Zombie CSU (51 page)

“I had steel-reinforced hockey pads on my knees, covered with double-thick foam,” remembers Sean Gallagher, a former assistant in the Personal Defense for Women program at Temple University, “and even with all that I had my leg sprained a couple of times. If it hadn’t been for the steel struts in the knee braces I’d be in a friggin’ wheelchair. And these were just women—some of them as small as five foot tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet. And I was
trying
not to get kicked. Some friggin’ zombie would go straight down, no questions asked.”

The kick to the knee is the easiest, fastest disabling technique for zombies. A slightly less effective but still highly useful skill is the sweep. “There are two basic kinds of sweeps,” explains Sensei David Pantano, fourth-degree black belt and owner of CounterStrike Kenpo Karate in Philadelphia. “You have the footsweep and the leg sweep. The footsweep needs more timing and is used to knock aside an attacker’s foot just as he’s taking a step forward. With the foot knocked aside the body is still committed to the forward motion and down he goes. The leg sweep, on the other hand, doesn’t rely on such precise timing but it does require more muscle. With that you launch a kick—wheel, roundhouse, whatever—at the attacker’s lower leg; anything from the back of the knee on down. Basically you’re kicking out his support, and again down he goes.”

Other useful kicks include the back kick and some of the lower, more powerful turning kicks including the front thrust. “A front thrust or shuffle side thrust isn’t going to do any kind of damage to a zombie,” warns semipro kickboxer Calvin Watson, “but it’ll knock their ugly asses away from you, maybe clear a path, maybe knock the sonsabitches into a ditch or down a flight of stairs. You use them to buy time to move, and then you damn well
move!
”

“Snapping kicks will not have the effect that we would desire,” advises Damian Gonzalez, an Aikidoist and instructor of Nami Ryu Kenjutsu. “Avoid all of the snapping kicks, front, side or snapping round kicks, either to the body, face, or groin. They work by generating pain and we are dealing with something that wouldn’t feel pain.”

Hand strikes are a different matter. Body punches would serve little purpose, but the jaw, eyes, neck, and legs are still viable targets for well-placed, fast, and powerful blows. “I would think their (zombies’) motor functions and dexterity would be greatly impaired,” observes Raymond Hook, a sibak (assistant instructor) of Kajukenbo
²
, “therefore the balance of a zombie would be almost non-existent. With this in mind, striking from a distance would be my best bet. I think low strikes to the legs and knees could be just what the
witch doctor
ordered. With limited motor skills a broken leg or separated knee would be hard to maneuver with. Also, weapons would do great. I would most likely want to use something with a bit of length, and something that might be lying around. I’m thinking a shovel, something that’s practical and easily accessible, and nothing fancy.”

The Zombie Factor

Zombies don’t fight. They just grab and bite. Singly they are easy to defeat and easy to escape. A punch or forceful blow—with hands, feet, or a handy blunt object—that just knocks them off balance will allow a human to run past them.

The danger comes when the zombies are in groups, or if there are a lot of them spread out along the human’s route of escape. While fatigue won’t affect a zombie, a human can eventually tire and slow down. That could get ugly.

J
UST THE
F
ACTS

Edged Weapons

Swords and knives have worked pretty well for the last several thousand years, and if somehow zombies became a concern for modern man, I think we’d see a pretty quick return to the way of the blade. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this book, zombies can probably hear, and gunshots are noisy. Attracting more zombies when trying to deal with the one at hand is not a great solution if you don’t have a lot of ammo and are a reliable marksman. Though finesse in swordplay takes years of exacting practice, the basics of swinging a sword are fairly easy for anyone to grasp.

Like all forms of combat, however, the nature of zombies does require that the sword be used with some degree of precision. Slashes to the body and stab wounds are (pardon the pun) pointless. Swords would have to be used to decapitate (ideally), or failing that to literally “disarm” the attacker and cut at least one leg out from under him.

When possible it’s preferable to cut off a zombie’s head. Most swords are capable of doing this, and anyone from a midsized adolescent boy (or average-sized woman) can manage that, once they learn how to use the hips rather than muscular arm strength to power the cut. Muscles may fatigue quickly but hip torsion provides easy and virtually inexhaustible power. The motion would be similar to that of a ballplayer swinging a bat. This does take practice, and requires a sword sturdy enough to cut through meat, tendon, and bone; or one slim enough to cut like a scalpel. Heavy-bladed swords, like European longswords, sabers, and cutlasses are fine, but they depend on considerable physical strength. Most Asian swords such as the Japanese
katana
are lighter and designed to take a finer edge. This is my favorite weapon of choice.

The
katana
, with its sleek and elegant single-edged blade is the samurai’s traditional weapon, and these swords are considered to be the sharpest weapons ever devised. The samurai treasured their swords, and eventually formed such a devotion to them that it was believed the sword was the embodiment of the samurai’s soul. The
katana
is so sharp and the cut it makes so fast that it is estimated that it can sever the head from the neck in one hundredth of a second. Even fast zombies are no match for that kind of speed.

