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Distracted by the reports he was watching, and with his hand on the side of his face, he shook his head slowly in full view of millions and said, "It’s really all over, ain’t it?" Then, startled by the sudden discovery of a viewing audience, he froze like a deer caught in the headlights for what seemed like an eternity, and then snapped out of it and gave his speech. He gave no explanation of his preliminary remark, which was typical of his inability to grasp things … any things. In the recap after the address, sympathetic commentators made a futile attempt at damage control by telling the nation he meant the disease was active in all four corners of the globe, but it was too late. Too many people heard the President of the United States say the end of the world was at hand, whether he actually meant that or not.

Many blamed him personally for the nightmare, and he was so unpopular by that time that the results of the last known poll – uselessly released a few days after the speech, but useless anyway – showed his approval rating to register an incredible, but solid, negative eleven percent. He unaccountably thought it a good sign for his administration because most of the voting population was now dead. On the other hand, it confirmed what the outraged opposing party had long suspected: the President was so abysmally bad that they could have nominated a parakeet in the next election and won by a landslide. But would there be a next election?

It didn’t make any difference. Elections, constitutions, charters, and even the Koran stopped being the basis for empowering leaders. Devout Muslims spent their lives working toward a global, unified, perfect Islam-ruled society into which anyone born simply couldn’t wait to die. Ironically, the Plague would come a lot closer to achieving that than the Muslims ever had, but people simply didn’t care anymore, and dying for anything so intangible as personal convictions became unfashionable. It was always impractical. The priority now was simply survival, and the good leaders were the ones who kept people alive and safe.

No one understood this better than the military, since they had the guns, the organization, the mission, and the most clearly defined strata of leadership. The changing nature of warfare and crowd control since the Plague began, however, presented its own unique challenges. For one thing, every day there were fewer soldiers, fewer civilians for them to protect, and more of the undead, and the odds were getting worse. It didn’t take long to realize, too, that no current generation was ever going to be safe from the creatures – there were too many of them, and their ranks were steadily growing. It was going to take years. The only people seriously making plans for a post-plague world they hoped to live long enough to see were in the White House. By now, nobody knew why.

Very little was still known about the disease itself, and the infrastructure supporting medical research was all but gone. Early efforts to destroy carriers of the disease only spread it. Fire was known to be the safest, best weapon, but the US had only so many appropriate incendiary devices. For some unknown reason there never came a point where the military armed the civilians to help out in the good fight. In fact, it disarmed civilians when it could, sparking a surprising number of firefights in the attempt. It only resulted in more zombies.

The inevitable battles between the undead things and military units underscored the problems. It was always "a few good men" versus a few hundred marauding, hungry things that used to be good men, or any men. One side had state-of-the-art weapons and the other side didn’t even know what weapons were. One side was highly trained, and the other side was stupid, slow, uncoordinated and without leadership in any sense of the word. But they were winning. More and more of the brutal, grisly encounters were ending without survivors, and not just because the winners were already dead.

Military formations started small and got progressively smaller as the disaster gnawed away at them. As the chain of command was disrupted, they had to operate autonomously. All the grinding bureaucratic red tape bullshit that existed before the Plague was desperately jettisoned by local commanders, but – paradoxically -- with a sense of glee they hadn’t experienced since taking off in their first car as teenagers.

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