Script Ideas
World War Z
Video
Script (exert)
DENVER, COLORADO, USA
[My train is late. The western drawbridge is being tested. Todd Wainio doesn’t seem to mind waiting for me at the platform. We shake hands under the station’s mural of Victory, easily the most recognizable image of the American experience in World War Z. Originally taken from a photograph, it depicts a squad of soldiers standing on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, their backs turned to us as they watch dawn break over Manhattan. My host looks very small and frail next to these towering, two-dimensional icons. Like most men of his generation, Todd Wainio is old before his time.
With an expanding paunch, receding, graying hair, and three, deep, parallel scars down the side of his right cheek, it would be difficult to guess that this former U.S. Army infantryman is still, at least chronologically, at the beginning of his life.]
The sky was red that day.
All the smoke, the crap that’d been filling the air all summer.
It put everything in an amber red light, like looking at the world through hell-colored
glasses. That’s how I first saw Yonkers, this little, depressed, rust-collar ‘burb just north
of New York City.
I don’t think anybody ever heard of it. I sure as hell hadn’t, and now it’s up there with, like, Pearl Harbor . . . no, not Pearl. . . that was a surprise attack.
This was more like Little Bighorn, where we . . . well … at least the people in charge, they
knew what was up, or they should have. The point is, it wasn’t a surprise, the war …
or emergency, or whatever you want to call it… it was already on.
It had been, what, three months since everyone jumped on the panic train.
You remember what it was like, people just freaking out. . . boarding up their houses,
stealing food, guns, shooting everything that moved. They probably killed more people,
the Rambos and the runaway fires, and the traffic accidents and just the . . . the whole shit storm that we now call “the Great Panic”; I think that killed more people at first than
Zack.
I guess I can see why the powers that be thought that one big stand-up battle was such a
good idea. They wanted to show the people that they were still in charge, get them to
calm the hell down so they could deal with the real problem. I get it, and because they
needed a propaganda smack-down, I ended up in Yonkers.
It actually wasn’t the worst place to make a stand. Part of the town sat right in this little
valley, and right over the west hills you had the Hudson River. The Saw Mill River
Parkway ran right through the center of our main line of defense and the refugees
streaming down the freeway were leading the dead right to us. It was a natural choke
point, and it was a good idea . . . the only good idea that day.
[Todd reaches for another
“Q,”
the homegrown, American variety
cigarette so named tor its one-quarter tobacco content.]
The rest of the script would be adapted as if you were a part of the battle.
Why didn’t they put us on the roofs? They had a shopping center, a
couple of garages, big buildings with nice flat Tops. They could have put a whole
company right above the A&P. We could have seen the whole
valley,
and
we would have been completely safe from attack. There was this apartment
building, about twenty stories, I think . . . each floor had a com
manding view of the
freeway. Why wasn’t there a rifle team in each window?
You know where they put us’ Right down on the ground, right behind sandbags or in
fighting holes. We wasted so much time, so much energy preparing these elaborate firing
positions. Good “cover and concealment,” they told us. Cover and concealment? “Cover”
means physical protection, conventional protection, from small arms and artillery or air-
dropped ord
nance. That sound like the enemy we were about to go up against? Was Zack
now calling in air strikes and fire missions? And why the hell were we worried about
concealment when the whole point of the battle was to get Zack to come directly at us!
So backasswards! All of it!
I’m sure whoever was in charge must have been one of the last of the Fulda Fucktards,
you know, those generals who spent their nard-drop years training to defend West
Germany from Ivan. Tight-assed, narrow-minded . .. probably pissed off from so many
years of brushfire war. He must have been
an rr because everything we did freak in stunk or Cold War btatic
De
fense.
You know
they even tried to dig fighting holes for the tanks? The engineers blasted them right out of
the A&P parking lot.
you
had tanks?
