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

Two hundred million zombies 1 . Who can even visualize that type of number, let alone combat it?
At least this time around we knew what we were combating, but when you added up all the
experience, all the data we’d compiled on their origin, their physiology, their strengths, their
weaknesses, their motives, and their mentality, it still presented us with a very gloomy prospect
for victory.
The book of war, the one we’ve been writing since one ape slapped another, was completely
useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.
All armies, be they mechanized or mountain guerilla, have to abide by three basic restrictions:
they have to be bred, fed, and led. Bred: you need warm bodies, or else you don’t have an army;
fed: once you’ve got that army, they’ve got to be supplied; and led: no matter how decentralized
that fighting force is, there has to be someone among them with the authority to say “follow me.”
Bred, fed, and led; and none of these restrictions applied to the living dead.
Did you ever read All Quiet on the Western Front? Remarque paints a vivid picture of Germany
becoming “empty,” meaning that toward the end of the war, they were simply running out of
soldiers. You can fudge the numbers, send the old men and little boys, but eventually you’re going
to hit the ceiling…unless every time you killed an enemy, he came back to life on your side. That’s
how Zack operated, swelling his ranks by thinning ours! And it only worked one way. Infect a
human, he becomes a zombie. Kill a zombie, he becomes a corpse. We could only get weaker, while
they might actually get stronger.
All human armies need supplies, this army didn’t. No food, no ammo, no fuel, not even water to
drink or air to breathe! There were no logistics lines to sever, no depots to destroy. You couldn’t
just surround and starve them out, or let them “wither on the vine.” Lock a hundred of them in a
room and three years later they’ll come out just as deadly.
It’s ironic that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain, because, as a group, they have
no collective brain to speak of. There was no leadership, no chain of command, no communication
or cooperation on any level. There was no president to assassinate, no HQ bunker to surgically
strike. Each zombie is its own, self-contained, automated unit, and this last advantage is what truly
encapsulates the entire conflict.
You’ve heard the expression “total war”; it’s pretty common throughout human history. Every
generation or so, some gasbag likes to spout about how his people have declared “total war”
against an enemy, meaning that every man, woman, and child within his nation was committing
every second of their lives to victory. That is bullshit on two basic levels. First of all, no country or
group is ever 100 percent committed to war; it’s just not physically possible. You can have a high
percentage, so many people working so hard for so long, but all of the people, all of the time? What
about the malingerers, or the conscientious objectors? What about the sick, the injured, the very
old, the very young? What about when you’re sleeping, eating, taking a shower, or taking a dump?
Is that a “dump for victory”? That’s the first reason total war is impossible for humans. The second
is that all nations have their limits. There might be individuals within that group who are willing to
sacrifice their lives; it might even be a relatively high number for the population, but that
population as a whole will eventually reach its maximum emotional and physiological breaking
point. The Japanese reached theirs with a couple of American atomic bombs. The Vietnamese might
have reached theirs if we’d dropped a couple more, 2 but, thank all holy Christ, our will broke
before it came to that. That is the nature of human warfare, two sides trying to push the other past
its limit of endurance, and no matter how much we like to talk about total war, that limit is always
there…unless you’re the living dead.