Sergei Ryzhkov's Interview

Siberia, The Holy Russian Empire

 **[The people who exist in this shantytown do so under the most primitive conditions. There is no electricity, no running water. The huts are grouped together behind a wall cut from the surrounding trees. The smallest hovel belongs to Father Sergei Ryzhkov. It is a miracle to see how the old cleric is still able to function. His walk reveals the numerous wartime and postwar injuries. The handshake reveals that all his fingers have been broken. His attempt at a smile reveals that those teeth not black with decay have been knocked out a long time ago.]**

 In order to understand how we became a “religious state,” and how that state began with a man like me, you have to understand the nature of our war against the undead.

 As with so many other conflicts, our greatest ally was General Winter. The biting cold, lengthened and strengthened by the planet’s darkened skies, gave us the time we needed to prepare our homeland for liberation. Unlike the United States, we were fighting a war on two fronts. We had the Ural barrier in the west, and the Asian swarms from
the southeast. Siberia had been stabilized, finally, but was by no means
 completely secure. We had so many refugees from India and China, so
many frozen ghouls that thawed, and continue to thaw, each spring. We
needed those winter months to reorganize our forces, marshal our
population, inventory and distribute our vast stocks of military
hardware.

 We didn’t have the war production of other countries. There was no
Department of Strategic Resources in Russia: no industry other than
finding enough food to keep our people alive. What we did have was our
legacy of a military industrial state. I know you in the West have
always laughed at us for this “folly.” “Paranoid Ivan”—that’s what you
called us—“building tanks and guns while his people cry out for cars and
 butter.” Yes, the Soviet Union was backward and inefficient and yes, it
 did bankrupt our economy on mountains of military might, but when the
motherland needed them, those mountains were what saved her children.

 [He refers to the faded poster on the wall behind him. It shows the
ghostly image of an old Soviet soldier reaching down from heaven to hand
 a crude submachine gun to a grateful young Russian. The caption
underneath reads “Dyedooshka, Spaciba” (Thank you, Grandfather).]

 I was a chaplain with the Thirty-second Motor Rifle division. We were a
 Category D unit; fourth-class equipment, the oldest in our arsenal. We
looked like extras in an old Great Patriotic War movie with our PPSH
submachine guns and our bolt-action Mosin-Nagant rifles. We didn’t have
your fancy, new battle dress uniform. We wore the tunics of our
grandfathers: rough, moldy, moth-eaten wool that could barely keep the
cold out, and did nothing to protect against bites.

 We had a very high casualty rate, most of it in urban combat, and most
of that due to faulty ammunition. Those rounds were older than us; some
of them had been sitting in crates, open to the elements, since before
Stalin breathed his last. You never knew when a “Cugov” would happen,
when your weapon would “click” at the moment a ghoul was upon you. That
happened a lot in the Thirty-second Motor Rifle division.

 We weren’t as neat and organized as your army. We didn’t have your
tight, light little Raj-Singh squares or your frugal “one shot, one
kill” combat doctrine. Our battles were sloppy and brutal. We plastered
the enemy in DShK heavy machine-gun fire, drowned them with
flamethrowers and Katyusha rockets, and crushed them under the treads of
 our prehistoric T-34 tanks. It was inefficient and wasteful and
resulted in too many needless deaths.

 Ufa was the first major battle of our offensive. It became the reason
we stopped going into the cities and started walling them up during
winter. We learned a lot of lessons those first months, charging
headlong into the rubble after hours of merciless artillery, fighting
block by block, house by house, room by room. There were always too many
 zombies, too many misfires, and always too many bitten boys.

 We didn’t have L pills 1 like in your army. The only way to deal with
infection was a bullet. But who was going to pull the trigger? Certainly
 not the other soldiers. To kill your comrade, even in cases as merciful
 as infection, was too reminiscent of the decimations. That was the
irony of it all. The decimations had given our armed forces the strength
 and discipline to do anything we asked of them, anything but that. To
ask, or even order, one soldier to kill another was crossing a line that
 might have sparked another mutiny.

 For a while the responsibility rested with the leadership, the officers
 and senior sergeants. We couldn’t have made a more damaging decision.
To have to look into the faces of these men, these boys whom you were
responsible for, whom you fought with side by side, shared bread and
blankets, saved his life or have him save yours. Who can focus on the
monumental burden of leadership after having to commit such an act?

 We began to see a noticeable degradation among our field commanders.
Dereliction of duty, alcoholism, suicide—suicide became almost epidemic
among the officer corps. Our division lost four experienced leaders,
three junior lieutenants, and a major, all during the first week of our
first campaign. Two of the lieutenants shot themselves, one right after
committing the deed, and the other later that night. The third platoon
leader chose a more passive method, what we began to call “suicide by
combat.” He volunteered for increasingly dangerous missions, acting more
 like a reckless enlisted man than a responsible leader. He died trying
to take on a dozen ghouls with nothing but a bayonet.

