Let's Read: World War Z - An Oral History of the Zombie

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>>32489051
It's back!!

This is what I get for copy-pasting the last OP. It's about 1.5 months this time. I'm an idiot.

>MALIBU, CALIFORNIA
>[I don’t need a photograph to recognize Roy Elliot. We meet for coffee on the restored Malibu Pier Fortress. Those around us also instantly recognize him, but, unlike prewar
days, keep a respectful distance.]

>ADS, that was my enemy: Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome, or, Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome, depending on who you were talking to.

I like AIDS. Authorial Idiocy Despair Syndrome. It’s what I have.

>Whatever the label, it killed as many people in those early stalemate months as hunger, disease, interhuman violence, or the living dead. No one understood what was happening at first. We’d stabilized the Rockies, we’d sanitized the safe zones, and still we were losing upwards of a hundred or so people a day. It wasn’t suicide, we had plenty of those. No, this was different. Some people had minimal wounds or easily treatable ailments; some were in perfect health. They would simply go to sleep one night and not wake up the next morning. The problem was psychological, a case of just giving up, not wanting to see tomorrow because you knew it could only bring more suffering. Losing faith, the will to endure, it happens in all wars. It happens in peacetime, too, just not on this scale. It was helplessness, or at least, the perception of helplessness. I understood that feeling. I directed movies all my adult life. They called me the boy genius, the wunderkind who couldn’t fail, even though I’d done so often.

Out of curiosity, since I’m no medical expert, is such a thing possible? Not because I want to meme on Brooks for getting it wrong, but because it’s genuinely interesting to me.

>>32489162
Nurse here. Yeah ....Kinda. I feel like it would manifest itself in other ways, but, yes just "giving up" and dying is a thing.

>>32489162
>When I heard about ADS, the government was trying to keep it quiet—I had to find out from a contact at Cedars-Sinai. When I heard about it, something snapped. Like the time I made my first Super 8 short and screened it for my parents. This I can do, I realized. This enemy I can fight!

Frankly, I like this chapter. It also suffers from the Brooksian problem of “alluding to other, more interesting stories”

>And the rest is history.
>[Laughs.] I wish. I went straight to the government, they turned me down.

I chuckled.

>Really? I would think, given your career…

I’m a little lost on my mid-2000s, but is this guy supposed be a stand-in for a real-life figure like “Karl Rove” shoveling shit was?

>Couldn’t you have become a freelance journalist, gotten a government press pass?
>It would have taken too long. Most mass media was either knocked out or federalized. What was left had to rebroadcast public safety announcements, to make sure anyone just tuning in would know what
to do. Everything was still such a mess…

>Just outside of Greater Los Angeles, in a town called Claremont, are five colleges—Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont Mckenna. At the start of the Great Panic, when everyone else
was running, literally, for the hills, three hundred students chose to make a stand. They turned the Women’s College at Scripps into something resembling a medieval city. They got their supplies from the other campuses; their weapons were a mix of landscaping tools and ROTC practice rifles. They planted gardens, dug wells, fortified an already existing wall.

>>32489194
>While the mountains burned behind them, and the surrounding suburbs descended into violence, those three hundred kids held off ten thousand zombies! Ten thousand, over the course of four months, until the Inland Empire could finally be pacified.1 We were lucky to get there just at the tail end, just in time to see the last of the undead fall, as cheering students and soldiers linked up under the oversized, homemade Old Glory fluttering from the Pomona bell tower. What a story! Ninety-six hours of raw footage in the can. I would have liked to have gone longer, but time was critical. One hundred a day lost, remember. We had to get this one out there as soon as possible. I brought the footage back to my house, cut it together in my edit bay. My wife did the narration. We made fourteen copies, all on different formats, and screened them that Saturday night at different camps and shelters all over LA. I called it Victory at Avalon: The Battle of the Five Colleges.

>The name, Avalon, comes from some stock footage one of the students had shot during the siege. It was the night before their last, worst attack, when a fresh horde from the east was clearly visible on
the horizon. The kids were hard at work—sharpening weapons, reinforcing defenses, standing guard on the walls and towers. A song came floating across the campus from the loudspeaker that played
constant music to keep morale up. A Scripps student, with a voice like an angel, was singing the Roxy Music song. It was such a beautiful rendition, and such a contrast with the raging storm about to hit. I
laid it over my “preparing for battle” montage. I still get choked up when I hear it.

This is the classic Brooksian Dilemna. It’s more interesting than what we’re reading about at the moment, but you just know Brooks would disappoint.

>>32489186
Thanks. But you seem to be saying that Brooks portrayed it about as realistically as he portrayed the military at Yonkers, right?

>>32489194
This guy's supposed to be young spielberg how I read it. He might be M. Night for the time period though

>>32489264
>How did it play with the audience?
>It bombed...They didn’t even look at me. I stood by the doorway like some conquering hero. They just filed past silently with their eyes on their shoes. I went home that night thinking, “Oh well, it was a nice idea, maybe the potato farm in MacArthur Park can use another hand.”

lel

>What happened?
>Two weeks went by. I got a real job, helping to reopen the road at Topanga Canyon. Then one day a man rode up to my house. Just came in on horseback as if out of an old Cecil B. De Mille western. He was a psychiatrist from the county health facility in Santa Barbara. They’d heard about the success of my movie and asked if I had any extra copies.

