For the sake of the plot, choose whichever zombie type fits your plans the best.
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Shelter in place for a while until decomposition of their muscles makes them completely ineffectual and unable to actually move.
Shouldn’t take long.
Probably just shoot myself.
I plan to go insane and live in the woods with a bone in my hair
Can we be insane hair bone pals?
Absolutely! I’ll have your bone ready when you arrive
I’m gonna eat a lot of brains until the protagonist blows my head off with an unrealistic shotgun.
For me that’s a no-brainer.
My jaw dropped
Series of tree houses, live like ewoks, no spider zombies
Realistic zombies: do nothing, it will pass quickly, or I will catch it too. If I don’t catch it I shelter on place for a few days
Movie zombies of any kind: kill myself, I’m not delusional, that world sucks and my chances are tiny
How do realistic zombies look like?
My head cannon for “realistic” zombies. is Mel Brooks’, the writer of 'zombie survival guide and ‘world war z’ (no relation to the movie or the game) esque zombies.
Max Brooks, Mel is his father. I’d expect a Mel Brooks-written Zombie guide would be a bit…different…
Thanks for the correction :) at least I was only of by 2 letters. Or only got 1/3 correct depending on your level of pessimism
My friends have had plans for this situation since highschool. We meet at our buddies house in the woods. We commandeer one of his neighbors tanks (his neighbor has one of the largest private collection of tanks). We take said tank (which can run off pretty much any liquid that burns) and drive it to SF where we then forcibly take control of a ferry and drive ourselves and the tank with enough supplies to sustain ourselves for at least a month on Alcatraz.
We figure by the end of the month most zombies will have decayed beyond mobility and should any other humans attempt to join us that we don’t want on the island with us… Well we have a tank.
How are you going to get the Tanks away from the neighbor? They can fight you off… They have tanks.
Oh he liked all of us. We used to help him set up his 4th of July demonstration for the neighborhood every year where he would fire a tank shell into the mountainside along with some fire works . We talked to him about our plan on more than one occasion.
Oooh okay, neighbor is in on the plan. That is a good plan!
My husband always says he will “get guns” and I’m always like, how are you gonna get the guns away from the people that already have them? You’re not going to be the first to get to a gun store and you’re not going to beat up the guys who have guns.
Are you sure the ferry could take the tank?
Tanks are heavy for sure but they aren’t THAT much heavier than a handful of cars. Plus if it’s just for protection against zombies and other humans on foot we wouldn’t need a heavily armored one.
Having the weight of 10 cars on the footprint of one can be a problem, even if the ferry can normally transport 100.
You should look out for IFVs from an airborne unit.Unfortunately he only collects tanks.
I’m of the firm “no magic zombies” camp.
If the zombies aren’t magic, they aren’t going to last long, whichever form of zombie they are. Wait inside a few days, most of them should be dead or immobile.
If a zombie loses blood, they aren’t going to keep walking, their muscles won’t work without blood.
If you have a strong door, zombie arms will break before the door breaks.
Dehydration. Organisms need water to function at all, let alone move, and zombies aren’t big on water fountains.
I see zombies as dangerous for a few days, with their senses failing so they can’t track you effectively for the majority of the outbreak, then it’s over.
Anything other than that scenario is a magical zombie, who can move without energy, function without a body, or unrealistically mutate.
I love zombie movies and comics, but for real real, no magic zombies.
update: I’m going to do a podcast episode about magical zombies now.
Have you read Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series? It’s the ultimate realistic zombie story.
ooh, no, thank you very much, I’ll check it out now.
If memory serves, she actually collaborated with the CDC to create a disease model that could realistically exist.
So every time I came up with a new iteration of Kellis-Amberlee, I would call back and say, “If I did this, this, this, this, this and this, could I raise the dead?” And every single time they would say, “No.” And I’d say, “OK,” hang up, and go back to working. After about the 17th time, I called and said, “If I did this, this, this, this, this, this and this, could I raise the dead?” And got, “Don’t . . . don’t do that.” At that point, I knew I had a viable virus.
very cool, I found it, I’ll be reading it after a couple books I’m working through right now.
thanks!
what about the nonmagic zombie situation where the plague spreads slowly and through typical viral pathways so that it becomes an endemic where people trying to go about their regular life will occasionally keel over and come back up as berserk monsters
that sounds like a magic zombie scenario and the aforementioned guidelines apply.
their dead tissue will break apart and decompose very rapidly, and dehydration will prohibit any complex movement after a few hours.
if reanimations are moving their dead bodies around without connective tissue or the fuel/cell requirements needed to work those bodily systems, that’s magic.
expecting non-magic zombies to be able to chase someone or gather in a horde is like expecting a car to run without any fuel, engine, or drivetrain.
the closest thing we have to a non-magic zombie but still similar to zombies in movies is rabies. the person becomes violent but extremely uncoordinated, aquaphobic, and then dies because the human body doesn’t function without the constant ingestion of water and fuel sources.