Dude, we had everything: tanks, Bradleys, Humvees armed with everything from fifty
cals to these new Vasilek heavy mortars. At least those
might
have been useful. We had
Avenger Humvee mounted Stinger surface-to-air missile sets, we had this AVLB portable
bridge layer system, perfect for the three-inch-deep creek that ran by the freeway. We had
a bunch of XM5 electronic warfare vehicles all crammed with radar and jamming gear
and . . . and … oh yeah, and we even had a whole FOL, Family of La
trines, just plopped
right there in the middle of everything. Why, when the water pressure was still on and
toilets were still flushing in every building and house in the neighborhood? So much we
didn’t need! So much shit that only blocked traffic and looked pretty, and that’s what I
think they were really there for, just to look pretty.
For the press.
Hell yeah, there muse have been at least one reporter for every two or three uniforms! On
foot and in vans, I don’t know how many news choppers must have been circling . . .
you’d think with so many they’d spare a few to try and rescue people from Manhattan . . .
hell yeah, I think it was all for the press, show them our big green killpower … or tan . . .
some were just back from the desert, they hadn’t even been repainted yet. So much of it
was for show, not just the vehicles but us as well. They had us in MOPP 4, dude, Mission
Oriented Protective Posture, big bulky suits and masks that are supposed to protect you
from a radioactive or biochem environment.
Couid
your superiors have believed the undead virus was airborne?
If that’s true, why didn’t they protect the reporters? Why didn’t our “supe
riors” wear them,
or anyone else immediately behind the line. They were cool and comfortable in their
BDUs while we sweated under layers of rub
ber, charcoal, and thick, heavy body armor.
And what genius thought to put us in body armor anyway? Because die press reamed ’em
for not having enough in the last war? Why the hell do you need a helmet when you’re
fighting a living corpse? They’re the ones who need the helmets, not us! And then you’ve
got the Net Rigs . . . the Land Warrior combat integra
tion system. It was this whole
personal electronics suite that allowed each one of us to link up with each other and the
higher-ups to link up with us. Through your eyepiece you could download maps, GPS
data, real-time
satellite recon. You could find your exact position on a battlefield, your buddies’ positions, the
bad guys . . . you could actually look through the video camera on your weapon, or anyone else’s,
to see what’s over a hedge or around a corner. Land Warrior allowed every soldier to have the
infor-mation of an entire command post, and let the command post control those soldiers as a
single unit. “Netrocentric,” that’s what I kept hearing
1. Although this is an exaggeration, prewar records have shown Yonkers to have the largest
press-to-military ratio than any other battlefield in history.
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from the officers in front of the cameras. “Netrocentric” and “hyperwar.” Cool terms, but they
didn’t mean shit when you’re trying to dig a fighting hole with MOPP gear and body armor, and
Land Warrior and standard combat load, and all of it on the hottest day in what was one of the
hottest summers on record. I can’t believe I was still standing when Zack began to show up.
It was just a trickle at first, ones and twos staggering between the aban
doned cars that jammed
the deserted freeway. At least the refugees had been evacuated. Okay, that was another thing they
did right. Picking a
choke point and clearing the civilians, great job. Everything else . . .
Zack started entering the first kill zone, the one designated for the MLRS. I didn’t hear
the rockets launch, my hood muffled the noise, but 1 saw them streak toward the target. 1
saw them arch on their way down, as their casings broke away to reveal all those little
bomblets on plastic streamers. They
1
re about the size of a hand grenade, antipersonnel
with a limited antiarmor capacity. They scattered amongst the Gs, detonating once they
hit the road or an abandoned car. Their gas tanks went up in like little volcanoes, geysers
of fire and debris that added to the “steel rain.” I got to be honest, it was a rush, dudes
were cheering in their mikes, me too, watching ghouls start to tumble. I’d say there were
maybe thirty, maybe forty or fifty, zombies spread out all across this half mile stretch of
freeway. The opening bombardment took out at least three-quarters of them.
