Drama and zombies

Drama, Greece, 20 years after the beginning of WWZ

John is one of the few survivors of the Zombie War in North Greece. His extended family spent twelve years in siege. Now, five years after the last Z-sighting in the area, he decides to talk to me about his experience.

John: It must be luck. That's how I look at it anyway. We made it through the war when others perished to zombies, famine, natural disasters, you name it. We weren't exactly preparing in case of a plague, there were any number of people much more capable to survive but didn't. The only thing we had that they didn't was each other. And luck. Or God, if you ask my father.

When the first cases of "African rabies" were reported in Europe, the continent's leaders had bigger problems – what passed then for bigger problems. The EuroCrisis. The national debt of Greece and a few more countries was so large it was bringing the whole EuroZone economy to its knees. In this country, we lived through five savage years of austerity: pensions and salaries cut, taxes went up, the poor were poorer every year and the elite that had caused the crisis was stilll very much in power keeping its riches and ignoring a whole people that lived every day with the doubt of ever recovering to what once life had been like.

I was graduating university that year and knew very well that employment was out of the question. I was planning to join my sister in the UK, along with my girlfriend who was only employed during the tourist period. We thought we had a good chance there. My sister had been living there for the past five years with her partner, they were doing well but they came back home running when the plague hit their city. They felt that as immigrants with no extended ties to the society, they wouldn't stand a chance alone. Their fear of zombies was greater than fear of the homophobia they had faced in Greece before. Eventually, they faced none of the second and lots of the first...

I've read some of the stories of survivors in the States, the nation with the highest rate of survival in lone communities during the war. My story couldn't have been more different than those cowboys driving away in SUVs and shooting zombies out of the window. I mean, we had two handguns and three hunting riffles between us for the duration. And we might have been a developed country on paper, but the authorities sure as hell didn't respond as readily as in some north European countries. We were pretty much left to our own devices after the first few months of full scale war. My twin brother took part in the largest battle of the Greek Army against the zombies, at Dion. It's, it was a fairly narrow passage between Olympus and Ossa, two of the highest mountains in the country. Sixty-five percent of the landlocked population lived south of Olympus and sixty percent of the Army was positioned north of it, pre-war. It's supposed to be a heroic moment in our history. The way my brother tells the story, it was just another half-hearted attempted against the walking plague. Another version of Yonkers, most nations have their own, right? Fortunately he survived thanks to the armoured tank he was stuck in. After the battle, he walked with a few of his comrades for a month until he reached home. He had a handgun and a litre of water on him, apart from the clothes he was wearing when he arrived.

Interviewer: How did you form your wartime community?

J: It happened almost organically during the first winter. We just turned to each other, after all family has been the core of greek society. My sister and her partner arrived just before the epidemic spread to Athens. University was cancelled soon after that so myself, my girlfriend and my baby sister returned to Drama straight away. By the time Dion Battle was fought, they had convinced our parents and her partner's family that we had better chance of surviving if we cooperated. When my brother came back he found mom, dad, baby sister, myself and my girlfriend, older sister, her partner with her parents and older brother living together in our house. Eleven people in three bedrooms/two bathrooms. Back then, the water mains still worked. Ah the marvel of running water!... I don't think I'm going to see it again, maybe my children. There's just too many things to rebuilt. But we were lucky with electricity. The hydroelectric station, 50km from where we stand now, was manned during the war. The workers were protected by an army unit because the dam was classified as vital war facility by the government. They could afford to power our area every now and then, especially during the winters when the zombies weren't attracted to the noise of the station. Those hours were so precious to us, we could recharge batteries, we could communicate with other survivors, it was like a three-hour Christmas interval.

The first months were hectic. Great Panic indeed. People were either mad desperate or mad with the government demanding protection but not doing anything to protect themselves. The army was called early on to defend the motherland. They couldn't contain the epidemic, mountainous terrain, bad organisation, not enough information about the plague, panic. After Athens was lost, the government was relocated to Thira, a small island in the Aegean. The mainland was practically overrun with zombies after that. Pre-war, 10 out of 12 million total population lived on the mainland, 6 million in two urban areas, you can imagine. Thankfully, our northern borders were so mountainous they kept the majority of zombies from neighbour countries at bay, more or less. When you live in such a small country, with fragmented land, you become very aware of neighbour countries and sea borders. We are closer to Bulgaria, Turkey, North Macedonia than Athens or the present capital, Thira. The mountains and valleys made it difficult for the dead to form big swarms too. I think the noise that attracts them gets lost in the geography or something. All I know is that I never saw more than a few thousand zombies together.

