We ran out of food a number of times. There were dozens of supermarkets in the city but it was risky getting to them because there were plenty of stray zombies on the streets. I studied them, working out ways that teams could provide a distraction while other groups dashed into stores to get the food and supplies we needed. That worked out pretty well. After a few early mishaps my groups were well prepared for scavenging.
They all came to respect me as their leader. I got them through the hard times. And I could make the tough decisions. No one else would have the balls to eject a troublesome family from the group. Why, it was basically a death sentence kicking somebody out. But I certainly had no trouble doing that. I loved the power over life and death. The real funny thing was that people kept on congratulating me for making tough decisions. It wasn’t tough at all. I felt about as much for those people as you felt the last time you stepped on a bug.
So, what went wrong?
One night I was up in the penthouse suite, my usual room. I was not long back from a raid, you see, and we’d found some hard drugs and cases of champagne. I made sure the salvage crew got their share and everyone else had access to alcohol. In hindsight I shouldn’t have done that.
Me and Jenny were fucking and I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut, I told her everything, told her I killed her father. I must have thought I was God or something. I just couldn’t stop bragging and thinking there would be no consequences.
Anyway, next thing my booze and drug addled mind could contemplate was that Jenny wasn’t moving any more. She’s taken an overdose. I began laughing but then she came back as a zombie.
I saluted her and said, “It’s been fun, babe, but now it’s time for me to leave.”
That’s when I found I couldn’t get out the door. I suspect she took the overdose deliberately, fully intending to kill herself and come back as a zombie out of spite. I looked for a weapon to defend myself. She must have hidden those, too. I was trapped in a room with a zombie and no way to defend myself. Anyone who might have been able to help me was either drunk or stoned. And I wasn’t exactly in prime shape, either.
[I sit back in my chair and take a good look at my host. He looks like a zombie himself with large chunks of flesh missing from his body and skeletal face. His blue eyes remain intense.]
She kept on biting me. By the time my boys broke down the door I was a mess. They pulled her off me and asked me what I wanted to do, did I want to end my life now, or later? I said neither one. Everyone was shocked but I stood there with a hunting knife and cut out all the parts I’d been bitten in. A lot of my face had to go. A good plastic surgeon could probably fix me but where the hell can I find one of them these days?
Not long after that the soldiers and militia swept through, liberating Great Britain. There wasn’t really a reason for my band of survivors to stay together. Most of them wanted to get out and check to see if they still had families. They couldn’t stop thanking me enough. There’s a statue of me in the town centre of Leeds. [Pauses.] They made it from some old photos of me. Not the way I look now.
What happened to the girl, Jenny? You didn’t say if your people killed her.
I handcuffed Jenny to the bed. I spent about a week working her over with a set of pliers before I finally stabbed her in the head. I know people say zombies are dumb but believe me, she knew what was happening. She knew who the winner was in the end.
The point is - I win. I’m still alive. No matter what life throws at me I always emerge on top. So fuck everyone else.
BEIJING, CHINA
Interviewer: Mick Franklin
INTERVIEW 24:
I sit opposite Colonel Lee in a room in an underground bunker. The room is decorated with military medals and photos of high-ranking officers.
To understand China in the 21st Century you must first understand a little about the leader Mao Zedong. He famously outlawed laughing. Many still blame him for the Great Chinese Famine, which is the worst famine in history, killing some 45 million people. Mao’s demands were outrageous, the “plough deep and plant close” policy he called on all farmers to use which was simply unworkable as well as lots of his other policies, with the result that the land became barren. No one had the authority to tell him his ideas didn’t work.
He ordered farmers and villagers to go and catch as many sparrows as they could as part of his “Four Pests Campaign.” Villagers would go around banging pots and pans, startling sparrows so they had no place to rest and would eventually drop dead from the sky in exhaustion. People would also destroy sparrow nests or even shoot them out of the air. These birds were driven almost to extinction. Why? Because Chairman Mao said they were “animals of Capitalism.” There are still all these photos of Chinese farmers holding strings of dead sparrows.
The Polish Embassy in Beijing refused to allow the soldiers and peasants in to kill the sparrows who had taken refuge in there. For three days millions of peasants beat drums outside the Polish Embassy. After that the Polish had to use shovels to clear away all the dead sparrows.
Of course, the problem then was that all the insects that the sparrows were keeping in check increased so greatly in numbers they became these dark swarms that almost blacked out the sky and devoured most of what little food we could grow. Even Chairman Mao could see then that we had to stop killing sparrows.
Tens of millions of people starved to death in the resulting famine and crop destruction.
To make matters worse the state lied continuously. There were propaganda photos of children standing on fields of wheat which were said to be so strong that the wheat could support the weight of these children. In reality the children were standing on a table which was covered in wheat. Mao ordered doctors to never write “starvation” as the cause of death, just like the doctors in the Ukraine famine.
