World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

The narrator provides a brief introduction to their interview with a doctor named Kwang Jingshu, explaining that Greater Chongqing has been decimated by the war. Its population, once 35 million, is now less than 50,000. The area lacks central power and has limited running water. Jingshu currently serves as chairman of the security council and has been an important part of the postwar response helping to prevent a postwar outbreak. Jingshu’s testimony is what follows.

Jingshu states that the first outbreak he witnessed was in a poor, remote village called New Dachang. While working an uneventful shift at a hospital in the region, he was suddenly paged for an emergency. He headed out in his car on the unpaved roads, finally locating the small cluster of houses. He found seven patients on cots in a meeting hall. The villagers, who were clearly frightened, had locked the patients in.

Jingshu’s initial reaction was anger. He thinks how China had become the world’s dominant superpower, leading the world in technological prowess but was still populated by these “ignorant peasants” (6). He examined the first shivering patient, who was running a fever and has a bite mark. Jingshu discerns that the bite was from a human and hypothesized it was the cause of the infection. The other patients had similar wounds.

The peasants took Jingshu to the source of the bite marks—a 12-year-old boy, who was bound up with twine and locked in an abandoned house. Despite having rubbed his skin off around the twine, the boy was not bleeding. When Jingshu took the boy’s blood, he discovered it consisted of a “brown, viscous matter” (7). The boy then began violently jerking around and managed to snap his right arm off. As the boy dragged himself across the floor, Jingshu fled the house in fear and locked the door.

The boy’s mother told Jingshu that the boy was bitten while diving for treasure in the Three Gorges Reservoir with his father. His father never resurfaced. Jingshu called an old colleague who worked in infectious diseases and showed him the patients with his phone. The colleague told Jingshu not to go anywhere, and Jingshu could tell from his words and tone that this was not the only outbreak. Within an hour, 50 men claiming to be from the Ministry of Health (but who were obviously from the Ministry of State Security) showed up in hazmat suits. The MSS officers took the patients away and brought the boy who bit them out in a body bag. The rest of the village was subjected to rough handling and inspection. The narrator adds that Jingshu was arrested but no formal charges are on record. The outbreak had already spread beyond China by the time Jingshu managed to escape.

The narrator’s next interview is with a smuggler, Nury Televaldi, at a café in Lhasa—the most populated city in the world, where many of the inhabitants are still celebrating the recent victory of the Social Democrats over the Llamist Party in the general election. Televaldi explains that, while smuggling was once rare in his hometown of Kashi due to the effort and expense, it became a thriving industry during the outbreak. Televaldi was not initially a “shetou,” or smuggler of refugees (12), but found it a lucrative business, as everyone suddenly wanted to leave. Despite the government’s attempts to crackdown, Kashi became a popular overland route, with most traveling by land but some of the richer clients travelling by air.

Televaldi explains he always wanted to get into air transportation, and the outbreak allowed him to do so. The narrator asks about the risk of infection, to which Televaldi replies that before Flight 575, the shetou were always careful and never accepted business from anyone with an obvious infection. Passengers had to appear healthy to the shetou, even if infected, so they were able to also fool the immigration authorities. Televaldi tells of a man with a small bitemark who made it to Paris with his wife before collapsing. He refused to call any doctors out of fear of being sent back, so he ordered his wife to leave him before the coma came on. Televaldi speculates that this may have been where the Paris outbreak began.

Televaldi emphasizes to the narrator that people were on the move out of desperation, driven by rumors of a cure in the West. The choice was succumbing to infection or being “treated” by their respective governments (14). Many of them disappeared without a trace, most likely absorbed into impoverished neighborhoods to work off their “bao,” or travel debts (15). The narrator presses Televaldi about the shetou spreading rumors of a cure in these other countries, but Televaldi denies ever having done so personally.

