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

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point red blood began to turn brown, and how it looked on gray London cement as opposed to

white, Cape Cod sand.

We had no control over what the spy birds chose to observe. Their targets were determined by

the U.S. military. We saw a lot of battles—Chongqing, Yonkers; we watched a company of Indian

troops try to rescue civilians trapped in Ambedkar Stadium in Delhi, then become trapped

themselves and retreat to Gandhi Park. I watched their commander form his men into a square,

the kind the Limeys used in colonial days. It worked, at least for a little while. That was the only

frustrating part about satellite surveillance; you could only watch, not listen. We didn’t know that

the Indians were running out of ammunition, only that the Zed Heads were starting to close in. We

saw a helo hover overhead and watched as the commander argued with his subordinates. We didn’t

know it was General Raj-Singh, we didn’t even know who he was. Don’t listen to what the critics

say about that man, about how he buggered off when things got too hot. We saw it all. He did try to

put up a fight, and one of his blokes did smash him in the face with a rifle butt. He was out cold

when they hauled him into that waiting chopper. It was a horrible feeling, seeing it all so close and

yet unable to do anything.

We had our own observation gear, both the civilian research birds and the equipment right there

on the station. The images they gave us weren’t half as powerful as the military versions, but they

were still frighteningly clear. They gave us our first look at the mega swarms over central Asia and

the American Great Plains. Those were truly massive, miles across, like the American buffalo must

have once been.

We watched the evacuation of Japan and couldn’t help but marvel at the scale. Hundreds of ships,

thousands of small boats. We lost count of how many helicopters buzzed back and forth from the

rooftops to the armada, or how many jetliners made their final run north to Kamchatka.

We were the first ones to discover zombie holes, the pits that the undead dig when they’re going

after burrowing animals. At first we thought they were just isolated incidents until we noticed that

they were spreading all over the world; sometimes more than one would appear in close proximity

to the next. There was a field in southern England—I guess there must have been a high

concentration of rabbits—that was just riddled with holes, all different depths and sizes. Many of

them had large, dark stains around them. Although we couldn’t zoom in close enough, we were

pretty sure it was blood. For me that was the most terrifying example of our enemy’s drive. They

displayed no conscious thought, just sheer biological instinct. I once watched a Zed Head go after

something, probably a golden mole, in the Namib Desert. The mole had burrowed deep in the slope

of a dune. As the ghoul tried to go after it, the sand kept pouring down and filling the hole. The

ghoul didn’t stop, didn’t react in any way, it just kept going. I watched it for five days, the fuzzy

image of this G digging, and digging, and digging, then suddenly one morning just stopping, getting

up, and shuffling away as if nothing had happened. It must have lost the scent. Good on the mole.

For all our enhanced optics, nothing had quite the same impact as the naked eye. To just look

through the view port down on our fragile little biosphere. To see the massive ecological

devastation makes one understand how the modern environmental movement began with the

American space program. There were so many fires, and I don’t just mean the buildings, or the

forests, or even the oil rigs blazing out of control—bleeding Saudis actually went ahead and did it 8

—I mean the campfires as well, what had to be at least a billion of them, tiny orange specks

covering the Earth where electric lights had once been. Every day, every night, it seemed like the

whole planet was burning. We couldn’t even begin to calculate the ash count but we guesstimated it

was equivalent to a low-grade nuclear exchange between the United States and former Soviet

Union, and that’s not including the actual nuclear exchange between Iran and Pakistan. We

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