The Wrath of the Just (Apocalypse Z)

by Manel Loureiro

  The captain made his way through the officers, courteous and smiling, and walked over to us. He kissed Lucia’s hand politely.

  “Miss, it is a pleasure to have you share this simple repast with us,” he said. “I think I speak for all my officers when I say that your presence on board is wonderfully refreshing. A lady as beautiful as you is a joy to behold.”

  “Unlike that spectacle of your men out there,” I said curtly.

  Lucia and Prit shot me a warning look.

  “It’s obviously not pleasant, sir,” said Captain Birley, unfazed. “Keep in mind we’re immersed in a struggle between the powers of God and Satan, between Light and Darkness. We must set aside social conventions, such as compassion.”

  “But they’re your men!” I protested.

  “The landing party?” Birley shrugged. “They’re helots, an inferior class of people, sinners all of them. They fight and give their lives to atone for their sins and earn a place at the Lord’s Table. Right now, those fallen soldiers are seated with our Lord Jesus Christ, at a banquet much bigger and better than this simple meal. I hope you don’t have a problem with that . . . sir.”

  I picked up on the elegant pause the captain had tacked on and backed down. “Um, no, of course not, Captain Birley. We’re eternally grateful for your hospitality and we fully understand your methods.”

  “It would be a shame to discover that you don’t deserve this status,” Birley said. An implied threat hung in the air. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to radio Gulfport and report the success of our operation.”

  Captain Birley walked to the radio room, stopping to chat with a group of officers along the way. The hum of conversation and soft classical music mingled with the groans of the Undead still lingering on the dock. It was truly surreal.

  “What do you make of all this?” Prit asked, taking a sip of his drink.

  “I don’t know, but I don’t like it,” said Lucia. “These people are so formal, so polite, and yet they give me the creeps. Something doesn’t fit.”

  Just then Strangärd casually walked up to us. Keeping his eyes on the crowd of Undead on the dock, he stood so the other officers in the room couldn’t see his face. Anyone would think he was lost in thought, distracted by the scene on the dock.

  “Be careful,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “Birley is watching you closely. The captain is very suspicious and will write a report about you for the reverend as soon as we get back. You’re treading on thin ice, friends.”

  “What’s going on? Who’re the helots? What’s this all about?” I asked, keeping my eyes on Lucia and flashing her a bright smile, as if she and I were having a lighthearted conversation.

  “We can’t talk here. The walls have ears. Just know that there are other people who think this is an aberration. When we get to Gulfport, I’ll explain everything.”

  Strangärd moved on and joined another group. I heard him laugh at a joke. That Swede certainly knew how to cover his tracks. How many more like him were there? In Gulfport, someone better give us an explanation. And it better be good.

  8

  Forty-eight hours later, the Ithaca’s holds were nearly overflowing with a half million tons of high-grade petroleum. I stood on the deck, watching as sailors disconnected the hoses, sealed them with layers of rubber tar, tied them to buoys, and then tossed them into the ocean. If they returned to Luba, they’d just have to fish those hoses off the buoys and reconnect them.

  A slight tremor signaled that the Ithaca’s engines had started. The tanker’s slime-covered anchors were raised, and the behemoth started slowly out to sea. Before we left the harbor, several helots on the other side of the fence brought four flag-draped coffins on deck, fired a salute, and cast them into the ocean. The TSJ virus had taken its toll among the wounded, as I’d predicted.

  The Ithaca picked up speed and headed for the open water. The wind began to blow hard across the deck. As I turned to head back inside, I stopped in my tracks and stared in disbelief. Among the soldiers saluting the sinking coffins was the giant black man who’d led the landing party. He’d been bitten twice, yet he looked to be in excellent health. He certainly wasn’t an Undead.

  9

  Kill them, kill them all! Even in their mothers’ womb!

  —Ilya Ehrenburg, “Kill”

  HANGEUL 9 LONG-RANGE LISTENING STATION

  WONSAN, NORTH KOREA

  Lieutenant Jung Moon-Koh was bored. He’d been at his post for seven hours. And just like every day for over a year now, his screen displayed the same thing: nothing.

  The Hangeul 9 Long-Range Listening Station was one of more than a hundred stations strung across North Korea, built to monitor South Korean radio transmissions. Back in the sixties, someone convinced Dear Leader Kim Il-Sung that listening in on those ruthless capitalists in the south was the best way to uncover and foil an attack.

  The bold promoter of the plan didn’t realize that radio transmissions numbered in the millions at the height of South Korea’s “Asian Tiger” economic boom. There were far more transmissions than in North Korea—where Juche, an extremely xenophobic, paranoid version of Marxism, was practiced, and where owning a radio was against the law. Sorting through all the transmissions was an impossible task for an impoverished country with limited technological capabilities. After a two-year investment of time and money, the idea was quietly shelved. A bullet cut short the brilliant career of the plan’s author—the usual reward for failure in the Workers’ Paradise.