What it is more of a Toxoplasma gondii style infection that makes you violent too?
Doesn’t sound as magical, but I guess you aren’t a zombie if toy aren’t dead.
Finally, another “No magic zombies” person!
What are your thoughts on a “28 X Later” style scenario? Where the they’re still subject to injuries/starvation/etc, and the risk is more due to the sheer speed of the infected, ability to ignore pain in the short term, and asymptomatic carriers of the disease?
28 is probably my favorite zombie series, and those zombies are heavily magic.
moving super fast and uncoordinated means rapid dehydration coupled with injuries, blood loss and tissue loss and damage.
their bodies can’t endure that kind of activity for more than a couple hours, and they’ll rapidly render themselves immobile, deteriorate and decompose. there aren’t going to be any zombies milling around inside houses or crawling around in fields 28 weeks later.
asymptomatic carriers are normally accounted for with any new pathogen, and with the rapid deterioration, incapacitation and death of any symptomatic infected, there aren’t going to be major societal collapses.
asymptomatic carriers are going to be an important vector of disease to account for as soon as the disease is recognized, and they’ll have to be separated from the rest of society as a vaccine is developed, but given the rapid onset, obvious symptoms, rapid deterioration of the symptomatic carriers and physical transmissibility, a short quarantine period indicates there aren’t going to be many asymptomatic carriers.
rabies is a good example, because it’s basically 28 days later zombies in real life.
extremely contagious, no cure, carriers become very violent but uncoordinated, they are fast for a very brief period of time but fundamentally incapacitated after a few hours because of dehydration and tissue damage, and then die.
conditions like transmissibility and natural human resistance make the 28 scenario unrealistic but for the most part, the rapid deterioration of the symptomatic carriers is the silver bullet here.
they are still great movies and I’m very excited to see 28 years later next month.
What about a subtler zombie pathogen that merely rewires your brain to make you allergic to everything but meat. It would have longer to spread, and the increase in consumption would probably cause a general environmental collapse.
You’d have aspects of cannibalism, societal collapse, and dramatic infection deceit scenes and nobody would ever look like a zombie.
People would have to publicly eat plants to prove they’re not zombies to enter secure areas. Remember the time Arby’s made a fake carrot that was made of meat? They called it a megetable. That’s real. What if the infected wormed their way into the food industry and started mislabeling things to muddy the waters due to social stigma?
Scientific zombies wouldn’t necessarily look dead, and a real version would be way less overt.
there are a few big issues here.
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The consistency and efficacy of that pathogen
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those people wouldn’t be zombies, they would just be carnivores.
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if cannibalism/societal colapse/megetables are going on, people are going to notice.
there are already pathogens that make someone vegetarian, but because of the resilience of the human body, the effect only takes hold in a very low percentage of people introduced to the pathogen (they’re not sure which mechanism in tick spit prompts the meat allergy yet, afaik).
The brain is incredibly complex and can rewire itself, so to have even 10% of the population have consistently perfectly rewired brains while maintaining all other normal functions and the coordination to conspire, cannibalize people and change the global food supply is a pretty magical scenario.
if cannibalism/societal colapse/megetables are going on, people are going to notice.
Fake news and xitter would like to have a word.
I think you’re reading some things into what I said to make it magical, but it’s not important. I’m just ideating because you got me excited about an idea.
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If a zombie loses blood, they aren’t going to keep walking, their muscles won’t work without blood.
Isn’t that the whole idea behind zombies: they need no circulating blood nor an heart pumping it? Soulless and heartless bastards, you know.
If you have a strong door, zombie arms will break before the door breaks.
One zombie no doubt, but like we all know those assholes are often moving in hordes… Sure, the first zombies squashed against the door won’t like that very much but then neither will the door and once it breaks under the weight of all the other zombies… Or if it is not the zombie-proof door, they will inadvertently press too hard on one of those nice large windows we often see in the hollywood type of houses, a window that isn’t zombie-proof obviously and then… bon appétit, like we say in my country ;)
The only kind of zombies I really worry about is the quickly and very much non-fictional ramping up illiteracy among younger generations. To me, this kind of cerebral death is much more worrying than hordes of dead people suddenly wanting to take a bite of my sorry ass. That said, maybe I should see that as the latest kind of zombification? Pure brain rot instead of flesh rot?