Only three-quarters.
[Todd finishes his cigarette in one long, angry drag. Immedi
ately, he reaches for another.)
Yep, and that’s what should have made us worry right then and there. “Steel rain” hit each
and every single one of them, shredded their insides; organs and flesh were scattered all
over the damn place, dropping from their bodies as diey came toward us . . . but head
shots . . . you’re trying to destroy the brain, not the body, and as long as they got a
working thinker and some mobility’ . . . some were still walking, others too thrashed
to stand were crawling. Yeah, we should have worried, but there wasn’t time.
The trickle was now turning into a stream. More Gs, dozens now, diick among the
burning cars. Funny thing about Zack . . . you always think he’s gonna be dressed in his
Sunday best. That’s how the media portrayed them, right, especially in the beginning …
Gs in business suits and dresses, like, a cross section of everyday America, only dead.
That’s not what they looked like at all. Most infected, the early infected, the ones who
went in that first wave, they either died under treatment or at home in their own beds.
Most were either in hospital gowns, or pajamas and nightshirts. Some were in sweats or
their undies … or just naked, a lot of them conv pletely buck bare. You could see their
wounds, the dried marks on their bodies, the gouges that made you shiver even inside that
sweltering gear.
The second “steel rain” didn’t have half the impact of the first, no more gas tanks to catch,
and now the more tightly packed Gs just happened to be shielding each other from a
possible head wound. I wasn’t scared, not yet. Maybe my wood was gone, but I was
pretty sure it’d be back when Zack entered the Army’s kill zone.
Again, I couldn’t hear the Paladins, too far back up the hill, but I sure heard, and saw,
their shells land. These were standard HE 155s, a high ex-plosive core with a
fragmentation case. They did even less damage than the rockets!
Why is that?
No balloon effect for one. When a bomb goes off close to you, it causes the
liquid in your body to burst, literally, like a freakin’ balloon. That doesn’t happen with
Zack, maybe because he carries less bodily fluid than us or be
cause that fluid’s more like
a gel. I don’t know. But it didn’t do shit, neither did the SNT effect
What is
SNT?
Sudden Nerve Trauma, I think that’s what you call it. It’s another effect of close-in high
explosives. The trauma is so great sometimes that your
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organs, your brain, all of it, just shuts down like God flickin’ your life
switch. Something to do with electrical impulses or whatnot. I don’t know, I’m not a
fuckin’ doctor.
But that didn’t happen.
Not once! I mean . . . don’t get me wrong . . . it’s not like Zack just skipped through the
barrage unscathed. We saw bodies blown to shit, tossed into the air, ripped to pieces, even
complete heads, live heads with eyes and jaws still moving, popping sky high like
freakin’ Cristal corks . . . we were
Taking them down, no doubt, but not as many or as fast as we needed to!
The stream was now like a river, a flood of bodies, slouching, moaning, stepping over
their mangled bros as they rolled slowly and steadily toward us like a slow-motion wave.
The next kill zone was direct fire from the heavy arms, the tanks main 120s and Bradleys
with their chain guns and FOTT missiles. The Humvees also began to open up, mortars
and missiles and the Mark-19s, which are, like, machine guns, but firing grenades. The
Comanches came whining in at what felt like inches above our heads with chains and
Hellfires and Hydra rocket pods.
It was a fuckin* meat grinder, a wood chipper, organic matter clouding like sawdust
above the horde.
Nothing can survive this,
I was thinking, and for a little while, it looked like I was
right. . . until the fire started to die.
Started
to die?
Petering out, withering . . .
[For a second he is silent, and then, angrily, his eyes reiocus.l
No one thought about it,
no one!
