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

I remember the monkeys, hundreds of them, climbing and skittering among the vehicles, even
over the tops of people’s heads. I’d watched them as far back as Chandigarh, leaping from roofs
and balconies as the living dead filled the street. I remember them scattering, chattering,
scrambling straight up telephone poles to escape the zombies’ grasping arms. Some didn’t even
wait to be attacked; they knew. And now they were here, on this narrow, twisting Himalayan goat
track. They called it a road, but even in peacetime it had been a notorious death trap. Thousands
of refugees were streaming past, or climbing over the stalled and abandoned vehicles. People
were still trying to struggle with suitcases, boxes; one man was stubbornly holding on to the
monitor for a desktop PC. A monkey landed on his head, trying to use it as a stepping-stone, but
the man was too close to the edge and the two of them went tumbling over the side. It seemed like
every second someone would lose their footing. There were just too many people. The road didn’t
even have a guardrail. I saw a whole bus go over, I don’t even know how, it wasn’t even moving.
Passengers were climbing out of the windows because the doors of the bus had been jammed by
foot traffic. One woman was halfway out the window when the bus tipped over. Something was in
her arms, something clutched tightly to her. I tell myself that it wasn’t moving, or crying, that it
was just a bundle of clothes. No one within arm’s reach tried to help her. No one even looked, they
just kept streaming by. Sometimes when I dream about that moment, I can’t tell the difference
between them and the monkeys.
I wasn’t supposed to be there, I wasn’t even a combat engineer. I was with the BRO 1 ; my job
was to build roads, not blow them up. I’d just been wandering through the assembly area at Shimla,
trying to find what remained of my unit, when this engineer, Sergeant Mukherjee, grabbed me by
the arm and said, “You, soldier, you know how to drive?”
I think I stammered something to the affirmative, and suddenly he was shoving me into the
driver’s side of a jeep while he jumped in next to me with some kind of radiolike device on his lap.
“Get back to the pass! Go! Go!” I took off down the road, screeching and skidding and trying
desperately to explain that I was actually a steamroller driver, and not even fully qualified at that.
Mukherjee didn’t hear me. He was too busy fiddling with the device on his lap. “The charges are
already set,” he explained. “All we have to do is wait for the order!”
“What charges?” I asked. “What order?”
“To blow the pass, you arse head!” he yelled, motioning to what I now recognized as a detonator
on his lap. “How the hell else are we going to stop them?”
I knew, vaguely, that our retreat into the Himalayas had something to do with some kind of
master plan, and that part of that plan meant closing all the mountain passes to the living dead. I
never dreamed, however, that I would be such a vital participant! For the sake of civil
conversation, I will not repeat my profane reaction to Mukherjee, nor Mukherjee’s equally profane
reaction when we arrived at the pass and found it still full of refugees.
“It’s supposed to be clear!” he shouted. “No more refugees!”
We noticed a soldier from the Rashtriya Rifles, the outfit that was supposed to be securing the
road’s mountain entrance, come running past the jeep. Mukherjee jumped out and grabbed the
man. “What the hell is this?” he asked; he was a big man, tough and angry. “You were supposed to
keep the road clear.” The other man was just as angry, just as scared. “You want to shoot your
grandmother, go ahead!” He shoved the sergeant aside and kept going.
Mukherjee keyed his radio and reported that the road was still highly active. A voice came back
to him, a high-pitched, frantic younger voice of an officer screaming that his orders were to blow