For the sake of the plot, choose whichever zombie type fits your plans the best.
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I plan to go insane and live in the woods with a bone in my hair
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Shelter in place for a while until decomposition of their muscles makes them completely ineffectual and unable to actually move.
Shouldn’t take long.
Probably just shoot myself.
I’m of the firm “no magic zombies” camp.
If the zombies aren’t magic, they aren’t going to last long, whichever form of zombie they are. Wait inside a few days, most of them should be dead or immobile.
If a zombie loses blood, they aren’t going to keep walking, their muscles won’t work without blood.
If you have a strong door, zombie arms will break before the door breaks.
Dehydration. Organisms need water to function at all, let alone move, and zombies aren’t big on water fountains.
I see zombies as dangerous for a few days, with their senses failing so they can’t track you effectively for the majority of the outbreak, then it’s over.
Anything other than that scenario is a magical zombie, who can move without energy, function without a body, or unrealistically mutate.
I love zombie movies and comics, but for real real, no magic zombies.
update: I’m going to do a podcast episode about magical zombies now.
what about the nonmagic zombie situation where the plague spreads slowly and through typical viral pathways so that it becomes an endemic where people trying to go about their regular life will occasionally keel over and come back up as berserk monsters
that sounds like a magic zombie scenario and the aforementioned guidelines apply.
their dead tissue will break apart and decompose very rapidly, and dehydration will prohibit any complex movement after a few hours.
if reanimations are moving their dead bodies around without connective tissue or the fuel/cell requirements needed to work those bodily systems, that’s magic.
expecting non-magic zombies to be able to chase someone or gather in a horde is like expecting a car to run without any fuel, engine, or drivetrain.
the closest thing we have to a non-magic zombie but still similar to zombies in movies is rabies, and the person becomes violent but extremely uncoordinated, aquaphobic, and then dies because the human body doesn’t function without the constant ingestion of water and fuel sources.
What it is more of a Toxoplasma gondii style infection that makes you violent too?
Doesn’t sound as magical, but I guess you aren’t a zombie if toy aren’t dead.
What about a subtler zombie pathogen that merely rewires your brain to make you allergic to everything but meat. It would have longer to spread, and the increase in consumption would probably cause a general environmental collapse.
You’d have aspects of cannibalism, societal collapse, and dramatic infection deceit scenes and nobody would ever look like a zombie.
People would have to publicly eat plants to prove they’re not zombies to enter secure areas. Remember the time Arby’s made a fake carrot that was made of meat? They called it a megetable. That’s real. What if the infected wormed their way into the food industry and started mislabeling things to muddy the waters due to social stigma?
Scientific zombies wouldn’t necessarily look dead, and a real version would be way less overt.
there are a few big issues here.
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The consistency and efficacy of that pathogen
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those people wouldn’t be zombies, they would just be carnivores.
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if cannibalism/societal colapse/megetables are going on, people are going to notice.
there are already pathogens that make someone vegetarian, but because of the resilience of the human body, the effect only takes hold in a very low percentage of people introduced to the pathogen (they’re not sure which mechanism in tick spit prompts the meat allergy yet, afaik).
The brain is incredibly complex and can rewire itself, so to have even 10% of the population have consistently perfectly rewired brains while maintaining all other normal functions and the coordination to conspire, cannibalize people and change the global food supply is a pretty magical scenario.
if cannibalism/societal colapse/megetables are going on, people are going to notice.
Fake news and xitter would like to have a word.
I think you’re reading some things into what I said to make it magical, but it’s not important. I’m just ideating because you got me excited about an idea.
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Finally, another “No magic zombies” person!
What are your thoughts on a “28 X Later” style scenario? Where the they’re still subject to injuries/starvation/etc, and the risk is more due to the sheer speed of the infected, ability to ignore pain in the short term, and asymptomatic carriers of the disease?
28 is probably my favorite zombie series, and those zombies are heavily magic.
moving super fast and uncoordinated means rapid dehydration coupled with injuries, blood loss and tissue loss and damage.
their bodies can’t endure that kind of activity for more than a couple hours, and they’ll rapidly render themselves immobile, deteriorate and decompose. there aren’t going to be any zombies milling around inside houses or crawling around in fields 28 weeks later.
asymptomatic carriers are normally accounted for with any new pathogen, and with the rapid deterioration, incapacitation and death of any symptomatic infected, there aren’t going to be major societal collapses.
asymptomatic carriers are going to be an important vector of disease to account for as soon as the disease is recognized, and they’ll have to be separated from the rest of society as a vaccine is developed, but given the rapid onset, obvious symptoms, rapid deterioration of the symptomatic carriers and physical transmissibility, a short quarantine period indicates there aren’t going to be many asymptomatic carriers.
rabies is a good example, because it’s basically 28 days later zombies in real life.
extremely contagious, no cure, carriers become very violent but uncoordinated, they are fast for a very brief period of time but fundamentally incapacitated after a few hours because of dehydration and tissue damage, and then die.
conditions like transmissibility and natural human resistance make the 28 scenario unrealistic but for the most part, the rapid deterioration of the symptomatic carriers is the silver bullet here.
they are still great movies and I’m very excited to see 28 years later next month.