It’s this sort of worldbuilding that I enjoy about WWZ tbqh.

>[Success?]That’s what I said. As it turns out, the very night after Avalon made its “debut,” ADS cases dropped in LA by a whole 5 percent! At first they thought it might just be a statistical anomaly, until a further study revealed that the decline was drastically noticeable only among communities where the movie was shown!

I guess academics can focus on useful things instead of inane autoenthographies in a zombie apocalypse.

>Not the military, not the municipal authorities, not even the people who ran the shelters where it was continuing to be screened without my knowledge. I don’t care... I got a few volunteers together, as much of my old crew as I could find. That kid who shot the Claremont stock footage, Malcolm Van Ryzin, yes, that Malcolm,2 he became my DP.3 We commandeered an abandoned dubbing house in West Hollywood and started cranking them out by the hundreds... It took a while to get responses. But when they came…

There’s a footnote which explains it, but until I get to it, I’ll be confused. Also, sorry for the inconsistent breaks. It’s some sort of eol character that I try to edit them out in my word processor when I see them.

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>>32489466
>Ten percent drop throughout the entire western safe zone. I was already on the road by then, shooting more stories. Anacapa was already wrapped, and we were halfway through Mission District. By the time Dos Palmos hit screens, and ADS was down 23 percent…only then did the government finally take an interest in me.

>Additional resources?

The answer is lolno, but he gets to film cool military stuff.

>Is that when you made ‘Fire of the Gods’?

Like the above

>The army had two functioning laser weapons programs: Zeus and MTHEL. Zeus was originally designed for munitions clearing, zapping land mines and unexploded bombs. It was small and light enough to be mounted in a specialized Humvee. The gunner sighted a target through a coaxial camera in the turret. He placed the aim point on the intended surface, then fired a pulse beam through the same optical aperture. Is that too technical?

Neat.

>I’m sorry. I became extremely immersed in the project. The beam was a weaponized version of solid-state, industrial lasers, the kind used to cut steel in factories. It could either burn through a bomb’s
outer casing or heat it to a point that detonated the explosive package. The same principle worked for zombies. On higher settings it punched right through their foreheads. On lower settings, it literally
boiled their brain till it exploded through the ears, nose, and eyes. The footage we shot was dazzling, but Zeus was a popgun next to MTHEL.

The next paragraph should satisfy any /k/ommando if the one above was not already enough.

>>32489466
>It’s some sort of eol character that I try to edit them out in my word processor when I see them.
>copy character
>use it in a find/replace all
>mass delete it
Wouldn't that work?

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>>32489605
>The acronym stands for Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser, codesigned by the United States and Israel to take out small incoming projectiles. When Israel declared self-quarantine, and when so many
terrorist groups were lobbing mortar rounds and rockets across the security wall, MTHEL was what knocked them down. About the size and shape of a World War II searchlight, it was, in fact, a deuterium fluoride laser, much more powerful than the solid state on Zeus. The effects were devastating. It blasted flesh from bones that then heated white before shattering into dust. When played at regular speed, it was magnificent, but at slo-mo…fire of the gods.

>mfw

>I think that might be an overstatement, but people were lined up on their off-hours. Some saw it every night. The poster campaign showed a close-up of a zombie being atomized. The image was lifted
right from a frame in the movie, the one classic shot when the morning fog actually allowed you to see the beam. The caption underneath read simply “Next.” It single-handedly saved the [MTHEL and Zeus].

>MTHEL was due to close a month after shooting. Zeus had already been chopped. We had to beg, borrow, and steal, literally, to get it reactivated just for our cameras. DeStRes had deemed both as a
gross waste of resources.

They need the industrial capacity to replace all the M16s in inventory with glorified Mini 14s. That’s an efficient use of resources.

>Inexcusably so. The “M” in MTHEL’s “Mobile” really meant a convoy of specialized vehicles, all of which were delicate, none truly all-terrain and each one completely dependent on the other. MTHEL also required both tremendous power and copious amounts of highly unstable, highly toxic chemicals for the lasering process.

>Inexcusably so

Perhaps, but there’s inexcusably stupid procurement decisions as well. Things like making everyone carry a Halligan Tool.

>>32489802
Perhaps, but there’s inexcusably stupid procurement decisions as well. Things like making everyone carry a Halligan Tool.

>Zeus was a little more economical. It was easier to cool, easier to maintain, and because it was Humvee-mounted, it could go anywhere it was needed. The problem was, why would it be needed? Even on high power, the gunner still had to hold a beam in place, on a moving target, mind you, for several seconds. A good sharpshooter could get the job done in half the time with twice the kills... In fact, both units had a squad of riflemen permanently assigned to them, people protecting a machine that is designed to protect people.

“In common with past papers by the same author, this study contains many fallacious assumptions, half-truths, distortions, and erroneous extrapolations. Unsubstantiated opinions are presented as facts. Any rebuttals give the appearance of arguments against the rudimentary virtues of simplicity, high performance, and low cost”

Revolt of the Majors always has the best quotes

>So why did you film them?
>Because Americans worship technology. It’s an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist. Whether we realize it or not, even the most indefatigable Luddite can’t deny our country’s technoprowess. We split the atom, we reached the moon, we’ve filled every household and business with more gadgets and gizmos than early sci-fi writers could have ever dreamed of. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, I’m in no place to judge. But I do know that just like all those ex-atheists in foxholes, most Americans were still praying for the God of science to save them.

