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stringy hair hung down over her face like a wet curtain. Her body was thin and rickety looking. She was wearing a baglike, bloodstained hospital gown, and to me she looked like an emaciated crack whore. She never even looked up, not even as our bus rolled on by. She just stood there, hugging herself with her bone-skinny arms in the cloud of dust our bus had kicked up. I wasn’t disgusted like I thought I would be. I just felt sad.
    But, like I said, that was eight months ago. I’ve seen a lot of zombies since then, a lot of death. I’ve studied them. I’ve gotten closer than I would have liked at times. Eventually—hopefully—all of these notebooks will get turned into some kind of cohesive whole, some narrative of the zombie outbreak that has brought our great nation from superpower status to the level of a ticking time bomb for the rest of the world, and in that narrative I’ll try to find a reason for it all.
    If there is one.
    Somehow I doubt there is.
    I’m growing more and more convinced that there aren’t reasons to explain this world we live in. Not good ones anyway.
    Maybe that’s what makes catastrophes so horrible—the lack of a reason. I mean in a teleological sense. Our brains are wired to see the world in terms of cause and effect. Even the atheists among us find some small measure of comfort knowing that there’s a reason things are so bad.
    These days, I find myself more interested in the zombies themselves than I am with the traditional things with which a historian and commentator should be concerned. Xenophon, Plutarch, Sallust, Suetonius, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Raphael Holinshed, Francesco Guicciardini, Edward Gibbon—those great chroniclers in the history of historians—they all sought to cast a wide net, giving equal attention to personal agenda and facts. I would like to cast a wide net, too. And I have plenty of opinions. The economic impact of the outbreak at home and abroad, the political flare-ups, the big, empty speeches on the floor of the U.N. and on the White House lawn—all those things have their place in a history with any claim to completeness. But I find it hard to give a rat’s ass about them. The politicians aren’t out here on the street dying with the rest of us. They’re all stashed away in some secure, undisclosed location, waiting it out. And their eloquent speeches don’t tell the part of the story that needs telling.
    I read Eddie Hudson’s book and a dozen others just like it. I know what they described—all the shambling corpselike people flooding the streets, attacking every living thing they could find. Well, I’ve seen what happens after almost two years. The infected aren’t dead. And like all living things, they’ve changed, adapted. The ones who have survived since the first days of the outbreak—and granted, there aren’t many of them—have become something different. And yet, for all that, they are still dangerous; they are still unpredictable. They still attack. They’re like alcoholics who can’t help coming back to the bottle. Even if they don’t want to.
    That’s the side of this thing I want to talk about.
    July 5th, 5:40 A.M.
    We’ve got about twenty minutes until takeoff and I wanted to jot down a few notes about the quarantine zone. Sometimes I find it hard to wrap my mind around how big it is. The logistical scope of the project is simply staggering.
    Back in its heyday, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency patrolled the 2,000 miles of borderland between the United States and Mexico. Of the agency’s 11,000 agents, more than 9,500 of them worked along that 2,000-mile stretch of desert. They hunted drug dealers and illegal aliens with a huge array of tools, everything from satellite imagery and publicly accessible webcams to helicopters, horses, and plain old-fashioned shoe leather. Even still, the border had more holes in it than a fishing net.
    In comparison, the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority only has a wall of some