When training dogs to sniff out cadavers, a special chemical is used to simulate the stink of decomposing flesh. It’s an artificial version of cadaverine. Since zombies don’t appear to attack one another—presumably they are not attracted to dead and rotting flesh—it seems like it would be a good idea to locate a supply of this chemical and use it as a zombie repellant by spraying it on clothes, etc. Not a pleasant thought, smelling like the dead, but it sure beats being on the menu.
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From all the experts with whom I spoke during the research for this book—more than two hundred of them—not one of them believed that a plague of this kind would result in the end of humanity. Most doubted it would ever become a pandemic, largely because of the sensational nature of the plague. Society does not crumble that easily, and sometimes we do prove that we’ve learned from past mishandling of disasters. It might we be that we are better prepared at this moment to face a zombie uprising than we have ever been. It’s probably the only useful side effect of global terrorism and global warming. We’ve seen the worst storms of our species’ history in events like the World Trade Center attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Christmas day tsunami and other tragedies. As wake-up calls go…those seem to have been pretty effective.
Will a disease like this ever happen?
Probably not. Well…maybe not. But anything’s possible.
I just like to rest in the thought that if the dead rose up…then so would we.
APPENDIX A
Zombie Apocalypse Survival Scorecard
Faces of Death by Graham Pratt
“People are screwups and their leaders are worse. Water and poor engineering destroyed New Orleans. You think FEMA could handle zombies? Please!”
—Bob Fingerman, author of Recess Pieces and Zombie World: Winter Dregs and Other Stories (both from Dark Horse Books)
Now that we’ve explored the forensics of the zombie problem; followed it through the investigations of medical science; tracked the spread of the plague with world-class epidemiologists, and taken it to the streets with cops, SWAT, and the military…how do our chances stack up if the dead rose?
The answers depend on how the dead rise and what kind of zombies we’d be facing. Here’s a summary of the major zombie subtypes along with some projections of how the twenty-first-century human race would do in a battle with the living dead.
SLOW ZOMBIES RISING AS A RESULT OF A PLAGUE
This is the most common variation on the standard Romero model, and it’s a far more plausible and practicable one. These zombies are the slow shufflers. They have very little brain function; they have poor balance; they fear fire; it takes a headshot to bring them down.
Potential for Global Pandemic: Very high, but it would follow well-established epidemic spread patterns beginning with a patient zero and then increasing exponentially. Each vector would have the potential for unlimited contamination of human victims; each victim would become a disease vector upon reviving from human death.
Limits to Disease Spread: Depending on where the infection begins, the spread of disease may be easily containable. In Resident Evil, for example, the disease would have been contained within the Vault had not human greed and a shortsighted desire to weaponize the disease overridden common sense and the sensible precautions built into all disease study and bioweapons research. If the disease begins spreading in a small town, there is the possibility of quarantine and purification (read: nuking the crap out of the town).
Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: Humans are smarter, faster, capable of using technology, and possess the ability to share information and form cooperative resistance. (Though in the movies they fail miserably at all of this so the movie zombie can ultimately win. Although this was a brilliant if cynical view put forward by Romero in Dawn and Day, the apocalypse-due-to-petty-humans theme has been way overused.) Considering the efficiency of military and local law enforcement, and the sophistication of their weapons and tactics, there is a solid chance that we would stay ahead of the undead tsunami and eventually win. Based on the information from my experts, I give humanity a survival likelihood of 85 percent to 95 percent.
Likelihood That We’re All Toast: A lot of things would have to go wrong, more than just pettiness and infighting, for us to screw the pooch so badly that we’d all become dinner for the dead.
SLOW ZOMBIES RISING AS A RESULT OF TOXIC CONTAMINATION
A number of films, with both slow and fast zombies, play the toxic spill card, as shown in films like The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, The Grapes of Death, and Toxic Zombie.
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Max Brooks on Zombie Realism
“Have you ever gone to a movie with your friends and one of them, that particular tight-assed nerd bag who won’t shut up about how ‘that would never happen’ or ‘this isn’t realistic and here’s why’? Well, I am that nerd bag.”
—Max Brooks, author of World War Z
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Potential for Global Pandemic: The severity of the outbreak depends on the number of people initially contaminated. If something gets into the water or major food source of a large population, then the outbreak could spin out of control.
Limits to Disease Spread: Very little except that beyond the initial contamination of one or more patient zeroes the disease would spread by one-to-one bite attacks.
Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: Even if an entire city is infected, there would be slowdown points, such as bridges, tunnels, rivers, mountains, etc. Each of these could be used as a combat zone for hard-fire elimination of the infected. If more than a 5 percent population of a large city becomes simultaneously contaminated, then the military would need to use nuclear (or nuclear equivalent) weapons in order to sterilize large geographic sections. Continental survival following an infection of more than 5 percent of the population would be fifty-fifty. Oceans would stop the global spread. If, however, the toxic contamination affects a very small group (such as the staff at a toxic dump site or the population of a small and/or moderately isolated town), then our chances of survival jump to 95 percent or better. In either cases, there will likely be a high percentage of noninfected fatalities during the sterilization process.
Likelihood That We’re All Toast: See above.
SLOW ZOMBIES RISING AS A RESULT OF UNEXPLAINED RADIATION
This results in all the recently deceased coming back to life. This is the classic Romero Night of the Living Dead scenario. These zombies are the slow shufflers. They have very little brain function; they have poor balance; they fear fire; it takes a head shot to bring them done.
Potential for Global Pandemic: Absolute.
Limits to Disease Spread: None.
Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: Zero, except in isolated pockets.
Likelihood That We’re All Toast: Virtually 100 percent. For storytellers interested in spinning a truly apocalyptic zombie story, the classic Night scenario is the way to go. But it’s so completely unwinnable as to almost inspire a “who cares?” response. In the later Romero films, he subtly backed off from this stance. It may still have been part of his mythology, but he didn’t belabor the point, or even raise it again as it negates the point of all resistance. Everyone dies, therefore, everyone will become a zombie…whether now or in forty years, so what’s the point of fighting for survival? It would be the same as taking a week’s worth of food and locking yourself in a radiation-proof room during a worldwide nuclear war: sure, you’d survive for a week, but so what? The futility of this was eloquently explored in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend; but even here the author relents from total fatalism by providing a new “humanity” to inherit the earth once the original tenants have all been evicted. When writing the script for Night, Romero was undoubtedly not thinking of launching either a franchise or a genre, and from a creative standpoint the “all recent dead rise” mythology painted him into a corner. In the following films he concentrated more on the spread-through-bite theme, which allows for a g
reat deal of creative freedom and flexibility.
FAST ZOMBIES RISING BECAUSE OF A PLAGUE
This is the premise of the remake of Dawn of the Dead. Something starts the plague and it spreads very, very fast. Victims who die as a result of bites reanimate within seconds.
Potential for Global Pandemic: Less likely than shown in the movie unless a lot of folks with bites suddenly hop onto airplanes to visit foreign countries. Once the disease becomes known in one country, the governments of neighboring countries would immediately start pointing missiles and very likely pressing buttons. If things got out of hand, it would be a race to see whether the plague or radioactive fallout would claim the most lives.
Limits to Disease Spread: Most likely it would become an overwhelming disaster within the confines of connected continents. North and South America would fall within days or weeks if the infection starts there. Same with Australia. Since Europe and Asia are connected by shared borders, any plague that starts there would consume that land mass.
Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: Slim to none. The disease spreads too fast to allow reaction, study, preparation, and response. It’s the same nihilistic view as the radiation raising all the dead, and from the storytelling point of view, there is one story to tell. At best you can try for episodic survivor tales, but that’s it.
Likelihood That We’re All Toast: There are two views on this. If you stick to the mythology as shown in the Dawn remake, then yeah, we’re toast; but since the disease in that film doesn’t operate the way any disease is likely to act, then we probably have a shot. No matter how virulent and aggressive a disease is, there has to be time for it to spread through the bloodstream. The thought that an infected person reanimates after hours or days is plausible; and the fact that they reanimate quickly makes some degree of sense, especially in justifying why they are fast and more coordinated: They are not in rigor yet and they’ve suffered significantly less damage to the brain. Fewer brain cells have died and, therefore, more of their motor cortex is working even if cognition is diminished. But the thought that a person who is bitten to death immediately reanimates and is a completely infectious vector is less likely. If they die from a bite to the throat (as does Ana’s husband in Dawn) and bleeds out from a torn artery, there won’t have been time for the disease to have taken hold throughout the entire body. The mouth won’t yet contain a sufficient (if any) amount of the pathogen to make them an instant carrier for the disease. So, the whole scenario where the disease spreads out of control and everyone immediately becomes a murderous zombie doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. Makes a helluva movie, though.
FAST, THINKING ZOMBIES RISING BECAUSE OF A GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENT GONE WRONG
This is the Return of the Living Dead model, and it has other tweaks on the model. The infected die over a period of a few hours and then reanimate as fully cognizant zombies. They can think, talk, strategize, and work cooperatively. They also have a desire to eat only human brains, and their own bodies are remarkably difficult to kill. Even severed limbs are active, as if every cell in the body has become a separate being. How this works with an arm detached from the central nervous system, not to mention the supportive and cooperative structures of the rest of the shoulder’s tendons and bones, is a bit hard to explain (which is why even as a kid I always thought that films like The Crawling Hand were just plain silly).
