A Zombie's History of the United States (24 page)

Operation Rainy Day was as effective as it was morally dubious. There is no way to tally the number of innocent civilians who became zombinated by 2,4-Z or accidentally poisoned by 2,3,7-P. Most disturbing were the numerous cases of pregnant women who ate food grown from soil and water contaminated by 2,4-Z. Here the doses were not enough to zombinate the mother, but they were enough to zombinate the unborn child inside her, who would then eat and claw its way out of the womb.

Furthermore, the de-animating clouds of 2,3,7-P certainly did not claim all the zombies created by London Fog. Soon the number of zombies roaming the jungles was enough to pose a real problem to U.S. forces on the ground. Dealing with the Vietcong was a handful enough, but worrying about zombies skulking through the rice patties too was more than forces could handle. Finally, in 1971, President Richard Nixon put an end to Operation Rainy Day.

Whether America ever could have succeeded in Vietnam is impossible to say, but Operation Rainy Day had insured that it was almost impossible. As the Vietnam conflict had never officially been a war, it also had no official end, merely petering out over the course of five years as troops were sent home, and funding and aid dollars were cut off. Eventually North Vietnam prevailed. Now the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Vietnamese government struggled through the remainder of the 1970s and the 1980s to get their zombie problem—a lasting testament to America’s involvement—under control. In the early 1990s, John Kerry, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts and a Vietnam veteran, spearheaded a zombie relief program for Vietnam to help them de-animate the remaining creatures.

UNDEAD SPACE

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner had proclaimed that the frontier was the source of the American character. President Kennedy cleverly resurrected this language when he referred to the United States’ space policy as the New Frontier. Part scientific exploration, part massive PR move, the space race was the only aspect of the Cold War that Americans could be excited about. The whole nation cheered when Mercury astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., became the first American in space. The public was not even informed when Pvt. Matthew Sell, or rather the zombinated remains of Pvt. Sell, went up into space two months earlier, as part of NASA’s secret Pluto program.

The Pluto program’s Pvt. Matthew Sell, the first mobile being in space.

Scientists could only hypothesize what effect space travel would have on the human body. It only made sense for NASA to use some of the zombies currently going to waste at Fort Dead. After all, zombie physiology reacts almost identically to that of a human. Without the Pluto program, many early space race accidents would have claimed a human life.

The Carrion in Space Program was a short-lived, privately funded project testing hybrid pilots for astronaut fitness in the early 1960s. Some researchers speculated that because hybrids required less food and could withstand environmental extremes no human could, they might make perfect occupants for the space capsules. Several prospective hybrids were located and brought into the program, though finding hybrids with flight training was difficult. It mattered little though. With the way things were in that political climate, NASA would never have used hybrids for the Mercury or Apollo programs.

In March 2006, the Vietnamese government happily declared that they were once again zombie free.

David Z

If it’s necessary to form a hybrid nationalist army, we’ll form a hybrid nationalist army. If we cannot succeed with the ballot, then we will succeed with our teeth.

—David Z, hybrid activist, Temple Round speech, April 1964

Inspired by the African American Civil Rights Movement, by the 1960s many fed-up hybrids decided to publicly “come out of the grave,” as unsympathetic journalists liked to mockingly say. While African Americans sought equal rights, hybrids sought rights of any kind. There was no existing federal law that made being a hybrid illegal, but this was a minor technicality for most law enforcement branches. Many states employed the tactic of charging captured hybrids with conspiracy to murder, arguing that left free, the hybrid would surely attack a human eventually (which did, in fact, occur somewhat routinely). Furthermore, most courts did not recognize hybrids as people, thus someone who killed a hybrid was not guilty of any crime, or at least not guilty of murder; a man who killed a hybrid in San Marcos, Texas, in 1957, was fined for “improper trash disposal” after leaving the terminated hybrid lying in the street.

Several different openly hybrid organizations formed during this period, each with slightly different goals. The Living Love League was a counterculture collection of hybrids (some of whom willingly chose to be hybridized) that worked primarily to change attitudes surrounding hybrids. They thought the terms “undead” and “Carrie” were negative and offensive; instead, they asked that hybrids be referred to as “differently animated.” Carries for Independence (CFI) petitioned to get their own territory within the United States, similar to Native American reservations, where they might live in peace and govern themselves. Of all the hybrid organizations, the most polarizing and publicized was the Hybrid Power Front (HPF), led by its charismatic and equally polarizing founder, David Z. The HPF did not seek equal rights with humans—they sought s
uperior
rights to humans.

Born David Bailey in 1930, David had lived an un-spectacular life, working as a middle-school teacher in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, when he became a hybrid in 1959. When his school discovered his hybridity, he was fired and forced to flee town after he was blamed for the disappearance of a child (something he refuted for the remainder of his animation). By 1960, David had traveled to Chicago where he happened to meet some members of the hybrid underground who were anonymously publishing
The Carrie Nation,
a prohybrid newsletter meant to educate the human public on the undead. Here David was to form many of the reactionary ideas that would soon catapult him to celebrity and infamy.

