Author Notes: It would be an impractical task, and a boring read, to list all of the characters that I created versus the characters that belong to their creator, Max Brooks. If you have read the book and someone seems familiar, they likely are. If not, I have tried to outline reasonable additions to Brooks' work..

The following narrator is owned by Max Brooks, although he never names her and only mentions her through the narration of his character Breckinridge "Breck" Scott. I decided to put her in Oregon, which was in a "relatively" safe region in the world along the United States West Coast, where she might have survived while continuing her work.

For any readers who have not read the book and have stumbled upon this fiction, I have tried to both stay true to the source material while also remaining accessible to those unfamiliar with the book. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and highly encourage it to anyone and everyone.

I first read World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks a few years back, when I was in high school. I recently retrieved it from my shelf and I found once again that I could not put it down. The style of a transcripted interview to create a fabric of different narratives from different people was well executed around a strong foundation of source material. Each character had their own pre-war identity and background. They tell their story of the Zombie apocalypse with their individual voices, each bringing their own inherent biases.

Portland, Oregon

[Kelli Tate invites me inside the Portland-area house from the rain. Her exact location is kept sensitive, as her notoriety for revealing Breckinridge "Breck" Scott's fraudulent vaccine, Phalanx, has earned her some lasting animosities. She seems unconcerned whether people learn her location. "It's mostly for my husband. He worries. The greedy assholes will get what's coming to them." She remains as photogenic today as the pictures on the wall show her in the days before the war. Pictures include days before the war as a student, and more recent ones with her husband, son and nieces and nephews. ]

I take it you've read up on some of the things Breckinridge Scott has written about me?

[Pause. She pours us coffee and sits down.]

Some would call it vitriol. Others say that you caused the Great Panic.

It was definitely vitriolic. Sexist, too. Mr. Scott wanted to squeeze the last riches from the teat before it dried up, and I exposed his scam before he could finish cashing in on public misinformation. It doesn't matter that he wasn't the specific person who called it African rabies; he had both the resources and the responsibility to fact-check his product and he deliberately refused. And, yes, I do think my story did send us over the threshold into the Great Panic. So, true on both counts. But let's be clear on this point: We were already headed for the Great Panic. The US, Chinese, South African, British governments, the CDC, WHO, you name it - even with all of these actors working together to keep a lid on the spread, that ship had sailed. There was no possibility left of a quiet clean up of the cases of infected. Hell, even if they did everything right, with uncontrolled borders, the diaspora, the organ donations … Once we reached the point of spread to our second, third, fourth continent there was no "right" thing to do that could prevent what unfolded.

So, you don't think earlier government actions would have offset what happened?

Offset our losses? Yes, we could have maybe saved more people. Had a higher global percentage of survival. No one knows the future. It's why, even though I'm the one who broke the story and had an advantage over most to plan ahead, I still spent my days trying to write articles while providing childcare for parents whose work was more important towards the war effort. That's why it is vital that we prepare for as many eventualities as possible. But, tell me, how much have you looked into other epidemics? I've spent the last couple years going over comparisons between the zombie plague and the spanish flu, the AIDS pandemic … well, we had a sort of perfect storm.

Meaning?

The zombie plague had several factors that we had technically dealt with before as far as spreading diseases and infections. But not all together, and certainly not with quite as active a mechanism for spread. For one thing, it had the infectiousness and virulence of the Spanish flu. Just look up graphs of world population deaths in a timeline, and you'll see large spikes for World War I and World War II. The spike in between? Spanish flu. Highly successful virus, and deadly, though not quite the death sentence as Z Plague. But it transmitted, incubated and killed quickly, meaning it closed the circle too quickly to infect as many people as it otherwise could have. We really lucked out with that one. Relatively speaking.

Then you have the AIDS pandemic. Our infrastructure in academia and virology helped us track down the origins of what was considered to be a mysterious killer of gays in urban areas right back to the specific river system and primates. Unlike other diseases, the development of HIV/AIDS takes longer, and symptoms even longer after that. That is, if it happened at all, so by the time people started noticing anything wrong, unknown numbers of people had been exposed. Add to that the confusion over how it was transmitted, with people claiming God was punishing gays, only to have three year old children diagnosed because they needed a blood transfusion. It's no wonder the 80s and 90s were so turbulent with that one.

