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Chapter Text

I am sitting in a lecture hall at the University of Alabama, along with around fifty undergraduate students. My purpose in being here is to listen to Professor Albert Jenkins, who is one of the few experts in the internal political ramifications of the war. He has invited me here because, as he put it, "I'll probably answer all your questions in the lecture." I sit up as he walks in and takes the stage.

"Good afternoon, y'all. Now, as I recall, last time we met we had just finished discussing most of the great shifts in political power in American history. Can anyone here give me all of them in chronological order?" (A student raises his hand. Jenkins points at him.) Harker.

(Harker speaks.) "1800, the Federalists begin their spiral and the Jeffersonians take control. 1824, the splintering of the Democrats. 1860, the Republican Party gains the ascendancy. 1932, the end of the Republican party's dominance and the Democratic Party's dominance. 1968, the Republicans retake control." (He stops. The professor gives him an inquiring look.) Is there another, Professor Jenkins?

(Jenkins looks around.) Can anyone give me another? (Another student raises her hand) Williams.

(Williams speaks) Would that be 2008, the Democrats shatter the Republicans due to mismanagement of government?

(There is laughter from the students, and a wry smile appears on Jenkins' face.) Now, Ms. Williams, there wouldn't happen to be some editorializing in that remark, would there? However, that particular episode shall be one of the what-ifs of history, due to the event known as World War Z, or, more commonly, The War. (His eyes sweep the class.) Y'all're one of the first classes I've had that contained folks too young to remember the Great Panic, or the time before. Y'all remember the war, but you don't remember much before. Let me give you a quick rundown.

It was 2010. The first black president in American history, Colin Powell, had been elected by a landslide. The Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and a large majority in the House. The United States had pulled out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, and we were moving troops into Afghanistan, hoping to win there.

Then things started happening. China began closing access to the outside world, claiming an epidemic. Reports began coming in of something called "African Rabies." Then the Israelis announced that they were building a wall around themselves, and were inviting all Jews and Palestinians to come in. Conspiracy websites in the United States were abuzz with rumors of American special ops teams moving under dead of night, killing several people—all with headshots, and taking the others, who were returned later, were noticeably closemouthed, and were buying guns, and lots of ammunition. Phalanx became all the rage—and then the outbreak got so bad that nothing could contain it. And y'all know the rest of what happened.

However, one thing y'all may not have noticed there was a noticeable shift in political dynamics after the war. Here's why. (The professor pulls down a map of the United States pre-war. It's an election map, divided by counties, with the colors indicating which party won each county.) Now, can anyone tell me any points of commonalty between the bluish areas? (Yet another student raises a hand) Jackson.

(Jackson speaks) Most of them are in urban areas?

(Jenkins nods) Precisely, Mr. Jackson. And as a corollary, most of the reddish areas are in rural or suburban areas. Generally, urban areas were hardest hit by the plague and its aftermath, as many urbanites were killed in the cities, or died on the way, or, especially those who left early on, froze to death or starved in Canada. While many suburban areas had these issues, rural areas were not hit nearly as hard as more urbanized locales.

Now, these circumstances came into play on both sides of the Rocky Mountain line. However, circumstances were slightly different, depending on which side of the line you were on. For instance, while Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, and San Diego were all overrun early on, they were taken back swiftly and violently—often, interestingly enough, by US military forces assisted by street gang members and militia groups. Said militia groups also cooperated with the US military to clear out Boise, Las Vegas, Reno, and Phoenix. Several cities, such as Missoula, Helena, and Cheyenne, never needed military help. Of those areas west of the Line, few suffered truly drastic depopulation—with the exceptions of L.A., Seattle, Portland, and Las Vegas.

In rural areas, many of the more radical militia groups from the USA and Canada banded together in the "Secessionist" movement, which was shattered quickly, primarily by American and Canadian special ops soldiers and more moderate militias. The same state of affairs occurred with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints(1). However, apart from there things west of the Line went relatively smoothly.

East of the line, things were a bit different. Almost all cities suffered drastic depopulation, especially Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Washington, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Miami. Much of the Dakotas, all of Nebraska and Kansas, and most of Oklahoma and Texas were passed over by the megaswarms, which ruined all the areas they passed over.

Areas that survived the zombies largely unscathed included the Black Hills, the Ozarks, northern areas of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, and most of the Appalachians. The Shenandoah Valley, being in the way of the Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond swarms, got run over.

Most areas that survived the initial swarms and the first winter made it through the war with relatively minor difficulties. However, the counteroffensive brought some new problems—reintegration of the enclaves into the United States.

Y'all have all heard of the Black Hills, I presume? (The class nods) Let me explain a few things about that. First, the government did not fire the first shot. Second, the reason the locals fired was because the military commander acted like a total idiot and ordered the locals to hand over all of their weapons, and then acted in a hostile manner when the locals wouldn't give up their guns. The results were possibly the biggest P.R. black eye the United States government got in the war, and a stalling of Army Group North for two weeks. After that, more gun-friendly policies were ordered to keep the authoritarian types from causing something like that to happen again.

There were some groups that were cleared out for being stupid and no one minded—for instance, the Barony of Chicago, controlled by fanatical survivalists holed up in one of the skyscrapers, or the so-called Free City of Flint, which was free for the gangs only, or the area in South Carolina controlled by most of the Ku Klux Klan(2)—what was left of them after everyone ran them out, anyway. Those were each the most famous examples of their type, and all were very nasty.

The consequences of the war are still not fully understood yet. However, there are a few things we do know. For instance, eighty percent of Americans do not believe in gun control. Of those, around three-quarters of them were in favor of gun control before the war. Also, there is an amendment going through Congress to make anti-abortion laws constitutional, and it looks like it may go through—and may be ratified. While unemployment remains high, due to very low corporate tax rates, more and more businesses are moving back from Cuba to the USA. The Great Plains are again the world's breadbasket, and manufacturing is picking up, now that the sweatshop areas have essentially been wiped out or are nonfunctional. The unions are experiencing a resurgence, though whether they will be able to resist the temptation to institute policies that will bankrupt their companies like the United Autoworkers.

To make a long story short, it will be decades before the United States gets back even close to how it was before the War.

Any questions? (A student raises a hand) Maxwell.

(Maxwell speaks) What about other social issues, professor, like race relations and homosexuality?

(Jenkins responds) Race relations, at this point, are better than they ever have been before. Most of the KKK either died in shootouts with locals or government forces, or were killed by Zack. Most of the New Black Panthers(3) died in the cities, as did most Reconquistists(4). As to homosexuality, it's now about as recognized as fornication--stigmatized, and rightfully so, but no more so than any other particular bedroom stupidity. The war kinda did for that, when everyone was needed on the front lines.

