[The current Chief of the United States Border Patrol is more weathered than most of the people who went through the war. He offers me a hand to shake as I come up to the bridge crossing the Rio Grande. He starts talking immediately.]
Warmbrunn-Knight. That's all anybody can talk about. Half the sources they used were from us, but does anyone talk about that? No. All anyone can talk about is that stupid... [He sighs] I should start from the beginning, shouldn't I?
We'd undergone a major expansion and reorganization during the years before the war, and there were...issues. We were originally part of INS(1) under DOJ, then we got rolled into CBP(2) under DHS(3). I actually came in back then, and ay-yi-yi...
[He shakes his head] Back in the INS days, it was real Wild West stuff. Revolvers, warning shots—that was a big no-no under DHS—hitting people with flashlights, little to no oversight. When the Patrol went under CBP, that changed. A lot of it for the better, some of it for the worse.
Didn't help that we were expanding faster than we ever had before. It took us eighty years to go from a hundred agents to ten thousand. In the five years around when I came in, we went from ten thousand to twenty thousand—and in the decade before 9/11, we'd gone from four thousand to ten thousand. The hiring process cut a lot of corners. It seemed like there were guys getting busted every month for drugs or bribes. Good night, we actually had some guys who tried to join that were in the States illegally. One of 'em was in my class at the Academy.
[He shakes his head.] Some people are just purblind stupid.
Anyway, the Patrol was still kind of in a state of flux when Zack showed up. We weren't the first non-intel federal agency to find out about it. That unfortunate distinction goes to OFO(4)—the Customs guys.
[He sighs] Port of San Francisco. Two inspectors were doing a routine cargo check when they heard scratching and moaning from one of the containers. So they opened it.
[I wince involuntarily. He looks at me with some sympathy.] Only reason one of them made it was that he took to his heels. Only reason it didn't shut down the port was because they shut and secured the bay doors.
We didn't know about that, of course. First thing we noticed was that we were getting a lot of illegals who weren't from Mexico. Not to say that this didn't happen before, mind you-one of the favorite tactics for the coyotes was, whenever someone from China or someplace like that, to tell them to cross the border and run to our trucks.
[My eyebrows go up. He shrugs] These guys would leave their own countrymen in the desert to die, sometimes. Why would you expect them to keep faith with guys from another continent? Kept us busy transporting and processing them while the smugglers did their real work, taking drugs over the border.
Thing was, most of the illegals who weren't Mexican were from Central or South America. But we started seeing a lot more Chinese and other Asians. And we'd ask them during processing, why did you leave your home country?
The usual answers were either "to work" or "to provide for my family." Stuff like that. [He pauses] But I'll never forget being on a conference call with a translator and a middle-aged Chinese man who looked like a banker or an accountant—not at all like our usual subjects, in other words—and asking him that. "Si le zou," he said, and the translator didn't speak for a moment before saying something sharply to the man and then repeating my question.
He shook his head. "Si le zou," he repeated, and the translator started yelling at him over the phone. The man started yelling back at him.
I didn't speak a lick of Chinese then—still don't—so I had no idea what he was saying. Finally, the yelling match ended, and the translator said to me wearily, "He insists that he left China because the dead are walking."
I didn't want to put that on the form. Who would? But that was his answer, and so I wrote it down and got the translator's name and phone number for when the guys above me inevitably sent it back.
[He snorts] I called that guy again three times that day. Every single layer of management thought they were getting pranked somehow, and every single time the man explained that yes, that was his answer.
When they finally signed off on the file and let me go home, I called up one of my classmates and told him what had happened. I think I added something about this being a novel way to try and claim asylum, then laughed a little.
Then I noticed he wasn't laughing. "Dobbs," he said, with utter seriousness, "tell no one else what you just told me. Call me back in three days. We'll talk more then."
"What?" I asked.
"Just do what I say, okay? I'll explain everything."
Well, two days later I had two men in suits sit me down and explain that what I had heard was complete nonsense and that I was to mention it to no one, because it might create panic. [He snorts] I was a cop for five years before I joined the Patrol, and I know a bad cover story when I hear it.
So I called up my friend and he gave it to me straight. He'd had an extremely similar experience to mine, as had several of our classmates. We didn't know what was going on-was it some new tactic from the smugglers? An urban legend?—but we knew something was up.
When was this?
About a week before the Israelis made their big announcement telling all the Jews and Palestinians to come on home. I knew something was up then. [He pauses] It was also about a month before I found out how very, very real Zack was.
[He shudders] We were processing a group we'd picked up at the station. We had about twenty guys, all in this one cell. One of 'em was looking a little bad, but we asked him if he was fine and he said he was. We fingerprinted 'em and got to work on the families in the group—women and kids always got top priority. We wanted them out of our hair ASAP.
Well, this one guy, the one who looks kind of bad, curls up under the blanket, right? And he's going through all the signs of turning, only we didn't know that. Well, I was busy with this one woman and her kid, trying to get her information, when suddenly I hear a pounding on the cell door and this one guy standing at the window with utter panic in his eyes.
