World War Z Short Story - "Every Little Helps!"

I wrote this for an alternative history forum. This short story assumes some familiarity with the World War Z book by Max Brooks, but not with the film version which shares a title and not much else!

The stench hit us long before we saw it. A grey battered and nondescript high sided tractor trailer was teetering awkwardly along the A45 somewhere near Wellingborough. Without asking, we knew that we were following this sad cargo to the same destination where we were heading to. Indeed, as if to acknowledge us, the indicators on the vehicle ahead signalled for the turn off. The place we were going to emphatically wasn't open to the general public. If the (armed) gate guards didn't discourage foolhardy trespassers, then the razor wire fence surrounding the entire site would.

Solanum Decontamination Facility 5 - Ministry of Health Property - Entry without permission absolutely forbidden - Danger of Death!

(Former premises of Chettles Ltd, near Wellingborough, Northamptonshire.)

The facility manager, William Knotts was visibly not too pleased to see us. Press and public relations was a part of his remit, but definitely a very secondary priority in an often chaotically busy working day. It had taken months for us to get permission to go to the site for this interview. I got the impression right from the start that there was a fair bit that he was reluctant to discuss.

Still, time to press on.

We gather that this was a former pet food manufacturer's premises. Is there any advantage to re-using an existing facility, rather than building something new?

These premises were rather ideal for adaption to their present purpose. When they say pet food manufacture, they really mean handling and processing what you could euphemistically call animal by-products. A lot of the processing infrastructure was already in place and only needed slight modification. Of course the TPD units and their support infrastructure were a new addition.

As for wishing for anything purpose built, well there's no budget for hardly anything these days, as you know.

TPD units? Please can you slow down a little bit, explain and make things clearer.

Sorry, TPD, or Thermal depolymerization is the major breakthrough in Solanum removal from the physical fabric of this battered world. The simple version goes something like this. You stick in your waste material, grind it up then heat to 250 degrees centigrade in a pressurised chamber for fifteen minutes or so. Once this is done, you're left with a bunch of raw hydrocarbons and left over stuff. From there, you play with those raw materials and the process gets more like conventional oil refining.

Oil refining? You mean there's useful products coming out of the other end?

That was the original plan, before WWZ started. There was an American company, I believe they were called Changing World Technologies, who were offering this as a serious answer to the expected peak oil crisis. Only they could never quite get the economics of it right.

Then of course, the zombie crisis kicked off and that all became irrelevant.

But where does the decontamination come into it?

(Laughs) one of the great claims that was made, almost as an aside, was the purported ability to kill off just about any micro organism, even down to the prion level. It seems some bright young thing in the civil service remembered this and made a case for the technology to be applied to such a role here in the UK.

What kind of materials do you handle at this facility?

Oh the range is very broad. There's rich people, poor people, long term Z's that are little more than skin and bones, along with the recently bitten. There's our own mountainous stacks of undead, but I gather that some of the other facilities are gearing up to take in contaminated material from abroad. We're something of a world leader in this field, apparently. (laughs again)

Up to now, we've been mostly processing freshly terminated material that's being collected in situ. More recently the earlier and better documented mass graves are being excavated and transported here, that's forming a greater part of our processing stock.

Of course Solanum is very nasty stuff, so we do also take on a wide range of other general waste material. Almost anything that has been in contact with the undead isn't really that safe to re-use any more, so in it all goes.

As we are now painfully aware, a large part of your work is with processing the remains of the undead directly. Are there any special issues with handling this?

Everyone on the shop floor wears full hazmat gear, no exceptions. Solanum is really evil stuff and I don't want to start losing people, even if it's convict labour. Of course the material that reaches us, *should* be completely inert, but that doesn't always go to plan either. Everybody is told time and time again to be very careful. Their gear is bite-proof. A couple of times it's needed to be.

Was there any opposition to the location of this facility?

Sure, there were some protests, mainly from a few locals who didn't want anything to do with Zeds next door to them. Even Zeds having their molecular structure pounded to oblivion. It also stinks the surrounding area out, but then again, so did the pet food people back in the day. There weren't actually that many protesting, people are too busy buggering on with day to day existence these days and don't have the energy or spare time to shout any more.

It helped that we were able to export our surplus electricity generation into the local grid, Being able to provide a guaranteed electricity supply these days makes more than a few new friends. (chuckles)

Coming back to the mainstay of this operation, which is processing the corpses of the undead, once living humans. Is there any attempt being made to identify any of the deceased?

Unfortunately not. You saw for yourself how the raw material is delivered to us. It's generally in bulk, twisted and clotted together. There's various states of decomposition and completeness, or lack thereof. Our priority is to get it chopped and broken down into small enough pieces to go in the pressure vessels. We don't have the resources for a room full of autopsy tables, or the time to wait on a row of hearses with individual corpses and weeping relatives queuing up at the gates.

That sounds appalling, is there any degree of sensitivity at all possible now?

(Looks away uncomfortably) No. Everyone's lost someone close to them, lost a lot of people generally. Once they're gone, that's it.

Coming back to the useful by-products, where do these go to?

The purified water is constantly tested, in case there is a fault with the process, and once verified as Solanum free, released in stages to the River Nene nearby. Separated minerals and materials will go to the manufacturers that need them. The various hydrocarbons, once converted to fuels, have been very helpful to those departments of His Majesties government that need such fuels.

You mean that we're burning zombie diesel?

I wouldn't put it that bluntly, but essentially yes we are. As a certain large pre-war supermarket chain were fond of saying, 'Every little helps' and that is what really counts right now.

At that point, the interview drew to a close. There were no further questions that we really wanted to ask, In fact, we would feel a lot better not having to spend any more time here than was strictly necessary. Fortunately, our route back was upwind of this factory floor of hell. We were more than a little glad to see the back of that place and would not have appreciated any further olfactory reminders.

CiH - Mag! Sept 2013.

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