— WORLD WAR Z —
by Max Brooks

PATRIOT’S MEMORIAL, THE FORBIDDEN CITY, BEIJING, CHINA

[I suspect Admiral Xu Zhicai has chosen this particular spot on the off chance that a photographer would be present. Although no one since the war has ever remotely questioned either his or his crew’s patriotism, he is taking no chances for the eyes of “foreign readers.” Initially defensive, he consents to this interview only on the condition that I listen objectively to “his” side of the story, a demand he clings to even after I explain that there is no other.]

 

[Note: For the sake of clarity, Western naval designations have replaced the authentic Chinese.]

 

We were not traitors—I say this before I’ll say anything else. We loved our country, we loved our people, and while we may not have loved those who ruled both, we were unwaveringly loyal to our leadership.

We never would have imagined doing what we did had not the situation become so desperate. By the time Captain Chen first voiced his proposal, we were already on the brink. They were in every city, every village. In the nine and a half million square kilometers that made up our country, you couldn’t find one centimeter of peace.

The army, arrogant bastards that they were, kept insisting that they had the problem under control, that every day was the turning point and before the next snow fell upon the earth they would have the entire country pacified. Typical army thinking: overaggressive, overconfident. All you need is a group of men, or women, give them matching clothes, a few hours training, something that passes for a weapon, and you have an army, not the best army, but still an army nonetheless.

That can’t happen with the navy, any navy. Any ship, no matter how crude, requires considerable energy and materials to create. The army can replace its cannon fodder in hours; for us, it might take years. This tends to make us more pragmatic than our compatriots in green. We tend to look at a situation with a bit more…I don’t want to say caution, but perhaps more strategic conservatism. Withdraw, consolidate, husband your resources. That was the same philosophy as the Redeker Plan, but of course, the army wouldn’t listen.

They rejected Redeker?

Without the slightest consideration or internal debate. How could the army ever lose? With their vast stockpiles of conventional armaments, with their “bottomless well” of manpower…“bottomless well,” unforgivable. Do you know why we had such a population explosion during the 1950s? Because Mao believed it was the only way to win a nuclear war. This is truth, not propaganda. It was common knowledge that when the atomic dust eventually settled, only a few thousand American or Soviet survivors would be overwhelmed by tens of millions of Chinese. Numbers, that was the philosophy of my grandparents’ generation, and it was the strategy the army was quick to adopt once our experienced, professional troops were devoured in the outbreak’s early stages. Those generals, sick, twisted old criminals sitting safely in their bunker and ordering wave after wave of conscripted teenagers into battle. Did they even think that every dead soldier was now a live zombie? Did they ever realize that, instead of drowning them in our bottomless well, we were the ones drowning, choking to death as the most populous nation on Earth found itself, for the first time in history, in danger of becoming fatally outnumbered?

That was what pushed Captain Chen over the edge. He knew what would happen if the war continued along its course, and what our chances for survival would be. If he thought that there was any hope, he would have grabbed a rifle and hurled himself at the living dead. He was convinced that soon there would be no more Chinese people, and perhaps, eventually, no more people anywhere. That was why he made his intentions known to his senior officers, declaring that we might be the only chance of preserving something of our civilization.

Did you agree with his proposal?

I didn’t even believe it at first. Escape in our boat, our nuclear submarine? This wasn’t just desertion, slinking out in the middle of a war to save our own pathetic skins. This was stealing one of the motherland’s most valuable national assets. The Admiral Zheng He was only one of three ballistic missiles subs and the newest of what the West referred to as the Type 94. She was the child of four parents: Russian assistance, black-market technology, the fruits of anti-American espionage, and, let us not forget, the culmination of nearly five thousand years of continuous Chinese history. She was the most expensive, the most advanced, the most powerful machine our nation had ever constructed. To simply steal her, like a lifeboat from the sinking ship of China, was inconceivable. It was only Captain Chen’s force of personality, his deep, fanatical patriotism that convinced me of our only alternative.

How long did it take to prepare?

Three months. It was hell. Qingdao, our home port, was in a constant state of siege. More and more army units were called in to maintain order, and each was just a little less trained, a little less equipped, a little younger, or older, than the one that came before it. Some of the surface ship captains had to donate “expendable” crew to shore up base defenses. Our perimeter was under attack almost every day. And through all of this we had to prepare and provision the boat for sea. It was supposed to be a routinely scheduled patrol; we had to smuggle on board both emergency supplies and family members.