Televaldi’s area of expertise was land transport into central Asia, and he tells the narrator that corrupt countries were almost begging for his business. He didn’t encounter many infected people until later, but they generally weren’t dangerous because their family members had them bound up. The riskiest type of smuggling was by sea, where an infected passenger could contaminate the entire hold. Captains might end up dumping everyone overboard or putting them on a deserted beach somewhere. He speculates that this may be where the stories of divers and swimmers disappearing came from or those about the infected wandering out of the oceans. Televaldi explains that he finally quit after dealing with a truck heading to Kyrgyzstan, where the wealthy passengers appear infected, and he realized that the money he was getting would be useless very soon. Televaldi could only give the helpless driver some money and wish him luck.

This interview is with Stanley MacDonald, a former soldier who has ended up at a monastery in Meteora in a quest for peace. According to the narrator, MacDonald was part of “drug interdiction operations” for the living dead in Kyrgyzstan (18) as a member of the Third Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. MacDonald clarifies in his interview that he was deployed to Kyrgyzstan before any major outbreak or panic, and his team’s mission was nothing unusual—just opium and hash. However, they knew “something is wrong” (19) when they approached a caravan and find a blood trail but no bodies. They also found pack mules that were torn apart and covered with bite marks and bags of abandoned “Bad Brown” (19)—a certain type of opium from Afghanistan.

They followed the blood trail to the cave entrance, where they saw the bodies of men killed by the booby traps they had set for invaders. MacDonald assumes they were trying to run from something. Further along, they stumbled upon a group of shooters who had also been torn apart, their body parts scattered. They had fired hundreds of rounds into the bodies of men who lay intact with flesh and body parts in their mouths. MacDonald and his men found the same scenario in every chamber. MacDonald tried to pull a body free from a collapsed tunnel, but the top half ripped from the bottom and tried to pull MacDonald’s arm into its mouth. Back in Canada, MacDonald is told that what he experienced was the result of exposure to some type of chemical agents and his PTSD. He is forced to undergo an “evaluation” (21), which he claims is the equivalent of an enemy “interrogation” (21) but conducted by your own side. He wants desperately to believe what his side is telling him, emphasizing that “[t]hey don’t teach you how to resist your own people” (21). As a result, he is entirely unprepared for what is coming.

The narrator is taken blindfolded to the next interview, so he doesn’t know the exact location of the village suspended from the trees in the Amazon Rain Forest. It is not clear whether the village’s location or the “warlike nature” of its occupants allowed them to endure the war more successfully than even advanced industrialized nations (21). The narrator speaks with a white man named Fernando Oliveira, who has a drug addiction and whose status in the village is unknown.

Oliveira immediately defends his role as a doctor, insisting that he helps people. His defensive posture is because he performs transplants of illegally harvested organs, mostly from China. He tells the narrator that his patient at the onset of the crisis was a man named Herr Muller with a rare genetic condition that caused his organs to be reversed. The transplanted heart—which turned out to be infected—came from someone with the exact same condition, which is the only way the transplant could have worked. Oliveira worked under Doctor Silva for the procedure, who assured Oliveira everything was fine when Muller immediately began manifesting symptoms of the “Walking Plague” (22). Although Oliveira was concerned, he took Silva’s advice and went out on the town.

Oliveira didn’t take the phone call from his receptionist right away. When he finally picked up, she told him Muller was in a coma. Oliveira raced back to the clinic, where Muller’s hysterical nurse explained that the patient had flatlined then woke up and bit Silva. Oliveira heard a commotion in Muller’s room. He got his gun from his car and went in. He found Muller in a corner eating Silva. Oliveira is unprepared for the shot from his “Desert Eagle” (25), a powerful Israeli gun, and it blows Muller’s head off.

Oliveira tells the narrator that the police helped him cover up the story because they were his allies in the organ business, and they took the bodies of Silva and Muller away. They provided no explanation of Muller’s disappearance to his family. Oliveira says Muller’s wife was lucky in that the heart transplant infected Muller before he could make it back home. Oliveira then speculates that illegally transplanted organs arriving from China may have been responsible for infecting thousands of people. Oliveira never warned anyone about the dangers because he was trying to rebuild his life after the incident, which turned into a scandal for him. He didn’t realize how dire the situation was until it was too late.

