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1913 A.D., PARAMARIBO, SURINAM
While Dr. Ibrahim Obeidallah might have been the first to expand humanity’s scientific knowledge of the undead, he was (thankfully) not the last. Dr. Jan Vanderhaven, already respected in Europe for his study of leprosy, arrived in the South American colony to study a bizarre outbreak of this familiar disease.
The infected souls show symptoms similar to those around the globe: festering sores, mottled skin, flesh decomposing in its appearance. However, all similarities with the conventional affliction end here. These poor souls appear to have gone completely mad. . . . They display no signs of rational thought nor even recognition of anything familiar. . . . They neither sleep nor take water. They reject all food except that which is alive. . . . Yesterday a hospital orderly, for sheer sport, and against my orders, flung an injured rat into the patients’ holding cell. One of them promptly grabbed the vermin and swallowed it whole. . . . The infected display almost rabid hostility. . . . They snap at all who approach, teeth bared like animals. . . . One patient’s visitor, an influential woman who defied all hospital protocols, was subsequently bitten by her infected husband. Despite all known methods of treatment, she succumbed rapidly to the wound, passing later that day. . . . The body was returned to the family plantation. . . . Against my pleadings, an autopsy was denied out of concern for decorum. . . . That night the corpse was reported stolen. . . . Experiments with alcohol, formalin, and heating tissue to 90 degrees centigrade have erased the possibility of bacteria. . . . I must therefore deduce that the agent can only be contagious living fluid . . . dubbed “Solanum.”
(“Contagious living fluid” was a common term before the later adoption of the Latin wordvirus. ) These excerpts come from a 200-page, yearlong study done by Dr. Vanderhaven on this new discovery. In this study, he documents a zombie’s tolerance to pain, apparent lack of respiration, slow rate of decomposition, lack of speed, limited agility, and absence of healing. Because of the violent nature of his subjects and the apparent fear of the hospital orderlies, Vanderhaven was never able to get close enough to do a full autopsy. For this reason, he was unable to discover that the living dead were just that. In 1914, he returned to Holland and published his work. Ironically, it earned him neither praise nor ridicule in the scientific community. His story, like many others of the day, was eclipsed by the outbreak of the First World War. Copies of the work lay forgotten in Amsterdam. Vanderhaven returned to practicing conventional medicine in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), where he subsequently died of malaria. Vanderhaven’s major breakthrough was the discovery of a virus as the culprit behind a zombie’s creation and he was, notably, the first person to ascribe the name “Solanum” to the virus. Why he chose this term is unknown. Although his work was not celebrated by his European contemporaries, it is now widely read all over the world. Unfortunately, one country put the good doctor’s findings to devastating use. (See “1942–45 A.D., Harbin.”)
1923 A.D., COLOMBO, CEYLON
This account comes fromThe Oriental, an expatriate newspaper for Britons living in the Indian Ocean colony. Christopher Wells, a copilot for British Imperial Airways, was rescued from a life raft after fourteen days at sea. Before dying of exposure, Wells explained that he had been transporting a corpse discovered by a British expedition to Mount Everest. The corpse had been a European, his clothing of a century earlier, with no identifying documents. As he was frozen solid, the expedition leader had decided to fly him to Colombo for further study. While en route, the corpse thawed, reanimated, and attacked the airplane’s crew. The three men managed to destroy their assailant by crushing his skull with a fire extinguisher (as they did not realize what they were dealing with, the attempt may have been to simply incapacitate the zombie). While safe from this immediate danger, they now had to contend with a damaged aircraft. The pilot radioed a distress signal but had no time to send a position report. The three men parachuted into the ocean, the crew-chief not realizing that a bite he sustained would have dire consequences later. The following day, he expired, reanimated several hours later, and immediately attacked the other two men. While the pilot wrestled with the undead assailant, Wells, in a panic, kicked both of them overboard. After relating—some would say confessing—his story to the authorities, Wells lapsed into unconsciousness and died the next day. His story was reported as the ravings of a sunstroke maniac. A subsequent investigation produced no evidence of the plane, the crew, or the alleged zombie.