As to crime, a major social issue which I now realize I did not cover, there has been a turn towards financial restitution for nonviolent offenses and hard labor for violent ones. Drug laws are becoming less controversial, as many dealers died in the War, as did many of their buyers. Their networks were shattered, and the survivors were often picked up by the military in the War days. The war on drugs is now much more low-intensity than it was before the War. Crime rates of all kinds are down, actually; turns out not as many folks try to murder, rob, or rape people when nine-tenths of the population is armed. And as white-collar crime now involves returning the current value equivalent to the money stolen, plus interest, there is very little of that.

Any other questions? No? Then let me end with this. I said that it would be decades before the United States got to where it was before the War. Let me add that it possibly never will. And in some ways, that might be a good thing. Class dismissed.

1: Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: splinter group of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; notorious in pre-War days for continuing to practice polygamy. Now effectively defunct.

2: Ku Klux Klan: an organization dedicated to white supremacy, known for burning crosses and anti-Semitism. Now effectively defunct.

3: New Black Panthers: an organization dedicated to black supremacy, known for being thuggish and anti-Semitic. Now effectively defunct.

4: Reconquistists: Term for Hispanic supremacists who wanted the lands taken by the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo to be returned to Mexico—a reconquista, or reconquest. Now effectively defunct.

Chapter Text

[It has taken some time to arrange this interview. Brigadier General (ret.) Martin Overbeek is widely recognized as one of the experts on large-scale zombie-fighting tactics and organization, and is usually consulting with one or another of those countries that still have significant White Zones. However, there is a brief lull in his schedule, and so we meet outside his home in the Catskills. He doesn't look the part, but from the moment he opens his mouth you understand why people listened to him.]

The problem was that the war came at one of the worst possible times to deal with something like that. I'm not talking about the interconnected world, globalization, cultural rot, or any societal or economic issues, although those did play a role. No, I'm talking about the fact that virtually none of the world's militaries had the capability to fight off Zack.

What do you mean?

[He waves a hand] Military capabilities can be measured in two ways: the equipment you have, and the people using it—hardware and software, I call it. Tactically, when you're fighting Zack, you don't need a lot of fancy hardware. All you need is a rifle, a melee weapon, anti-bite protection, and a lot of ammo. The software is a lot tougher. You need people that can aim true and quickly, trust each other not to break and run, exercise fire discipline, and don't scare worth anything. That's a lot harder to instill than just training men in how to use a SIR, AK, or Lobo.

[He sighs] That was the main purpose of Special Forces, by the way—training people to fight for themselves. We did the best we could, back before the war, but all too frequently you'd hear about troops whose trainers you'd trained breaking and running during a firefight, or engaging in atrocities, or something like that. Hold on, I'm getting ahead of myself. Sorry.

No, no. It's fine. Continue.

Anyway, that applies on the strategic level, too. Dealing with software, when you're fighting Zack, you don't go for dash, aggressiveness, and elan. Look at what those poor bastards had to go through in the Paris catacombs. No, you go slow, you take your time, you preserve your troops, and you don't do something daring unless someone desperately needs relief. Hardware wise, you basically need a light infantry force with a motorized logistics train and a few mechanized units for dealing with people trying to take advantage of the breakdown of society.

All that goes to say that when you look at nearly all of the world's militaries at the start of the war, you find out really quickly that everyone who had the right tactical software had all the wrong hardware, and everyone who had the right hardware had bad software.

Could you explain that a little?

Sure. The Western-style militaries were an example of the former problem. Their software at the individual and small-unit level was generally good. Professionalism, stand and fight, never leave a man behind. Yes, there were some issues, like needing to re-learn how to shoot, but we found out that was relatively easily remedied, especially once we replaced the M16 with the SIR.

The strategic software and all the hardware, though… [He shakes his head] You've already heard about Yonkers, so I won't retell that story. The thing was, all the Western-style militaries had something like Yonkers happen, except for the Swiss.

The reason is that militaries tend to train to combat what are called "existential threats"—i.e, situations that, if unchecked, could destroy a country. Ever since the beginning of World War II, the existential threat faced by Western countries and their allies was that of a mechanized, conventional assault by a similarly equipped human enemy, and so their militaries were armed accordingly. However, against enemies that did not fit that paradigm, said militaries usually came out the losers—look at Vietnam, Algeria, or Iraq to see what I mean. However, none of those brushfire wars were really existential threats.

And that was how things were until Zack showed up, and they tried to fight him off like he was the Soviet Union blasting through the Fulda Gap or the North Koreans rolling across the DMZ. [He snorts] I might not have done much better if I'd been in their shoes—I was just a captain when it all started, and I barely wrapped my head around it. Imagine training all your life to fight a particular enemy, then not only do you never fight him, but you end up fighting something that's almost his opposite.

The Swiss, like I mentioned, were the exception. I'm not sure why they took Warmbrunn-Knight more seriously than everyone but the Israelis did, but I think it had something to do with being something of a garrison state themselves, and their army was built to fight in the mountains—which is to say, light infantry with some mechanized backup, trained to aim carefully. When their military deployed to take on Zack, their first battle, when two battalions took on the Zurich Horde, did end up getting to hand-to-hand in the end. But they killed every last Zack that came stumbling out of that city, and they never stepped back.

Anyway, at the other extreme then you have the poorer Third World countries, like the DRC. Their militaries were almost perfectly equipped for Zack, physically—lots of rifle-armed infantry, little mechanized equipment to guzzle fuel and clog roads. The problem was that the soldiers had little-to-no training in even basic firearms usage, didn't trust each other, certainly didn't trust their officers, and their concept of fire discipline was not shooting into the air whenever something good happened.

The only reason any of the countries whose militaries fit that description are still going concerns is that Zack rots quick in the jungle.

Countries like Mali or Tajikistan, on the other hand? [He shakes his head] Doomed from the start, and still gone now. The only people who live in what used to be Mali are the surviving Tuaregs, and from what I hear the Sahelian Confederacy doesn't have any plans to reclaim Timbuktu or Bamako. And Tajikistan didn't have a government until the Russians took it back.

Most countries fell somewhere between those two extremes, but they all faced the same combination of not having the right equipment or the right mindset—or, in some cases, not having either. The Gulf States were a prime example of this, which is why Yemen and Oman are the most powerful states on the Arabian Peninsula and Riyadh is a White Zone.

The thing is, in case you haven't guessed it by now, the key factor that distinguished the surviving countries from the ones that didn't wasn't their militaries.

