody ever heard of it. I sure as hell hadn't, and now it's up there with, like, Pearl Harbor . . . no, not Pearl . . . that was a surprise attack. This was more like Little Bighorn, where we . . . well . . . at least the people in charge, they knew what was up, or they should have. The point is, it wasn't a surprise, the war . . . or emergency, or whatever you want to call it . . . it was already on. It had been, what, three months since everyone jumped on the panic train.

After three months of the Great Panic, the Joint Chiefs of the US military and sympathetic figures in government felt that something had to be done. Strictly speaking, after a month, they felt something had to be done, after two months they were pretty sure they knew, and after three months, they had their ducks in a row.

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You remember what it was like, people just freaking out . . . boarding up their houses, stealing food, guns, shooting everything that moved. They probably killed more people, the Rambos and the runaway fires, and the traffic accidents and just the . . . the whole shit storm that we now call "the Great Panic"; I think that killed more people at first than Zack.

Everywhere collapsed, but few places had the level of terroristic death squad shit as parts of the US during the Great Panic. Places like Memphis got their start in the Great Panic, besieged first by the living in their suburbs, then the dead in their suburbs.

Even without Yonkers, I think America was fucked. What Yonkers really devastated was the ability of places like Britain or Germany to keep any sort of order, as it became abundantly clear that the Americans would not be riding in to save us all.

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I guess I can see why the powers that be thought that one big stand-up battle was such a good idea. They wanted to show the people that they were still in charge, get them to calm the hell down so they could deal with the real problem. I get it, and because they needed a propaganda smackdown, I ended up in Yonkers.

That isn't why they did Yonkers. They needed to position everything and everyone just right, and part of that was to use units they judged politically unreliable to face off against the swarms on national TV. And then they made sure it would end how they wanted it to.

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It actually wasn't the worst place to make a stand. Part of the town sat right in this little valley, and right over the west hills you had the Hudson River. The Saw Mill River Parkway ran right through the center of our main line of defense and the refugees streaming down the freeway were leading the dead right to us. It was a natural choke point, and it was a good idea . . . the only good idea that day.

Yonkers was a classic chokepoint defence; not a bad place to set up at all. But the soldiers on the ground were micromanaged to hell and back, the battle was all directed by a committee of generals in DC, with an agenda. They'd sent units to Yonkers that they'd rather not have come with them - a lot of the Marines out of LeJeune, a lot of other East Coastal military force… the New York National Guard made a strong showing, what was left of them.

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I'm sure whoever was in charge must have been one of the last of the Fulda Fucktards, you know, those generals who spent their nard-drop years training to defend West Germany from Ivan. Tight-assed, narrow-minded . . . probably pissed off from so many years of brushfire war. He must have been an FF because everything we did freakin' stunk of Cold War Static Defense. You know they even tried to dig fighting holes for the tanks? The engineers blasted them right out of the A&P parking lot.

They wanted these units dead or disabled - they needed someone dead or disabled to sell the need to evacuate, and these units were their most problematic ones, on the face. That's why they fixed the tanks in place, that's why it was "Static Defence" and that's why it's pretty insulting to the general at Yonkers - Stafford Jones, I think? - to blame him for this, when he was one of the poor fucks put in a battle they absolutely could not win.

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You had tanks?

Dude, we had everything: tanks, Bradleys, Humvees armed with everything from fifty cals to these new Vasilek heavy mortars. At least those might have been useful. We had Avenger Humvee mounted Stinger surface-to air missile sets, we had this AVLB portable bridge layer system, perfect for the three-inch-deep creek that ran by the freeway. We had a bunch of XM5 electronic warfare vehicles all crammed with radar and jamming gear and . . . and . . . oh yeah, and we even had a whole FOL, Family of Latrines, just plopped right there in the middle of everything. Why, when the water pressure was still on and toilets were still flushing in every building and house in the neighborhood?

They had everything because they were a grabbag of whoever the junta - not in so many words, not yet, but soon enough - did not believe would agree to abandon the East Coast to cower behind the Mississippi.

I'm just going to pick up, though - it is extremely odd for a serving US infantryman from before the Great Panic to be confused about why they would want a family of latrines in a pitched battle in an abandoned town whilst the whole fucking place falls apart around their ears. You want to rely on the plumbing job done by a random family before they bugged out? You want to rely on there not having been a gas leak or airlock in the water supply? You want to put thousands of US soldiers and marines' shit down the sewers of a suburban neighbourhood on the freeway? I'm unsure why he wouldn't know this - he was in service already, he must've been to Iraq or Afghanistan, or at least to basic training?

Probably nothing. I'm sure he will misunderstand no further military procedures going forward.

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So much of it was for show, not just the vehicles but us as well. They had us in MOPP 4, dude, Mission Oriented Protective Posture, big bulky suits and masks that are supposed to protect you from a radioactive or biochem environment.

Could your superiors have believed the undead virus was airborne?

If that's true, why didn't they protect the reporters? Why didn't our "superiors" wear them, or anyone else immediately behind the line.

I believe at the time there was some concern about aerosolising zombies through artillery barrage, and the possible effects of ingesting this aerosol; we know from the sick fucks in Korea that it just causes respiratory problems unless you've got some sort of cut in your wind pipe or lungs, and they thought this aerosolised mist might get to the infantry and cause infection.

The people behind the lines didn't wear them because it was unlikely they would reach beyond the front line, and also because they didn't care if any of these people died.

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And what genius thought to put us in body armor anyway? Because the press reamed 'em for not having enough in the last war? Why the hell do you need a helmet when you're fighting a living corpse? They're the ones who need the helmets, not us!

The odd machismo about helmets from the Americans is one of the most bizarre things I've seen. There's an endless number of reasons why you still need a helmet in war. Our heads need protecting too, arsehole. I've fought battles where we didn't have military grade helmets. It fucking sucks!

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Zack started entering the first kill zone, the one designated for the MLRS. I didn't hear the rockets launch, my hood muffled the noise, but I saw them streak toward the target. I saw them arch on their way down, as their casings broke away to reveal all those little bomblets on plastic streamers.

The GMLRS used by the US Military has a minimum engagement range of 15 kilometres. Can you see 15 kilometres? Do you think Todd can?

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Their gas tanks went up in like little volcanoes, geysers of fire and debris that added to the "steel rain." I got to be honest, it was a rush, dudes were cheering in their mikes, me too, watching ghouls start to tumble. I'd say there were maybe thirty, maybe forty or fifty, zombies spread out all across this half mile stretch of freeway. The opening bombardment took out at least three-quarters of them.

This is just plain untrue. There have been papers written about the artillery bombardment of the zombie swarms at Yonkers [HERE] and the general conclusion is that the MLRS destroyed the ghouls within its killzone. Shattered their skulls, tore their bodies to shreds so bad the second barrage just annihilated them. Total Body Disruption is the technical term. This is the idea of the battle you get by, say, reading about it after the fact, possibly talking to someone who was there as a cook or with the news crews.

Isn't that odd?

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The trickle was now turning into a stream. More Gs, dozens now, thick among the burning cars. Funny thing about Zack . . . you always think he's gonna be dressed in his Sunday best. That's how the media portrayed them, right, especially in the beginning . . . Gs in business suits and dresses, like, a cross section of everyday America, only dead. That's not what they looked like at all. Most infected, the early infected, the ones who went in that first wave, they either died under treatment or at home in their own beds.

I remember this phenomenon. When we were leaving our house, finally - this was maybe a year in? We were out of food and firewood - most of the ghouls still wandering our village were like this, in dressing gowns and nighties. One old man was wearing an actual nightcap, god knows how it didn't fall off.

In larger cities or on roads it tended to be different; the majority of the undead were refugees or later survivors, they'd be in clothes. You could always tell the later survivors - they were wearing clothes that didn't match, because they were clothes they'd scavenged from wherever they could find. I was the same - by the time I got to Bristol I was wearing a Tottenham football shirt I'd taken from a giftshop and a pair of leather trousers I'd literally pulled off a mannequin and cut the bottom six inches off.

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The second "steel rain" didn't have half the impact of the first, no more gas tanks to catch, and now the more tightly packed Gs just happened to be shielding each other from a possible head wound. I wasn't scared, not yet. Maybe my wood was gone, but I was pretty sure it'd be back when Zack entered the Army's kill zone.

No one who has ever seen an artillery barrage from an MLRS go off would say with a straight face that it wasn't effective because it didn't have any cars to detonate. Come the fuck on. At least lie convincingly, Todd. You'll get caught otherwise.

He talks about how the Paladins weren't doing shit, either, which, again, how would you know, Todd? They were firing at targets 13 kilometres away.

Article:

Why is that?

No balloon effect for one. When a bomb goes off close to you, it causes the liquid in your body to burst, literally, like a freakin' balloon. That doesn't happen with Zack, maybe because he carries less bodily fluid than us or because that fluid's more like a gel. I don't know. But it didn't do shit, neither did the SNT effect.

What is SNT?

Sudden Nerve Trauma, I think that's what you call it. It's another effect of close-in high explosives. The trauma is so great sometimes that your organs, your brain, all of it, just shuts down like God flickin' your life switch. Something to do with electrical impulses or whatnot. I don't know, I'm not a fuckin' doctor.

Oh, there's a very simple reason these are not observed in ghouls; they're not real. The main causes of death from explosions are "getting blown up" and "getting flung into shit by the blast".

This is the sort of commentary on these things you pick up by being sat on your arse somewhere, watching this shit on the television.

Article:

The next kill zone was direct fire from the heavy arms, the tank's main 120s and Bradleys with their chain guns and FOTT missiles. The Humvees also began to open up, mortars and missiles and the Mark-19s, which are, like, machine guns, but firing grenades. The Comanches came whining in at what felt like inches above our heads with chains and Hellfires and Hydra rocket pods. It was a fuckin' meat grinder, a wood chipper, organic matter clouding like sawdust above the horde. Nothing can survive this, I was thinking, and for a little while, it looked like I was right . . . until the fire started to die.

They tore the ghouls apart about as effectively as the MLRS was doing in the far distance, and the Paladins in the middle distance - less than they should've, the damn things are full of some sort of ballistic gel-esque blood - but moreso than Todd claims.

Had the Americans kept them supplied, had the Americans acted in this war like they have in every war, ever, they'd have won Yonkers.

But the commanders on the day did not want to win Yonkers. They wanted to lose, because then they could pull back behind the Mississippi and leave the venal East Coast to be consumed.

Article:

Started to die?

Petering out, withering . . .

[For a second he is silent, and then, angrily, his eyes refocus.]

No one thought about it, no one! Don't pull my pud with stories about budget cuts and supply problems! The only thing in short supply was common fucking sense! Not one of those West Point, War College, medals-up-the-ass, four-star fart bags said, "Hey, we got plenty of fancy weapons, we got enough shit for them to shoot!?!" No one thought about how many rounds the artillery would need for sustained operations, how many rockets for the MLRS, how many canister shots . . . the tanks had these things called canister shots . . . basically a giant shotgun shell. They fired these little tungsten balls . . . not perfect you know, wasting like a hundred balls for every G, but fuck, dude, at least it was something! Each Abrams only had three, three!

Of course they thought about it.

This is new clique stuff, though. The old clique; the chair of the Joint Chiefs, the wartime President, General Travis… they always called it a logistical snarl. They hadn't been able to get enough munitions to the forces in the field, they'd responded by trying to shorten the supply lines but the situation had deteriorated, et cetera et cetera.

The new clique just blame the pre-war generals - including the old clique, naturally - for being incompetent.

I give America another couple of changes of leadership before someone admits the general staff did some treason to seize power.

Article:

And what about flechettes? That's the weapon we always hear about these days, flechettes, these little steel spikes that turn any weapon into an instant scattergun. We talk about them like they're a new invention, but we had them as far back as, like, Korea. We had them for the Hydra rockets and the Mark-19s. Just imagine that, just one 19 firing three hundred and fifty rounds a minute, each round holding, like, a hundred4 spikes! Maybe it wouldn't have turned the tide . . . but . . . Goddammit!

