I often think back to when everything was so complex, and I don’t know whether I should burst into tears, or smile solely because I managed to live through the war. When Zack started showing up in Maryland after the refugees made their way into the States, from Africa and China, I knew we were fucked from the beginning. I remember sitting around the tube watching CNN with Paul, my best friend, and this was when the outbreak was still west of the Rockies. Still focusing on the television he blankly muttered out, “Militia. We have to join a militia, it’s the only way we beat this thing.”

Those words haunt me even today, I mean, as if anything could haunt me worse than watching Zack annihilate city after city, and town after town. I can’t get over the feeling of when it actually hit me. When the infected were already in the adjacent towns, the whole thing really slammed the bolt home. We’d get to thinking every so often, the both of us, about how the whole thing started. If we were informed of what this thing was earlier, then we probably could have controlled it. It’s not as if it was fucking airborne, they had to bite you, and they moved slower than dog shit melting the sun. Instead of being told that it was a form of rabies, it would have been great to know how to kill them. Most of us had to figure that out on own accords.

Paul and I were in the shit nonstop from when it all began until World War Z ended. We managed to observe the 1^st Norfolk Militia in southwestern Pennsylvania about four weeks after the infection spread from DC into Alexandria, Virginia, eventually routing their men north of the border. We had been humping across the mountainous areas of the Appalachians for a while when we saw them. It was a patrol slaughtering a group of Quisling nut-jobs getting devoured by their undead counterparts. I would have to say that despite the fact we were seeing a group of people taking charge and killing the infected, we were both apprehensive about making contact with them. Seeing as the first Quislings were popping up everywhere and these were still in the early days of the outbreak; it was somewhat like a totally paranoid anarchy. I was expecting to receive a bullet to the face if we approached them outright, even with my rucksack full of ammunition carrying an M1 Carbine, and Paul with his Ruger .22 from Wal-Mart.

When their gunshots had finally stopped, I stood up from the prone and announced our names and purpose. I do look back on this and laugh a little, because it felt as if I was trying to communicate with aliens at first. From their five-ton truck, they dispatched a group to escort us back to the vehicle, and check us for bites. Paul and I had done a great job at avoiding Zack back in those days. The only time we fired our rifles was if we absolutely had to. We knew after watching wave after wave storm in on screaming people, that sound was definitely not something you wanted to make, especially if you were looking to survive longer than a day. Hell, I remember one evening just before nightfall we couldn’t find any suitable houses to occupy, so we got up on the roof this old Victorian place. The house was still in decent condition from what I could see in glow of the sunset. The inside had been torn to pieces though, and probably in the due course of the initial panic.

We had run into a few deserted Mom and Pop hardware stores along the way while we were foraging for more of our necessary supplies, and managed to pick up a box of thick nails, a decent hammer, and some sturdy nylon rope used for towing light stuff with lawn tractors. I don’t know why we got those things, but it looked like something we might need later. Maybe we thought we could board up a house or something; it beats me to be honest.

We used what we had and nailed a length of rope to the roof, and used more rope to secure our equipment and ourselves to the makeshift anchor. We slept against the relentless distant moaning of Zack atop the roof that night. The air and sky was full of smoke from the burning cities, so the stars and moon were masked in our area. With the exception of the occasional white flash cascading across the dim clouds, and the eventual thud that followed it, the power was out and we couldn’t see two feet in front of us. Zack was on to us all right, we knew that for a fact. We could both hear a few of them moaning desperately down below, and this made me wonder if they could just smell us up here, or if maybe the hammer falls for the anchor gave away our position. I can’t be entirely sure of which.

When my eyes opened the following morning, I swear it was as if the whole region had already been infected. It seemed like hundreds had flocked to stand below us in the morning rays of the summer sun, with hands grabbing at the sky, and mouths wide open. It made me think of those Pentecostal churchgoers from back in the day, only these ones were hell bound, and wanted nothing more than to eat us alive. I can’t say I wasn’t shocked because most likely I was, but I suppose in retrospect I had almost expected something like this to occur sooner or later. I shook Paul awake, and told him not to look down. Though by the time I had finished my sentence, he was already peering over the edge of the roof into an abyss of the undead. The tether around his waist and legs pulled tight against him, and if he had not been wearing it, he probably could have fallen off. I can understand that, I mean I was somewhat weak in the knees when I first saw it too.