[This admission seems somewhat surprising to me.]

What do you mean?

[He smiles] What separated the countries that are still around from the countries that aren't was another "software" issue—how well can you and your people adapt to the new environment? Cuba and most of the Caribbean islands, Israel, and Switzerland were very quick to adapt, and survived virtually intact.

I know it seems surprising that I'd say something like that—after all, my job is to develop military solutions for Zack. But the dirty little secret about my job is that it's essentially about helping militaries that can't adapt by themselves.

Why do some places adapt well, and others don't?

That's a much more complicated question than you know, and there's no one right answer to it, whether you're talking about adapting to Zack or just in general, and sometimes people can surprise you.

I mean, think about Cuba. Who would have thought that one of the last Communist dictatorships would be able to react quickly and decisively enough to keep itself virtually zombie-free? Or Russia, for that matter. At the start of the war, the country was an utter mess with an extremely centralized decisionmaking process, a poorly-trained military on the verge of mutiny, and a people who'd been utterly demoralized by the failure of Communism and the failure of capitalism to bring anything close to a good life. By rights, the country should have ended up like Ukraine and Belarus, but it didn't. Why?

[He shrugs] My personal theory is that Russians tend to cohere when they face an existential threat to their existence, and Zack was a worse threat to that than Hitler had been. Now, the coherence was initially imposed from the top down, but if you look at what happened during the war it's remarkable how quickly everyone in the country fell into line.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Why did China have such a hard time, then? Well, for one thing, the Chinese actually had a fairly average survival rate, which is not unimpressive, considering how densely packed their cities were and the fact that they're where the outbreak started. On the positive side, you have a country with a fairly large and decently-trained security apparatus, good communications, and a willingness to engage in things that resemble the Redeker plan.

On the negative side, though, you have a country whose strategy has been to swamp the enemy with numbers or, if beaten, absorb the conquerors over the course of the next few generations. Well, Zack could do both of those things better than the Chinese government could—well, the first one anyway.

Which brings me to something else. None of the prewar political leadership—I mean the big guys, the prime ministers, presidents, party leaders, what have you—made it more than a year or so into the war, aside from the Safe Five(1) and Russia. Then the question became whether or not the new leadership was selected because it actually knew what it was doing, or because it had access to more firepower than its rivals.

[He quirks a smile] Although the latter is sometimes a result of the former, so the distinction isn't always cut-and-dried. Again, look at China, or the warlords in Central Asia, former Yugoslavia, Central Africa—or even the United States. There were three kinds of people who managed to carve out fiefdoms for themselves—the lucky, the smart, and those who were both. The ones who were just lucky tended to get swamped by Zack herds and hordes after a little while, and if that didn't happen to them, were killed when actual governments showed up, while the smart ones tended to become those governments. That's how the Sahelian Confederacy got its start, and the Kurds managed to get a state for themselves. Their survival rate was higher than anyone in the region other than the Israelis.

[He looks at me carefully] You're not here to listen to me talk about that, I know. But you have to understand the hows and the whys of what happened before thinking about what could have happened.

In the end, the problem was that large organizations—and that's what governments are, large organizations—are usually the least able to adapt to sudden changes in their environment. Individual people are much more capable of shifting their thinking, mostly because they don't have to overcome quite so much inertia, and the organizations that accommodated those people did better than the ones who didn't—again, see Israel, or even the United States.

(This seems strange to me, since less than thirty percent of the United States's population survived the war. Something of my puzzlement must show, because he sighs and shakes his head.)

Yes, I know. You're thinking about how we lost nearly three-quarters of our prewar population. The frightening thing about that number is that it actually puts us comfortably in the top twenty countries for the percentage of survivors, at least if you look at the prewar states.

It seems weird, right? That having a twenty-eight percent survival rate would make us one of the most successful countries against Zack, especially when you have places like Cuba and Israel in the high nineties, or Nepal, Bhutan, and Switzerland in the eighties(2). Like there should have been a lot of countries that lost between twenty and seventy percent of their populations.

[He shakes his head] There weren't. Even the islands that came together to create the West Indies Federation lost more than one in five of their people on average, even though they avoided getting overrun by refugees carrying the plague—for one thing, they had their own outbreaks, and for another, they were pretty dependent on outside supplies of food and medicine. They managed to get through—again, they adapted quickly—but it wasn't easy. The same situation went for the Oceanian governments as well.

Norway and Ireland had the highest percentages of survivors besides Switzerland in all of Europe—forty-five and forty percent, respectively. Namibia and Botswana had the highest percentages in Africa, each at around thirty-five percent. Peru managed to keep forty percent of its population alive, somehow. And then Asia…once you get out of the Safe Five, the highest percentage goes to…well, really, we're not sure, mostly because what used to be Afghanistan is cut off from the outside world and likes it that way, while the Central Asian states were taken over by the HRE. The highest percentages we know about are Taiwan and Vietnam, at thirty percent—which is around the same as Canada's, as it happens.

(I remember something he mentioned earlier.) What was China's survival rate?

Fifteen percent. And yes, that is above average. Think about how many countries had virtually no survivors. Brunei, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Iceland, Bangladesh, Cape Verde, the Comoros, Sao Tome and Principe, and then when you throw in Iran and Pakistan, there's ten right there.

And then you have the places where everything just came apart and it was a multi-cornered war between various living factions and Zack. Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Burundi, Nigeria, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, and there were several others.

And then you've got the plain unlucky. Singapore, hammered by its own infected and half the Malay horde, Japan, Bulgaria and Greece which were hit by the Istanbul megaswarm, Argentina, Venezuela, Ukraine and Belarus, or what happened when the Aswan Dam broke…

The average survival rate was, I think, somewhere around thirteen percent. At that point, a twenty-eight percent survival rate is pretty good, don't you think?(3) Especially when, unlike a lot of those countries, we took the majority of our casualties during the Great Panic.

(That's what I'm looking to talk about today, and Overbeek knows this.) You're on the record as saying that the Great Panic in the United States was largely the result of the government's actions. Why?

Think about what they did. First, they tried to conceal the existence of zombies, which, when they finally became undeniable, lent them a version of the mystique accorded to aliens. Second, Phalanx. This might not have been so bad if they'd coupled it with active measures to suppress Zack, but when Yonkers happened and it became obvious that the government couldn't keep Zack down and that the miracle drug in fact wasn't…well, let's say I'm looking forward to seeing Breck Scott dangle from a limb one of these days. And's that's the third thing, Yonkers, but you've heard about that. The reason we had the Great Panic was because the government had spent so much time lying and avoiding lying by cluelessness that everyone subconsciously decided that Zack couldn't be stopped.