Then there was that big ebola outbreak a little before Z Plague. Ah, Ebola. [She sits back and fiddles with her mug.] Remember? They ran out of body bags, people were dropping so fast. But once they dropped, they stayed down. [Pause.] With respect to that one, we all had a solid understanding of what ebola is at the viral level, how it transmits, incubation periods, treatment plans, survival expectations, et cetera. Even though there wasn't, and still isn't, a cure for ebola, we knew precisely how to contain that one. There wasn't quite enough news coverage on that particular outbreak to fully inform people, but it was alright relative to other events. It fell through with government response. After that, governments had a chance to get their act in gear. A mere couple years later, signs of the Z Plague are popping up and what do governments do? Listen to the private interests that line their retirement funds. Business as usual.

Z Plague is different. Infection is based on bites, so it's immediate and definite, rather than a guessing game of statistics. In a way, it makes things more clear cut, whereas exposure to HIV or AIDS may or may not ever develop into anything, and that requires a test which takes time. The Z Plague's incubation period was variable and generally longer before the Panic, when many of the cases in North America were organ donations. This meant tracking connections and understanding how infections spread was that much harder. Once bite infections became more common in North America, we began to understand how it was contracted and transmitted. But that understanding came too late to use towards curbing its spread once the panic had set in.

[Sheepish silence.]

I just realized I never let you ask your own questions. You can cut that first bit out and ask the questions you came here to ask.

That's fine. I came here to ask you how you were able to write this story. You were 25 at the time, a recent college graduate and in your first position as a journalist.

[Silence.]

I'm just trying to get an idea of how you knew you were onto something. What drew your attention to Phalanx?

Isn't it obvious? I was trying to understand this African rabies outbreak. I mean, come on. What case of rabies has ever escalated to that level where the population is encouraged to get a preemptive vaccination? Normally, you only get a rabies vaccine after you've come into contact with an infected, or suspected, rabid animal. There's a period of time in which you can get the vaccine after your exposure, and it will still work. Same with AIDS. Now, entire populations are suddenly told that there's a big bad new bug out there and caution is necessary, but we also happen to have the cure on hand? Any high school student in a beginning journalism class would small that one.

What form of sources did you use? Public records, other journalists, CDC … ?

… As a journalist, I need to use caution in divulging any kind of information regarding potential sources. I can tell you that once I found the right direction, following the money wasn't hard. And once I had a better idea of the cover up that was happening, it wasn't hard to pick a place where an outbreak had occurred and take a flight. That's why my initial piece took as long as it did to break the scandal. I needed to fly to China, to Brazil, to Pakistan and find people who might not know what was happening, but sure as hell knew this was no case of rabies or psychosis. Ultimately, there isn't a whole lot I can personally tell you. I just passed things along to an unaware public who deserved information.

How did you get those interviews?

Oh, you know. People who knew people who had friends. That kind of thing.

Can you tell me what some of those interviewees said? Had any of them gotten the Phalanx vaccine?

Many of them actually had as time went on. Or if they hadn't, they knew people who'd had it but turned, anyway. Ultimately, it was all hearsay, but it added some needed anecdotal evidence to make people listen to the data I'd collected.

One man I spoke to was a ranking official in the Chinese government. The kind of guy who didn't seem too verbose, but I'd barely sat down in his living room when he launched into a monologue about how I couldn't release his name, or even his city, but that everyone was in danger. He gave me a heavily redacted account of what he knew of this new disease.

Redacted?

He wanted the world to be warned about the coming storm. He was high enough in the chain to have access to a good amount of information and he and some of his colleagues were connecting enough dots to not like the picture. But he wasn't high enough to have much say in decisions. He was loyal to his country, but he was also invested in his family's future. If another country could keep it together, could act soon enough, it might be enough to save his family. He wanted information to get out there, but he wasn't going to sell out is country and colleagues to do it. He and his colleagues had children going to school in the US, Canada, the UK.

He and one of his friends had spent years arranging for their son to marry his daughter. She was a student, but was already successful, well-placed in society, drop-dead gorgeous. Then all of a sudden, his friend puts a stop the the marriage and forces his son to marry some no-name chick from Delaware for the citizenship. At first, my guy was confused and angry, offended at the sudden stiff. Then, he started to realize the reasons behind it. [Considers.] I think he also felt better that the friend's son seemed to have gotten the short end of that deal.

My guy showed me a picture from the wedding on his phone from facebook[1] and no joke, I almost shit myself trying to hold in the laughter. My guy's almost-son-in-law was a handsome guy, so he and the interveiwee's daughter would have had the hottest babies ever born. And this poor kid suddenly has his dad all over his ass to marry this, frankly, less than desirable woman who has, for some reason, agreed to marry a guy she doesn't know from China. Probably money, although bribery was never mentioned. I've gotta say I never thought I'd learn about mail-order grooms while researching vaccinations. Anyway.