Really

>But it didn’t matter. The movie was such a hit that I was asked to do a whole series. I called it “Wonder Weapons,” seven films on our military’s cutting-edge technology, none of which made any strategic difference, but all of which were psychological war winners

Makes

>>32489866
>A lie? It’s okay. You can say it. Yes, they were lies and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they’re used. The lies our government told us before the war, the ones that were supposed to keep us happy and blind, those were the ones that burned, because they prevented us from doing what had to be done. However, by the time I made Avalon, everyone was already doing everything they could possibly do to survive. The lies of the past were long gone and now the truth was everywhere, shambling down their streets, crashing through their doors, clawing at their throats. The truth was that no matter what we did, chances were most of us, if not all of us, were never going to see the future. The truth was that we were standing at what might be the twilight of our species and that truth was freezing a hundred people to death every night. They needed something to keep them warm. And so I lied, and so did the president, and every doctor and priest, every platoon leader and every parent. “We’re going to be okay.” That was our message. That was the message of every other filmmaker during the war. Did you ever hear of The Hero City?

YOU

>>32489917
>Great film, right? Marty made it over the course of the Siege. Just him, shooting on whatever medium he could get his hands on. What a masterpiece: the courage, the determination, the strength, dignity, kindness, and honor. It really makes you believe in the human race. It’s better than anything I’ve ever done. You should see it.
>I have
>Which version?… You need to do some homework, young man. Marty made both a wartime and postwar version of The Hero City. The version you saw, it was ninety minutes?

THINK

>Did it show the dark side of the heroes in The Hero City? Did it show the violence and the betrayal, the cruelty, the depravity, the bottomless evil in some of those “heroes’” hearts? No, of course not. Why would it? That was our reality and it’s what drove so many people to get snuggled in bed, blow out their candles, and take their last breath. Marty chose, instead, to show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they’re going to be okay. There’s a word for that kind of lie. Hope.

HUH

Short break, and I'll do blimps. Maybe one more account tonight

Tfw it's back

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>>32489933
Well, it's worked before.

>>32489933
>PARNELL AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, TENNESSEE
>[Gavin Blaire escorts me to the office of his squadron commander, Colonel Christina Eliopolis. As much a legend for her temper as for her outstanding war record, it is difficult
to see how so much intensity can be compacted into her diminutive, almost childlike frame. Her long black bangs and delicate facial features only reinforce the picture of
eternal youth. Then she removes her sunglasses, and I see the fire behind her eyes.]

Prepare for Dude Blimps LMAO

>I was a Raptor driver, the FA-22. It was, hands down, the best air superiority platform ever built. It could outfly and outfight God and all his angels. It was a monument to American technical prowess…and in this war, that prowess counted for shit.

IT’S JUST F-22 REEEEE!

>That must have been frustrating
>Frustrating? Do you know what it feels like to suddenly be told that the one goal you’ve worked toward your whole life, that you’ve sacrificed and suffered for, that’s pushed you beyond limits you never knew you had is now considered “strategically invalid”?

Sad!

>Let me put it this way; the Russian army wasn’t the only service to be decimated by their own government. The Armed Forces Reconstruction Act basically neutered the air force. Some DeStRes “experts” had determined that our resource-to-kill ratio, our RKR, was the most lopsided of all the branches.

I like to imagine that this is the universe where Pierre Sprey actually became an important and influential person. This makes me extremely sad.

>>32490400
>How about the JSOW, the Joint Standoff Weapon? It was a gravity bomb, guided by GPS and Inertial Nav, that could be released from as far as forty miles away. The baseline version carried one hundred
and forty BLU-97B submunitions, and each bomblet carried a shaped charge against armored targets, a fragmented case against infantry, and a zirconium ring to set the entire kill zone ablaze. It had been considered a triumph, until Yonkers.1 Now we were told that the price of one JSOW kit—the materials, manpower, time, and energy, not to mention the fuel and ground maintenance needed for the delivery aircraft—could pay for a platoon of infantry pukes who could smoke a thousand times as many Gs. Not enough bang for our buck, like so many of our former crown jewels. They went through us like an industrial laser... you have more combat aircraft lost to the stroke of a pen than to all the SAMs, Flak, and enemy fighters in history.2 At least the assets weren’t scrapped, thank God, just mothballed… Long-term investment,” they called it. That’s the one thing you can always depend on; as we’re fighting one war, we’re always preparing for the next one. Our airlift capacity, at least the organization, was almost left intact.

It might be more effective if bombs worked on zombies, but Lo Pan.

>Airborne resupply was our primary objective, the only one that really counted anymore.

>[She points to a yellowed map on the wall.]
>The base commander let me keep it, after what happened to me.
>[The map is of the wartime continental United States. All land west of the Rockies is shadowed a light gray. Amongst this gray are a variety of colored circles.]

>>32490543
>[She points to a yellowed map on the wall.]
>The base commander let me keep it, after what happened to me.
>[The map is of the wartime continental United States. All land west of the Rockies is shadowed a light gray. Amongst this gray are a variety of colored circles.]

>Islands in the Sea of Zack. Green denotes active military facilities. Some of them had been converted into refugee centers. Some were still contributing to the war effort. Some were well defended but had no strategic impact.