Oh, and fourth, they refused to offer any sort of civil defense preparation, and the only advice they did provide was part of the Redeker plan—misdirection. 'Think North.' [He snarls] I'd laugh, but my wife ended up there.

They sacrificed millions of people's lives to fix a problem that they created themselves, and the worst part is that it was nowhere close to necessary.

What do you mean?

The Redeker Plan was basically what's called a "Go-to-Hell" or "GOTH" plan—that is, when it all falls apart and the only thing you can do is survive, you switch to your GOTH plan, and the devil take the hindmost.

Now, some countries needed something like the Redeker Plan to survive the plague, mostly the ones with large, densely-packed populations and few weapons, whether in private or government hands.

But in most places, Zack never should have been able to get sufficient numbers to cause the Redeker Plan to be necessary. He's slow, easily led, and stupid. If you have any kind of preparation at all, he's no threat to you at any odds of less than three or four to one. So how did there get to be enough zombies to present a threat to humanity's existence?

I'll tell you how. Concealment and control. China was the big one there, of course—if the old Politburo had admitted to the problem instead of trying to hide it under layer after layer of deception, they might still be in power now.

But that sort of thinking was everywhere, even here in the States. I heard you talked with Grover Carlson and General d'Ambrosia. For all their differences, both men had one thing in common that blinded them to how to keep Zack from becoming dangerous.

[That there could be any resemblance between Carlson and d'Ambrosia is a shocking notion.] What could that be?

Both of them thought that the solution had to come strictly through government channels. Now, the each thought that for completely different reasons. Carlson wanted to get his party re-elected, and thought that bringing the problem into the open would kill that prospect. D'Ambrosia, on the other hand, really thought that trying to keep things quiet while rebuilding the military to stop zombie hordes was the only way to keep America safe.

You disagree.

Yes.

The people who were in power at the time, they go on about how they knew people wouldn't believe them because they'd squandered their trust with things like Iraq and the financial crisis and all that.

Getting people to believe that Zack was real wouldn't've been that hard. I was on those clearance teams. By the end of the first month, it was almost old hat. If they'd given us proper equipment, we could have captured half a dozen or more specimens every time we got sent out. Then haul 'em onto live television, demonstrate what they are and how to kill them.

At which point you've done two things: you've shown that there's an enemy, and you've shown that he can be killed. Then you can start training people in how to kill him. That was something we knew how to do, and do well.

What I wanted, and a lot of us in the lower ranks wanted, was for the government to tell people what was going on and then start pushing for people to organize themselves, then send us out to train those people in how to deal with Zack. I mean, just look at how well the neighborhood security teams did behind the wall. If we'd instituted that everywhere before things went to hell…[His voice trails off]

Would that have worked?

Let me put it this way: I can't say much about where we went on the clearance teams, but what I can tell you is that those communities that went through early outbreaks and survived did much better than the ones who didn't. And those Blue Zones that received trainers had a higher survival rate than those that didn't, all other things being equal.(4)

And sure, there would have been panic and people who would have taken advantage. Hoarding, people committing murder and claiming they thought the person they killed was infected, and the disruption caused by the inevitable panicky fleeing to the backcountry. But it would have been much more spread out, the infrastructure wouldn't have been nearly as overloaded, and you would have had way fewer innocent people killed because of insufficient training and support, or opportunism. And who knows, maybe my idea wouldn't have worked, but, when it comes down to it…[He looks me squarely in the eye] Can you honestly say that the outcome of trying it would have been any worse than what ended up happening?

1 The Safe Five are the countries with a lower than 10% mortality rate—Israel, Switzerland, Cuba, Bhutan, and Nepal. Due to Tibet not being independent at the beginning of the war, it is not included in this list.

2 The percentage of survivors in the "Safe Five" are as follows: Cuba: 99%; Israel: 98%; Nepal: 88%; Bhutan: 85%; Switzerland: 83%

3 This was before the official UN report was released, so this information was new to me.

4 There are no statistics or studies that can either confirm or refute the first statement, but the second is true. Overbeek never mentioned this to me, but he was one of those trainers, and was dropped into the Savannah Blue Zone, which was deemed a "high-risk" assignment. By the time the army arrived, the city had been cleared.

Chapter Text

[Miles Timmermann, the chief demographer for the UN, is a surprisingly mild-looking fellow, given his reputation. He greets me courteously and gestures for me to sit in front of his desk. As I do so he leans back in his chair and I see the hard glint in his eye. This is a man who has faced both zombies and academics and come out on top. He starts talking before I can even get out a question.]

"Demography is destiny," I used to hear, and still do. [He snorts] In a very narrow sense, yes. After all, people who don't exist tend to have somewhat negligible effects on the rest of the world.

The politics, tracking racial and religious groups, was always extremely overblown. Identity-based voting blocs eventually break up or shift, as time goes on, especially as the identities themselves tend to change. You Americans have more experience with that than we Europeans, but we've seen it happen ourselves.

The hard numbers, though, the birth rates, the death rates, what people were dying of—those numbers really mattered, and that was what I always considered the core of my work to be. And even then, there were problems. Underreporting, overreporting—it was a mess.

[He sighs] The thing is that a lot of the people who talk about the positive effects that the war had overstate their case. Look at that twit who wrote that book in the seventies about how the world was going to be in total famine by the end of the century. I'm surprised he hasn't actually gotten killed yet, what with his talk about how the war saved us from total overpopulation, which is a downright lie.

It is?

Of course! [He leans forward and puts a hand on one arm of his chair while the other taps his desk.] All anyone ever looked at was the absolute numbers, and how it took us tens of thousands of years to reach two billion people and then managed to go from there to six billion in less than a century. No one was willing to actually look at the trendlines for the rate of growth, because reporters don't understand statistics, and if they do their editors believe their readers won't.

What do you mean?

All the hysteria over overpopulation comes from the 1960s, when people looked out at the world and realized that, despite two of the most catastrophic wars in human history, the rate of world population growth had tripled between 1920 and 1960—from considerably less than one percent per year to nearly two percent per year.

Those numbers don't sound particularly scary.

Suppose I told you that, at a two percent growth rate, world population would double every thirty-five years. Does that sound a little scarier?

Yes.

Exactly. And they should have been concerned at that point. After all, if we'd continued on that trajectory, when the plague hit there would have been more than nine billion people on the planet. Can you imagine? [He shudders] India might well have gone the way of Bangladesh, and China…well.

