Zombie CSU (62 page)

Faces of Death
by Graham Pratt

“People are screwups and their leaders are worse. Water and poor engineering destroyed New Orleans. You think FEMA could handle zombies?
Please!
”
—Bob Fingerman, author of
Recess Pieces
and
Zombie World: Winter Dregs and Other Stories
(both from Dark Horse Books)

N
ow that we’ve explored the forensics of the zombie problem; followed it through the investigations of medical science; tracked the spread of the plague with world-class epidemiologists, and taken it to the streets with cops, SWAT, and the military…how do our chances stack up if the dead rose?

The answers depend on how the dead rise and what kind of zombies we’d be facing. Here’s a summary of the major zombie subtypes along with some projections of how the twenty-first-century human race would do in a battle with the living dead.

S
LOW
Z
OMBIES
R
ISING AS A
R
ESULT OF A
P
LAGUE

This is the most common variation on the standard Romero model, and it’s a far more plausible and practicable one. These zombies are the slow shufflers. They have very little brain function; they have poor balance; they fear fire; it takes a headshot to bring them down.

 


Potential for Global Pandemic: Very high, but it would follow well-established epidemic spread patterns beginning with a patient zero and then increasing exponentially. Each vector would have the potential for unlimited contamination of human victims; each victim would become a disease vector upon reviving from human death.


 


 


Limits to Disease Spread: Depending on where the infection begins, the spread of disease may be easily containable. In
Resident Evil
, for example, the disease would have been contained within the Vault had not human greed and a shortsighted desire to weaponize the disease overridden common sense and the sensible precautions built into all disease study and bioweapons research. If the disease begins spreading in a small town, there is the possibility of quarantine and purification (read: nuking the crap out of the town).


 


 


Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: Humans are smarter, faster, capable of using technology, and possess the ability to share information and form cooperative resistance. (Though in the movies they fail miserably at all of this so the movie zombie can ultimately win. Although this was a brilliant if cynical view put forward by Romero in
Dawn
and
Day
, the apocalypse-due-to-petty-humans theme has been way overused.) Considering the efficiency of military and local law enforcement, and the sophistication of their weapons and tactics, there is a solid chance that we would stay ahead of the undead tsunami and eventually win. Based on the information from my experts, I give humanity a survival likelihood of 85 percent to 95 percent.


 


 


Likelihood That We’re All Toast: A lot of things would have to go wrong, more than just pettiness and infighting, for us to screw the pooch so badly that we’d all become dinner for the dead.


 

S
LOW
Z
OMBIES
R
ISING AS A
R
ESULT OF
T
OXIC
C
ONTAMINATION

A number of films, with both slow and fast zombies, play the toxic spill card, as shown in films like
The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, The Grapes of Death
, and
Toxic Zombie
.

 


Potential for Global Pandemic: The severity of the outbreak depends on the number of people initially contaminated. If something gets into the water or major food source of a large population, then the outbreak could spin out of control.


 


 


Limits to Disease Spread: Very little except that beyond the initial contamination of one or more patient zeroes the disease would spread by one-to-one bite attacks.


 


 


Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: Even if an entire city is infected, there would be slowdown points, such as bridges, tunnels, rivers, mountains, etc. Each of these could be used as a combat zone for hard-fire elimination of the infected. If more than a 5 percent population of a large city becomes simultaneously contaminated, then the military would need to use nuclear (or nuclear equivalent) weapons in order to sterilize large geographic sections. Continental survival following an infection of more than 5 percent of the population would be fifty-fifty. Oceans would stop the global spread. If, however, the toxic contamination affects a very small group (such as the staff at a toxic dump site or the population of a small and/or moderately isolated town), then our chances of survival jump to 95 percent or better. In either cases, there will likely be a high percentage of noninfected fatalities during the sterilization process.


 


 


Likelihood That We’re All Toast: See above.