Redeker

My morning forty-five is usually a time for quiet, though I keep an audiobook running to occupy the background. Today, I revisited the complete edition of World War Z by Max Brooks. For anyone who appreciates the format, this production remains the industry’s high-water mark. The cast is massive—Mark Hamill, Alan Alda, Nathan Fillion—but they strip away the Hollywood gloss, performing the script with the dry, terrifying cadence of leaked historical archives.

The narrative is grounded in the biology of Solanum, a virus Brooks treats not as a rage infection, but as a total physiological shutdown. The host dies—fever, paralysis, cardiac arrest—and simply restarts. The person is gone, replaced by a walking vessel driven by consumption, immune to pain and shock. The only way to stop one is to destroy the brain; anything less is a waste of ammunition.

While the origins of the virus in remote caves or long forgotten histories in a river in bum-fuck nowhere are interesting, the book truly excels when examining the mental gymnastics required to survive it. There is a haunting interview with a female pilot downed in the zombie-infested swamps of Louisiana. Trapped and panicking, she’s guided to safety by a calm, authoritative voice over her radio—a Skywatcher named Metcalf. He talks her through the horror, keeping her moving when she wants to give up. It is only later implied that her radio had been broken the entire time. Her mind, unable to process the trauma, fractured; it created a separate, competent persona to pilot her body through the nightmare when her conscious self couldn’t cope.

That specific kind of dissociation acts as a subtle prelude to the book’s turning point: the Redeker Plan.

When traditional military might failed, Paul Redeker, a South African strategist, proposed a survival model rooted in cold, apartheid-era arithmetic. He argued that trying to save everyone would doom the species. His solution was to retreat essential personnel—technicians, leaders, soldiers—into fortified zones, while leaving the rest of the population behind in sacrificial zones. These essentially became bait: intended to draw the undead away from the strongholds to buy time for the military to regroup.

It’s a strategy of pure logic, devoid of humanity. But Brooks reveals that Redeker, much like the pilot in the swamp, couldn’t actually live with the reality of what he had done. The pilot created a voice to lead her out of the trauma; Redeker, it seems, had to become someone else entirely to remain within it.

By the end of my walk, I was left thinking less about the zombies and more about that psychological cost. We all imagine we’d be the ones behind the safe walls, but to be the architect of those walls requires a fracture of the mind that very few survive intact.