ACTIVITIES
1. Reading + Listening Activity (True - False Questionnaire)
2. How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypsis (Poster Creation Group Work)
Reading + Listening Activity
Read this while listening
PART 2, 3, 4
INTRODUCTION
It goes by many names: "The
Crisis," "The Dark Years," "The Walking Plague," as
well as newer and more "hip" Titles such as "World War Z"
or "Z War One." I personally dislike this last moniker as it implies
an inevitable "Z War Two." For me, it will always be "The Zombie
War," and while many may protest the scientific accuracy of the word Zombie, they will be hard-pressed to
discover a more globally accepted term for the creatures that almost caused our
extinction. Zombie remains a devastating word, unrivaled in its power to conjure up so many
memories or emotions, and it is these memories, and emotions, that are the
subject of this book. This record of the greatest conflict in human history
owes its genesis to a much smaller, much more personal conflict between me and
the chairperson of the United Nation's Postwar Commission Report. My initial work
for the Commission could be described as nothing short of a labor of love. My
travel stipend, my security access, my battery of translators, both human and
electronic, as well as my small, but nearly priceless voice-activated
transcription "pal" (the greatest gift the world's slowest typist
could ask for), all spoke to the respect and value my work was afforded on this
project. So, needless to say, it came as a shock when I found almost half of
that work deleted from the report's final edition. "It was all too
intimate," the chairperson said during one of our many "animated"
discussions. "Too many opinions, too many feelings. That's not what this
report is about. We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the human
factor." Of course, she was right. The official report was a collection of
cold, hard data, an objective "after-action report" that would allow future
generations to study the events of that apocalyptic decade without being
influenced by "the human factor." But isn't the human factor what
connects us so deeply to our past' Will future generations care as much for
chronologies and casualty statistics as they would for the personal accounts of
individuals not so different from themselves? By excluding the human factor,
aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from a history that may,
heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it' And in the end, isn't the human factor
the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as "the
living dead"? I presented this argument, perhaps less professionally than
was appropriate, to my "boss," who after my final exclamation of
"we can't let these stories die" responded immediately with,
"Then don't. Write a book. You've still got all your notes, and
the legal
GREATER CHONG QING,
THE UNITED
FEDERATION OF CHINA
[At its prewar height, this region boasted a
population of over thirty-five million people. Now, there are barely fifty
thousand. Reconstruction funds have been slow to arrive in this part of the
country, the government choosing to concentrate on the more densely populated
coast. There is no central power grid, no running water besides the Yangtze
River. But the streets are clear of rubble and the local “security council” has
prevented any postwar outbreaks. The chairman of that council is Kwang Jingshu,
a medical doctor who, despite his advanced age and war time injuries, still
manages to make house calls to all his patients.]
The first
outbreak I saw was in a remote village that officially had no name. The
residents called it “New Dachang,” but this was more out of nostalgia than
anything else. Their former home, “Old Dachang,” had stood since the
period of the Three Kingdoms, with farms and houses and even trees said to be centuries
old. When the Three Gorges Damwas completed, and reservoir waters began to
rise, much of Dachang had been disassembled, brick by brick, then rebuilt on
higher ground. This New Dachang, however, was not a town anymore, but a
“national historic museum.” It must have been aheartbreaking irony for those
poor peasants, to see their town saved but then only beingable to visit it as a
tourist. Maybe that is why some of them chose to name their newlyconstructed
hamlet “New Dachang” to preserve some connection to their heritage, even
if it was only in name. I personally didn’t know that this other New
Dachang existed, so you can imagine how confused I was when the call came
in.The hospital was quiet; it had been a slow night, even for the increasing
number of drunk-driving accidents. Motorcycles were becoming very popular.