But that trend didn't continue. The population growth rate peaked during the early seventies, and then started to drop almost as fast as it had risen. There was a brief fluctuation in the eighties, but by the time the war hit we were on track to be at one percent population growth by 2025, and some of our estimates thought we'd be at zero population growth by 2100, with about eleven billion people.

Would that level of population be sustainable, though?

[Timmermann shrugs] Who knows? Technology was advancing rapidly, and the fact is that even before the war human beings didn't take up much of the earth's surface. That, and the decline in population growth was hitting those areas that consumed the most resources per person first, mostly.

My generation of demographers was actually having to look at some of the potential issues with having fewer births than deaths in a country. Japan was going to feel it first, but we knew Europe was going to as well, with the United States and Canada a few decades behind.

But then the war came, and that changed the game completely.

How so?

The year the war began, a little more than half the world's population lived in cities, and projections were that more than two-thirds would by 2050. It's estimated that, worldwide, less than a quarter of the survivors lived in cities before the war, and the old great cities still haven't fully recovered. New York, I believe, is the only one that has even a third of its prewar population living there now. We're still working on the data, but it looks like humanity's steady urbanization reversed because of the war, and probably is going to take some time to recover.

Then there was what the war did to birthrates. World population growth was being driven by Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and mainland Asia—which, to be honest, I think played a role in the concerns about overpopulation from some of the doomsayers. The "wrong sort" were having children, was how one of my British colleagues described some of his more Malthusian colleagues. [He smiles sardonically.] Well, the war certainly fixed the overpopulation problem pretty much everywhere it actually existed, and in a lot of places where it didn't.

[He sighs.] Sorry. Old fights.

The first few years, of course, saw a pretty catastrophic decline. We think the average fertility rate was somewhere around ten per thousand, and it didn't start going up until the Americans, and then the rest of the world, took the offensive. [He chuckles] I suppose your president was right. We needed some kind of sign that the human race was worth carrying on.

That's one of the sort of interesting things, by the way—those countries that went on the offensive early on had their birthrates rebound more quickly and with greater effect than those who did so later. Well, generally speaking, but I'll get to that in a moment.

One thing that changed was something we called "birthrate inequality"—lots of people having no children or one child, lots of people having two, and then a few having three or more. This was mostly a First World phenomenon, but one thing we've noticed since the war is that very few people who can have children don't, and extremely few people have more than three.

Why is that?

[He shrugs] I don't know enough to really have an opinion. The psychology of reproduction isn't my field—too fuzzy for me—but one of my friends who works in that field thinks that survivors of the war see having children as an act of defiance against the plague that tried to destroy them, but also know that too many can lead to you and them being dead if something goes wrong. Me? I think she's overcomplicating things, but she's usually been proven right about how people work, so who knows.

But you're not here to ask about that, you're here to talk about what the world looks like now compared to then. That is why you're here, yes?

Yes.

Good. I would hate to have wasted your time and mine.

[He leans back in his chair]

Back before the war, Asia had three-fifths of the world's population, Europe one-ninth, Africa one-seventh, Anglophone North America one-twentieth, Latin America one-twelfth. The remaining fraction was in Australia and the Pacific Ocean.

That wasn't how the births were distributed, though. Projections were that, by 2050, Europe, Latin America, and Asia were all going to lose share, while Africa would increase its share to more than a fifth of the world's population.

[This puzzles me] Didn't you just say that Latin America and Asia were drivers of population growth?

Yes. I know it sounds contradictory, but Asia mostly drove population growth by dint of the sheer size of its population, not its fertility, and while Latin Americans had more babies than their northern neighbors they weren't that far removed. The fact was that Africans were having lots and lots of babies. Some countries had fertility rates of six or seven children per woman.

At any rate, Europe's share was projected to drop by nearly a quarter, Asia by one-twentieth, and Latin America by one-eighth.

Now? The numbers are a lot more equal than they used to be—aside from Asia, that is.

[He points to a map on the wall.] That's the rough draft of the population map we'll be presenting to the UN in a month or so, once we finish analyzing the data. [He stands and walks over to it.]

Oceania's share more than quadrupled, from half a percent to more than two percent, thanks to taking lower casualties than most of the rest of the world, and a lot of the people who fled there deciding that they liked the island life. Anglophone North America's share went up too—both it and Latin America have one-tenth of the world's population, while Europe has one-seventh.

Asia and Africa… [He pauses] Asia still has about fifty-five percent of the world's population, and Africa is down to around a tenth. We think.

You think?

[He sighs] Do you remember how I said statistics weren't always reliable, even before the war? It's even worse now, especially with how unsafe it is to even go into some of these areas. The group we sent up the Congo River turned around after the tenth ambush, and they only made it a few hundred kilometers from Kinshasa—and they made it further up than anyone else had since before the war started. For all we know there's some lunatic mercenary making the locals worship him as a god.

No one has any idea what's going on in Laos or the New Guinea Highlands, or in the far reaches of the Amazon Basin, and the only reason anyone knows what's going on in what used to be Nigeria or Angola is that people keep trying to restart oil production there. And then there's whatever's happening in North Korea—now that's a nightmare waiting to be discovered, whenever somebody finally decides to venture in there.

Then you have all the people who deliberately cut themselves off from the world.

Also, the war changed the birth patterns. Remember how I was talking about birthrate inequality within the First World? That was how the various countries were too. Now? There's not a single country in the world lower than replacement rate, and none with more than four children per woman—and not all of the high birthrate countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.

And then there are the other effects.

(This is what I really came here for.) What other effects?

How much do you know about the Black Death?

It killed off about a third of Europe and it was spread by fleas carried on rats. I don't know much about anything else.

Go read up on it—it'll amaze you just how similar the reactions to its arrival were to the plague. But one of the most fascinating things about the disease was the effect it had on the economy and demography of Western Europe. It led to a much smaller labor force, one that could demand higher wages, and a lot of technological progress, thanks to that labor shortage. Cleared out a lot of the nobility, too, which made things a little more peaceful for a little while.

Like the Black Death the fact is that, for a lot of countries, the war solved a lot of their problems.

(The words cause an instant feeling of revulsion, and he nods.) I understand. That was my reaction, the first time I thought that. But it's true.

We all know about Cuba, and what the war did for it, but it also did a lot for China and India. Both countries had a problem—they each had hundreds of millions of people living in the twentieth century, and hundreds of millions of people living in the sixteenth century. This skewed everything about them—it was a large portion of the reason that sex-selective abortion was relatively common in both countries.

I'd heard that China had a problem with that, but I hadn't about India.