 Major Kovpak just vanished. No one knows exactly when. We knew he
couldn’t have been taken. The area was thoroughly swept and no one,
absolutely no one left the perimeter without an escort. We all knew what
 probably happened. Colonel Savichev put out an official statement that
the major had been sent on a long-range recon mission and had never
returned. He even went so far as to recommend him for a first-class
Order of the Rodina. You can’t stop the rumors, and nothing is worse for
 a unit’s morale than to know that one of their officers had deserted. I
 could not blame the man, I still cannot. Kovpak was a good man, a
strong leader. Before the crisis he had done three tours in Chechnya and
 one in Dagestan. When the dead began to rise, he not only prevented his
 company from revolting, but led them all, on foot, carrying both
supplies and wounded from Curta in the Salib Mountains all the way to
Manaskent on the Caspian Sea. Sixty-five days, thirty-seven major
engagements. Thirty-seven! He could have become an instructor—he’d more
than earned the right—and had even been asked by STAVKA because of his
extensive combat experience. But no, he volunteered for an immediate
return to action. And now he was a deserter. They used to call this “the
 Second Decimation,” the fact that almost one in every ten officers
killed themselves in those days, a decimation that almost brought our
war effort to a crushing halt.

 The logical alternative, the only one, was to therefore let the boys
commit the act themselves. I can still remember their faces, dirty and
pimply, their red-rimmed eyes wide as they closed their mouths around
their rifles. What else could be done? It wasn’t long before they began
to kill themselves in groups, all those who’d been bitten in a battle
gathering at the field hospital to synchronize the moment when they
would all pull the trigger. I guess it was comforting, knowing that they
 weren’t dying alone. It was probably the only comfort they could
expect. They certainly didn’t get it from me.

 I was a religious man in a country that had long since lost its faith.
Decades of communism followed by materialistic democracy had left this
generation of Russians with little knowledge of, or need for, “the opium
 of the masses.” As a chaplain, my duties were mainly to collect letters
 from the condemned boys to their families, and to distribute any vodka I
 managed to find. It was a next-to-useless existence, I knew, and the
way our country was headed, I doubted anything would occur to change
that.

 It was right after the battle for Kostroma, just a few weeks before the
 official assault on Moscow. I had come to the field hospital to give
last rights to the infected. They had been set apart, some badly mauled,
 some still healthy and lucid. The first boy couldn’t have been older
than seventeen. He wasn’t bitten, that would have been merciful. The
zombie had had its forearms ripped off by the treads of an SU-152
self-propelled gun. All that remained was hanging flesh and broken
humerus bones, jagged at the edges, sharp like spears. They stabbed
right through the boy’s tunic where whole hands would have just grabbed
him. He was lying on a cot, bleeding from his belly, ashen-faced, rifle
quivering in his hand. Next to him was a row of five other infected
soldiers. I went through the motions of telling them I would pray for
their souls. They either shrugged or nodded politely. I took their
letters, as I’d always done, gave them a drink, and even passed out a
couple cigarettes from their commanding officer. Even though I’d done
this many times, somehow I felt strangely different. Something was
stirring within me, a tense, tingling sensation that began to work its
way up through my heart and lungs. I began to feel my whole body tremble
 as the soldiers all placed the muzzles of their weapons underneath
their chins. “On three,” the oldest of them said. “One…two…” That was as
 far as they got. The seventeen-year-old flew backward and hit the
ground. The others stared dumbfounded at the bullet hole in his
forehead, then up to the smoking pistol in my hand, in God’s hand.

 God was speaking to me, I could feel his words ringing in my head. “No
more sinning,” he told me, “no more souls resigned to hell.” It was so
clear, so simple. Officers killing soldiers had cost us too many good
officers, and soldiers killing themselves had cost the Lord too many
good souls. Suicide was a sin, and we, his servants—those who had chosen
 to be his shepherds upon the earth—were the only ones who should bear
the cross of releasing trapped souls from infected bodies! That is what I
 told division commander after he discovered what I’d done, and that is
the message that spread first to every chaplain in the field and then to
 every civilian priest throughout Mother Russia.

 What later became known as the act of “Final Purification” was only the first step of a religious fervor that would surpass even the Iranian revolution of the 1980s. God knew his children had been denied his love for too long. They needed direction, courage, hope! You could say that it is the reason we emerged from that war as a nation of faith, and have continued to rebuild our state, on the basis of that faith.

 **Is there any truth to the stories of that philosophy being perverted for political reasons?**

 [Pause.] I don’t understand.

 **The president declared himself head of the Church . . .**

 Can’t a national leader feel God’s love?

 **But what about organizing priests into “death squads,” and assassinating people under the premise of “purifying infected victims”?**

 [Pause.] I don’t know what you’re talking about.

 **Isn’t that why you eventually fell out with Moscow? Isn’t that why you’re here?**

 **[There is a long pause. We hear the sounds of footsteps approaching. Someone knocks at the door. Father Sergei opens it to find a small, ragged child. Mud stains his pale, frightened face. He speaks in a frantic, local dialect, shouting and pointing up the road. The old priest nods solemnly, pats the boy on the shoulder, then turns to me.]**

 Thank you for coming. Will you excuse me, please?

 **[As I rise to leave, he opens a large wooden chest at the foot of his bed, removing both a bible and a World War II - era pistol.]**