“The end was near.” —Voices from the Zombie War
The Zombie War
came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by
the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the
survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United
States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that
once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and
inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men,
women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or
at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time.
World War Z is
the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so
powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the
ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through
the plague years.
Ranging from the now infamous village of New
Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological
trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed
northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary
refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the
Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the
west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally
started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and
duration of the Zombie War.
Most of all, the book captures with
haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the
often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree
of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable
because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human
factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history
that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end,
isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy
we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”
Note: Some of the
numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously
published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission.
Eyewitness reports from the first truly global war
“I
found ‘Patient Zero’ behind the locked door of an abandoned apartment
across town. . . . His wrists and feet were bound with plastic packing
twine. Although he’d rubbed off the skin around his bonds, there was no
blood. There was also no blood on his other wounds. . . . He was
writhing like an animal; a gag muffled his growls. At first the
villagers tried to hold me back. They warned me not to touch him, that
he was ‘cursed.’ I shrugged them off and reached for my mask and gloves.
The boy’s skin was . . . cold and gray . . . I could find neither his
heartbeat nor his pulse.” —Dr. Kwang Jingshu, Greater Chongqing, United
Federation of China
“‘Shock and Awe’? Perfect name. . . . But
what if the enemy can’t be shocked and awed? Not just won’t, but
biologically can’t! That’s what happened that day outside New York City,
that’s the failure that almost lost us the whole damn war. The fact
that we couldn’t shock and awe Zack boomeranged right back in our faces
and actually allowed Zack to shock and awe us! They’re not afraid! No
matter what we do, no matter how many we kill, they will never, ever be
afraid!” —Todd Wainio, former U.S. Army infantryman and veteran of the
Battle of Yonkers
“Two hundred million zombies. Who can even
visualize that type of number, let alone combat it? . . . For the first
time in history, we faced an enemy that was actively waging total war.
They had no limits of endurance. They would never negotiate, never
surrender. They would fight until the very end because, unlike us, every
single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to consuming
all life on Earth.” —General Travis D’Ambrosia, Supreme Allied
Commander, Europe
Books!
