Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (11 page)

In the Michigan State model, regardless of the zombie body count, the final meal is always a steaming pile of fresh you.

A
sk anyone with even a casual knowledge of zombies what the undead eat, and more often than not, the response will be “Braiiiins!” But despite popular belief, the undead likely don’t prefer your brain to any other part of your living body. In fact, the concept of a zombie craving brains is unique to the
Return of the Living Dead
film series, a semispoof collection of B-movies from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The flaw in this premise is revealed through simple physics.

Bite-compression work done by researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the United States’ oldest technical university, found that the human mouth is both too flat and too weak to penetrate a human skull. Predators have long mouths that protrude outward to allow them to use their full force when biting down on their prey. The human mouth is inset and unable to open wide enough to get a good grip on anything larger than an apple.

Other less popular theories put forth in
Return of the Living Dead
include that burning zombies spreads infection; zombies can talk, think, and reason; zombies know how to use car radios; and any animal can become a zombie.

In fact, some research suggests that zombies may not eat anything at all but, rather, just bite and chew. Though seemingly simple, the act of swallowing is a complex neuromuscular activity controlled by several different parts of the brain. As it’s commonly believed that the zombie brain is low-functioning compared to that of the average human, evidenced in part by lack of speech, swallowing may prove too complex a task for a zombie. Additionally, eating may be a death sentence.

Decomposition begins in the stomach, as bacteria feed on the soft tissue and organs. Pumping more soft tissue into the zombie gut could be like pouring gasoline on a flame. The rotting process might speed up, and the zombie would become a worthless pile of goo in no time flat. And even if zombies could swallow, they probably would not be able to digest what they ate. How often do you see a zombie stop for a bathroom break? That could lead to massive bloating, sluggishness, and loss of balance, as their midsections become stretched like heavy, rotten watermelons, further reducing their threat to able-bodied humans.

If zombies don’t actually eat anything, is it possible that the undead may increase their longevity by literally eating themselves from the inside out? Many of the human body’s internal organs, once vital to the survival of a living person, are not likely needed for a zombie to function. Because of this,
the newly reanimated corpse has a portable store of food built right into its framework.

Humans can go weeks without food. But as they eventually reach the later stages of starvation, the body will literally eat itself. In fact, digestive-related organ failure is what usually kills a starved person. By contrast zombies may have no need for many of their organs. They would then be free to digest the heart, lungs, liver, and intestines without suffering any ill effects, thereby substantially increasing their life span.

Regardless of whether or not zombies actually swallow the human flesh they bite into, if they are able to digest their own organs, then the undead may be able to fend off harmful bacteria, while continuing to generate needed energy and extending their lives.

Do zombies eat dead people? The answer may seem obvious, as they are generally considered to be after one thing and one thing only: live flesh. Therefore, a zombie would pass right by an available dead body and continue hunting the living.

But imagine a group of zombies cornering you in a dead-end alley. You do everything you can to fight back, but eventually, their numbers are too great, and you are driven to the ground by clawing hands and gnashing teeth. The zombies chew on your fingers, rip off a leg, and make short work of your intestines. Soon enough, you die from the overwhelming pain and blood loss, which leads to another version of the same question.

At the moment your heart stops beating, do the zombies get up and wander off, or do they continue feasting on your lifeless corpse?

If you think they get up, then zombies don’t eat dead people. But if you think they finish the job, sucking out your eyeballs and chewing on your forearm even after you’ve died, then zombies do at least eat the newly deceased. This may seem like a small point, but it could mean the difference between real hope for civilization’s survival and total world collapse.

If zombies continue feeding on the dead, then they are effectively destroying their own reinforcements. A person with a deadly bite may rise up to become a zombie himself, but a body that has been chewed down to nothing won’t be physically able to stand and search out new victims. Zombies could quite literally eat themselves out of existence.

My hope is that they have really big appetites and don’t know when to say when.

It’s often suggested that zombies bite human beings because they are driven to spread their disease to other viable hosts. Because, with rare exception, prevailing wisdom suggests that the zombie virus is likely only communicable to humans, it could be argued that the undead would therefore be drawn to human beings only and ignore all other living creatures.

But even if the zombie infection is only a threat to humans, it is also a generally accepted belief that zombies aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, nor are they attacking the living because of some greater strategy. Zombies do what they do because they are driven to it and don’t know how to do anything else. It’s possible that a hunting zombie might not be able to differentiate between different species and therefore would essentially want to bite anything that moves.

But because zombies are thought not to work together and not to use any tools or weapons, it would be difficult for them to catch most animals in the wild even if they so desired.

An easy test for this is to go outside and attempt to catch a squirrel, mouse, or rat with your bare hands. Even a cat or a stray dog that doesn’t want to be caught is going to be a nearly impossible goal, especially if you’re not aided by any advance strategy or tools. So zombies may want to eat animals, but if their abilities are limited, as we suspect, then for the most part, it’s just not going to work out for them.

Good news for your pet ferret Bobo, but you’re still pretty much screwed.

Tarman crawls out of a fifty-gallon drum of toxic sludge with one thing on his mind: brains. A military experiment gone wrong, he is the first modern zombie to ever say “brains” and the first modern zombie to ever eat brains, making him one of the most iconic ghouls of all time.

William Stout, famed production designer of
Return of the Living Dead
, later worked on creature design for
Predator
(1987),
Men in Black
(1997), and
Pan’s Labyrinth
(2006).

ILLUSTRATION BY WILLIAM STOUT

W
e’ve all seen the unlucky saps in zombie movies who get bitten, fall ill, die soon after, and then come back as undead beasts themselves. But how exactly does the zombie sickness cause such a speedy death in its victims? Turns out your own immune system might do most of the work, acting as a final nail in your coffin.

Sepsis is a condition in which the body fights a severe infection that has spread via the bloodstream. The immune system goes into overdrive, overwhelming normal processes in the blood and leading to blood clots and organ failure. Patients who become septic must be quickly seen by medical professionals or risk falling into a state of shock. If they are left untreated, death can occur within a matter of hours.

More than 200,000 people die of sepsis each year in the United States alone, and the symptoms closely mirror those seen in depictions of the progression of the zombie sickness. If a flesh eater’s bite can deliver enough toxic filth to induce septic shock, it doesn’t need to be fatal, because your own immune system will react so violently to the invading sickness that you will essentially kill yourself. In fact, new findings suggest that a bite resulting in infection need not be as directly damaging as previously thought to be fatal.

A 2010 study of the causes of deadly inflammation at
Harvard Medical School found that when the cells in our body are damaged by injury, they release large quantities of mitochondrial DNA. Though harmless, the DNA debris is interpreted by our immune system to be foreign bacterial invaders, and legions of white blood cells are called into action, sometimes with fatal results.

Therefore, a microscopic zombie sickness could kill a newly infected person quickly without relying on any sophisticated mechanisms. It has only to launch small attacks on cells it doesn’t need for future functions, thereby overwhelming the immune system and sending white blood cells into a deadly panic. Death by septic shock would quickly follow.

But to really address the question of how long we have, we must look at two factors: the incubation period of the zombie sickness and the zombie life span.

As the speed of zombies on the hunt has increased in recent years, so, it seems, has the rate of infection. Rather than a day or even several hours, films such as
28 Days Later
present a virus that takes full control of its host in just a matter of seconds. In the case of living zombies, the argument is that it can transform its victims much more quickly because there is no need to go through the traditional process of death and reanimation. But is that logic sound?