Family members?

Oh yes, that was the cornerstone of the plan. Captain Chen knew the crew wouldn’t leave port unless their families could come with them.

How was that possible?

To find them or to smuggle them aboard?

Both.

Finding them was difficult. Most of us had family scattered throughout the country. We did our best to communicate with them, get a phone line working or send word with an army unit headed in that direction. The message was always the same: we’d be heading back out on patrol soon and their presence was required at the ceremony. Sometimes we’d try to make it more urgent, as if someone was dying and needed to see them. That was the best we could do. No one was allowed to go out and physically get them: too risky. We didn’t have multiple crews like you do on your missile boats. Every rating would be missed at sea. I pitied my shipmates, the agony of their waiting. I was lucky that my wife and children…

Children? I thought…

That we were only allowed one child? That law was modified years before the war, a practical solution to the problem of an imbalanced nation of only-child sons. I had twin daughters. I was lucky. My wife and children were already on base when the trouble started.

What about the captain? Did he have family?

His wife had left him in the early eighties. It was a devastating scandal, especially in those days. It still astounds me how he managed to both salvage his career and raise his son.

He had a son? Did he come with you?

[Xu evades the question.]

 

The worst part for many others was the waiting, knowing that even if they managed to make it to Qingdao, there was a very good chance that we might have already sailed. Imagine the guilt. You ask your family to come to you, perhaps leave the relative safety of their preexisting hideout, and arrive only to be abandoned at the dock.

Did many of them show up?

More than one would have guessed. We smuggled them aboard at night, wearing uniforms. Some—children and the elderly—were carried in supply crates.

Did the families know what was happening? What you were intending to do?

I don’t believe so. Every member of our crew had strict orders to keep silent. Had the MSS even had a whiff of what we were up to, the living dead would have been the least of our fears. Our secrecy also forced us to depart according to our routine patrol schedule. Captain Chen wanted so badly to wait for stragglers, family members who might be perhaps only a few days, a few hours, away! He knew it might have jeopardized everything, however, and reluctantly gave the order to cast off. He tried to hide his feelings and I think, in front of most, he might have gotten away with it. I could see it in his eyes though, reflecting the receding fires of Qingdao.

Where were you headed?

First to our assigned patrol sector, just so everything would initially seem normal. After that, no one knew.

A new home, at least for the time being, was out of the question. By this point the blight had spread to every corner of the planet. No neutral country, no matter how remote, could guarantee our safety.

What about coming over to our side, America, or another Western country?

[He flashes a cold, hard stare.]

 

Would you? The Zheng carried sixteen JL-2 ballistic missiles; all but one carried four multiple reentry warheads, with a ninety-kiloton yield. That made her equivalent to one of the strongest nations in the world, enough power to murder entire cities with just the turn of a key. Would you turn that power over to another country, the one country up until that point that had used nuclear weapons in anger? Again, and for the last time, we were not traitors. No matter how criminally insane our leadership might have been, we were still Chinese sailors.

So you were alone.

All alone. No home, no friends, no safe harbor no matter how harsh the storm. The Admiral Zheng He was our entire universe: heaven, earth, sun, and moon.

That must have been very difficult.

The first few months passed as though it was merely a regular patrol. Missile subs are designed to hide, and that’s what we did. Deep and silent. We weren’t sure if our own attack subs were out looking for us. In all probability our government had other worries. Still, regular battle drills were conducted and the civilians trained in the art of noise discipline. The chief of the boat even rigged special soundproofing for the mess hall so it could be both a schoolroom and play area for the children. The children, especially the younger ones, had no idea what was happening. Many of them had even traveled with their families across infested areas, some barely escaping with their lives. All they knew was that the monsters were gone, banished to their occasional nightmares. They were safe now, and that’s all that mattered. I guess that is how we all felt those first few months. We were alive, we were together, we were safe. Given what was happening to the rest of the planet, what more could we want?

Did you have some way of monitoring the crisis?