He's so credulous. He's clearly spoken to, like, one (1) executive at a munitions factory and taken their word for it on the Flechette shit.

Flechettes almost never hit the head. High Explosives, that's what you want from your tanks, and then you go around with a crowbar or some shit, smashing the crippled surviving ghouls.

Article:

The fire was dying, Zack was still coming . . . and the fear . . . everyone was feeling it, in the orders from the squad leaders, in the actions of the men around me . . . That little voice in the back of your head that just keeps squeaking "Oh shit, oh shit."
We were the last line of defense, the afterthought when it came to firepower. We were supposed to pick off the random lucky G who happened to slip through the giant bitchslap of our heavier stuff. Maybe one in three of us was expected to fire his weapon, one in every ten was expected to score a kill.

The infantry at Yonkers panicked and shat itself after the artillery got betrayed and still did an (extremely destructive) good job at killing ghoul. and the Americans have invested a large amount into pretending the opposite is true.

Article:

You think that after watching all the wonders of modern warfare fall flat on their high-tech hyper ass, that after already living through three months of the Great Panic and watching everything you knew as reality be eaten alive by an enemy that wasn't even supposed to exist that you're gonna keep a cool fucking head and a steady fucking trigger finger?

[He stabs that finger at me.]

Well, we did! We still managed to do our job and make Zack pay for every fuckin' inch! Maybe if we'd had more men, more ammo, maybe if we'd just been allowed to focus on our job . . .

As soon as the big guns slacked off, infantrymen started to break. I don't blame them, not as such - with the artillery gone they were basically fucked, a few thousand infantrymen smeared across a freeway only 2 lines thick, but they didn't fail for any reason but because in the face of the shambling ghoul, their morale broke.

Excuse it as much as you want, that's what happened.

Article:

Land Warrior, high-tech, high-priced, high-profile netro-fuckingcentric Land Warrior. To see what was in front of our face was bad enough, but spybird uplinks were also showing how truly large the horde was. We might be facing thousands, but behind them were millions! Remember, we were taking on the bulk of New York City's infestation! This was only the head of one really long undead snake stretching all the way back to Times Fuckin' Square! We didn't need to see that. I didn't need to know that!

This is not an accurate representation of what happened with Land Warrior. Knowing that the undead horde stretched back to Time Square? That wasn't information the soldiers had. That was, as I say, information you got by sitting on your arse, watching television.

One thing I will say, though, and it isn't something people say often about Yonkers - the consensus all over is either that it was symptomatic of their degenerated nature as a military blah blah blah, or that it was sabotage, but like…

It kinda worked? Not for "America" or anything like that; it was a clusterfuck in that regard, but like, the poor brave bastards drew 3 million ghouls out of NYC, gave the survivors enough breathing room to establish a clean cordon and start to expand.

Article:

Someone from another platoon, I didn't know his name, started hollering "I hit him in the head and he didn't die! They don't die when you shoot them in the head!" I'm sure he must have missed the brain, it can happen, a round just grazing the inside of the skull . . . maybe if he'd been calm and used his own brain, he would have realized that. Panic's even more infectious than the Z Germ and the wonders of Land Warrior allowed that germ to become airborne. "What?" "They don't die?" "Who said that?" "You shot it in the head?" "Holy crap! They're indestructible!" All over the net you could hear this, browning shorts across the info superhighway.

Panic like this did not come from Land Warrior, which he does not understand, but from a highly sophisticated piece of technology called "saying shit with your actual mouth".

Soldiers screamed this shit, you can actually hear it on some of the recordings [here], [here] and [here].

He talks also about a soldier getting mauled by a family behind the lines - that was caught on his guncam, which was then published by the LA Times. They hadn't cleared the houses. Orders from on high, again. If someone said that the doors to some of those suburban houses were opened a crack by some sicko from the CIA, I wouldn't call them a liar out of hand.

What that mauling was not, however, is "broadcast across Land Warrior".

Article:

Suddenly the image went dark, cut off from an external source, and the voice, the older voice, was back again . . . "Stay off the net!" he ordered, trying real hard to control his voice and then the link went dead.

About the only actual use of Land Warrior across this battle was General Stafford Jones using it to try to rally his soldiers - "Stay in line! Hold the fucking line!" broadcast to every man deployed there.

He left it too late; they were already disintegrating. In complete disarray, 'Zack' already amongst them, fleeing towards the tanks and the press behind them.

Then comms went completely stone dead.

Article:

I'm sure it must have taken more than a few seconds, it had to, even if they'd been hovering above our heads, but, it seemed like right after the communications line blacked out that the sky was suddenly screaming with JSFs.

Oh, I have no doubt they cut communications just before sending the air strike. They had no intention of any intact units walking away from this one.

Article:

I felt this weight slam between my shoulder blades, soft and heavy. I rolled over, it was a head and torso, all charred black and still smoking and still trying to bite!

If the ghoul is this charred, the brain has boiled, and it's dead. They can survive explosions we can't - talk about their gel bodies all you want, if you ask me they're just supernaturally predisposed to not make it easy for us - but they can't survive every explosion.

Article:

And then they came, right out of the smoke like a freakin' little kid's nightmare! Some were steaming, some were even still burning . . . some were walking, some crawling, some just dragging themselves along on their torn bellies . . . maybe one in twenty was still able to move, which left . . . shit . . . a couple thousand? And behind them, mixing with their ranks and pushing steadily toward us, the remaining million that the air strike hadn't even touched!

None of the survivors of Yonkers I've spoken to - there's a few here and there in Havana, if you know where to look - ever contradicted each other on this point; every ghoul under that air strike? Died.

The narrative that they judged the air strikes ineffectual, that, I don't know, the thermals from NYC burning were too much for the jets, that it was established by experts that the battle was lost? Is hot nonsense conjured to explain why the airforce just… didn't bomb the horde.

Now, later on or closer to New York, you can talk about collateral damage, but on the freeway through suburbia? Flatten the fuckers. But again, that'd just be if they wanted to win.

Article:

And that was when the line collapsed. I don't remember it all at once. I see these flashes: people running, grunts, reporters. I remember a newsman with a big Yosemite Sam mustache trying to pull a Beretta from his vest before three burning Gs pulled him down . . . I remember a dude forcing open the door of a news van, jumping in, throwing out a pretty blond reporter, and trying to drive away before a tank crushed them both. Two news choppers crashed together, showering us with their own steel rain. One Comanche driver . . . brave, beautiful motherfucker . . . tried to turn his rotor into the oncoming Gs. The blade diced a path right down their mass before catching on a car and hurling him into the A&P.

Some of this is made up (Geraldo Riviera, your moustached Newsman, died in the airstrike), some of it was on the news (two helicopters colliding), and some of it he picked up along the way from actual witnesses, like the idiot in the Comanche.

Article:

The world was white, my ears were ringing. I froze . . . hands were clawing me, grabbing my arms. I kicked and punched, I felt my crotch get warm and wet. I shouted but couldn't hear my own voice. More hands, stronger, were trying to haul me somewhere. Kicking, squirming, cursing, crying . . . suddenly a fist clocked me in the jaw. It didn't knock me out, but I was suddenly relaxed. These were my buddies. Zack don't punch. They dragged me into the closest Bradley. My vision cleared just long enough to see the line of light vanish with the closing hatch.

He's so full of shit. Only 2 Bradleys made it out of Yonkers; they were hull down, most of them got swarmed under.

Article:

I know "professional" historians like to talk about how Yonkers represented a "catastrophic failure of the modern military apparatus," how it proved the old adage that armies perfect the art of fighting the last war just in time for the next one. Personally, I think that's a big 'ole sack of it. Sure, we were unprepared, our tools, our training, everything I just talked about, all one class-A, gold-standard clusterfuck, but the weapon that really failed wasn't something that rolled off an assembly line.

He's talking about fear, and honestly this isn't wrong - a lot of the problems militaries and people faced was that ghouls didn't react how you'd expect them too. They don't flinch from fire, they don't hesitate. You cannot cow a ghoul.

But it also isn't right; Yonkers wasn't lost because of this, it was lost because the American junta fed an army into the teeth of a horde to justify abandoning the east coast.

Of course, that proved to be a mistake; the American public freaked the fuck out even more than they had before. Within a week of Yonkers, when they started withdrawing, planning to base themselves out of fucking, like, St Louis, order had collapsed almost everywhere, and the Military Industrial Complex of the United States of America, smeared across the states for the gratification of various officials… ate shit and died.

With their precious fucking military collapsing around their ears and mass desertions amongst military units - entire brigades were just refusing orders and staying in whatever city would take them - they had to flee further west, but Denver had already collapsed by the time they arrived, and they had to shuffle even further. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

This was inevitable; they were already in free fall, but pulling the shit they pulled at Yonkers was the nail in the coffin.

Article:

Yonkers was supposed to be the day we restored confidence to the American people, instead we practically told them to kiss their ass goodbye. If it wasn't for the Sou'frican Plan, I have no doubt, we'd all be slouching and moaning right now.

The fucking South African plan nearly killed us all.

Article:

Have you ever seen the effects of a thermobaric weapon? Have you ever asked anyone with stars on their shoulders about them? I bet my ballsack you'll never get the full story. You'll hear about heat and pressure, the fireball that continues expanding, exploding, and literally crushing and burning everything in its path.

They used thermobaric bombs because they provided plausible excuseology; they didn't have any choice but to tragically lose the soldiers at Yonkers to stop the horde in its tracks. Collateral damage was as sad as it was unavoidable. General Stafford Jones did not survive to withdraw. We can infer, therefore, that he was the leader of bloc within the military.

He talks a lot of shit about Thermobaric Bombs - no, Todd, there is not an evil Pentagon conspiracy to lie about how Thermobaric Bombs work - but this feels as good a place to stop as any.

Todd Wainio was not at Yonkers - he is stealing valour every time he opens his fat fucking mouth to talk about it, and if he wasn't so good at reading the currents of politcal movement in America, he would've suffered the fate he deserves. He's certainly not very good at pretending to have been a pre-war veteran.

From going through pre-war records taken from the J Edgar Hoover Building by a defector in 2020, Todd Wainio appears to have been a far right militiaman in Idaho who was swept up by the US government, and then ended up a soldier and almost instantly began to lie about his past.

I've done a journalism here, by which I mean "I went to the National Library José Martí and looked through the FBI records we've got because Todd made me very suspicious," which isn't a lot, but it's more than the alleged journalist who works for the fucking UN ever did. Writing this section whilst actively filled with contempt for the guy being interviewed may have bled through, so, uh, sorry.

Some people might be confused here - the US military is abominable, why do I care if he pretended membership? Firstly, because he's talking with authority he lacks, spreading propaganda for his wretched state, and secondly because he's stealing valour from the poor fucking arseholes left to die as heroically as it was possible for someone to die in this war, the poor fucking arseholes who saved the "Hero City". I don't care about a lot of US soldiers, obviously, but the guys at Yonkers got fucked so the Joint Chiefs could coup the government. And this prick goes "oh I was there" about it, when he plainly was not.

Next I'll be talking about the broken man in South Africa, and the evil plan that broke him.

Wishing all support to our comrades in Chile in their revolutionary struggle. I know it doesn't seem like it'll help much, but please donate what you can to the cause [HERE].

If your country has blocked monetary donation to Chile, you can donate to the solidarity strike funds in Spain [HERE], the UK [HERE] and the USA itself [HERE]. Do not donate to strike funds in America if you live there, just FYI - it is considered seditious in the USA to provide funding to a strike if you are not a member of the striking union.

Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE], they do vital work.

Donate to the Sámi communities restoring the arctic ecosystem [HERE].

AN: I did Yonkers, which is where making these things work as something which could actually happen has resulted in… messy outcomes. I would be sad about doing Todd so dirty, but I'm not done doing that yet, so I'm not sad about it. Also, he's an arsehole in the book, too, so.

