World War Z

by Max Brooks

It has been nearly twenty years since the start of the apocalyptic worldwide pandemic known as the Zombie War, and about ten years since the war has ended in humanity's victory. The framing device for the novel follows "Max Brooks", author of the Zombie Survival Guide (referred to simply as "the civilian survival guide" in this book) an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission, as he travels the world interviewing survivors of this zombie plague.

The exact origin of the zombie plague is unknown, but the first cases of what became the global pandemic began in China. It is implied that the virus is ancient, and was somehow released due to geological disruption caused by the Three Gorges Dam. The Politburo fears that the outbreak will be seen as weakness to foreign powers, so it attempts to hush it up (mirroring its previous attempts to downplay the [[2002–2004 SARS outbreak]]). Realizing that large-scale security sweeps for zombies cannot be covered up, the Politburo simply covers up what the sweeps are for, by initiating a military crisis with Taiwan as a distraction. Despite the lockdown, the plague continues to spread to neighboring nations by human trafficking, refugees, and the black market organ trade. The first large scale, publicly known outbreak occurs in Cape Town, South Africa - leading to the plague being nicknamed "African Rabies". This makes the public dismiss the epidemic as simply a severe strain of rabies that mostly affects poor African countries (mirroring how the first name used to refer to HIV, "[[Gay-related immune deficiency]]", treated it as a disease that only affected a minority group). For a full year, world governments and the public at large respond to the growing epidemic with total complacency, unwilling to invest resources in disaster response and prevention, despite the warnings of medical experts.

The sole nation to take reports of the infection seriously is Israel - stated to be due to a policy put in place after the surprise of the Yom Kippur War for its intelligence community to consider every threat, no matter how ridiculous. Israel initiates a "voluntary self-quarantine", closing its borders and constructing a massive wall around its entire perimeter. In order to withdraw to a more defensible position, Israel abandons the Palestinian territories (including all of Jerusalem). In an attempt to convince its neighbors that this quarantine is not a land-grab, Israel also allows all uninfected Palestinians safe passage into its borders before they completely shut down. This refugee policy and the loss of Jerusalem lead to Israel's right-wing ultra-orthodox starting a brief but bloody civil war, though it is put down by the IDF.

Most other world governments do not take Israel's quarantine seriously. The United States does little to prepare because of its overconfidence in its ability to suppress any threat, and the desire to not cause a panic during an election year. Although special forces teams contain initial small-scale domestic outbreaks, a widespread effort never starts: the US is deprived of political will by "brushfire wars", and a widely distributed and marketed placebo vaccine, Phalanx, creates a false sense of security.

The following spring, a journalist reveals that Phalanx does nothing to prevent zombification, and that the infected are not victims of rabies but rather walking corpses, sparking an event known as the "Great Panic." Order breaks down around the globe as countries discover the true severity of the catastrophe, and for a time this initial wave of rioting and breakdown of essential services kills more people than the zombies. As entire regions are overrun by the undead, millions of panicked refugees try to flee to safety: attempts by Iran to stem the flow of refugees from Pakistan result in a nuclear exchange that obliterates both countries. Russia forces a decimation of its own military to stop and prevent mutinies. Ukraine uses its stockpile of chemical weapons against large numbers of refugees and soldiers alike to root out the infected from the uninfected population as zombies, unlike humans, are unaffected by nerve gas.

After zombies overrun New York City, the US military sets up a high-profile defense in the nearby city of Yonkers in the hope that a great display of military power will help restore public order. The "Battle of Yonkers" is a disaster, however; Cold War-era weapons and tactics focused on disabling vehicles and wounding or frightening the enemy prove ineffective against zombies, who use human wave attacks, can only be killed by direct damage to the brain, and have no self-preservation instincts. The unprepared and demoralized soldiers are routed on live television. For several weeks, human civilization teeters on the brink of collapse.