Not immediately. Our goal was stealth, avoiding both commercial shipping lanes and submarine patrol sectors…ours, and yours. We speculated, though. How fast was it spreading? Which countries were the most affected? Was anyone using the nuclear option? If so, that would be the end for all of us. In a radiated planet, the walking dead might be the only creatures left “alive.” We weren’t sure what high doses of radiation would do to a zombie’s brain. Would it eventually kill them, riddling their gray matter with multiple, expanding tumors? That would be the case for a regular human brain, but since the living dead contradicted every other law of nature, why should this reaction be any different? Some nights in the wardroom, speaking in low voices over our off-duty tea, we conjured images of zombies as fast as cheetahs, as agile as apes, zombies with mutated brains that grew and throbbed and burst from the confines of their skulls. Lieutenant Commander Song, our reactor officer, had brought aboard his watercolors and had painted the scene of a city in ruins. He tried to say that it wasn’t any city in particular but we all recognized the twisted remains of the Pudong skyline. Song had grown up in Shanghai. The broken horizon glowed a dull magenta against the pitch-black sky of nuclear winter. A rain of ash peppered the islands of debris that rose from lakes of melted glass. Snaking through the center of this apocalyptic backdrop was a river, a greenish-brown snake that rose up into a head of a thousand interconnected bodies: cracked skin, exposed brain, flesh dripping from bony arms that reached out from openmouthed faces with red, glowing eyes. I don’t know when Commander Song began his project, only that he secretly unveiled it to a few of us after our third month at sea. He never intended to show it to Captain Chen. He knew better. But someone must have talked and the Old Man soon put a stop to it.

Song was ordered to paint over his work with something cheerful, a summer sunset over Lake Dian. He then followed up with several more “positive” murals on any space of exposed bulkhead. Captain Chen also ordered a halt to all off-duty speculation. “Detrimental to the morale of the crew.” I think it pushed him, though, to reestablish some semblance of contact with the outside world.

Semblance as in active communication, or passive surveillance?

The latter. He knew Song’s painting and our apocalyptic discussions were the result of our long-term isolation. The only way to quell any further “dangerous thought” was to replace speculation with hard facts. We’d been in total blackout for almost a hundred days and nights. We needed to know what was happening, even if it was as dark and hopeless as Song’s painting.

Up until this point, our sonar officer and his team were the only ones with any knowledge of the world beyond our hull. These men listened to the sea: the currents, the “biologics” such as fish and whales, and the distant thrashing of nearby propellers. I said before that our course had taken us to the most remote recesses of the world’s oceans. We had intentionally chosen areas where no ship would normally be detected. Over the previous months, however, Liu’s team had been collecting an increasing number of random contacts. Thousands of ships were now crowding the surface, many of them with signatures that did not match our computer archive.

The captain ordered the boat to periscope depth. The ESM mast went up and was flooded with hundreds of radar signatures; the radio mast suffered a similar deluge. Finally the scopes, both the search and main attack periscopes, broke the surface. It’s not like you see in the movies, a man flipping down the handles and staring through a telescopic eyepiece. These scopes don’t penetrate the inner hull. Each one is a video camera with its signal relayed to monitors throughout the boat. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. It was as if humanity was putting everything they had to sea. We spotted tankers, freighters, cruise ships. We saw tugboats towing barges, we saw hydrofoils, garbage scows, bottom dredgers, and all of this within the first hour.

Over the next few weeks, we observed dozens of military vessels, too, any of which could have probably detected us, but none of which seemed to care. You know the USS Saratoga? We saw her, being towed across the South Atlantic, her flight deck now a tent city. We saw a ship that had to be HMS Victory, plying the waves under a forest of improvised sails. We saw the Aurora, the actual World War I–era heavy cruiser whose mutiny had sparked the Bolshevik Revolution. I don’t know how they got her out of Saint Petersburg, or how they found enough coal to keep her boilers lit.

There were so many beat-up hulks that should have been retired years ago: skiffs, ferries, and lighters that had spent their careers on quiet lakes or inland rivers, coastal crafts that should have never left the harbor for which they’d been designed. We saw a floating dry dock the size of an overturned skyscraper, her deck now stuffed with construction scaffolding that served as makeshift apartments. She was drifting aimlessly, no tug or support vessel in sight. I don’t know how those people survived, or even if they survived. There were a lot of drifting ships, their fuel bunkers dry, no way to generate power.

We saw many small private boats, yachts, and cabin cruisers that had lashed themselves together to form giant directionless rafts. We saw many purpose-built rafts as well, made from logs or tires.

