I choked up, suddenly feeling cold despite the heat. I unslung the rifle with numb hands.
The guy in the tree was shouting at me, telling me to run away, to go find help. I almost did exactly that. Except a part of me knew that these creatures were relentless. Maybe I realised they had been at the bottom of that tree for days trying to reach that man, never resting, always pursuing their prey. And I guessed that if I fled they would follow me, but while I would get tired and thirsty and hungry they would just keep going. They could pursue me right across the desert if that’s what it took and eventually they would catch me.
So, I stood there with the gun waving wildly in my trembling hands, fear made my voice crack as I told them, “Just stay back there, fellas. We can work this out.”
They didn’t respond, they just approached me in an excited frenzy, hands reaching for me, you know what they’re like. I’m sure you’ve been chased by them before.
My rifle is a bolt action and doesn’t have a safety catch on it. I shot the first one through the chest when he was about five metres away from me. It had no effect, didn’t even slow him down. A bullet like that could stop even a crocodile.
The guy in the tree was going crazy now, screeching at me to run. I guess all that time up there had kind of driven him a bit crazy, and I don’t blame him. I’d faced the creatures for less than a minute and I was feeling my own sanity begin to snap.
I fumbled with the gun, trying to load another bullet with the bolt action. It was a movement I had made thousands of times before but now I was terrified, walking backwards to try and create distance, pure ice in my veins, all my instincts screaming at me to just leave that man to die and just get out of there.
The zombie who I had shot got his hands on me, ready to eat me alive. It was more blind luck than anything else that I got the gun between me and him which forced the barrel under his jaw. In blind desperation I fired the gun, certain that somehow the ghoul would be unaffected by the bullet like it was the first time. I was sure I was dealing with a demon, you see. I thought nothing could kill it.
But of course the bullet went through its brain killing it instantly. It immediately released me and fell backwards, reminding me of someone dropping backwards into a swimming pool. I was shocked. Somehow I was still alive.
The other two zombies were getting closer. The guy in the tree had stopped screaming, instead watching this new development with interest. Like me he probably thought these things were unstoppable, until I had put one of them down.
I’ve never been as scared of the ghouls as I was right then. But I made my hands work, forcing them to obey. I got the gun up again, this time going for the closest ghoul’s head and missed completely. A cold voice inside my told me I only had two bullets left in the gun. If I didn’t make them count I probably wouldn’t get the chance the reload.
I got the gun up again, my hands still shaking uncontrollably which was throwing off my aim, and waiting till the ghoul was almost on top of me. Then I shot it through the head. I did the same thing with the last one.
In the aftermath I just stood there breathing heavy, I had a kind of death grip on the gun and my hands hurt for days later. Cautiously the man climbed down from the tree, approaching me slowly as though he thought the zombies might get up again. He offered a hand and I shook it. I think he was trying to say thank you but he was too shell shocked to manage that. It doesn’t matter.
I walked with him to the nearest town, making sure he was seen by the local quack and then I went and visited some friends to find out if this thing was happening anywhere else. By then we began hearing on the news of the invasions in the big cities. The last thing I heard on the news was the biker gang in Melbourne taking the fight to the zombies. Then the news stations went off the air for a long time.
What have you done since the initial outbreak?
[Smiles broadly.] Ah, now I found my true calling! I’m a teacher and I guess a kind of ambassador. Before the war my people were lost, just drifting aimlessly through life. We had been that way since the arrival of the European settlers. Don’t get me wrong, the Europeans tried to help us join modern society but very few of us seemed capable of doing so. I mean, you wouldn’t often see a bank manager who was an Aboriginal. What you did see a lot of was Aboriginals who were alcoholics, riddled with serious disease, and a life expectancy of just their early forties.
However, if you looked at the Aboriginals in their natural state, the ones who still lived in tribes and out in the wilderness they were some of the healthiest people you could ever meet. Did you know that Australian Aborigines have the best eyesight of anyone in the world? A lot of those guys can run all day. They’re superhuman.
So, what I did was reach out to those tribes. That was no easy task, a lot of them didn’t even know that the Zombie War was on. They were happy living in the deserts and rainforests. That meant that the only way I could contact them was to travel in to these areas myself and then try to speak to them. That leads me to my next problem, which is that there are about eight hundred different Aboriginal languages. We don’t all just speak one language, in fact far from it.
Sometimes I would reach the natives only to find that the zombies had beaten me to it and completely wiped out a whole tribe. That broke my heart. Occasionally I would meet a tribe that was hostile, or that once I explained to them what I planned to do they simply declined and told me never to return.
But overall my project has been a success. I was able to find a number of Aboriginals in the safe zones who had been lifelong alcoholics and I began to train them in the old ways. They learned survival skills, how to hunt, how to befriend the land.
Of course, in the beginning none of them wanted to go! It took the government telling them they had to leave before they would actually abandon the relative safety they had found. The government was all for my idea and supported it completely, they knew that food and just about every supply imaginable was running low, so they were keen for me to take a portion of the Australian refugees off their hands and make them self-reliant.