The samurai had many different types of swords and knives, including the
tachi
—great swords, which were four feet in length;
katana
—thirty-two inches;
wakizashi
—fourteen inches;
tanto
—a dagger of varying length; among others. The samurai were trained to use these and many other weapons through practice of various specialized weapon arts such as
kenjutsu
(swordplay),
naginatajutsu
(art of the halberd),
kyujutsu
(archery),
tanto-jutsu
(dagger fighting),
hanbojutsu
(art of the short stick), to name just a handful of their weapon arts.

Despite the antiquity of the Japanese sword arts, it’s easier to learn the use of those arts today than it is the use of more modern European sword skills. Many martial arts teach weapon use—and the sword is very popular—including jujutsu, aikido, aikijutsu, ninjutsu, as well as those schools dedicated expressly to the sword: kenjutsu and kendo, iaijutsu and iaido.

There are a number of useful swords in the Chinese martial arts, many of which are taught in the various styles of kung fu. The
dao
is a tough single-edged saber ideal for chopping and useful to modern zombie fighters because its use is so common among practitioners of kung fu and wu shu, which means that there are—at a conservative estimate—ten thousand Americans who have a fair working knowledge of its use. The heavier
dadao
and
piandao
are also reliable, though fewer people are skilled in it; and the
pudao
, known as the “horse cutter sword,” is very powerful, but its use is almost entirely unknown in the West. A
guandao
is an excellent weapon (once mastered) but cumbersome for a beginner. It’s a pole weapon with what looks like a heavy curved blade on the end, similar in basic concept to the European halberd.

If we enter an age where zombies are a reality, then the way of the sword would make an even more substantial comeback. Bet on it.

Expert Witness

Jujitsu sensei Rick Robinson, chief instructor of the Yamabushi-Ryu dojo in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, agrees that the sword will, quite literally, give humans an
edge
over zombies: “There is a cut that is drawn in an are from left to right that hits the forward forearm of the attacker, and continues to hit the orbital socket with the kissaki,
³
that would turn the head away, the sword is brought around a second time to take the head. This prevents an initial grab and then beheads the zombie. If you use the hips for the cut rather than the arms the movement takes almost no energy and can be utilized many, many time without tiring. That would be very helpful with groups of zombies. There are techniques meant to sever the legs, but with zombies they would be more useful with
naginata
⁴
or
nagimaki
.”

“I would want to have either a
wakizashi
, or
katana
—one of the thin-bladed swords,” says kenjutsu expert Damian Gonzalez,” so that I can cleanly cut through necks or hit them right above the bridge of the nose to remove the tops of their heads. Cutting off the arms and legs is useful when trying to escape.”

Harry Matsushita, a fourth dan
⁵
in the Cleveland Toyama Ryu Iaijutsu sword school, says, “If we have a problem with those ghouls from the movies people would flock to our
dojos
(schools) to learn how to fight. We’d be able to meet that need, too, because we wouldn’t have to teach them the full art of iaijutsu or kenjutsu. After all, they wouldn’t need to learn formality and ritual, they wouldn’t have to learn how to block. All they would need to master are a very few basic cuts. Taking the leg, taking the outstretched arm, taking the head. We could crash-course them through a lot of that in a day and refine it for practical application in a week.”

Zombie Mutations
by Ken Meyer, Jr.

“Zombies are frightening but they’re no match for skilled fighters.”

“Ninjutsu swordplay would be pretty useful,” insists Bernardo Gutierrez, a fifth dan in that art. “Ninjutsu isn’t about ritual swordplay or duels—it’s dodge, evade and kill. The big thing would be to reinforce in practitioners the need to take heads off rather than cut throats or slash open the body, but that’s just a matter of some focused training.”

And what about other edged weapons?

“I’d bet my life on the effectiveness of the kukri knife,” says Tapaswi Dhamma,
⁶
a practitioner of the Burmese martial art of Bando. “It’s a great bone cutter, it’s heavy enough to lop off an arm or sever a head but light enough to be mighty damn fast.” The kukri, or
khukuri
, is an ancient weapon from Nepal that is favored by the
Gurkha
, a hardy people from Nepal and parts of North India. This long knife has a 20-degree bend in the blade that allows for a combination of chopping and cutting.
⁷
“If zombies ever attacked a
Gurkha
village,” Dhamma reflects, “even our kids would make short work of them, slow or fast.”

“I think you’d find that there are a lot of people out there who know how to use a sword,” insists Brady Howard, a sword and arms trainer for Renaissance combat performers. “Sure, we don’t practice with sharpened blades, but we train to be good swordsmen; and most of us own new or historical blades that will definitely take an edge. If zombies start coming after us we’ll sharpen up and be ready.”

Smaller knives would be a bit less useful because they require far more precision and would really only be of value in attempting to blind a zombie (very risky), darting in to cut hamstrings or ankle tendons (also risky), or in stabbing up into the slot at the base of the skull where a knife blade could rise up to pierce the brain. Whereas this technique, favored by knife-wielding assassins and military special forces, would dispatch a zombie, it’s doubtful anyone but an expert would be able to pull it off.

The Zombie Factor

The bottom line is that one-to-one an armed person should be able to kill a slow-moving zombie. In films we’ve seen zombies dispatched with screwdrivers, the broken handle of a croquet mallet, clubs, tire irons, and a variety of blunt objects and edged weapons. They can be destroyed.