He shot back with surprised gasp after a few moments, as his brain took a long look at what he just saw, and had to take it all in before he could react. I can remember him looking like he was about to throw up the contents of his stomach. It took me a second to try to calm myself down. I think I was almost panting with fright at the time once everything had registered with me too. Eventually I stopped, and this allowed me time to try to calm him down as well. We still had enough food and water in our supplies to last another week, so I assured him that we were going to make it out of this fucked up situation. This was definitely around the time that we realized we could hear rustling below from inside the house. I will never know exactly how many were in there, because neither of us wanted to find out. I can only imagine the scores of them aimlessly wondering right beneath us, probably in the same awkward hands-held-high position as their friends outside. Personally, I don’t think to think about it. When you’re that close to them, the images can get burned into the back of your mind; as if your eyes were a big screen projector left on the same picture for too long.

This was when we realized that the infestation had grown out of the scope of controlling it. He said to me on many occasions in the weeks before finding the militia that he wasn’t sure we were going to survive. At times, I had found myself agreeing with him, but I would always tell him that if we’re going to go down, we were going down with a fight, guns-a-blazing, as I liked to put it to him. Anyway, the rope that we took earlier in the week ended up saving our lives as you can see, because Zack’s stupid ass was only out in front of the house. There were a few stragglers in the distance to the rear when we came down off the roof, at least half a mile away, probably coming over to join in the festivities.

Back then, they still looked semi-normal before all of the eventual walking decomposition started to set in, and sometimes we would find ourselves feeling sorry for them in the beginning. Of course, that is if you could get past the glassy grey eyes, pale bloodless skin, stained clothing, and the non-stop moaning; they could have been your neighbors about two months before that point. It was times like that we really had to stop and look at what they really were. It was hard sometimes, but the best way of looking at it for us was, at least we’re not the Quislings. I always thought they deserved to be shot anyway, and a lot of the time, we couldn’t tell if they were actually infected, so they’d get a bullet to forehead just like the rest of ‘em. We’d take bets every so often in the heat of the battles that came later on, despite the fear, we’d be laughing our sick bellows, our faces covered in carbon residue from the rifle chambers, and wondering about which ones were the Quislings. Only in the latter half of the war did we start rule out thinking the Quislings could even still exist. Zack attacked them regardless of their mentally retarded disposition trying to act like the real deal, so by the end of everything I think the Quislings were just as extinct as the zombies themselves were.

In the 1^st Norfolk, “No Prisoners” militia the setting truly did resemble the Regular Army. We wore woodland BDUs, the chow lines were long, the food tasted like cardboard sometimes, and people still occasionally acted like morons despite our situation. We used the same rank system as the Army too, although people gained rank due to corrupt leadership a lot of the time. Everybody in 2^nd Squad knew it, but there was nowhere else for us to go, so we just dealt with it. Occasionally we would lose an officer to a bite, or a First Sergeant, and that meant someone needed to be put into that position to fill the slot. The both of us started our undead extermination careers as Privates, and inherently so. Some years later, we had our own squads, and we both watched many of our friends get bit, and sometimes we were the ones to finish them.

Paul and I had a game that we played sometimes in the unit once we were settled in. We called it “First to Forty”, and whoever could shoot forty of Zack would get a little extra sleep the next morning. In other words, you had no guard shift during the night. It never really made much of a difference who won anyway. Hell, because after a while Zack would come to you in your dreams, and the recurring nightmares were never a highlight of my nightlife. The longer you were asleep it seemed, the worse some of the dreams would get, so if you won the game it wasn’t exactly your lucky day more often than not. One time this person John Collins, a tall administrative assistant from Fairfax, Virginia won and he told us to go fuck ourselves. I let out a bit of real laughter to that one, not the battle laughter I was talking about earlier. Jokes were not as funny as they used to be back in those days, because laughter usually leads to Zack creeping up on you in the middle of the night, so jokes were rather forbidden in the beginning. Silence wasn’t bliss in the night, but it was the best we could do to keep down the night attacks.

