If there were an actual zombie apocalypse - and I mean, where it’s blindingly obvious if someone is infected or not (grotesquely disfigured, snarling, Walking-Dead gait) - wouldn’t it be a total piece of cake to defeat? With all the guns and weaponry of the military and police, and the symptoms so obvious (let’s assume that it takes a good deep bite to transmit,) it’s hard to see how it couldn’t be contained very easily, especially since society has been lusting after precisely such a zombie apocalypse for so long. You’d have a hard time restraining private gun-owning citizenry from charging in on the fun.
And probably shooting Johnny and Edgar Winter, accidentaly.
Dad, you killed the zombie Flanders!
He was a zombie?
It’s all a question of the type of zombies. Fast or slow?
Of further relevance, this 2009 documentary:
That’s one of many things* that annoy me about The Walking Dead. Even if 99.9% of the population got converted into zombies, over a period of a few years the survivors would have been been able to eliminate most of them. The zombies are mainly a menace when they are in large herds. So attract them into a quarry or other trap where you can kill them at a distance, either with guns, arrows, or if ammo is short with slingshots.
*The other thing is how so much of the population got converted in the first place. Although people are converted into zombies by dying after a bite, zombies attack people so they can eat them. Since people are mostly vulnerable to herds, if caught they should be mostly consumed and incapable of roaming about even if the head is intact. Most zombies we see have their bodies intact and don’t appear to have been partly eaten. They appear to have been killed by something other than zombies, but what could have killed such a large percentage of the population isn’t explained.
Not according to all the documentaries I’ve seen.
Yeah, TWD zombies are stupid because of most of the reasons Colibri mentions. Also, incubation time is a factor-- TWD incubation time was something between several minutes to several hours, which is plenty of time to lock up and quarantine a bit person, chop off the affected limb, etc.
I think the Word War Z zombies were the most likely to result in a zombie apocalypse (the movie, not the book-- I read the book but it’s been too long to remember book details of zombie pathology). The WWZ zombie incubation was FAST- like 11 seconds. Then the zombies themselves were fast running zombies, and they specifically bit just to spread the virus-- they didn’t devour victims, they were making more zombies.
This isn’t really a Café thread in the end, so I’m going to lure it over to IMHO.
Not Quarantine Zone?
I considered it but you know, it would have been in bad taste in the end.
I’ll just point out that the book is VERY different from the movie on this front. In the book zombie infections take days before they’re fatal, and the zombies are the more traditional slow/shambling type. But Max Brooks does a good job showing why the zombie apocalypse gets out of hand – governments suppress knowledge of the infection, pharma companies market useless cures and preventatives that lull people into complacency, etc. Eventually it gets to the point where people can’t ignore it anymore and everyone freaks out.
If only this were analogous to something. . .
Yeah, well, if you told the population of the U.S. that people infected with COVID should and could be shot on sight, the virus would be snuffed out by tomorrow.
I realize this makes me an utter killjoy, but the problem I’ve always had with long-running zombie apocalypses is the thermodynamics aspect of it.
How long can a person survive without food or water? Days without water, a month without food, broadly speaking. Why should a zombie be different? Muscles take energy to move, all that moanin’ and shufflin’ takes energy to do. There’s no such thing as an energy-free shambling. Even if a zombie was ten times more effective at metabolising their energy reserves (metabolism really isn’t very efficient, frankly), they’d all run out of power within a year’s time.
Anything that has zombies alive past the first few weeks (unless they can readily feed and drink and aren’t rotting away) has to rely on supernatural causes. In that case, then, no, an “actual” zombie apocalypse would not be easy to defeat. Our practical knowledge of spellcasting is, ah, really limited let’s say.
And once you’ve decided to just embrace the inherently supernatural nature of zombies, you can pick and choose whatever rules you like anyway. Zombies just violate basic thermodynamics? Awesome! Put enough of them on a treadmill and you have limitless, free energy.
I’ll be over here, trying to turn magic into a science, I guess. I’ll call it thaumatology. Science-magic. Magic-science. I don’t know yet.
