Zombies vs. Body-Snatchers!

Cafe Society
1

Suppose there were simultaneous global outbreaks of both zombies and body snatchers:

  1. Which group takes over humanity the fastest?

  2. Which group ends up dominating the planet in the long run?
    Assumptions:

  3. Zombies: early-Romero-style stupid, slow shamblers for the zombies, with the following provisos:

    A) A human must be directly contaminated (although a scratch will suffice) to become a zombie – i.e., forget the death-from-any-cause-always-creates-a-zombie premise (introduced in Night of the Living Dead but abandoned by the Dawn of the Dead remake).

    B) Zombies are stupid, incapable of tool use more sophisticated than smashing in a window with a rock (a la the pre-Romero The Last Man On Earth, with Vincent Price), and utterly incapable of pulling off the trickier moves they pull in Land of the Dead.

    C) Zombies are landlocked. None of this silly crap about walking underwater to reach an island or another continent, which smacks of zack biological revisionism and in any event implies an unzombie-like degree of forethought or determination.

    D) Zombies can be “killed” or stopped only by destroying the brain or by total body destruction (i.e., by crushing, shredding or immolation.)

  4. Body Snatchers: Don Siegel/Philip Kaufman-style body-snatchers, in which the human victim has to fall asleep for at least a few seconds with a pod located nearby, say, within fifty feet or closer.

    A) The snatchers’ intelligence (or instincts) is a shared, “hive”-style collective purpose and general understanding of how to propagate their numbers. Whether an individual snatcher’s intelligence is limited by that of the host human (or other) it takes over is… unknown, or at least debatable.

    B) The snatchers are only as resilient or frail as their host species. Whatever will kill a human will kill a snatcher in the form of a human.

2

I vote for the Body-Snatchers on both counts. Zombies are easy to identify and as long as everyone cooperates, they’re easy to kill. With Body-Snatchers, I can see a BattleStar Galatica-like paranoia developing.

3

Body Snatchers or humans win; the zombies get annihilated right off. Modern military weapons will shred, burn and explode them. There’s a reason you don’t see human wave tactics any more, especially at a zombie-shambling pace.

As for the Body Snatchers, that’s a lot more interesting. If there’s a way to test for them, and it and them are discovered soon enough they get destroyed, or reduced to a sporadic problem. If the test is dicovered late, then they could easily have taken over whole countries from the top down, and we’d have a Cold War scenario, with Body Snatchers instead of Commies under every bed. If there is no test possible, then at best a lot of privacy and likely freedom is lost, since the only way to root them out will by to find and destroy the pods, which would require constant, relentless searching everywhere, no holds barred. Even then, the Body Snatchers have a good chance of winning in the end.