Temporary lack of the computer with my game on it means yet another Blueless day. Let’s continue with WWZ.

The monasteries are built into the steep, inaccessible rocks, some buildings sitting perched atop high, almost vertical columns. While originally an attractive refuge from the Ottoman Turks, it later proved just as secure from the living dead.

Later on in the book a lot of time will be spent on the fact that security alone won’t save you, since you also need the resources to survive. It’s not clear if there were any refugees at the time or if the existing population just had to wait things out, though. It seems like there should have been at least some, which would mean survival was a matter of leaving those people to die outside the walls…

There are “post-war” staircases for people now, which are retractable. Apparently lots of people like to visit because there’s been a spiritual upswing. I don’t really buy that – wars tend to produce atheists and home-grown religious revival as people either go back to their memories of faith or reject the whole thing. Religious tourism is more something I associate with current times, when people have the time and luxury to search for exactly the answers they want.

Anyway. Our narrator’s here to chat with one of the guys who first encountered the dead, pre-WWZ in Kyrgyzstan. (The place the last interviewee said the truck of zombies was going.)

Our mission was strictly conventional, opium and hash, the primary export crop of terrorists around the world.

Here’s the first real sign these books are a post-9/11 work, bleating about terrorists. Terrorists are not actually all the bad guys ever.

The guy here is in the Canadian military, although he sounds exactly like an American. I have little interest in the subject of the Canadian military, so I have no idea how independent they are, but even assuming they follow America around like puppies they probably should sound slightly different.

That’s all we’d ever encountered in that rocky wasteland. Traders and thugs and locally hired muscle.

No civilians. No one growing the crop. Somehow there’s local muscle to hire without anyone else around that it might be morally unpleasant to shoot to death.

But anyway, now that the setup is done it improves drastically. We now begin one of my favorite things, the supernatural mystery!

The cave entrance was easy to find. We’d tracked it back from the blood trail leading to the caravan. Right away we knew something was wrong.

Yes! Tell me more, military guy!

There were no bodies. Rival tribes always left their victims laid out and mutilated as a warning to others.

…tribes? A second ago these were terrorist exports and nothing. Are we doing tribes = terrorists now? But whatever, moving on.

There was plenty of blood, blood and bits of brown rotting flesh, but the only corpses we found were the pack mules. They’d been brought down, not shot, by what looked like wild animals. Their bellies were torn out and large bite wounds covered their flesh.

Creepy…

Still, if they’re looking close enough to notice the brown flesh, you’d think they’d have noticed it wasn’t aged like the rest? Unless I’m misreading and that’s not zombie flesh, just regular bits, and the zombies took no damage?

We guessed it had to be wild dogs.

…You’re unable to tell the difference between dog bites and human bites.

Now, this could totally work, if there was more emphasis that no one was paying attention. For example, instead of “guessed”, which implies they were curious and trying to find an explanation, “assumed” and then going on to say that there were dog attacks like this in the area all the time and also not their problem, so no one bothered examining the mules in the first place.

But that doesn’t quite fix it, because this is supposed to be supernatural mystery, and part of that is supposed to involve the characters knowing things are wrong but not knowing what it means. It would be completely appropriate here to say that they did realize these weren’t regular dog bites and weren’t sure what animal it was. That’s how it’s supposed to go, people are supposed to be finding all the relevant information but are unable to put the pieces together because it’s something that isn’t supposed to exist.

Also, the fact the mules are in the middle of a human massacre but killed by something else should be a big flag, as animals generally don’t hang out calmly during a fight. They’d have to have bolted, then somehow been driven back by the dogs who just happened to bring them down right there.

Packs of those damn things roamed the valleys, big and nasty as Arctic wolves.

What?

Okay, arctic wolves are not some scary D&D icebreathing monster. They rarely even encounter humans, because, you know, arctic, unlike the standard timber wolf. Incidentally, northern European wolves are larger than their American relatives, of which the arctic wolf is. The tundra wolf (Russian, because Russians have no luck) is an actual large subspecies, unlike the medium-sized arctic wolf.

More importantly, wolves are not the measurement for viciousness. Wild dogs are. Wolves don’t like humans. They don’t like being around humans. They don’t understand humans. Wild dogs? Wild dogs have no fear. There’s a reason that dingos, one of the smaller breeds, are the ones who’ll eat your baby.

