Plot Summary

‘World War Z’ is author Max Brooks’ most popular and critically acclaimed novel. It won the Audie Award for Multi-Voiced Performance in 2007 and has been adapted into a successful film.

‘Spoiler Free’ ‘World War Z’ Summary

The novel begins with an agent of the United Nations who was tasked to create a report on the recent Zombie Wars. The report includes interviews with survivors around the world. When he complained to his boss that a lot of the materials had been redacted, he was told that the original report was too emotional. He insisted that the emotional parts were what humanized the report. He was told to write his report as he sees fit, and he decided to turn the original report into a book.

The plague began in a backwater Chinese province which caused a mild outbreak, but their government’s forceful crackdown created a refugee situation, causing residents to flee to other parts of the world, carrying the contagion with them. It also spread via other means, including human trafficking and black market organ trade.

As expected, many countries in the world ignored the news of the dead rising from the grave to prey on the living, except Israel, who took the threat seriously and began reinforcing their borders against the zombie incursion.

Because the world’s governments refused to share information, and as a consequence of that, no organized preventive measures were put in place, the world was soon overrun by hordes of zombies, biting, infecting, and killing everyone they came across. By this time, governments had become aware of the threat and had begun to take protective measures, but their armies were unprepared and did not understand the new enemy or how to eliminate them. This led to many disastrous military engagements like the battle of Yonkers, where the United States’ state-of-the-art military tech barely made a dent in the zombie hordes amassed in Manhattan.

With the lack of proper leadership and direction from the world’s government leaders, the outbreak causes a lot of panic, an event that was aptly named The Great Panic. Small bands of people try to fight the zombies with little success, but others mostly fled to places they considered safe with little resources, but most just die a horrible death. Amid the chaos and death, the South African government adopted a plan by a man named Paul Redeker. The Redeker Plan is cold and inhumane, but it helped the government buy much-needed time. The Redeker plan was also adopted by many other nations, which helped them turn the tide and record their first victories since the plague started.

Having learned from their past mistakes, the world governments and peoples joined forces and also created new weapons to dispatch the zombies better. The counter-strike was long and arduous, especially in countries like France, where the underground tunnels provided hiding places for the zombies and made the battles turn ugly.

The plague changed the world irrevocably by the zombie plague outbreak, and although the people of the world have suffered a great calamity, they can now pick up the pieces of their lives and emerge in a new, zombie-free world.

‘World War Z’ Summary

Spoiler alert: important details of the novel are revealed below.

The book begins with interviews detailing the first few months at the start of the pandemic. A doctor in China named Kwang Jing-shu narrates how he encountered “Patient Zero,” a 12-year-old boy from a provincial Chinese village who was reported to be showing strange symptoms, which shocked the doctor. The boy had gone swimming in a dam and was bitten on the leg while he was underwater. Dr. Kwang called his friend named, Dr. Gu, who worked with the Institute of Infectious Diseases, to tell him about his discovery, but Gu’s attitude suggested that he was familiar with the emerging disease. The Chinese government quickly responded to the alert by Kwang, sending men in hazmat suits to take away the patient and those who had come in contact with him. Dr. Kwang was also detained, and the government quickly covered up the event and cracked down on those who spread information about the disease. The Chinese government’s violent crackdown and cover-up of the event, coupled with rumors, began to spread panic, and people started fleeing China to other parts of the world, some carrying the disease with them. They hid wounded family members in fear, which aided in the spread. In other instances, like in the Sao Paulo outbreak, the disease spread via an infected illegally sourced heart that was transplanted to a patient.

As the disease spread, there was seemingly great chaos among the world leaders in the intelligence-gathering communities. The lies and cover-ups by China only served to impede the understanding of the disease further and the creation of countermeasures. No government wanted to be the first to admit to a superstitious belief in walking corpses, so when CIA agent Bob Archer insisted on discussing zombies, he was transferred to Brazil as punishment. However, the US government would soon admit that there was indeed a zombie problem, but officials knew that the public would not support another war because they were tired of America’s forever wars. As panic began to spread, some people saw this as the perfect opportunity to cash in on the fear of the masses. A man named Breckinridge Scott and some others began marketing a fake vaccine made from rabies vaccine as a cure and made millions from them. Seeking to calm a scared and desperate populace, the American government played along with the scam.

In the months and years that follow, the zombie problem gets increasingly worse, with large groups of zombies attacking as many people as they can get to. Riots also broke out in cities across the world, further crippling law and order, and the delivery of essential services. Russia decimates its army in an ill-advised move to checkmate mutinies and desertions, and Ukraine uses VX gas on civilians to weed out the infected. many uninfected people died in the process. The US also suffered severe losses in the battle of Yonkers, where bombing raids failed to stop the zombies approaching their battle lines, and the soldiers proved too scared to function properly, and they were overrun, suffering massive casualties. Iran and Pakistan also fight over refugees and eventually end up attacking each other with nuclear weapons, which, coupled with massive and uncontrolled fires raging in many regions of the world, caused a nuclear winter. Eventually, a plan by a former South African apartheid official named Paul Redeker was implemented. The Redeker Plan involved using unsuspecting civilians as bait to distract the zombies while safe zones were established, fortified, and stocked. The Redeker Plan proved immensely successful and was soon adopted by other countries.

The world soon went on an offensive against the zombies after the UN conference in Honolulu, led by the United States, had to re-invent its army’s weapons and techniques to increase its efficiency. Soldiers are retrained to aim for the head instead of the torsos, new types of body armor are issued to prevent bites and exchange of bodily fluids, and the use of volley firing was reinstated. By slow increments, the world eventually begins recording victories against the zombies, and country after country rid themselves of the scourge.

Fifteen years after the Honolulu conference, victory had been achieved, but the world had irreparably changed. New countries and independent states have emerged, and some countries like Russia have become expansionists once again. Although severely damaged, the world economy was slowly recovering. Fossil fuels have also become scarce, and many animals have gone extinct due to overhunting by humans, predation by zombies, and pollution.

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