I told the woman to wait for a moment while I went to go see what was going on, and she looked up at me with utter terror in her eyes and whispered, "Por favor, oficial, no abra la puerta." Please, officer, don't open the door.
I asked her why, and she said, "los muertos vivientes." The living dead.
I didn't believe her, of course. Why would I? So I went over to the door and opened it.
Thing you have to know is that in the field, you had to keep an eye on illegals, but once you got 'em to the station, especially the Mexicans, they were usually cooperative unless they had some kind of warrant for their arrest or something here in the States. They knew as well as we did that they wouldn't spend long in jail before getting sent back home where they could try again. One time I arrested a guy twice in the same month.
So when I unlocked the door and nearly got knocked over by a stampede it was more than a little surprising—I actually had to step out of the way to avoid getting trampled. At first I got ready to yell out that there was an escape attempt going on, but then I heard the crunching sound from inside the cell.
[He shudders again.] There he was, that guy who'd looked kind of sick, kneeling over one of the other guys and eating him.
Now, what I should've done is shot him right there. Would've, too, but procedure was to lock up your gun when you were processing aliens—lots of people wandering around, and the last thing you wanted was to have some MS-13 hombre get his hands on a loaded pistol.
Which was why all I had was my baton and my cuffs.
I yelled out for one of the other agents to grab the door, drew my baton, stepped into the room, and yelled at the guy to get on the ground and put his hands behind his back. [He shakes his head] I know, what an idiot, right?
That's when he—it—looked up at me, and I felt a chill roll down my spine. There was nothing in those eyes. I've met sociopaths and psychopaths, and even the worst have something going on back there.
And then it moaned—that gut-wrenching, brain-freezing moan that everyone was going to become all-too-familiar with over the next few years. Then it lunged at me.
I got lucky, then—it tripped over the corpse and fell on its face. I don't know why I did what I did next—still thinking like it was a person, I guess—and I ran over, got my knee in his back, and cuffed him. He kept trying to bite at me, but I wasn't putting anything anywhere near his mouth. My first year as a cop, I got bit by a homeless guy. Spent a week in the hospital because it got infected, and I've been paranoid about it ever since. [He pauses] Probably saved my life that day.
Of course, that was when I felt the body on the floor start to move. I turned my head and really looked at him for the first time. He didn't have a throat. He should not have been moving.
But he was, and then he raised his head up and looked at me with the same eyes that the other one had, and moaned in the exact same way.
That was when I panicked. All I could think was getoutgetoutgetout. I ran for it, not ashamed to say so. I remembered to close the door behind me, though. I did not want those things following me out there. That was when I saw that all of the men who'd been in the cell had clustered in front of the women and kids-well, most of them, anyway-and two of the other agents had gone to grab their pistols.
The aliens were telling them to shoot them in the head. They looked at me as I staggered forward, and I said "Listen to them. One of those guys got his throat torn out, and he's still moving."
Right then I heard a thump against the door and I turned to see that same guy press himself against the window, gaping wound and all.
The rest is kind of a blur, honestly. We locked that cell down and made sure nobody went inside, and started making calls to the CDC and sector. It didn't take long for one of the response teams to show up, maybe two hours.
Don't remember much about what they told us or how they ended up getting rid of the Zacks, just that they checked everyone by running a dog over them and told us that if we told anyone about what had happened that there would be severe penalties. They also took all of the aliens into their custody, once we processed them. Never found out what happened to them.
[He sighs] Of course we talked about it with anybody who we thought knew what was going on. Stuff like this had happened all over the place-our sector was one of the last to get hit.
Once that happened, we started really tracking things, Intel especially. I guess they wanted to know where they could expect outbreaks next.
[He spits] What should have blown it wide open was what happened at the Laredo checkpoint. Dog went into a frenzy when it sniffed an eighteen-wheeler. Agent on primary told him to pull into secondary for further inspection. Then the idiot just opened the back of the truck. [He shakes his head] Shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but he knew what was up. Government had finally briefed us on what was going on the week before. Told us exactly what to do, and that wasn't it.
Of course, you're here about the order. But you can't understand the order and what we did about it without understanding what we knew and when we knew it.
[The look in his eyes is utterly haunted] It was right after the outbreak at the El Paso Processing Center. Five hundred dead. That was when the orders came down. We weren't going to prosecute anyone anymore. Everyone was going to get sent right back to their home countries.
Well, except for the ones the dogs alerted to. Those we took for "special processing." By which I mean we tied them down until they turned and then put a bullet in their heads. We rotated that duty.
At first, the illegals just kind of accepted it. The same way they'd accepted being sent back when they faced gangs and cartels and corrupt governments. But it didn't take a month after the order came down for that to change.
Everyone was fighting us when we caught them. Everyone. The men would throw themselves at us, trying to keep us busy while their wives and kids ran for it. Our use of force incidents quintupled, at least. We couldn't keep track of them properly.