1942 A.D., THE CENTRAL PACIFIC
During Japan’s initial advance, a platoon of Imperial Marines was sent to garrison Atuk, an island in the Caroline chain. Several days after landing, the platoon was attacked by a swarm of zombies from the inland jungle. Initial casualties were high. Without any information about the nature of their attackers or the correct means of destruction, the marines were driven to a fortified mountaintop on the north end of the island. Ironically, as the wounded were left to die, the surviving marines spared themselves the danger of taking infected comrades with them. The platoon remained stranded in their mountaintop fortress for several days, lacking food, low on water, and cut off from the outside world. All this time, the ghouls were besieging their position, unable to scale the steep cliffs but preventing any chance of escape. After two weeks of imprisonment, Ashi Nakamura, the platoon sniper, discovered that a head shot was fatal to a zombie. This knowledge allowed the Japanese to finally combat their attackers. After dispatching the surrounding ghouls with rifle fire, they advanced into the jungle for a complete sweep of the island. Eyewitness accounts have the commanding officer, Lieutenant Hiroshi Tomonaga, decapitating eleven zombies with nothing but his officer’s Katana (an argument for the use of this weapon). A postwar examination and comparison of records have shown that Atuk is in all probability the same island that Sir Francis Drake described as “the Isle of the Damned.” Tomonaga’s own testimony, given to American authorities after the war, states that once radio communication with Tokyo had been reestablished, the Japanese High Command sent specific instructions to capture, not kill, any remaining zombies. Once this was accomplished (four ghouls had been successfully bound and gagged), the Imperial Submarine I-58 was dispatched to retrieve the undead prisoners. Tomonaga confessed his lack of knowledge of what happened to the four zombies. He and his men were ordered not to discuss their experience, under penalty of death.
1942–45 A.D., HARBIN, JAPANESE PUPPET STATE OF MANCHUKUO (MANCHURIA)
In his 1951 bookThe Sun Rose on Hell, former U.S. Army Intelligence officer David Shore details a series of wartime biological experiments conducted by a unit of the Japanese military known as “Black Dragon.” One experiment, dubbed “Cherry Blossom,” was organized specifically for the breeding and training of zombies into an army. According to Shore, when Japanese forces invaded the Dutch East Indies in 1941–42, a copy of Jan Vanderhaven’s work was discovered in a medical library in Surabaya. The work was sent to Black Dragon headquarters in Harbin for further study. Although a theoretical plan was ordered, no sample of Solanum could be found (proof that the ancient zombie-killing “Brotherhood of Life” had done its job too well). All this changed six months later with the incident on Atuk Island. The four restrained zombies were delivered to Harbin. Experiments were performed on three of them, and one was used specifically to breed other zombies. Shore states that Japanese “dissidents” (anyone who disagreed with the military regime) were used as guinea pigs. Once a “platoon” of forty zombies had been reanimated, Black Dragon operatives attempted to train them like obedient drones. This met with dismal results: Bites turned ten of the sixteen instructors into zombies. After two years of fruitless attempts, the decision was made to release the force of the now fifty zombies against the enemy no matter what condition they were in. Ten ghouls were to be parachuted over British forces in Burma. The plane was hit by antiaircraft fire before reaching its target, exploding into a fireball that destroyed all traces of its undead cargo. A second attempt was made to deliver ten zombies by submarine to the American-held Panama Canal zone (it was hoped that the ensuing chaos would interrupt Atlantic-built, Pacific-bound American warships). The submarine was sunk en route. A third attempt was made (again by submarine) to release twenty zombies into the ocean off the West Coast of the United States. Halfway across the Northern Pacific, the submarine’s captain radioed that the zombies had broken free of their restraints and were attacking the crew, and that he had no choice but to scuttle the boat. As the war drew to a close, a fourth and final attempt was made to parachute the remaining zombies onto a nest of Chinese guerrillas in Yo