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

ARMAGH, IRELAND
[While not a Catholic himself, Philip Adler has joined the throngs of visitors to the
pope’s wartime refuge. “My wife is Bavarian,” he explains in the bar of our hotel.
“She had to make the pilgrimage to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.” This is his first
time away from Germany since the end of the war. Our meeting is accidental. He
does not object to my recorder.]
Hamburg was heavily infested. They were in the streets, in the buildings, pouring out of the
Neuer Elbtunnel. We’d tried to blockade it with civilian vehicles, but they were squirming through
any open space like bloated, bloody worms. Refugees were also all over. They’d come from as far
away as Saxony, thinking they could escape by sea. The ships were long gone, the port was a mess.
We had over a thousand trapped at the Reynolds Aluminiumwerk and at least triple that at the
Eurokai terminal. No food, no clean water, just waiting to be rescued with the dead swarming
outside, and I don’t know how many infected inside.
The harbor was choked with corpses, but corpses that were still moving. We’d blasted them into
the harbor with antiriot water cannons; it saved ammo and it helped to keep the streets clear. It
was a good idea, until the pressure in the hydrants died. We’d lost our commanding officer two
days earlier…freak accident. One of our men had shot a zombie that was almost on top of him. The
bullet had gone right through the creature’s head, taking bits of diseased brain tissue out the other
end and into the colonel’s shoulder. Insane, eh? He turned over sector command to me before
dying. My first official duty was to put him down.
I’d set up our command post in the Renaissance Hotel. It was a decent location, good fields of
fire with enough space to house our own unit and several hundred refugees. My men, those not
involved in holding the barricades, were attempting to perform these conversions on similar
buildings. With the roads blocked and trains inoperative, I thought it best to sequester as many
civilians as possible. Help would be coming, it was just a question of when it would arrive.
I was about to organize a detail to scrounge for converted hand-to-hand weapons, we were
running low on ammunition, when the order came to retreat. This was not unusual. Our unit had
been steadily withdrawing since the first days of the Panic. What was unusual, though, was the
rally point. Division was using map-grid coordinates, the first time since the trouble began. Up until
then they had simply used civilian designations on an open channel; this was so refugees could
know where to assemble. Now it was a coded transmission from a map we hadn’t used since the
end of the cold war. I had to check the coordinates three times to confirm. They put us at
Schafstedt, just north of the Nord-Ostsee Kanal. Might as well be fucking Denmark!
We were also under strict orders not to move the civilians. Even worse, we were ordered not to
inform them of our departure! This didn’t make any sense. They wanted us to pull back to
Schleswig-Holstein but leave the refugees behind? They wanted us to just cut and run? There had
to be some kind of mistake.
I asked for confirmation. I got it. I asked again. Maybe they got the map wrong, or had shifted
codes without telling us. (It wouldn’t be their first mistake.)
I suddenly found myself speaking to General Lang, commander of the entire Northern Front. His