Travis D'Ambrosia's 2nd Interview

ABOARD THE MAURO ALTIERI,

 THREE THOUSAND FEET ABOVE VAALAJARVI, FINLAND

 [I stand next to General D’Ambrosia in the CIC, the Combat Information
Center, of Europe’s answer to the massive U.S. D-29 command and control
dirigible. The crew work silently at their glowing monitors.
Occasionally, one of them speaks into a headset, a quick, whispered
acknowledgment in French, German, Spanish, or Italian. The general leans
 over the video chart table, watching the entire operation from the
closest thing to a God’s-eye view.]

 “Attack”—when I first heard that word, my gut reaction was “oh shit.” Does that surprise you?

 [Before I can answer…]

 Sure it does. You probably expected “the brass” to be just champing at
the bit, all that blood and guts, “hold ’em by the nose while we kick
’em in the ass” crap.

 [Shakes his head.] I don’t know who created the stereotype of the
hard-charging, dim-witted, high school football coach of a general
officer. Maybe it was Hollywood, or the civilian press, or maybe we did
it to ourselves by allowing those insipid, egocentric clowns—the
MacArthurs and Halseys and Curtis E. LeMays—to define our image to the
rest of the country. Point is, that’s the image of those in uniform, and
 it couldn’t be further from the truth. I was scared to death of taking
our armed forces on the offensive, more so because it wouldn’t be my ass
 hanging out in the fire. I’d only be sending others out to die, and
here’s what I’d be sending them up against.

 [He turns to another screen on the far wall, nodding to an operator,
and the image dissolves into a wartime map of the continental United
States.]

 Two hundred million zombies 1 . Who can even visualize that type of
number, let alone combat it? At least this time around we knew what we
were combating, but when you added up all the experience, all the data
we’d compiled on their origin, their physiology, their strengths, their
weaknesses, their motives, and their mentality, it still presented us
with a very gloomy prospect for victory.

 The book of war, the one we’ve been writing since one ape slapped
another, was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new
 one from scratch.

 All armies, be they mechanized or mountain guerilla, have to abide by
three basic restrictions: they have to be bred, fed, and led. Bred: you
need warm bodies, or else you don’t have an army; fed: once you’ve got
that army, they’ve got to be supplied; and led: no matter how
decentralized that fighting force is, there has to be someone among them
 with the authority to say “follow me.” Bred, fed, and led; and none of
these restrictions applied to the living dead.

 Did you ever read All Quiet on the Western Front? Remarque paints a
vivid picture of Germany becoming “empty,” meaning that toward the end
of the war, they were simply running out of soldiers. You can fudge the
numbers, send the old men and little boys, but eventually you’re going
to hit the ceiling…unless every time you killed an enemy, he came back
to life on your side. That’s how Zack operated, swelling his ranks by
thinning ours! And it only worked one way. Infect a human, he becomes a
zombie. Kill a zombie, he becomes a corpse. We could only get weaker,
while they might actually get stronger.

 All human armies need supplies, this army didn’t. No food, no ammo, no
fuel, not even water to drink or air to breathe! There were no logistics
 lines to sever, no depots to destroy. You couldn’t just surround and
starve them out, or let them “wither on the vine.” Lock a hundred of
them in a room and three years later they’ll come out just as deadly.

 It’s ironic that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain,
 because, as a group, they have no collective brain to speak of. There
was no leadership, no chain of command, no communication or cooperation
on any level. There was no president to assassinate, no HQ bunker to
surgically strike. Each zombie is its own, self-contained, automated
unit, and this last advantage is what truly encapsulates the entire
conflict.

 You’ve heard the expression “total war”; it’s pretty common throughout
human history. Every generation or so, some gasbag likes to spout about
how his people have declared “total war” against an enemy, meaning that
every man, woman, and child within his nation was committing every
second of their lives to victory. That is bullshit on two basic levels.
First of all, no country or group is ever 100 percent committed to war;
it’s just not physically possible. You can have a high percentage, so
many people working so hard for so long, but all of the people, all of
the time? What about the malingerers, or the conscientious objectors?
What about the sick, the injured, the very old, the very young? What
about when you’re sleeping, eating, taking a shower, or taking a dump?
Is that a “dump for victory”? That’s the first reason total war is
impossible for humans. The second is that all nations have their limits.
 There might be individuals within that group who are willing to
sacrifice their lives; it might even be a relatively high number for the
 population, but that population as a whole will eventually reach its
maximum emotional and physiological breaking point. The Japanese reached
 theirs with a couple of American atomic bombs. The Vietnamese might
have reached theirs if we’d dropped a couple more, 2 but, thank all holy
 Christ, our will broke before it came to that. That is the nature of
human warfare, two sides trying to push the other past its limit of
endurance, and no matter how much we like to talk about total war, that
limit is always there…unless you’re the living dead.

 For the first time in history, we faced an enemy that was actively
waging total war. They had no limits of endurance. They would never
negotiate, never surrender. They would fight until the very end because,
 unlike us, every single one of them, every second of every day, was
devoted to consuming all life on Earth. That’s the kind of enemy that
was waiting for us beyond the Rockies. That’s the kind of war we had to
fight.