At this time Mao was giving a lot of our food supply away to other countries, all so that he could say that Communism was such a success we even had food to spare.
[Shakes his head.]
Forty five million dead. That doesn’t even include the tens of millions who died in the political purging, or “The Great Leap Forward.” It doesn’t include the tens of millions who died in death camps.
What was China like immediately before the War?
We were a mix of Communism and Capitalism. It was like the old guard was still there, hoisting the flag for Communism, not willing to make way for the new kids to the game who wanted to follow the Western example of Capitalism. China itself was busy imploding. In the first decade of the 21st century we were building four cities a year the size of London. Regular visitors to China would marvel that an area that had been empty land and a river just one year before was now a thriving city full of people. But then just as rapidly those cities went into decline in the second decade of the 21st century.
What we lacked was energy. We still had plenty of slave labour –Chairman Mao’s legacy, if you like. Many of our people lived on the equivalent of two US dollars a day. They would work twelve hour days in appalling conditions. If a worker took one day off they would have to work two or three days before they would start to be paid again.
That was the Communism side. A lot of people credit Chairman Mao with making us into a super power, saying that he had to be so hard on us in order to drag us up in the world that one day we would control the entire planet and it was all thanks to him. It’s easy to say that if you’re not one of the people starved to death or under constant fear that a police officer was going to shoot you through the head because your neighbour accused you of being a Capitalist.
The Capitalist side was a lot different. There were many Chinese who bought expensive watches that were genuine while Western visitors to China bought imitation watches that looked expensive. The Chinese Capitalist wanted the same things as the Westerners, but they wanted the genuine articles. These people paid for piano lessons for their children because they believed it would raise their intelligence. In fact, they would lavish money on educati
on. They understood that was the real way forward, that education would give anyone an edge in a competitive world.
Tell me about your nuclear missiles.
It was Mao Zedong who first created a Chinese nuclear weapons program. This was in response to the First Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1954. Mao never expected to be able to match the American stockpile of nuclear weapons; his only goal was to gain some international credibility. The Soviets sent over advisers to help us construct nuclear missile facilities. However, in 1958 Nikita Khruschkev, Stalin’s successor, told Mao of his plans for peaceful co-existence with the West. Mao vehemently disagreed with this policy. The following year China and Russia formerly ended their military alliance.
The Chinese nuclear stockpiling continued, as did our testing of these weapons. By the time the War arrived we had more than 260 nuclear warheads. The actual number was a state secret, although some diplomats put the number at well over 2,000.
How were the nuclear missiles launched?
[Sits staring for a minute.] Our launch protocol was based on what the Americans had. Our leadership meets with the top military advisors. This would normally take place in the Situation Room but can also be conducted over a secure line. If the leadership still wants to go ahead with the launch then a challenge code is read out to them. They are then given the “biscuit,” a laminated card that is always near our leader. This is the counterpart to the challenge code. The military then broadcasts an encoded message to the launch crews. That message is only about as long as the average Tweet.
The encoded message includes the actual launch codes. The missile crews will then unlock safes that have launch codes in them and compare them with those given in the encoded message. If the missiles are being launched from a submarine, then you need the captain, the executive officer and two other people to verify the launch codes.
Once the missiles are actually launched they cannot be stopped . . . they cannot be stopped.
How many people died?
My God, official estimates said that half a billion Chinese people died in the first explosions. That doesn’t include those who died of radiation sickness in the prevailing winds. Or those who weren’t at ground zero but were still burned and died later. My mother was not immediately killed by the missile that struck Peking, no, she was just a simple villager. The heat from the explosion caused the skin on her body to shrivel and contract to her fingertips, just hanging there. Her neighbours were walking around with their eyes melting down their faces. Later, they came back as ghouls.
After the explosions I had donned a radiation suit and headed out near the blast zone, searching for my mother. There were so many frightened people, trying to help each other, trying to help their families. Even in the face of Armageddon there was still humanity. I rushed passed these people, some of them sensing I was a government official and imploring me for help. I could see people with third degree burns, the worst, who were doing their best to help other survivors, not knowing that their injuries were so bad they would be dead shortly. When I found my mother all I could do was put her out of her misery.
There were so many people who needed help and almost nothing I could do. I knew from all the dead bodies in the streets that soon the area would be swarming with ghouls. The best that any survivor could do was run and find shelter, which is exactly what I did. I knew where the nearest bunker was and I made my way there. If you are ever exposed to radiation your first priority is getting to safety, then you need to discard and preferably burn your clothing, which solves about ninety percent of the radiation problem. Then you need to eat something like Miso soup (which is rich in iodine) to help flush out the radiation that is left.