>The Red Zones were labeled “Offensively Viable”: factories, mines, power plants. The army’d left custodial teams during the big pullback. Their job was to guard and maintain these facilities for a time
when, if, we could add them to the overall war effort. The Blue Zones were civilian areas where people had managed to make a stand, carve out a little piece of real estate, and figure some way to live
within its boundaries. All these zones were in need of resupply and that’s what the “Continental Airlift” was all about.

>It was a massive operation, not just in terms of aircraft and fuel, but organization as well. Remaining in contact with all these islands, processing their demands, coordinating with DeStRes, then trying to
procure and prioritize all the materiel for each drop made it the statistically largest undertaking in air force history.

>We tried to stay away from consumables, things like food and medicine that required regular deliveries. These were classified as DDs, dependency drops, and they got a backseat to SSDs, self-sustaining drops, like tools, spare parts, and tools to make spare parts. “They don’t need fish,” Sinclair used to say, “they need fishing poles.” Still, every autumn, we dropped a lot of fish, and wheat, and salt, and dried vegetables and baby formula…Winters were hard. Remember how long they used to be? Helping people to help themselves is great in theory, but you still gotta keep ’em alive.

Neat

This is the one with the plane crash. I'm looking for opportunities to riff it, but it's pretty atmospheric. I might just dump it without commentary.

Hoo boy, this is going to be long. Here we go:

I’ll never be sure what exactly brought us down: mechanical malfunction or metal fatigue combined with weather. It might have been the contents of our payload, mislabeled or mishandled. That
happened a lot more than anyone wanted to think about. Sometimes if hazardous materials weren’t packaged properly, or, God forbid, some shit-for-brains QC inspector let his people assemble their
detonators before crating them for travel…that happened to a buddy of mine, just a routine flight from Palmdale to Vandenberg, not even across an infested area. Two hundred Type 38 detonators, all fully
assembled with their power cells accidentally running, all set to blow on the same freq as our radio.

[She snaps her fingers.]

That could have been us. We were on a hop from Phoenix to the Blue Zone outside Tallahassee, Florida. It was late October, almost full winter back then. Honolulu was trying to squeeze out just a few
more drops before the weather socked us in till March. It was our ninth haul that week. We were all on “tweeks,” these little blue stims that kept you going without hampering your reflexes or judgment. I
guess they worked well enough, but they made me have to piss my kidneys out every twenty minutes. My crew, the “guys,” used to give me a lot of grief, you know, girls always having to go. I know they
weren’t really putting the hate on, but I still tried to hold it as long as I could.

After two hours of banging around in some seriously heavy turbulence, I finally broke down and turned the stick over to my copilot. I’d just zipped up when suddenly there was this massive jolt like God
had just drop-kicked our tail…and suddenly our nose was dipping. The head on our C-130 wasn’t even really a toilet, just a portable chempot with a heavy, plastic shower curtain. That’s probably what
ended up saving my life. If I’d been trapped in a real compartment, maybe knocked out or unable to reach the latch

>>32491040
Suddenly there was this screech, this overpowering blast of high-pressure air and I
was sucked out right through the rear of the aircraft, right past where the tail should have been. I was spiraling, out of control. I could just make out my ship, this gray mass shrinking and smoking on its way down. I straightened myself out, hit my chute. I was still in a daze, my head swimming, trying
to catch my breath. I fumbled for my radio and started hollering for my crew to punch out. I didn’t get an answer. All I could see was one other chute, the only other one that made it out.

That was the worst moment, right there, just hanging helplessly. I could see the other chute, above and north of me by about three and a half clicks. I looked for the others. I tried my radio again, but
wasn’t able to get a signal. I figured it had been damaged during my “exit.” I tried to get my bearings, somewhere over southern Louisiana, a swampy wilderness that seemed to have no end. I wasn’t sure
exactly, my brain was still misfiring. At least I had sense enough to check the bare essentials. I could move my legs, my arms, I wasn’t in pain or bleeding externally. I checked to make sure my survival kit
was intact, still strapped to my thigh, and that my weapon, my Meg,4 was still jamming me in the ribs.

>Did the air force prepare you for situations like these?

We all had to pass the Willow Creek Escape and Evade program in the Klamath Mountains in California. It even had a few real Gs in there with us, tagged and tracked and placed at specific marks to
give us the “real feel.” It’s a lot like what they teach you in the civilian manual: movement, stealth, how to take out Zack before he can howl your position. We all “made it,” lived, I mean, although a couple of
pilots washed out on a Section Eight. I guess they just couldn’t hack the real feel. That never bothered me, being alone in hostile territory. That was standard operating procedure for me.

>>32491052
>Always?

You wanna talk about being alone in a hostile environment, try my four years at Colorado Springs.

