The Zombie Combat Manual (21 page)

Shoes

Choose your footwear carefully. It is one of the only pieces of defensive apparel that doubles as a zombie-neutralizing weapon. Avoid flimsy shoes such as sandals and flip-flops; these footwear choices may not last as long as a solid pair of hiking or combat boots and certainly do not provide the heft required to put a finishing stomp on a ghoul’s skull. Safety-toe boots with steel reinforcements are an excellent choice, but remember that the comfort factor should not be overlooked. You may have to travel many miles on foot to safety during an undead outbreak, so your choice of footwear needs to be as comfortable as it is functional.

COMBAT REPORT: JAMES LITVIK

Clothing Designer, Indianapolis, Indiana

I step into James Litvik’s workshop, located in an office park outside Indianapolis. The room is buzzing with the rhythmic sound of sewing machines and employees jostling back and forth with tall reams of fabric. I find Mr. Litvik standing in the back, inspecting some of his new tops that have just come off the machines. He explains that the disarray is a result of trying to complete a special rush order for the navy. “Customized wet suits for the special warfare teams,” he says. Litvik’s line of defensive garments has recently been awarded one of three government contracts to supply all branches of the armed services with “bite-resistant apparel.” This line of work is strikingly different from the designs Litvik created to start his career, which were featured on the fashion runways of New York, Paris, and London. We retreat from the frenetic noise of the workshop to his office, which is just as cluttered with mannequins and fabric rolls, but more conducive to an interview.

JL:
My father didn’t hate me.

ZCM: Sorry?

JL: I said, my father didn’t hate me. I wanted to get that out before we started. I’ve spoken some with journalists before, and my story’s been twisted into your typical “queer son redeems self with military dad” cliché. I hope that’s not what you’re planning to do.

ZCM: I understand. How did your father feel about you?

JL:
Pop was career army just like Grandpop, as “Hooah” as a man could get. He was also an amazingly open-minded person. Like most parents, he probably knew who I was even before I did. He was also a pragmatist. He knew it wouldn’t be easy for me growing up where we lived. I remember him trying to teach me how to box when I was way too young to be interested in anything but blocks. It was his way of trying to protect me. And he never, ever made me feel like less of a son. When I think about it, being a military brat helped develop my style; being exposed early to different cultures and dress when we lived briefly in Europe and Asia, those experiences influenced me greatly later on when I was developing my couture line.

Still, an army dad loves to have an army son, and my brother, Jake, filled that bill. JROTC, West Point, Ranger Battalion, the whole business. While I was studying pattern-making and interning in Milan, he was “playing in the sandbox.” Even though we saw each other rarely in between his extended deployments, he kept in close touch so we always knew he was all right, even if he couldn’t tell us where he was. I had heard through Pop that Jake was being sent to deal with some events that were going on in the Middle East, and foreign reports started to filter in online about some new disease there causing mass outbreaks of civil unrest.

If you remember, back here in the States we were weren’t hearing much from our own government. Thinking back now, I realize how oblivious we all were. All we kept hearing were things like, “Everything’s fine. Go about your lives. Keep traveling. Keep shopping.” I guess they figured that Uncle Mastercard would make everything better, so that’s what everyone did. I launched my clothing line, made the rounds in Paris and New York, and dressed a few B-listers for some red carpet events. Things were going well, despite more news of casualties coming in from overseas. No one seemed affected by it here, just a passing paragraph on page three of the newspapers, far below the pictures of those celebrities wearing my fall collection.

Then the shit really hit the fan, and there was no keeping the lid on what was happening any longer. We didn’t hear from Jake that often anymore. The communications between deployed soldiers and families became even more restrictive to the point where he was only sending two-word messages—“I’m okay,” so we knew that he was. Until he wasn’t.

To this day I don’t know whether it was intentional or just coincidence, but I was visiting Indiana when the CACOs
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arrived at our door. Either way, it’s a good thing I was there. With Mom gone, I’m not sure Pop would have made it through that night if he’d gotten the news by himself. When we went to see Jake’s body, I prepared myself for the worst. At that point, there were daily reports all over the news mentioning the horrific wounds our soldiers had been suffering. Some images had also been leaked online: bodies torn to pieces, sometimes barely anything left for a family to bury. I tried to steel both myself and Pop for seeing my brother’s body ravaged by the living dead.

What I saw shocked me worse than any trauma could. At first glance, Jake looked untouched, except for the trickle of blood that ran from his nose. We were told by the casualty assistance officers that this was from the PRW, the “preemptive reanimation wound” given to infected soldiers after they’ve passed to prevent undesired reanimation. Other than that, he didn’t look injured at all, until we looked closer. When we turned his forearm over, we saw a two-inch-long scratch, like that from an animal’s claw, along the inside of his wrist. The coroner told us that this scrape was probably where the infection entered his bloodstream. I could hardly believe it. The wound looked no worse than a cat scratch. I didn’t understand how he could be so vulnerable to such a minor injury. Why didn’t his equipment or uniform protect him more effectively?

From the look on Pop’s face, I could tell he was thinking the same thing. He wasn’t the most emotional person; this is a man who, at our mom’s wake, made sure he ordered three full beer kegs for the guests. “People gotta drink, don’t they?” he said. But when I saw him standing there by Jake’s body, his hands gripping the coroner’s steel table so hard that the veins in his forearms bulged, I knew that it wasn’t just sorrow he felt for the loss of his son, but anger at the senseless way it happened. He said one last thing before quietly leaving the room—“He shouldn’t have died this way.”