Securing the ammo to do the job would be a challenge. I can see a mis-allocation of resources when it comes to that. People unwilling or unable to do the job may have large stockpiles, and those that are ready to ‘Lock-n-Load’ would run out pretty quick.
And you gotta have Rules. Consider Zombieland a training film. The second one, not so much.
But hey, bring it on!
So, could a zombie in a paraglider take off from a treadmill?
This is where the ingenuity of a country that’s accustomed to limited availability of firearms, but plenty of cricket bats, has the advantage. See this excerpt from the reenactment of a zombie event in a recent U.K. documentary:
In TWD, the zombie virus is airborne. Everyone is already infected, which means if you die in any circumstances, you come back as a zombie, not just if you get bitten.
…one of my favourite things about the series Z-Nation and Black Summer is that both of them explored “how things go wrong” in the fog of war of the early days of the zombie crisis.
Open (general, not character specific) spoilers for Z Nation and Black Summer from now.
The protagonists of Z Nation are zombie killing machines. But through flashbacks we see that it took time for everyone to understand the rules. They learn either via accident or from “rumors’” that you can kill the zombies by taking out the head. They learn how you get turned. But in the beginning not everybody knew the rules, and it was while people were figuring out the rules that most of the people died and society collapsed.
In one of the early episodes our protagonists visit a well fortified base lead by a seasoned veteran. The base is secure, no zombies can get in, the people have set up a sustainable fortress where they can live normal lives.
But they let in a few members of a cult. And those members kill themselves in the middle of the dining hall, immediately turn into zombies and chaos ensues in seconds. It only takes a few minutes for the base to get wiped out. It was a strategic failure but an understandable one: its traditional warfare coming up against insurgent tactics. Combating zombies requires a fundamental change in paradigm. (I didn’t think a cult infiltrating a base and turning themselves into zombies would be a thing that people would do. But then I see videos like this and realize that as absurd and comedic as Z Nation could be, it would be a lot closer to what might actually happen than anything I saw on the Walking Dead).
Another example is the final battle in Black Summer. Our protagonists are advancing on the stadium and they meet up with groups of other people approaching the stadium so they all form a (loose) line that (initially) from a strategic view works really really well. The line allows them to focus on their individual arc of fire and they can clear the zombies in front of them knowing that there won’t be any zombies behind them. And this works right up until one of the characters in the line accidentally gets shot, turns into a zombie, and then it all devolves into chaos again. The line is broken and they go from zombies just in front of them to being surrounded by zombies in seconds.
By the end of Z Nation our protagonists have literally seen it all and zombies end up being the least of their problem. But it took time to get there and requires a change in paradigm and tactics, and by that time society had essentially collapsed.
On a completely different note that I just thought of while I was writing this, and comparing the Covid response of places like NZ (where I live) to places like the US and the UK. Covid-19 turned out to be (relatively) easy to defeat here. I just had to sit on my ass for eight week to break the chains of community transmission. The government closed the borders and set up managed isolation facilities, ramped up testing and contact tracing and we were done. Its a very super-easy formula. Victoria Australia followed that formula and went from hundreds of infections a day down to zero.
But I watch in horror as the numbers go up all around the rest of the world, and I keep seeing the same mistakes being made over and over and over again. Would the same thing happen with a zombie outbreak? Yeah, I think it would. No matter how simple the solution humans will figure out a way to fuck up the response.
It’s true, and in the original Night of the Living Dead the humans appeared to be winning at the end of the movie even if our protagonists didn’t fare so well. We’ve got an enemy that is clumsy, cannot form complex plans, learn from experience, or use tools. I don’t ever want to be in a situation where something is trying to eat me, but I’d feel fairly confident that I could beat a bunch of zombies. I don’t even need a firearm. Me and a few friends could make ourselves some shields, set up a bottleneck, and take turns playing a whack-a-zombie falling back if their numbers become overwhelming.
George Romero understood this when he made the first modern zombie movie. Local law enforcement had it under control by the next day.