Which Aboriginal taught you your survival skills?
Everything I learned about survival and living off the land I learned from a white man! Maybe there’s some irony in that, I don’t know. But before the war there was a number of white men who chose to live in the wilderness, they loved the independence and the freedom. These bushmen could survive as well as anyone else. I had been in danger as a kid of getting involved in drugs but a school project had me spending six weeks on a cattle farm where the workers taught me how to survive. That was the happiest time of my life up until that point. Six weeks became six months. I’ve never stopped learning since.
So that was my next project, which in many ways has been much more successful. I got a number of native Aboriginals employed by the government to become survival teachers, all coordinated by me. Now an Aboriginal child has the choice of staying with the mainstream society or else returning to the tribes to live. Every Australian child, regardless of colour, receives an education in reading, writing and traditional subjects, as well as learning survival skills. The generation before the Zombie War had little idea how to survive away from the cities, but now most Australian children have the skill set to walk out into the wilderness with almost nothing and survive for months.
That has gone a long way to healing the rift between the Aborigines and the white man. Now we have a mutual respect and care for each other.
[Tarka is silent for a minute and is visibly fighting back tears.] I don’t want to say that I’m grateful the Zombie War happened, I’m not. Billions of lives were lost. It’s just that if any good came out of this it’s that my people have finally found their place. Before the War, man, we were going off the deep end. We were so close to losing our way forever. I can’t imagine where we would be now if the War hadn’t happened.
“Never again” –founding maxim of Israel.
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL
Interviewer: Mick Franklin<
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INTERVIEW 16:
I cannot find my host when I walk in to the crowded café. This despite me having a recent photo of him on my clipboard. When I see a man smiling and waving at me from a table I smile back and take a seat. Ben-Ami is a slight man with dark skin. He motions for me to sit down.
Before the war everyone was allowed to carry a handgun as long as a bullet wasn’t chambered. You see, that extra time it takes to draw and cock the gun gives people a chance to respond if the guy with the gun has bad intentions. I know in the rest of the West a lot of you are anti-gun and completely against open carry, but I can tell you right now that a bad guy with a gun can do a lot more damage in a society of unarmed civilians. Here a bad guy with a gun can kill, on average, two people before he’s stopped. The average in a country where the citizens don’t carry guns is up around twenty.
So, guns do save lives. Creating anti-gun laws only serves to disarm the public –outlaws will, by definition, find ways around the law.
[I set up my tape recorder.]
Sorry, I feel quite passionate about gun control. And you know, in light of everything that happened, all those ghouls in our streets . . . where would you like me to start?
Could you give me a little background to the Israeli and Arab conflict?
Two men enter a room and sit down at a table together. Let’s say their names are Mo and . . . Drew. An intimidating stranger sits down at the table in front of them. He’s wearing a suit, dark glasses, and is obviously powerful. He produces a briefcase and places it on the table, snapping it open. Inside the briefcase is a million dollars. The stranger says to Mo and Drew, “Here’s a million dollars. You can keep it all . . . if you can decide how to split it fairly between you. That’s the only way I’m going to let you two have the money, if you can both come to an agreement on how it should be divided.”
Drew laughs and says to Mo, “There I was thinking this was going to be difficult to resolve! This is obvious. We each get half a million dollars, perfectly fair. Let’s collect our money and go our separate ways.”
“Not so fast,” says Mo, “I want nine hundred thousand dollars. I’m a reasonable man, so I will allow you to keep one hundred thousand.”
Drew is shocked, “But we could split this equally! There’s no reason why one of us should have much more than the other one. Each of us are both in the same situation here.”
Mo sits there resolutely with his arms folded, “You are being unreasonable. Since when did the laws of economics change? One hundred thousand is definitely better than zero. If you agree to my deal you still get to walk away with something.”
Drew says, “But that’s completely unfair! There’s two of us and we have the opportunity to split the money equally.”
Mo becomes angry, “This is your last chance. Agree to my terms now or this discussion is over. I really don’t care if I walk away with nothing.”
Drew sits down, deflated, “Okay.”
“Okay. Good. I’m glad to see you made the right choice.”
That little story is my version of the Blackmailer’s Paradox, which is Game Theory in action. In that scenario you can see that one reasonable person is up against an irrational one. In that example Drew conceded a tremendous amount but how do you think negotiations would go next time when Mo knows that he has already gotten an incredibly good deal from Drew? Also, consider what Mo said, that he does not care if he leaves the table with nothing.
This sums up the negotiations between Israel and the Arab world. It shows that Israel has to deal with an irrational, hostile competitor who prefers to lose rather than compromise. It also shows that Israel needs to be very clear where it stands and not back down from that position. That is what us Jews face when we are dealing with the Arabs.
That’s a little simplified, don’t you think?
Professor Robert Aumann, an expert on the Israeli and Arab negotiations, and a Nobel Prize winner, created that example of ‘Game Theory’.