There were no give-ups anymore—and we were noticing that there weren't a lot of Chinese coming in anymore, and lots of people from other countries. The numbers just kept climbing. I think we had close to six hundred thousand apprehensions in the six months before Yonkers-and who knows how many made it over while we were busy transporting and processing. We couldn't handle them all. Neither could ICE.
I think we knew when we were done. It was the week before Yonkers. The cities were all coming apart. The cartels and Zack were chewing each other up, and people were coming across the border in droves.
So we quit. Oh, we didn't resign, but we got together with Customs and basically set up asylum-granting centers at all the POEs. Only question was whether or not you had a bad criminal record or not. We'd fingerprint people and keep them locked up if they had one.
Those were tense times. Where we were at, the Army, the Federales(5) and Rurales(6), and cartels'd come to an uneasy truce. They got their families over the bridge first, and they fought to keep some kind of clear zone open. They gave us the job of infection check, though.
Didn't blame them.
We could track the spread of the plague by where people were coming from. By that time, nobody was coming from south of Mexico City, and precious few from there. Everybody was from the northern states of Mexico—Chihuahua, Coahuila, Sonora. There was always the sound of gunfire from the south, as people turned or small groups of Zack cropped up.
Brownsville was already down, no one knew how long El Paso would hold out-even the cartels had pulled out of Juarez-and rumors were that they'd issued the evacuation order for Laredo. [He scowls] A day late, of course. Less than a tenth of the agents there made it out. Rot in hell, Redeker.
But that day was different. The longest we'd ever heard gunfire before was about thirty minutes. Not this day. The shooting started right after dawn. And it was moving towards us. Slowly-the Mexicans fell apart in a lot of places, but not there, thanks to Francisco Zapata, who headed the local Federales—but surely. And the crowd was starting to get more and more frantic. People were crowding into the bridge.
And then we saw it. The Monclova horde had followed the last refugees to make it out of the city all the way north, and the defenders knew they didn't have enough ammunition-and we knew it too.
I remember looking at my fellow agents. We were already disobeying an executive order. If we just let these people through, we'd add disobeying an agency directive to that. [He smiles wryly] I know that sounds like our priorities weren't straight, and they weren't, but no one was thinking clearly.
Still. For all that it was our job to keep people from entering illegally, we also saved people. And there was only one way to do that.
We stood aside and let them in. The only thing we did was run them by the dogs first. Whenever they alerted, we'd stop the line and sort out who they were alerting to. Then we'd take 'em out and get them where they needed to go, a little warehouse just north of the bridge. [He pauses] I think they'd stopped waiting for the infectees to turn before they shot them. It was all Old Patrol in there.
[He grows quieter] We stayed there all day and into the night, trying to clear everybody through. The sounds of gunfire from the south kept coming closer and closer, the dogs were alerting more frequently, and more and more pistol shots could be heard in the quarantine area.
And it seemed like the line would never end, that we'd be here until Zack came over the bridge.
But, around two a.m., the last civilian passed through.
Then came the hard part, which came into stark relief as the surviving soldiers, cops, and cartel enforcers came into view, firing carefully as they retreated.
Our Patrol Agent in Charge was there, and we all looked at him. He looked at us, then wrote on a sheet of paper, "Bienvenidos a los Estados Unidos"—Welcome to the United States—and hung it off the table.
"Time to go, boys," he said with a sigh. "Nothing left to do here."
He walked away, and we followed as the Mexicans crossed the bridge. Then we blew it up behind us—one of the agents had been an engineer in the army before he joined the Patrol, lucky for us. Our evac order came in the next day, and we ended up fighting our way through El Paso, and from there to the beginnings of the Wall, with the Mexicans. That Zapata was a force of nature, I tell you. No surprise that he's President down there now and he's turning it into a functioning country.
Anyway, once we few got back they stuck us agents in the desert. There were still people sneaking and smuggling across the border, even with the lifting of all immigration quotas.(7)
The war changed us more than any other law enforcement agency. Now-a-days, if you're trying
to enter illegally, it's because you did something that means no one wants you or you're smuggling something. No one sympathizes with those people. And a lot of the pressures that sent people north kind of went away, too—and the US isn't as desirable a destination, but we're getting there.
Yeah, my job is a whole lot easier than it was twenty years ago. [He looks south across the border, grim-faced.] I'd gladly trade, though, if it meant we didn't have to go through the War. No ifs, ands, or buts.
(1) Immigration and Naturalization Service
(2) Customs and Border Protection
(3) Department of Homeland Security
(4) Office of Field Operations
(5) Mexican Federal Police: national police force of Mexico, originally organized to fight the drug cartels.
(6) Rural Defense Corps: part-time militia used to support Federal Police to fight the cartels. Both organizations were widely rumored to be used primarily by the dominant cartels in their area to crush competition.
(7) One of the more controversial laws passed in the first year of the War.