 

[veteranMortal]

Redeker

So, off the bat, before I post - Paul Redeker has undergone something of a nervous breakdown, and so I'm… probably going to pull some punches? He knows better than a lot of people how much of a fucking monster he is.

Article:

ROBBEN ISLAND, CAPE TOWN PROVINCE, UNITED STATES OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

[Xolelwa Azania greets me at his writing desk, inviting me to switch places with him so I can enjoy the cool ocean breeze from his window. He apologizes for the "mess" and insists on clearing the notes off his desk before we continue. Mister Azania is halfway through his third volume of Rainbow Fist: South Africa at War. This volume happens to be about the subject we are discussing, the turning point against the living dead, the moment when his country pulled itself back from the brink.]

The fucking USSA. Their "Volkstaat" grew fucking quick once they started feeding black people to the zombies in "Blue Zones" or whatever the fuck they called the zones they used as bait.

They hold the old Cape Province and they've seized Walvis Bay and the Penguin Islands, and they're consistently saber rattling with the Republic over the province of the Free State.

The fact that they love them some Redeker should, I think, be a cause of some self reflection in America and Europe. By and large it is not.

Article:

Dispassionate, a rather mundane word to describe one of history's most controversial figures. Some revere him as a savior, some revile him as a monster, but if you ever met Paul Redeker, ever discussed his views of the world and the problems, or more importantly, the solutions to the problems that plague the world, probably the one word that would always cling to your impression of the man is dispassionate.

I think its funny, how he tries to frame himself here - spoiler alert, by the way, Xolelwa Azania was Paul Redeker, following a deep psychological break (His name very crudely translates to "Forgive me, South Africa") - as being, like… coldly logical? It's a defence mechanism. He knows what he was.

I'm not going to comment too much on his use of a Xhosa name, as a lilywhite Afrikaner who was in the Apartheid government - it sucks! But I'm gonna use the name he chooses, so just be aware of that going forwards.

Article:

Paul always believed, well, perhaps not always, but at least in his adult life, that humanity's one fundamental flaw was emotion. He used to say that the heart should only exist to pump blood to the brain, that anything else was a waste of time and energy. His papers from university, all dealing with alternate "solutions" to historical, societal quandaries, were what first brought him to the attention of the apartheid government.

Paul Redeker's university papers are interesting. They're not, like… useful? He's not correct in his solutions, but he isn't trying to be. You can see the skeleton of his Orange Eighty-Four plans in all of them; he believes there is always some means for a government to achieve a goal, but that the costs are consistently higher than the government believes they will be going in, and ought to be accounted for properly.

Article:

Many psychobiographers have tried to label him a racist, but, in his own words, "racism is a regrettable by-product of irrational emotion." Others have argued that, in order for a racist to hate one group, he must at least love another. Redeker believed both love and hate to be irrelevant. To him, they were "impediments of the human condition," and, in his words again, "imagine what could be accomplished if the human race would only shed its humanity." Evil? Most would call it that, while others, particularly that small cadre in the center of Pretoria's power, believed it to be "an invaluable source of liberated intellect."

It is a common enough bias - that if we shed our humanity, we could achieve so much more, though of course, we'd not have our humanity any more.

Personally, I think a lot of the things he grants "could be accomplished" are overstatements; I don't think breeding programs "to maximise infant production" would really help us very much in investigating birth defects, for example.

As to the racism - of course he's fucking racist! You don't grow up a boer in apartheid South Africa without internalising a bunch of nasty racist beliefs. Just because you believe yourself to be coldly logical does not stop you being racist.

Article:

It was the early 1980s, a critical time for the apartheid government. The country was resting on a bed of nails. You had the ANC, you had the Inkatha Freedom Party, you even had extremist, right-wing elements of the Afrikaner population that would have liked nothing better than open revolt in order to bring about a complete racial showdown. On her border, South Africa faced nothing but hostile nations, and, in the case of Angola, a Soviet-backed, Cuban-spearheaded civil war.

"What if we tried that again, but with less of South Africa, and also the Cubans have less need or desire for restraint?" - Afrikaners, apparently.

Be seeing you real soon, I imagine.

Article:

This is where Redeker stepped in. His revised Plan Orange, appropriately completed in 1984, was the ultimate survival strategy for the Afrikaner people. No variable was ignored. Population figures, terrain, resources, logistics . . . Redeker not only updated the plan to include both Cuba's chemical weapons and his own country's nuclear option, but also, and this is what made "Orange Eighty-Four" so historic, the determination of which Afrikaners would be saved and which had to be sacrificed.

Orange Eighty fucking Four. He was asked how he would preserve the Afrikaner government of South Africa, and he told them. It's an impressively unpleasant plan; he talks about checking fertility and IQ and other "desirable qualities" - it is some hardcore eugenics shit. I don't think it would've worked, like, at all - even less than the zombie version, because Black people aren't fucking zombies, they can, like, make logical fucking choices.

He handed this plan over to the Minister of Defence, said it was the only way to maintain White rule in South Africa. Then he clicked his tongue and said "Weigh up your options, Mr Malan, and I'm sure you'll see only one path lies open for you."

Article:

Of course he was invited to appear before the "Truth and Reconciliation" hearings, and, of course, he refused. "I won't pretend to have a heart simply to save my skin," he stated publicly, adding, "No matter what I do, I'm sure they will come for me anyway."

Paul Redeker's consistent belief that the Black majority of South Africans want him dead is almost funny, if it weren't so sad - you didn't actually kill anyone, babe. You presented an evil action plan to the Minister of Defence, who did not in the end use it. You would've been fine? Somewhat reviled, but hey, you are anyway.

Article:

He wasn't surprised when the door blew off its hinges and agents of the National Intelligence Agency rushed in. They confirmed his name, his identity, his past actions. They asked him point-blank if he had been the author of Orange Eighty-Four. He answered without emotion, naturally. He suspected, and accepted, this intrusion as a last-minute revenge killing; the world was going to hell anyway, why not take a few "apartheid devils" down first.

Like I said, of course he's racist.

The NIA had been dissolved by the time of the Great Panic, but it was resurrected by-

Article:

What he could have never predicted was the sudden lowering of their firearms, and the removal of the gas masks of the NIA agents. They were of all colors: black, Asian, colored, and even a white man, a tall Afrikaner who stepped forward, and without giving his name or rank, asked abruptly . . . "You've got a plan for this, man. Don't you?"

The Cape State freaks. It takes a special sort of arsehole to look at the Great Panic and go "Great! Now our for-sure-not-an-ethnostate can secede!"

And we all know what they became, and we know how fast.

Article:

It had no name, as explained later "because names only exist to distinguish one from others," and, until that moment, there had been no other plan like his. Once again, Redeker had taken everything into account, not only the strategic situation of the country, but also the physiology, behavior, and "combat doctrine" of the living dead. While you can research the details of the "Redeker Plan" in any public library around the world, here are some of the fundamental keys:

I'll give this shit a breakdown - the plan calls for the retreat of the government and military to a defensible position, and the deliberate sacrifice of the majority of the population to draw the ghoul concentrations away from the Government - the theory goes that even when these civilian exclaves perish, the ghouls are sufficiently far from the governmental stronghold that they will not be drawn to it in great numbers, and it can survive alone.

It is a monstrously evil plan, a plan which calls for a government to deliberately betray their population en masse for its own self preservation. This was not the plan which would save the most people - that would be something like consolidating your people into a variety of smaller safe zones, establish links between them and from that position, clear any ghouls caught between them whilst using your combined strength to attempt to widen your net, searching for more survivor exclaves - we did this in England whilst the government hid in Northern Scotland - but that plan has a greater risk of your government falling in favour of some other governmental body, or being one of the unlucky safe zones which fails to survive.

No country which implemented the Redeker plan lost its government over the course of the war, but no country which implemented the "other" plan - call it the Bristol Plan, because that's where I first heard it, though it developed more or less independently across much of the world - lost as much of its population as the Redeker planners.

Article:

Within minutes they were on a helicopter for Kimberley, the very underground base where Redeker had first written Orange Eighty-Four. He was ushered into a meeting of the president's surviving cabinet, where his report was read aloud to the room. You should have heard the uproar, with no voice louder than the defense minister's. He was a Zulu, a ferocious man who'd rather be fighting in the streets than cowering in a bunker.

This is a slight rhetorical dodge - I doubt Azania did it, so I'd imagine its from our interviewer. "The President" here refers to the Premier of the Western Cape, but he was already styling himself "The President of the Cape State" - they only started calling themselves the USSA once they invaded Namibia. The Americans like to pretend that all of South Africa was party to the Redeker plan, when in practice the Cape provinces more or less went on their own merry way.

I'm slightly dubious the Defence Minister was a Zulu, not in the Cape, but this close to where he had his nervous breakdown, its unsurprising Azania's memory is fading. And, again, he's casually racist.

Article:

The president looked almost personally insulted by Redeker. He physically grabbed the lapels of the safety and security minister and demanded why in hell he brought him this demented apartheid war criminal.

This is where Redeker broke - because this did not happen. Nothing from here on out in this interview happened. The Premier looked through the plan, asked a handful of follow up questions, then clapped his hands once, and said "Well, we'd better get on with it, we have a province to save."

And Redeker couldn't withstand that. He was an Afrikaner, he probably had Antisocial Personality Disorder, he was certainly a racist, but he couldn't withstand it. He presented this plan, this evil, monstrous plan, to show them that if their first and only priority was the survival of their government, over and above that of their citizenry… This was the cost. It was the same as his Orange Eighty-Four gambit. He lays out, clear and simple, how much death and suffering it will cost to ensure certain things, and therefore, I believe - and perhaps I am being too charitable - that this ought not be pursued.

Having the government agree to the plan broke him. Even the Apartheid government had not done this. He showed them the evil they would need to do to preserve themselves instead of their population, and they said "Alright then."

This was what he wanted to happen; he wanted to be dismissed out of hand as an evil relic, have this plan dismissed.

In his fantasy, the President refuses him, denies him, tells him he didn't call for him.

Article:

a faint voice said, "I did." He had been sitting against the back wall; now he stood, hunched over by age, and supported by canes, but with a spirit as strong and vital as it had ever been. The elder statesman, the father of our new democracy, the man whose birth name had been Rolihlahla, which some have translated simply into "Troublemaker."

This, obviously, did not really happen - Nelson Mandela was in hospital in Pretoria in 2013, slowly succumbing to a respiratory infection - but Redeker imagines the worst thing possible, to him. That Nelson Mandela would come to him, come to this monstrous, evil plan, and say "Yes, this will save us. We must betray the people to save our own skins. That South Africa itself, in the person of Nelson Mandela, was forgiving him the unforgivable.

It sincerely fucking sucks that our Journalist doesn't explain that this cannot have literally happened, but to an American audience, I think it salves their guilt to imagine that South Africa embraced this plan wholeheartedly, that Mandela endorsed it.

Article:

Not much is known about Redeker's childhood, whether he even had parents, or was raised by the state, whether he had friends or was ever loved in any way. Those who knew him from work were hard-pressed to remember witnessing any social interaction or even any physical act of warmth. The embrace by our nation's father, this genuine emotion piercing his impenetrable shell . . .

[Azania smiles sheepishly.]

Perhaps this is all too sentimental. For all we know he was a heartless monster, and the old man's embrace had absolutely no impact. But I can tell you that that was the last day anyone ever saw Paul Redeker. Even now, no one knows what really happened to him. That is when I stepped in, in those chaotic weeks when the Redeker Plan was implemented throughout the country.

Even after his nervous breakdown, even wholly dissociating like he is, Azania insists, seriously insists, that it was he who implemented the plans, that the government gave him the responsibility. That it was him who ensured the white survivor enclaves were statistically more viable, him who designated the white only Volkstaat, him who suggested they move into Namibia to stabilise the situation in Walvis Bay.

