I think this is my favorite chapter.

In contrast with last chapter, the behavior of people here seems very human. It’s about people responding to the disease like people always do, by fleeing the area, and responding to sick family members like people always do, by trying to take them along anyway.

And it’s pretty internally consistent, even if it’s hard to believe this led to a full-on zombie apocalypse.

Our main character explains that when the outbreak began, there was a sudden boom in people wanting to get out of China and he was there to take their money. Anyone with even moderate incomes were figuring out things were going rotten, including minor government officials. But everything is still very hushed up, and he says that initially no one, including himself, really understood what was going on.

It occurs to me to wonder how this would actually go down in China. It’s not really taking into account the dedication and ingenuity of Chinese bloggers to communicate around blocks, or how disconnected some segments of urban society are. Would the WOW addicts even notice? Personally, I’d expect a huge flood of rural people fleeing outward from every area the infection shows up in, and rapidly clogging the borders. The idea of setting it in China is because their huge population means lots of zombies, but it also means the pre-zombie population is going to be pretty hard to contain if they all start moving. It doesn’t seem like it’d be broken down into rural idiots waiting to be zombie chow and urban professionals who know something’s wrong and are getting out.

He says that there was an official crackdown, but in reality no one wanted to stop things. The people in charge cared more about getting bribes. Most of what he did was by land. The really rich would go by plane, but that was harder because they were paying more attention to infected on planes.

What I like about the character is that he’s acting in opposition to society, but for all this disregard, it never occurs to him that society could fail until the very end. He kept assuming that the zombies would be kept under control, that money would have value and products would be there to buy, so on. It’s sort of like libertarians and how if they ever succeeded at killing government, they’d suddenly realize how nice it is to have roads and police and people not just killing you and taking your stuff.

There’s a reference to a flight where it seems someone died and reanimated midair, leading to a major crackdown, and the smuggler interviewed tells another story he knows that precedes it, of a couple where the man was infected but managed to get to Paris before the disease got bad. We learn here that the infection goes fast and travels by blood, but even a “slow burn” that doesn’t hit a big blood vessel gives you at most a few days.

I’m sure they thought there was a cure in the West, a lot of the infected did.

This doesn’t make much sense, though.

Rather like the fact no one seems able to get the word out, or post a youtube video or whatever, we don’t live in a world where there are nebulous promises that there’s a cure across the sea. Yes, yes, they’re desperate, but there’s limits. Just think about how destructive the untreated zombies become, if there was any treatment at all they’d want people to show up for it, and there’s no reason for the western countries to hide it instead of sharing it with the Chinese government. Even if you’re such a conspiracy theorist you think it’s a plot to crush China or something, once the infected start flooding in they wouldn’t keep it secret.

I mean, this isn’t exactly AIDS here. It’s not easily avoided. It isn’t practically invisible and it doesn’t take ages to show up, so you can’t just assume that the really rich get it but then get cured again. If AIDS made the victims become undead monsters devoted to chewing people’s faces off, would anyone really believe the CIA had a cure they were sitting on?

I can believe people wanting to get out of the infected areas, and I can believe they’re hiding their loved ones in the hopes of a cure being found, but I draw the line at thinking there’s a cure but it’s being kept secret for no reason. Especially when these people are, supposedly, reasonably well off and well educated.

The normal motivation for hiding the sick is not wanting them to be taken from you, harmed, or killed, not because you think there’s a magic cure somewhere else. I don’t know why they can’t just be running to escape China’s crackdown.

But back to the people who we’re told think there’s a secret cure in Paris but certainly don’t act like it:

His wife tried to call the doctor, but he forbade it. He was afraid they would be sent back. Instead, he ordered her to abandon him, to leave now before he lapsed into coma. I hear that she did, and after two days of groans and commotion, the hotel staff finally ignored the DO NOT DISTURB sign and broke into the room. I’m not sure if that is how the Paris outbreak started, though it would make sense

Still, this seems unusually negligent. It’s clear he’s going to be found pretty soon, although I suppose two days head start is better than two hours. But it’s not clear why this has to be an all or nothing instead of her calling a doctor as well as leaving. (And so what if they’d be sent back, they can hardly do anything with him while he’s infected, so if there’s a cure, they’d have to do that first.) I think the wife is there to explain how the story was passed on, but he has no idea where she went afterward, so there’s no way she ever shared these facts, plus there’s details from after she left, and “zombie in hotel room” seems like the sort of story other people would pass along. The whole anecdote doesn’t work because those are supposed to be told to you by someone, yet this one is just a little story without explanation of how he knows.

It’s also unclear how this kind of thing would lead to a full-on outbreak. Picture a rabid man in the same situation. Picture three if you want, to make up for the fact zombies are more durable. So they shamble from their hotel room into the unarmed staff, okay. And they bite, and there’s infections, and we know everyone bitten turns in the end – but no one bitten is just going to wander away, are they? The police and paramedics will show up. They’ll take everyone injured back with them, and since the various governments are trying to block infected people from getting into their countries, they clearly understand at least the bare basics of the infection, so at the very least, they’d be quarantined, and shortly after restrained. A rabid dog released from a hotel room doesn’t end with most people rabid. It would be bad for the people opening the hotel door and in the corridor, but it wouldn’t be the center of a citywide epidemic.

He also says that the reanimation on a flight doesn’t really change things much, because security increases are on a country by country basis and some don’t care.

You know, this book was published in 2006. You’d think the author would realize airport security can ramp up fast. I’m fine with some cynicism, but people have other motivations than money. Sure, at first, but this is a very slow zombie apocalypse, people should have been able to see it coming.