We used to say that your Harley-Davidsons killed more young Chinese than all
the GIs in the Korean War.That’s why I was so grateful for a quiet shift. I was
tired, my back and feet ached. I wason my way out to smoke a cigarette and
watch the dawn when I heard my name being paged. The receptionist that
night was new and couldn’t quite understand the dialect. There had been an
accident, or an illness. It was an emergency, that part was obvious, and could
we please send help at once. What could I say? The younger doctors, the kids
who think medicine is just a way to pad their bank accounts, they certainly
weren’t going to go help some “nongmin” just for the sake of helping. I guess
I’m still an old revolutionary at heart. “Our duty is to hold ourselves
responsible to the people. Those words still
mean something to me…and I tried to remember that as my Deer bounced
and banged over dirt roads the government had promised but never quite gotten
around to paving. I had a devil of a time finding the place. Officially, it
didn’t exist and therefore wasn’t on any map. I became lost several times and
had to ask directions from locals who kept thinking I meant the museum town. I
was in an impatient mood by the time I reached the small collection of hilltop
homes. I remember thinking, This had better be damned serious.
Once I saw their faces, I regretted my wish.
There were seven of them, all on cots, all
barely conscious. The villagers had moved them into their new communal meeting
hall. The walls and floor were bare cement. The air was cold and damp. Of
course they’re sick, I thought. I asked the villagers who had been
taking care of these people. They said no one, it wasn’t “safe.” I noticed that
the door had been locked from the outside. The villagers were clearly
terrified. They cringed and whispered; some kept their distance and prayed.
Their behavior made me angry, not at them, you understand, not as individuals,
but what they represented about our country. After centuries of foreign
oppression, exploitation, and humiliation, we were finally reclaiming our
rightful place as humanity’s middle kingdom. We were the world’s richest and
most dynamic superpower, masters of everything from outer space to cyber space.
It was the dawn of what the world was finally acknowledging as “The Chinese
Century” and yet so many of us still lived like these ignorant peasants, as
stagnant and superstitious as the earliest Yangshao savages. I was still lost
in my grand, cultural criticism when I knelt to examine the first patient. She
was running a high fever, forty degrees centigrade, and she was shivering
violently. Barely coherent, she whimpered slightly when I tried to move her
limbs. There was a wound in her right forearm, a bite mark. As I examined it
more closely, I realized that it wasn’t from an animal. The bite radius and
teeth marks had to have come from a small, or possibly young, human being.
Although I hypothesized this to be the source of the infection, the actual
injury was surprisingly clean. I asked the villagers, again, who had been
taking care of these people. Again, they told me no one. I knew this could not
be true. The human mouth is packed with bacteria, even more so than the most
unhygienic dog. If no one had cleaned this woman’s wound, why wasn’t it
throbbing with infection? I examined the six other patients. All showed similar
symptoms, all had similar wound son various parts of their bodies. I asked one
man, the most lucid of the group, who or what had inflicted these
injuries. He told me it had happened when they had tried to subdue “him.” “Who?”
I asked.
I found “Patient Zero” behind the locked door of
an abandoned house across town. He was twelve years old. His wrists and feet
were bound with plastic packing twine. Although he’d rubbed off the skin around
his bonds, there was no blood. There was also no blood on his other wounds, not
on the gouges on his legs or arms, or from the large dry gap where his right
big toe had been. He was writhing like an animal; a gag muffled his growls. At
first the villagers tried to hold me back. They warned me not to touch him,
that he was “cursed.” I shrugged them off and reached for my mask and gloves.
The boy’s skin was as cold and gray as the cement on which he lay. I could find
neither his heartbeat nor his pulse. His eyes were wild, wide and sunken
back in their sockets. They remained locked on me like a predatory beast.
Throughout the examination he was inexplicably hostile, reaching for me with
his bound hands and snapping at me through his gag. His movements were so
violent I had to call for two of the largest villagers to help me hold him
down. Initially they wouldn’t budge, cowering in the doorway like baby rabbits.
I explained that there was no risk of infection if they used gloves and masks.
When they shook their heads, I made it an order, even though I had no lawful
authority to do so. That was all it took. The two oxen knelt beside me. One
held the boy’s feet while the other grasped his hands. I tried to take a blood
sample and instead extracted only brown, viscous matter. As I was withdrawing
the needle, the boy began another bout of violent struggling.