We couldn't be protected by the authorities, that was clear enough from the get go. Especially when my brother came back with the stories of the army's shortcomings. We started stockpiling food, pharmaceuticals and tools. Everyone that wasn't running for the islands was doing the same. Thankfully I guess for us, most people decided to leave and find refuge on islands rather than stay and take their chances. I understand their reasoning. The vast majority of Greeks that survived (interviewers note: about 200,000 people) did so because they found themselves on islands, not the larger ones because not all new arrivals could be monitored in those first days of Panic. Peloponnisos was host to the larger mainland community of survivors. They cut off the two bridges that connected them to northern territories and people huddled on mountains. A few thousand people survived there.

We felt that running away was not an option. There were so many of us and only one city car to drive. Apart from that, we knew our area well enough to defend our house and after making a list of all the surviving skills we had between us we were fools enough to think we stood a good chance. And yes, we survived but what skills we thought we had before the war, were nothing to what we learned to do in order to stay alive. And luck, blind luck was by our side. Even the Eurocrisis worked to our advantage. Pensions were cut again and again in the four years before the plague and most people had to support their home economics with other means. Growing vegetables and hunting became popular pastimes, wood-burning stoves were en vogue again, use of bigger cars was phased out.

All in all, we had a good team. Dad was a jack of all trades. He basically built our family house with his own hands. He could fix everything. Mom had professional training as a nurse and a seamstress when she was younger. My sister-in-law's parents had been growing their own produce for years, using local varieties as well. They had kept animals and knew how to preserve what land and animals could offer. Her dad could also fish. Myself and the rest of my siblings had been primarily citizens of the digital world. We had few real-life skills apart from the very specific that were provided by higher education and our niche jobs. I mean, I was studying design of augmented reality apps for mobile phones in university. I knew computers but I didn't know how to make a radio station for two-way communications. I taught myself from a library book I "borrowed" during the second winter. My sister spent most of her adult life in biology labs. She could dissect brains but couldn't produce penicillin. You get the picture. But we were strong and healthy when the war started and that was advantage enough. We learned a lot during the first two years from our parents, books and simple trial and error.

What none of us knew was how to fight. My twin brother, my sister-in-law and myself had experience in martial arts and self-defence, useless against zombies. The men had gone through army training as all males had to go through in pre-war Greece, apart from myself. I was supposed to be called the year after my university graduation. The four of them had fired guns and understood simple tactics, they organised our defences the best they could. We found hunting riffles in empty houses. We gathered whatever could be used for hand-to-hand fighting, axes, spades and the like.

The first major decision was to move from our house into the school across the street. The building was large enough to accommodate all of us and the grounds came with some pre-installed security measures. The large yard was enclosed with steel railings 2m high and the ground floor had steel bars on every window. There are only three large doors to enter the building made out of metal. The two upper floors provided us with plenty of living space, and later accommodated our garden and livestock animals. We could keep a watch of our surroundings from the top. We moved in as fast as we could, the population had fled when the plague reached our city and we knew the dead were coming. We had the idea to demolish the three flights of stairs that connected the ground to the first floor and just use a ladder, as a precaution in case the zombies made it through the fence and then in the building. After three years, we built a wooden retractable staircase, my father's project to test how much us the youngs (sic) had learnt about wood work.

I: What did you do for food?

J: We had stockpiled enough to get us through the Panic. During the first winter, the in-laws made plans for a veg garden that could sustain us. We operated like that more or less for the duration of the war. Every winter we would forage anything useful and/or edible we could find, every summer we would lay low, growing and preserving our own food in the school yard, never leaving the security provided by the fence. This neighbourhood was classified as suburbs before the war and was surrounded by farmland. We didn't have to go very far to look for livestock or fruit trees.

I: Livestock? You kept animals as well? Wasn't the noise a problem?

J: Yeah, there were occasions of zombies coming to the school because of farm noises in the summer. You know though, animals can sense them coming long before any human can. So, in a way they acted as an alarm system on top of providing precious food and clothing. Plus we soundproofed a classroom by nailing egg carton containers on the walls and used it as a stable. During the twelve years of war we kept two dogs and we had on average six chickens and three goats every season. The dogs were friends and guardians, the eggs, milk and cheese a luxury.

We had just enough food and with careful planing and mothers' ability to make what we had go further, we didn't starve. We had people who knew how to grow food, space to cultivate and enough people to do the work. A lot of communities perished to famine the first two winters, most of them didn't have all three to sustain themselves.

I: How did you defend yourselves against the zombies?

J: By doing our best not to fight them. We reinforced the school's fence, ground floor windows and doors. We set string alarms a few blocks away in each direction. When foraging in the winter, we would destroy any frozen zombies we came upon. "Less trouble for the summer!" we used to say. When one or two would come by, we tried to exterminate them through the fence with axes and heavy hammers.