The interview is conducted aboard the IS Imfingo with Captain Jacob Nyathi. The ship, known as an “Infinity Ship” (28), produces electricity from seawater and is considered the “future of maritime transport” (28). Nyathi tells the narrator he comes from an impoverished part of Khayelitsha township, outside of Cape Town. At the onset of the outbreak, he was walking home after waiting tables. He heard gunshots, which is not out of the ordinary in his neighborhood. He immediately took shelter behind a barbershop, but the shooting didn’t stop. He heard screams and saw a people running away and telling everyone else to run too.

Nyathi didn’t listen. He instead tried to fight through the crowd to get to his house, where his mother and two younger sisters were. After being knocked over and trampled, he saw the zombies slowly coming toward him. He backed into a shanty, where another zombie pulled at him, trying to eat him. Nyathi manages to grab a cooking pot and hit the zombie several times in the head. He then took off running, weaving his way through “a nightmare of shacks and fire and grasping hands” (31). He tried to help a terrified woman and her children. The woman only stabbed his hand with a screwdriver.

Nyathi made it out of the shantytown but was immediately hit with something in the shoulder and knocked out. When he came to, he was in the recovery ward at Groote Schuur Hospital. He was high on some type of medication, maybe morphine, when he was told the police had shot him in the shoulder. He was still in a state of euphoria when he heard people arguing over whether the patients downstairs have rabies. He didn’t awaken to “the nightmare” around him for some time (32).

The narrator describes interview subject Jurgen Warmbrunn as having unruly hair and eyebrows that resemble Albert Einstein’s. Warmbrunn does not reveal which Israeli intelligence service he worked or still works for but acknowledges he was once considered a spy. Warmbrunn feels his people were more prepared for the war than others because they are used to living “in constant fear of extinction” (32).

Warmbrunn explains that he first detected something was wrong when a client complained that his employer’s new software decryption program seemed to be inaccurately decoding emails from China. Warmbrunn examined one of the emails and noted that the characters were decoded correctly, but the text said something about reanimated corpses that turned into “some kind of homicidal berserker” (33). He initially dismissed the message, presuming there must be some kind of “code within a code” (33).

Shortly afterward, Warmbrunn was talking to a man at his daughter’s wedding, and the man brought up reanimated corpses. The man explained that he was at Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town, recovering from an injury he suffered while feeding a shark, when the first “cases” were brought in from Khayelitsha province (34). The man didn’t see any patients himself but got stories of their condition from staff. Warmbrunn took the information to his superiors and began to look into the situation. He found some anecdotal material on the internet and an abundance of information from the World Health Organization. He determined that the phenomenon of reanimated corpses had been spreading around the world, and they can be killed by destroying their brains.

Warmbrunn contacted his friend Paul Knight, who had substantial research of his own, and the two paired up to pen what became known as the “‘Warmbrunn-Knight’ report” (36. It includes advice from 15 experts in various fields and provides nearly a hundred pages of analysis and recommendations to prevent the situation from escalating to “epidemic proportions” (36). However, Warmbrunn feels things would have been different had people heeded the report’s warnings and advice. When the narrator points out that people, including Warmbrunn’s own government, did follow the report, Warmbrunn responds that it is only minimally and at great expense.

The narrator interviews Saladin Kader, a Palestinian and professor of urban planning at Khalil Gilbran University. Kader recalls his sheltered upbringing in Kuwait City. At 17 years old, he worked at a Starbucks after school, and the TVs in the store played the news. There was an “uproar” when the Israeli ambassador announced at the UN General Assembly that Israel is implementing a “voluntary quarantine” (37). He didn’t wait to hear the part where the ambassador offered asylum to several groups, including Palestinians who formerly lived in Israel—the latter of which applied to his family. Kader thought their warnings of reanimated corpses was a lie concocted by his “most hated enemy” (37). He decided Israel was simply trying to recruit Jews and kidnap Palestinians in response to recently being pushed out of the occupied territories by the Palestinians.

However, Kader’s father worked as a janitor in a hospital and was present when the first major outbreak of “African rabies” occurs (38). He told Kader they needed to leave Kuwait immediately. Kader was incredulous and tried to convince his father that it was all a plot derived by the Israeli’s as they prepared to evacuate Jerusalem in the face of Palestinian reoccupation. After another large outbreak, his father quit his job and emptied the family bank account. He and Kader violently argued, as his father viewed Israel as their best option for refuge. Kader finally relented when his father gave him an ultimatum that Kader would either go with his family peacefully or his father would murder him as they continued to tussle in the kitchen.