  For over forty years, almost all the stations sat shuttered. A few monitored transmissions from the US fleet as it patrolled the Sea of Japan, but since most naval communications were encoded, that didn’t prove very useful. No one had suggested changes to the system for decades—initiating a task without Dear Leader’s request was unthinkable.

  Then came the Apocalypse.

  At first, the news filtering in from North Korea’s embassies around the world was confusing. They reported that a disease had broken out in Dagestan and was spreading like wildfire throughout the world, but the details were sketchy. Government officials and military leaders in Pyongyang concluded that the news must be a smoke screen to hide the South’s imminent attack on the North. In response, the ever-paranoid North Korean regime activated all its defenses. The People’s Army was put on high alert and the country’s borders were sealed tighter than ever. That paranoia saved the country.

  As the pandemic raged out of control, North Korea dug in the way it had since the 1950s. At first its embassies were the only source of news, but they soon fell silent as the pandemic swept through one country after another. Embassy staff pleaded to be evacuated, but the government turned a deaf ear. By then the country’s leaders knew that the TSJ virus was highly contagious and that its consequences were devastating.

  When TSJ finally reached South Korea, chaos swept that country for three weeks. In just five days, Seoul became a city of the damned, and other cities fared no better.

  The soldiers and sailors stationed on US bases tried to blast their way to the sea, but their massive convoy of tanks disappeared, as if the earth had swallowed it up somewhere between Seoul and the port of Ulsan, where more than a million people were waiting to be evacuated. Not one of the fifty thousand American military personnel stationed in South Korea survived.

  Wave after wave of desperate refugees tried to flee across the border into North Korea. The Politburo met briefly and ruled that citizens from the South had no right to safety in the North. The borders remained closed.

  Even before the Apocalypse, the border separating the two Koreas was one of the most tightly sealed and well defended in the world. The Korean War ended in a cease-fire in 1953, but because no peace accord was signed, the two countries remained officially at war. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)—a strip of land 148 miles long and two and a half miles wide along the 38th parallel—divided the Korea
n Peninsula in two. Thousands of miles of walls, fences, minefields, and bunkers made it impassable.

  Hundreds of thousands of terrified civilians dug in at the border, but they found it locked up tight. What took place at the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom—one of the most photographed sites in the DMZ—was a tragic example of that deadlock. In just twenty-four hours, ninety thousand people fled there. They tried to negotiate their way in, but were met with silence. The crowd rioted, but unarmed and frightened civilians were no match for North Korea’s well-trained, well-armed soldiers. As the hours passed, the crowd’s threats changed to pleading. Once again all they got was silence.

  North Korean soldiers held their positions and waited. Even the loudspeakers that had been broadcasting propaganda nonstop for decades fell silent.

  One night, the first Undead finally showed up. Chaos broke out as the crowd surged against the border in the dark, fleeing the bloody shadows that pulled entire families out of the cars where they’d taken shelter against the cold.

  Then the soldiers started shooting.

  The next morning, thousands of bodies lay piled up in the ruins of the Joint Security Area. A bullet to the head was all that distinguished the Undead from civilian corpses. In the background, out of reach of the machine guns, tens of thousands of Undead swayed, taking the first steps of their new “life.”

  Not one person, living or dead, managed to cross the DMZ. As the weeks went on, North Korea’s powerful defenses held off the tide of Undead. The creatures shambled toward the line, but they fell into minefields, got tangled in the barbed wire, or were gunned down.

  No one crossed the border by air or sea either. Boatloads of refugees set sail from fishing villages in South Korea, but North Korean soldiers shelled them before they could land. In one town, the mayor couldn’t bring himself to murder a boatload of six hundred children, so he allowed them to land. Three hours later, an army battalion was dispatched to correct that error. To be on the safe side, they killed the town’s six thousand inhabitants too. The People’s Army carried out their Dear Leader’s orders without question.

  Other people who set out on sailboats, alone or in small groups, did manage to land north of the DMZ. But because the country had been closed off for over fifty years, they stood out like fleas on a white sheet and were immediately arrested and executed—along with those who captured them. Patriotic Squadrons for Containment, as the groups guarding the border were called, fired thousands of rounds during those tumultuous weeks.

  Finally, the situation stabilized. The Undead who approached the border were few and far between. Over a million Undead roamed South Korea, but they were kept busy chasing the few survivors left there, far from the border.

  So, thanks to Kim Jong-Un’s paranoia and a twist of fate, North Korea was the only country with no Undead inside its borders. A backward Communist regime became not only the only surviving nation but also the most advanced one on Earth.

  The country’s leaders suspected that there were more people out there. Other countries, or at least parts of them, must have survived. They became obsessed with finding out who and where they were.

  Although North Koreans were safe behind their walls, they were prisoners within their own borders, just as they’d been for half a century. Most of the population went about their daily lives, with no knowledge of the Undead or the fall of civilization. But the Politburo needed to know what was going on.

  That’s when someone remembered that the abandoned Hangeul network could pick up radio transmissions from anywhere in the world. The system mothballed so long ago now seemed like the perfect tool. Survivors would have to communicate somehow.