But hey, maybe this guy just isn’t up on canine biology and no one ever explained to him that actually it’s the wild dogs you need to watch out for. I’m guessing that the military is not actually getting menaced by wild dog packs on a daily basis.

But anyway, while they have a ready explanation for the dead mules, they can’t explain the fact no one took their packs of opium.

Except wait, weren’t they assuming this was wild dogs? He isn’t saying he’s writing off the wounds as from animals, he explicitly says They’d been brought down, not shot, by what looked like wild animals. so that should have been a separate thing from whatever attacked the people. If the group was attacked and the mules bolted only to be brought down later by wild dogs, there wouldn’t have been anyone there to take the drugs. And if the idea is that they must have left the mules behind to be killed by wild dogs, then isn’t that already weird? Why take the packs when you can take the animal carrying them?

THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS IS THAT IT’S SUPPOSED TO NOT MAKE SENSE AND THE AUTHOR CAN’T EVEN DO THAT RIGHT.

The guy should be saying that he thought the mules were killed during the fight and then mauled by animals afterward, which keeps the mystery of why no one tried to take the stuff they carried without making things nonsense. They’re missing plenty of chunks and there’s no reason to do a careful check of their bodies, it should be easy to assume they were shot and the death wound just isn’t obvious.

But. Back to the tracking.

They follow a blood trail from what seems like the only person to escape the massacre, as there’s no other blood trails.

A lot of blood. Anyone who lost that much wouldn’t be getting up again. Only somehow he did.

Yes, here we go.

He hadn’t been treated. There were no other track marks.

Wait, if the ground is soft enough for you to read tracks, how did you fail to notice the tracks of all the zombies? Why didn’t you notice that there were tracks going off in every direction? Even assuming the zombies were moving in packs, there should be at least two, since the first zombies would shamble off before the second set gets up again. And all those tracks should look really freakish. And there should be no wild dog tracks.

You could easily mention this kind of thing in a way that explains why no one bothered looking, like having the initial bit being on hard ground or saying there were lots of tracks going off but they assumed those belonged to the attackers and they wanted to hunt for the drug traders, so they didn’t check them at all and went for the blood trail since that was obviously that of the losing party. Also some reference to it being odd none of them tried to follow the apparently pretty obvious trail this guy left and some speculation on why.

From what we could tell, this man had run, bled, fallen facedown—we still could see his bloody face-mark imprinted in the sand. Somehow, without suffocating, without bleeding to death, he’d lain there for some time, then just gotten up again and started walking.

Yes, that’s legitimately very creepy.

These new tracks were very different from the old. They were slower, closer together. His right foot was dragging, clearly why he’d lost his shoe, an old, worn-out Nike high-top.

Very, very creepy.

The drag marks were sprinkled with fluid. Not blood, not human, but droplets of hard, black, crusted ooze that none of us recognized.

They’re good enough trackers to tell all this. They’re even such good trackers they check the black stuff that must look an awful lot like regular blood to verify it’s something completely different. Yet they don’t freak out at him apparently dribbling unknown impossible fluid.

This black gunk will be a thing for the book. The author didn’t feel his attempt at scientific zombies was awful enough, so in addition to them being virus-activated perpetual motion machines, their dead body, the thing that no longer has any ability to produce any new substance, fills up with a black virus-filled ichor. Because he says so.

Look. Either they’re dead bodies or they’re not. You can only have gunk-spewing zombies if they’re disease zombies rather than undead ones. A grudging middle ground is possible if you have disease zombies that become undead ones, but these are no such creature, as they’re all just as filled with goop regardless of if they’re killed after contacting the disease or if they die of it.

But now for the cave they found. It’s even better than the mystery of the guy who somehow keeps going after collapsing from blood loss.

Immediately we began to see bodies, men killed by their own booby traps. They looked like they’d been trying…running…to get out.
Beyond them, in the first chamber, we saw our first evidence of a one-sided firefight, one-sided because only one wall of the cavern was pockmarked by small arms. Opposite that wall were the shooters. They’d been torn apart. Their limbs, their bones, shredded and gnawed…some still clutching their weapons, one of those severed hands with an old Makarov still in the grip. The hand was missing a finger. I found it across the room, along with the body of another unarmed man who’d been hit over a hundred times. Several rounds had taken the top of his head off. The finger was still stuck between his teeth.