In South Africa, the government adopts a contingency plan drafted by apartheid-era intelligence consultant Paul Redeker, known as the Redeker Plan. It calls for the establishment of small safe zones, leaving large groups of survivors abandoned in special zones as human bait, serving as a distraction to the undead and allowing those within the main safe zones time to regroup and recuperate. Governments worldwide assume similar plans which prove successful. The United States government establishes its safe zone west of the Rocky Mountains, with the US government relocating to [[Honolulu, Hawaii]]. Those left behind east of the Rockies are instructed to evacuate north, as zombies freeze solid in extreme cold. Many panicked and unprepared civilians in North America flee to the wildernesses of northern Canada and the Arctic, where eleven million people die of starvation and hypothermia.

Other safe zones are established by surviving governments around the world. The United Kingdom retreats to Scotland and Ireland. Continental Europe is almost totally overrun, except for safe zones in the Denmark and Iberian peninsulas, as well as in the Alps. Russia retreats to trans-Ural Siberia, and India establishes safe zones in the valleys of the Himalayas. South American nations retreat west of the Andes Mountains, while Cuba becomes a bastion against the undead due to its island geography and disproportionately strong military. In the Pacific, Australia establishes a safe zone in Tasmania, while Japan opts to evacuate its population to the colder Kamchatka peninsula in Russia. China's Politburo, however, refuses to make any strategic retreats, resulting in it becoming the worst hit country of the entire war. Eventually, half the Chinese military mutinies against the Politburo for its incompetence and destroys its leaders with a nuclear strike, after which the new government implements the Redeker Plan by retreating north to Manchuria.

The surviving safe zones spend the next seven years gradually rebuilding their industrial base within their new, limited borders. A United Nations conference is then held off the coast of Honolulu aboard the . Though many countries are content to wait until the zombies decay naturally, The President of the United States insists they need to go on the offensive to retake the planet. Determined to lead by example, the US military reinvents itself to meet the specific strategic requirements of fighting the undead, including the distribution of semiautomatic weapons, retraining soldiers to aim for zombie's heads and utilize strategies focused on volley firing, and the invention of the "lobotomizer," a melee weapon designed to quickly destroy a zombie's head. Backed by a resurgent US wartime economy, the military begins the three-year-long process of retaking the contiguous United States from both the undead swarms and groups of hostile human survivors. Entirely new strategies have to be implemented for this "war": each zombie is an independent fighting unit with no logistical lines or command structure to target, thus the war is a large-scale campaign of total extermination, slowly clearing and securing every mile of territory because even a single surviving zombie could restart the infection cycle.

Other nations that voted to attack go about their own offensives: Russia, its armories badly-depleted, resorts to using large stores of World War II-era tanks, firearms, flamethrowers and ammunition, waging a costly offensive against the undead by brute force. The United Kingdom takes a slow-but-steady approach, taking until five years after the official end of the war to finish clearing its territory. France, set on restoring its pride and reputation after embarrassments and defeats going back to World War I, charges headlong against the undead, its armed forces displaying extreme valor at an extraordinarily high cost. An unnamed British Army general comments as the war ends that there are "enough dead heroes for the end of time." Ten years after the official end of the Zombie War, the world is still heavily damaged, but slowly on the road to recovery. Millions of zombies are still active, mainly on the ocean floor, mountains above the snow line, and arctic areas such as Scandinavia, Siberia, and northern Canada. Numerous political and territorial changes have occurred during the recovery. Cuba has become a democracy and hosts the world's most thriving economy. Tibet is freed from Chinese rule, which in turn becomes a democracy as well, and hosts Lhasa as the world's most populated city. Following a religious revolution, Russia has become The Holy Russian Empire, an expansionist theocracy that adopts a repopulation program, keeping the nation's few remaining fertile women as state broodmares. North Korea is completely empty, with the entire population presumed to have disappeared into underground bunkers or been wiped out in the outbreak. Iceland has been completely depopulated and, due to its lack of a properly equipped military force and the huge influx of infected refugees, remains the world's most heavily infested country. The overall quality of life has diminished as well, including shorter life expectancies, limited access to running water and electricity, and an ongoing nuclear winter. Nevertheless, the majority of those who have survived have hope for the future, knowing that humanity faced the brink of extinction, and won.