Still, it seems very black and white to me. I’m sure the Arabs have their own point on all this.
It was Aristotle who said that the truth could be found somewhere between both extremes, but rarely in the middle.
Okay. Can you tell me your job before the war?
I was a secret agent! [Laughs.] No, seriously. I noticed when you walked in here you had trouble recognising me. Unlike James Bond who is a handsome, striking guy, a one in a million type, I’m more like one of a million. I blend in to the crowd. I have a face that is immediately forgettable.
My special skills include being fluent in four languages. That was useful for the work I was doing, which was infiltrating terrorist organisations and reporting back to the IDF (Israeli Defence Force). You know, when a terrorist cell leader received the intel that one of his crew was really an undercover agent from Yamam (Israeli Counter Terror Police) he would always say, “Well, if there’s one man who definitely is not an undercover spy it’s that little man right there who gets our coffee.” [Laughs.] They used to order me to go get the coffee every day. If I complained that I had collected the coffee the day before I would get an answer like, “That’s right, and you’re getting the coffee again today.”
Mostly it was easy work. As long as I kept my ears open I would hear a lot of interesting things and then I relayed that information back to my handler, who I would meet about once a week or so. The information I provided saved a lot of lives. If the IDF knew in advance when a terrorist attack was going to be carried out and who was involved it was easy to lay a trap for the terrorists. There was one Arabic woman who tried to blow up a hospital . . . the very hospital which four months earlier had performed lifesaving surgery on her. Unbelievable. Thanks to the information I provided she was surrounded by police before she could go into the hospital and detonate a suicide vest.
There were many other planned terrorist attacks in crowds, schools, airports and so on that I was able to help prevent. I don’t want to give you the impression that my job was easy. Each night I slept under the same roof as people who were dedicated to killing me. Five times a day they would pray to their god for my race to die. If they had ever found out that I was really an agent for their sworn enemy . . . let’s just say it was a constant fear of mine what they would do to me.
I am not a big person so if I was found out then I could not put up much fight. However, if my handler ever gave me the instructions that the terrorist cell I had infiltrated needed to die, well, let’s just say that another one of my special skills is that I’m accurate with a gun, especially when the element of surprise was on my side. I certainly don’t recall ever arresting anyone from the terrorist cells I found my way in to.
[Sips his tea.]
Could you tell me about some of the Israeli innovations and inventions since the War?
Well, love us or hate us, Jewish people have always been world leaders in breakthroughs for medicine, science, technology and pretty much everything else. Almost everything that was ever invented was invented by a Jew, or at the very least a Jew was helping to fund the idea and promote it to the world. That hasn’t changed.
A life-saving Israeli invention since the War began is “combat fabric,” or Com-Fab. All of our front line solders have it, which is also now the case for many high risk groups around the world. I’m not sure on the science behind it but basically the uniforms allow you to move freely as though you are wearing normal fabric but if you do happen to be bitten by a zombie then the material kind of freezes in place for a few moments, negating the bite. Now, it’s not going to protect you all day long. A zombie bite is very powerful, much more powerful than any normal human bite. Zombies also have incredibly strong hands. Com-Fab is not going to allow you to stand in the middle of a horde having a picnic while the zombies can’t hurt you. What it will do is protect you from one bite. It buys you a few precious seconds. That can be the world of difference.
We also invented the Aegis guns, using Edifice technology.
Could you e
laborate on that?
I’m not really a tech or a scientist . . .
That’s okay.
Alright, basically an Aegis gun is linked to a trooper’s helmet camera with the Edifice technology running, which is usually able to distinguish the shape of a human head and help makes some minor corrections to the trooper’s aim. This includes slightly effecting the bullet’s trajectory as it leaves the barrel. Now, an Aegis gun isn’t going to allow you to shoot around corners or to shoot something that is behind you. But what it was designed to do and what it will do is allow you to shoot a moving target if you’re pretty much already aiming at it. That’s all it’s really meant to do, to help a soldier get the head shot that is needed to kill a ghoul. As you can imagine it can be difficult to consistently shoot the brain again and again when you’re up against an army of zombies. You’re tired, you’re scared, and even just a little movement or sway from the zombies can be the difference between you missing or scoring a kill.
Does the IDF’s combat helmets do anything else?
Yes! [Smiles.]
I was involved in those mobile phone bombs, I don’t know if you ever heard about those? Okay, so before the War the IDF scientists built these mobile phone batteries that were slimmer than a normal battery but that extra space was used to house explosive material. Thousands of these phones with the explosives built in were distributed through Israel and Palestine. Whenever the voice of a terrorist leader was intercepted by our intelligence teams we would then be able to detonate the phone. Now, the phones couldn’t just be detonated from anywhere, you would need a person with the activation equipment no more than two miles away. Also, we had to be sure that the voice pattern really was a terrorist. I did have to confirm in several cases that the man speaking in the phone was a high-level bad guy.
Zombie War: Interviews From The Frontline Page 12