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

That’s all right.
Well, as I understand it, there’s a type of person who just can’t deal with a fight-or-die situation.
They’re always drawn to what they’re afraid of. Instead of resisting it, they want to please it, join
it, try to be like it. I guess that happens in kidnap situations, you know, like a Patty Hearst/
Stockholm Syndrome–type, or, like in regular war, when people who are invaded sign up for the
enemy’s army. Collaborators, sometimes even more die-hard than the people they’re trying to
mimic, like those French fascists who were some of Hitler’s last troops. Maybe that’s why we call
them quislings, like it’s a French word or something. 2
But you couldn’t do it in this war. You couldn’t just throw up your hands and say, “Hey, don’t kill
me, I’m on your side.” There was no gray area in this fight, no in between. I guess some people just
couldn’t accept that. It put them right over the edge. They started moving like zombies, sounding
like them, even attacking and trying to eat other people. That’s how we found our first one. He
was a male adult, midthirties. Dirty, dazed, shuffling down the sidewalk. We thought he was just in
Z-shock, until he bit one of our guys in the arm. That was a horrible few seconds. I dropped the Q
with a head shot then turned to check on my buddy. He was crumpled on the curb, swearing,
crying, staring at the gash in his forearm. This was a death sentence and he knew it. He was ready
to do himself until we discovered that the guy I shot had bright red blood pouring from his head.
When we checked his flesh we found he was still warm! You should have seen our buddy lose it. It’s
not every day you get a reprieve from the big governor in the sky. Ironically, he almost died
anyway. The bastard had so much bacteria in his mouth that it caused a near fatal staph infection.
We thought maybe we stumbled onto some new discovery but it turned out it’d been happening
for a while. The CDC was just about to go public. They even sent an expert up from Oakland to
brief us on what to do if we encountered more of them. It blew our minds. Did you know that
quislings were the reason some people used to think they were immune? They were also the
reason all those bullshit wonder drugs got so much hype. Think about it. Someone’s on Phalanx,
gets bit but survives. What else is he going to think? He probably wouldn’t know there was even
such a thing as quislings. They’re just as hostile as regular zombies and in some cases even more
dangerous.
How so?
Well, for one thing, they didn’t freeze. I mean, yeah, they would if they were exposed over time,
but in moderate cold, if they’d gone under while wearing warm clothes, they’d be fine. They also
got stronger from the people they ate. Not like zombies. They could maintain over time.
But you could kill them more easily.
Yes and no. You didn’t have to hit them in head; you could take out the lungs, the heart, hit them
anywhere, and eventually they’d bleed to death. But if you didn’t stop them with one shot, they’d
just keep coming until they died.
They don’t feel pain?
Hell no. It’s that whole mind-over-matter thing, being so focused you’re able to suppress relays to
the brain and all that. You should really talk to an expert.