They had to fly to Cairo first, then took a bus to Taba, where they were forced to walk past cages with barking dogs. Kader watched as people were carted away in black vans after the dogs barked at them. He decided they are being screened for rabies and maintained this view at the resettlement camp outside Yeroham. The camp felt like a prison, and they were subjected to daily medical examinations. After three weeks, they were cleared to go to Tel Aviv—with housing, education, and a job for Kader’s father all lined up. However, at the city of Beer Heeba, their bus crashed amidst gunfire. Kader and his family were pulled into a Starbucks, where Kader realized he was witnessing an Israeli Civil War, fueled by tensions surrounding Israel’s territorial losses. As his family headed into the back of a tank, a van exploded and burning zombies ran out. Kader had another realization: His father—and the Israelis—had been right all along.

The narrator conducts his interview with Bob Archer, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in a somewhat modest, unassuming office. Archer tells the narrator that the CIA was once happy to perpetuate the image of secrecy surrounding their organization. If people blamed the CIA for various global events, it provided an illusion of power. The CIA appeared an “omniscient octopus” (46). The downside is that once the zombies appeared, people blamed the CIA for failing to prevent the crisis. Archer admits the CIA has never been “all-seeing” and has “very real limitations” (46). They focus on immediate dangers that are “clear and present” (47).

Archer delves further, revealing that the CIA initially failed to notice anything because China was covering up the situation. They orchestrated the “Taiwan Strait incident” (47), which included the assassination of a Chinese defense minister and the triumph of the Taiwan National Independence Party. The subsequent demonstrations and threats of war convinced the CIA that World War III was imminent. The CIA was also overwhelmed by the loss of several experts after the new administration came into office. They blamed the CIA for certain actions taken under the previous administration, and there was a mass exodus of several experienced members. Archer’s suspicions that something else was going on were met with silence and got him transferred to Buenos Aires. The narrator brings up the Warmbrunn-Knight report, which Archer admits was basically ignored despite being delivered in person by Paul Knight. Shortly after, Israel issued their “Voluntary Quarantine” and it became impossible to ignore the facts (50). The only question was whether people were going to believe them.

The narrator speaks with Travis D’Ambrosia, Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, who is overseeing the UN’s Northern Force’s (N-For) annual “Sweep and Clear” (50). The operation is designed to regularly clear out the remaining undead, whose numbers have drastically been reduced. D’Ambrosia begins the interview by admitting that “mistakes were made” (50) and the situation could have been handled better. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs was initially reluctant to present Israel’s warnings as anything more than a hypothetical scenario. D’Ambrosia found it “liberating” when they finally took the threat seriously (51) since he had suspicions for months.

The Military began Phase One of its operations to globally contain the threat. D’Ambrosia recognizes their strategy as nearly identical to the one outlined in the Warmbrunn-Knight report, but he was only able to get his hands on a copy of the report a couple of years after the Great Panic. The first phase was a success as Special Forces covertly moved into infested areas and destroyed the enemy. However, they ran into problems with Phase Two, which required recruiting and training civilians to fight. There was barely enough money to keep the current military functioning, and Americans were still exhausted from the previous conflict. Despite having won, it was a long, costly endeavor that saw little public support by the end. Veterans had also been mistreated by the government upon their return from Vietnam, and many modern soldiers had their enlistment time extended or they were recalled into active duty. By the time the zombies came, everyone was war-wary, and the nation was “almost too weak and vulnerable to stop them” (54).