When we were not fighting off the masses of undead, we were stacking them into gruesome barricading walls, on each side of our twenty-five foot tall wooden palisade built around the original missile silo structure our command center was based. For a bunch of backwoods people, I was surprised to see the marvel of engineering that went into the design we had setup. The silo, having been abandoned by the US Army back in the early 90’s, or at least that’s what the higher ups said, was surrounded by a wooded area with maybe three-hundred meters of open land in each direction. To our luck, an existing three layer chain-linked fence with razor wire lined the perimeter and was still intact. It provided some protection from the hordes in the beginning. This little bit of help gave us the ability to send out detachments to deforest portions of the area, in which the logs later became our inner perimeter fortress walls.

The deforesting teams were only dispatched outside of the fort during daylight conditions. When the rest of the companies were keeping Zack busy on the other side of the compound, was usually the best time. We did lose many of our men on those details over the years, but once the construction of the palisade was completed, everything was all right for the most part. At least you didn’t have to worry about being selected to go “outside” to chop down massive oak trees. The methods they used to get the wood back into the place were a completely different deal, and I had nothing to do with it. They had taken some old construction equipment from somewhere in town and made it all come together. Of course, they had to spend time using our slim resources, welding plates on to the frames of the huge vehicles so that they could not be attacked outright. That was smart on our part, because those machines were crawling with undead fucks by the time they made it back into the perimeter.

For about six months during my third tour, I spent my time in the supply section. The unit had taken in so many refugees and trained them to fight, that we were running a little thin on rifles for a while. It was my job to go outside of the perimeter with a medium sized detachment from 1^st Platoon and 2^nd Platoons of Alpha Company to go into surrounding towns to gather non-perishable food items, medicines, gasoline for the generators, weapons, and ammunition. The systems worked like this. At the inner palisade, there were two sets of massive thick wooden doors to pass through to get to the outer perimeter. Guard towers were at the main gate section, and were powered by some strange motorized contraption one of the engineers devised. If the motors failed, the contingency was that the guards could still close the doors by hand from the mid-level of the tower by pulling on a set of large wooden beams. The beams were connected to the center mass of the door, and were on rollers to there was as little resistance as possible.

The hinges were special, so the outer perimeter doors swung very quickly outward, and only to the width of our biggest trucks, maybe give or take a few feet. This way, the moment the trucks passed through, the doors could be closed with a minimal amount of the infected getting in. A gun team in either guard tower would kill off the ones that managed to squeeze by the vehicles. On the return trips, we would use our CB radios to notify the teams that we were inbound, and they would be waiting to open the doors back up for us. Usually on the way back in, Zack would be plowed through by the trucks and get into the perimeter; however, it really wasn’t much of a big deal, because most of them were liquefied on impact anyway.

The surrounding cities were infested pretty badly in some parts, so we had maps with us showing the areas that were heavily populated with the undead. Sometimes the intelligence would be wrong, and we would have to haul ass to another town with the Zacks hot on our shit. There were more than a few times we were almost overrun on missions. Paul requested to ride along with me on the mission. I remember it was into the heart of Leechburg. Everything was going as planned, and we met very little resistance from Zack on the way out there. We were all off the trucks getting supplies when the security teams started to report movement from all directions. Our first stop had been the Lucky Shot gun store, which to our amazement hadn’t been looted by anyone previously. It seemed kind of odd altogether, especially given the zombie infestation and all, but I suppose it was our lucky day; pun very intended.

I remember that by this time we had fully automatic weapons, because some self-proclaimed geniuses with rifles or more like eccentric ex-Special Forces types would spend time modifying our weaponry to be more effective. AR-15 rifles and civilian versions of the M4A1 were their favorite ones to tinker with if I recall. There were plenty of them in PA it seemed, and were common to find once you got past the infected hordes.