He'd just about had enough of the inaction, the cover up upon cover up, when he and some colleagues went to visit a site. They were in a facility to receive a briefing on what their scientists had learned from several of the Patient Zeroes they'd obtained a while back. The scene he described was that of a horror movie. There they are, standing behind the glass that looks into the lab with several of the "patients," and the researchers are giving a presentation through the glass, speaking into a microphone that speaks into the observation room. They'd strapped the patient down and were referring to some MRI scans. They were wrapping the presentation up, it was almost over. The rest of the patients are in a kind of glass pen to, I don't know, show that they're mobile and can stand or something. Maybe it was just for dramatic effect.

One of the, uh, … they must have been an older one, and it had been a teenager anyway, and the restraints were meant for adults. It basically translated to a looser cuff, which meant that the kid's wrist couldn't get free, but there was enough space to wear on the tissues, which were already decayed some. Eventually, the kid's wrist and ankles had been rubbed and chafed so much over the last couple years, that it's not surprising he finally got free. Do you know what ring avulsion[2] is?

Uh, no. What is it?

You should look it up after this interview. Don't eat before you see pictures, unless you saw a lot during the war and you're not bothered by that kind of thing. Short answer, this kid did it to his whole hand. Pulled the skin and connective tissues on his hands off like a glove being pulled inside out. Same thing with one of his feet, and the cuff of the other foot detached from the gurney. The cuff detached, so these scientists and doctors, the people who know more about what's happening than probably anyone else in the world at the time, they rush to the foot of the gurney to hold his leg down while someone, I don't know, looks for duct tape.

Logically, a loose leg isn't a big deal, seeing as it's the arms and head you need to watch for, but these were the early days, right? And, as smart and cutting edge as these scientists are, they were just as prone to mistakes as anyone else. So, they're at the foot of the bed and that's when the zombie pulls at the right angle and sits up, and these skinless hands grab the nearest doctor by the back of their head. Drags this guy by the hair to his mouth. They'd taken it's gag out for the presentation, to better show the patient's state and physical tendencies. Bites part of the doctor's scalp and ear clean off. Another researcher, stupid, really, gets between them to save the doctor. Gets bitten on the arm. A technician wearing gloves tries to put the gag back into the zombie's mouth. The tech gets his fingers taken off, glove included.

This was before there was a true understanding of the gravity of this plague. They had armed security, but they weren't permitted in the contamination zone for security clearance issues. It was all very bureaucratic, apparently. A simple request form would have permitted armed security to stand just outside in the hallway. It would have been approved, too, seeing as a bunch of government officials were visiting that day, and would have merited the beefed up firepower. [Pause.] That's not entirely fair. Even if they had been a step away, they probably would have been given the priority of protecting the researchers, but they also would have been instructed not to harm the patients, so it probably would have just led to more infections.

When the soldiers finally haul themselves across the building and up a flight of stairs, they get into the lab and the kid has gotten out of the gurney. It's weak, missing most of his foot, so it's hobbling around, and not really a threat on the scale of it. Some of the staff are running away, terrified of exposure, since they didn't all have gloves on, and some are rushing in, trying to treat the injured, but avoid the patient. The kid isn't moving very well, but at that point, people are freaked out and don't know what to do. The chaos is exciting the others in the pen, and now they're pressing on the glass all together.

Remember, this glass wouldn't have been tempered with anything. It was an indoor window, meant to stop germs, microbes, not a physical attack. Just as some of the scientists and soldiers are dog piling the kid, the glass breaks and the eight of them in the pen spill out over the room. That's when my interviewee's boss has had enough. Up until then, the people in the observation room had been transfixed like in a horrific show. His boss hits the speakers and orders the soldiers to screw the patients and put them down. There were plenty more where the infected came from that they could study, and there was no intrinsic value in these particular subjects.

Up until then, they didn't know how to truly stop them. They were so wrapped up in studying them in general, in understanding what had happened at the biochemical level, so confused at the contradiction to every biological law. They were obsessed with learning more, running tests with the ultimate goal of a cure. Death was no longer the "death sentence" it once was, so perhaps a reversal of the condition didn't seem so crazy. They never stopped to ask themselves how to put them down for good. Didn't know that destroying the brain was the only killswitch.

Even if they had, the people best able to figure it out were on the floor, being gnawed on. The soldiers would have been least likely to know to go for the brain.