>But there were other women…
Other cadets, other competitors who happen to have the same genitalia. Trust me, when the pressure kicked in, sisterhood punched out. No, it was me, only me. Self-contained, self-reliant, and always,
unquestionably self-assured. That’s the only thing that got me through four years of Academy hell, and it was the only thing I could count on as I hit the mud in the middle of G country.
I unclasped my chute—they teach you not to waste time concealing it—and headed in the direction of the other chute. It took me a couple hours, splashing through this cold slime that numbed everything
below my knees. I wasn’t thinking clearly, my head was still spinning. No excuse, I know, but that’s why I didn’t notice that the birds had suddenly beat it in the opposite direction. I did hear the scream
though, faint and far away. I could see the chute tangled in the trees. I started running, another no-no, making all that noise without stopping to listen for Zack. I couldn’t see anything, just all these naked
gray branches until they were right on top of me. If it wasn’t for Rollins, my copilot, I’m sure I’da been a goner.
I found him dangling from his harness, dead, twitching. His flight suit had been torn open5 and his entrails were hanging…draped over five of them as they fed in this cloud of red-brown water. One of
them had managed to get its neck entangled in a section of small intestine. Every time it moved it would jerk Rollins, ringing him like a fucking bell. They didn’t notice me at all. Close enough to touch and
they didn’t even look.
At least I had the brains to snap on my suppressor. I didn’t have to waste a whole clip, another fuckup. I was so angry I almost started kicking their corpses. I was so ashamed, so blinded by self-hate…

>Self-hate?

I screwed the pooch! My ship, my crew…

>>32491093
>But it was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.

How do you know that? You weren’t there. Shit, I wasn’t even there. I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t doing my job. I was squatting over a bucket like a goddamn girl!
I found myself burning up, mentally. Fucking weakling, I told myself, fucking loser. I started to spiral, not just hating myself, but hating myself for hating myself. Does that make any sense? I’m sure I might

have just stayed there, shaking and helpless and waiting for Zack.

But then my radio started squawking. “Hello? Hello? Is anyone out there? Anyone punch outta that wreck?” It was a woman’s voice, clearly civilian by her language and tone.

I answered immediately, identified myself, and demanded that she respond in kind. She told me she was a skywatcher, and her handle was “Mets Fan,” or just “Mets” for short. The Skywatch system
was this ad hoc network of isolated ham radio operators. They were supposed to report on downed aircrews and do what they could to help with their rescue. It wasn’t the most efficient system, mainly
because there were so few, but it looked like today was my lucky day. She told me that she had seen the smoke and falling wreckage of my Herc’ and even though she was probably less than a day’s walk
from my position, her cabin was heavily surrounded. Before I could say anything she told me not to worry, that she’d already reported my position to search and rescue, and the best thing to do was to getto open ground where I could rendezvous for pickup.

I reached for my GPS but it had been torn from my suit when I was sucked out of my ship. I had a backup survival map, but it was so big, so unspecific, and my hump took me over so many states that it was practically just a map of the U.S.…my head was still clouded with anger and doubt. I told her I didn’t know my position, didn’t know where to go…

>>32491105
She laughed. “You mean you’ve never made this run before? You don’t have every inch of it committed to memory? You didn’t see where you were as you were hanging by the silk?” She was so sure of me, trying to get me to think instead of just spoon-feeding me the answers. I realized that I did know this area well, that I had flown over it at least twenty times in the last three months, and that I had to be somewhere in the Atchafalaya basin. “Think,” she told me, “what did you see from your chute? Were there any rivers, any roads?” At first, all I could remember were the trees, the endless gray landscape with no distinguishable features, and then gradually, as my brain cleared, I remembered seeing both rivers and a road. I checked on the map and realized that directly north of me was the I-10 freeway. Mets told me that was the best place for an S&R pickup. She told me it shouldn’t take any longer than a day or two at best if I got a move on and stopped burning daylight.

As I was about to leave, she stopped me and asked if there was anything I’d forgotten to do. I remember that moment clearly. I turned back to Rollins. He was just starting to open his eyes again. I felt like I should say something, apologize, maybe, then I put a round through his forehead.
Mets told me not to blame myself, and no matter what, not to let it distract me from the job I had to do. She said, “Stay alive, stay alive and do your job.” Then she added, “And stop using up your
weekend minutes.”

She was talking about battery power—she didn’t miss a trick—so I signed off and started moving north across the swamp. My brain was now on full burner, all my lessons from the Creek came rolling
back. I stepped, I halted, I listened. I stuck to dry ground where I could, and I made sure to pace myself very carefully. I had to swim a couple times, that really made me nervous. Twice I swear I could feel a hand just brush against my leg.

>>32491132
Once, I found a road, small, barely two lanes and in horrible disrepair. Still, it was better than trudging through the mud. I reported to Mets what I’d found and asked if it would take me right to the freeway. She warned me to stay off it and every other road that crisscrossed the basin. “Roads mean cars,” she said, “and cars mean Gs.” She was talking about any bitten human drivers who died of their wounds while still behind the wheel and, because a ghoul doesn’t have the IQ points to open a door or unbuckle a seatbelt, would be doomed to spend the rest of their existence trapped in their cars.

I asked her what the danger of that was. Since they couldn’t get out, and as long as I didn’t let them reach through an open window to grab me, what did it matter how many “abandoned” cars I passed
along the road. Mets reminded me that a trapped G was still able to moan and therefore still able to call for others. Now I was really confused. If I was going to waste so much time ducking a few back
roads with a couple Zack-filled cars, why was I heading for a freeway that was sure to be jammed with them?

She said, “You’ll be up above the swamp. How are more zombies gonna get to you?” Because it was built several stories above the swamp, this section of the I-10 was the safest place in the whole
basin. I confessed I hadn’t thought of that. She laughed and said, “Don’t worry, honey. I have. Stick with me and I’ll get you home.”