The CB radio on my chest clip was going wild with chatter as I was filling our big plastic totes with boxes of bullets. Range reports were coming in from 1^st, and 2^nd squads at less than six-hundred meters. 3^rd and Weapons squad were reporting multiple flocks in the distance east of our position at about eight-hundred meters. Considering the speed that Zack trudges along at, it really doesn’t matter until they get within two-hundred fifty meters; then it’s time to book it out of there. What we didn’t know is that a separate flock of more than three-hundred was coming at us through the town’s alleyways from a few blocks over. 1^st squad spotted them and began frantically requesting permission to fall back. I heard Sergeant Billings’ from 2^nd come over the CB authorizing the order.

By the time our foraging teams gathered up as much as they could from various places on the block of Morgan Street, the infected were on top of us in full force. We lost an entire squad that day, because as 1^st was retreating into the path of the oncoming flock. They didn’t realize that what they saw was only the back end of it all, because the road leading to the trucks was curved; the fuckers were waiting for them when they came into the bend. The rest of the elements managed to make it back without too much skirmishing. Some of the men were shouting to 1^st squad as they watched them get torn apart. From the back of the trucks I’m sure to them it was like watching a horrific real-life movie that got smaller and smaller until it faded out of sight. I’m not saying that we didn’t lose a lot of good men that day, but we all knew the risks that went along with the supply missions.

You just had to assume, as most of us did anyway that if you were overrun, there was no chance of being rescued. The unit doesn’t like to send its detachments into the same stretch of area any more than three times a month. That’s once a week or so, and if you think you’re going to survive out there for that long with Zack breaking down your door, you’re dead fucking wrong. The plan we had for any such occasion was to kill as many as you could, then turn your rifle on yourself before they got to you. At the very least, this way, you wouldn’t become one of them. I suppose in some kind of grim way it was the honorable thing to do. If you became Zack, then you were just another mindless zombie the unit would eventually have to fight off, so you’d really be doing it out of respect more than anything would.

Missions were never expected to succeed outside of the palisade, so even if you came home with less than half of what you left with, you still came out on top. The infected were everywhere, and it was only a matter of chance a mission lead to anything other than total failure. On many other occasions, some teams were never as lucky we were. Men that I had known since Paul and I had enlisted were killed off on these supply detachments all the time, well after I was taken off the ready list and switched to the roving perimeter guard element. Eventually after this, we both stopped making friends and just concentrated on the job at hand. We found that it wasn’t as hard to deal with the loss of our men whenever they got bitten if we didn’t care about them in the first place.

The worst thing that I saw the men do was become complacent with their surroundings. Some of them would go right up to the outer perimeter line and talk shit to the zombies. I don’t think we ever lost anyone that way, but just because they were willing to stand face to face with them, spit on them, and occasionally waste a few of them for fun, as they used to say it, often made me feel sick. If I saw it though, I would tear into their asses for doing it, because the last thing we need is people who are comfortable being surrounded by hungry dead people. I remember that we did lose a person who flung himself right into a flock outside the gates from the guard tower. Why he did it, we’ll never know. He left his weapon and ammo behind on the floor before he Zacked himself. I suppose that his idea of suicide was different from the rest of ours, but at least he did the honorable thing by leaving his rifle for another able body.

Life inside the palisade reminded me of seeing pictures of old world civilizations. In the beginning, before all of the refugees poured into the gates we didn’t have very many women. I’d say that our numbers were substantial toward the end of the war. You would think that rape would have happened more often than it did, because the man to woman ratio was still awfully skewed. I mean, the rule was if you committed murder, rape, or any like acts we would throw your ass over the walls so you could get eaten alive. For the most part this deterred the men from getting stupid, but someone always has to be that guy. When our interesting version of the Military Police caught Private Adler with Maria Lanning’s fourteen year old daughter Trisha, after some of the townspeople (which is what they pretty much were) heard screaming from inside one of our little tents, he was less than enthused.

