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

Please continue.
Okay, well, that’s why we could never talk them down. There was nothing left to talk to. These
people were zombies, maybe not physically, but mentally you could not tell the difference. Even
physically it might be hard, if they were dirty enough, bloody enough, diseased enough. Zombies
don’t really smell that bad, not individually and not if they’re fresh. How do you tell one of these
from a mimic with a whopping dose of gangrene? You couldn’t. It’s not like the military would let us
have sniffer dogs or anything. You had to use the eye test.
Ghouls don’t blink, I don’t know why. Maybe because they use their senses equally, their brains
don’t value sight as much. Maybe because they don’t have as much bodily fluid they can’t keep
using it to coat the eyes. Who knows, but they don’t blink and quislings do. That’s how you spotted
them; back up a few paces, and wait a few seconds. Darkness was easier, you just shone a beam in
their faces. If they didn’t blink, you took them down.
And if they did?
Well, our orders were to capture quislings if possible, and use deadly force only in self-defense. It
sounded crazy, still does, but we rounded up a few, hog-tied them, turned them over to police or
National Guard. I’m not sure what they did with them. I’ve heard stories about Walla Walla, you
know, the prison where hundreds of them were fed and clothed and even medically cared for. [His
eyes flick to the ceiling.]
You don’t agree.
Hey, I’m not going there. You want to open that can of worms, read the papers. Every year some
lawyer or priest or politician tries to stoke that fire for whatever side best suits them. Personally,
I don’t care. I don’t have any feelings toward them one way or the other. I think the saddest thing
about them is that they gave up so much and in the end lost anyway.
Why is that?
’Cause even though we can’t tell the difference between them, the real zombies can. Remember
early in the war, when everybody was trying to work on a way to turn the living dead against one
another? There was all this “documented proof ” about infighting—eyewitness accounts and even
footage of one zombie attacking another. Stupid. It was zombies attacking quislings, but you never
would have known that to look at it. Quislings don’t scream. They just lie there, not even trying to
fight, writhing in that slow, robotic way, eaten alive by the very creatures they’re trying to be.
MALIBU, CALIFORNIA
[I don’t need a photograph to recognize Roy Elliot. We meet for coffee on the