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