Turning the Tide Part 2
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 The natural beauty has been replaced by wreckage: abandoned vehicles, debris, and human corpses remain partially frozen into the gray snow and ice.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
[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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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?
[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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
