World War Z

I ran, I didn’t know where I was going. It was a nightmare of shacks and fire and grasping hands all racing past me. I ran through a shanty where a woman was hiding in the corner. Her two children were huddled against her, crying. “Come with me!” I said. “Please, come, we have to go!” I held out my hands, moved closer to her. She pulled her children back, brandishing a sharpened screwdriver. Her eyes were wide, scared. I could hear sounds behind me… smashing through shanties, knocking them over as they came. I switched from Xhosa to English. “Please,” I begged, “you have to run!” I reached for her but she stabbed my hand. I left her there. I didn’t know what else to do. She is still in my memory, when I sleep or maybe close my eyes sometimes. Sometimes she’s my mother, and the crying children are my sisters.

I saw a bright light up ahead, shining between the cracks in the shanties. I ran as hard as I could. I tried to call to them. I was out of breath. I crashed through the wall of a shack and suddenly I was in open ground. The headlights were blinding. I felt something slam into my shoulder. I think I was out before I even hit the ground.

I came to in a bed at Groote Schuur Hospital. I’d never seen the inside of a recovery ward like this. It was so clean and white. I thought I might be dead. The medication, I’m sure, helped that feeling. I’d never tried any kind of drugs before, never even touched a drink of alcohol. I didn’t want to end up like so many in my neighborhood, like my father. All my life I’d fought to stay clean, and now…

The morphine or whatever they had pumped into my veins was delicious. I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t care when they told me the police had shot me in the shoulder. I saw the man in the bed next to me frantically wheeled out as soon as his breathing stopped. I didn’t even care when I overheard them talking about the outbreak of “rabies.”

Who was talking about it?

I don’t know. Like I said, I was as high as the stars. I just remember voices in the hallway outside my ward, loud voices angrily arguing. “That wasn’t rabies!” one of them yelled. “Rabies doesn’t do that to people!” Then… something else… then “well, what the hell do you suggest, we’ve got fifteen downstairs right here! Who knows how many more are still out there!” It’s fu

Tel Aviv, Israel

[Jurgen Waimbru

Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature. I don’t blame anyone for not believing. I don’t claim to be any smarter or better than them. I guess what it really comes down to is the randomness of birth. I happened to be born into a group of people who live in constant fear of extinction. It’s part of our identity, part of our mind-set, and it has taught us through horrific trial and error to always be on our guard.

The first warning I had of the plague was from our friends and customers over in Taiwan. They were complaining about our new software decryption program. Apparently it was failing to decode some e-mails from PRC sources, or at least decoding them so poorly that the text was unintelligible. I suspected the problem might not be in the software but in the translated messages themselves. The mainland Reds … I guess they weren’t really Reds anymore but. . . what do you want from an old man? The Reds had a nasty habit of using too many different computers from too many different generations and countries.

Before I suggested this theory to Taipei, I thought it might be a good idea to review the scrambled messages myself. I was surprised to find that the characters themselves were perfectly decoded. But the text itself… it all had to do with a new viral outbreak that first eliminated its victim, then reanimated his corpse into some kind of homicidal berzerker. Of course, I didn’t believe this was true, especially because only a few weeks later the crisis in the Taiwan Strait began and any messages dealing with rampaging corpses abruptly ended. I suspected a second layer of encryption, a code within a code. That was pretty standard procedure, going back to the first days of human communication. Of course the Reds didn’t mean actual dead bodies. It had to be a new weapon system or ultrasecret war plan. I let the matter drop, tried to forget about it. Still, as one of your great national heroes used to say: “My spider sense was tingling.”

Not long afterward, at the reception for my daughter’s wedding, I found myself speaking to one of my son-in-law’s professors from Hebrew University. The man was a talker, and he’d had a little too much to drink. He was rambling about how his cousin was doing some kind of work in South Africa and had told him some stories about golems. You know about the Golem, the old legend about a rabbi who breathes life into an inanimate statue? Mary Shelley stole the idea for her book Frankenstein. I didn’t say anything at first, just listened. The man went on blathering about how these golems weren’t made from clay, nor were they docile and obedient. As soon as he mentioned reanimating human bodies, I asked for the man’s number. It turns out he had been in Cape Town on one of those “Adrena-line Tours,” shark feeding I think it was.

[He rolls his eyes.]

Apparently the shark had obliged him, right in the tuchus, which is why he had been recovering at Groote Schuur when the first victims from Khayelitsha township were brought in. He hadn’t seen any of these cases firsthand, but the staff had told him enough stories to fill my old Dicta-phone. I then presented his stories, along with those decrypted Chinese e-mails, to my superiors.

And this is where I directly benefited from the unique circumstances of our precarious security. In October of 1973, when the Arab sneak attack almost drove us into the Mediterranean, we had all the intelligence in front of us, all the warning signs, and we had simply “dropped the ball.” We never considered the possibility of an all-out, coordinated, conventional assault from several nations, certainly not on our holiest of holidays. Call it stagnation, call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writings true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks it’s necessary. Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to finish what Hitler started, we realized that not only was that mirror image necessary, but it must forever be our national policy. From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper. If a neighbor’s nuclear power plant might be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, you dig; if a dictator was rumored to be building a ca

And that is what I did, I dug. At first it wasn’t easy. With China out of the picture… the Taiwan crisis put an end to any intelligence gathering … I was left with very few sources of information. A lot of it was chaff, especially on the Internet; zombies from space and Area 51… what is your country’s fetish for Area 51, anyway? After a while I started to uncover more useful data: cases of “rabies” similar to Cape Town… it wasn’t called African rabies until later. I uncovered the psychological evaluations of some Canadian mountain Troops recently returned from Kyrgyzstan. I found the blog records of a Brazilian nurse who told her friends all about the murder of a heart surgeon.