World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

I promise.
Well…we were in his temporary office, the “presidential suite” of a hotel. He’d just been sworn in
on Air Force Two. His old boss was sedated in the suite next to us. From the window you could see
the chaos on the streets, the ships at sea lining up to dock, the planes coming in every thirty
seconds and ground crew pushing them off the runway once they landed to make room for new
ones. I was pointing to them, shouting and gesturing with the passion I’m most famous for. “We
need a stable government, fast!” I kept saying. “Elections are great in principle but this is no time
for high ideals.”
The president was cool, a lot cooler than me. Maybe it was all that military training…he said to
me, “This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren’t just
fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don’t have the luxury
of old-world pillars. We don’t have a common heritage, we don’t have a millennia of history. All we
have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have…[struggling to
remember]…all we have is what we want to be.” You see what he was saying. Our country only
exists because people believed in it, and if it wasn’t strong enough to protect us from this crisis,
then what future could it ever hope to have? He knew that America wanted a Caesar, but to be one
would mean the end of America. They say great times make great men. I don’t buy it. I saw a lot of
weakness, a lot of filth. People who should have risen to the challenge and either couldn’t or
wouldn’t. Greed, fear, stupidity, and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it today. My boss was a
great man. We were damn lucky to have him.
The business of elections really set the tone for his entire administration. So many of his
proposals looked crazy at first glance, but once you peeled back the first layer, you realized that
underneath there existed a core of irrefutable logic. Take the new punishment laws, those really
set me off. Putting people in stocks? Whipping them in town squares!?! What was this, Old Salem,
the Taliban’s Afghanistan? It sounded barbaric, un-American, until you really thought about the
options. What were you going to do with thieves and looters, put them in prison? Who would that
help? Who could afford to divert able-bodied citizens to feed, clothe, and guard other able-bodied
citizens? More importantly, why remove the punished from society when they could serve as such a
valuable deterrent? Yes, there was the fear of pain—the lash, the cane—but all of that paled when
compared to public humiliation. People were terrified of having their crimes exposed. At a time
when everyone was pulling together, helping each other out, working to protect and take care of
one another, the worst thing you could do to someone was to march them up into the public square
with a giant poster reading “I Stole My Neighbor’s Firewood.” Shame’s a powerful weapon, but it
depended on everyone else doing the right thing. No one is above the law, and seeing a senator
given fifteen lashes for his involvement in war profiteering did more to curb crime than a cop on
every street corner. Yes, there were the work gangs, but those were the recidivists, those who’d
been given chances time and time again. I remember the attorney general suggesting that we
dump as many of them into the infested zones as possible, rid ourselves of the drain and potential
hazard of their continued presence. Both the president and I opposed this proposition; my
objections were ethical, his were practical. We were still talking about American soil, infested yes,
but, hopefully one day to be liberated. “The last thing we needed,” he said “was to come up against
one of these ex-cons as The New Grand Warlord of Duluth.” I thought he was joking, but later, as I
saw the exact thing happen in other countries, as some exiled criminals rose to command their own
isolated, and in some cases, powerful fiefdoms, I realized we’d dodged one hell of a speeding
bullet. The work gangs were always an issue for us, politically, socially, even economically, but
what other choice did we have for those who just refused to play nice with others?