They didn't, obviously. He was institutionalised on Robben Island early on, and has stayed there ever since.

I'm doing Redeker as its own thing, here, rather than putting it in with the rest of "Turning the Tide" because I think it is its own thing.

On a more personal note; I firmly believe every government which instituted the redeker plan, or a variation thereof, sacrificed its own right to exist. Violence against them can never be unjustified, and there is no cause to respect their laws, officers or legitimacy.

Wishing all support to our comrades in Chile in their revolutionary struggle. I know it doesn't seem like it'll help much, but please donate what you can to the cause [HERE].

If your country has blocked monetary donation to Chile, you can donate to the solidarity strike funds in Spain [HERE], the UK [HERE] and even the USA itself [HERE]. Do not donate to strike funds in America if you live there, just FYI - it is considered seditious in the USA to provide funding to a strike if you are not a member of the striking union.

Donate to the Sámi communities restoring the arctic ecosystem [HERE].

Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE]. If you survived in a Redeker Zone, I am no longer asking - you must donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad.

AN: The Redeker Plan had to stand alone, like Yonkers did, but it isn't really long enough, so this chapter's a bit shorter than the preceding.

The Nelson Mandela shit actually truly pisses me off.

 

[veteranMortal]

Spoiler: Clarifying Note re: Ukraine

This situation in Ukraine within this story is not intended to provide commentary on the Imperialistic and Genocidal invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. This is a work of fiction inspired by a work written in 2006, and events - though unfortunately somewhat parallel - are not at all intended to be so.

Turning the Tide

Article:

ARMAGH, IRELAND

[While not a Catholic himself, Philip Adler has joined the throngs of visitors to the pope's wartime refuge. "My wife is Bavarian," he explains in the bar of our hotel. "She had to make the pilgrimage to Saint Patrick's Cathedral." This is his first time away from Germany since the end of the war. Our meeting is accidental. He does not object to my recorder.]

Obligatory: where's your Orange Order now, cunt?

I would apologise for being crass, but the orangemen emigres after Northern Ireland joined Ireland were some of the nasty pricks in the royalist army, and fighting at their side was a universally noxious experience.

Article:

Hamburg was heavily infested. They were in the streets, in the buildings, pouring out of the Neuer Elbtunnel. We'd tried to blockade it with civilian vehicles, but they were squirming through any open space like bloated, bloody worms. Refugees were also all over. They'd come from as far away as Saxony, thinking they could escape by sea. The ships were long gone, the port was a mess. We had over a thousand trapped at the Reynolds Aluminiumwerk and at least triple that at the Eurokai terminal. No food, no clean water, just waiting to be rescued with the dead swarming outside, and I don't know how many infected inside.

Germany was a fucking mess. Massively urbanised, not very militarised, and they were asleep at the wheel? I don't think there's evidence to suggest they did it intentionally, there wasn't something at play here, they just… failed to contain it. The plague rose in every city with very little being done to stop it, and then after Yonkers, when they realised the Americans wouldn't be coming back, wouldn't be riding in on the proverbial shining steed, everywhere in Germany started going to hell in a handbasket at once.

Article:

I'd set up our command post in the Renaissance Hotel. It was a decent location, good fields of fire with enough space to house our own unit and several hundred refugees. My men, those not involved in holding the barricades, were attempting to perform these conversions on similar buildings. With the roads blocked and trains inoperative, I thought it best to sequester as many civilians as possible. Help would be coming, it was just a question of when it would arrive.

It would've been possible to secure this position permanently. Further, it would've been possible to expand this position, to clear Hamburg, street by painful street. I can say this with confidence, because where units were too far to be recalled to Bavaria or the canal, they managed. In Stuttgart, where orders were to ensure they killed as many as possible before they were overrun - I'm serious, those were the orders to the Stuttgart garrison - they cleared the whole city, kept about a hundred thousand people alive. They managed in Leipzig and Dresden when they refused orders to withdraw to the south.

… Berlin, of course, here serves as the terrible exception to the rule that a defended city is a surviving city.

But we've all seen footage of Berlin's fall. Leopard IIs emptying their magazines into an endless swarm, then slamming on the accelerator and just carving forwards until sheer weight of pulverised flesh starts to make the treads slip on the road, artillery annihilating ghoul after ghoul until it starts to run dry, infantry maintaining a fighting retreat on a smaller and smaller cordon, until they reached for a new magazine and came up empty handed.

The Bundeswehr wasn't built to fight on this scale without the Americans. Nor was the British Army, but at least some of the Germans tried.

Article:

Division was using map-grid coordinates, the first time since the trouble began. Up until then they had simply used civilian designations on an open channel; this was so refugees could know where to assemble. Now it was a coded transmission from a map we hadn't used since the end of the cold war. I had to check the coordinates three times to confirm. They put us at Schafstedt, just north of the Nord-Ostsee Kanal. Might as well be fucking Denmark!

The German Northern Command was some quixotic shit. A grabbag of chewed up units and the shattered remains of the Federal government, cowering in a 50 mile slice of land, with maybe a million civilians.

There's a reason the "German" Government only really rules across the depopulated North of the country. Once Southern Command seceded they were fucked.

Article:

I suddenly found myself speaking to General Lang, commander of the entire Northern Front. His voice was shaking. I could hear it even over the shooting. He told me the orders were not a mistake, that I was to rally what was left of the Hamburg Garrison and proceed immediately north. This isn't happening, I told myself. Funny, eh? I could accept everything else that was happening, the fact that dead bodies were rising to consume the world, but this . . . following orders that would indirectly cause a mass murder.

Bold words from a man who followed them. He bitches and whines, but he does it. He commanded the garrison of the second largest German city, and he left it to die.

Article:

Now, I am a good soldier, but I am also a West German. You understand the difference? In the East, they were told that they were not responsible for the atrocities of the Second World War, that as good communists, they were just as much victims of Hitler as anyone else.

Oh, you self righteous cunt. If we absolutely must engage in the fucking phrenology of war crime - West Germany inherited the traditions and General Staff of the Wehrmacht, which shaped the Bundeswehr wholly and utterly. It was in the halls of NATO military bases that the myth of the clean Wehrmacht was born.

As the claim goes - West Germany kept the Wehrmacht, East Germany kept the Gestapo.

More pertinently - you're not West German! You were born in the 1980s! You joined the military long after reunification! You're just a German, arsehole.

Article:

You understand why the skinheads and proto-fascists were mainly in the East? They did not feel the responsibility of the past, not like we did in the West. We were taught since birth to bear the burden of our grandfathers' shame. We were taught that, even if we wore a uniform, that our first sworn duty was to our conscience, no matter what the consequences. That is how I was raised, that is how I responded.

Skinheads and protofascists mostly crop up in places with abjectly bleak economic prospects. They crop up in the former DDR because once it was integrated into the Federal Republic, the bottom fell out of its economy.

I just… I'm not a German, so I can't say for certain, but my impression has never been that 24 years after reunification, that many people genuinely were still smugly talking about how the Osties had never reconciled with their nazi history?

Like, leaving aside that neither of the German successor states ever did, I mean. Anyway, personally I think he's justifying. Germany is unique for the fact that it retains surviving successor governments who are actively hostile to their also surviving pre-war government. Most countries only had one or the other.

Article:

I told Lang that I could not, in good conscience, obey this order, that I could not leave these people without protection. At this, he exploded. He told me that I would carry out my instructions or I, and, more importantly, my men, would be charged with treason and prosecuted with "Russian efficiency." And this is what we've come to, I thought. We'd all heard of what was happening in Russia . . . the mutinies, the crackdowns, the decimations. I looked around at all these boys, eighteen, nineteen years old, all tired and scared and fighting for their lives. I couldn't do that to them. I gave the order to withdraw.

Lang did you a kindness. You were going to follow the order anyway, but now you could blame him for it.

I know this because Lang had no means of enforcing this threat on you, in Hamburg, and you must've known that. This was the standing order for the German General Staff - threaten decimation on those forces unwilling to obey the disengage orders - but from Leipzig and Dresden, it's clear the threat was toothless. If they had the means to get troops to your position, they would, presumably, have done so.

Article:

What about the civilians?

[Pause.] We got everything we deserved. "Where are you going?" they shouted from buildings. "Come back, you cowards!" I tried to answer. "No, we're coming back for you," I said. "We're coming back tomorrow with more men. Just stay where you are, we'll be back tomorrow." They didn't believe me. "Fucking liar!" I heard one woman shout. "You're letting my baby die!"

This was the assumption in Northern Command as a whole, I think. They were consolidating all forces north of the canal, to create an army strong enough to try to clear the swarms in cities - Berlin was still holding out at this point, in their final desperate cordon. They were going to form a single unified army which could clear Hamburg and punch through to relieve Berlin.

Article:

Most of them didn't try to follow, too worried about the zombies in the streets. A few brave souls grabbed on to our armored personnel carriers. They tried to force their way down the hatches. We knocked them off. We had to button up as the ones trapped in buildings started throwing things, lamps, furniture, down on us. One of my men was hit with a bucket filled with human waste. I heard a bullet clang off the hatch of my Marder.

I cannot understand this. I'm not even sure I can try. You can't let the entire refugee population of Hamburg flee with you, sure, but the, what, 40-50 people who clung to your vehicles? What's the harm, exactly?

Knocking these civilians off your convoy as it noisily trundled through Hamburg was murder. All there is to it. You left them as zombie bait.

Article:

On our way out of the city we passed the last of our new Rapid Reaction Stabilization Units. They had been badly mauled earlier in the week. I didn't know it at the time, but they were one of those units classified as expendable. They were detailed to cover our retreat, to prevent too many zombies, or refugees, from following us. They were ordered to hold to the end.

The actions of the RRSU in Hamburg have become something of a legend in Germany, but unpleasantly for something so recent, can only be pieced together archaeologically. Huge killing fields along the Autobahn, a running battle through the streets to reach the holdouts in the city centre, and a ring of burnt out vehicles in the Rathausmarkt, with the bodies of a few hundred civilians in the centre, most of whom had shot themselves.

Article:

Then, when [General Lang] rose to shake my hand, I'd draw my weapon and blow his Eastern brains against the map of what used to be our country. Maybe his whole staff would be there, all the other little stooges who were "just following orders." I'd get them all before they took me! It would be perfect. I wasn't going to just goose-step my way into hell like some good little Hitler Jugend. I'd show him, and everyone else, what it meant to be a real Deutsche Soldat.

What would be the point? The civilians you abandoned would still be dead. You would still have their blood on your hands, except now you'd have made it worthless. The place to mutiny was in Hamburg, and you blew it.

Article:

But that's not what happened.

No. I did manage to make it into General Lang's office. We were the last unit across the canal. He'd waited for that. As soon as the report came in, he'd sat down at his desk, signed a few final orders, addressed and sealed a letter to his family, then put a bullet through his brain.
Bastard. I hate him even more now than I did on the road from Hamburg.

Do you know what General Lang wrote, in that letter to his family? You can read it [HERE] - it's in German, but I can paraphrase.

General Lang did not know the details of the Procknow Plan - Germany's Redeker - until that morning, when he'd already ordered almost all the withdrawals. He had been writing up plans to go on the offensive. First clear Kiel itself by drawing the zombies across the canal piecemeal across the Levensau High Bridge, then work out from there. Plan after plan, diagram after diagram. Rearguard units would work on training and army a citizens' militia to clear out whatever zombies the army didn't manage to draw out.

It was an ambitious plan, and it might have worked. It might not have, but either way, he was overruled. Informed that they would follow Procknow. He sat down, looked at the map of all the people he'd thought he could save, but instead had doomed, and he shot himself.

You can argue he was still a coward - General Müller in Leipzig famously says it was the duty of every officer faced with such an order to kill whoever gave it to him and assume control directly, but then, Leipzig is a military dictatorship - but you cannot, as Adler does - just say he killed himself because he was too weak to do Procknow.

