Dragon Quill

[Jesika Hendricks gestures to the expanse of subarctic wasteland. The natural beauty has been replaced by wreckage: abandoned vehicles, debris, and human corpses remain partially frozen into the gray snow and ice. Originally from Waukesha, Wisconsin, the now naturalized Canadian is part of this region’s Wilderness Restoration Project. Along with several hundred other volunteers, she has come here every summer since the end of official hostilities. Although WRP claims to have made substantial progress, none can claim to see any end in sight.]

Finally, another female interviewee! Also, a grim hellscape for our setting today, always appreciated. (more…)

[While not a Catholic himself, Philip Adler has joined the throngs of visitors to the pope’s wartime refuge. “My wife is Bavarian,” he explains in the bar of our hotel. “She had to make the pilgrimage to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.”

But we don’t get an interview with the wife, because she is a female and being interviewed is for men!!!

The guy is actually German and our narrator explains it’s pure chance they met.

Hamburg was heavily infested. They were in the streets, in the buildings, pouring out of the Neuer Elbtunnel. We’d tried to blockade it with civilian vehicles, but they were squirming through any open space like bloated, bloody worms. Refugees were also all over. They’d come from as far away as Saxony, thinking they could escape by sea. The ships were long gone, the port was a mess. We had over a thousand trapped at the Reynolds Aluminiumwerk and at least triple that at the Eurokai terminal. No food, no clean water, just waiting to be rescued with the dead swarming outside, and I don’t know how many infected inside.
The harbor was choked with corpses, but corpses that were still moving. We’d blasted them into the harbor with antiriot water cannons; it saved ammo and it helped to keep the streets clear. It was a good idea, until the pressure in the hydrants died.

Once again, the book delivers quality scenes. This sounds like it’d fit well into Left4Dead or something – massive numbers of people turning too fast and ending up overwhelming everything by sheer numbers.

How this happened with the whole bite and wait several days to turn business in this book is far less clear. (more…)

We’re on a new section now! That means we’re…..still nowhere near the end of this.

Remember how considerate the author was of mental health and how he never ever just makes up shit for drama? This chapter is more of that. (more…)

On the heels of the last chapter being about military fuckups, it’s time to really go into that. This is the chapter that a good 90% of the online arguments are about. Generally, the focus is on the milirary aspect of this, but as we’ll see, this book provides so much more. (Like how this is the fifth chapter to take place in the US so far, and there’ve been other chapters with Americans in foreign locations.)

This chapter is set at a mural of a famous picture of soldiers near the end of the zombie war, to compare to the interviewee who’s been worn out from his time in the army. It’s time to hear about the infamous Battle of Yonkers. (more…)

[From the surface, all that is visible are the funnels, the massive, carefully sculpted wind catchers that continue to bring fresh, albeit cold, air to the three-hundred-kilometer maze below. Few of the quarter million people who once inhabited this hand-carved marvel of engineering have remained. Some stay to encourage the small but growing tourist trade. Some are here as custodians, living on the pension that goes with UNESCO’s renewed World Heritage Program. Some, like Ahmed Farahnakian, formerly Major Farahnakian of the Iranian Revolution Guards Corps Air Force, have nowhere else to go.]

That’s a pretty nice opening. (more…)

Today, our narrator is in a bar. There’s this very involved explanation about how every Caribbean island has a “Special Economic Zone”, quotes there in the original, which is walled off from everywhere else. (more…)

[The room is bare except for a table, two chairs, and a large wall mirror, which is almost sure to be one-way glass. I sit across from my subject, writing on the pad provided for me (my transcriber has been forbidden for “security reasons”).
Maria Zhuganova’s face is worn, her hair is graying, her body strains the seams
of the fraying uniform she insists on wearing for this interview. Technically we are alone, although I sense watching eyes behind the room’s one-way glass.]

We’ll be returning to this setting to later find out what’s actually going on here, but naturally there’s no context because the claim this is an oral history is getting flimsier by the minute. To spoil it, here’s the reason why we’re finally getting interviews with female character who got anything done: because they’re now imprisoned broodmares to repopulate Russia.

But hey, at least the interviews are no longer totally unbalanced genderwise and at least women can be seen to do things other than be homemakers or infants.