It was just starting to come out when the plague hit, and it also wasn't the result of a governmental policy, so it didn't make the headlines.(1) Several states in India had a male/female birth ratio as bad as China's, and we were anticipating that the resultant problems would hit India even harder than China, although perhaps New Delhi would learn from how Beijing handled the crisis, along with figuring out how to deal with the drastic differences in the standard of living between the city and countryside before they combined with the large population of surplus males to produce internal conflict.

When the war came, most of those problems went away. The cities became charnel houses, and the villages did too. India and China both threw their young men into the fight with reckless abandon. When the Three Gorges Dam went down, the disaster killed millions—but the dam was probably going to go down eventually. When the Chinese rebels dropped a nuclear bomb on the Politburo, it opened up the possibility for actual governmental reform. Meanwhile, in India, the caste system finally broke under the stress of the war, and those areas of India that had the most problems were also the hardest hit by the plague.

This was true just about everywhere, but those countries were the big ones. Of course, some countries had their problems solved because they didn't exist anymore.

[He pauses] Thing was, the war cut the human race down to about how many of us there were back at the beginning of the 19th century.

And despite the high birth rate and relatively low infant mortality rate, we're still looking at population growth at the same rate as we had in 1920 or so, which is fantastic. Assuming, of course, that we can extrapolate with any level of accuracy based on what few numbers we do have.

[He sighs] It was always difficult to count babies once you got out of the hospitals, especially in the backcountry. And the deaths were hard to count too. How many children were born and died with no one to record their existence? Especially during the war.

And we always wondered how much the governments were massaging the numbers, and we're still wondering now—especially the Russians. Those creches they've set up are supposedly doing their job, but we're still seeing a declining population there. Then again, that was a problem for them before the war—alcoholism, drugs, HIV—and the plague only exacerbated those problems for them.

It's odd, really—one thing that hasn't changed is relative life expectancy. Sure, the average life expectancy's dropped since before the war, even discounting "eaten by zombies," but when you look at life expectancy by country nearly everyone is ranked at least near where they used to be, aside from the places that got wiped out or absorbed.

Well, there's a few differences. Your country took a big jump in the rankings, mostly because your main problem was your diet and lack of exercise. Now? Not nearly as much of a problem. I'm sorry, I got off track.

That's all right.

Still. At any rate, what's essentially happened is that the whole world's basically been cut down to the number of people you need to keep modern civilization going, with a little bit of cushion.

[This seems odd.] It takes that many people to maintain twenty-first century technology?

Oh yes. The supply chains were and are extraordinarily complicated, and involve moving things from all over the world, making things all over the world, making sure that all of those things are compatible with one another—it's more than the human mind can grasp, and a lot of the problems we've been having come from needing to rebuild all of the supply chains—especially when, like I mentioned, there are areas with industrially vital resources that in a state of anarchy.

But anyway, what we have now is a world where it's entirely probable that we'll have nearly-guaranteed food surpluses for centuries, almost everywhere. Starvation, famine? Not things of the past, to be sure, but much less common than they used to be. And once food is cheaper—well. Everything gets better for everyone, really, especially with the higher wages most people will be able to get.

The farmers still end up having some problems of course, but that's always been the case. I realize that must sound a little callous, but that's the truth.

[He sighs] Demographics are tough. You have to look at the big picture, you can't get lost in the details. That's how you do your job.

But then I wonder how different that makes me from Paul Redeker, really. He thought that we'd run out of time to save the many at the expense of the few, so he decided that we had to sacrifice the many so that a few could live. Big picture thinking at its most cold-blooded.

And sometimes I wonder if the reason that the governments bought into the Redeker Plan was because it gave them a chance to play God. Choose who lived and who died, save favored groups at the expense of unfavored ones.

But that was an illusion, really. [He snorts] How many of those governments who deliberately set things up to make it easier for them to keep control are still around? How many of the unfavored groups actually had survival rates higher than the favored ones, thanks to the former having better memory of how to fight the zombies than the latter?

[He shakes his head.] Sometimes I wonder if that desire to play God is why people keep claiming that we know more than we actually do, why they don't listen when we give disclaimers like the one I'm giving you. Not that stunts like announcing in 1999 that the world's six billionth inhabitant was born in Bosnia—and if you don't think there were some politics involved in that, I'd like to play cards with you—did anything to dispel that image.

It would have been much better if whoever had that idea had been told that it was impossible to have even the slightest idea who the six billionth person on Earth was, since back then around four people were born every second and two people died. Those stats have changed a bit, as it happens. The current rate is around one child born every second and one death every second and a half. The war skewed our demographics on that, as well. The elderly and the sickly got hit hard by the war—nearly everyone who was dependent on modern medicine to stay alive died during those years.

We're still settling into the new normal, and we have governments acting like the present trendlines are going to continue as they are indefinitely. It's like nobody learned the most important lesson from the war, which is what I was just trying to get at.

[He pauses, then looks me in the eye, rather unsettlingly.] Omniscience is impossible. Nothing is certain in this world but uncertainty, and to pretend otherwise is a fool's game.

1. In talking with people from India, I found out that this was something of an open secret.

A/N: The opinions given by interviewees should not necessarily be taken as those of the author verbatim.

Chapter Text

[The current Chief of the United States Border Patrol is more weathered than most of the people who went through the war. He offers me a hand to shake as I come up to the bridge crossing the Rio Grande. He starts talking immediately.]

Warmbrunn-Knight. That's all anybody can talk about. Half the sources they used were from us, but does anyone talk about that? No. All anyone can talk about is that stupid... [He sighs] I should start from the beginning, shouldn't I?

We'd undergone a major expansion and reorganization during the years before the war, and there were...issues. We were originally part of INS(1) under DOJ, then we got rolled into CBP(2) under DHS(3). I actually came in back then, and ay-yi-yi...

[He shakes his head] Back in the INS days, it was real Wild West stuff. Revolvers, warning shots—that was a big no-no under DHS—hitting people with flashlights, little to no oversight. When the Patrol went under CBP, that changed. A lot of it for the better, some of it for the worse.

Didn't help that we were expanding faster than we ever had before. It took us eighty years to go from a hundred agents to ten thousand. In the five years around when I came in, we went from ten thousand to twenty thousand—and in the decade before 9/11, we'd gone from four thousand to ten thousand. The hiring process cut a lot of corners. It seemed like there were guys getting busted every month for drugs or bribes. Good night, we actually had some guys who tried to join that were in the States illegally. One of 'em was in my class at the Academy.

[He shakes his head.] Some people are just purblind stupid.

Anyway, the Patrol was still kind of in a state of flux when Zack showed up. We weren't the first non-intel federal agency to find out about it. That unfortunate distinction goes to OFO(4)—the Customs guys.