The missiles were also directed at our borders to try and stop the armies of ghouls that were pouring in. That was the plan anyway, to drastically reduce the number of domestic zombies and also to regain control over our borders. What actually happened was that in a fraction of a second our population was halved. In the coming months when the sky rained petrol and the wind carried radiation millions more died. Our country was reduced to a mere fraction of what we once were, now hiding underground or in areas untouched by the nuclear weapons. All the while zombies marched across the countryside almost unhindered. Sure, the initial blasts had destroyed many of them, incinerating them right where they stood. But while radiation sickness and the resulting lack of food were lethal to humans, the zombies had nothing to fear from these things. That’s why a lot of the zombies you see in China are skin and bone or covered in burns and radiation sores –they’re people who survived the initial nuclear attacks only to die and reanimate later.
Meanwhile China’s leaders were safely enclosed in bunkers, congratulating each other on their excellent military strategy, clinking champagne glasses and eating lobster.
I had argued with the leadership, pleading with them not to bomb our own cities. They had calmly told me that the ghouls were everywhere. We had lost the War. I told them there were still plenty of survivors, they were holed up in buildings and camped quietly in the mountains, they were hiding underground, and they were fighting back and surviving, believing that as a nation we would rise up again. The Americans might come up with a cure for the zombie virus any day. We had to hold on to hope.
The old guard refused to listen. These old men, remnants of Mao’s legacy. They believed that if they couldn’t have China then no one could have it. Hell, they were so stubborn-minded they probably would have bombed China anyway even without the zombie threat, just out of fear of losing control to the Capitalists who had been gradually taking over. And do you know what they called it, this bombing of our own people? They broadcast the message out to the empty streets, villages scoured of life and farms that held what frightened few survivors remained. The broadcasts echoed in underground chambers where survivors huddled together in the dark, eating what little food they were able to scavenge. They called it, “The Next Great Leap Forward.”
Fight Back!
THE BLOOD LANDS
Interviewer: TJ Weeks
INTERVIEW 25:
The important events that follow come directly from TJ Weeks contribution to American War History, a series of journals documenting discoveries and military triumphs throughout the Zombie War. Although the following story is now common knowledge throughout America the complete and unabridged version has been included here.
The colorful leaves were softly falling against the black hard paved asphalt road as the wind whirled in circular patterns. There were the occasional slow-paced thuds placed by weak stepping zombies searching their next intestine filled feast. Their eyes were lifeless with a ghostly white film covering the once window to their soul. The world around had started to drag in unfortunate limp bodies that seemed to shell a killing machine. The ones we once knew could not be trusted and only spoke in groans these days.
The CDC had early reports of finding the source and a cure, they were now calling our world ‘The Bloodlands’ because they were doing nothing but reporting deaths and undead walking the streets, but that all went black many days ago. The reports are that the world we know now is run by three police officers that host a small group of only fifteen survivors. There may be more life out there, but we may never know. All we know for sure was the first sign of infection started here in the small town of Grand Saline, Texas. Chief Collins was the ranking officer. He stood about six foot two inches in height and weighed in at about two-hundred and forty pounds. He led his other two officers, Dornell Connly and Patrick Brown on running the small town.
The day before the infection hit, the trio had released a video on YouTube of the two officer’s tasing the Chief. The video was meant to be educational to demonstrate how it is used, but looked more like being lost in a Three Stooges episode.
Chief Collins was a State Trooper before he became chief. Now he was better known as the town asshole that liked to abuse his power of authority. He was only interested in making a name for himself than serving and protec
ting by all means. He often used Facebook to blast people with simple tickets, which caused a few suicides of kids after being bullied in school for seeing their parents posted up like an escaped psycho murderer or something. It also caused some of the better people to move because they were no longer proud of the town and what he had done to it.
As for me, well, I went out on my own to find answers. I had very little medical experience and was far from being a scientist, but the answers are out there, I can feel it. So, instead of insulting you by telling their story, I’m going to break out with my own.
October thirtieth of two thousand sixteen, I broke free with only what I could carry in my left pocket and a small black backpack stuffed with only essentials. My right pocket held one pack of Marlboro red cigarettes and my white lighter. My back pocket held a silver flask wrapped in dark brown leather with a Jack Daniels imprint that had been given to me a few years back by an old friend. It was topped off with Black Berry Merlot wine. Not my typical drink, but it was all that I had left of my beautiful wife that had been taken from me in all this madness and was now part of the undead that I had safely locked into our home until I could save her.
Alone and in the midst of the apocalypse is a place I never thought I would be. It came without warning. The town that was left after the piece of crap chief became the boss, suddenly were running crazy and scared trying to get out of town. The rumor was that the infection that started here was slowly spreading and that there was the chance of them getting somewhere safe before it hit and finding a place that they were able to live in safety. With what I had already seen, that was going to be very unlikely. But, there had to be something, there had to be a way to get rid of the infection.
Zombie War: Interviews From The Frontline Page 19