Don’t pull my pud with stories about budget cuts and
supply problems! The only thing in short supply was com-
mon fucking sense! Not one of those West Point, War College, medals-up-the-ass, four-
star fart bags said, “Hey, we got plenty of fancy weapons, we got enough shit for them to
shoot!?!” No one thought about how many rounds the artillery would need for sustained
operations, how many rockets for the MLRS, how many canister shots . . . the tanks had
these things called canister shots . . . basically a giant shotgun shell. They fired these little
tungsten balls . . . not perfect you know, wasting like a hundred balls for even- G, but
fuck, dude, at least it was something! Each Abrams only had three, three! Three out of a
total loadout of forty! The rest were standard HEAT or SABOT! Do you know what a
“Silver Bullet,” an armor-piercing, depleted-uranium dart is going to do to a group of
walking corpses? Noth
ing! Do you know what it feels like to see a sixty-something-ton
tank tire into a crowd with absolutely ass-all result! Three canister rounds! And what
about flechettes? That’s the weapon we always hear about these days, flechettes, these
little steel spikes that turn any weapon into an instant scattergun. We talk about them like
they’re a new Invention, but we had them as far back as, like, Korea. We had them for the
Hydra rockets and the Mark-19s. Just imagine that, just one 19 firing three hundred and
fifty rounds a minute, each round holding, like, a hundred” spikes! Maybe it wouldn’t
have turned the tide . . . but . . . Goddammit!
The fire was dying, Zack was still coining . . . and the fear . .. everyone was feeling it, in
the orders from the squad leaders, in the actions of the men around me . . . That little
voice in the back of your head that just keeps squeaking “Oh shit, oh shit.”
We were the last line of defense, the afterthought when it came to fire
power. We were
supposed to pick off the random lucky G who happened to
slip through The giant bitchslap of our heavier stuff. Maybe one in three of us was
expected to fire his weapon, one in every ten was expected to score
a kill.
They came by the thousands, spilling out over the freeway guardrails, down the side
streets, around the houses, through them … so many of them, their moans so loud they
echoed right through our hoods.
2. The standard, prewar 40-mm canister cartridge held 115 tlechettes.
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We flipped our safeties off, sighted our targets, the order came to fire . . . I was a SAW
gunner, a light machine gun that you’re supposed to fire in short, controlled bursts about
as long as it takes to say “Die motherfucker die.” The initial burst was too low, I caught
one square in the chest. I watched him fly backward, hit the asphalt, then get right back
up again as if nothing had happened. Dude . . . when they get back up …
[The cigarette has burned down to his fingers. He drops and crushes it without noticing.]
I did my best to control my fire, and my sphincter, “lust go for the head,”
I kept telling myself. “Keep it together, just go for the head.” And all the time my SAW’s
chattering “Die motherfucker die.”
We could have stopped them, we should have, one guy with a rifle, that’s all you need,
right? Professional soldiers, trained marksmen . . . how could they get through? They still
ask that, critics and armchair Pattons who weren’t there. You think it’s that simple’ You
think that after being “trained” to aim for the center mass your whole military career you
can suddenly make an expert head shot every time’ You think in that strait-jacket and
suffocation hood it’s easy to recharge a clip or clear a weapon jam? You think that after
watching all the wonders of modern warfare tall flat on their high-tech hyper ass, that
after already living through three months of the Great Panic and watching everything you
knew as reality be eaten alive by an enemy that wasn’t even supposed to exist that you’re
gonna keep a cool fucking head and a steady fucking trigger finger?
[He stabs that finger at me.l
Well, we did! We
still
managed to do our job and make Zack pay for every fuckin’ inch!
Maybe if we’d had more men, more ammo, maybe if we’d just been allowed to focus on
our job . . .
3. SAW: A light machine gun, short for Squad Automatic Weapon.
[His finger curls back into his fist.]
