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

Most of the Eight Balls were later in the war. Not from the stress, though, you understand, but
from the lack of it. We all knew it would be over soon, and I think a lot of people who’d been
holding it together for so long must’ve had that little voice that said, “Hey, buddy, it’s cool now, you
can let go.”
I knew this one guy, massive ’roidasaurus, he’d been a professional wrestler before the war. We
were walking up the freeway near Pulaski, New York, when the wind picked up the scent of a
jackknifed big rig. It’d been loaded with bottles of perfume, nothing fancy, just cheap, strip mall
scent. He froze and started bawlin’ like a kid. Couldn’t stop. He was a monster with a two grand
body count, an ogre who’d once picked up a G and used it as a club for hand-to-hand combat. Four
of us had to carry him out on a stretcher. We figured the perfume must have reminded him of
someone. We never found out who.
Another guy, nothing special about him, late forties, balding, bit of a paunch, as much as anyone
could have back then, the kinda face you’d see in a prewar heartburn commercial. We were in
Hammond, Indiana, scouting defenses for the siege of Chicago. He spied a house at the end of a
deserted street, completely intact except for boarded-up windows and a crashed-in front door. He
got a look on his face, a grin. We should have known way before he dropped out of formation,
before we heard the shot. He was sitting in the living room, in this worn, old easy chair, SIR
between his knees, that smile still on his face. I looked up at the pictures on the mantelpiece. It was
his home.
Those were extreme examples, ones that even I could have guessed. A lot of the others, you just
never knew. For me, it wasn’t just who was cracking up, but who wasn’t. Does that make sense?
One night in Portland, Maine, we were in Deering Oaks Park, policing piles of bleached bones
that had been there since the Panic. Two grunts pick up these skulls and start doing a skit, the one
from Free to Be, You and Me, the two babies. I only recognized it because my big brother had the
record, it was a little before my time. Some of the older Grunts, the Xers, they loved it. A little
crowd started gathering, everyone laughing and howling at these two skulls. “Hi-Hi-I’m a
baby.—Well what do you think I am, a loaf ’a bread?” And when it was over, everyone
spontaneously burst into song, “There’s a land that I see…” playing femurs like goddamn banjos. I
looked across the crowd to one of our company shrinks. I could never pronounce his real name,
Doctor Chandra-something. 7 I made eye contact and gave him this look, like “Hey, Doc, they’re all
nut jobs, right?” He must have known what my eyes were asking because he just smiled back and
shook his head. That really spooked me; I mean, if the ones who were acting loopy weren’t, then
how did you know who’d really lost it?
Our squad leader, you’d probably recognize her. She was in The Battle of the Five Colleges.
Remember the tall, amazon chick with the ditch blade, the one who’d sung that song? She didn’t
look like she used to in the movie. She’d burned off her curves and a crew cut replaced all that
long, thick, shiny black hair. She was a good squad leader, “Sergeant Avalon.” One day we found a
turtle in a field. Turtles were like unicorns back then, you hardly saw them anymore. Avalon got
this look, I don’t know, like a kid. She smiled. She never smiled. I heard her whisper something to
the turtle, I thought it was gibberish: “Mitakuye Oyasin.” I found out later that it was Lakota for
“all my relations.” I didn’t even know she was part Sioux. She never talked about it, about
anything about her. And suddenly, like a ghost, there was Doctor Chandra, with that arm he always
put around their shoulders and that soft, no-big-deal offer of “C’mon, Sarge, let’s grab a cup of
coffee.”
That was the same day the president died. He must have also heard that little voice. “Hey,
buddy, it’s cool now, you can let go.” I know a lot of people weren’t so into the VP, like there was no