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

My war never ended. If anything, you could say it’s still escalating. Every month we expand our
operations and improve our material and human assets. They say there are still somewhere
between twenty and thirty million of them, still washing up on beaches, or getting snagged in
fishermen’s nets. You can’t work an offshore oil rig or repair a transatlantic cable without running
into a swarm. That’s what this dive is about: trying to find them, track them, and predict their
movements so maybe we can have some advance warning.
[We hit the whitecaps with a jarring thud. Choi grins, checks his instruments, and
shifts the channels on his radio from me to the mother ship. The water before my
observation dome froths white for a second, then gives way to light blue as we
submerge.]
You’re not going to ask me about scuba gear or titanium shark suits, are you, because that crap’s
got nothing to do with my war? Spear guns and bang sticks and zombie river nets…I can’t help you
with any of that. If you want civilians, talk to civilians.
But the military did use those methods.
Only for brown water ops, and almost exclusively by army pukes. Personally, I’ve never worn a
mesh suit or a scuba rig…well…at least not in combat. My war was strictly ADS. Atmospheric
Diving Suit. Kind of like a space suit and a suit of armor all rolled into one. The technology actually
goes back a couple hundred years, when some guy 1 invented a barrel with a faceplate and arm
holes. After that you had stuff like the Tritonia and the Neufeldt-Kuhnke. They looked like
something out of an old 1950s sci-fi movie, “Robby the Robot” and shit. It all kinda fell by the
wayside when…do you really care about all this?
Yes, please…
Well, that sort of technology fell by the wayside when scuba was invented. It only made a
comeback when divers had to go deep, real deep, to work on offshore oil rigs. You see…the deeper
you go, the greater the pressure; the greater the pressure, the more dangerous it is for scuba or
similar mixed-gas rigs. You’ve got to spend days, sometimes weeks, in a decompression chamber,
and if, for some reason, you have to shoot up to the surface…you get the bends, gas bubbles in the
blood, in the brain…and we’re not even talking about long-term health hazards like bone necrosis,
soaking your body with shit nature never intended to be there.
[He pauses to check his instruments.]
The safest way to dive, to go deeper, to stay down longer, was to enclose your whole body in a