A Zombie's History of the United States (25 page)

Initial reports in the press suggested that humans had finally terminated David Z. Many were shocked when the assassins turned out to be hybrids. The woman, Maria Sholts, and the man, Devon Lester, were both hybrids and members of Carries for Independence. Lester claimed that he and Sholts had acted of their own volition and not on orders from CFI. Their motive, Lester told reporters, was that David Z “had been endangering the hopes of all Carries by pushing America toward a mortal war, one that the hybrids stood no chance of winning, we know.” The CFI publicly denounced the actions of Sholts and Lester, though they also reiterated Lester’s points about David Z. Since killing a hybrid was not a crime in Florida, Lester was not arrested. Outraged, Lester demanded that he and David Z be treated like humans and that he be prosecuted for his crime of murder. The CFI marched outside a Miami police station, refusing to leave until Lester was arrested. In an act of both contrition and condescension, Lester was finally arrested, though not for murder. For firing his gun inside the Conservatory Ballroom, Lester was charged with disturbing the peace and fined $400.

For those who study undead history, the hybrid rights movement came to a somewhat predictable end. With David Z out of the picture, CFI made some headway to secure a private hybrid reservation. A bill allotting several hundred acres in Wyoming to CFI was about to go before Congress when, on October 1, 1971, one of CFI’s leaders, Robert Bizek, was caught devouring a homeless man in a motel room in Detroit, Michigan.

The FBI had received information that implicated all the top men and women of CFI in dozens of homeless kidnappings and murders throughout the 1960s. A raid of CFI’s Boston headquarters on October 18 led to a bloody battle between the FBI and the hybrids living and working within the complex. The live news reports of the daylong bloodbath caused a stir in several other cities. Humans mobbed up and attacked known hybrids in their neighborhoods, and ex-members of the disbanded HPF seized the moment to go on small killing and infecting sprees in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Houston.

After over a hundred years of ambiguity, on February 20, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the Human Safety Act, which officially recognized hybrids as “non-beings” and a danger to regular citizens. Being a hybrid was still not a crime. There were no arrests, no trials. Now an officer of the law’s duty was to terminate a hybrid upon sight. Normal citizens were also encouraged to do the same.

Once more the hybrids went into hiding.

Secret War of the Undead

There is no secret zombie war.

—President Ronald Reagan, 1985

On December 27, 1979, Soviet special forces swooped into Kabul, Afghanistan, and occupied several key governmental and military facilities, including the Tajbeg Presidential Palace. This was not technically an invasion—the Soviets had been asked to come by the Afghan government. The Russians would soon regret accepting the invitation, as thus began the Soviet-Afghan War, which is often, and aptly, referred to as the Soviet Union’s Vietnam War.

In 1978, the Afghan Communist Party established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan after a bloody military coup known as the Saur Revolution. The new communist government immediately ran into violent conflict with the local, anticommunist
mujahideen
(Muslim guerilla fighters). By 1979, the conflict was proving impossible for the Republic to contain, so President Hafizullah Amin begged the Soviet Union for assistance. So the Soviets moved in. Finding Amin unsatisfactory, they had him killed and replaced him with the more Soviet-friendly Babrak Karmal. Regrettably for the Soviets, they did not find the mujahideen any easier to suppress.

In typical Cold War fashion, the anticommunist rebels were able to garner financial and weapons support from the United States (unofficially, of course). On April 2, 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed a secret executive order authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct covert operations against the communist regime in Afghanistan, though Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, flatly denied that any such order had been issued when questioned about it mere weeks later. Carter had supplied funding for the CIA program known as Operation Dustup, which included the arming of Afghanistan’s mujahideen with zombie weaponry.

The CUS had new zombie toys for the rebels to play with. Head of the class were the Chicken Hawk, a small rocket launcher that deployed a tear gas-like shell of zombie contagion, and the Z-2, a hand grenade that sent out a shower of sharp pellets coated in zombie contagion that could pierce clothing and light armor. Both were incredibly effective. The Soviets had their own toys too, such as the B-75, a machine gun that fired zombie contagion- coated bullets, and the PLO-20, which resembled a flame-thrower, and could spray foam contagion up to a hundred yards. Afghanistan’s rough terrain was soon swarming with the undead.

The infestation actually served the rebels well, as the zombies were a far greater problem for the Soviets and their Afghani allies than for the mujahideen, who were relatively secure from the undead in their mountain safeguards. Then the game completely changed in 1984, when the CIA began receiving rebel reports that there were zombies attacking other zombies. Several samples of these new zombie-eating zombies were shipped back to Fort Dead, where the CUS scientists discovered that the Soviets had figured out a way to genetically alter the zombie contagion, creating a strain of zombies that also hungered for the flesh of natural zombies. The Soviets had found a shrewd gimmick for cleaning up Afghanistan’s zombie-beset deserts.

