Sardar Khan

The next place that I visited was Udaipur Lake Palace on Lake Pichola in Rajasthan, India. This was the home to my next interviewee, Sardar Khan. Khan was in what I like to call a sticky situation. He described to me a very narrow passage way along the side of a mountain where many civilians were attempting to escape the zombies. Some of them were successful and some of them were not. The main problem with this situation was that many people would fall off the edge of the mountain and die. They had set charges in the narrow passage way so that when the zombie came, they could seal them off. He told me that there were so many civilians trying to get across and could not detonate the charges without killing them. A very high-ranking general came to them, General Raj-Singh. He said that they needed to detonate the charges otherwise they will all be dead. When General Raj-Singh tried to detonate the charges, they would not blow. Something had gone wrong with the charges. Meanwhile, they go into the giant crowd of people and he loses General Raj-Singh in the crowd. Khan tells me he finds his way into a microbus. He said he could hear the zombies coming and they were around 200 meters away. At this point, he began to bang his head on the side of the bus hoping to kill himself. He eventually passed out and did not succeed in killing himself. He woke up a while later to the sound of a dripping noise, the crackle of his radio, and the howling of the zombies. It ended up that the dripping noise he was hearing were the zombies falling over the edge of the mountain to their death. It looked like General Raj-Singh detonated the charges after all and sealed the people off from the zombies. Khan then tells me about how they said the secured zones on the radio and then tells me of a monkey that pissed on him. Sardar Khan is a fascinating man and I wish we could have talked about more of his experiences during the Zombie War.

Bohdan Taras Kondratiuk

Recently, I traveled to Yevchenko Veterans' Sanatorium in Odessa, Ukraine. While I was there, I sat down with a man named Bohdan Taras Kondratiuk. Kondratiuk was a Russian soldier who participated in the Zombie War. Where he comes in in the war is that he was supposed to secure these people to get across Patona Bridge in order to escape the zombies. The government had promised to bring them supplies to help them across the bridge. He told me they did not bring them anything. This meant that he and the soldiers he was with had to check everyone crossing the bridge to see if they had been bitten. This did not go so well. All of the sudden, out-of-nowhere, "Rooks" show up and gas up the bridge. Quickly, he and his men get in their tank to escape the gas. After the planes go by, he notices everyone is dead. Very shortly after they are gassed, some of the dead begin to reanimate. The gunner in the tank is told to take them out and he does. After all of the zombies were dead, he told his fellow soldiers in tanks to head southwest. He asked me if I had been to the Great Patriotic War Museum Complex in Kiev and then described what it was like there. My talk with Kondratiuk was interesting and I wish I could have found out more about him.

Guarder of Celebrities: T. Sean Collins

Recently, I sat down with Mr. T. Sean Collins in a bar in Barbados regarding his work in the Zombie War. Collins is a war vet and considers himself to be a mercenary more than anything else. He was hired by a very rich man who wanted him to do private security (from zombies) for different celebrities, whether they are musicians, athletes, or movie or television stars. He was situated with these celebrities and the man that hired him had a house right by the beach. The man had done his homework and set up an impenetrable fortress. The thing about this fortress was that the owner had set up live web cam feeds in every room of the house. These feeds would broadcast over a news network so people could see them sitting pretty. One day, they notice that some of their motion sensors tripped a few miles away and everyone went to their post to defend. It turns out that instead of hundreds of zombies, there are hundreds of people who weren't infected. They begin to get closer he tells me and they start shooting at each other, however, he does not fire a shot. He tells me he didn't do that because he was hired to protect them from zombies, not from people. He told me he took off on the beach and never saw them again. He drinks from his rum and asks the waiter to bring him another one. Mr. Collins was probably one of my favorite interviews. I wish we would have been able to talk about what happened after he left the island, but unfortunately we did not.

An Interview With Doctor Fernando Oliveira

I was blindfolded on the way to my next location to speak with Doctor Fernando Oliveira. All I know is that we were somewhere in the Amazon Rain Forest in Brazil. Oliveira was, or still is, a doctor who came into direct contact with the infected. This was unlike any other encounter I had heard up to this point. It was very violent the way he described it, well not very violent but rather very bloody and disgusting. A heart had just arrived in a plastic ice cooler. This heart was for a man named Herr Muller, who needed to have his heart replaced. It turns out that this heart was infected. Oliveira says that he did not know it at the time, but found out very soon after the surgery. He and a Doctor Silva performed the operation and Silva said he would stay and watch Herr Muller until he recovered. Oliveira told Silva to call him if there were any problem. Oliveira says that he went out that night and did not pick up his phone for an hour. When he picked it up, he heard that there was trouble at the clinic. Apparently, Muller had flat-lined and Silva tried to revive him. While reviving him, Silva was bitten by Muller on the hand. A nurse, Rosi, had run out of the room and locked the door behind her. When he got there (Oliveira) and saw the situation, he decided that he needed to get his gun from his car. He came back inside and opened the door. He saw Muller on top of Doctor Silva with flesh coming out of his mouth. Oliveira says he aimed and pulled the trigger of his Desert Eagle aiming for Muller's chest, but ended up shooting his head right off. There was blood all over the floor and a black liquid as well. This black liquid was also coming out of Muller's chest. He said he called the police and they came and cleaned up the room and covered up what happened that night. He and I talked about the spread of the infection through the donations of organs of the infected. He said that some people end up dying randomly after they have had a transplant without being bitten. We talked more about the possibilities of this happening and other related things to this subject. He seems like an interesting Doctor and I wish we could have talked more about his experiences with the infected.