Article:

YEVCHENKO VETERANS' SANATORIUM, ODESSA, UKRAINE

[The room is windowless. Dim, fluorescent bulbs illuminate the concrete walls and unwashed cots. The patients here mainly suffer from respiratory disorders, many made worse by the lack of any usable medication. There are no doctors here, and understaffed nurses and orderlies can do little to ease the suffering. At least the room is warm and dry, and for this country in the dead of winter, that is a luxury beyond measure. Bohdan Taras Kondratiuk sits upright on his cot at the end of the room. As a war hero he rates a hung sheet for privacy. He coughs into his handkerchief before speaking.]

Ukraine is in an absolute state, which comes with being a pariah state people only trade with because you're a breadbasket.

Article:

Chaos. I don't know how else to describe it, a complete breakdown of organization, of order, of control. We'd just fought four brutal engagements: Luck, Rovno, Novograd, and Zhitomir. Goddamn Zhitomir. My men were exhausted, you understand. What they'd seen, what they'd had to do, and all the time pulling back, rearguard actions, running. Every day you heard about another town falling, another road closing, another unit overwhelmed.

The Ukrainian military disintegrated in the collapse. They weren't alone - a lot of European militaries just… vanished. One day Italy had a military, and the next day it didn't.

Article:

Kiev was supposed to be safe, behind the lines. It was supposed to be the center of our new safety zone, well garrisoned, fully resupplied, quiet. And so what happens as soon as we arrive? Are my orders to rest and refit? Repair my vehicles, reconstitute my numbers, rehabilitate my wounded? No, of course not. Why should things be as they should be? They never have been before.

I don't know if Kiev could've been saved - internal Ukrainian politics and history aren't something I was ever terribly interested in, and I don't think I'm alone in that. It was always just one of the Russian satellite states? I think there was some internal strife, though. Kiev - and a lot of the rest of the Ukrainian cities - wanted closer relations with Europe, there were treaty negotiations going on even as the world fell apart, which Yanukovych pulled out of at the last minute "for the duration of the crisis", which I think was unpopular in Kiev especially.

Article:

The safety zone was being shifted again, this time to the Crimea. The government had already moved . . . fled . . . to Sevastopol. Civil order had collapsed. Kiev was being fully evacuated. This was the task of the military, or what was left of it.

So I'm slightly unwilling to grant him the charity of assuming he abandoned Kiev for Crimea along strictly objective lines. He was always close with the old Russian leadership, Putin and his ilk, the ones who formed the Holy Russian Empire. At the time Ukraine collapsed, they were still in control of Krasnodar Krai.

Article:

We were an armored platoon, you understand. Tanks, not military police. We never saw any MPs. We were assured they would be there, but we never saw or heard from them, neither did any of the other "units" along any of the other bridges. To even call them "units" is a joke. These were just mobs of men in uniforms, clerks and cooks; anyone who happened to be attached to the military suddenly became in charge of traffic control. None of us were set up for this, weren't trained for it, weren't equipped . . . Where was the riot gear they promised us, the shields, the armor, where was the water cannon?

We've all heard of what Ukraine did, but honesty a first hand account is useful? Not to absolve them, but to understand the situation. They were throwing together random assortments of units with haggard, ancient equipment, with impossible orders.

Article:

Our orders were to "process" all evacuees. You understand "process," to see if any of them had been tainted. But where were the goddamn sniffer dogs? How are you supposed to check for infection without dogs? What are you supposed to do, visually inspect each refugee? Yes! And yet, that is what we were told to do. [Shakes his head.] Did they really think that those terrified, frantic wretches, with death at their backs and safety—perceived safety—only meters away were going to form an orderly line and let us strip them naked to examine every centimeter of skin? Did they think men would just stand by while we examined their wives, their mothers, their little daughters? Can you imagine? And we actually tried to do it. What other alternative was there? They had to be separated if any of us were going to survive. What's the point of even trying to evacuate people if they're just going to bring the infection with them?

I was never subjected to visual inspection - by the time I arrived at the Bristol Commune, they had dogs - but I've heard of it. Even when the military was competent, when it stayed cohesive and had basic trust from the public, like the French on Corsica, this was a huge violation, a lot of people found it extremely invasive. What it must've been like when done by some teenaged Ukrainian conscript…

Article:

Across the Dnieper, Kiev burned. Black pillars rose from the city center. We were downwind, the stench was terrible, the wood and rubber and stink of burning flesh. We didn't know how far they were now, maybe a kilometer, maybe less. Up on the hill, the fire had engulfed the monastery. Goddamn tragedy. With its high walls, its strategic location, we could have made a stand. Any first-year cadet could have turned it into an impregnable fortress—stocked the basements, sealed the gates, and mounted snipers in the towers. They could have covered the bridge for . . . fucking forever!

I don't understand this fetishisation of old buildings? We had it to, amongst some of the Guards. We'd be passing some castle and invariably someone pipes up "God, survivors could've held out there for years!"

They were always city people. I don't mean to be rude, but in that first winter, when it got so cold that wine bottles froze in their cupboards… Not having power meant even in a modern building with modern amenities, we had cases of hypothermia. In an old castle like that, or a monastery like this… Terrible.

Article:

I thought I heard something, a sound from the other bank . . . that sound, you know, when they are all together, when they are close, that . . . even over the shouts, the curses, the honking horns, the distant sniper fire, you know that sound.

[He attempts to mimic their moan but collapses into uncontrolled coughs. He holds his handkerchief up to his face. It comes away bloody.]

That sound was what pulled me away from the radio. I looked over at the city. Something caught my eye, something above the rooftops and closing fast.

I wonder, a little, if the Ukrainian government would've still done this if Kiev were loyal to their regime, or if they knew the level of condemnation it would get them.

Article:

I was pulling people across, telling them to run. I saw the bombs released, thought maybe I could dive at the last moment, shield myself from the blast. Then the parachutes opened, and I knew. In a split second, I was up and dashing like a frightened rabbit. "Button up!" I screamed. "Button up!" I leapt onto the nearest tank, slammed the hatch down, and ordered the crew to check the seals!

This was when Ukraine became a pariah state. As soon as this was known to have happened, condemnations came in hard and fast. There were governments in the process of actively collapsing which took the time to condemn this. In one fell swoop, Yanukovych's regime became the one people talked to when discussing outrageous brutality - he overtook the fucking decimations in Russia!

Article:

The gunner was sobbing, the driver was frozen, the commander, a junior sergeant just twenty years old, was balled up on the floor, clutching the little cross he had around his neck. I put my hand on the top of his head, assured him we would be fine while keeping my eyes glued to the periscope.

It is so fucked how young the soldiers are in the Ukrainian military - a lot of Europe's militaries, actually. It happened about the start of the Panic; some countries had a lot of ex-soviet gear, others had all the shit the Americans left behind pulling out, and no one had the time to recruit volunteers, so national service swung abruptly into the vogue.

Which leaves you with this situation where the entire platoon is made of teenagers except the Captain, and it's only almost dumb luck that got him to see the gas come down.

At Moskovskyi Bridge, the units positioned to screen the refugees were not so fortunate, and didn't button up when the nerve gas came down.

Article:

And then I understood. Yes, they'd learned from Zhitomir, and now they found a better use for their cold war stockpiles. How do you effectively separate the infected from the others? How do you keep evacuees from spreading the infection behind the lines? That's one way.

It remains unclear how many people the Ukrainian government killed with nerve agents; they've certainly never released figures, but it was in the low millions before they ran out.

One of the most monstrously evil states to survive the war.

Article:

Twenty minutes later, it was over. I know I should have waited for orders, at least reported our status or the effects of the strike. I could see six more flights of Rooks streaking over, five heading for the other bridges, the last for the city center. I ordered our company to withdraw, to head southwest and just keep going. There were a lot of bodies around us, the ones who'd just made it over the bridge before the gas hit. They popped as we ran over them.

They gave all the soldiers on all the bridges medals for their service in the face of adversity. I think everyone's probably seen the guy who gave a speech at the UN where he symbolically crushed his medal under his heel [HERE], and the guy who refused to accept it at the ceremony [HERE].

Those of you plugged into the Chinese intranet might remember the minor drama when that Ukrainian cosplayer used one of these medals in a cosplay? It made some waves in the, ah… non-Chinese? Portions of the Chinese Intranet. How dare she use a medal from such an infamous day? Her response is [HERE] - I wouldn't recommend listening, it's upsetting watching; she keeps it to remember her commander and gunner, who'd stepped out of the tank to calm the crowd. Not to remember the government that did this to them, but to remember the friends lost because of it.

Not to stereotype, but I think the Chinese understood better than a lot of us, under the circumstances.

There are a handful of other identifiable survivors of the Kiev Gas Attack but honestly most of them have put bullets through their own brains.

Article:

Have you been to the Great Patriotic War Museum Complex? It was one of the most impressive buildings in Kiev. The courtyard was filled with machines: tanks, guns, every class and size, from the Revolution to the modern day. Two tanks faced each other at the museum's entrance. They were decorated with colorful drawings now, and children were allowed to climb and play on them. There was an Iron Cross, a full meter in size, made from the hundreds of real Iron Crosses taken from dead Hitlerites.

Ukraine is an interesting country. Their military is pretty effectively loyal to Yanukovych at this point - they have the buy-in that only the sure and certain knowledge that you'll be shot as a war criminal if you abandon him can get you - but what's left of their civilian population hates the cunt, as does anyone and everyone no longer actively in the military.

Article:

There was a mural, from floor to ceiling, showing a grand battle. Our soldiers were all connected, in a seething wave of strength and courage that crashed upon the Germans, that drove them from our homeland. So many symbols of our national defense and none more spectacular than the statue of the Rodina Mat (Motherland). She was the tallest building in the city, a more than sixty-meter masterpiece of pure stainless steel. She was the last thing I saw in Kiev, her shield and sword held high in everlasting triumph, her cold, bright eyes looking down at us as we ran.

So you end up with this sort of awkward realignment. The Ukrainian public before the Years of Zed were pretty opposed to the legacy of the old Soviet Union - for good reason. But look at a map. Romania scarcely has a military to speak of, Poland's regime is just as drenched in blood as Yanukovych's… the only neighbour they have that hates him, for reasons both realpolitik and moral (he's an ally of the HRE, and also is uncontroversially despised) is the new RSFSR. The Ukrainian public, therefore, is after having the Russians roll in, just to deal with… the former Russian puppet, Yanukovych. It's a messy situation.

And like, I'm not going to sugar coat it - the RSFSR isn't great! It started as a mutinying military with no real socialist impetus behind it, and mostly stumbled into it by mistake, a propaganda tool, and they only became socialist by painful inches, insofar as they have. They're less Russian Nationalist than you'd think - which comes of being formed initially from a military which overwhelmingly recruits from its internal minorities, but they'll still probably set up a sympathetic government to their broader goals?

But you know what? They don't drop nerve gas on their own citizens. So, like… fuck it? I don't know. He's fucking awful, so I can see why people would want the soviets coming in. Hopefully they'll take cues from the rest of the International on this?

I don't know.

***

Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].

Donate to the Kharkov Hospice for Kiev Survivors [HERE]

Wishing all success to the Chilean Socialist Republic.

AN: Use of the Russian names for the cities and other names changed in decommunisation was deliberate. It does not denote any especial political motive on the part of the reviewer, beyond a lack of information on Ukrainian political movements which in her timeline did not reach fruition.

The implication that Soviet Russian intervention in Ukraine would be appreciated by the Ukrainian public is not intended to comment on the Russian Federation waging imperialistic war in Ukraine, either. The situation is different; Brooks wrote the Ukrainian government doing some pretty hardcore atrocities here.

 

[veteranMortal]

Turning the Tide Part 2

Article:

SAND LAKES PROVINCIAL WILDERNESS PARK, MANITOBA, CANADA

[Jesika Hendricks gestures to the expanse of subarctic wasteland. The natural beauty has been replaced by wreckage: abandoned vehicles, debris, and human corpses remain partially frozen into the gray snow and ice. Originally from Waukesha, Wisconsin, the now naturalized Canadian is part of this region's Wilderness Restoration Project. Along with several hundred other volunteers, she has come here every summer since the end of official hostilities. Although WRP claims to have made substantial progress, none can claim to see any end in sight.]