Land Warrior, high-tech, high-priced, high-profile netro-fucking-centric Land Warrior. To
see what was in front of our face was bad enough, but spybtrd uplinks were also showing
how truly large the horde was. We might be facing diousands, but behind them were
millions! Remember, we were taking on the bulk of New York City’s infestation! This
was only the head of one really long undead snake stretching all the way back to Times
Fuckin’ Square! We didn’t need to see that. I didn’t need to know that! That little scared
voice wasn’t so little anymore. “Oh shit, OH SHIT!” And suddenly it wasn’t in my head
anymore. It was in my earpiece. Every time some jerkoff couldn’t control his mouth,
Land Warrior made sure the rest of us heard it. “There’s too many!” “We gotta get the
fuck outta here!” Someone from another platoon, I didn’t know his name, started
hollering “I hit him in the head and he didn’t die! They don’t die when you shoot them in
the head!” I’m sure he must have missed the brain, it can happen, a round j ust grazing the
inside of the skull. . . maybe if he’d been calm and used his own brain, he would have
realized that. Panic’s even more infec
tious than the Z Germ and the wonders of Land
Warrior allowed that germ to become airborne. “What?” “They don’t die?” “Who said
that?” “You shot it in the head?” “Holy crap! They’re indestructible!” All over the net you
could hear this, browning shorts across the info superhighway.
“Everyone pipe down!” someone shouted. “Hold the line! Stay off the net!” an older
voice, you could tell, but suddenly it was drowned out in this scream and suddenly my
eyepiece, and I’m sure everyone else’s, was filled with the sight of blood spurting into a
mouth of broken teeth. The sight
was from a dude in the yard ot a house behind the line. The owners must have left a few
reanimated family members locked in when they bugged out. Maybe the shock from the
explosions weakened the door or some-thing, because they came bursting out, right into
this poor bastard. His gun camera recorded the whole thing, fell right at the perfect angle.
There were five of them, a man, a woman, three kids, they had him pinned on his back,
the man was on his chest, the kids had him by the arms, trying to bite through his suit.
The woman tore his mask off, you could see the terror in
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his face. I’ll never forget his shriek as she bit off his chin and lower lip. “They’re behind
us!” someone was shouting. “They’re coming out of the houses! The line’s broken!
They’re everywhere!” Suddenly the image went dark, cut off from an external source, and
the voice, the older voice, was back again . . . “Stay off the net!” he ordered, trying real
hard to control his voice and then the link went dead.
I’m sure it must have taken more than a few seconds, it had to, even if they’d been
hovering above our heads, but, it seemed like right after the communications line blacked
out that the sky was suddenly screaming with JSFs. I didn’t see them release their
ordnance. I was at the bottom of
my hole cursing the army and God, and my own hands for not digging deeper. That
ground shook, the sky went dark. Debris was everywhere, earth and ash and burning
whatever flying above my head. I felt this weight slam between my shoulder blades, soft
and heavy. I rolled over, it was a head and torso, all charred black and still smoking and
still trying to bite! I kicked it away and scrambled out of my hole seconds after the last of
the JSOW
5
fell.
I found myself staring into this cloud of black smoke where the horde had been. The
freeway, the houses, everything was covered by this mid
night cloud. I vaguely remember
other guys getting out of their holes, hatches opening on tanks and Bradleys, everyone
just staring into the darkness. There was a quiet, a stillness that, in my mind, lasted for
hours.
And then they came, right out of the smoke like a freakiiV little kid’s nightmare! Some
were steaming, some were even still burning . . . some were walking, some crawling,
some just dragging themselves along on their torn bellies . . . maybe one in twentv was
still able to move, which left . . . shit… a couple thousand? And behind them, mixing with
their ranks and pushing steadily toward us, the remaining million that the air strike hadn’t
even touched!