[He sighs] Port of San Francisco. Two inspectors were doing a routine cargo check when they heard scratching and moaning from one of the containers. So they opened it.

[I wince involuntarily. He looks at me with some sympathy.] Only reason one of them made it was that he took to his heels. Only reason it didn't shut down the port was because they shut and secured the bay doors.

We didn't know about that, of course. First thing we noticed was that we were getting a lot of illegals who weren't from Mexico. Not to say that this didn't happen before, mind you-one of the favorite tactics for the coyotes was, whenever someone from China or someplace like that, to tell them to cross the border and run to our trucks.

[My eyebrows go up. He shrugs] These guys would leave their own countrymen in the desert to die, sometimes. Why would you expect them to keep faith with guys from another continent? Kept us busy transporting and processing them while the smugglers did their real work, taking drugs over the border.

Thing was, most of the illegals who weren't Mexican were from Central or South America. But we started seeing a lot more Chinese and other Asians. And we'd ask them during processing, why did you leave your home country?

The usual answers were either "to work" or "to provide for my family." Stuff like that. [He pauses] But I'll never forget being on a conference call with a translator and a middle-aged Chinese man who looked like a banker or an accountant—not at all like our usual subjects, in other words—and asking him that. "Si le zou," he said, and the translator didn't speak for a moment before saying something sharply to the man and then repeating my question.

He shook his head. "Si le zou," he repeated, and the translator started yelling at him over the phone. The man started yelling back at him.

I didn't speak a lick of Chinese then—still don't—so I had no idea what he was saying. Finally, the yelling match ended, and the translator said to me wearily, "He insists that he left China because the dead are walking."

I didn't want to put that on the form. Who would? But that was his answer, and so I wrote it down and got the translator's name and phone number for when the guys above me inevitably sent it back.

[He snorts] I called that guy again three times that day. Every single layer of management thought they were getting pranked somehow, and every single time the man explained that yes, that was his answer.

When they finally signed off on the file and let me go home, I called up one of my classmates and told him what had happened. I think I added something about this being a novel way to try and claim asylum, then laughed a little.

Then I noticed he wasn't laughing. "Dobbs," he said, with utter seriousness, "tell no one else what you just told me. Call me back in three days. We'll talk more then."

"What?" I asked.

"Just do what I say, okay? I'll explain everything."

Well, two days later I had two men in suits sit me down and explain that what I had heard was complete nonsense and that I was to mention it to no one, because it might create panic. [He snorts] I was a cop for five years before I joined the Patrol, and I know a bad cover story when I hear it.

So I called up my friend and he gave it to me straight. He'd had an extremely similar experience to mine, as had several of our classmates. We didn't know what was going on-was it some new tactic from the smugglers? An urban legend?—but we knew something was up.

When was this?

About a week before the Israelis made their big announcement telling all the Jews and Palestinians to come on home. I knew something was up then. [He pauses] It was also about a month before I found out how very, very real Zack was.

[He shudders] We were processing a group we'd picked up at the station. We had about twenty guys, all in this one cell. One of 'em was looking a little bad, but we asked him if he was fine and he said he was. We fingerprinted 'em and got to work on the families in the group—women and kids always got top priority. We wanted them out of our hair ASAP.

Well, this one guy, the one who looks kind of bad, curls up under the blanket, right? And he's going through all the signs of turning, only we didn't know that. Well, I was busy with this one woman and her kid, trying to get her information, when suddenly I hear a pounding on the cell door and this one guy standing at the window with utter panic in his eyes.

I told the woman to wait for a moment while I went to go see what was going on, and she looked up at me with utter terror in her eyes and whispered, "Por favor, oficial, no abre la puerta." Please, officer, don't open the door.

I asked her why, and she said, "los muertos vivientes." The living dead.

I didn't believe her, of course. Why would I? So I went over to the door and opened it.

Thing you have to know is that in the field, you had to keep an eye on illegals, but once you got 'em to the station, especially the Mexicans, they were usually cooperative unless they had some kind of warrant for their arrest or something here in the States. They knew as well as we did that they wouldn't spend long in jail before getting sent back home where they could try again. One time I arrested a guy twice in the same month.

So when I unlocked the door and nearly got knocked over by a stampede it was more than a little surprising—I actually had to step out of the way to avoid getting trampled. At first I got ready to yell out that there was an escape attempt going on, but then I heard the crunching sound from inside the cell.

[He shudders again.] There he was, that guy who'd looked kind of sick, kneeling over one of the other guys and eating him.

Now, what I should've done is shot him right there. Would've, too, but procedure was to lock up your gun when you were processing aliens—lots of people wandering around, and the last thing you wanted was to have some MS-13 hombre get his hands on a loaded pistol.

Which was why all I had was my baton and my cuffs.

I yelled out for one of the other agents to grab the door, drew my baton, stepped into the room, and yelled at the guy to get on the ground and put his hands behind his back. [He shakes his head] I know, what an idiot, right?

That's when he—it—looked up at me, and I felt a chill roll down my spine. There was nothing in those eyes. I've met sociopaths and psychopaths, and even the worst have something going on back there.

And then it moaned—that gut-wrenching, brain-freezing moan that everyone was going to become all-too-familiar with over the next few years. Then it lunged at me.

I got lucky, then—it tripped over the corpse and fell on its face. I don't know why I did what I did next—still thinking like it was a person, I guess—and I ran over, got my knee in his back, and cuffed him. He kept trying to bite at me, but I wasn't putting anything anywhere near his mouth. My first year as a cop, I got bit by a homeless guy. Spent a week in the hospital because it got infected, and I've been paranoid about it ever since. [He pauses] Probably saved my life that day.

Of course, that was when I felt the body on the floor start to move. I turned my head and really looked at him for the first time. He didn't have a throat. He should not have been moving.

But he was, and then he raised his head up and looked at me with the same eyes that the other one had, and moaned in the exact same way.

That was when I panicked. All I could think was getoutgetoutgetout. I ran for it, not ashamed to say so. I remembered to close the door behind me, though. I did not want those things following me out there. That was when I saw that all of the men who'd been in the cell had clustered in front of the women and kids-well, most of them, anyway-and two of the other agents had gone to grab their pistols.

The aliens were telling them to shoot them in the head. They looked at me as I staggered forward, and I said "Listen to them. One of those guys got his throat torn out, and he's still moving."

Right then I heard a thump against the door and I turned to see that same guy press himself against the window, gaping wound and all.

The rest is kind of a blur, honestly. We locked that cell down and made sure nobody went inside, and started making calls to the CDC and sector. It didn't take long for one of the response teams to show up, maybe two hours.