  Young Lieutenant Jung Moon-Koh knew nothing of this. A year and a half before, he was transported in the dead of night from his barracks near the Chinese border to a telecommunications school. After a three-month crash course, he ended up at Station 9. Every day, Jung asked himself if he was being punished for some mistake he’d made.

  His job at Station 9 was anything but fun. Operators wore headphones and stared at their computer screens for ten-hour shifts, trying to detect signals. Mostly they picked up static.

  They located 1156 steady radio signals worldwide. Most stations were operating on automatic mode, broadcasting a prerecorded message over and over. Some were weather stations that sent out automatic daily forecasts. Others—such as the broadcasts from Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife on the Canary Islands or the National Gallery in Copenhagen—had been set up by survivors, but no living person was running them anymore. The operators even located a country music station with a powerful generator somewhere in Tennessee that still played music almost two years after its last employee died.

  What they were really interested in were signals from the few remaining human settlements. Most were small, wretched groups, clinging to isolated islands, on the verge of chaos and famine. The Politburo wasn’t interested in them. It was convinced that a stronger settlement existed out there but that their broadcasts were too weak for the Hangeul network’s enormous ears to detect.

  Jung pulled off his headphones, stretched, ran his hands through his crew cut, and glanced furtively around the room. The captain had been gone for a while, leaving him and the other lieutenant alone in that cavernous room. Jung guessed he was sneaking a drink.

  “Hey! Park! Park!” Jung tugged on the other lieutenant’s sleeve.

  “What do you want? If Captain Kim catches us looking away from the screens, our heads are gonna roll!”

  “Don’t worry. The captain is having his usual afternoon break.” The young man laughed. “He won’t be back for half an hour. Let’s have a smoke.”

  “What about listening?” Park reluctantly looked back at his equipment. Then his eyes zeroed in on the pack of Chinese cigarettes in Jung’s hand.

  “We can listen through the loudspeakers, you numbskull,” Jung replied with a sly grin.

  Jung threw a switch on the Soviet-era relic. The room filled with the same static the two young soldiers had been monitoring for hours.

  “See?” Jung said, lighting two cigarettes. “We can smoke and talk and still do our job. We just have to be organized.”

  “The captain’ll have our heads . . .” Park wavered. It was hard to say no to a cigarette. Tobacco had gotten harder and harder to find, but nobody knew why. The only cigarettes available were the foul-smelling national brands that burned your throat. Chinese cigarettes were much better, but they cost a fortune on the black market. That wasn’t a problem for Jung, whose father was some high-ranking official.

  “Where’d you get those?” Park asked, his eyes shining.

  “My old man gave them to me, but he’s lately gotten tightfisted. He said he doesn’t know when he’ll get more, so I better make them last.” He shrugged and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Like it’s so hard for him to go to China and bring back a few cartons!”

  Park stared at the pack, breathing in the smoke. He wondered what he could get on the black market for that pack of cigarettes. Enough to send for his poor parents? But Jung would never give it to him. His comrade was a good guy, but his father was a big shot in the party. He didn’t understand how hard life was for peasants.

  “When was the last time your father went to China?”

  “He used to go every three or four months. Geez, now that you mention it, it’s been a long time! That’s strange.”

  “Not that strange. Ever wonder why we’re listening to nothing for hours on end?”

  “We’re doing what we’re told,” Jung replied, with a wave of his hand. “We pick up the imperialists’ signals so we can strike the moment—”

  “What signals? We got here months ago and all we’ve picked up are broadcasts on automatic pilot in languages we don’t understand and a stupid country music station. That’s it. Call me crazy, but I don’t think anyone’s alive out there.”

  “
You’re just saying that to scare me.” Jung took a deep drag on his cigarette.

  “I’m serious, Jung. I think we’re alone. I think everyone’s dead and we’re the only ones left.”

  Jung thought, This is the last time I share a cigarette with Park. He’s bad news. What he’s saying is really weird. And scary . . . He needs more lessons in Juche.

  “Know what’s wrong with you, Park—”

  “This is the Ithaca,” the speakers suddenly blared. “Calling Gulfport. Gulfport, come in. This is the Ithaca, the operation was a success. We’re returning home . . . (static) . . . half a million tons of oil. Gulfport, come in . . .”

  The door flew open and Captain Kim rushed in, wide-eyed. He was so shocked by the radio signal he didn’t notice that his subordinates were disobeying orders, standing next to their computers, cigarettes in hand. Kim was in charge because of his rudimentary knowledge of English, the language of those damned imperialists. Through the static, he clearly made out the word “oil.” He knew what to do.

  “Record that signal,” he snapped at his men. “My superiors need to hear that.”

  10

  Two hours later, a government car sped along the deserted streets of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital. In the backseat, Colonel Hong Jae-Chol stared blankly out the window as the car headed for the Ministry of Defense.

  All around him stretched Pyongyang, grandiose, beautiful—and sad. His car crossed one of the bridges over the Taedong River in the lane reserved for Communist Party vehicles. They had passed only about a dozen cars and trucks along the way; there were no private cars in North Korea.