Needless to say, it was not long until CUS produced its own variant of the Soviet strain, with zombies designed to target the Soviets’ new strain. Now a surreal and secret war was being fought without rebels or Soviets, but with American zombies and Soviet zombies. Before long it became clear to both the rebels and the Soviets that this was a futile strategy. Creating zombies for the purpose of fighting other zombies was not pushing the conflict toward victory for either side, and with both sides overzealously building up a zombie fighting force, the zombie population actually increased, despite the fact that these new zombies were fully willing to devour each other, as well as humans.

In March 1985, the United States adopted National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 166, which changed our strategy from simply mucking things up for the Soviets, to supporting a clear victory for the mujahideen. Under direct orders from CIA Director William Casey (son of Project Phantom’s founder, Lt. Gen. Patrick Casey), the CIA began training the Afghans in tactics such as car bombs, bombs affixed to zombies, and cross-border raids outside of Afghanistan. By February 1989, after ten years of fighting, the Soviets had finally withdrawn all their troops.

The long and costly war had mortally wounded an already ailing USSR. In the end, the Cold War was won not with A- or Z-bombs, but with bank accounts. The Soviets had overspent for far too long and their empire was crumbling around them, plagued by a bad economy and political unrest. On November 9, 1989, the Communist East German government announced the opening, or “fall,” of the Berlin Wall. Then on December 21, 1991, representatives from all of the Soviet republics (except Georgia), signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, ratifying the Belavezha Accords from earlier in the month, and dissolving the Soviet Union.

The once mighty and fearsome Soviet Union was now the Commonwealth of Independent States. On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the president of the USSR and turned power over to Boris Yeltsin, president of Russia. After five decades, the United States had won. That long-held, nervous breath could finally be released. We were safe again…

Or so we thought at the time.

Conclusion of the Living Dead

THE FUTURE HAS A PULSE

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

—Thomas Jefferson, August 1816

The quote above is a telling one. Those are the words of an idealist, a man more interested in possibilities than realities. Thomas Jefferson is undeniably an important figure in the American narrative. He did great things for our country when it was at its most fragile. Yet he also willfully misled the American public about the Lewis and Clark mission. Whether Jefferson’s subversion of the truth was intended to protect his own interests or the public’s is debatable, but in either case, it is as important to remember his actions as it is to remember what really befell Meriwether Lewis. Just as we must not overlook the fact that Jefferson was a lifelong slave owner, we also must not overlook the fact that he and Dr. Benjamin Rush accidentally released the zombie-human hybrid contagion into the world. Jefferson was a complicated and fascinating man—we do him far more justice by remembering him warts and all, than we do attempting to sugarcoat his story.

The same can be said for America itself. Some historians choose to paint our country with impressionistic strokes, but history should be a stark photograph. Even the smallest of white lies, minor distortions, and withheld details have a way of building up over time to conceal vast sections of the truth. These omissions and fudged facts are purportedly done in America’s interests, but lying rarely helps anyone except the liar. Maybe you rest easier at night thinking there are no zombies out there in the world, but that ignorance ultimately makes you less safe.

During the Soviet-Afghan War, there were many Muslims from around the world who believed in the Afghani rebels’ cause and joined the mujahideen. These volunteers were known as Afghan Arabs, and one of the most prominent members was a wealthy Saudi oil prince named Osama bin Laden. When the war was over, bin Laden assembled the al-Qaeda organization for the purpose of continuing
jihad
against new enemies, primarily the United States. Though the CIA attempted to de-animate the zombies left in Afghanistan after the war, there was simply no way to ensure the de-animation of the entire force. Now, over two decades later, zombies spawned from those zombies are being used against our own brave men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces serving in the Middle East.

This remains a very hot-button issue in America. Many officials currently deny that bin Laden was part of the mujahideen trained by the CIA, while others still deny that the CIA trained
anyone
in Afghanistan, period. Though they all agree on one point:
there are no zombies in the Middle East
.

Newzweek
, a supermarket tabloid renowned for its outlandish stories often based on supernatural or conspiratorial themes, is one of the only media outlets to make any mention of zombies in the Middle East. A fairly sad commentary on the current state of zombie awareness.

I am not an investigative journalist. I have not been embedded with the troops, or interviewed generals, but I know from colleagues who did field research in Afghanistan prior to 9/11 that there were zombies in the region then. Surely they are still there now, and surely they are being utilized and weaponized. The truth will find its way out someday, but it may take decades. I would think that the sooner the White House and the Pentagon admit what has
really
been dragging the war out in the Middle East so much longer than anticipated, the sooner we might be able to work toward a solution and a resolution.

As I said, I am not a journalist. I am also not of a philosophical disposition like Mr. Jefferson. My sentiments would be the inverse of his aforementioned musing: I favor the history of the past better than the dreams of the future. Sparing you the tedium of my own psychoanalysis of why this is the case, I will simply say that I do not like trying to predict what lies before us. Speculation is not a talent within my wheelhouse. But one thing I can say with certainty and no speculation—ignoring the past positions us dangerously for the future.