The Smuggler: Nury Televaldi

Recently, I met with a smuggler by the name of Nury Televaldi at a crowded sidewalk café in Lhasa, Tibet. Televaldi was a smuggler of drugs, jewels, people and other things. The outbreak completely changed the way of things tremendously. Televaldi began to get offers from people to help them flee from their cities. At this point he wasn't exactly questioning what they were fleeing from, but he did have an idea, it was an outbreak in their area and they did not want to get infected. He even says that they had a small outbreak in his former city, Kashi. He says that the government did not like this smuggling of people and put harder regulations on traveling and immigration. He says that the crackdown wasn't very efficient and actually made him pretty successful. He talked about how he used air travel to smuggle people, but usually the people were wealthy and could afford it. I asked him about the infected and being discovered on an airplane. He told me that he didn't let people fly unless they were uninfected or if they showed the mild signs of infection, otherwise they would have been caught. He begins to tell me a brief story about a businessman and his wife. He got them into Paris by air, but the man was infected and he told his wife to leave him inside the hotel room. The wife vanished along with someone else. He goes on and talks about people that vanish. He says they usually go with family and friends but for those who don't, they usually end up in the slums of wherever they are. I asked him if they created a myth about a cure for the infection in the west just to earn money. He denies it. We continue to talk a little bit about air smuggling and how they tightened restrictions in some countries after Flight 575. He explained how he snuck into different countries without resistance because he found loopholes in the system. I asked him if he saw many infected while smuggling and he said during the beginning he didn't, but eventually he began to. He said that they weren't very dangerous because they were already gagged and tied down. I usually just took their money and sent them on their way. He then remarked something about sea smuggling and how dangerous and difficult was. He said the problems of sea smuggling were that some infected could infect all of the other people on the ship. The sea smugglers however came up with some solutions and usually they either dumped the infected overboard in the middle of the ocean or dumped them on a deserted part of coast. He says how lucky he was that he never had to deal with that. He then tells me about a wealthy man who was transporting many infected in the back of a trailer to Kyrgyzstan. I wish I would have talked to him more about the infected he came in contact with, as well as talking about some more experiences of smuggling.

Subject #1: Kwang Jingshu

The first subject that I spoke with regarding the Zombie War is Kwang Jingshu. Jingshu is one of the most experienced doctors in all of China. During our conversation, he shares one of his experiences with me. He told me that it was a slow night in the hospital and nothing important was really going on. That was until he was paged to make a house call. This house call was much more serious than most house calls. There were seven people, all lying down on cots. He goes on to say that the people of this community have isolated them in the communal meeting hall and locked them in there. Jingshu tells that he inspected the sick and noticed that they were bitten by something. He predicted that these people were probably bitten by an infected child. He was right. He goes on to find the young boy behind a locked door of an abandoned house across town. He was called "Patient Zero." He described to me that he wanted to get a blood sample from the boy, so he had two large men hold him down. While in this process, the boy snaps one of his arms and the assistants and the doctor himself retreated, even though he does not like to admit it. He eventually ran into the house and locked the door behind him. He says he was so scared and worried at that moment. Jingshu needed to know how the boy was infected and his mother came forward. She said that the boy and his father were retrieving some things from their old village and he was bitten on his foot. She says that his father never returned from the trip. At this point, says Jingshu, he called another doctor, Gu Wen Kuei. He says that the doctor on the phone gave him several directions and then asked him if he was armed. Jingshu was not. The only reason that Doctor Gu Wen Kuei would ask this is that Jingshu is in serious danger with all of these people. In good time, backup had arrived, 50 men from the Ministry of Health came to get the sick. After putting the sick on stretchers and tying them up and gagging them, they inspected all the citizens of the town. At the end of the talk of this experience, Jingshu went back to talking about when Doctor Gu Wen Kuei asked him if he was armed. After he was asked that, he called his daughter and warned her of another possible outbreak. I learn that Kwang Jingshu was imprisoned by the MSS without any formal charges. Unfortunately, we did not discuss that in this conversation even though I would have liked to.