We even came across a nautical shantytown constructed atop hundreds of garbage bags filled with Styrofoam packing peanuts. It reminded us all of the “Ping-Pong Navy,” the refugees who, during the Cultural Revolution, had tried to float to Hong Kong on sacks filled with Ping-Pong balls.

We pitied these people, pitied what could only be their hopeless fate. To be adrift in the middle of the ocean, and prey to hunger, thirst, sunstroke, or the sea herself…Commander Song called it “humanity’s great regression.” “We came from the sea,” he would say, “and now we’re running back.” Running was an accurate term. These people clearly hadn’t put any thought into what they would do once they reached the “safety” of the waves. They just figured it was better than being torn apart back on land. In their panic they probably didn’t realize they were just prolonging the inevitable.

Did you ever try to help them? Give them food or water, maybe tow them…

To where? Even if we had some idea where the safe ports might have been, the captain wouldn’t dare take the risk of detection. We didn’t know who had a radio, who might be listening to that signal. We still didn’t know if we were a hunted boat. And there was another danger: the immediate threat of the undead. We saw a lot of infested ships, some where the crews were still fighting for their lives, some where the dead were the only crew left. One time off Dakar, Senegal, we came across a forty-five-thousand-ton luxury liner called the Nordic Empress. Our search scope’s optics were powerful enough to see every bloody handprint smeared on the ballroom’s windows, every fly that settled on the deck’s bones and flesh. Zombies were falling into the ocean, one every couple of minutes. They would see something in the distance, a low-flying aircraft, I think, or even the feather of our scope, and try to reach for it. It gave me an idea. If we surfaced a few hundred meters away, and did everything we could to lure them over the side, we might be able to clear the ship without firing a shot. Who knows what the refugees might have brought aboard with them? The Nordic Empress might turn out to be a floating replenishment depot. I presented my proposal to the master at arms and together we approached the captain.

What did he say?

“Absolutely not.” There was no way of knowing how many zombies were onboard the dead liner. Even worse, he motioned to the video screen and pointed to some of the zombies falling overboard. “Look,” he said, “not all of them are sinking.” He was right. Some had reanimated wearing life jackets, while others were beginning to bloat up with decomposition gases. That was the first time I had ever seen a floating ghoul. I should have realized then that they would become a common occurrence. Even if 10 percent of the refugee ships were infested, that was still 10 percent of several hundred thousand vessels. There were millions of zombies falling randomly into the sea, or else pouring in by the hundreds when one of those old hulks capsized in rough weather. After a storm, they would blanket the surface to the horizon, rising waves of bobbing heads and flailing arms. Once we raised the search scope and were confronted with this distorted, greenish-gray haze. At first we thought it was an optical malfunction, as if we’d hit some floating debris, but then the attack scope confirmed that we’d speared one of them right under the rib cage. And it was still struggling, probably even after we lowered the scope. If ever something brought the threat home…

But you were underwater? How could they…

If we surfaced and one was caught on deck, or on the bridge. The first time I cracked the hatch, a fetid, waterlogged claw darted in and had me by the sleeve. I lost my footing, fell onto the lookout below me, and landed on the deck with the severed arm still clamped to my uniform. Above me, silhouetted in the bright disc of the open hatch, I could see the arm’s owner. I reached for my sidearm, fired straight up without thinking. We were showered in bone and bits of brain. We were lucky…if any of us had had any kind of open wound…I deserved the reprimand I got, although I deserved worse. From that point on, we always did a thorough scope sweep after surfacing. I would say that, at least one in every three instances, a few of them were crawling about on the hull.

Those were the observation days, when all we did was look and listen to the world around us. Besides the scopes we could monitor both civilian radio traffic and even some satellite television broadcasts. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Cities were dying, whole countries. We listened to the last report from Buenos Aires, the evacuation of the Japanese home islands, too. We heard sketchy information about mutinies in the Russian military. We heard after reports of the “limited nuclear exchange” between Iran and Pakistan, and we marveled, morbidly, at how we had been so sure that either you, or the Russians, would be the ones to turn the key. There were no reports from China, no illegal or even official government broadcasts. We were still detecting naval transmissions, but all the codes had been shifted since our departure. While this presented something of a personal threat—we didn’t know if our fleet had orders to hunt down and sink us—at least it proved our whole nation hadn’t disappeared into the stomachs of the undead. At this point in our exile any news was welcome.