Adler was crying for forgiveness, pleading with the MPs in an incoherent blather. Justice was swift inside the fort, because within a few hours after Trisha testified to Colonel Everett that Adler had raped her, his ass was over the wall. I remember hearing him scream blood murder, especially when he was in mid-air. You could hear his hollering for a mile, which wasn’t so great, because later on that day we had one of the worst firefights in our history go down. From that point on, any subsequent offenders had their mouths taped shut and their arms tied behind their backs before they were tossed. This definitely cut down the repercussions having a screaming maniac outside the wall can cause. Shit, even if it’s a few minutes, it’s still enough to get the attention of every infected fuck in a four-hundred meter radius.

When the Army showed up on our doorstep near the end, people didn’t really know what to think. For the past however long we all kind of lived in our little society, doing what we had to do, living our lives hour by hour. The Army seemed kind of like a relief, because at least they had machine-guns, tanks, and a lot of food. If they hadn’t offered rations outright, I’m sure most of the townspeople would have been rather pissed off, however the Army did is right when they came to us. In some way, they didn’t rescue us, because in another way it seemed like all they did was help us wipe out the Zacks faster than ever before. For the most part, after years of supply parties being sent out further and further, our ammunition, food, and medical supplies weren’t top-notch, but we had plenty of everything we needed.

For ten and a half long years, Paul and I served side-by-side, waging what felt like an endless war against Zack. I’m sure that it was endless to just about everybody anyway, even after the declaration of victory in the states. It still felt like the war was raging along even though it had finally ended. We continued to serve in the 1^st by patrolling the car-laden streets with grabbers and our surrounding bodies of water. Occasionally Water Zacks, at least that’s what we call them, would show up on the banks of the Crooked Creek trying to gnaw on some poor kid’s ankles when they’re trying to fetch wash water for their family. Sometimes we still get dispatches from the local CDC Outbreak Prevention Center in Old Ford City. My blood runs cold when those calls come in, because it reminds me of when it all started. It still feels like it will never be over, even though it essentially is, but at least we do a good job disposing of them. We have to be on the money with that kind of stuff, I mean, who wouldn’t be? Do you think I want to go through all of that shit over again? I don’t think anyone does; and I have my doubts that WWZ II is on anyone’s Christmas wish list.

One of the biggest problems I have had since everything has calmed down a little, and the paranoia around me isn’t as great; is the thought of my family. I know haven’t mentioned them all throughout this account, because I have a tendency to forget that they even existed in the first place. I don’t know, the memories come and go. I don’t even have a picture of them to remind me of what they looked like. When the outbreaks started the panic was so widespread, and so immediate, that the phone relay systems were reserved for military, local law enforcement, and emergency calls. The cell phone providers were so bogged down back then that it was pointless. So essentially, because I was staying with Paul in northern Maryland at the time, I saw no reason to risk everything to try to round them up. I guess I figured that everything would pan out for the best, and there was no reason to go crazy about the outbreak. After all, it was so far away, and it didn’t seem real when it went down.

My family lived in Baltimore, which turned into a Zack factory in less than two months after the first reported cases in the state. I really just assume that they were turned before they knew what these things really were. The panic was widespread, but I have a feeling they tried to make a stand against the things. The city fell rather quickly and I haven’t been back to Maryland in thirteen years. I miss them, but I can’t let it destroy me, because a lot of people just like me were put into the same situation so long ago. I go to the “MemorieZ” talk group here once a week in the city to talk about all of this shit, but the best coping mechanism so far is telling myself that its okay that I made it through, and they did not. You can’t live your life dwelling on the past.

Also, one last thing before I have to go to my evening formation. Since the war ended, our original numbers have dramatically decreased. Most of the vets decided to settle down after the war, but right now Paul’s on deployment in Virginia doing sweep and burial detail. The National Guard has recognized us as full unit of the United States Army, and we are getting new men every day that want to help with the cleanup efforts and about 35% of the main body consists of them now. I will probably be joining him down there in a few weeks. When you contacted me, I got permission from Colonel Everett to stick around up here so that I could tell you about my experiences. Sometimes I think it’s important that people get a good taste of history from all walks of life. If the kids being born today aren’t going to know what a CD player is, they might as well be taught why they don’t.