Really?

Despised them; dirty, smelly, slobbering germ bags that humped your leg and made the carpet smell like piss. God, I hated them. I was that guy who’d come over to your house and refuse to pet the dog. I was the guy at work who always made fun of people with dog pictures on their desk. You know that guy who’d always threaten to call Animal Control when your pooch barked at night?

[Motions to himself.]

I lived a block away from a pet store. I used to drive by it every day on my way to work, confounded by how these sentimental, socially incompetent losers could shell out so much money on oversized, barking hamsters. During the Panic, the dead started to collect around that pet shop. I don’t know where the owner was. He’d pulled down the gates but left the animals inside. I could hear them from my bedroom window. All day, all night. Just puppies, you know, a couple of weeks old. Scared little babies screaming for their mommies, for anyone, to please come and save them.

I heard them die, one by one as their water bottles ran out. The dead never got in. They were still massed outside the gate when I escaped, ran right past without stopping to look. What could I have done? I was unarmed, untrained. I couldn’t have taken care of them. I could barely take care of myself. What could I have done?…Something.

[Maze sighs in her sleep. Darnell pats her gently.]

I could have done something.

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.]

ABOARD USS HOLO KAI, OFF THE COAST OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS

[Deep Glider 7 looks more like a twin fuselage aircraft than a minisub. I lie on my stomach in the starboard hull, looking out through a thick, transparent nose cone. My pilot, Master Chief Petty Officer Michael Choi, waves at me from the port hull. Choi is one of the “old-timers,” possibly the most experienced diver in the U.S. Navy’s Deep Submergence Combat Corps (DSCC). His gray temples and weathered crow’s-feet clash violently with his almost adolescent enthusiasm. As the mother ship lowers us into the choppy Pacific, I detect a trace of “surfer dude” bleeding through Choi’s otherwise neutral accent.]

My war never ended. If anything, you could say it’s still escalating. Every month we expand our operations and improve our material and human assets. They say there are still somewhere between twenty and thirty million of them, still washing up on beaches, or getting snagged in fishermen’s nets. You can’t work an offshore oil rig or repair a transatlantic cable without running into a swarm. That’s what this dive is about: trying to find them, track them, and predict their movements so maybe we can have some advance warning.