Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
I l l u st ra t i o n b y J o h n Pe t e rs e n
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M A X B R O O KS 2
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THREE RIVERS PRESS N3
NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
ISBN 978-0-307-34661-2
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Henry Michael Brooks, 0
who makes me want to change the world 0
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A special thank-you to my wife, Michelle, for all her love and support.
To Ed Victor, for starting it all.
To Steve Ross, Luke Dempsey, and the entire Crown Publishers team.
To T. M. for watching my back.
To Brad Graham at the Washington Post; Drs. Cohen, Whiteman, and
Hayward; Professors Greenberger and Tongun; Rabbi Andy; Father Fraser;
STS2SS Bordeaux (USN fmr); “B” and “E”; Jim; Jon; Julie; Jessie; Gregg;
Honupo; and Dad, for “the human factor.”
And a final thank-you to the three men whose inspiration made this
book possible: Studs Terkel, the late General Sir John Hackett, and, of
course, the genius and terror of George A. Romero.
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CONTENTS 0
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INTRODUCTION 1
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WARNINGS
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BLAME 1
45 1
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T H E G R E AT PA N I C
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TURNING THE TIDE 2
105 2
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HOME FRONT USA 2
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AROUND THE WORLD, AND ABOVE
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TOTAL WA R 2
270 2
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GOOD-BYES
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INTRODUCTION 0
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It goes by many names: “The Crisis,” “The Dark Years,” “The Walking 1
Plague,” as well as newer and more “hip” titles such as “World War Z” or “Z 1
War One.” I personally dislike this last moniker as it implies an inevitable 1
“Z War Two.” For me, it will always be “The Zombie War,” and while many 1
may protest the scientific accuracy of the word zombie, they will be hard- 1
pressed to discover a more globally accepted term for the creatures that al- 1
most caused our extinction. Zombie remains a devastating word, unrivaled 1
in its power to conjure up so many memories or emotions, and it is these 1
memories, and emotions, that are the subject of this book. 1
This record of the greatest conflict in human history owes its genesis to 1
a much smaller, much more personal conflict between me and the chair- 2
person of the United Nation’s Postwar Commission Report. My initial 2
work for the Commission could be described as nothing short of a labor 2
of love. My travel stipend, my security access, my battery of translators, 2
both human and electronic, as well as my small, but nearly priceless voice- 2
activated transcription “pal” (the greatest gift the world’s slowest typist 2
could ask for), all spoke to the respect and value my work was afforded on 2
this project. So, needless to say, it came as a shock when I found almost 2
half of that work deleted from the report’s final edition. 2
“It was all too intimate,” the chairperson said during one of our many 2
“animated” discussions. “Too many opinions, too many feelings. That’s not 3
what this report is about. We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the 3
human factor.” Of course, she was right. The official report was a collec- 3
tion of cold, hard data, an objective “after-action report” that would allow S3
future generations to study the events of that apocalyptic decade without N3
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1 being influenced by “the human factor.” But isn’t the human factor what
2 connects us so deeply to our past? Will future generations care as much for
3 chronologies and casualty statistics as they would for the personal accounts
4 of individuals not so different from themselves? By excluding the human
5 factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from a history
6 that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t
7 the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we
8 now refer to as “the living dead”? I presented this argument, perhaps less
9 professionally than was appropriate, to my “boss,” who after my final excla-
0 mation of “we can’t let these stories die” responded immediately with,
1 “Then don’t. Write a book. You’ve still got all your notes, and the legal
2 freedom to use them. Who’s stopping you from keeping these stories alive
3 in the pages of your own (expletive deleted) book?”
