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

though…real pricks all high on the smell of their own piss. Just rude and pushy and ordering
everyone else around. One guy sticks out in my mind, only because he wore this baseball cap that
read “Get It Done!” I think he was the chief handler of the fat fuck who won that talent show. That
guy must have had fourteen people around him! I remember thinking at first that it would be
impossible to take care of all these people, but after my initial tour of the premises, I realized our
boss had planned for everything.
He’d transformed his home into a survivalists’ wet dream. He had enough dehydrated food to
keep an army fed for years, as well as an endless supply of water from a desalinizer that ran right
out into the ocean. He had wind turbines, solar panels, and backup generators with giant fuel tanks
buried right under the courtyard. He had enough security measures to hold off the living dead
forever: high walls, motion sensors, and weapons, oh the weapons. Yeah, our boss had really done
his homework, but what he was most proud of was the fact that every room in the house was wired
for a simultaneous webcast that went out all over the world 24/7. This was the real reason for
having all his “closest” and “best” friends over. He didn’t just want to ride out the storm in comfort
and luxury, he wanted everyone to know he’d done it. That was the celebrity angle, his way of
ensuring high-profile exposure.
Not only did you have a webcam in almost every room, but there was all the usual press you’d
find on the Oscar’s red carpet. I honestly never knew how big an industry entertainment
journalism was. There had to be dozens of them there from all these magazines and TV shows.
“How are you feeling?” I heard that a lot. “How are you holding up?” “What do you think is going
to happen?” and I swear I even heard someone ask “What are you wearing?”
For me, the most surreal moment was standing in the kitchen with some of the staff and other
bodyguards, all of us watching the news that was showing, guess what, us! The cameras were
literally in the other room, pointed at some of the “stars” as they sat on the couch watching
another news channel. The feed was live from New York’s Upper East Side; the dead were coming
right up Third Avenue, people were taking them on hand to hand, hammers and pipes, the manager
of a Modell’s Sporting Goods was handing out all his baseball bats and shouting “Get ’em in the
head!” There was this one guy on rollerblades. He had a hockey stick in his hand, a big ’ole meat
cleaver bolted to the blade. He was doing an easy thirty, at that speed he might have taken a neck
or two. The camera saw the whole thing, the rotted arm that shot out of the sewer drain right in
front of him, the poor guy back flipping into the air, coming down hard on his face, then being
dragged, screaming, by his ponytail into the drain. At that moment the camera in our living room
swung back to catch the reactions of the watching celebs. There were a few gasps, some honest,
some staged. I remember thinking I had less respect for the ones who tried to fake some tears
than I did for the little spoiled whore who called the rollerblading guy a “dumbass.” Hey, at least
she was being honest. I remember I was standing next to this guy, Sergei, a miserable, sad-faced,
hulking motherfucker. His stories about growing up in Russia convinced me that not all Third World
cesspools had to be tropical. It was when the camera was catching the reactions of the beautiful
people that he mumbled something to himself in Russian. The only word I could make out was
“Romanovs” and I was about to ask him what he meant when we all heard the alarm go off.
Something had triggered the pressure sensors we’d placed several miles around the wall. They
were sensitive enough to detect just one zombie, now they were going crazy. Our radios were
squawking: “Contact, contact, southwest corner…shit, there’s hundreds of them!” It was a damn
big house, it took me a few minutes to get to my firing position. I didn’t understand why the lookout
was so nervous. So what if there were a couple hundred. They’d never get over the wall. Then I
heard him shout “They’re running! Holy fuckin’ shit, they’re fast!” Fast zombies, that turned my
gut. If they could run, they could climb, if they could climb, maybe they could think, and if they