We couldn’t get Jake’s personal combat uniform. It was incinerated as part of standard containment procedures for all zombie casualties, but Pop and I started asking around, trying to find out exactly what type of equipment the infantry grunts were being issued. I would’ve thought that our government would have taken into consideration the uniqueness of this enemy and outfitted the men accordingly. Unfortunately, our worst suspicions were proven correct. Everyone was being issued the same old standard BDU, made from cloth that couldn’t withstand a rose thorn, much less rows of jagged, ripping teeth.

Sure, you saw plenty of high-tech military equipment being profiled by the media—the drones, heatsig cams, stalker bots. Everyone thought that we could tech-brawl our way out of this situation just like the other conflicts. You would have thought they learned something about technological reliance over boots on the ground after the last few flare-ups, but I guess the pull of the gadgetry was too strong. That was our first mistake. The second was not providing for the trigger-pullers doing the actual fighting. The defense secretary loved to show off the high-tech thingamajigs to the press, but the last innovation that made it down to the grunt level was a new camouflage pattern, and they even managed to botch that up.

I just want to make this clear; our family is a patriotic one. Pop was never the kind to whine about what the government does or doesn’t provide our fighting troops. Our family’s played a big part in this country’s history of adapting to jungle fighting, desert warfare, urban combat, and insurgencies. With three generations of military in our family, the Litviks know better than most about the liabilities of “fighting the last war.” In fighting the living dead, this axiom seemed to be coming true once again for the men and women going into harm’s way. The difference this time was, if something didn’t change soon, there wouldn’t be a next war to adapt to. It wasn’t about pointing fingers or whether what was happening was right or wrong. It was about finding a way to keep our men alive. And if the DoD wasn’t going to do it better, maybe I could.

I decided to stay in Indiana while Pop used his military contacts to get field videos and postmortems of wounded soldiers, which we reviewed meticulously. Once we saw what was happening in combat and where the injuries on the body were occurring, the answer was so obvious. Seventy-five percent of the attack injuries were happening along the length of the arms, with most of the remaining twenty-five percent along the upper torso and neck area. The best analogy I can think of is being in a knife fight. If you’re trying to fend off someone with a blade, you’re going to be using your arms and hands. The same happens with a biting and clawing attack. The same thing happened to Jake. Once we realized this, I started doing what I trained to do—design clothing—except this time with a greater purpose other than satisfying vanity.

I knew the first priority in my designs needed to be durability. Any defensive attire had to be capable of withstanding dozens of bites or scratches without breaking the skin beneath. Second, it needed to be light and flexible enough so that any soldier wouldn’t mind putting it on underneath his regulation uniform and all the other gear he’d be piling on top of it. Finally, it needed to be cheap. Sure, I could have used Kevlar or carbon fiber, but that would have driven the price of each piece up at least tenfold, and I wanted anything I created to be affordable to even the lowest pay grade.

We played with so many different fabrics—leather, vinyl, burlap. I even managed to test a small batch of engineered spider’s silk. None of them were light enough to be comfortable while simultaneously being durable enough to withstand extensive bite trauma. I finally realized that we needed to think outside standard fabrics for our solution, and came upon this.

Litvik hands me what looks to be a roll of nylon wire.

ZCM: Is this fishing line?

JL:
Braided multifilament line to be exact, much stronger and less give than your standard nylon monofilament, and up to ten times sturdier by weight than steel. Sewn in a trifold, quadruple basket-weave pattern, we found a solution that seemed to be flexible, durable, and cheap enough for even an E-1 recruit’s paycheck. After getting our first container shipment of the line, I stayed up for two nights straight making twenty prototypes, sewing the weave by hand into the forearms, shoulder, and neck areas of athletic dry-wick tops. When I tried one on, it looked good, felt comfortable, and seemed to withstand trauma from knives and other sharp implements. There was, however, the small matter of making sure the prototypes worked in the intended environment.

ZCM: How did you test them?

JL:
The same way we still test every prototype, in the Replication Room.

Litvik leads me up a staircase, past rooms of mannequins and sewing equipment to a padlocked door away from the rest of the workshop. He opens it, revealing a largely empty space, except for rows of garments hanging on portable racks on one side of the room and several steel tables lining the opposite wall. A steady hum from air-conditioning units drones in the background. On the tables, set on a long platform and individually encased in Lucite boxes, is a row of severed zombie heads, all of which are clearly still reanimated. Their eyes track us as we walk deeper into the room.

JL:
I thought about using various types of testing methods, all of which had greater bite force than a typical human being—attack dogs, animal traps, mechanical presses. In the end, I knew that I couldn’t really be sure, and no one would trust my work, unless I proved it against the real thing. Back in those days it wasn’t so easy to get live specimens. Pop’s military contacts that work on the darker side came through for me again. That one on the end there, I named him Quentin
[Litvik points to one of the heads, a male with an exceptionally large cranium]
, he’s been with me since the first prototypes. This is where I tested all the ones made those nights, just like we do now.

He slides one of the garments off the rack and slips his arm into the sleeve. Walking up to one of the heads, he lifts the plastic shield covering the head. It immediately begins gnashing its teeth. Litvik looks into its eyes and shoves his forearm into its mouth, which immediately begins gnawing on his arm. This goes on for several seconds, and he finally pulls away. Litvik removes his arm from the garment and rolls up his sleeve, turning his forearm over and showing me the skin, which is completely unmarked and intact.

JL:
Once all the prototypes were run through this controlled simulation, my next goal was trying to get them into actual soldiers’ hands for field testing. I knew this was going to be tough. Speaking with Jake over the years, I knew that the government frowned upon its soldiers using any types of non-official-issued equipment. I understood this reasoning. The military is all about consistency, uniformity; it couldn’t have every other soldier wearing a nonregulation uniform or carrying some weird survival knife. I thought about contacting PMCs,
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but those guys often handle personal protection rather than offensive operations, and I needed the samples to be run through the most difficult of paces.