>>32491151
And I did. I stayed away from anything even resembling a road and stuck to as pure a wilderness track as I could. I say “pure” but the truth was you couldn’t avoid all signs of humanity or what could have
been humanity a long time ago. There were shoes, clothes, bits of garbage, and tattered suitcases and hiking gear. I saw a lot of bones on the patches of raised mud. I couldn’t tell if they were human or
animal. One time I found this rib cage; I’m guessing it was a gator, a big one. I didn’t want to think about how many Gs it took to bring that bastard down.

The first G I saw was small, probably a kid, I couldn’t tell. Its face was eaten off, the skin, nose, eyes, lips, even the hair and ears…not completely gone, but partially hanging or stuck in patches to the
exposed skull. Maybe there were more wounds, I couldn’t tell. It was stuck inside one of those long civilian hiker’s packs, stuffed in there tight with the drawstring pulled right up around its neck. The
shoulder straps had gotten tangled on the roots of a tree, it was splashing around, half submerged. Its brain must have been intact, and even some of the muscle fibers connecting the jaw. That jaw started
snapping as I approached. I don’t know how it knew I was there, maybe some of the nasal cavity was still intact, maybe the ear canal. It couldn’t moan, its throat had been too badly mangled, but the splashing might have attracted attention, so I put it out of its misery, if it really was miserable, and tried not to think about it. That was another thing they taught us at Willow Creek: don’t write their eulogy, don’t try to imagine who they used to be, how they came to be here, how they came to be this. I know, who doesn’t do that, right? Who doesn’t look at one of those things and just naturally start to wonder? It’s like reading the last page of a book…

>>32491160
your imagination just naturally spinning. And that’s when you get distracted, get sloppy, let your guard down and end up leaving someone else to wonder what happened to you. I tried to put her, it, out of my mind. Instead, I found myself wondering why it had been the only one I’d seen. That was a practical survival question, not just idle musings, so I got on the radio and asked Mets if there was something I was missing here, if maybe there was some area I should be careful to avoid.

She reminded me that this area was, for the most part, depopulated because the Blue Zones of Baton Rouge and Lafayette were pulling most of the Gs in either direction. That was bittersweet comfort,
being right between two of the heaviest clusters for miles. She laughed, again…“Don’t worry about it, you’ll be fine.”

I saw something up ahead, a lump that was almost a thicket, but too boxy and shining in places. I reported it to Mets. She warned me not to go near it, keep on going and keep my eyes on the prize. I
was feeling pretty good by this point, a little of the old me coming back.
As I got closer, I could see that it was a vehicle, a Lexus Hybrid SUV. It was covered in mud and moss and sitting in the water up to its doors. I could see that the rear windows were blocked with survival
gear: tent, sleeping bag, cooking utensils, hunting rifle with boxes and boxes of shells, all new, some still in their plastic. I came around the driver’s side window and caught the glint of a .357. It was still
clutched in the driver’s brown, shriveled hand. He was still sitting upright, looking straight ahead.

>>32491186
There was light coming through the side of his skull. He was badly decomposed, at least a year, maybe more. He wore survival khakis, the kind you’d order from one of those upscale, hunting/safari catalogs. They were still clean and crisp, the only blood was from the head wound. I couldn’t see any other wound, no bites, nothing. That hit me hard, a lot harder than the little faceless kid. This guy had had everything he needed to survive, everything except the will. I know that’s supposition. Maybe there was a wound I couldn’t see, hidden by his clothes or the advanced decomposition. But I knew it, leaning there with my face against the glass, looking at this monument to how easy it was to give up.
I stood there for a moment, long enough for Mets to ask me what was happening. I told her what I was seeing, and without pause, she told me to keep on going.

I started to argue. I thought I should at least search the vehicle, see if there was anything I needed. She asked me, sternly, if there was anything I needed, not wanted. I thought about it, admitted there
wasn’t. His gear was plentiful, but it was civilian, big and bulky; the food needed cooking, the weapons weren’t silenced. My survival kit was pretty thorough, and, if for some reason I didn’t find a helo
waiting at the I-10, I could always use this as an emergency supply cache.
I brought up the idea of maybe using the SUV itself. Mets asked if I had a tow truck and some jumper cables. Almost like a kid, I answered no. She asked, “Then what’s keeping you?” or something like
that, pushing me to get a move on. I told her to just wait a minute, I leaned my head against the driver’s side window, I sighed and felt beat again, drained. Mets got on my ass, pushing me. I snapped back for her to shut the fuck up, I just needed a minute, a couple seconds to…I don’t know what.

>>32491199
I must have kept my thumb on the “transmit” button for a few seconds too long, because Mets suddenly asked, “What was that?” “What?” I asked. She’d heard something, something on my end.

>She’d heard it before you?