So, what would I do if illiterate zombies were to try to eat me or turn me into one of them? I would be throwing all the books from my personal library at them, knocking them off one by one with some (not always that) serious knowledge I suppose :p
Or maybe it’s time I learn how to pray? Because if those illiterate zombies become dominant we’ll all be screwed once and for all I’m afraid.
i remember being pretty concerned during trump 1 when the US withdrew from the UNESCO literacy program, but it was barely a footnote to anyone
Indeed but, to me at least, this is not Trump/UNESCO-related issue. It’s a Western societies issue.
We have very similar issues going here in France. For me, it all begun back in the 80s so, yeah, it’s not really something new. But things have been going worse since then. And it has been accelerating. Quickly. Badly.
In France, our educative system (it’s called l’éducation nationale, aka a nation-wide highly centralized system deciding what kids are to learn and how they should be educated) and since the mid-80s the level has collapsed beyond belief. Kids aren’t being taught much anymore, and math as well as reading are vanishing skills. Let’s not mention history and civic education (which help in any working democracy). Things have become real worse in recent years. Like, a lot worse.
Obviously, it’s not the kid’s fault. It’s us the adults, teachers, parents and elected representatives voting absurd laws who have failed. But it’s them kids who will pay dear for our mistakes (like with the climate crisis, btw).
They already started paying.
I mean, who has the best chance of getting a qualified job between say a lower or, nowadays, even a middle-class kid barely able to open a book and to understand what’s written in it (and barely able to spell their name correctly) and a kid from a family where knowledge and teaching are still considered valuable investments worthy of sending their kids into private schools in which, unlike public schools, they’re actually being taught how to read (and how to properly use books), and do math, and learn some history, philosophy and so on?
Those wealthier and better-educated kids will get all the rewards, while all the others kids will be fucked up, for their entire life (but hey, they will know how to watch ads on YT and TikTok).
They already are being fucked up btw, they just can’t realize it as we have not given them the basic tools required to understand what’s happening around them.
But the real worse is yet to come. Here in France at least even our private schools are subjected to the dumbing-down of the entire educative system, as they also depend on nation-wide laws and controls… Controls that have been getting harsher and harsher and, unsurprisingly, even those private schools are witnessing a sharp decline. Sure, it’s less sharp than in public schools but still very worrying. So, what will happen? Well, I can’t predict the (very near) future but would I have school-age kids myself and would I have enough money to send them to a private school I would simply pack my things and move abroad in any other country but France, in a country that would not actively be trying to ruin our educative system.
France was rightly regarded as a country of readers up until the late 70s to early 80s. Books (serious books, I mean) were a popular discussion topic, it was in the newspapers, magazines, radio and TV, it was discussed between people (the Internet and social media of back then). It was popular. Nowadays? It’s not rare at all to enter a house where there is not a single book to be found. A house where no one owns a library card either (or read ebooks). Kids are just not encouraged to read books. Even comics are starting to become a happy exception.
Once again, this is a failure that will cost dearly to kids growing up in those families.
Without any reading culture and habits, not only will they be at a disadvantage when competing against ‘reading kids’ but they’re also much more vulnerable to the stupidest ideas floating around… provided those already stupid ideas are simplified enough for them to instantly grasp them without much effort.
What kind of adults and citizen will that create? I’d rather not imagine. That’s a fucking nightmare happening right in front of our eyes and nobody seems to care.
That said, maybe I should see that as the latest kind of zombification? Pure brain rot instead of flesh rot?
Zombies are sci-fi. Sci-fi, by and large, is social commentary. You’ve hit the nail on the head quite nicely actually.
“they need no circulating blood nor an heart pumping it?”
yup, those are the magic zombies. real complex organisms whose muscles won’t function without energy/water/bodily structure are much more demanding.
and keep in mind that every moment after death those bodies will be decomposing, that that body is not living, then it is decomposing a piece of steak left over from a picnic in the forests decomposes.
All of the dead soft tissue is going to break apart very quickly and won’t be able to hold the body together.
“moving in hordes”
a horde could be a problem for the few hours that they are coordinated enough to move until dehydration sets in.
“Pure brain rot instead of flesh rot…what would I do…I would be throwing all the books from my personal library at them”
this is a great idea, very poetic retaliation.
Honestly? Probably die
Devouring as many brains as possible, I guess.
#teamzombie
Go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this to all blow over.
Thanks! I love talking about this kind of stuff, even if it is really silly and never going to happen, it’s fun to pretend.
The way I see it, if you’re prepared for a zombie apocalypse, you’re pretty much prepared for anything. It’s really just another way of saying “worst-case scenario.” The people who enjoy thinking about this kind of stuff are basically preppers or survivalists who just find it more engaging to plan for a zombie outbreak than something more “mundane” like an EMP, pandemic, or natural disaster.
Relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/599/
I’m not telling you my plan zombie, but rest assured, once you’re defeated, we’ll all get taken out by some zombie-denier anyways.