The soldiers didn't want to hit the scientists, so they had to aim carefully, which was difficult with the zombies already chewing on many of the researchers and the soldiers' own comrades, everyone writhing and rolling all over the place. They shot center body mass. They tried to pepper them with multiple shots. Shot them so many times and grew so desperate that eventually, headshots killed them all, but they still didn't know that they only needed one bullet per kill.

After the barrage, there was dead silence. The researchers were all either dead or had fled the lab, never expecting this much action in their lives. The soldiers were assigned to provide security for what was just another government building. They could be posted at any number of locations, including government labs with floors upon floors of braniacs and freezers filled with anything from the measles to feline leukemia to the common cold. They weren't the elite teams trained for any and every eventuality. My interviewee and his colleagues were pencil pushers who'd studied enough, and been wealthy enough, to afford the right education and connections to ensure they never needed to see such kinds of action. Between the pencil pushers, pipetters and soldiers, no one was qualified to react to something like this.

Then the doctor, missing his ear, stood up. His surgical mask dangled from the one ear he still had. He was covered in the dark, clumped innards of the dead, but also of his own blood, since he'd received several rounds by accident. His mouth opened, and for a moment it looked to everyone like he would give some final nugget of wisdom or, at the very least, a pleading request to solve this problem or care for his family. Instead, that horrible moan came out and he shuffled towards one of the two remaining soldiers. The first wave of action in the lab was scary enough, but it was so unexpected that everyone was either too stunned to move or with it enough to run. This time, the two soldiers kept shooting the doctor. One had switched to his handgun, having jammed his rifle. They had stepped behind a gurney to get it between them and the doctor, but that meant it lined up the observation room window right behind the doctor from the soldiers. Bullets hit the observation window, and everyone was sprayed with glass and fluids. My interviewee probably won the lottery to have not been cut and infected from that.

They finally blew up the doctor's head, adding brains to everyone's attire, and my interviewee's boss again had the presence of mind to order the soldiers and everyone into the hallway, where they locked the doors behind them. From there, my interviewee went straight home, didn't care that he was freaking people out on the street. He got home, packed his daughter a bag and told her to head to school early, which was out of the country, and that he would pack more of her things and mail them after her, but he was sending her on the first flight he could book. He packed his wife a bag and told her to head to her nephew's place in Australia. She was a doctor and wasn't going to just leave, so they compromised that she'd leave at some point later, especially because she worked in the prenatal ward, which rarely had emergency patients, certainly not that kind, and was physically removed from the infectious disease floors.

And none of this went in the news, even locally? What about the families of those who died?

Deaths can be covered up, at least the cause of death, anyway. It's been done before, so I imagine it wouldn't have been too difficult for a government to pull off. As for the regular news, too easy. It's true that there's a certain level of required documentation for incident reports in those types of facilities, and reports are passed up. The point of a report is that it will go somewhere, be read by someone, so the more places it could hypothetically be seen is a factor there. But even if you got your hands on an incident report with keywords like outbreak and exposure, who cared whether some researcher who spend their days cataloging and pipetting in a lab sticks themselves with a needle by accident? Unless you care enough and both have that kind of access and know what you're looking for, good luck.

Protocols exist in labs like that one, the CDC and all over the world. That hasn't stopped outbreaks of all types of diseases in labs, and those are downplayed all the time. You think governments didn't invest in weaponizing viruses? And how could that be accomplished without messing around and factoring in risk? I never got my hands on evidence of tossing weaponized viruses around willy nilly, but I wouldn't put it past them, either.

Prewar, people would regularly take some serial-killing virus out of the freezer and spend the day playing with it. Mistakes can and will be made - it's debatable whether you should even bother researching outbreaks in labs. I have. It reads like the stuff of nightmares. Today, especially in light of the resurgence of many diseases that had previously been eliminated in the US, scientists fiddle with any number of diseases in petri dishes on a daily basis.

Wartime and postwar lab outbreaks are scary, too. Did you know that, in the US, they needed to clear CDC facilities while wearing hazmat[3] suits? Most hospitals didn't actively store infectious diseases, but many had something stored somewhere. Even the dead have some water content and, therefore, the capacity to host disease. Every room, every closet, every freezer needed to be cleared. And the vast majority of those freezers hadn't had working generators in years by the time front reached them. Some of the world's worst diseases were probably free-floating around the building, sticking to every mouth breather, so avoiding any spray was more crucial than ever.

