Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (14 page)

The plague in
Zombieland
is caused by a mutated form of mad cow disease that turns those infected into raving lunatics with an appetite for human flesh. Its great box-office success solidified the living zombie’s place in the subgenre and proved once again that just because the world is dead doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun.

Geeky hero Columbus reveals that the only thing he fears more than zombies is clowns. Unfortunately, to save the girl of his dreams he has to fight a snarling zombie clown on its home turf: an apocalyptic amusement park.

ILLUSTRATION BY LUCAS CULSHAW

U
nlike werewolves and vampires, zombies aren’t interested in going to high school with you. Their cover isn’t to become a star on your basketball team, an eccentric antiques dealer, or a singer in a rock band. Werewolves and vampires might be scary, but ultimately they’re trying to coexist in a society in which they have a stake. By contrast, zombies don’t know and don’t care. Zombies don’t have a cover. Instead, they have the singular mission of killing and eating every last living human on earth and will stop at nothing to accomplish their goal.

That’s why when thinking about zombies, it’s impossible not to think also about the end of the world. No other contemporary monster is so closely tied to complete societal collapse followed by the speedy extinction of the human race. It’s a compelling scenario played out countless times on-screen and in print and is a fundamental principle of the modern zombie.

Zack Snyder, director of the highly successful remake of George Romero’s
Dawn of the Dead
(2004), was drawn to zombies specifically because they embody our concerns about the rapid fall of modern civilization:

I have a feeling that our whole way of life is like an eggshell that we think is so impervious, but once you put a crack in it everything comes apart pretty quickly.
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It seems Zack isn’t alone in his thinking. On the heels of the tsunami and resulting nuclear disaster in Japan in March 2011,
Newsweek
magazine’s cover simply read, “Apocalypse Now,” asking what the #@%! could possibly be next. Author of
The End of the World as We Know It
Daniel Wójcik points out that fears about mankind’s doom pervade modern popular culture in large part because they are backed by our experiences in an uncertain world:

The destruction of our environment, the greenhouse effect, the AIDS epidemic, widespread famine, overpopulation, incurable strains of pneumonia, Ebola and flesh-eating viruses, and other as yet unimaginable future afflictions may contribute to our eventual extinction.
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In a grim forecast, Jared Diamond says that there is a strong possibility of the collapse of civilization within the next few decades. And far from being a survivalist nut-job or doomsday alarmist, Diamond is a Pulitzer Prize winner who was awarded the United States National Medal of Science by President Clinton in 1999. Do you plan on being around for the next thirty years or so?

If zombies are to cause the end of the world, some say they will rise when a current human virus horribly mutates. Others say a strange new type of infection in animals will jump species to deadly effect. Still others point to dangerous advances
in biological warfare as a logical launch point. In truth, there’s no telling what the final trigger of the next great undead outbreak will be.

Taking a cue from Diamond, I believe a certain level of paranoia can prove helpful in identifying the coming zombie pandemic in its earliest stages. I believe in turning over every stone and exploring every possibility, no matter how unlikely. When it comes to zombie research and survival, I’m not interested in wading through the rubble of mankind, scratching my head, and wondering what happened after the fact. The time for wild speculation and heated debate is now, because once the dead come knocking, all bets are off.

Though the idea that government researchers will accidentally cause a zombie outbreak is arguably overplayed in the movies, recent findings suggest that it might nonetheless be right on the nose. A 2010 article in
New Scientist
magazine provides evidence that a planned bio lab funded by the United States is almost guaranteed to result in disaster.

Foot-and-mouth disease is a highly contagious, often fatal viral threat that infects animals such as cattle, sheep, pigs, bison, and deer. It can be devastating to livestock and wild herds if left unchecked.

By the government’s own risk estimates, the proposed research lab has a 70 percent chance of accidentally leaking foot-and-mouth, causing up to $50 billion in damage. But even that wasn’t enough to kill the project. Now the National Academy of Science (NAS) says the risk is much higher, explains academy member Jack Roth:

If the virus that causes FMD escaped, it’s likely it would reach distances far away before we knew it had escaped.
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NAS goes on to claim that the Homeland Security analysis is incomplete and utterly fails to learn from fifteen other past catastrophic accidents, almost ensuring future disaster.

