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

TOMONAGA: And suddenly I knew. I knew why the gods had taken my sight, why they sent me to
Hokkaido to learn how to care for the land, and why they had sent the bear to warn me.
KONDO: He began to laugh as he let me up and helped to brush the dirt from my clothing.
TOMONAGA: I told him that Japan had not been abandoned, not by those whom the gods had chosen
to be its gardeners.
KONDO: At first I didn’t understand…
TOMONAGA: So I explained that, like any garden, Japan could not be allowed to wither and die. We
would care for her, we would preserve her, we would annihilate the walking blight that infested
and defiled her and we would restore her beauty and purity for the day when her children would
return to her.
KONDO: I thought he was insane, and told him so right to his face. The two of us against millions of
siafu?
TOMONAGA: I handed his sword back to him; its weight and balance felt familiar to the touch. I told
him that we might be facing fifty million monsters, but those monsters would be facing the gods.
CIENFUEGOS, CUBA
[Seryosha Garcia Alvarez suggests I meet him at his office. “The view is
breathtaking,” he promises. “You will not be disappointed.” On the sixty-ninth
floor of the Malpica Savings and Loans building, the second-tallest building in
Cuba after Havana’s José Martí Towers, Señor Alvarez’s corner office overlooks
both the glittering metropolis and bustling harbor below. It is the “magic hour”
for energy-independent buildings like the Malpica, that time of the day when it’s
photovoltaic windows capture the setting sun with their almost imperceptible
magenta hue. Señor Alvarez was right. I am not disappointed.]
Cuba won the Zombie War; maybe that’s not the most humble of statements, given what
happened to so many other countries, but just look at where we were twenty years ago as opposed
to where we are now.
Before the war, we lived in a state of quasi-isolation, worse than during the height of the cold
war. At least in my father’s day you could count on what amounted to economic welfare from the
Soviet Union and their ComEcon puppets. Since the fall of the communist bloc, though, our
existence was one of constant deprivation. Rationed food, rationed fuel…the closest comparison I
can make is that of Great Britain during the Blitz, and like that other besieged island, we too lived
under the dark cloud of an ever-present enemy.
The U.S. blockade, while not as constricting as during the cold war, nonetheless sought to
suffocate our economic lifeblood by punishing any nation that attempted free and open trade. As