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

not telling us! This is what they have us breaking our backs to find!” You could see heads start to
nod, a few grunts of agreement. Arkady continued, “What if these things are everywhere? What if
they’re back home, with our families right now!” He was trying to make eye contact with as many
of us as possible. He wasn’t paying enough attention to the old woman. His grip loosened, she
pulled free and bit him on the hand. Arkady roared. His fist caved in the old woman’s face. She fell
to his feet, writhing and gurgling that black goo. He finished the job with his boot. We all heard her
skull crack.
Blood was trickling down the gouge in Arkady’s fist. He shook it at the sky, screaming as the
veins in his neck began to bulge. “We want to go home!” he bellowed. “We want to protect our
families!” Others in the crowd began to pick it up. “Yes! We want to protect our families! This is a
free country! This is a democracy! You can’t keep us in prison!” I was shouting, too, chanting with
the rest. That old woman, the creature that could take a knife in the heart without dying…what if
they were back home? What if they were threatening our loved ones…my parents? All the fear, all
the doubt, every tangled, negative emotion all fused into rage. “We want to go home! We want to
go home!” Chanting, chanting, and then…A round cracked past my ear and Arkady’s left eye
imploded. I don’t remember running, or inhaling the tear gas. I don’t remember when the Spetznaz
commandos appeared, but suddenly they were all around us, beating us down, shackling us
together, one of them stepping on my chest so hard I thought I was going to die right then and
there.
Was that the Decimation?
No, that was the beginning. We weren’t the first army unit to rebel. It had actually started about
the time the MPs first closed down the base. About the time we staged our little “demonstration,”
the government had decided how to restore order.
[She straightens her uniform, composes herself before speaking.]
To “decimate”…I used to think it meant just to wipe out, cause horrible damage, destroy…it
actually means to kill by a percentage of ten, one out of every ten must die…and that’s exactly
what they did to us.
The Spetznaz had us assemble on the parade ground, full dress uniform no less. Our new
commanding officer gave a speech about duty and responsibility, about our sworn oath to protect
the motherland, and how we had betrayed that oath with our selfish treachery and individual
cowardice. I’d never heard words like that before. “Duty?” “Responsibility?” Russia, my Russia,
was nothing but an apolitical mess. We lived in chaos and corruption, we were just trying to get
through the day. Even the army was no bastion of patriotism; it was a place to learn a trade, get
food and a bed, and maybe even a little money to send home when the government decided it was
convenient to pay its soldiers. “Oath to protect the motherland?” Those weren’t the words of my
generation. That was what you’d hear from old Great Patriotic War veterans, the kind of broken,
demented geezers who used to besiege Red Square with their tattered Soviet banners and their
rows and rows of medals pinned to their faded, moth-eaten uniforms. Duty to the motherland was a
joke. But I wasn’t laughing. I knew the executions were coming. The armed men surrounding us,
the men in the guard towers, I was ready, every muscle in my body was tensing for the shot. And