Food was becoming an issue, not immediately, but soon enough to begin considering options. Medicine was a bigger problem; both our Western-style drugs and various traditional herb remedies were beginning to run low because of the civilians. Many of them had special medical needs.

Mrs. Pei, the mother of one of our torpedo men, was suffering from chronic bronchial problems, an allergic reaction to something on the boat, the paint or perhaps machine oil, something you couldn’t simply remove from the environment. She was consuming our decongestants at an alarming rate. Lieutenant Chin, the boat’s weapons officer suggested, matter-of-factly, that the old woman be euthanized. The captain responded by confining him to quarters, for a week, on half-rations, with all but the most life-threatening sickness to go untreated by the boat’s pharmacist. Chin was a coldhearted bastard, but at least his suggestion brought our options into the light. We had to prolong our supply of consumables, if not find a way of recycling them altogether.

Raiding derelicts was still strictly forbidden. Even when we spotted what looked like a deserted vessel, at least a few zombies could be heard banging belowdecks. Fishing was a possibility, but we had neither the material to rig any kind of net, nor were we willing to spend hours on the surface dropping hooks and lines over the side.

The solution came from the civilians, not the crew. Some of them had been farmers or herbalists before the crisis, and a few had brought little bags of seeds. If we could provide them with the necessary equipment, they might be able to start raising enough food to stretch our existing provisions for years. It was an audacious plan, but not completely without merit. The missile room was certainly large enough for a garden. Pots and troughs could be hammered out of existing materials, and the ultraviolet lamps we used for the crew’s vitamin D treatment could serve as artificial sunlight.

The only problem was soil. None of us knew anything about hydroponics, aeroponics, or any other alternate agricultural method. We needed earth, and there was only one way to get it. The captain had to consider this carefully. Trying to deploy a shore party was as dangerous as, if not more than, attempting to board an infested ship. Before the war, more than half of all human civilization lived at or near the world’s coastlines. The infestation only increased this number as refugees sought to flee by water.

We began our search off the mid-Atlantic coast of South America, from Georgetown, Guyana, then down the coasts of Surinam, and French Guyana. We found several stretches of uninhabited jungle, and at least by periscope observation, the coast appeared to be clear. We surfaced and made a second, visual sweep from the bridge. Again, nothing. I requested permission to take a landing party ashore. The captain was not yet convinced. He ordered the foghorn blown…loud and long…and then they came.

Just a few at first, tattered, wide-eyed, stumbling out of the jungle. They didn’t seem to notice the shoreline, the waves knocking them over, pushing them back up on the beach or pulling them out to sea. One was dashed against a rock, his chest crushed, broken ribs stabbing through the flesh. Black foam shot from his mouth as he howled at us, still trying to walk, to crawl, in our direction. More came, a dozen at a time; within minutes we had over a hundred plunging into the surf. This was the case everywhere we surfaced. All those refugees who’d been too unlucky to make it to the open ocean now formed a lethal barrier along every stretch of coastline we visited.

Did you ever try to land a shore party?

[Shakes his head.] Too dangerous, even worse than the infested ships. We decided that our only choice was to find soil on an offshore island.

But you must have known what was happening on the world’s islands.

You would be surprised. After leaving our Pacific patrol station, we restricted our movements to either the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean. We’d heard transmissions or made visual observations of many of those specks of land. We learned about the overcrowding, the violence…we saw the gun flashes from the Windward Islands. That night, on the surface, we could smell the smoke as it drifted east from the Caribbean. We could also hear islands that weren’t so lucky. The Cape Verdes, off the coast of Senegal, we didn’t even see them before we heard the wails. Too many refugees, too little discipline; it only takes one infected soul. How many islands remained quarantined after the war? How many frozen, northern rocks are still deeply and dangerously in the white?

Returning to the Pacific was our most likely option, but that would also bring us right back up to our country’s front door.

Again, we still did not know if the Chinese navy was hunting us or even if there was still a Chinese navy. All we knew was that we needed stores and that we craved direct contact with other human beings. It took some time to convince the captain. The last thing he wanted was a confrontation with our navy.

He was still loyal to the government?

Yes. And then there was…a personal matter.

Personal? Why?

[He skirts the question.]

 

Have you ever been to Manihi?

 

[I shake my head.]

