Zombie CSU (64 page)
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.”
F
AST
H
UMAN
Z
OMBIES
R
ISING
B
ECAUSE OF A
V
IRUS
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.
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.”