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

SIBERIA, THE HOLY RUSSIAN EMPIRE
[The people who exist in this shantytown do so under the most primitive
conditions. There is no electricity, no running water. The huts are grouped
together behind a wall cut from the surrounding trees. The smallest hovel
belongs to Father Sergei Ryzhkov. It is a miracle to see how the old cleric is still
able to function. His walk reveals the numerous wartime and postwar injuries.
The handshake reveals that all his fingers have been broken. His attempt at a
smile reveals that those teeth not black with decay have been knocked out a
long time ago.]
In order to understand how we became a “religious state,” and how that state began with a man
like me, you have to understand the nature of our war against the undead.
As with so many other conflicts, our greatest ally was General Winter. The biting cold,
lengthened and strengthened by the planet’s darkened skies, gave us the time we needed to
prepare our homeland for liberation. Unlike the United States, we were fighting a war on two
fronts. We had the Ural barrier in the west, and the Asian swarms from the southeast. Siberia had
been stabilized, finally, but was by no means completely secure. We had so many refugees from
India and China, so many frozen ghouls that thawed, and continue to thaw, each spring. We needed
those winter months to reorganize our forces, marshal our population, inventory and distribute our
vast stocks of military hardware.
We didn’t have the war production of other countries. There was no Department of Strategic
Resources in Russia: no industry other than finding enough food to keep our people alive. What we
did have was our legacy of a military industrial state. I know you in the West have always laughed
at us for this “folly.” “Paranoid Ivan”—that’s what you called us—“building tanks and guns while his
people cry out for cars and butter.” Yes, the Soviet Union was backward and inefficient and yes, it
did bankrupt our economy on mountains of military might, but when the motherland needed them,
those mountains were what saved her children.
[He refers to the faded poster on the wall behind him. It shows the ghostly image
of an old Soviet soldier reaching down from heaven to hand a crude submachine
gun to a grateful young Russian. The caption underneath reads “Dyedooshka,
Spaciba” (Thank you, Grandfather).]
I was a chaplain with the Thirty-second Motor Rifle division. We were a Category D unit;
fourth-class equipment, the oldest in our arsenal. We looked like extras in an old Great Patriotic
War movie with our PPSH submachine guns and our bolt-action Mosin-Nagant rifles. We didn’t
have your fancy, new battle dress uniform. We wore the tunics of our grandfathers: rough, moldy,
moth-eaten wool that could barely keep the cold out, and did nothing to protect against bites.
We had a very high casualty rate, most of it in urban combat, and most of that due to faulty
ammunition. Those rounds were older than us; some of them had been sitting in crates, open to the
elements, since before Stalin breathed his last. You never knew when a “Cugov” would happen,