(more…)

Time to learn about how the author thinks mental illness works. (more…)

[I stand on the shore with Ajay Shah, looking out at the rusting wrecks of once-proud ships. Since the government does not possess the funds to remove them and because both time and the elements have made their steel next to useless, they remain silent memorials to the carnage this beach once witnessed.]

Ah, back to form. So this chapter is about people trying to escape by sea. This is a pretty solid zombie plan in theory, but in practice you’re limited by the avaliable boats. Today’s interviewee knew of a “shipyard” nearby but not the fact it was one dismantling ships rather than producing them. Apparently, neither did a lot of other people, or else they still felt their chances were better. (more…)

On to a new section. Now we enter The Great Panic, which is naturally referring only to the events in America because AMERICA FUCK YEAH and I guess other countries dealt with it in their own way whatever that might be.
(more…)

[This neighborhood is, according to the brochure, the “New Community” for the “New America.” Based on the Israeli “Masada” model, it is clear just from first glance that this neighborhood was built with one goal in mind. The houses all rest on stilts, so high as to afford each a perfect view over the twenty-foot-high, reinforced concrete wall. Each house is accessed by a retractable staircase and can connect to its neighbor by a similarly retractable walkway. The solar cell roofs, the shielded wells, the gardens, lookout towers, and thick, sliding, steel-reinforced gate have all served to make Troy an instant success with its inhabitants, so much so that its developer has already received seven more orders across the continental United States. Troy’s developer, chief architect, and first mayor is Mary Jo Miller.]

Introduction: male interviewer.
Warnings, GREATER CHONGQINGN THE UNITED FEDERATION OF CHINA: male doctor
LHASA, THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF TIBET: male smuggler
METEORA, GREECE: male soldier
THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST, BRAZIL: male doctor
BRIDGETOWN HARBOR, BARBADOS, WEST INDIES FEDERATION: male teen
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL: male intelligence agent
BETHLEHEM, PALESTINE: male teen
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA, USA: male CIA
VAALAJARVI, FINLAND: male American military adviser
VOSTOK STATION: ANTARCTICA: male snakeoil salesman
AMARILLO, TEXAS, USA: male White House chief of staff.

That is, thirteen sections in, we have the first female main character. (more…)

[Grover Carlson works as a fuel collector for the town’s experimental bioconversion plant. The fuel he collects is dung. I follow the former White House chief of staff as he pushes his wheelbarrow across the pie-laden pastures.]

This may be a petty choice, but let’s admit it, it’s pretty satisfying. (more…)

This chapter, the most remote of the remote antarctic stations, which is why today’s interviewee lives there.

We meet in “The Dome,” the reinforced, geodesic greenhouse that draws power from the station’s geothermal plant. These and many other improvements were implemented by Mister Scott when he leased the station from the Russian government. He has not left it since the Great Panic.

He’s hiding out, you see. Like a great deal of this book, this at first seems clever and intriguing, then will end up feeling dumb and badly reasoned. (more…)

[It is spring, “hunting season.” As the weather warms, and the bodies of frozen zombies begin to reanimate, elements of the UN N-For (Northern Force) have arrived for their annual “Sweep and Clear.” Every year the undead’s numbers dwindle. At current trends, this area is expected to be completely “Secure” within a decade.

We haven’t yet been introduced to much of zombie behavior yet, so this seems reasonable, and the idea frozen zombies would be trapped by ice should be savored as emminantly reasonable on its own and also a rare exception to the nonsense we’ll mostly be getting.

Our interviewee today is Travis D’Ambrosia, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe there to be in charge of zombie mopup, and unlike last chapter’s friendly principal personality, is more of a broken man:

There is a softness to the general’s voice, a sadness. Throughout our interview, he struggles to maintain eye contact.

I won’t deny mistakes were made. I won’t deny we could have been better prepared. I’ll be the first one to admit that we let the American people down. I just want the American people to know why.

That’s right, “Surpreme Allied Commander, Europe” is an American. And yet the average American reads this book and is wowed by the multiculturalism. (more…)

Right then. We now enter the book’s second section: Blame. (more…)