Planes aren’t much of a vector, either. This goes back to the rabies thing. The reason planes are considered such a dangerous disease vector is because people can be infectious before they’re showing symptoms (or those symptoms are indistinguishable from less harmful diseases) and most of the diseases we worry about are transmitted through air or maybe touch, both of which happen a lot in close quarters like a plane. But imagine you’re dealing with a disease that makes itself known by a human bite mark somewhere on the person’s body (and probably on an extremity) and is not infectious until the final stage, is only transmitted by biting, and prior to that it displays unique symptoms to warn you.

Once you know what the disease is, it’s really easy to stop them from getting on (or off) a plane. There will still be some countries that will be such hellholes they can’t even manage that, but we’re being given things like Mexico as an example of an easy in here.

Furthermore, if some hellhole did keep letting planes in and out, the other countries would stop it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the western countries just ordered flights in infected countries grounded and started shooting down flights that disobeyed. I mean, really, it’s zombies, you would not get a restrained response to this. Given what we learn of the diseases’ spread, it’s not like this would have prevented the zombie apocalypse and remove the premise of the book, so why not?

Now, I can see this being a problem in the initial stages, when people aren’t sure what to look for. And if they’re still in the rounding up phase and don’t have sufficient resources to handle it, they might try to quarantine all the infected and eventually have a swarm of zombies break out. And if you’re there at any of those points, it’ll be bad. (Are there many stories set in the initial part of the zombie outbreak? Most stuff I see focuses on the post-apocalyptic aspect.) But you’re just not going to get from this to having the majority of your population zombified.

Granted, there aren’t many ways you could. This is why making zombism undead rabies is a bad idea. You can get away with it if the infection is incredibly contagious and has no incubation period, like the 28 Days Later not-zombies, but nothing transmitted by bite alone could ever spread that fast, especially when the zombies themselves aren’t, and with an incubation period it’s easy to stop in its tracks. There’s even an extended intermediary period of helplessness before they get back up and start chewing on people.

But back to the good part. He goes on to say that he was only dealing with other Asian countries.

Those countries were in such economic shambles, their officials were so backward and corrupt, they actually helped us with the paperwork in exchange for a percentage of our fee.

One of the recurring issues in the book is people putting greed ahead of doing the right thing, and it’s not particularly subtle about it. I found the book a bit too strident about this. Once people start zombifying inside the country’s borders, I can’t see officials taking such a helpful attitude. Being corrupt doesn’t make you evil, and even being evil doesn’t make you willing to die as well. This is a good explanation for the initial spread, but it’s just taking place over too long a period, people should have realized this is a bad idea. (In general, parts of this work fine assuming it’s over a short period, and parts if over a long period, but there’s problems making all of it work under either.)

It is a nice look at the slow disintegration of society as the disease spreads. Originally, he didn’t see any infected personally, because they couldn’t get that far before dying and reanimating, and then getting collected by the police. As time goes on and control breaks down, families start smuggling zombies out with them. He says they weren’t really dangerous, though.

Their family usually had them bound and gagged. You’d see something moving in the back of a car, squirming softly under clothing or heavy blankets. You’d hear banging from a car’s boot, or, later, from crates with airholes in the backs of vans.

This aspect of how the disease spread, in contrast, I find very believable.

I generally loathe this trope when it shows up in zombie fiction, because how dumb do you have to be to think there’s a cure for rotting corpsehood? But when you’re restricting it to an infection-only type, it’s far more believable that people would treat it as a disease. And they’re being practical about it, keeping them well restrained. Still quite dangerous in the long term, but pretty good in the short term.

And at this point, it seems like China’s attempts to keep things under wraps have left people more afraid of the government than the disease, which will certainly skew your priorities. Instead of people fleeing the disease, they’re fleeing being found out.

Anyway, he says it wasn’t too bad compared to smuggling people by ship and the possibility of an infected breaking its bonds and contaminating the entire hold. Yup, that sounds pretty bad.

I’ve heard of various “solutions.” Sometimes ships would pull up to a stretch of deserted coast—it didn’t matter if it was the intended country, it could have been any coast—and “unload” the infected renshe onto the beach. I’ve heard of some captains making for an empty stretch of open sea and just tossing the whole writhing lot overboard.

This is another good explanation for the disease’s spread, but why would you ever bother finding a coast instead of dumping them right into the ocean? A problem might be that infected can mean either the still living or the reanimated. I can see people preferring to find the living a coast instead, even if you know they’re doomed.

He attributes the stories of zombies walking out of the surf to this kind of behavior. Remember that bit, zombies being in the ocean is going to be kind of a thing in this book, and it’s not going to be handled that well. For the moment, though, that’s really fucking creepy.

And he goes on to share his own experience with the last stages, which was when he got out of the business.

There was this truck, a beat-up old jalopy. You could hear the moans from the trailer. A lot of fists were slamming against the aluminum. It was actually swaying back and forth. In the cab there was a very wealthy investment banker from Xi’an. He’d made a lot of money buying up American credit card debt. He had enough to pay for his entire extended family. The man’s Armani suit was rumpled and torn. There were scratch marks down the side of his face, and his eyes had that frantic fire I was starting to see more of every day. The driver’s eyes had a different look, the same one as me, the look that maybe money wasn’t going to be much good for much longer.

That’s a good image.

As a way for the zombie apocalypse to happen, this works well. People are refusing to kill the dead, so they’re piling up until there aren’t enough of the living to keep them restrained. And it only takes one slip for you to be added to their numbers, while they can wait forever.