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

[He hesitates.]
Windsor.
Windsor was your castle.
Well, not mine personally.
I mean, you were there.
[Another pause.]
It was, from a defensive standpoint, as close as one could come to perfection. Before the war, it
was the largest inhabited castle in Europe, almost thirteen acres. It had its own well for water, and
enough storage space to house a decade’s worth of rations. The fire of 1992 led to a stateof-the-art
suppression system, and the subsequent terrorist threats upgraded security measures to
rival any in the UK. Not even the general public knew what their tax dollars were paying for:
bulletproof glass, reinforced walls, retractable bars, and steel shutters hidden so cleverly in
windowsills and door frames.
But of all our achievements at Windsor, nothing can rival the siphoning of crude oil and natural
gas from the deposit several kilometers beneath the castle’s foundation. It had been discovered in
the 1990s but never exploited for a variety of political and environmental reasons. You can believe
we exploited it, though. Our contingent of royal engineers rigged a scaffolding up and over our
wall, and extended it to the drilling site. It was quite an achievement, and you can see how it
became the precursor to our fortified motorways. On a personal level, I was just grateful for the
warm rooms, hot food, and, in a pinch…the Molotovs and flaming ditch. It’s not the most efficient
way to stop a Zed Head, I know, but as long as you’ve got them stuck and can keep them in the
fire…and besides, what else could we do when the bullets ran out and we were left with nothing
else but an odd lot of medieval hand weapons?
There were quite a bit of those about, in museums, personal collections…and not a decorative
dud among them. These were real, tough and tested. They became part of British life again,
ordinary citizens traipsing about with a mace or halberd or double-bladed battle-axe. I myself
became rather adept with this claymore, although you wouldn’t think of it to look at me.
[He gestures, slightly embarrassed, to the weapon almost as long as himself.]
It’s not really ideal, takes a lot of skill, but eventually you learn what you can do, what you never