Don't remember much about what they told us or how they ended up getting rid of the Zacks, just that they checked everyone by running a dog over them and told us that if we told anyone about what had happened that there would be severe penalties. They also took all of the aliens into their custody, once we processed them. Never found out what happened to them.

[He sighs] Of course we talked about it with anybody who we thought knew what was going on. Stuff like this had happened all over the place-our sector was one of the last to get hit.

Once that happened, we started really tracking things, Intel especially. I guess they wanted to know where they could expect outbreaks next.

[He spits] What should have blown it wide open was what happened at the Laredo checkpoint. Dog went into a frenzy when it sniffed an eighteen-wheeler. Agent on primary told him to pull into secondary for further inspection. Then the idiot just opened the back of the truck. [He shakes his head] Shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but he knew what was up. Government had finally briefed us on what was going on the week before. Told us exactly what to do, and that wasn't it.

Of course, you're here about the order. But you can't understand the order and what we did about it without understanding what we knew and when we knew it.

[The look in his eyes is utterly haunted] It was right after the outbreak at the El Paso Processing Center. Five hundred dead. That was when the orders came down. We weren't going to prosecute anyone anymore. Everyone was going to get sent right back to their home countries.

Well, except for the ones the dogs alerted to. Those we took for "special processing." By which I mean we tied them down until they turned and then put a bullet in their heads. We rotated that duty.

At first, the illegals just kind of accepted it. The same way they'd accepted being sent back when they faced gangs and cartels and corrupt governments. But it didn't take a month after the order came down for that to change.

Everyone was fighting us when we caught them. Everyone. The men would throw themselves at us, trying to keep us busy while their wives and kids ran for it. Our use of force incidents quintupled, at least. We couldn't keep track of them properly.

There were no give-ups anymore—and we were noticing that there weren't a lot of Chinese coming in anymore, and lots of people from other countries. The numbers just kept climbing. I think we had close to six hundred thousand apprehensions in the six months before Yonkers-and who knows how many made it over while we were busy transporting and processing. We couldn't handle them all. Neither could ICE.

I think we knew when we were done. It was the week before Yonkers. The cities were all coming apart. The cartels and Zack were chewing each other up, and people were coming across the border in droves.

So we quit. Oh, we didn't resign, but we got together with Customs and basically set up asylum-granting centers at all the POEs. Only question was whether or not you had a bad criminal record or not. We'd fingerprint people and keep them locked up if they had one.

Those were tense times. Where we were at, the Mexican Army, the Federales(5) and Rurales(6), and cartels'd come to an uneasy truce. They got their families over the bridge first, and they fought to keep some kind of clear zone open. They gave us the job of infection check, though.

Didn't blame them.

We could track the spread of the plague by where people were coming from. By that time, nobody was coming from south of Mexico City, and precious few from there. Everybody was from the northern states of Mexico—Chihuahua, Coahuila, Sonora. There was always the sound of gunfire from the south, as people turned or small groups of Zack cropped up.

Brownsville was already down, no one knew how long El Paso would hold out-even the cartels had pulled out of Juarez-and rumors were that they'd issued the evacuation order for Laredo. [He scowls] A day late, of course. Less than a tenth of the agents there made it out. Rot in hell, Redeker.

But that day was different. The longest we'd ever heard gunfire before was about thirty minutes. Not this day. The shooting started right after dawn. And it was moving towards us. Slowly-the Mexicans fell apart in a lot of places, but not there, thanks to Francisco Zapata, who headed the local Federales—but surely. And the crowd was starting to get more and more frantic. People were crowding into the bridge.

And then we saw it. The Monclova horde had followed the last refugees to make it out of the city all the way north, and the defenders knew they didn't have enough ammunition-and we knew it too.

I remember looking at my fellow agents. We were already disobeying an executive order. If we just let these people through, we'd add disobeying an agency directive to that. [He smiles wryly] I know that sounds like our priorities weren't straight, and they weren't, but no one was thinking clearly.

Still. For all that it was our job to keep people from entering illegally, we also saved people. And there was only one way to do that.

We stood aside and let them in. The only thing we did was run them by the dogs first. Whenever they alerted, we'd stop the line and sort out who they were alerting to. Then we'd take 'em out and get them where they needed to go, a little warehouse just north of the bridge. [He pauses] I think they'd stopped waiting for the infectees to turn before they shot them. It was all Old Patrol in there.

[He grows quieter] We stayed there all day and into the night, trying to clear everybody through. The sounds of gunfire from the south kept coming closer and closer, the dogs were alerting more frequently, and more and more pistol shots could be heard in the quarantine area.

And it seemed like the line would never end, that we'd be here until Zack came over the bridge.

But, around two a.m., the last civilian passed through.

Then came the hard part, which came into stark relief as the surviving soldiers, cops, and cartel enforcers came into view, firing carefully as they retreated.

Our Patrol Agent in Charge was there, and we all looked at him. He looked at us, then wrote on a sheet of paper, "Bienvenidos a los Estados Unidos"—Welcome to the United States—and hung it off the table.

"Time to go, boys," he said with a sigh. "Nothing left to do here."

He walked away, and we followed as the Mexicans crossed the bridge. Then we blew it up behind us—one of the agents had been an engineer in the army before he joined the Patrol, lucky for us. Our evac order came in the next day, and we ended up fighting our way through El Paso, and from there to the beginnings of the Wall, with the Mexicans. That Zapata was a force of nature, I tell you. No surprise that he's President down there now and he's turning it into a functioning country.

Anyway, once we few got back they stuck us agents in the desert. There were still people sneaking and smuggling across the border, even with the lifting of all immigration quotas.(7)

The war changed us more than any other law enforcement agency. Now-a-days, if you're trying to enter illegally, it's because you did something that means no one wants you or you're smuggling something. No one sympathizes with those people. And a lot of the pressures that sent people north kind of went away, too—and the US isn't as desirable a destination, but we're getting there.

Yeah, my job is a whole lot easier than it would have been twenty years ago. [He looks south across the border, grim-faced.] I'd gladly trade, though, if it meant we didn't have to go through the War. No ifs, ands, or buts.

(1) Immigration and Naturalization Service

(2) Customs and Border Protection

(3) Department of Homeland Security

(4) Office of Field Operations

(5) Mexican Federal Police: national police force of Mexico, originally organized to fight the drug cartels.

(6) Rural Defense Corps: part-time militia used to support Federal Police to fight the cartels. Both organizations were widely rumored to be used primarily by the dominant cartels in their area to crush competition.

(7) One of the more controversial laws passed in the first year of the War.