For some reason, they keep going. Personally, I see people dead because they were so desperate get out they didn’t avoid their own traps, I call for backup rather than heading in. I find crazy cannibal bodies inside? I get out, then call for backup, then say that yes I’ll take the court-martial for not going back inside if I’m ordered to. Fuck that.

I realize that I am not the most military-minded person, but I’d think at least one person would have at least advocated not going into this murderhole, particularly when there’s no sign that whoever slaughtered everyone else has left.

I mean, at the least shift uncomfortably outside for a minute and listen for any sign of life in there. Call in and only when you’re told to go check it out actually venture in. Some sign you’re as creeped out here as you should be.

Every chamber told a similar story. We found smashed barricades, discarded weapons.

Seriously, do you need a literal sign saying FUCKED BE ALL THAT ENTER HERE? Did you all celebrate finding those drugs by doing as much as you could?

He notes that there are two types of bodies, the shredded ones and the headshot cannibals. I find that second note rather out of character – it’s clear no one was aiming for the head by how badly they did, so the zombies should be pretty pulped by gunfire. (And also, somehow none of them were crippled but still twitching…) What I’d expect is noting that the cannibals didn’t seem to eat each other, which seems far more like the sort of feature you’d find important. Also, they examine the bodies closely enough to find that they’re full of chewed flesh, but somehow fail to notice they’re also full of black gunk.

This also illustrates a problem in the zombie paradigm. These zombies did way too much damage to their victims. There’s still a clear divide between zombie and non-zombie in death. (Which brings in a related problem, that it’s not clear how the zombie managed to spawn so many so fast for the initial attack.)

You could see by the blood trails, the footprints, the shell casings, and pockmarks that the entire battle had originated from the infirmary.

You can tell this but you can’t tell that it doesn’t make sense for this number of unarmed people busy chewing discarded limbs to be able to take out that many heavily armed people shooting from behind barricades?

Seriously. There is not one note of confusion about this. The obvious thing to assume is that there are way more insane cannibals still around, because they must have had overwhelming numbers to win by chewing people to death. Then, there’s the question of why, if there were so many, the few cannibal bodies have taken so much punishment instead of the defenders shifting to shoot other targets. There’s the question of why there are so few cannibal bodies when they must have taken heavier losses.

But then, the whole thing is written in an incredibly flat tone. I suppose that’s excused by it being a retrospective, but he could at least throw in a mention of how confused they were, and anyway, finding an excuse doesn’t change that this way is more boring. I suppose it’s supposed to be cinematic, just the images, but that really misses the point of an oral history.

Naturally in the infirmary is the dead zombie and the empty cots of the people it bit. Also a headless doctor by the dead zombie for some reason. Is that meant to imply he took his own life rather than be turned into a zombie?

Finally, he finds a collapsed tunnel, where he sees a moving hand sticking out of the rubble, reaches to help, and it’s a zombie. Luckily his wild shot happens to blow its head off, so he survives.

I’d been the only one in the tunnel when it happened. I was the only witness…

What sort of idiot explores any part of this nightmare alone?

Anyway, so, he goes back home and the government convinces him he just went crazy due to chemical agents or something, because apparently the government didn’t think anything was odd with the rest of the report about a cannibal shootout and had no interest in examining the bodies they found there.

[He looks out at the valley, his eyes unfocused.] Who in his right mind could have been ready for this?

Anyone who investigated what you found?

Look, okay, so walking dead may be a big leap, but at the least, they’d see signs of some sort of thing that makes you crazy and immune to pain, which the military would be interested in on every level. The infirmary thing implies it’s a communicative disease, something the military likes, and his own freakout implies it’s some chemical spread in the air, also popular with the military.

The zombie plague is just way too slow. People should have seen it coming miles off.

This ends on a nice note of horror that won’t be borne out by the book, which will ultimately boil down to zombies being something you can totally be ready for. If you read the previous survival guide, it’s an extended screed against the idea zombies are anything more than extremely simple murderbots. Much as this chapter requires the reader to insert their own emotional assumptions into an incredibly flat recounting, the story as a whole requires the reader to bring their own horror to the zombie concept. The author only finds horror in the human aspect of things – that’s why the only flickers of emotion here are at the end, when he’s talking about the military beating him down until he doubted his own memories. The zombies themselves are ultimately just one of any interchangeable disasters to hang a book on, one with the benefit that people won’t notice as fast if parts don’t make sense.

But this does set a nice scene. The author’s main skill in this book is just setting up little set pieces that would serve well in a larger story.