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

Wouldn’t the light tend to attract even more of them?
Yes, definitely. Night attacks almost doubled once mariners began leaving their lights on. The
civilians never complained though, and neither did the island’s council. I think that most people
would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.
How long did you stay in Manihi?
Several months. I don’t know if you would call them the best months of our lives, but at the time it
certainly felt that way. We began to let our guard down, to stop thinking of ourselves as fugitives.
There were even some Chinese families, not Diaspora or Taiwanese, but real citizens of the
People’s Republic. They told us that the situation had gotten so bad that the government was
barely keeping the country together. They couldn’t see how, when over half the population was
infected and the army’s reserves were continuing to evaporate, they had the time or assets to
devote any energy to find one lost sub. For a little while, it looked as if we could make this small
island community our home, reside here until the end of the crisis or, perhaps, the end of the
world.
[He looks up at the monument above us, built on the very spot where,
supposedly, the last zombie in Beijing had been destroyed.]
Song and I had shore patrol duty, the night it happened. We’d stopped by a campfire to listen to
the islanders’ radio. There was some broadcast about a mysterious natural disaster in China. No
one knew what it was yet, and there were more than enough rumors to keep us guessing. I was
looking at the radio, my back to the lagoon, when the sea in front of me suddenly began to glow. I
turned just in time to see the Madrid Spirit explode. I don’t know how much natural gas she still
carried, but the fireball skyrocketed high into the night, expanding and incinerating all life on the
two closest motus. My first thought was “accident,” a corroded valve, a careless deckhand.
Commander Song had been looking right at it though, and he’d seen the streak of the missile. A
half second later, the Admiral Zheng’s foghorn sounded.
As we raced back to the boat, my wall of calm, my sense of security, came crashing down around
me. I knew that missile had come from one of our subs. The only reason it had hit the Madrid was
because she sat much higher in water, presenting a larger radar outline. How many had been
aboard? How many were on those motus? I suddenly realized that every second we stayed put the
civilian islanders in danger of another attack. Captain Chen must have been thinking the same
thing. As we reached the deck, the orders to cast off were sounded from the bridge. Power lines
were cut, heads counted, hatches dogged. We set course for open water and dived at battle
stations.
At ninety meters we deployed our towed array sonar and immediately detected hull popping
noises of another sub changing depth. Not the flexible “pop-groooaaan-pop” of steel but the quick
“pop-pop-pop” of brittle titanium. Only two countries in the world used titanium hulls in their attack
boats: the Russian Federation and us. The blade count confirmed it was ours, a new Type 95
hunter-killers. Two were in service by the time we left port. We couldn’t tell which one.