 

You couldn’t ask for a more ideal image of a prewar tropical paradise. Flat, palm-covered islands or “motus” form a ring around a shallow, crystal-clear lagoon. It used to be one of the few places on Earth where they cultured authentic black pearls. I had bought a pair for my wife when we visited Tuamotus for our honeymoon, so my firsthand knowledge made this atoll the most likely destination.

Manihi had changed utterly since I was a newly married ensign. The pearls were gone, the oysters were eaten, and the lagoon was crowded with hundreds of small, private boats. The motus themselves were paved with either tents or ramshackle huts. Dozens of improvised canoes either sailed or rowed back and forth between the outer reef and the dozen or so large ships that were anchored in deeper water. The whole scene was typical of what, I guess, postwar historians are now calling “the Pacific Continent,” the refugee island culture that stretched from Palau to French Polynesia. It was a new society, a new nation, refugees from all over the world uniting under the common flag of survival.

How did you integrate yourself into that society?

Through trade. Trade was the central pillar of the Pacific Continent. If your boat had a large distillery, you sold fresh water. If it had a machine shop, you became a mechanic. The Madrid Spirit, a liquefied natural gas carrier, sold its cargo off for cooking fuel. That was what gave Mister Song his idea for our “market niche.” He was Commander Song’s father, a hedge-fund broker from Shenzhen. He came up with the idea of running floating power lines into the lagoon and leasing the electricity from our reactor.

 

[He smiles.]

 

We became millionaires, or…at least the barter equivalent: food, medicine, any spare part we needed or the raw materials to manufacture them. We got our greenhouse, along with a miniature waste recovery plant to turn our own night soil into valuable fertilizer. We “bought” equipment for a gymnasium, a full wet bar, and home entertainment systems for both the enlisted mess and wardroom. The children were lavished with toys and candy, whatever was left, and most importantly, continuing education from several of the barges that had been converted into international schools. We were welcomed into any home, onto any boat. Our enlisted men, and even some of the officers, were given free credit on any one of the five “comfort” boats anchored in the lagoon. And why not? We lit up their nights, we powered their machinery. We brought back long forgotten luxuries like air conditioners and refrigerators. We brought computers back online and gave most of them the first hot shower they’d had in months. We were so successful that the island council even allowed us a reprieve, although we politely refused, from taking part in the island’s perimeter security.

Against seaborne zombies?

They were always a danger. Every night they would wander up onto the motus or try to drag themselves up the anchor line of a low-lying boat. Part of the “citizenship dues” for staying at Manihi was to help patrol the beaches and boats for zombies.

You mentioned anchor lines. Aren’t zombies poor climbers?

Not when water counteracts gravity. Most of them only have to follow an anchor chain up to the surface. If that chain leads to a boat whose deck is only centimeters above the water line…there were at least as many lagoon as beach attacks. Nights were always worse. That was another reason we were so welcome. We could take back the darkness, both above and below the surface. It is a chilling sight to point a flashlight at the water and see the bluish-green outline of a zombie crawling up an anchor line.

Wouldn’t the light tend to attract even more of them?

Yes, definitely. Night attacks almost doubled once mariners began leaving their lights on. The civilians never complained though, and neither did the island’s council. I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.

How long did you stay in Manihi?

Several months. I don’t know if you would call them the best months of our lives, but at the time it certainly felt that way. We began to let our guard down, to stop thinking of ourselves as fugitives. There were even some Chinese families, not Diaspora or Taiwanese, but real citizens of the People’s Republic. They told us that the situation had gotten so bad that the government was barely keeping the country together. They couldn’t see how, when over half the population was infected and the army’s reserves were continuing to evaporate, they had the time or assets to devote any energy to find one lost sub. For a little while, it looked as if we could make this small island community our home, reside here until the end of the crisis or, perhaps, the end of the world.

 

[He looks up at the monument above us, built on the very spot where, supposedly, the last zombie in Beijing had been destroyed.]

 

Song and I had shore patrol duty, the night it happened. We’d stopped by a campfire to listen to the islanders’ radio. There was some broadcast about a mysterious natural disaster in China. No one knew what it was yet, and there were more than enough rumors to keep us guessing. I was looking at the radio, my back to the lagoon, when the sea in front of me suddenly began to glow. I turned just in time to see the Madrid Spirit explode. I don’t know how much natural gas she still carried, but the fireball skyrocketed high into the night, expanding and incinerating all life on the two closest motus. My first thought was “accident,” a corroded valve, a careless deckhand. Commander Song had been looking right at it though, and he’d seen the streak of the missile. A half second later, the Admiral Zheng’s foghorn sounded.

