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

[We come upon a collection of bones, too many to count. They lie in a pit, half
covered in ice.]
I was a pretty heavy kid. I never played sports, I lived on fast food and snacks. I was only a little
bit thinner when we arrived in August. By November, I was like a skeleton. Mom and Dad didn’t
look much better. Dad’s tummy was gone, Mom had these narrow cheekbones. They were fighting
a lot, fighting about everything. That scared me more than anything. They’d never raised their
voices at home. They were schoolteachers, “progressives.” There might have been a tense, quiet
dinner every now and then, but nothing like this. They went for each other every chance they had.
One time, around Thanksgiving…I couldn’t get out of my sleeping bag. My belly was swollen and I
had these sores on my mouth and nose. There was this smell coming from the neighbor’s RV. They
were cooking something, meat, it smelled really good. Mom and Dad were outside arguing. Mom
said “it” was the only way. I didn’t know what “it” was. She said “it” wasn’t “that bad” because the
neighbors, not us, had been the ones to actually “do it.” Dad said that we weren’t going to stoop to
that level and that Mom should be ashamed of herself. Mom really laid into Dad, screeching that it
was all his fault that we were here, that I was dying. Mom told him that a real man would know
what to do. She called him a wimp and said he wanted us to die so then he could run away and live
like the “faggot” she always knew he was. Dad told her to shut the fuck up. Dad never swore. I
heard something, a crack from outside. Mom came back in, holding a clump of snow over her right
eye. Dad followed her. He didn’t say anything. He had this look on his face I’d never seen before,
like he was a different person. He grabbed my survival radio, the one people’d try to buy…or
steal, for a long time, and went back out toward the RV. He came back ten minutes later, without
the radio but with a big bucket of this steaming hot stew. It was so good! Mom told me not to eat
too fast. She fed me in little spoonfuls. She looked relieved. She was crying a little. Dad still had
that look. The look I had myself in a few months, when Mom and Dad both got sick and I had to
feed them.
[I kneel to examine the bone pile. They have all been broken, the marrow
extracted.]
Winter really hit us in early December. The snow was over our heads, literally, mountains of it,
thick and gray from the pollution. The camp got silent. No more fights, no more shooting. By
Christmas Day there was plenty of food.
[She holds up what looks like a miniature femur. It has been scraped clean by a
knife.]
They say eleven million people died that winter, and that’s just in North America. That doesn’t
count the other places: Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia. I don’t want to think about Siberia, all