I guess so, because in another second, once I’d cleared my head and opened my ears, I began to hear it too. The moan…loud and close, followed by the splashing of feet.
I looked up, through the car’s window, the hole in the dead man’s skull, and the window on the other side, and that’s when I saw the first one. I spun around and saw five more coming at me from all
directions. And behind them were another ten, fifteen. I took a shot at the first one, the round went wild. Mets started squawking at me, demanding a contact report. I gave her a head count and she told me to stay cool, don’t try to run, just stay put and follow what I’d learned at Willow Creek. I started to ask how she knew about Willow Creek when she shouted for me to shut up and fight.
I climbed to the top of the SUV—you’re supposed to look for the closest physical defense—and started to measure ranges. I lined up my first target, took a deep breath, and dropped him. To be a
fighter jock is to be able to make decisions as fast as your electrochemical impulses can carry them. I’d lost that nanosecond timing when I hit the mud, now it was back. I was calm, I was focused, all the
doubt and weakness were gone. The whole engagement felt like ten hours, but I guess in reality, it was more like ten minutes. Sixty-one in total, a nice thick ring of submerged corpses. I took my time, checked my remaining ammo and waited for the next wave to come. None did.

>>32491207
It was another twenty minutes before Mets asked me for an update. I gave her a body count and she told me to remind her never to piss me off. I laughed, the first time since I’d hit the mud. I felt good again, strong and confident. Mets warned me that all these distractions had erased any chance of making it to the I-10 before nightfall, and that I should probably start thinking about where I was gonna catch my forty.

I got as far away from the SUV as I could before the sky started to darken and found a decent enough perch in the branches of a tall tree. My kit had this standard-issue microfiber hammock; great invention, light and strong and with clasps to keep you from rolling out. That part was also supposed to help calm you down, help you get to sleep faster…yeah, right! It didn’t matter that I’d already been up for close to forty-eight hours, that I’d tried all the breathing exercises they taught us at the Creek, or that I even slipped two of my Baby-Ls.6 You’re only supposed to take one, but I figured that was for lightweight wussies. I was me again, remember, I could handle it, and hey, I needed to sleep.
I asked her, since there was nothing else to do, or think about, if it was okay to talk about her. Who was she, really? How’d she end up in this isolated cabin in the middle of Cajun country? She didn’t
sound Cajun, she didn’t even have a southern accent. And how did she know so much about pilot training without ever going through it herself? I was starting to get my suspicions, starting to piece together a rough outline of who she really was.

Mets told me, again, that there would be plenty of time later for an episode of The View. Right now I needed my sleep, and to check in with her at dawn. I felt the Ls kick in between “check” and “in.” I was out by “dawn.”

>>32491225
I slept hard. The sky was already light by the time I opened my eyes. I’d been dreaming about, what else, Zack. His moans were still echoing in my ears when I woke up. And then I looked down and
realized they weren’t dreams. There must have been at least a hundred of them surrounding the tree. They were all reaching excitedly, all trying to climb over each other to get up to me. At least they
couldn’t ramp up, the ground wasn’t solid enough. I didn’t have the ammo to take all of them out, and since a firefight might also buy time for more to show up, I decided it was best to pack up my gear and
execute my escape plan.

>You had planned for this?

Not really planned, but they’d trained us for situations like this. It’s a lot like jumping from an aircraft: pick your approximate landing zone, tuck and roll, keep loose, and get up as quick as you can. The goal is to put some serious distance between you and your attackers. You take off running, jogging, or even “speed walking”; yes, they actually told us to consider this as a low-impact alternative. The point is to get far enough way to give you time to plan your next move. According to my map, the I-10 was close enough for me to make a run for it, be spotted by a rescue chopper, and be lifted off before these stink bags would ever catch up. I got on the radio, reported my situation to Mets, and told her to signal S&R for an immediate pickup. She told me to be careful. I crouched, I jumped, and cracked my ankle on a submerged rock.

I hit the water, facedown. Its chill was the only thing that kept me from blacking out from the pain. I came up spluttering, choking, and the first thing I saw was the whole swarm coming at me. Mets must
have known something was up by the fact that I didn’t report my safe landing. Maybe she asked me what had happened, although I don’t remember. I just remember her yelling at me to get up and run.

>>32491232
I tried putting weight on my ankle, but lightning shot up through my leg and spine. It could bear the weight, but…I screamed so loud, I’m sure she heard me through her cabin’s window. “Get out of there,” she was yelling…“GO!” I started limping, splashing away with upwards of a hundred Gs on my ass. It must have been comical, this frantic race of cripples.

Mets yelled, “If you can stand on it, you can run on it! It’s not a weight-bearing bone! You can do this!”
“But it hurts!” I actually said that, with tears running down my face, with Zack behind me howling for his lunch. I reached the freeway, looming above the swamp like the ruins of a Roman aqueduct. Mets
had been right about its relative safety. Only neither of us had counted on my injury or my undead tail. There was no immediate entrance so I had to limp to one of the small, adjoining roads that Mets had
originally warned me to avoid. I could see why as I began to get close. Wrecked and rusting cars were piled up by the hundreds and every tenth one had at least one G locked inside. They saw me and
started to moan, the sound carried for miles in every direction.

Mets shouted, “Don’t worry about that now! Just get on the on-ramp and watch the fucking grabbers!”

>Grabbers?

