A Zombie's History of the United States (20 page)

Apparently Roosevelt had learned that one of their neighbors had captured a zombie out West and brought it back east for exhibition. Roosevelt promptly offered to buy the zombie, and against Edith’s wishes the creature was brought to their home. Roosevelt informed her that he was going to let the zombie bite him. In his fevered state, Roosevelt believed himself strong enough to overcome the zombination through sheer will. After all, he was the same man who was told by a doctor as a young man that he had a bad heart and should avoid a strenuous life. Had he not willed himself to a life of rugged adventure?

By the time Kermit arrived, he found Edith in a frazzled state. Roosevelt had already gone through with it, wrestling the zombie and allowing it to bite him. Roosevelt had de-animated the zombie, but unsurprisingly was not in fact able to will himself against the zombination. Edith had then locked him in the study. Edith was ready to call the police when Kermit stopped her. Presumably in a last act to honor his great father, Kermit determined that he would de-animate zombie Teddy himself. Alas, Kermit made no record of the event, but Kermit lived and Roosevelt was buried. His father would surely have been proud.

Like McKinley before him, the truth of Roosevelt’s end was kept from the press to preserve his legacy. The Roosevelts simply told everyone that Teddy had died peacefully in his sleep. Thomas R. Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, said that, “Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight.” Little did he know how right he was.

EIGHT

V is for Victory, Z is for Zombie THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND THE WEAPONIZED ZOMBIE

We want to get the hell over there. The quicker we clean up this goddamned mess, the quicker we can take a little jaunt against the purple pissing Japs and clean out their nest, too. Before the goddamned zombies get all of the credit.

—Gen. George S. Patton, addressing his troops before Operation Overlord, June 5, 1944

Despite the First World War being definitively christened the “War to End All Wars,” that subtitle did little to discourage more wars from coming. The so-called Great War was one of the most grisly and emotionally devastating wars in Western history, and this made the Allies ruthless at the Treaty of Versailles. Under the treaty, the Germans lost much of their home territory, all of their overseas colonies, and the ability to annex other states. In addition, limitations were placed on the size and capabilities of their military, and crippling reparations were imposed. Many Germans felt that they had lost more than just a war; the Allies had stripped them of their dignity as well.

The German people were left bruised, angry, disillusioned, and impressionable; many pulled toward radical political and cultural ideas. From this tumult rose Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party, emboldening the German people with a powerful and dangerous sense of national (and genetic) pride. Together with Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, Germany would initiate a conflict truly deserving of being called a “world war,” and one that would ultimately claim more lives than any war in history—roughly 60 million humans, which to put things in perspective, is equivalent to the entire populations of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Nevada combined.

The segment of the American population who lived through that experience has been referred to as the “greatest generation.” What of those who bravely fought and sacrificed, but were not exactly “living” through it? Their contribution was no less.

Project Phantom

I foresee a future where all American wars are fought by zombies.

—Lt. Gen. Patrick Casey, letter to the president, 1920

In April 1917, shortly after the United States officially entered World War I, Project Phantom was brought before the military brass for examination. The brainchild of Lt. Gen. Patrick Casey, the project was for the proposed use of zombies as a tactical weapon. The decision for America to enter the war had not been a widely popular one, and advances in how wars were fought—trench warfare, the airplane, the tank—had opened the door to outside-the-box thinking. Zombies had always proved a destructively counterproductive weapon when fighting on American soil, but some probably felt that leaving Germany a zombie-infested wasteland was just what “the Boche” deserved.

Funnily enough, many of the people who supported Project Phantom had passionately opposed President Roosevelt’s zombie preserves; yet, had Teddy gotten his way, there assuredly would have been zombies fighting in the World War I trenches. As it was, rounding up zombies was not so easy as it had been decades earlier, and funds and manpower to search them out was spread thin. Casey had just managed to round up enough zombies for a ground test when the war ended—only one year, six months, and five days after America had joined.

Project Phantom was not finished though. Like a zombie itself, Casey’s project didn’t exactly die…it became something else. In March 1920, Project Phantom set up shop at Fort Andrew in New Mexico, about 100 miles south of Albuquerque. Over the next several years, the few remaining wild zombies were rounded up and shipped to “Fort Dead,” as the base was unaffectionately known, where they were used in and subjected to a variety of experiments in the base’s underground labs by Casey and a small team of scientists headed by Dr. Stephen Ingpen, a British anthropologist.

Ingpen and his team did extensive work trying to determine how a zombie can sense living flesh so effectively, often being lured from great distances by a single human. It had long been believed that it was a preternatural sense, that “evil” zombies were simply drawn toward “good” humans by virtue of their demonic purpose. Theodore Roosevelt had theorized that zombies were drawn to human blood, and Ingpen was to prove him right.

Ingpen’s team discovered that, like a common animal, sight and smell guided zombies. Zombies were placed in a controlled cell next to a human. When the zombies’ view of the human was obstructed and when vents cut off the airflow between the cells, the zombies shambled aimlessly or stood in a catatonic daze. If either the view or the airflow became unobstructed, the zombies immediately reacted, attempting to reach the human. How zombies were able to visually distinguish between a human and another zombie when no smell was present was not determined, but spoke to some innate intelligence still lurking in the zombie’s mind. Ingpen did determine that the smell of a human was a much stronger lure to a zombie than mere sight.