One of my “orderlies,” the one responsible for
his arms, gave up trying to hold them and thought it might safer if he just
braced them against the floor with his knees. But the boy jerked again and
I heard his left arm snap. Jagged ends of both radius and ulna bones stabbed
through his gray flesh. Although the boy didn’t cry out, didn’t even seem to notice,
it was enough for both assistants to leap back and run from the room. I
instinctively retreated several paces myself. I am embarrassed to admit this; I
have been a doctor for most of my adult life. I was trained and…you could even
say “raised” by the People’s Liberation Army. I’ve treated more than my share of
combat injuries, faced my own death on more than one occasion, and now I was
scared, truly scared, of this frail child. The boy began to twist in my
direction, his arm ripped completely free. Flesh and muscle tore from one
another until there was nothing except the stump. His now free right arm, still
tied to the severed left hand, dragged his body across the floor. I hurried
outside, locking the door behind me. I tried to compose myself, control my
fear and shame. My voice still cracked as I asked the villagers how the
boy had been infected. No one answered. I began to hear banging on the
door, the boy’s fist pounding weakly against the thin wood. It was all I could
do not to jump at the sound. I prayed they would not notice the color draining
from my face. I shouted, as much from fear as frustration, that I had to
know what happened to this child. A young woman came forward, maybe his mother.
You could tell that she had been crying for days; her eyes were dry and deeply
red. She admitted that it had happened when the boy and his father were “moon
fishing,” a term that describes diving for treasure among the sunken ruins of the Three Gorges
Reservoir. With more than eleven hundred abandoned villages, towns, and
even cities, there was always the hope of recovering
something valuable. It was a very common practice in those days, and also very illegal. She explained that they weren’t
looting, that it was their own village, Old Dachang, and they were just trying to recover some heirlooms from the
remaining houses that hadn’t been moved. She repeated the point, and I
had to interrupt her with promises not to
inform the police. She finally explained that the boy came up crying with a bite
mark on his foot. He didn’t know what had happened, the water had been too dark
and muddy. His father was never seen again.
I reached for my cell phone and dialed the number of Doctor Gu Wen Kuei, an old comrade from my army days who now worked at the
Institute of Infectious Diseases at Chongqing
University. We exchanged pleasantries, discussing our health, our grandchildren; it was only proper. I then told him
about the outbreak and listened as he made
some joke about the hygiene habits of hillbillies. I tried to chuckle along but continued that I thought the incident might be
significant. Almost reluctantly he asked me what the symptoms were. I told him everything: the bites, the fever, the
boy, the arm…his face suddenly
stiffened. His smile died. He asked me to show him the infected. I went
back into the meeting hall and waved the phone’s camera over each of the
patients. He asked me to move the camera closer to some of the wounds
themselves. I did so and when I brought the screen back to my face, I saw that
his video image had been cut. “Stay where you
are,” he said, just a distant, removed voice now. “Take the names of all
who have had contact with the infected. Restrain those already infected. If any
have passed into coma, vacate the room and secure the exit.” His voice was
flat, robotic, as if he had rehearsed this
speech or was reading from something. He asked me, “Are you armed?” “Why
would I be?” I asked. He told me he would get back to me, all business again.
He said he had to make a few calls and that I should expect “support” within several
hours. They were there in less than one, fifty
men in large army Z-8A helicopters; all were wearing hazardous materials suits. They said they were from the Ministry
of Health. I don’t know who they thought
they were kidding. With their bullying swagger, their intimidating
arrogance, even these backwater bumpkins could recognize the Guoanbu. Their
first priority was the meeting hall. The patients were carried out on
stretchers, their limbs shackled, their mouths gagged. Next, they
went for the boy. He came out in a body bag.
His mother was wailing as she and the rest of the village were rounded up for “examinations.”
