I always figured, like The Stand, some people were just immune.
Well, the issue’s been argued before.
In a hospital situation, things would get crazy REAL fast, particularly with zombies wandering around willy nilly and people unable to defend themselves.
In private homes, not so much. I can see zombies wandering around indoor for years, unable to fathom the working of doorknobs.
But under most circumstances, the zombie has the advantage. Shoot him, break his arms, whatever,* he will not stop*. Your best option is simply to run away… as long as your breath holds out. And when you have to stop for the night, what then?
Fortifications will work. At least, until they need resupplying. Boats are good, too. Ships are ideal, and this was pointed out in WWZ, the book and the movie.
…but the fact is, even in our society, where everyone who ever saw a zombie movie knows you have to destroy the brain, this ain’t easy, requiring a gun or a fairly heavy tool (Louisville Sluggers do count as tools), and he’s trying to eat you the whole time. A lot of people simply aren’t going to be able to DO that, for whatever reason, ranging from clumsiness to being grossed out to not being strong enough to simply not being able to bash in Grandma’s skull!
And everyone who can’t or won’t or simply isn’t quick enough is soon another zombie. The whole POINT of Romero’s zombies is that individually, they aren’t much… but when you get a mob of them, you are in trouble… and when you get a HORDE of them, you are in deep doodoo indeed.
True, if one guy gets lunched out by a horde, he will soon be a zombie head on a stripped skeleton, unable to do a whole lot… but in the course of a societal breakdown, people with guns are going to be out there, and they will be shooting, and not everyone they shoot is going to be a zombie, which is another trope of the better type of zombie film. So, yeah, lotsa gunshot wounds… and the hospitals will be the first place to fall apart… and all the medical personnel on duty are fine candidates for the Big Zombie Dawn Breakfast. Gunshot wounds are almost always serious. Who’s going to treat them? And what happens when they aren’t treated?
That’s the zombie apocalypse I see. The first month would be full of stuff like that. And if civilization holds together, it’s going to have to be someplace easily defendable and self contained, and able to supply itself.
Hello, sailor!
…and in most diseases, a tiny fraction of the population IS immune, usually; that’s natural selection, which is why Dutch Elm Disease hasn’t wiped out the species; the survivors will breed and eventually the whole strain will be disease resistant. Works with poisons, too, which is why bug sprays have to change their formulas periodically.
Doesn’t always work, though. I wouldn’t want to count on being immune to rabies. Much less some spooooky govvamint genetically engineered superbug…
In most discussions like these, two distinct issues get combined:
- The nature of disease
- The nature of zombies
I don’t see the dangers from zombies. They’re magic creatures who avoid the 2nd law of thermodynamics, are apparently impervious from disease, pain, rot, or standard biological rules, and are given a malicious motivation that doesn’t make sense on the top of it nor when you get down to the bottom of things. We may as well be talking about a germ/virus that turns people into unicorns.
Then we’re reduced to talking about the nature of disease… and, really, when you’re talking about a pathogen that can take out civilization and 99.99% of mankind within weeks, why the need to add zombies to the mix? Because it makes for a better film? 
Aw, you’re no fun.
And actually, a pathogen of that sort wouldn’t be, either. And it would make for a rather dull movie if the pathogen was airborne.
But movies have been based on diseases that require contact; Contagion was actually quite good, and it’s not the only example. On the other hand, *Contagion *was boringly realistic; the disease isn’t 100% fatal, and a certain portion of the population is immune. Civilization doesn’t collapse, although it does take a beating. The scary part of the movie is the assertation that it could happen at all.
Assuming anything like a zombie apocalypse DOES happen IRL, the zombies would be living humans, guns would work pretty much fine, and if you ignored them, they’d all be keeling over inside a few days, and mainly, we’d just have to stay indoors to avoid them.
What fun is that?
Couple of things…
First, the whole “zombies want brains” thing seems isolated to very few movies. Most zombies depicted simply want flesh, and aren’t picky if it is brains or arms or faces or knees. They do, however, have a preference for non-zombie.
Which is why some versions specifically talk about a mechanism whereby zombies recognize other zombies. Like the Resident Evil franchise, where the infected can detect other infected, and don’t attack them.
So depending upon the infection cycle, the zombies catch a prey, start munching, but the infection spreads enough that the recognition kicks in, and they stop munching. Now you have a new zombie.
Speed and mechanism of transmission can also be a factor. WWZ had a very fast spreading virus, essentially about 20 seconds to totally infect a victim. And these zombies were effectively living people running at the full speed and power of their physical bodies without tiring or facing the weaknesses actual human bodies face. (Yeah, magic.)