Tests done aboveground on Fort Dead’s desert compound showed that the average zombie could smell a single human from a half-mile away. One zombie (nicknamed Bud) was able to locate a human from 1.2 miles away on repeated occasions. Ingpen and his team were never able to determine how exactly a zombie’s olfactory system became heightened upon zombination, or why it continued to work even with heavy damage or rotting of the nasal tissue. In fact, the only way to stop the power of a zombie’s “nose” was the complete removal or destruction of the olfactory system, which then left the zombie unable to detect unseen human presence.

Ingpen proved that clouding a zombie’s sense of smell was possible. Certain chemical compounds and natural substances, such as Meriwether Lewis’s discovery, the Mandan root, could confuse a zombie’s senses or even repel the undead in a temporary capacity.

Ingpen’s stated goal at the onset of Project Phantom was to discover what gave zombies “life.” Hundreds of dissections took place over the next two decades, which revealed nothing. Of all the questionable experiments performed during the long and questionable run of Project Phantom, probably none were as morally murky as the human testing the team performed. Convicted criminals were offered pardons for partaking in Project Phantom. Hooked up with electrodes to dozens of monitors, the subjects were then zombinated, generally by an injection of a zombie-infected serum, as the scientists tried to detect precisely what occurred during the metamorphosis.

This answer of zombie “life” would elude Ingpen, as it eluded those before and after him, but these experiments, deplorable as they were, bore major discoveries on the front of zombie de-animation. Nikola Tesla’s theory had been quite correct. Whatever the key to zombination was, it was related to electricity, and a high enough electrical shock would render a zombie de-animated. Though he wouldn’t be able to perfect his theory for several more decades, Ingpen also deduced that certain chemical agents—which attack the nervous system—could be used to de-animate vast numbers of zombies very quickly.

While Ingpen’s scientists were making leaps in the field of zombology, the purpose of Project Phantom was still a military operation; Lt. Gen. Casey had promised Washington zombie soldiers. Ingpen spent years unsuccessfully trying to train zombies. Though zombies demonstrated a clever aptitude for circumventing certain obstacles to get at decoy prey, they could not be trained with the mere promise of reward or punishment, something necessary in the training of any animal (or human). After enough repetition, some zombies could learn that there was, say, always a human behind the red door or that stacking up a pile of blocks was the fastest way to get to a human up on a platform. With no humans present, though, a zombie became inactive and purposeless.

In 1931, Casey brought in chemist Dr. Neil Moore to see if he could reverse engineer the fabled hybrid concoction that Dr. Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson had used so foolishly more than a century prior. While an army of trained zombies would have been impressive, what Casey really wanted was an army of Carries, able to take both bullets and commands.

In the end, Moore never replicated Rush’s miracle, but replicating the end result was easily accomplished by simply using blood from a “living” hybrid. Casey had hoped Moore would be able to weed out the hybrid’s hunger for human flesh, but this was simply not possible. Again using volunteer convicts, Ingpen and Moore developed a squad of what might be called super soldiers—four to be exact, given code names after Alexander Dumas’s four musketeers: d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.

Had this been during wartime, the musketeers program would surely have continued, likely drawing a better class of volunteers (Casey had originally wanted to use immigrants looking for citizenship as test subjects), but the folly of using convicted felons eventually caught up with Project Phantom when Porthos and Athos went on a rampage, killing Casey, Ingpen, Aramis, two other scientists, and five guards before finally being de-animated as they tried to reach Fort Dead’s surface level. When Casey’s replacement, Col. Howard Alan, took over, his first command was to shut down the super soldier program, permanently. While zombies weren’t trainable, they were at least predictable. And less clever.

Under Alan’s tutelage Project Phantom was to create one of World War II’s greatest secret weapons.

The Berserker Corps

I have just returned from visiting the zombie
Berserks at the front, and there is not a finer fighting
organization in the world!

—Gen. Douglas MacArthur, reporting to Gen. Eisenhower, 1942

On September 3, 1939, Great Britain and France both issued ultimatums demanding that Germany immediately withdraw its troops from Poland. When Germany did not comply, World War II effectively began. Though President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (fifth cousin to Theodore) and much of the military felt America should enter the fray as well, with dark lingering memories of World War I, sentiment among the public was heavily against joining the war. FDR did send Britain supplies and some weapons, including an offer for a weapon the U.S. military had not yet used themselves: Project Phantom’s Berserker Corps.

A ZOMBIE SUPERHERO

When New York freelance newspaper writer Arvin Seidiker returned from his tour of duty in Europe he landed a job penning comic books for Cooper Comics (CC). Seidiker’s work on CC’s
Hero Tales
drew heavily from his experiences in the war. When his editors asked him to come up with an original character that might rival the popular heroes of CC’s competitors, such as Marvel Comics’s Captain America, Seidiker returned with Captain Zom B, an undead super soldier inspired by stories Seidiker had heard of the Berserker Corps while serving in France (he never saw any personally).