Their names were taken, their blood drawn. One by one they were stripped and
photographed. The last one to be exposed was a withered old woman. She had a
thin, crooked body, a face with a thousand lines and tiny feet that had to have
been bound when she was a girl. She was
shaking her bony fist at the “doctors.” “This is your punishment!” she shouted. “This is revenge for
Fengdu!” She was referring to the City of Ghosts, whose temples and
shrines were dedicated to the underworld. Like Old Dachang, it had been
an unlucky obstacle to China’s next Great Leap Forward. It had been evacuated,
then demolished, then almost entirely drowned. I’ve never been a superstitious
person and I’ve never allowed myself to be hooked on the opiate of the people.
I’m a doctor, a scientist. I believe only in what I can see and touch. I’ve never seen Fengdu as anything but a cheap,
kitschy tourist trap. Of course this ancient crone’s words had no effect
on me, but her tone, her anger…she had witnessed
enough calamity in her years upon the earth: the warlords, the Japanese, the
insane nightmare of the Cultural
Revolution…she knew that another storm was coming, even if she
didn’t have the education to understand it. My
colleague Dr. Kuei had understood all too well. He’d even risked his neck to
warn me, to give me enough time to call
and maybe alert a few others before the “Ministry of Health” arrived. It was something he had said…a
phrase he hadn’t used in a very longtime,
not since those “minor” border clashes with the Soviet Union. That was back in1969.
We had been in an earthen bunker on our side of the Ussuri, less than a
kilometer downriver from Chen Bao. The
Russians were preparing to retake the island, their massive artillery hammering our forces. Gu and I had been trying to remove shrapnel from the
belly of this soldier not much younger than us. The boy’s lower
intestines had been torn open, his blood and excrement were all over our gowns.
Every seven seconds a round would land close by and we would have to bend over
his body to shield the wound from falling earth, and every time we would be close enough to hear him whimper softly for
his mother. There were other voices,
too, rising from the pitch darkness just beyond the entrance to our bunker, desperate, angry voices that weren’t supposed to be
on our side of the river. We had two infantry
men stationed at the bunker’s entrance. One of them shouted “Spetsnaz!” and started firing into the dark. We could hear other
shots now as well, ours or theirs, we couldn’t
tell. Another round hit and we bent over
the dying boy. Gu’s face was only a few centimeters from mine. There was
sweat pouring down his forehead. Even in the dim light of one paraffin
lantern, I could see that he was shaking and pale. He looked at the patient,
then at the doorway, then at me, and suddenly
he said, “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be allright.” Now, this is a man who has never said a
positive thing in his life. Gu was a worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If
he had a headache, it was a brain tumor; if it looked like rain, this year’s harvest was ruined. This was his way of
controlling the situation, his lifelong
strategy for always coming out ahead. Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalistic predictions, he had no choice
but to turn tail and charge in the opposite
direction. “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right.” For the first time
everything turned out as he predicted. The Russians never crossed the river and
we even managed to save our patient. For years
afterward I would tease him about what it took to pry out a little ray of sunshine, and he would always respond that it would
take a hell of a lot worse to get him to do it again. Now we were old
men, and something worse was about to happen. It was right after he asked me if I was armed. “No,” I said,
“why should I be?” There was a brief silence, I’m sure other ears were listening. “Don’t worry,” he said,
“everything’s going to be all
right.” That was when I realized that this was not an isolated outbreak. I
ended the call and quickly placed another to my daughter in Guangzhou. Her
husband worked for China Telecom and spent at least one week of every month abroad.
I told her it would be a good idea to accompany him the next time he left and
that she should take my granddaughter and stay
for as long as they could. I didn’t have time to explain; my signal was jammed just as the first helicopter appeared. The
last thing I managed to say to her was
“Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right.”
[Kwang
Jingshu was arrested by the MSS and incarcerated without formal charges. By the time he escaped, the outbreak had spread
beyond China’s borders.]
QUESTIONNAIRE
WILL BE MAKE IN CLASS