And that was when the line collapsed. I don’t remember it all at once. I see these flashes:
people running, grunts, reporters. I remember a newsman
4. JSF: Joint Strike Fighters.
5. JSOW: Joint Standoff Weapon.
with a big Yosemite Sam mustache trying to pull a Beretta from his vest be-fore three
burning Gs pulled him down … I remember a dude forcing open the door of a news van,
jumping in, throwing out a pretty blond re
porter, and trying to drive away before a tank
crushed them both. Two news choppers crashed together, showering us with their own
steel rain. One Comanche driver.. . brave, beautiful motherfucker . . . tried to turn his
rotor into the oncoming Gs. The blade diced a path right down their mass before catching
on a car and hurling him into the A&P. Shooting . . . crazy random shooting … I took a
round in the sternum, in my armor’s center plate. I felt like I’d run into a wall, even
though I’d been standing still. It knocked me on my ass, I couldn’t breathe, and just then
some dumb-ass lobbed a flash bang right in front of me.
The world was white, my ears were ringing. I froze . . . hands were claw-ing me,
grabbing my arms. I kicked and punched, I felt my crotch get warm and wet. I shouted
but couldn’t hear my own voice. More hands, stronger, were trying to haul me
somewhere. Kicking, squirming, cursing, crying . . . suddenly a fist clocked me in the
jaw. It didn’t knock me out, but I was sud
denly relaxed. These were my buddies. Zack
don’t punch. They dragged me into the closest Bradley. My vision cleared just long
enough to see the line of light vanish with the closing hatch.
[He reaches for another
Q,
then abruptly decides against it.l
I know “professional” historians like to talk about how Yonkers repre
sented a
“catastrophic failure of the modern military apparatus,” how it
proved the old adage that armies perfect the art of fighting the last war just in time tor the
next one. Personally, I think that’s a big ‘ole sack of it. Sure, we were unprepared, our
tools, our training, everything I just talked about, all one class-A, gold-standard
clusterfuck, but the weapon that really failed wasn’t something that rolled oft an assembly
line. It’s as old as … I don’t know, I guess as old as war. Its tear, dude, just tear and you
don’t have to be Sun treakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurt
–
ing the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day. Break their spirit, that’s
what every successful army goes for, from tribal face paint to
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the “blitzkrieg” to . . . what did we call the first round of Gulf War Two, “Shock and
Awe”?Perfect name, “Shock and Awe”! But what if the enemy can’t be shocked and
awed? Not just won’t, but biologically
can’t!
That’s what happened that day outside New
York City, that’s the failure that al
most lost us the whole damn war. The fact that we
couldn’t shock and awe Zack boomeranged right back in our faces and actually allowed
Zack to shock and awe us! They’re not afraid! No matter what we do, no matter how
many we kill, they will never, ever be afraid!
Yonkers was supposed to be the day we restored confidence to the
American people, instead we practically told them to kiss their ass good
bye. If it wasn’t
for the Sou’frican Plan, I have no doubt, we’d all be slouch
ing and moaning right now.
The last thing I remember was the Bradley being tossed like a Hot Wheels car. I don’t
know where the hit was, but I’m guessing it must have been close. I’m sure had I still
been standing out there, exposed, I wouldn’t be standing here today.
Have you ever seen the effects of a thermobaric weapon? Have you ever asked anyone
with stars on their shoulders about them* I bet my ballsack you’ll never get the full story.
You’ll hear about heat and pressure, the fire
ball that continues expanding, exploding, and
literally crushing and burn
ing everything in its path. Heat and pressure, that’s what
thermobaric means. Sounds nasty enough, right? What you won’t hear about is the im
–
mediate aftereffect, the vacuum created when that fireball suddenly con
tracts. Anyone left
alive will either have the air sucked right out of their lungs, or-and they’ll
never
admit this
to anyone-have their lungs ripped right out of their mouth. Obviously no one’s going to
live long enough to tell that kind of horror story, probably why the Pentagon’s been so
good at covering up the truth, but if you ever see a picture of a G, or even an example of
a real walking specimen, and he’s got both air bags and wind
pipe just dangling out from
his lips, make sure you give him my number. I’m always up for meeting another veteran
of Yonkers.
Four Men & A Ham 