On May 12th of the 3ed year, we fought our biggest battle. A swarm of about two thousand was moving through from east to west. As soon as my baby sister spotted the first ones she sounded the alarm for a swarm and we started our "sealing" procedure. After making sure the fence perimeter was safe, everyone went in the school, doors were barricaded, ladder retracted, animals moved to the soundproofed room, humans stationed at windows to keep a look out. And then silence. We would wait for the zombies to pass. Only that day they were too many. They filled the narrow roads, came pouring through gardens and empty houses, just shuffling away. They weren't moaning so we knew they hadn't noticed the living. I remember watching them walking and in a way they looked like a disorganised parade. Moving together, with mixed up uniforms, not really keeping pace, not really celebrating. And I was horrified at how normal they looked from a distance. Zombies are just like us, only not human. The parade of nightmares had the rhythm of broken legs, spreading destruction and fate worst than death. I was convinced I was in a dream, a very bad dream. I pinched myself to wake up but no. That was life. I was in my high school building with my family and I was watching zombies go through my mother's flower garden. That broke me. I yelled "Wake up!".

The tail end of the swarm heard the noise and came close to the fence, about a hundred zombies. Moaning. There was moaning. I was beyond nightmares at that point, I had to be dragged into the soundproof room by my two sisters. Stood between our dogs and hauled like they did, I thought that the crazier I'd act the sooner I'd wake up. When the animals calmed down I collapsed. When I came around the next day I was told of how the fence collapsed under the weight of a hundred zombies, how they pushed a door open and rushed in the building. They couldn't get to us, no stairs to the first floor. They wouldn't leave either. They had to be exterminated. My sister and her partner climbed a rope down to the yard, closed the door behind the zombies, secured the fence as much as possible and then the battle begun. From the broken stairs, my family fought the dead that were trying to reach up. Spades through the crown of the head, heavy stones, long axes. When a few of them were still standing, the family retreated to one of the staircases making every possible sound in order to lure the zombies there. My father, my brother, my girlfriend and my baby sister jumped down from another staircase and attacked the zombies from behind. It was soon over, I was told. My father was putting down one of the last when another managed to bite him on the leg. Without thinking, he brought his axe down to his own leg, cutting it just below the knee. It didn't do him any good, his axe was covered in black goo and he received a bigger dosage of the virus than what was delivered by the bite. My baby sister shot him on the head not an hour later to end his suffering.

We held his funeral the next day and spent a week cleaning the school and fixing our defences. During that summer I went through the motions of surviving and preparing for the winter, my heart wasn't really into it. I had let my family down. I wasn't there when needed.

(his voice trembles for a moment, he composes himself and continues)

My father fixed that school into a home. He taught us all he knew about building and carpentry. He kept our spirits up whistling his favourite tunes. He would remind us what the Greeks have gone through the last century alone, re-telling the stories his father told of the Asia Minor Disaster of 1922 and WW2. "Zombies are nothing compared to the famine your grandfather endured! Twice!".

The rest of us made it through the war alive, not unscathed though. The psychological burden was heavy on all of us. I'm pretty sure we all developed PTSD at some point. My mother and father-in-law had some health problems before the war and when we couldn't find anymore of their medications in any pharmacy, clinic, hospital, house that we could reach within a day's walking radius, they had to take a step back, let the "kids" take care of them. Mind you, I was over thirty when that happened and I was still a "kid" for my unstoppable Greek mother!

All of us lost weight and suffered from the cold. The winters became harsher and we had heavy snow every year. It's not that we didn't know how to handle the cold; this is Northern Greece after all not the "sea, sand and sun" southern islands. The duration of winter was a problem. You need larger amounts of wood to burn for heat. Short summers don't allow you to grow as much food needed for a longer winter. Clothes and equipment wear out more quickly. I had a pair of thermal socks I swear I mended twenty times. Finding something to do to pass the time... Again, we were raised in a developed country, came of age when the internet was the no.1 tool for work and entertainment. We didn't know what to do at nights without streaming movies, game-consoles, social media. Our parents though grew up in a thoroughly analogue era and their parents didn't see a TV set before they were forty years old. Our mother-in-law came to the rescue. She organised our library, with proper paper books. She would come up with small projects to keep us occupied, she challenged anyone who whispered "I'm bored" to a game of backgammon. Every second weekend, when possible, we would put together a small show acting our old greek movies. She remembered every piece of dialogue and write it down for us. The "production" performed when my girlfriend and I got married ten years into the war was so much fun we forgot about the zombies!

Good times in the midst of nightmares. That's what I choose to remember from this war. Always be prepared and keep your loved ones close. They are the ones that ultimately save your life.