The ones reaching through broken windows. On the open road, I at least had a chance of dodging them, but on the on-ramp, you’re hemmed in on either side. That was the worst part, by far, those few
minutes trying to get up onto the freeway. I had to go in between the cars; my ankle wouldn’t let me get on top of them. These rotting hands would reach out for me, grabbing my flight suit or my wrist. Every head shot cost me seconds that I didn’t have. The steep incline was already slowing me down. My ankle was throbbing, my lungs were aching, and the swarm was now gaining on me fast. If it hadn’t been for Mets…

>>32491256
She was shouting at me the whole time. “Move your ass, you fuckin’ bitch!” She was getting pretty raw by then. “Don’t you dare quit…don’t you DARE crap out on me!” She never let up, never gave me
an inch. “What are you, some weak little victim?” At that point I thought I was. I knew I could never make it. The exhaustion, the pain, more than anything, I think, the anger at fucking up so badly. I actually considered turning my pistol around, wanting to punish myself for…you know. And then Mets really hit me. She roared, “What are you, your fucking mother!?!”

That did it. I hauled ass right up onto the interstate.

I reported to Mets that I’d made it, then asked, “Now what the fuck do I do?”
Her voice suddenly got very soft. She told me to look up. A black dot was heading at me from out of the morning sun. It was following the freeway and grew very quickly into the form of a UH-60. I let out a whoop and popped my signal flare.

The first thing I saw when they winched me aboard was that it was a civilian chopper, not government Search and Rescue. The crew chief was a big Cajun with a thick goatee and wraparound
sunglasses. He asked, “Where de’ hell you come from?” Sorry if I butchered the accent. I almost cried and punched him in his thigh-sized bicep. I laughed and said that they work fast. He shot me a look
like I didn’t know what I was talking about. It turned out later that this wasn’t the rescue team but just a routine air shuttle between Baton Rouge and Lafayette. I didn’t know at that moment, and I didn’t care. I reported to Mets that I got my pickup, that I was safe. I thanked her for everything she’d done for me, and…and so I wouldn’t really start bawling, I tried to cover with a joke about finally getting that episode of The View. I never got a response.

>>32491256
>She sounds like a hell of a Skywatcher.
She was a hell of a woman.
>You said you had your “suspicions” by this point.
No civilian, even a veteran Skywatcher, could know so much about what goes into wearing those wings. She was just too savvy, too informed, the kind of baseline knowledge of someone who had to have
gone through it herself.
>So she was a pilot.
Definitely; not air force—I would have known her—but maybe a squid or a jarhead. They’d lost as many pilots as the air force on resupply hops like mine, and eight out of ten were never accounted for. I’m sure that she must have run into a situation like mine, had to ditch, lost her crew, maybe even blamed herself for it like me. Somehow she managed to find that cabin and spent the rest of the war as one
kick-ass Skywatcher.
>That makes sense.
Doesn’t it?
>[There is an awkward pause. I search her face, waiting for more.]
What?
>They never found her.
No.
>Or the cabin.
No.
>And Honolulu never had any record of a Skywatcher with the call sign Mets Fan.
You’ve done your homework.
>I…
You probably also read my after-action report, right?
>Yes.

And the psych evaluation they tacked on after my official debriefing.
>Well…

>>32491275
Well, it’s bullshit, okay? So what if everything she told me was information I’d already been briefed on, so what if the psych team “claim” my radio was knocked out before I hit the mud, and so the fuck what
if Mets is short for Metis, the mother of Athena, the Greek goddess with the stormy gray eyes. Oh, the shrinks had a ball with that one, especially when they “discovered” that my mother grew up in the
Bronx.
>And that remark she made about your mother?
Who the hell doesn’t have mother issues? If Mets was a pilot, she was a natural gambler. She knew she had a good chance of scoring a hit with “mom.” She knew the risk, took her shot…Look, if they
thought I’d cracked up, why didn’t I lose my flight status? Why did they let me have this job? Maybe she wasn’t a pilot herself, maybe she was married to one, maybe she’d wanted to be one but never
made it as far as I did. Maybe she was just a scared, lonely voice that did what she could to help another scared lonely voice from ending up like her. Who cares who she was, or is? She was there when I needed her, and for the rest of my life, she’ll always be with me.

FIN

And that concludes one of my favorite vignettes of World War Z. Sure, it's something of a "what a twist" moment, but it's executed well. Which makes the stupid shit throughout WWZ so sad, because Brooks has some talent - probably more than me.

If the thread dies after this, I'm going to try have a new one during the week, probably Monday. I'll announce it in the WFG

>>32491052
>live zombies in training space with expensive pilots
this some lo pan shit right here

>>32491411
I was too caught up in the atmosphere. I really enjoyed this segment. It has some silliness, but it's outweighed. It's not as good as the "parents euthanizing their kids in the church" or "starving to death in frozen trailer park" segments, but the I-10 part is chilling, having lived through Hurricane Katrina.

>>32491456
The whole segment is basically just more "homespun wisdom beats smarty-pants military." Meh.

>>32491474
But with the twist that "muh homespun wisdom" is that she's absolutely fucking nuts

Bless you for destroying fuddlore, and for giving us keks

>>32491514
The twist has been played out since Fight Club, I fear. Not to mention that explaining it retroactively is poor form, when it would've been better to put clues within the narrative that she was unreliable.

>>32491328
That was a really nice segment, thanks Billy.

>>32489051
Ah shit, just discovered this thread, but need the sleep for work tomorrow.

Will be nice for the morning and the bus, at least! Love your analysis, Billy Boy!

>>32491551
Yeah, despite my own complaints about it, the thread is entertaining. Thanks, OP.

>>32491563
No problem. This thread is for talking shit about bad authors, myself included

>>32491600
>authors
>myself included

Billy pls