4 Some critics will, no doubt, take issue with the concept of a personal
5 history book so soon after the end of worldwide hostilities. After all, it has
6 been only twelve years since VA Day was declared in the continental
7 United States, and barely a decade since the last major world power cele-
8 brated its deliverance on “Victory in China Day.” Given that most people
9 consider VC Day to be the official end, then how can we have real per-
0 spective when, in the words of a UN colleague, “We’ve been at peace
1 about as long as we were at war.” This is a valid argument, and one that
2 begs a response. In the case of this generation, those who have fought and
3 suffered to win us this decade of peace, time is as much an enemy as it is an
4 ally. Yes, the coming years will provide hindsight, adding greater wisdom to
5 memories seen through the light of a matured, postwar world. But many of
6 those memories may no longer exist, trapped in bodies and spirits too dam-
7 aged or infirm to see the fruits of their victory harvested. It is no great se-
8 cret that global life expectancy is a mere shadow of its former prewar
9 figure. Malnutrition, pollution, the rise of previously eradicated ailments,
0 even in the United States, with its resurgent economy and universal
1 health care are the present reality; there simply are not enough resources
2 to care for all the physical and psychological casualties. It is because of this
3S enemy, the enemy of time, that I have forsaken the luxury of hindsight and
4N published these survivors’ accounts. Perhaps decades from now, someone
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WORLD WAR Z 3
will take up the task of recording the recollections of the much older, 0
much wiser survivors. Perhaps I might even be one of them. 0
Although this is primarily a book of memories, it includes many of the 0
details, technological, social, economic, and so on, found in the original 0
Commission Report, as they are related to the stories of those voices fea- 0
tured in these pages. This is their book, not mine, and I have tried to main- 0
tain as invisible a presence as possible. Those questions included in the 0
text are only there to illustrate those that might have been posed by read- 0
ers. I have attempted to reserve judgment, or commentary of any kind, and 0
if there is a human factor that should be removed, let it be my own. 1
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WARNINGS
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GREATER CHONGQING, THE UNITED FEDERATION OF CHINA
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even trees said to be centuries old. When the Three Gorges Dam was com- 0
pleted, and reservoir waters began to rise, much of Dachang had been dis- 0
assembled, brick by brick, then rebuilt on higher ground. This New Dachang, 0
however, was not a town anymore, but a “national historic museum.” It 0
must have been a heartbreaking irony for those poor peasants, to see their 0
town saved but then only being able to visit it as a tourist. Maybe that is 0
why some of them chose to name their newly constructed hamlet “New 0
Dachang” to preserve some connection to their heritage, even if it was 0
only in name. I personally didn’t know that this other New Dachang ex- 0
isted, so you can imagine how confused I was when the call came in. 1
The hospital was quiet; it had been a slow night, even for the increasing 1
number of drunk-driving accidents. Motorcycles were becoming very pop- 1
ular. We used to say that your Harley-Davidsons killed more young Chi- 1
nese than all the GIs in the Korean War. That’s why I was so grateful for a 1
quiet shift. I was tired, my back and feet ached. I was on my way out to 1
smoke a cigarette and watch the dawn when I heard my name being paged. 1
The receptionist that night was new and couldn’t quite understand the di- 1
alect. There had been an accident, or an illness. It was an emergency, that 1
part was obvious, and could we please send help at once. 1
What could I say? The younger doctors, the kids who think medicine is 2
just a way to pad their bank accounts, they certainly weren’t going to go 2
help some “nongmin” just for the sake of helping. I guess I’m still an old 2
revolutionary at heart. “Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the 2
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people.” Those words still mean something to me . . . and I tried to re- 2
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member that as my Deer bounced and banged over dirt roads the govern- 2
ment had promised but never quite gotten around to paving. 2
I had a devil of a time finding the place. Officially, it didn’t exist and 2
therefore wasn’t on any map. I became lost several times and had to ask di- 2
rections from locals who kept thinking I meant the museum town. I was in 2
an impatient mood by the time I reached the small collection of hilltop 3
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1. From “Quotations from Chairman Maozedong,” originally from “The Situation and Our
Policy After the Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan,” August 13, 1945. S3
2. A prewar automobile manufactured in the People’s Republic. N3
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1 homes. I remember thinking, This had better be damned serious. Once I saw
2 their faces, I regretted my wish.