During the march across, they almost never had enough qualified personnel to clear those buildings. They needed people who were qualified and fastidious enough to dress and undress in hazmat suits. They needed to be people who wouldn't take shortcuts, and who had the background knowledge to lock down those freezers, labs, floors, wings and buildings and follow sterilization protocols so they could leave the facility for when the government could devote more time and people to dealing with it all. Then, they needed to be able to do the deed of actually clearing a building of zombies. Close quarters, indoors with no electricity so it's dark. And those suits get really hot, really fast, and heat stroke becomes a risk. A lot of the zombies were helmeted military from before the pullout and change in uniforms, which drastically complicated how you'd take them down.

Dark twisting hallways, the worst diseases humans have ever had floating around, lots and lots of zombies and a lot of them are wearing armor. How many people, out of the surviving population, would have had that basic knowledge, attention to detail bordering on OCD[4] and the physical ability to take down zombies in the least desirable conditions? Not nearly enough, that's how many. Mostly, the military opted to construct special barriers around the facility and keep going, leaving it under guard until a qualified group could be cobbled together to do it. Took years.

You've become one of the preeminent journalists for covering diseases and other related topics. Is it more out of initial interest or because of your extensive experience in the area?

Both, I imagine. I needed to spend a lot of time relearning basic biology in order to understand everything, so that opened more doors for me. I was 25, and recently out of college, after all, so crazy hours spent researching was nothing new. The interest was pretty clear cut, given that the world was literally spiraling out of control.

I interviewed others, too, and they provided continued human interest for me. Another contact was from Karachi, which didn't have it that bad, yet, but they had extended family staying with them. They were from the rural, more mountainous region where certain kinds of foot traffic was just starting up. These anecdotes, while I couldn't share them in their entirety for many reasons, including the fact they were long and they'd be hearsay, gave me a better idea of what we were dealing with. It made the notion that a vaccine could possibly prevent something like this skeptical at best. Clearly, it couldn't protect you from being eaten.

I've heard that someone specifically came to you with suspicions of both the fraudulent vaccine and concerns for a larger danger than a minor epidemic virus, including some excerpts from the Warmbrunn-Knight Report.

I see.

[Concentrates on refolding her napkin. Sips at coffee, which has grown cold.]

In your whistleblowing publication, you included materials and documents that were not from the Warmbrunn-Knight Report. Including compiled maps of known cases over time that showed it had grown to pandemic levels. There were also memos that discussed no discernable change in rates of infection between populations with and without Phalanx vaccinations. Documents like these would have to have come from someone with government access to raw data, rather than estimates and averages provided to the mainstream media outlets.

[Laughter. Somewhat strained.]

Well, … it is, refreshing to speak with someone who has put this much thought and preparation into an interview. What you need to understand is that the breaking story only had so much data. Solid, but finite. Once people started listening, though, that's when the doors opened for me, and I was able to publish follow-up pieces to more fully inform people. Any initial sources I may have had served to crack the door.

This is a picture of you and your family? Your husband? [Kelli Tate, with an unassuming man and another couple in uniform sit together, each adult with an infant or small child in their arms. Together with a mongrel at their heels, they share looks of subdued calm, framed in front of the same Portland area house we are currently in.]

That was taken about a year before VA day. We were lucky as a couple. We had started dating before the war, and we both made it through. Many didn't. Most.

By the time you were dating, your husband contracted with intelligence departments, had some exposure to mapping software and was also doing contract work for the pharmaceutical company that developed Phalanx, didn't he?

[Silence. Runs finger over the photo frame, clumping dust from the surface.]

We were lucky, as a couple. Before, I don't think either of us were planning for the future beyond paying off loans. I never thought about caring for children much before, much less having them. Then, during the war, it wasn't just something to do for the war effort, or supporting family members on the lines. It turned into planning for the future. Talk about offsetting our losses.

Look, any potential sources I had from that exposition piece are, in theory, protected by laws designed to prevent retaliation against whistleblowers. They weren't working too well in the years preceding the war. As it stands now, the government doesn't have the time, resources or public support to conduct a witch hunt to prosecute someone whom many even in the government would see as a heroic figure. We don't know how the tides could turn in the future on that front. If such a source were to express any interest to me in speaking with you, I'll let you know.

[1] A pre-war social networking site. Currently, it and other sites are being data-mined from some of the very few intact server farms to aid in the investigation of identity fraud.

[2] Ring avulsion: An injury to the finger that occurs as a result of wearing a ring. When the ring is forcefully pulled it causes the ring to pull on the tissues, leading to skin and soft tissue damage.

[3] Hazmat: A contraction of hazardous materials. A hazmat suit is worn to handle hazardous materials without exposing the wearer to the potentially harmful environment.

[4] OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a frequently diagnosed disorder before the war.