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

Did you have some way of monitoring the crisis?
Not immediately. Our goal was stealth, avoiding both commercial shipping lanes and submarine
patrol sectors…ours, and yours. We speculated, though. How fast was it spreading? Which
countries were the most affected? Was anyone using the nuclear option? If so, that would be the
end for all of us. In a radiated planet, the walking dead might be the only creatures left “alive.” We
weren’t sure what high doses of radiation would do to a zombie’s brain. Would it eventually kill
them, riddling their gray matter with multiple, expanding tumors? That would be the case for a
regular human brain, but since the living dead contradicted every other law of nature, why should
this reaction be any different? Some nights in the wardroom, speaking in low voices over our
off-duty tea, we conjured images of zombies as fast as cheetahs, as agile as apes, zombies with
mutated brains that grew and throbbed and burst from the confines of their skulls. Lieutenant
Commander Song, our reactor officer, had brought aboard his watercolors and had painted the
scene of a city in ruins. He tried to say that it wasn’t any city in particular but we all recognized
the twisted remains of the Pudong skyline. Song had grown up in Shanghai. The broken horizon
glowed a dull magenta against the pitch-black sky of nuclear winter. A rain of ash peppered the
islands of debris that rose from lakes of melted glass. Snaking through the center of this
apocalyptic backdrop was a river, a greenish-brown snake that rose up into a head of a thousand
interconnected bodies: cracked skin, exposed brain, flesh dripping from bony arms that reached
out from openmouthed faces with red, glowing eyes. I don’t know when Commander Song began
his project, only that he secretly unveiled it to a few of us after our third month at sea. He never
intended to show it to Captain Chen. He knew better. But someone must have talked and the Old
Man soon put a stop to it.
Song was ordered to paint over his work with something cheerful, a summer sunset over Lake
Dian. He then followed up with several more “positive” murals on any space of exposed bulkhead.
Captain Chen also ordered a halt to all off-duty speculation. “Detrimental to the morale of the
crew.” I think it pushed him, though, to reestablish some semblance of contact with the outside
world.
Semblance as in active communication, or passive surveillance?
The latter. He knew Song’s painting and our apocalyptic discussions were the result of our
long-term isolation. The only way to quell any further “dangerous thought” was to replace
speculation with hard facts. We’d been in total blackout for almost a hundred days and nights. We
needed to know what was happening, even if it was as dark and hopeless as Song’s painting.
Up until this point, our sonar officer and his team were the only ones with any knowledge of the
world beyond our hull. These men listened to the sea: the currents, the “biologics” such as fish and
whales, and the distant thrashing of nearby propellers. I said before that our course had taken us
to the most remote recesses of the world’s oceans. We had intentionally chosen areas where no
ship would normally be detected. Over the previous months, however, Liu’s team had been
collecting an increasing number of random contacts. Thousands of ships were now crowding the
surface, many of them with signatures that did not match our computer archive.
The captain ordered the boat to periscope depth. The ESM mast went up and was flooded with
hundreds of radar signatures; the radio mast suffered a similar deluge. Finally the scopes, both the
search and main attack periscopes, broke the surface. It’s not like you see in the movies, a man
flipping down the handles and staring through a telescopic eyepiece. These scopes don’t penetrate
the inner hull. Each one is a video camera with its signal relayed to monitors throughout the boat.