Everyone who died in Northern Canada represents a failure of the government of the USA. They are the victims of a deliberate campaign of industrial murder.

Article:

I don't blame them, the government, the people who were supposed to protect us. Objectively, I guess I can understand. They couldn't have everyone following the army west behind the Rocky Mountains. How were they going to feed all of us, how were they going to screen us, and how could they ever hope to stop the armies of undead that almost certainly would have been following us? I can understand why they would want to divert as many refugees north as possible.

I can see why they chose to interview this specific woman. She's mad at them, but she doesn't blame them, despite the fact that, like… Yes! You absolutely can blame them! They didn't need to do any of this the way they did any of this!

But she survived and I suppose it makes it easier for her to convince herself she believes they had to do it. People don't generally want to accept they live under a government that fully intended that they die, so I guess I get it.

Article:

What else could they do, stop us at the Rockies with armed troops, gas us like the Ukrainians? At least if we went north, we might have a chance. Once the temperature dropped and the undead froze, some us might be able to survive. That was happening all around the rest of the world, people fleeing north hoping to stay alive until winter came. No, I don't blame them for wanting to divert us, I can forgive that. But the irresponsible way they did it, the lack of vital information that would have helped so many to stay alive…that I can never forgive.

The idea that they could've just… not left everyone beyond the Rockies to sink or swim? Not mentioned.

And yes, the Americans didn't give the information necessary for how to survive in the frigid North, but like… there was no information possible. "You won't survive" is the information which would help, but it would have led to them having to either protect the rest of America, or actually commit the murders with gas, bombing or shootings, and that would've been too visible, too overtly evil for the American Government to sell to their people. To their soldiers, at this delicate time. Driving people onto inhospitable land and then acting surprised when they die, though? That's old hat.

Article:

It was August, two weeks after Yonkers and just three days after the government had started withdrawing west. We hadn't had too many outbreaks in our neighborhood. I'd only seen one, a collection of six feeding on a homeless man. The cops had put them down quickly. It happened three blocks from our house and that was when my father decided to leave.

It is deeply, profoundly unfair, but I'm pretty confident they'd have had better odds of survival, in Waukesha. Not, per se, "in" Waukesha, but 16 million people survived the war in the general vicinity of the Great Lakes.

And they left it too late, anyway - if they'd headed north earlier, bought a cabin, some food… maybe. There were people who did.

Article:

We were in the living room; my father was learning how to load his new rifle while Mom finished nailing up the windows. You couldn't find a channel with anything but zombie news, either live images, or recorded footage from Yonkers. Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of "experts" all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more "shocking" and "in depth" than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.

The American media abjectly shat the bed, but honestly - in a rank departure from previous stances - I don't think the government had a lot to do with this. So far as I can tell, the American government just said "Go north, the zombies will freeze" and the media ran with it, because they had nothing else to say. This was an "authentic" complete fuck up.

Article:

The only thing any of them could agree on was that all private citizens should "go north." Because the living dead freeze solid, extreme cold is our only hope. That's all we heard. No more instructions on where to head north, what to bring with us, how to survive, just that damn catchphrase you'd hear from every talking head, or just crawling over and over across the bottom of the TV. "Go north. Go north. Go north."

This I will assume she misremembers; there were absolutely dissenters, they just didn't have another option, because "go West" was officially barred from being reported by the US Government. So they just said "going north is extremely risky, and I cannot recommend it in good consciousness"

Article:

Now Mom tried to argue, tried to make him see reason. We lived above the snowline, we had all we needed. Why trek into the unknown when we could just stock up on supplies, continue to fortify the house, and just wait until the first fall frost? Dad wouldn't hear it. We could be dead by the fall, we could be dead by next week! He was so caught up in the Great Panic. He told us it would be like an extended camping trip. We'd live on mooseburgers and wild berry desserts. He promised to teach me how to fish and asked me what I wanted to name my pet rabbit when I caught it. He'd lived in Waukesha his whole life. He'd never been camping.

Honestly, as a random given American, fleeing north wasn't the worst decision possible; if you weren't west of the Rockies already, you had a greater than 80% chance of dying if you didn't flee north.

As someone living within a two hour drive of Chicago, though… Unfortunate.

Article:

[She shows me something in the ice, a collection of cracked DVDs.]

This is what people brought with them: hair dryers, GameCubes, laptops by the dozen. I don't think they were stupid enough to think they could use them. Maybe some did. I think most people were just afraid of losing them, that they'd come home after six months and find their homes looted.

At this point, they were still being told the retreat was only temporary, that the US military would be pushing out over winter to clear the frozen undead. No shit they thought they'd be back in 6 months; that was still the official position of the fucking army.

That changed about when Air Force One got got before it could take off.

Article:

We actually thought we were packing sensibly. Warm clothes, cooking utensils, things from the medicine cabinet, and all the canned food we could carry. It looked like enough food for a couple of years. We finished half of it on the way up. That didn't bother me. It was like an adventure, the trek north.

You always underestimate how much food you need, going on a trip like this. You'd be surprised how much food it takes to feed a family for even just a month. e On the move we never had that much trouble getting food - I did gain a new… appreciation is the wrong word? Acceptance of dog food's edibility? Once we stopped at the Oxford Services and dug in - we assumed for the duration - we started to struggle, and that was in the English South-East. Winters even just in Wisconsin are beyond my comprehension of how I'd deal with them.

Article:

All those stories you hear about the clogged roads and violence, that wasn't us. We were in the first wave. The only people ahead of us were the Canadians, and most of them were already long gone. There was still a lot of traffic on the road, more cars than I'd ever seen, but it all moved pretty quickly, and only really snarled in places like roadside towns or parks.

Not a lot of Canadians left, now. More Americans than Canadians ended up in the Canadian north, and American "military assistance" was deployed to bring Canada under control during the reconquest, so even most people with Canadian citizenship - like Ms Hendricks here - were American-born.

There's that joke - how do you tell when you're crossing from the Red Belt into Canada? You start seeing the American Flag.

Article:

Parks?

Parks, designated campgrounds, any place where people thought they'd gone far enough. Dad used to look down on those people, calling them shortsighted and irrational. He said that we were still way too close to population centers and the only way to really make it was to head as far north as we could.

Once you were past the Canadian border, at least in their part of America, you were less likely to survive the further north you went, for reasons which I suspect are obvious.

Article:

Mom would always argue that it wasn't their fault, that most of them had simply run out of gas. "And whose fault is that," Dad would say. We had a lot of spare gas cans on the roof of the minivan. Dad had been stocking up since the first days of the Panic.

"It is their own fault they don't have any gas" says man who's been hoarding gas.

I know statistically this man was not single handedly responsible for the fuel shortages, but you've not known fury until you've been starving and freezing for weeks walking down a motorway jammed with abandoned cars and you find the burnt out wreck of a car with 10 melted Jerry cans on the roof and 200 slagged and ruined tins of food in the boot. Fucking hoarders.

Article:

We'd pass a lot of traffic snarls around roadside gas stations, most of which already had these giant signs outside that said NO MORE GAS. Dad drove by them really fast. He drove fast by a lot of things, the stalled cars that needed a jump, or hitchhikers who needed a ride.

It's funny; I think everyone who survived the crisis agrees there was an unpleasant general tendency towards "Fuck you, got mine" thinking in the pre-war which did not lend itself well to survival, but where we went from there to try to fix that differs from place to place?

America's pretty violently militarised now, the HRE and Brazil are giving theocracy a try, Japan's doing absolutely appalling cult of the warrior shit, Royalist Britain is attempting to get buy-in for the monarchy, and across the world, collectivist socialist movements are picking up steam.

I don't know where the world is going, not in the short term, but "back to rampant consumer capitalism" does not seem to be on the cards.

Article:

We did pick up one woman, walking by herself and pulling one of those wheeled airline bags. She looked pretty harmless, all alone in the rain. That's probably why Mom made Dad stop to pick her up. Her name was Patty, she was from Winnipeg.

It's interesting how things stick in your mind. I remember there was a family down the street - we were close, I think I had a crush on the daughter? I was too young to really "get" what that meant, but…
Anyway, when we finally decided to leave - when we were really starting to run out of food on our little cul-de-sac, we'd finally had to kill the chickens, boil them down into this awful stew - we walked past their house and I looked up. They had this big window, stretched all the way up their stairwell, you could see both levels of the house, and they were just… there? Hanging from the stairs?

And I remember because their cat was sitting on top of the stairs, licking himself. They couldn't have been dead long, or he'd have left, but the image of this cat with his leg up in the air, licking himself, without a care in the world…

I don't know. Her mention of the airline bag reminded me. Such a little thing to remember about Patty from Winnipeg.

Article:

I was proud of my parents for doing the right thing, until she sneezed and brought up a handkerchief to blow her nose. Her left hand had been in her pocket since we picked her up. We could see that it was wrapped in a cloth and had a dark stain that looked like blood.

I used to be really prone to blisters, and they always made it so difficult to deal with anyone, especially once I was alone, on the way west. I'd be walking along with them, we'd be discussing plans for once we arrived, and then they'd see I was limping, or we'd stop and I'd take my boots off, and they'd see the soiled bandage wrapped around a bloody wound, and that'd be it. They'd leave in the night, or hurry off. One guy pulled a knife ordered me to leave. I get it, he had kids to watch out for, but when you're 15, you start to take it personally. I never saw him again, never got an apology.

Sometimes injuries are just injuries! You could've at least looked at what Patty was dealing with!

The old rhyme; if it weeps, they're for keeps, if it's dry, time to die.

Article:

I just kept thinking about mooseburgers and wild berries. It was like heading to the Promised Land. I knew once we headed far enough north, everything would be all right.

Honestly, sometimes I do have to be thankful for having such a dogshit, evil government that they never gave us any false hopes like this, they just lied unconvincingly about how they would be returning shortly and then fucked off. It meant we lost less when reality sunk in, and it means there's less now that people can use to excuse them.

Other times I think about the suicides in the early years, about the bodies we found in farmhouses with plenty of food and clean water, without a ghoul to be seen, with empty bottles of sleeping pills.

Article:

There were these big cookouts every night, people all throwing in what they'd hunted or fished, mostly fished. Some guys would throw dynamite in the lake and there'd be this huge bang and all these fish would come floating to the surface. I'll never forget those sounds, the explosions or the chainsaws as people cut down trees, or the music of car radios and instruments families had brought. We all sang around the campfires at night, these giant bonfires of logs stacked up on one another.

I know what she's saying here, and it isn't, like, absolutely untrue - 55 million people hit the Canadian wilderness like a bullet through a blancmange - but like… it wasn't because they were inefficient in their usage of things that the wilds of, like, the most frigidly awful northern Canada were unable to sustain them?

Article:

That was when we still had trees, before the second and third waves started showing up, when people were down to burning leaves and stumps, then finally whatever they could get their hands on. The smell of plastic and rubber got really bad, in your mouth, in your hair.

Like, they didn't "run out of trees" - they cut down all the trees within easy dragging distance of camp, and without chainsaws, couldn't cut down the bigger ones, or drag them back without trucks. People did survive in the northern canadian territories without such a massive QoL collapse even in camps like this. Just, like, not often.

Article:

But once the dead were frozen, how were you going to survive the winter?

Good question. I don't think most people thought that far ahead. Maybe they figured that the "authorities" would come rescue us or that they could just pack up and head home.

People assumed the ghouls would freeze and die, and they could just… go home. There's no reason they wouldn't assume that - it was what they were told. There's a reason the first Spring was so devastating to Americans above the snowline.

Article:

[She draws my attention to another object in the ice, a Sponge-Bob SquarePants sleeping bag. It is small, and stained brown.]