3 There were seven of them, all on cots, all barely conscious. The villagers
4 had moved them into their new communal meeting hall. The walls and
5 floor were bare cement. The air was cold and damp. Of course they’re sick, I
6 thought. I asked the villagers who had been taking care of these people.
7 They said no one, it wasn’t “safe.” I noticed that the door had been locked
8 from the outside. The villagers were clearly terrified. They cringed and
9 whispered; some kept their distance and prayed. Their behavior made me
0 angry, not at them, you understand, not as individuals, but what they rep-
1 resented about our country. After centuries of foreign oppression, exploita-
2 tion, and humiliation, we were finally reclaiming our rightful place as
3 humanity’s middle kingdom. We were the world’s richest and most dy-
4 namic superpower, masters of everything from outer space to cyber space.
5 It was the dawn of what the world was finally acknowledging as “The Chi-
6 nese Century” and yet so many of us still lived like these ignorant peasants,
7 as stagnant and superstitious as the earliest Yangshao savages.
8 I was still lost in my grand, cultural criticism when I knelt to examine
9 the first patient. She was running a high fever, forty degrees centigrade, and
0 she was shivering violently. Barely coherent, she whimpered slightly when
1 I tried to move her limbs. There was a wound in her right forearm, a bite
2 mark. As I examined it more closely, I realized that it wasn’t from an
3 animal. The bite radius and teeth marks had to have come from a small, or
4 possibly young, human being. Although I hypothesized this to be the
5 source of the infection, the actual injury was surprisingly clean. I asked
6 the villagers, again, who had been taking care of these people. Again, they
7 told me no one. I knew this could not be true. The human mouth is packed
8 with bacteria, even more so than the most unhygienic dog. If no one had
9 cleaned this woman’s wound, why wasn’t it throbbing with infection?
0 I examined the six other patients. All showed similar symptoms, all had
1 similar wounds on various parts of their bodies. I asked one man, the most
2 lucid of the group, who or what had inflicted these injuries. He told me it
3S had happened when they had tried to subdue “him.”
4N “Who?” I asked.
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1 The boy began to twist in my direction, his arm ripped completely free.
2 Flesh and muscle tore from one another until there was nothing except the
3 stump. His now free right arm, still tied to the severed left hand, dragged
4 his body across the floor.
5 I hurried outside, locking the door behind me. I tried to compose myself,
6 control my fear and shame. My voice still cracked as I asked the villagers
7 how the boy had been infected. No one answered. I began to hear banging
8 on the door, the boy’s fist pounding weakly against the thin wood. It was
9 all I could do not to jump at the sound. I prayed they would not notice the
0 color draining from my face. I shouted, as much from fear as frustration,
1 that I had to know what happened to this child.
2 A young woman came forward, maybe his mother. You could tell that
3 she had been crying for days; her eyes were dry and deeply red. She admit-
4 ted that it had happened when the boy and his father were “moon fishing,”
5 a term that describes diving for treasure among the sunken ruins of the
6 Three Gorges Reservoir. With more than eleven hundred abandoned vil-
7 lages, towns, and even cities, there was always the hope of recovering
8 something valuable. It was a very common practice in those days, and also
9 very illegal. She explained that they weren’t looting, that it was their own
0 village, Old Dachang, and they were just trying to recover some heirlooms
1 from the remaining houses that hadn’t been moved. She repeated the
2 point, and I had to interrupt her with promises not to inform the police.
3 She finally explained that the boy came up crying with a bite mark on his
4 foot. He didn’t know what had happened, the water had been too dark and
5 muddy. His father was never seen again.
6 I reached for my cell phone and dialed the number of Doctor Gu Wen
7 Kuei, an old comrade from my army days who now worked at the Institute
3
8 of Infectious Diseases at Chongqing University. We exchanged pleas-
9 antries, discussing our health, our grandchildren; it was only proper. I then
0 told him about the outbreak and listened as he made some joke about the
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2 3. The Institute of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases of the First Affiliated Hospital,
3S Chongqing Medical University.
