The Longer We Were There by Steven Moore

Author:Steven Moore [Moore, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Military
ISBN: 9780820355672
Google: 2WLRDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2019-09-15T04:16:23+00:00

PLAYING ZOMBIES

BACK WHEN WE STILL HAD ROOM for TVS and Xbox, there was one especially popular video game in the platoon. I don’t remember its official name; the guys just called it Zombies. The privates and E-4s in the platoon, especially, were fucking obsessed with playing Zombies, a two-player game where you fought off relentless, successive waves of zombies in a bombed-out theater. The theater was bombed out because the game was set during a war, as though the stakes weren’t high enough already, and so the zombies were dead enemy soldiers come back to life. They arrived in waves. Each wave began with an ominous flash of lightning inside the ruined theater. Then came the horde. This return of the dead in waves—and the repeated cycle of fighting them and fighting them and fighting them—was the central premise, and our guys, who were simultaneously bored and stressed out, homesick and anxious after six months of patrols in eastern Afghanistan, loved it.

I wasn’t very good at video games and didn’t much care to play them, but sometimes I sat and watched, just to pass the time. The game was both thrilling and boring at once. And even the thrill was static. Each wave was tense and sometimes desperate but also short and manageable. Each victory was about the size of the last one. The game wasn’t advancing toward any larger goal except to reach the next wave, so any wave could doom the players, but no particular one was the most important or the most supremely difficult. And none was final. It wasn’t about defeating the great villain at the end. It was about stamina, about who would relent first.

The best players in my squad were Specialists Taylor and Timmins. They succeeded because they had a system. After they killed a wave of zombies, and before the next wave attacked, the action sort of paused for one or two minutes, and they used this pause to reset themselves. Between the first few waves, they acquired better and better weapons until they had the most destructive ones. Then they stockpiled ammo. They got organized, then killed zombies. They gathered ammo. Killed zombies. Replenished. You had to communicate, was the thing. If Taylor was attacked by zombies and injured, he would call out his status, and Timmins would say I got you, and cover him while he ran to another part of the theater to find more health, which came in these cans of energy drink, for some reason, so if Taylor was hemorrhaging all over because zombies had clawed and thrashed at him, he had to hurry around the theater and find a can of energy drink and chug it down, which stopped the bleeding. And the break between waves of zombies was short, so he had to move with a sense of purpose. Then prepare for the lightning, and the horde.

To give the game a little variety, some of the waves featured zombie dogs. The dogs moved faster than the human zombies and traveled in packs.

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