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

about eight inches long, that you could use in a pinch if your Lobo wasn’t handy. We used to joke
“careful, you’ll poke somebody’s eye out,” which, of course, we did plenty. The SIR made a pretty
good close combat weapon, even without the spike, and when you add all the other things that
made it so awesome, you can see why we always referred to it, respectfully, as “Sir.”
Our staple ammo was the NATO 5.56 “Cherry PIE.” PIE stands for pyrotechnically initiated
explosive. Outstanding design. It would shatter on entry into Zack’s skull and fragments would fry
its brain. No risk of spreading infected gray matter, and no need for wasteful bonfires. On BS 4
duty, you didn’t even have to decap before you buried them. Just dig the trench and roll the whole
body in.
Yeah, it was a new army, as much the people as anything else. Recruitment had changed, and
being a grunt meant something very different now. You still had the old requirements—physical
stamina, mental competence, the motivation and discipline to master difficult challenges in extreme
conditions—but all that was mouse farts if you couldn’t hack long-term Z-shock. I saw a lot of good
friends just lose it under the strain. Some of them collapsed, some turned their weapons on
themselves, some on their buddies. It didn’t have anything to do with being brave or anything like
that. I once read this British SAS survival guide that talked all about the “warrior” personality,
how your family’s supposed to be emotionally and financially stable, and how you’re not even
supposed to be attracted to girls when you’re real young. [Grunts.] Survival guides…[Jerks his
hand in a masturbatory movement.]
But the new faces, they could have been from anywhere: your neighbor, your aunt, that geeky
substitute teacher, or that fat, lazy slob at the DMV. From former insurance salesmen to a guy who
I’m damn sure was Michael Stipe, although I never got him to admit it. I guess it all made sense;
anyone who couldn’t roll wouldn’t have made it this far in the first place. Everyone was already a
veteran in some sense. My battle buddy, Sister Montoya, fifty-two years old, she’d been a nun, still
was I guess. Five three and a buck even, she’d protected her whole Sunday school class for nine
days with nothing but a six-foot iron candlestick. I don’t know how she managed to hump that ruck,
but she did, without complaining, from our assembly area in Needles, all the way to our contact
site just outside of Hope, New Mexico.
Hope. I’m not kidding, the town was actually named Hope.
They say the brass chose it because of the terrain, clear and open with the desert in front and
the mountains in back. Perfect, they said, for an opening engagement, and that the name had
nothing to do with it. Right.
The brass really wanted this test-op to go smoothly. It’d be the first major ground engagement
we’d fought since Yonkers. It was that moment, you know, like, when a lot of different things all
come together.
Watershed?
Yeah, I think. All the new people, the new stuff, the new training, the new plan—everything was
supposed to sort of mix together for this one first big kickoff.
We’d encountered a couple dozen Gs en route. Sniffer dogs would find them, and handlers with
silenced weapons would drop them. We didn’t want to attract too many till we were set. We wanted
this to be on our terms.