What do you think this is rated to, a heated bedroom at a sleepover party? Okay, maybe they couldn't get a proper bag—camping stores were always the first bought out or knocked off—but you can't believe how ignorant some of these people were. A lot of them were from Sunbelt states, some as far away as southern Mexico.

Statistically this is rather improbable. Based on surviving satellite imagery from the American Northern Migration, it was almost exclusively from, like, Northern States, a few from the rest of America - your "Sunbelt" states - and almost none from below the US border, because the sicko freaks you employed to guard the border continued to do that until, like, they were actually consumed by ghouls.

I expect her parents made some stereotyping and racist assumptions about people they saw in the camp, and she picked up on them.

Article:

In the beginning everyone was friendly. We cooperated. We traded or even bought what we needed from other families. Money was still worth something. Everyone thought the banks would be reopening soon. Whenever Mom and Dad would go looking for food, they'd always leave me with a neighbor. I had this little survival radio, the kind you cranked for power, so we could listen to the news every night.

Christ, I had a windup just like that. Not knowingly - I was too old for something like that, or so I claimed - but we found one tucked into the back of my wardrobe, a gift from a well-meaning grandparent - and it was my job to crank it up every day. I took it so seriously, even when the only news was the Prime Minister's party giving different orders every day about where to retreat so they looked like they were "doing something" whilst the deputy prime minister's party told everyone to shelter in place and await further information.

We only moved on when someone let slip on the news that the leader of the opposition had died refusing to abandon the people of London, which I think surprised my parents - they'd always thought he was an empty suit, I remember Dad saying. That was what made it sink in that no one was coming to save us, and we were running out of food coming into winter.

Article:

It was all stories of the pullout, army units leaving people stranded. We'd listen with our road map of the United States, pointing to the cities and towns where the reports were coming from. I'd sit on Dad's lap. "See," he'd say, "they didn't get out in time. They weren't smart like us." He'd try to force a smile. For a little while, I thought he was right.

It took America a little while - until mid September-ish? - to finally acknowledge that they'd have to abandon "Middle America" - they'd wanted to hold the Mississippi after convincing as many people as they could to flee north, but after Yonkers everyone freaked the fuck out, and before they knew it, the plan had always been to retreat to the Rockies.

Article:

But after the first month, when the food started running out, and the days got colder and darker, people started getting mean. There were no more communal fires, no more cookouts or singing. The camp became a mess, nobody picking up their trash anymore. A couple times I stepped in human shit.

To be fair - "fair" - waste disposal is hard when you're used to flushing toilets and garbage disposal, and the ground is frozen - if you're not gonna shit in your drinking water - and you shouldn't - you're left either hacking out a latrine from solid frozen mud, or having a shitting pile in the corner of the camp, both of which are awful.

That said, don't just shit in the middle of camp, come on now.

Article:

I wasn't left alone with neighbors anymore, my parents didn't trust anyone. Things got dangerous, you'd see a lot of fights. I saw two women wrestling over a fur coat, tore it right down the middle. I saw one guy catching another guy trying to steal some stuff out of his car and beat his head in with a tire iron. A lot of it took place at night, scuffling and shouts.

You see people - mostly Americans, ironically - point to things like this, accounts like this - and use it as excuseology for their fucking insane judicial system, and I just… if you put people in a situation like this, with a mindset like this, you get a situation like this; no one here thought they would be here for long, everyone was here just to defend themselves, and they were suddenly all out of food.

I'm in two minds about whether they'd have been better or worse if someone had risen to a leadership position in the camp - on the one hand, some of the camps where someone was giving communal directions went well - there was one they found last year that didn't even know the crisis was over, and no one there wanted to go back - but on the other hand, you get places like Duck Lake Post.

Article:

The only time anyone ever came together was when one of the dead showed up. These were the ones who'd followed the third wave, coming alone or in small packs. It happened every couple of days. Someone would sound an alarm and everyone would rally to take them out. And then, as soon as it was over, we'd all turn on each other again.

I noticed something similar, when we lived on the motorway. People would come by - we were essentially a trading post in Summer 2015, it was nice - and sometimes they'd be followed by some shambling ghouls. It tended to put our community's little tensions at ease; the Mulhollands would forget that they blamed my Mum for not figuring out their son had pneumonia before it was too late, Mum and Dad would forget the Collins' hoarded food whilst my baby brother was sick…

But, like… we were able to be civil without the zombies at the door? Maybe it was because there were so few of us? Or we were just in less apocalyptic conditions?

Article:

When it got cold enough to freeze the lake, when the last of the dead stopped showing up, a lot of people thought it was safe enough to try to walk home.

Walk? Not drive?

No more gas. They'd used it all up for cooking fuel or just to keep their car heaters running. Every day there'd be these groups of half-starved, ragged wretches, all loaded down with all this useless stuff they'd brought with them, all with this look of desperate hope on their faces.

I probably don't need to tell you - lots of people died of exposure trying to walk back down to civilisation in late Autumn. I don't know of anyone who made it back doing this, not even anecdotally.

Article:

[We come upon a collection of bones, too many to count. They lie in a pit, half covered in ice.]

I was a pretty heavy kid. I never played sports, I lived on fast food and snacks. I was only a little bit thinner when we arrived in August. By November, I was like a skeleton. Mom and Dad didn't look much better. Dad's tummy was gone, Mom had these narrow cheekbones. They were fighting a lot, fighting about everything.

My parents never fought. I know this sounds crazy, or delusional, but I'm serious - they never fought. Maybe they argued in their bedroom, I don't know, but even at the worst of times they presented us with a united front. Even when we had to dig far too small a grave, in that first winter, they didn't fight, not in front of me or my sister, and not in front of the baby, whilst they had him. I think it strained their marriage, though - how could it not have?

Article:

One time, around Thanksgiving…I couldn't get out of my sleeping bag. My belly was swollen and I had these sores on my mouth and nose. There was this smell coming from the neighbor's RV. They were cooking something, meat, it smelled really good. Mom and Dad were outside arguing. Mom said "it" was the only way. I didn't know what "it" was. She said "it" wasn't "that bad" because the neighbors, not us, had been the ones to actually "do it."

You knew this was coming, right? Stories of the American Ice Camps never fail to reach the Donner Party sections, and it's always pretty grim, so like, buckle up. There's substantive evidence in various camps of actual deliberate murder in these events, though Jesika doesn't touch on it one way or the other regarding her own camp; that's not uncommon. For people who hated each other so much, the survivors of the Ice Camps maintain one hell of a conspiracy of silence on murder.

Article:

Mom told him that a real man would know what to do. She called him a wimp and said he wanted us to die so then he could run away and live like the "faggot" she always knew he was. Dad told her to shut the f**k up. Dad never swore. I heard something, a crack from outside. Mom came back in, holding a clump of snow over her right eye.

I… I don't know about this? Maybe this is true, god knows there's enough people who get real bigoted under stressful circumstances, but it is unpleasantly fitting with the New Clique's political shift towards presenting themselves - presenting their civilian "government", excuse me - as being the shield between minorities and "the public" - they know the Old Clique pissed off an awful lot of people, and they're pretty sure they want to appeal to minorities, not to reactionaries, because the Old Clique could never staunch the emigration bleed, and it isn't white supremacists being welcomed into Mexico or Cuba.

Article:

He grabbed my survival radio, the one people'd try to buy…or steal, for a long time, and went back out toward the RV. He came back ten minutes later, without the radio but with a big bucket of this steaming hot stew. It was so good! Mom told me not to eat too fast. She fed me in little spoonfuls. She looked relieved. She was crying a little.

I know its grim to mention it, but a working radio in that first Winter was worth a lot more than that? They could've traded other things. Their gun, maybe.

It's a nicer thing to dwell on than, you know, that.

Article:

Dad still had that look. The look I had myself in a few months, when Mom and Dad both got sick and I had to feed them.

[I kneel to examine the bone pile. They have all been broken, the marrow extracted.]

Winter really hit us in early December. The snow was over our heads, literally, mountains of it, thick and gray from the pollution. The camp got silent. No more fights, no more shooting. By Christmas Day there was plenty of food.

We ate seagulls, that first Christmas. They came to shelter around the service station for the winter and we killed them with slingshots - which is not easy! - and had seagull stew. I remember sitting there, listening to a boy coughing his last from a pallet by the fire, eating thin Seagull stew, trying to imagine everything would be okay.

I'm sorry, for what it's worth - no one signed up to just listen to me bitch and whine about how hard I had it, not when people actually starved. It just helps a little to talk about these things, I suppose.

Article:

[She holds up what looks like a miniature femur. It has been scraped clean by a knife.]

They say eleven million people died that winter, and that's just in North America. That doesn't count the other places: Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia. I don't want to think about Siberia, all those refugees from southern China, the ones from Japan who'd never been outside a city, and all those poor people from India. That was the first Gray Winter, when the filth in the sky started changing the weather. They say that a part of that filth, I don't know how much, was ash from human remains.

Alright, so I'll get into this - most of this is wrong.

Something like 18 million Americans died in that first winter, and another 10 million over the rest of the war. Of the 40 million Americans to cross the border into Canada during the Great Panic, a little under 12 million survived the war. Of the 15 million Canadians to head into the wilderness, only around 5 million made it, with 7 million of those deaths in that first winter.

And this was not as universal an experience as she, like, seems to believe it was. Outside of North America, a little in Scandinavia and, obviously, the Icelandic Disaster… no one really did this - in Europe, most people were either unable to do this, mostly went into the Alps, or decided not to do this full stop. In China they largely sheltered in place and waited for the military to clear them, and in Japan the evacuation was a centrally-planned affair.

India is a special case, but the Himalayas were never going to be able to support the hundreds of millions of people that the Indian Redeker Plan called for, winter or no winter.

Also, because it is pedantic - very little of the ash in the air was from cremating people. Mostly it was just, like, from the nuclear exchange that happened? Or from the massive fires?

Article:

[One of the other team members calls us over. A zombie is half buried, frozen from the waist down in the ice. The head, arms, and upper torso are very much alive, thrashing and moaning, and trying to claw toward us.]

Why do they come back after freezing? All human cells contain water, right? And when that water freezes, it expands and bursts the cell walls. That's why you can't just freeze people in suspended animation, so then why does it work for the living dead?

[The zombie makes one great lunge in our direction; its frozen lower torso begins to snap. Jesika raises her weapon, a long iron crowbar, and casually smashes the creature's skull.]

It's because they're evil, and hate us, Jesika. There's no biological explanation you can find, it just… happened. One day, zombies.

Honestly I found her section a little weird in ways I couldn't pin down, so I looked into it and [HERE] you can find her writing an opinion in the Toronto Star about this interview. She wasn't completely happy, but she wasn't completely sad either? She says - and I believe her - that he stitched together answers from multiple much more probing, leading questions. It is all her own words, but she doesn't think if she were to write an account out longhand, she'd talk about things with this tone.

"The government told us to come here to die," She says in her piece. "Why would I blame my Dad for obeying?"

Article:

UDAIPUR LAKE PALACE, LAKE PICHOLA, RAJASTHAN, INDIA

[Completely covering its foundation of Jagniwas Island, this idyllic, almost fairy-tale structure was once a maharaja's residence, then a luxury hotel, then a haven to several hundred refugees, until an outbreak of cholera killed them all. Under the direction of Project Manager Sardar Khan, the hotel, like the lake and surrounding city, is finally beginning to return to life. During his recollections, Mister Khan sounds less like a battle-hardened, highly educated civilian engineer, and more like a young, frightened lance corporal who once found himself on a chaotic mountain road.]

Hotels are great. Forget anything negative anyone's ever told you about them. Hundreds of bedrooms with preserved food in each and every one of them, a lock on every door and at least one bed in every room. There was one of those crappy chain hotels at the service station; Premier Inn or Travelodge or something.

We used to move from room to room each week - we didn't have any way to wash the sheets without wasting water we couldn't afford.