As we raced back to the boat, my wall of calm, my sense of security, came crashing down around me. I knew that missile had come from one of our subs. The only reason it had hit the Madrid was because she sat much higher in water, presenting a larger radar outline. How many had been aboard? How many were on those motus? I suddenly realized that every second we stayed put the civilian islanders in danger of another attack. Captain Chen must have been thinking the same thing. As we reached the deck, the orders to cast off were sounded from the bridge. Power lines were cut, heads counted, hatches dogged. We set course for open water and dived at battle stations.

At ninety meters we deployed our towed array sonar and immediately detected hull popping noises of another sub changing depth. Not the flexible “pop-groooaaan-pop” of steel but the quick “pop-pop-pop” of brittle titanium. Only two countries in the world used titanium hulls in their attack boats: the Russian Federation and us. The blade count confirmed it was ours, a new Type 95 hunter-killers. Two were in service by the time we left port. We couldn’t tell which one.

Was that important?

[Again, he does not answer.]

 

At first, the captain wouldn’t fight. He chose to bottom the boat, set her down on a sandy plateau at the bare limit of our crush depth. The Type 95 began banging away with its active sonar array. The sound pulses echoed through the water, but couldn’t get a fix on us because of the ocean floor. The 95 switched to a passive search, listening with its powerful hydrophone array for any noise we made. We reduced the reactor to a marginal output, shut down all unnecessary machinery, and ceased all crew movement within the boat. Because passive sonar doesn’t send out any signals, there was no way of knowing where the 95 was, or even if it was still around. We tried to listen for her propeller, but she’d gone as silent as us. We waited for half an hour, not moving, barely breathing.

I was standing by the sonar shack, my eyes on the overhead, when Lieutenant Liu tapped me on the shoulder. He had something on our hull-mounted array, not the other sub, something closer, all around us. I plugged in a pair of headphones and heard a scraping noise, like scratching rats. I silently motioned for the captain to listen. We couldn’t make it out. It wasn’t bottom flow, the current was too mild for that. If it was sea life, crabs or some other biologic contact, there would have to be thousands of them. I began to suspect something…I requested a scope observation, knowing the transient noise might alert our hunter. The captain agreed. We gritted our teeth as the tube slid upward. Then, the image.

Zombies, hundreds of them, were swarming over the hull. More were arriving each second, stumbling across the barren sand, climbing over each other to claw, scrape, actually bite the Zheng’s steel.

Could they have gotten in? Opened a hatch or…

No, all hatches are sealed from the inside and torpedo tubes are protected by external bow caps. What concerned us, however, was the reactor. It was cooled by circulating seawater. The intakes, although not large enough for a man to fit through, can easily be blocked by one. Sure enough, one of our warning lights began to silently flash over the number four intake. One of them had ripped the guard off and was now thoroughly lodged in the conduit. The reactor’s core temperature began to rise. To shut it down would leave us powerless. Captain Chen decided that we had to move.

We lifted off the bottom, trying to be as slow and quiet as possible. It wasn’t enough. We began to detect the sound of the 95’s propeller. She’d heard us and was moving in to attack. We heard her torpedo tubes being flooded, and the click of her outer doors opening. Captain Chen ordered our own sonar to “go active,” pinging our exact location but giving us a perfect firing solution on the 95.

We fired at the same time. Our torpedoes passed each other, as both subs tried to get away. The 95 was a little bit faster, a little more maneuverable, but the one thing they didn’t have was our captain. He knew exactly how to avoid the oncoming “fish,” and we ducked them easily right about the time our own found their targets.

We heard the 95’s hull screech like a dying whale, bulkheads collapsing as compartments imploded one after the other. They tell you it happens too fast for the crew to know; either the shock of the pressure change renders them unconscious or the explosion can actually cause the air to ignite. The crew dies quickly, painlessly, at least, that’s what we hoped. One thing that wasn’t painless was to watch the light behind my captain’s eyes die with the sounds of the doomed sub.

 

[He anticipates my next question, clenching his fist and exhaling hard through his nose.]

 

Captain Chen raised his son alone, raised him to be a good sailor, to love and serve the state, to never question orders, and to be the finest officer the Chinese navy had ever seen. The happiest day of his life was when Commander Chen Zhi Xiao received his first command, a brand-new Type 95 hunter-killer.

