World War Z: Twice Compound

Wisconsin, USA

[I meet with Lita in the garden of her compound. We are just a stone's throw away from the small one-floor building that houses the compound's residents, and nearer still to the wall of cars, stacked two high, that surrounds the encampment. There are a number of tattered tents erected behind the building. Children are working in the garden, weighing pale tomatoes in their hands. Under the window overlooking the garden, there is a single flowerless rosebush, and through it I can see small plants potted in Tupperware.

Lita leans heavily on her hoe during our discussion. She is still young, but her eyes, or perhaps just the dirt in the creases around them, show that the world rests greatly upon her.]

Tell me what happened.</i>

Where should I start?

Anywhere. Anywhere you'd like.

[She pauses, thinking.] We weren't ready. Not for the ghouls; we knew they were coming. What we didn't expect was the military.

The military came to help you?</i>

Ha. Not quite. They got here even before the ghouls did, or maybe they arrived at the same time. Either way, neither group was here to help us.

So what happened?</i>

[She pauses again and looks over the broken town through spaces in the car wall.] At first I thought it was thunder, so I took my time getting out of bed. I knew the lightning would come again, so I had time. I opened the curtains just in time to see a bomb go off out to my left. Mushroom cloud and everything. Lots of fire.

Looking back, I think I still didn't grasp what was going on. I just stood there and watched as more thunder rang out and more fires started. As you probably noticed on your walk out here, I'm on a fairly nice hill, so I had a clear view of everything. Look down, see fires; look up, see helios.

I don't know what they were trying to accomplish. Maybe they wanted to kill all of us so the ghouls wouldn't have anyone to infect. Obviously that didn't work too well. Maybe they were trying to take out the ghouls as they entered the town, but, well, that didn't work either.

Luckily, our wall here keeps us pretty safe. [As she says this, a zombie wanders up and throws itself upon a car. Lita casually hands me the hoe and trades it for one of the many Lobotimizers leaning against the wall. She maneuvers the weapon through a small space. With a quick parry and thrust, the blade delivers. She sets the weapon back where it was and returns.]

A few show up like that every week.

What do you do with the bodies?</i>

Every day a small group collects them and piles them up a ways from here. We burn the weekly.

So, tell me more about how this place got set up.</i>

To be honest, I wasn't meaning for any of this to happen. After the military ransack, I called my sister to make sure she was okay. She immediately set up shop with her radio in a spare room. And people just started showing up.

With you at the head.</i>

Trust me, I didn't want that. It's only because this is my house. Everyone insisted that I be in charge. And now I've accepted it because I know best how Twice runs.

Twice?</i>

Yeah, Twice Compound. As in, "once bitten, twice shy." Cute, huh? That one was my idea.

Very nice. So, after your leadership was decided on...?</i>

It was hectic. People were showing up bitten, or carrying everything they own, or with ninety-three-year-old Grandma Esther in tow. We had to turn away a lot of people.

But eventually it settled down. We designated rooms: basement for sleeping, main room for meetings and meals. There's a radio room, an exercise room, and a small nursery.

That radio my sister brought turned out to be a godsend. It allows us to have some contact with the outside world, or what's left of it. We don't talk back much, but we do let people know that we're open to travelers.

Is that what the tents are for?</i>

No. Tents are for sick people. With no medicine or vaccines, we can't risk a flu spreading through Twice. Someone could die, and we need someone healthy at all times to keep working the garden.

And after the wall was built, people started feeling... comfortable, shall we say. We learned the hard way the downsides of sharing one bedroom. We don't want any more children here, but without those tents, I think there'd be a lot more grumpy adults.

Didn't you say there was a nursery?</i>

We don't want any new children. Doesn't mean we don't have old ones. Some people came here with children or pregnant, and we've taken in a couple orphans.

Has the military been back since that night?</i>

Once, and without the bombs this time. A plane flew over the town at about dawn. The children were so excited to see it, and they clapped and cheered when the parachuters jumped out, huge chutes like wings behind them. The adults were already up and working as we always are.

A group was out burning the ghoul bodies. This was still near the beginning of the infestation, so we had collected quite a few bodies over the week, and they made a nice stink and a pillar of smoke. The military group made a beeline for them.

They spent the night with us. Luckily we had a full enough garden to feed them so we didn't have to dip into our preserves and cans.

There were seven of them, all men, and all looking to show off for the women at Twice. I tried to tell them that we were safe inside the wall, but they insisted on having a night guard. When we went to bed, he started his patrol. I can't imagine how bored he must have been walking in circles within the wall. Around and around.

Apparently a ghoul wandered up and spooked him. For being a military man, he was easily spooked. We woke up to the blam! blam! of a pistol.

There's a reason we use the Lobo's. The gunfire attracted every ghoul in the area. Sure, he killed that first one, but even as the echo died off, you could hear them coming. At first it was just the silence, the silence of everyone holding their breath at once.

And then you hear them.

The ghouls?</i>

Yes! Yo hear them shuffling closer and closer. You hear the closest one moaning, and you think you hear their echo. But at the same time, you know the echo is really just more of them, slowly making their way towards you.

[She lets her arms fall to her sides. Her shoulders hunch forward and her chin drops. Quietly, she moans, perfectly mimicking the real sound. Several of the children look out through the wall of cars. They relax when they see Lita's pose. Obviously she has done this before, possibly to teach them what to look out for.]

Have you ever heard that many of them?

I have, while out in New Jersey.</i>

New Jersey, huh? How was it?

It was a wreck. But never-mind that. Continue.</i>

Right. So in a matter of minutes, we've got the kids in the basement, the windows covered, and are armed to the teeth with Lobo's and the occasional gun. We've run through this for practice before, after all.

Normally we have a rule keeping all light in the basement after dusk. Without light pollution, any light outside could be seen for miles and would bring the ghouls right to us. That night, we broke the rule. I figured that it was the best call. We knew that we'd be fine as long as we kept the ghouls outside of the wall. But the only way to see where they were was to use light. Might bring a few more, but hey, we had a swarm coming anyway, right?

So we got out the ladder, gathered some scavenged batteries, and put some of the older folk up on the roof. They were armed with every sort of flashlight you can imagine, from pink plastic ones to those heavy-duty industrial ones.

These military men were not ready at all, not at all. They were pacing, shaking, hell!, one was sitting in the dark, crying!

These military men were not ready for battle.

The whole time, the guy who shot the first ghoul is spouting is mouth off! Some of the women like to remind me that his name was Louis, but I just call him Hot Shot. And cocky as a man could be. He running his mouth, whooping and hollering, and probably scaring the kids more than any ghoul would.

The kids aren't afraid of the zombies?</i>

No, they're as scared as anyone else, but at least they're used to that fear. They've heard ghouls moaning when they wander past at night. They've seen us kill ghouls that come too close. It's scary, but it's routine.

Hot Shot, on the other hand, was something totally else. Here at Twice we focus on discipline. Save the bravado for the exercise room. My sister likes to spread that mantra out over the radio waves.

So imagine this. It's night. We've got just the wall protecting us. The military apparently has too high of a turnaround rate to properly train their men, so we've got six wimps and one man far too eager to fight.

Then the first ghouls come, the ones that happened to be nearby already.