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

to the master at arms and together we approached the captain.
What did he say?
“Absolutely not.” There was no way of knowing how many zombies were onboard the dead liner.
Even worse, he motioned to the video screen and pointed to some of the zombies falling
overboard. “Look,” he said, “not all of them are sinking.” He was right. Some had reanimated
wearing life jackets, while others were beginning to bloat up with decomposition gases. That was
the first time I had ever seen a floating ghoul. I should have realized then that they would become
a common occurrence. Even if 10 percent of the refugee ships were infested, that was still 10
percent of several hundred thousand vessels. There were millions of zombies falling randomly into
the sea, or else pouring in by the hundreds when one of those old hulks capsized in rough weather.
After a storm, they would blanket the surface to the horizon, rising waves of bobbing heads and
flailing arms. Once we raised the search scope and were confronted with this distorted,
greenish-gray haze. At first we thought it was an optical malfunction, as if we’d hit some floating
debris, but then the attack scope confirmed that we’d speared one of them right under the rib
cage. And it was still struggling, probably even after we lowered the scope. If ever something
brought the threat home…
But you were underwater? How could they…
If we surfaced and one was caught on deck, or on the bridge. The first time I cracked the hatch, a
fetid, waterlogged claw darted in and had me by the sleeve. I lost my footing, fell onto the lookout
below me, and landed on the deck with the severed arm still clamped to my uniform. Above me,
silhouetted in the bright disc of the open hatch, I could see the arm’s owner. I reached for my
sidearm, fired straight up without thinking. We were showered in bone and bits of brain. We were
lucky…if any of us had had any kind of open wound…I deserved the reprimand I got, although I
deserved worse. From that point on, we always did a thorough scope sweep after surfacing. I
would say that, at least one in every three instances, a few of them were crawling about on the
hull.
Those were the observation days, when all we did was look and listen to the world around us.
Besides the scopes we could monitor both civilian radio traffic and even some satellite television
broadcasts. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Cities were dying, whole countries. We listened to the last
report from Buenos Aires, the evacuation of the Japanese home islands, too. We heard sketchy
information about mutinies in the Russian military. We heard after reports of the “limited nuclear
exchange” between Iran and Pakistan, and we marveled, morbidly, at how we had been so sure
that either you, or the Russians, would be the ones to turn the key. There were no reports from
China, no illegal or even official government broadcasts. We were still detecting naval
transmissions, but all the codes had been shifted since our departure. While this presented
something of a personal threat—we didn’t know if our fleet had orders to hunt down and sink
us—at least it proved our whole nation hadn’t disappeared into the stomachs of the undead. At this
point in our exile any news was welcome.
Food was becoming an issue, not immediately, but soon enough to begin considering options.
Medicine was a bigger problem; both our Western-style drugs and various traditional herb
remedies were beginning to run low because of the civilians. Many of them had special medical
needs.