World War Z

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 “biologies” 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 i

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 over-turned 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 ru

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, everv fly that settled on the deck’s bones and flesh. Zombies were falling into the ocean, one every couple of minutes. They would see some-thing 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 begi

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.