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Another round hit and we bent over the dying boy. Gu’s face was only a 0
few centimeters from mine. There was sweat pouring down his forehead. 0
Even in the dim light of one paraffin lantern, I could see that he was shak- 0
ing and pale. He looked at the patient, then at the doorway, then at me, 0
and suddenly he said, “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right.” 0
Now, this is a man who has never said a positive thing in his life. Gu was a 0
worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If he had a headache, it was a brain tumor; 0
if it looked like rain, this year’s harvest was ruined. This was his way of 0
controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always coming out ahead. 0
Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalistic predictions, 1
he had no choice but to turn tail and charge in the opposite direction. 1
“Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right.” For the first time every- 1
thing turned out as he predicted. The Russians never crossed the river and 1
we even managed to save our patient. 1
For years afterward I would tease him about what it took to pry out a 1
little ray of sunshine, and he would always respond that it would take a hell 1
of a lot worse to get him to do it again. Now we were old men, and some- 1
thing worse was about to happen. It was right after he asked me if I was 1
armed. “No,” I said, “why should I be?” There was a brief silence, I’m 1
sure other ears were listening. “Don’t worry,” he said, “everything’s going 2
to be all right.” That was when I realized that this was not an isolated out- 2
break. I ended the call and quickly placed another to my daughter in 2
Guangzhou. 2
Her husband worked for China Telecom and spent at least one week of 2
every month abroad. I told her it would be a good idea to accompany him 2
the next time he left and that she should take my granddaughter and stay 2
for as long as they could. I didn’t have time to explain; my signal was 2
jammed just as the first helicopter appeared. The last thing I managed to 2
say to her was “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right.” 2
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[Kwang Jingshu was arrested by the MSS and incarcerated with- 3
out formal charges. By the time he escaped, the outbreak had 3
spread beyond China’s borders.] S3
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1 u
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4 LHASA, THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF TIBET
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6 [The world’s most populous city is still recovering from the re-
7 sults of last week’s general election. The Social Democrats have
8 smashed the Llamist Party in a landslide victory and the streets
9 are still roaring with revelers. I meet Nury Televaldi at a
0 crowded sidewalk café. We have to shout over the euphoric din.]
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2 Before the outbreak started, overland smuggling was never popular. To
3 arrange for the passports, the fake tour buses, the contacts and protection
4 on the other side all took a lot of money. Back then, the only two lucrative
5 routes were into Thailand or Myanmar. Where I used to live, in Kashi, the
6 only option was into the ex-Soviet republics. No one wanted to go there,
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7 and that is why I wasn’t initially a shetou. I was an importer: raw opium,
8 uncut diamonds, girls, boys, whatever was valuable from those primitive
9 excuses for countries. The outbreak changed all that. Suddenly we were
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0 besieged with offers, and not just from the liudong renkou, but also, as you
1 say, from people on the up-and-up. I had urban professionals, private farm-
2 ers, even low-level government officials. These were people who had a
3 lot to lose. They didn’t care where they were going, they just needed to
4 get out.
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Did you know what they were fleeing?
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We’d heard the rumors. We’d even had an outbreak somewhere in Kashi.
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The government had hushed it up pretty quickly. But we guessed, we knew
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something was wrong.
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2 1. Shetou: A “snake head,” the smuggler of “renshe” or “human snake” of refugees.
3S 2. Liudong renkou: China’s “floating population” of homeless labor.
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bao to the local Chinese mafia. The majority of them simply melted into 0
the host country’s underbelly. 0
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The low-income areas? 0
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If that’s what you want to call them. What better place to hide than among 0
that part of society that no one else even wants to acknowledge. How else 0
could so many outbreaks have started in so many First World ghettos? 0
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It’s been said that many shetou propagated the myth of a miracle cure in 1
other countries. 1
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Some. 1
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Did you?