Anyway, just watched “Fear the Walking Dead”, a new Walking Dead series that tracks the infection just as it breaks out in LA. They posit some interesting factors.
[spoiler]First, there is a flu type virus running around, making people ill. The virus infects, and eventually kills, turning the victim, but people don’t know that’s what’s up. So there is a lot of people mysteriously out sick, and then they start to have some weird incidents like victims of car accidents attacking first responders. But it’s not well understood, and nobody does a good job of handling it from a media perspective. Instead of getting out front and trying to address the issue, it is ignored and downplayed.
But that feeds into current issues with law enforcement. An incident downtown has the police have to shoot a homeless man, but people get worked up about the poor, unarmed, helpless homeless man and his getting shot for no reason. And a riot breaks out.
And like good riots, it causes a lot of confusion and destruction, which is how the virus gets a good spread there.
Plus, the rioters don’t help by doing things like looting and setting fires, which drives people who were trying to hole up out into the open.
When the military does finally step in, they don’t exactly help the situation. Anyway, despite creating a safety enclave, it doesn’t last. Apparently, plenty of folks are leery of the military, and hole up or whatnot in the city on their own, and become fodder for new zombie spread. [/spoiler]
Just an interesting point how social factors keep an ideal response from being able to occur, and allowing the infestation to take over.
Well, yeah. The antivaxxer movement is a prime example of that. It’d be that much worse in a plague where anyone who dies MUST be decerebrated or suffer cranial trauma within a few minutes… or reanimate.
Most people simply aren’t wired to be able to hammer a bolt into a loved one’s head as soon as they quit breathing.
From Cracked - 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly)
Well, yeah. If yer gonna bring SCIENCE into it, the zombie apocalypse would be over in a couple weeks, if that. Most zombie fiction that addresses the issue at all points out that zombies either don’t decay or decay at a slower rate than they should, not to mention the whole issue with the decay of muscle tissue to the point where a zombie shouldn’t be able to grip or bite inside a few days (you and I rebuild muscle tissue as we use it; a dead thing cannot).
So the goal here is to build a zombie who doesn’t decay, who rebuilds muscle tissue to the point of keeping enough strength to eat you, but is still largely bulletproof except for his brain…
I recall a zombie-infection story I found interesting.
I think it was “A Night on the Moor” by Gilchrist, but I can’t verify it.
The zombies were recent corpses which were infected and re-animated by plant spores from plants in the area of a battle. They had two objectives: disperse, and if you find another creature, kill and infect it.
The infestation was self-limiting; come dawn the zombies laid down and fertilized a patch of ground for the plant to grow in.
That sounds a lot like “Night On Mispec Moor,” by Larry Niven. Our hero saves himself from a zombie horde by fortifying himself with spray bottles of “Spectrum Cure,” an antibiotic/antiviral. He climbs up on a boulder against a cliff and sprays any zombie that gets too close until dawn, when the remaining zombies collapse.
It’s a more functional paradigm. Zombies are only active for a short time, then they die, never to reanimate. But it’s not a world ending kind of thing…
Another one, but more vampires than zombies, is “The Passage” by Justin Cronin, pt 1 of a trilogy.
Yeah, but Niven’s zombies died and didn’t reanimate again after sunrise. Cronin’s vampires just go to ground and reactivate the following night.
I find it particularly lame saying “Oh zombies break the 2nd law of thermodynamics” or whatever.
You can either say that it’s just magic, and answer the question as though we’d said “What if Twilight-style vampires existed”? Or you can add whatever ad hoc shit you think might make it work (e.g. zombie “virus” is actually nanobots, powered by a slow-decaying radioactive isotope…whatever floats your boat). But fighting the hypothetical is just irrelevant.
And also, not necessary…For the reasons I’ve given upthread, a zombie outbreak would come, far, far short of the “handful of people left” fantasy, even if we grant zombies with the properties they have in the movies.
You’re quite correct: when dealing with fiction, the “it’s magic” argument is pretty lame. Of course it’s magic - it’s fiction.
However, when people start speculating about zombie attacks in the real world, the one that exists outside of our heads? Saying “they’re magic” is merely efficient prioritizing, so we can spend time worrying about the true dangers to humanity - global warning, nuclear weapons, and the creatures of Altair V who have hijacked the minds of every important person on Earth.
…wul, if you wanna speculate about zombie attacks in the REAL world, I thought “bath salts” were a perfectly logical explanation.
That’s it. I did a search from what I recalled, but that one didn’t come up in it for some reason.
It’s not one of his best. Feels like he needed to pay the rent that month or something.