Lab Rats by Ryan Allen
“Who knows what today’s government-funded mad scientists are cooking up?”
Potential for Global Pandemic: If we accept the mythology in its entirety, then the spread of the disease begins as a standard one-to-one oubreak with pandemic potential; but when we add to this a deliberate and hostile intelligence, then it becomes a battle on the level of ethnic genocide.
Limits to Disease Spread: Whomever has the best weapons will win; but with an enemy that can never be completely destroyed (even ash from incineration is a contaminate), there is no foreseen limit to the spread of the disease.
Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: Unless it starts on an island or in some place that can be contained without using incineration (and that depends on how fast we can erect a fifty-foot-high concrete wall around an entire town), then our chances of stopping it would be very small.
Likelihood That We’re All Toast: Isolated communities capable of fortification may survive until the zombies acquire weapons. And even that fifty-foot-high concrete wall will yield to a tank or fifty determined thinking zombies with jackhammers.
Zombie Rage by Ryan Allen
“If it happens too fast it may be too late.”
FAST HUMAN ZOMBIES RISING BECAUSE OF A VIRUS
This was the model used in Romero’s The Crazies and 28 Days Later: A government experiment gone wrong in Crazies and a rage virus accidentally released in 28. The infected humans, especially in recent films, are incapable of controlled or rational thought and are, for all intents and purposes, fast zombies—even if they are technically alive.
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Nuclear Meltdown
One thing that might settle the hash of both zombies and surviving humans is the reality of worldwide nuclear meltdown. In an apocalyptic situation, with no active infrastructure or an absence of human staff at nuclear power plants, the cooling towers would very quickly cease to operate; they require constant human supervision. With no one at the controls, the water used to cool the rods would evaporate and the superheated gasses would result in meltdowns of every one of the approximately four hundred nuclear power plants worldwide—more than a hundred of which are in the United States. Each meltdown would release massive amounts of radioactive vapor. We’d not only be toast, but that toast would glow in the dark. One very small consolation is that radiation causes tissue damage and cellular decay, so the zombies would bite the radioactive dust, too.
* * *
Potential for Global Pandemic: Like Dawn, the premise requires that we accept that infection spreads instantly and completely through the entire body within seconds of contamination.
Limits to Disease Spread: While this premise is frightening, it’s unlikely. More likely the process would take hours during which the infected would experience a decrease in rational behavior and an increase in hostility. Triage and quarantine would come later once order is restored.
Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: Since the disease would have to have a lag time of a few hours, this would likely spin out of control for a while and then it would smash into the kinds of disaster-response protocols that all governments have in place. Losses would be high, and among them would be many uninfected who would be killed because the initial military responses would have to take a big-picture view of containment.
Likelihood That We’re All Toast: If things were handled with the lack of military efficiency shown in the movies, then the whole world would go down in less than a year, except for isolated islands and fortified pockets. But I doubt that any military would crumble as easily as the occupying U.S. military does in 28 Weeks Later. Some of my military experts (see Chapters 5 and 9) tell me they groaned louder than a hungry zombie when they saw the way military tactics were portrayed. Although they all liked the movie from a fan point of view, they all agreed that no one would ever have made it out of England (as they did in the film, using a stolen military helicopter). Captain Dick Taylor, US Army (retired) put it this way: “Knowing the potential for a global disaster, anything…and I mean anything flying out of that country, especially after a known outbreak, and not heading directly to a secure quarantine spot, would be shot out of the sky before they cleared the outbound coastline. There is not the slightest doubt about it.”
DELIBERATELY REANIMATED DEAD
Authors and filmmakers have been kicking this concept around for a long time, and there are some zombie experts who consider Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, published in 1918, to be the very first entry in this subgenre. There’s some weight to the argument since it does involve the dead being brought back to l
ife and, once revived, demonstrates decidedly hostile tendencies. In H. P. Lovecraft’s 1922 short story “Herbert West—Reanimator”1 a scientist’s attempts to create a reagent that will restore life to the dead back-fires resulting in reanimated but mindless and aggressive corpses who bear a striking resemblance to the flesh-eating ghouls of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Director Stuart Gordon filmed this as Re-Animator in 1985 based on a script he cowrote with Dennis Paoli and William Norris, and in this landmark film the zombie element was played up, both for laughs and for real shocks. These creatures are typically very strong, uncontrollably violent, but they can be destroyed.
Potential for Global Pandemic: Only moderate.