Have you read Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series? It’s the ultimate realistic zombie story.
ooh, no, thank you very much, I’ll check it out now.
If memory serves, she actually collaborated with the CDC to create a disease model that could realistically exist.
So every time I came up with a new iteration of Kellis-Amberlee, I would call back and say, “If I did this, this, this, this, this and this, could I raise the dead?” And every single time they would say, “No.” And I’d say, “OK,” hang up, and go back to working. After about the 17th time, I called and said, “If I did this, this, this, this, this, this and this, could I raise the dead?” And got, “Don’t . . . don’t do that.” At that point, I knew I had a viable virus.
very cool, I found it, I’ll be reading it after a couple books I’m working through right now.
thanks!
For me that’s a no-brainer.
My jaw dropped
Go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this to all blow over.
Relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/599/
My plan, in its entirety:
BRAAAAINS!!!
Die, I guess. On the off chance that I survive the first few days, try to build a civilization.
I feel like that in this timeline we should already start and try to build a civilization
Hoard toilet paper.
Also, buy truckloads of hand sanitizer
My friends have had plans for this situation since highschool. We meet at our buddies house in the woods. We commandeer one of his neighbors tanks (his neighbor has one of the largest private collection of tanks). We take said tank (which can run off pretty much any liquid that burns) and drive it to SF where we then forcibly take control of a ferry and drive ourselves and the tank with enough supplies to sustain ourselves for at least a month on Alcatraz.
We figure by the end of the month most zombies will have decayed beyond mobility and should any other humans attempt to join us that we don’t want on the island with us… Well we have a tank.
How are you going to get the Tanks away from the neighbor? They can fight you off… They have tanks.
Oh he liked all of us. We used to help him set up his 4th of July demonstration for the neighborhood every year where he would fire a tank shell into the mountainside along with some fire works . We talked to him about our plan on more than one occasion.
Oooh okay, neighbor is in on the plan. That is a good plan!
My husband always says he will “get guns” and I’m always like, how are you gonna get the guns away from the people that already have them? You’re not going to be the first to get to a gun store and you’re not going to beat up the guys who have guns.
Are you sure the ferry could take the tank?
Tanks are heavy for sure but they aren’t THAT much heavier than a handful of cars. Plus if it’s just for protection against zombies and other humans on foot we wouldn’t need a heavily armored one.
Having the weight of 10 cars on the footprint of one can be a problem, even if the ferry can normally transport 100.
You should look out for IFVs from an airborne unit.Unfortunately he only collects tanks.
I’m not telling you my plan zombie, but rest assured, once you’re defeated, we’ll all get taken out by some zombie-denier anyways.
Realistic zombies: do nothing, it will pass quickly, or I will catch it too. If I don’t catch it I shelter on place for a few days
Movie zombies of any kind: kill myself, I’m not delusional, that world sucks and my chances are tiny
How do realistic zombies look like?
Like corpses. And corpses don’t tend to be particularly strong or fast once they start rotting. Unless there’s some sort of magic involved to stop the decomposition process, they’ll likely all die out as they rot. The fresher zombies will take a few weeks to become inert, but that’s a blip in the radar in the grand scheme of things.
But the bigger issue then becomes what caused it. If it was something like a prion disease, (like Mad Cow Disease) then you’re likely fucked even after the zombies all rot; Prions don’t decompose, and (if the zombie outbreak was big enough) you’re almost guaranteed to catch it via dirty soil exposure (either directly, or via tainted produce that was grown where a zombie died) eventually.
My head cannon for “realistic” zombies. is Mel Brooks’, the writer of 'zombie survival guide and ‘world war z’ (no relation to the movie or the game) esque zombies.
Max Brooks, Mel is his father. I’d expect a Mel Brooks-written Zombie guide would be a bit…different…
Thanks for the correction :) at least I was only of by 2 letters. Or only got 1/3 correct depending on your level of pessimism
Devouring as many brains as possible, I guess.