Though foot-and-mouth has no clear connection to zombieism, the weight of the evidence makes it difficult to doubt that irresponsible research and incompetent safety strategies could eventually lead to the end of the world one way or another.

In a scene frighteningly similar to
28 Days Later
, a group of fifteen monkeys at an isolated research lab in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture escaped in July 2010 by catapulting themselves over a high electric security fence. The monkeys did so by bending and releasing flexible tree limbs. Though the monkeys were quickly rounded up, we can’t help but imagine the consequences if they’d escaped to civilization carrying with them some new and deadly sickness or experimental bio-weapon.

In another case out of Japan, leading Asian news outlet the
Japan Times
filed a 2010 report about disturbing new symptoms observed in a high number of recently flu-infected people in that country:

The health ministry has reported that 151 flu patients up to age 17 demonstrated abnormal behavior between late
September and mid-November, including acting violently insane and uttering gibberish.
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Though authorities claim that the popular vaccine Tamiflu was at fault, leading to the ban of its use by teens, only twenty-six of the known “zombie flu” sufferers had ever used that specific drug. Something more complicated, and potentially dangerous, appears to be at work.

Providing yet another sign that the human race is doing everything it can to speed up the arrival of the coming zombie plague, researchers in England recently discovered a new kind of superbug living inside the artificially enhanced breasts, butts, and noses of plastic-surgery patients. The deadly bug, which originated in south Asia, is resistant to nearly all antibiotics and is expected to spread across the entire planet before too long.

The offending agent is actually a gene known as NDM-1 and is unique because it can jump across different species of bacteria and is virtually untreatable. The new NDM-1 bacteria is resistant even to carbapenems, a group of antibiotics often reserved as a last resort for emergency treatment for multi-drug-resistant bugs.

Experts suggest that the proliferation of these superbugs could become a catastrophic global public-health crisis as the NDM-1 gene fuses with other deadly bacteria or even new pathogens that have yet to be identified.

If the undead sickness is caused by a bacterial agent that can be treated through modern medicine, the introduction of this newly discovered gene would turn a small and controllable outbreak into a global zombie pandemic that threatens
the very survival of the human race. Hope those fake boobs were worth it!

From elective surgery to lifesaving organ transplants, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that a rare infection has been passed through organ donation, in what is the first human-to-human transfer of the deadly amoeba known as
Balamuthia mandrillaris
(BM).

BM causes a condition leading to focal paralysis, seizures, and other serious brain-stem symptoms, before eventually killing its victim. It also often creates skin lesions on the body and face, through which the amoeba may enter the bloodstream and migrate to the brain. Dr. Mark Jacobson notes that the process of infection is of primary concern:

Four people got organs from the deceased, and already two are showing signs of infection. Organs are not routinely tested for less common pathogens, which allows rare and deadly organisms to slip through.
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This raises the specter of lifesaving interventions becoming transmission points. Innocent people from across the country and around the world would accept infected organs, sealing their undead fate with what they believe to be a lifesaving surgical procedure.

Families staying home to help loved ones recover would run a serious risk of being attacked and eaten by their fathers,
mothers, children, and siblings. Given the right incubation period, zombieism could take root in unsuspecting cities and towns before any warning signs were spotted or alarms signaled.

For perhaps the most disturbing trend in recent years, we look to African drug addicts. In a grotesque display of ingenuity, desperate addicts are injecting themselves with other addicts’ blood in an attempt to share the high. Called flashblood (or flushblood), the practice almost guarantees that users will contract AIDS and hepatitis from their infected donors, as reported by the
New York Times
:

A woman who has made enough money to buy a sachet of heroin will share blood to help a friend avoid withdrawal. The friend is often a fellow sex worker who has become too old or sick to find customers.
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There are even reports of addicts selling their blood on the black market.

Mixing blood types in large enough doses is deadly, but no one has ever tested the effects of mixing different types of blood, each carrying different deadly infections, and then cross-mixing that over an extended population. In short, flashblood is just another indication that the human race is doing a disturbingly good job of creating prime conditions for the dead to rise and eat us all.