Article:

They called it a road, but even in peacetime it had been a notorious death trap. Thousands of refugees were streaming past, or climbing over the stalled and abandoned vehicles. People were still trying to struggle with suitcases, boxes; one man was stubbornly holding on to the monitor for a desktop PC. A monkey landed on his head, trying to use it as a stepping-stone, but the man was too close to the edge and the two of them went tumbling over the side.

India's retreat into the Himalayas was a logistical and humanitarian disaster. Hundreds of millions of people crammed into the tallest Mountain Range on earth. What did they expect to happen? Did they think they'd just be able to improvise the food situation? Did they think the food they'd shipped in with them would be enough? How?

It's one of the things that sincerely upsets me, because like… no, they obviously didn't think that? None of the pre-war governments "accidentally" forgot that people need food to live, they just wanted some of the people who they'd decided would die to die in a way that didn't bring them back as ghouls. It was clever. Monstrous, but clever.

Article:

I saw a whole bus go over, I don't even know how, it wasn't even moving. Passengers were climbing out of the windows because the doors of the bus had been jammed by foot traffic. One woman was halfway out the window when the bus tipped over. Something was in her arms, something clutched tightly to her. I tell myself that it wasn't moving, or crying, that it was just a bundle of clothes.

We didn't have cases like this in Britain, these huge streams of people forcing themselves through little roads. I suppose there was Anglesey, but no one ever thinks about the people streaming into Anglesey, we think of the horrors we faced clearing it out.

There was the crush at Dover, maybe, but even then, it wasn't along a whole road like this, it was at the bottleneck by the port. You won't find many people who'll dispute that India had one of the worst Great Panics; offhand only Iceland had it worse, and Iceland's specific circumstances were unfortunate.

Article:

I wasn't supposed to be there, I wasn't even a combat engineer. I was with the BRO; my job was to build roads, not blow them up. I'd just been wandering through the assembly area at Shimla, trying to find what remained of my unit, when this engineer, Sergeant Mukherjee, grabbed me by the arm and said, "You, soldier, you know how to drive?"

At least you were an engineer? Like, being the wrong sort of Engineer is one of the lesser sins. I knew a guy in the Guards who'd been in the Royal Welsh Poor Fucking Infantry, and he'd been the one to blow the Menai Suspension bridge; he'd never even done GCSE Physics. He did it, though. Enough plastic explosives could get you anywhere.

Article:

I think I stammered something to the affirmative, and suddenly he was shoving me into the driver's side of a jeep while he jumped in next to me with some kind of radiolike device on his lap. "Get back to the pass! Go! Go!" I took off down the road, screeching and skidding and trying desperately to explain that I was actually a steamroller driver, and not even fully qualified at that. Mukherjee didn't hear me. He was too busy fiddling with the device on his lap. "The charges are already set," he explained. "All we have to do is wait for the order!"

The inherent flaw with setting geographical location to be fallback points on the grounds of difficulty of access is that you end up turning roads which by their very nature act as bottlenecks into even worse bottlenecks, with millions of refugees clogging them up as they try to force their way in, followed by ghouls… You are committing to either overwhelming everyone in your moronic redeker redoubt, or baiting a chunk of the civilian population which otherwise had some hope of survival to come and die right on your doorstep.

Article:

I knew, vaguely, that our retreat into the Himalayas had something to do with some kind of master plan, and that part of that plan meant closing all the mountain passes to the living dead. I never dreamed, however, that I would be such a vital participant! For the sake of civil conversation, I will not repeat my profane reaction to Mukherjee, nor Mukherjee's equally profane reaction when we arrived at the pass and found it still full of refugees.

Someone gave a profoundly cowardly order, here - I'm not sure who, but it stands out. Ordering people to "clear the pass" before they detonate the charges? They must've known that was just… never going to happen? But ordering them to do it absolves you of the inevitable massacre.

Article:

Mukherjee keyed his radio and reported that the road was still highly active. A voice came back to him, a high-pitched, frantic younger voice of an officer screaming that his orders were to blow the road no matter how many people were on it. Mukherjee responded angrily that he had to wait till it was clear. If we blew it now, not only would we be sending dozens of people hurtling to their deaths, but we would be trapping thousands on the other side.

Right, just so. Suddenly the shitty orders are the fault of the junior officer, the people on the bridge the fault of the unit holding the bridge, the failure to blow the charges the fault of the sergeant on the scene, and whoever gave the orders for this fuckup doesn't take any blame at all.

Article:

Mukherjee answered that he would blow it when the zombies got here, and not a second before. He wasn't about to commit murder no matter what some pissant lieutenant…

But then Mukherjee stopped in midsentence and looked at something over my head. I whipped around, and suddenly found myself staring into the face of General Raj-Singh!

It is incredible - a testament to the man, the hero - that a man who did not survive a year of the war remains such a globally known figure. He is used by every movement in India as a political prop, every other week it feels like they're unveiling another statue of him… He was truly larger than life, in every sense. And people noticed.

Article:

[Khan takes a deep breath, his chest filling with pride.]

"Gentlemen," he began…he called us "Gentlemen" and explained, very carefully, that the road had to be destroyed immediately. The air force, what was left of it, had its own orders concerning the closure of all mountain passes. At this moment, a single Shamsher fighter bomber was already on station above our position.

Why does everyone default to nukes? Sure, they work - they burn the brain right out of a ghoul, at a greater distance than you'd imagine - but they're not a cure-all, and by now, from the Iran-Pakistan war, everyone must've known this.

Article:

Mukherjee gulped, not sure of what to do, until the Tiger held out his hand for the detonator. Ever the hero, he was now willing to accept the burden of mass murderer. The sergeant handed it over, close to tears. General Raj-Singh thanked him, thanked us both, whispered a prayer, then pressed his thumbs down on the firing buttons.

The problem with being as well known as a hero as General Raj-Singh is that you are consequently known as being the sort of man who will take this responsibility. Not for the Tiger of Delhi the peace of sitting in a secure zone, resting his hands on his gut and implicitly ordering sergeants to commit war crimes. No, he was always going to make his way forwards - was always likely to take the detonator, truthfully.

Article:

Nothing happened, he tried again, no response. He checked the batteries, all the connections, and tried a third time. Nothing. The problem wasn't the detonator. Something had gone wrong with the charges that were buried half a kilometer down the road, set right in the middle of the refugees.

What an interesting failure.

For clarity's sake - I am going to talk about something which is legitimately, genuinely, considered a conspiracy theory, but I think I'm right. Maybe this happened authentically - God knows the Indian army was in shambles by now - but I don't buy it.

Article:

This is the end, I thought, we're all going to die. All I could think of was getting out of there, far enough away to maybe avoid the nuclear blast. I still feel guilty about those thoughts, caring only for myself in a moment like that.

Thank God for General Raj-Singh. He reacted…exactly how you would expect a living legend to react. He ordered us to get out of here, save ourselves and get to Shimla, then turned and ran right into the crowd. Mukherjee and I looked at each other, without much hesitation, I'm happy to say, and took off after him.

Yes, he reacted exactly how you would expect him to react. By running to certain death.

Heroes are very predictable.

Article:

Now we wanted to be heroes, too, to protect our general and shield him from the crowd. What a joke. We never even saw him once the masses enveloped us like a raging river. I was pushed and shoved from all directions. I don't know when I was punched in the eye. I shouted that I needed to get past, that this was army business. No one listened. I fired several shots in the air.

Trying to work through a crowd of people is honestly in its way harder than getting through a crowd of ghouls - you aren't going to brutalise them, and they're often much stronger. I'm impressed he did as well as he did, to be honest?

The Sergeant dies and our Lance Corporal gets himself separated from Raj-Singh.

Article:

Then the wind came up; it brought the stink and moan whipping through the valley. In front of me, about half a kilometer ahead, the crowd began running. I strained my eyes…squinted. The dead were coming. Slow and deliberate, and just as tightly packed as the refugees they were devouring.

The microbus shook and I fell. First I was floating on a sea of human bodies, then suddenly I was beneath them, shoes and bare feet trampling on my flesh.

People don't talk a lot about the smell, I find. And like, I get it, the smell isn't pleasant, the stickily sweet slow rot of their skin, the putrescence of whatever they've eaten slowly rotting in their digestive tracts, the strange, stale body odour that clings to their clothes, the last hangover of their mortal lives. It's a very particular sort of repulsive, different from anything else.

Article:

I fumbled for my sidearm, my hand wouldn't work. I cursed and cried. I thought I'd be religious at that point, but I was just so scared and angry I started beating my head against the underside of the van. I thought if I hit it hard enough I could bash in my own skull. Suddenly there was a deafening roar and the ground rose up underneath me. A wave of screams and moans mixed with this powerful blast of pressurized dust. My face slammed into the machinery above, knocking me cold.

Ah, another atheist in the foxhole. People get so mad sometimes, when they find out some of us look into the abyss and don't come out of it praying.

He was very fortunate to be knocked unconscious when the bridge was blown. The stampedes on those mountain passes when the explosions tore through them killed a lot of people.

Article:

I crawled out from under the microbus. At least my legs were still working well enough to stand. I realized that I was alone, no refugees, no General Raj-Singh. I was standing among a collection of discarded personal belongings in the middle of a deserted mountain path. In front of me was a charred cliff wall. Beyond it was the other side of the severed road.

I will give them this - sealing themselves in the Himalayas did, like, work? Once they'd suppressed the little outbreaks from bitten refugees, India suffered no incursions from the ghouls within their little holdfast. Mass starvation, sure, but no zombies.

Article:

The Tiger must have set the demolition charges off by hand. I guessed he must have reached them the same time as the living dead. I hope they didn't get their teeth in him first. I hope he's pleased with his statue that now stands over a modern, four-lane mountain freeway.

Yes, it is always much easier to venerate a dead hero than work with a live one. This was just after the Americans had their heated moment in the retreat, when we were all coming to terms with what that meant, and I think - and this is just me - that the Indians were getting very worried about Raj-Singh, especially as he was - from little we can piece together from his private journals, which might be fraudulent, because, like, obviously? - not tremendously onboard with abandoning everyone outside of the Himalayas to die, and let a not insignificant fraction of the people in the Himalayas starve right along with them.

So they put him in a situation where he would need to make the ultimate sacrifice to save India, and obviously he didn't blink. The detonator never went off - maybe it was never even connected.

Heroes are predictable, and they die like anyone else.

Article:

The monkey didn't help matters any. He was sitting on top of the microbus, just watching the undead plunge to their end. His face appeared so serene, so intelligent, as if he truly understood the situation. I almost wanted him to turn to me and say, "This is the turning point of the war! We've finally stopped them! We're finally safe!" But instead his little penis popped out and he peed in my face.

India would spend the next 10 years slowly starving in the Himalayas, their shrinking population fed only by what little could be imported from Nepal. The Nepalese government has even confirmed what everyone suspected - they rushed their advance into clearing parts of northern India so they could have more agricultural land to supply the two hundred million Indians left of those who stuffed themselves into two states with a pre-war cumulative population of 16 million.

So I do not, per se, condemn Nepal for refusing to give Bihar back. Call me a campist all you want, Nepal fought for that land to actually no shit save India, India can't complain now it's done.

Apologies this update took a few weeks, I've been busy with work. We'll be getting into America's Rocky Years next time. Should be neat.

Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].

Donate to the legal fund for the Indians abandoned by their government [HERE]. They're suing.

Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE]; the women out of the Bratsk camps have started arriving, and… they really need the funds urgently.

AN: Alas, my daily updates have ended. I had some difficulty getting this one out, and it didn't help that I suddenly had a load of other stuff to do. The next one may take longer or shorter than this, I'm not sure. Either way, it probably won't be out tomorrow night.

Enjoy Canada and India, both of which consider the question "What happens if you stuff millions of people into a place only capable of supporting a fraction of that" and - I gather from how Brooks talks about this - we are meant to assume they have different outcomes?