The narrator interviews Breckinridge “Breck” Scott at a station Scott is leasing from the Russians. Scott has been living at the outpost atop Lake Vostok, the most remote in the world, since the Great Panic. He tells the narrator that his mantra is “Fear sells” (55). When the outbreaks started happening, it was initially called African rabies, and Scott saw the “opportunity of a lifetime” (55). He successfully pitched the idea of a rabies vaccine, since there isn’t one, to contacts in the biomed industry. With a pro-business president in the White House, Phalanx made its way through the FDA in two months. Scott adamantly insists to the narrator that the vaccine does work against rabies, which is all that matters. He claims he hasn’t lied about its purpose or its efficacy since successful tests on similar drugs had been conducted in Europe. As long as he makes clear that it prevents “Some Viral Infections” (57), then he isn’t fabricating its function.

Although the narrator pushes the idea that Phalanx doesn’t actually do anything since the disease plaguing the world isn’t rabies, Scott counters that it’s irrelevant. His vaccine was selling protection from fear at a time when people needed it. He claims he singlehandedly helped end the economic recession through Phalanx’s massive success. He blames the reporter who exposed that Phalanx wasn’t a “wonder drug” for inciting the Great Panic (58). Scott makes clear to the narrator he takes no personal responsibility for making money off a drug that is essentially useless. He says the finger should be pointed toward the person who first called it African rabies or the consumers who fail to research the disease properly. He concludes that “They’re the bad guys, not me” (58).

The narrator talks with former White House Chief of Staff Grover Carlson, who currently collects dung as fuel for an experimental bioconversion plant. Carlson admits to briefing the president three months before the Israelis issue their quarantine and after he read the Warmbrunn-Knight report. They made what Carlson deems an “appropriate response” (59), given that the situation could have turned out to be “typical alarmist crap” (59). They enacted Phase One of their military strategy, produced an educational video for law enforcement, and pushed Phalanx through the FDA. They knew Phalanx was nothing more than “a placebo” (60), but it placated Americans in the short-term. Telling them the truth, speculates Carlson, would only have terrified people and caused pandemonium.

The narrator calls out Carlson for never actually trying to solve the problem, to which Carlson responds that, like poverty or crime, it was a situation that was impossible to solve. It should instead be managed for the voter base so they “keep you in office” (61). Carlson dismisses the idea that they neglected various outbreaks by insisting that cops are always making outrageous demands for resources. The higher-ups weren’t worried about the giant corporate-owned press or media exposing anything because they had a lot to lose financially from another panic, which negatively impacts the stock market. Carlson argues that “real Americans” don’t listen to alternative news sources anyway (63), and they had Phalanx to pacify them. The narrator concludes the interview by telling Carlson that they essentially ignored warnings of an impending global catastrophe by downplaying the threat and insisting it was manageable. In response, Carlson tells the narrator to “Grow up” (63).

The narrator next interviews Mary Jo Miller, the “developer, chief architect, and first mayor” of Troy (64), an experimental neighborhood where the houses all sit on stilts to look over a massive concrete wall. The houses come complete with retractable stairs and walkways. Miller shares with the narrator that she was shackled with a number of anxieties, both financial and personal, before the outbreak. She barely listened to the news because she found it depressing, and she primarily used the internet for shopping. There was some conversation at work about the situation, but it dissipated during the first winter when things died down.

In the spring, Miller came to work to find a coworker cleaning out her desk. The coworker told Miller she and her family were moving to a cabin in Alaska—a decision Miller scoffed at. She noticed her own children—Jenna and Aiden—seemed to be struggling, but she and her husband decided to handle it by medicating them. She admits to the narrator that they are all taking Phalanx by this time, and her husband kept promising to teach her how to shoot a gun on Sundays. However, he never did because he always spent Sundays on his boat, which Miller refers to as his mistress.

Miller finally understood the situation was serious when, one night, she heard all the dogs down their street near San Diego begin barking. She heard what sounded like a gunshot, and then a zombie suddenly broke through the sliding glass door to the backyard. It grabbed her husband and they wrestled on the carpet. As she was running to get the gun, another one entered her daughter’s bedroom window and grabbed her daughter by the hair. Miller’s memory of the incident is hazy, but Aiden and Jenna tell her that she ripped the zombie’s head off to get it off Jenna. Her husband came into the room with “thick, black goo” all over him and holding the gun and their dog’s leash (67). He told Miller and the kids to get to the car. He took the gun to the backyard, and Miller hears it go off as she starts the car engine.