The Zombie Survival Guide - Max Brooks [25]
Who was talking about it?
I don’t know. Like I said, I was as high as the stars. I just remember voices in the hallway outside my ward, loud voices angrily arguing. “That wasn’t rabies!” one of them yelled. “Rabies doesn’t do that to people!” Then … something else … then “well, what the hell do you suggest, we’ve got fifteen downstairs right here! Who knows how many more are still out there!” It’s funny, I go over that conversation all the time in my head, what I should have thought, felt, done. It was a long time before I sobered up again, before I woke up and faced the nightmare.
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL
[Jurgen Warmbrunn has a passion for Ethiopian food, which is our reason for meeting at a Falasha restaurant. With his bright pink skin, and white, unruly eyebrows that match his “Einstein” hair, he might be mistaken for a crazed scientist or college professor. He is neither. Although never acknowledging which Israeli intelligence service he was, and possibly still is, employed by, he openly admits that at one point he could be called “a spy.”]
Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature. I don’t blame anyone for not believing. I don’t claim to be any smarter or better than them. I guess what it really comes down to is the randomness of birth. I happened to be born into a group of people who live in constant fear of extinction. It’s part of our identity, part of our mind-set, and it has taught us through horrific trial and error to always be on our guard.
The first warning I had of the plague was from our friends and customers over in Taiwan. They were complaining about our new software decryption program. Apparently it was failing to decode some e-mails from PRC sources, or at least decoding them so poorly that the text was unintelligible. I suspected the problem might not be in the software but in the translated messages themselves. The mainland Reds … I guess they weren’t really Reds anymore but … what do you want from an old man? The Reds had a nasty habit of using too many different computers from too many different generations and countries.
Before I suggested this theory to Taipei, I thought it might be a good idea to review the scrambled messages myself. I was surprised to find that the characters themselves were perfectly decoded. But the text itself … it all had to do with a new viral outbreak that first eliminated its victim, then reanimated his corpse into some kind of homicidal berzerker. Of course, I didn’t believe this was true, especially because only a few weeks later the crisis in the Taiwan Strait began and any messages dealing with rampaging corpses abruptly ended. I suspected a second layer of encryption, a code within a code. That was pretty standard procedure, going back to the first days of human communication. Of course the Reds didn’t mean actual dead bodies. It had to be a new weapon system or ultrasecret war plan. I let the matter drop, tried to forget about it. Still, as one of your great national heroes used to say: “My spider sense was tingling.”
Not long afterward, at the reception for my daughter’s wedding, I found myself speaking to one of my son-in-law’s professors from Hebrew University. The man was a talker, and he’d had a little too much to drink. He was rambling about how his cousin was doing some kind of work in South Africa and had told him some stories about golems. You know about the Golem, the old legend about a rabbi who breathes life into an inanimate statue? Mary Shelley stole the idea for her book Frankenstein. I didn’t say anything at first, just listened. The man went on blathering about how these golems weren’t made from clay, nor were they docile and obedient. As soon as he