The kind that attacked you?

[Nods.] That was why Captain Chen would have done anything to avoid our fleet. That was why it was so important to know which sub had attacked us. To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be. He had already betrayed his oath, betrayed his homeland, and now to believe that that betrayal might have led him to murder his own son…

The next morning when Captain Chen did not appear for first watch, I went to his cabin to check on him. The lights were dim, I called his name. To my relief, he answered, but when he stepped into the light…his hair had lost its color, as white as prewar snow. His skin was sallow, his eyes sunken. He was truly an old man now, broken, withered. The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts.

From that day on, we ceased all contact with the outside world. We headed for the arctic ice, the farthest, darkest, most desolate void we could find. We tried to continue with our day-to-day life: maintaining the boat; growing food; schooling, raising, and comforting our children as best we could. With the captain’s spirit gone, so went the spirit of the Admiral Zheng’s crew. I was the only one who ever saw him during those days. I delivered his meals, collected his laundry, briefed him daily on the condition of the boat, then relayed his orders to the rest of the crew. It was routine, day in, day out.

Our monotony was only broken one day when sonar detected the approaching signature of another 95-class attack sub. We went to battle stations, and for the first time we saw Captain Chen leave his cabin. He took his place in the attack center, ordered a firing solution plotted, and tubes one and two loaded. Sonar reported that the enemy sub had not responded in kind. Captain Chen saw this as our advantage. There was no questioning in his mind this time. This enemy would die before it fired. Just before he gave the order, we detected a signal on the “gertrude,” the American term for an underwater telephone. It was Commander Chen, the captain’s son, proclaiming peaceful intentions and requesting that we stand down from GQ. He told us about the Three Gorges Dam, the source of all the “natural disaster” rumors we’d heard about in Manihi. He explained that our battle with the other 95 had been part of a civil war that the dam’s destruction had sparked. The sub that attacked us had been part of the loyalist forces. Commander Chen had sided with the rebels. His mission was to find us and escort us home. I thought the cheer was going to carry us right to the surface. As we broke through the ice and the two crews ran to each other under the arctic twilight, I thought, finally, we can go home, we can reclaim our country and drive out the living dead. Finally, it’s over.

But it wasn’t.

There was still one last duty to perform. The Politburo, those hated old men who had caused so much misery already, were still holed up in their leadership bunker in Xilinhot, still controlling at least half of our country’s dwindling ground forces. They would never surrender, everyone knew this; they would keep their mad hold on power, squandering what was left of our military. If the civil war dragged on any longer, the only beings left in China would be the living dead.

And you decided to end the fighting.

We were the only ones who could. Our land-based silos were overrun, our air force was grounded, our two other missile boats had been caught still tied to the piers, waiting for orders like good sailors as the dead swarmed through their hatches. Commander Chen informed us that we were the only nuclear asset left in the rebellion’s arsenal. Every second we delayed wasted a hundred more lives, a hundred more bullets that could be thrown against the undead.

So you fired on your homeland, in order to save it.

One last burden to shoulder. The captain must have noticed me shaking the moment before we launched. “My order,” he declared, “my responsibility.” The missile carried a single, massive, multi-megaton warhead. It was a prototype warhead, designed to penetrate the hardened surface of your NORAD facility in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. Ironically, the Politburo’s bunker had been designed to emulate Cheyenne Mountain in almost every detail. As we prepared to get under way, Commander Chen informed us that Xilinhot had taken a direct hit. As we slid beneath the surface, we heard that the loyalist forces had surrendered and reunified with the rebels to fight the real enemy.

Did you know they had begun instituting their own version of the South African Plan?

We heard the day we emerged from under the ice pack. That morning I came on watch and found Captain Chen already in the attack center. He was in his command chair, a cup of tea next to his hand. He looked so tired, silently watching the crew around him, smiling as a father smiles at the happiness of his children. I noticed his tea had grown cold and asked if he would like another cup. He looked up at me, still smiling, and shook his head slowly. “Very good, sir,” I said, and prepared to resume my station. He reached out and took my hand, looked up into, but did not recognize, my face. His whisper was so soft I could barely hear it.

What?

“Nice boy, Zhi Xiao, such a good boy.” He was still holding my hand when he closed his eyes forever.