ART IS DEAD

During the height of the hybrid rights movement, a hybrid art subculture rose up from the Los Angeles art scene. There were hybrid painters, such as Mikal Gregoire, and hybrid musicians, such as T. D. Denman, and the rock band The Carrie-Ons. Most prominent was hybrid filmmaker John Bungert.

Outspoken and controversial, Bungert was known for films that often portrayed humans as the villains, and that unconventionally glorified zombies (most hybrids looked down on their animalistic forbearers). He broke onto the American underground film scene in 1964, when film critic Manny Farber championed Bungert’s
Humunkind
in an article for
Film Culture
. Bungert quickly became a darling of the art cinema world, championed as a visionary by other experimental filmmakers, including Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas. Bungert resented the attention, knowing he was being embraced more as a novelty because of his hybridity than as an actual artist.

In 1968, human filmmaker George A. Romero released the extremely anti-zombie film,
Night of the Living Dead
, which Bungert said was “as hate filled and grotesque as
Birth of the Nation,
” referring to D. W. Griffith’s pro-Ku Klux Klan silent film.

Bungert immediately put together a film meant as a response to Romero’s film. Titled
Night of the Dead Living,
the film told the story of a group of hybrids who became trapped in a remote country house while a mob of humans try to break in and terminate them.

The film was never finished, unfortunately. On December 18, 1968, Bungert was found terminated in his small Santa Monica office. The crime was, of course, not investigated. Bungert had no particular enemies, but many of his friends believed that he had possibly gotten involved with some sordid investors while financing his films.

The name David Z was a pseudonym he used writing for
The Carrie Nation,
but eventually he embraced the name on a philosophical level. Bailey had been a human; David Z was more than human. By 1962, David had abandoned the anonymity of the newsletter completely. He was now traveling around the country making public speeches anywhere people would listen—and surprisingly, he was finding audiences, human audiences, rapt by his bravado. He was also developing a following of diehard hybrid devotees.

An interview televised on August 27, 1962, with former
New York Times
reporter Michael Cagle, catapulted David Z to national awareness. Here David Z laid out his beliefs for tens of millions of Americans. The interview opened with this David Z statement:

I would like to point something out so that we will better understand each other. I don’t want you to think from the statements I have made that I’m being disrespectful towards humans. I’m being frank. And I think that my statements will give you a better insight into the mind of a true hybrid man than a majority of statements you get from other hybrids, other hybrids who will tell you what you to hear with the pathetic hope that it will make them draw closer to you and create a better possibility of getting from you some of the crumbs that you might let fall from your table. Well, I’m not looking for your crumbs.

Throughout the interview, David Z shocked America with his rhetoric, which clearly implied that he felt hybrids were superior to humans, and some subtle but palpable insinuations that the end of the human race was imminent. While the majority of the hybrid rights movement fought against mortal segregation, David Z advocated a complete separation of hybrids from humans, but in an inverted fashion. He espoused a system where hybrids were the top tier of society, with humans essentially existing as their servants and food source. David Z also rejected the larger hybrid rights movement’s strategy of nonviolence:

I am not saying to go out and get violent, but you should never be nonviolent unless you are confronted with nonviolence. I’m nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But if you drop that violence on me, you had better get prepared to have your face chewed right off. I will suck your brain out through your eyes.

David Z’s speeches had a powerful effect on his audiences, especially among hybrids who were tired of being told to wait peaceably for equality and respect. Of course, the things David Z said alarmed most humans, and many hybrids too—he was described as a hatemonger and a threat to improved human-hybrid relations. Both Carries for Independence and the Living Love League denounced him as an irresponsible extremist whose views were not representative of hybrid Americans.

David Z was equally critical of the rest of the hybrid rights movement. He described other leaders as “mummies” for the human establishment and said that the Living Love League was “a bunch of stupid hippies who became zombies to piss of their parents.” When Carries for Independence gave a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, David Z told the
Los Angeles Times,
“I don’t see why any hybrid should be excited over a speech set in front of a statue of a dead human and who didn’t even like us when he was alive.”

In 1965, David Z formed the Hybrid Power Front to consolidate his nationwide pockets of followers. The FBI had opened a file on him long before then, but now they took particular interest. There was growing concern that David Z would try and stage an attack on humans of some kind. The public was already calling him a terrorist before any event had even taken place. In humanity’s defense, these fears were not just unfounded “mortalism,” as hybrid activists called bigotry toward hybrids. When David Z made comments such as, “Humans are our food. I look at you now the same way I looked at a roast chicken when I was human,” it was hard for humans to react any differently. The FBI was actually making moves to arrest David Z, when he was suddenly terminated on March 3, 1966.

David Z was giving a speech before a crowd of hybrids at the Conservatory Ballroom in Miami when a disturbance erupted in the crowd. “Gun!” someone yelled. As David Z’s bodyguards moved to protect him, a woman rushed forward and shot David Z in the face with a sawed-off shotgun. A man then charged the stage and fired a handgun at David Z, hitting him seven times, twice in what remained of his head. Furious onlookers literally ripped the woman apart, while slightly calmer onlookers merely beat the man.