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[Pause.] 1
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No. 1
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[Another pause.] 2
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How did Flight 575 change air smuggling? 2
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Restrictions were tightened, but only in certain countries. Airline shetou 2
were careful but they were also resourceful. They used to have this saying, 2
“every rich man’s house has a servant’s entrance.” 2
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What does that mean? 2
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If western Europe has increased its security, go through eastern Europe. If 3
the U.S. won’t let you in, go through Mexico. I’m sure it helped make the 3
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3. Bao: The debt many refugees incurred during their exodus. N3
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1 rich white countries feel safer, even though they had infestations already
2 bubbling within their borders. This is not my area of expertise, you remem-
3 ber, I was primarily land transport, and my target countries were in cen-
4 tral Asia.
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6 Were they easier to enter?
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8 They practically begged us for the business. Those countries were in such
9 economic shambles, their officials were so backward and corrupt, they ac-
0 tually helped us with the paperwork in exchange for a percentage of our
1 fee. There were even shetou, or whatever they called them in their barbar-
2 ian babble, who worked with us to get renshe across the old Soviet repub-
3 lics into countries like India or Russia, even Iran, although I never asked or
4 wanted to know where any of the renshe were going. My job ended at the
5 border. Just get their papers stamped, their vehicles tagged, pay the guards
6 off, and take my cut.
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8 Did you see many infected?
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0 Not in the beginning. The blight worked too fast. It wasn’t like air travel.
1 It might take weeks to reach Kashi, and even the slowest of burns, I’ve been
2 told, couldn’t last longer than a few days. Infected clients usually reanimated
3 somewhere on the road, where they would be recognized and collected by
4 the local police. Later, as the infestations multiplied and the police became
5 overwhelmed, I began to see a lot of infected on my route.
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7 Were they dangerous?
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9 Rarely. Their family usually had them bound and gagged. You’d see some-
0 thing moving in the back of a car, squirming softly under clothing or heavy
1 blankets. You’d hear banging from a car’s boot, or, later, from crates with
2 airholes in the backs of vans. Airholes . . . they really didn’t know what
3S was happening to their loved ones.
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Did you? 0
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By then, yes, but I knew trying to explain it to them would be a hopeless 0
cause. I just took their money and sent them on their way. I was lucky. I 0
never had to deal with the problems of sea smuggling. 0
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That was more difficult?
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And dangerous. My associates from the coastal provinces were the ones 0
who had to contend with the possibility of an infected breaking its bonds 0
and contaminating the entire hold. 1
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What did they do? 1
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I’ve heard of various “solutions.” Sometimes ships would pull up to a 1
stretch of deserted coast—it didn’t matter if it was the intended country, it 1
could have been any coast—and “unload” the infected renshe onto the 1
beach. I’ve heard of some captains making for an empty stretch of open sea 1
and just tossing the whole writhing lot overboard. That might explain the 1
early cases of swimmers and divers starting to disappear without a trace, or 1
why you’d hear of people all around the world saying they saw them walk- 2
ing out of the surf. At least I never had to deal with that. 2
I did have one similar incident, the one that convinced me it was time 2
to quit. There was this truck, a beat-up old jalopy. You could hear the 2
moans from the trailer. A lot of fists were slamming against the aluminum. 2
It was actually swaying back and forth. In the cab there was a very wealthy 2
investment banker from Xi’an. He’d made a lot of money buying up Amer- 2
ican credit card debt. He had enough to pay for his entire extended family. 2
The man’s Armani suit was rumpled and torn. There were scratch marks 2
down the side of his face, and his eyes had that frantic fire I was starting to 2
see more of every day. The driver’s eyes had a different look, the same one 3
as me, the look that maybe money wasn’t going to be much good for much 3
longer. I slipped the man an extra fifty and wished him luck. That was all I 3
could do. S3
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Also by Max Brooks
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