Murdermouth: Zombie Bits
Page 6
LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: A lot of things would have to go wrong, more than just pettiness and in-fighting, for us to screw the pooch so badly that we’d all become dinner for the dead.
SLOW ZOMBIES RISING AS A RESULT OF TOXIC CONTAMINATION.
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 slow-down 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 weapons of mass destruction in order to sterilize large geographic sections. Fuel air bombs would be the first choice, with nukes as a last-case fallback plan.
Continental survival following a 5 percent-plus infection would be 50-50. 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 case there will likely be a high percentage of non-infected fatalities during the sterilization process.
LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: See above.
SLOW ZOMBIES RISING AS A RESULT OF UNEXPLAINED RADIATION.
This results in all of the recently deceased coming back to life. This is the classic George A. Romero Night of the Living Dead scenario. 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 done.
POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: The premise is that the radiation somehow permeates the entire atmosphere at roughly the same time. In that case, the risk for a global pandemic is absolute.
LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: None. This scenario even eliminates hold-out areas such as remote islands, fortified bases, etc.
LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Zero, except at facilities hardened against radiation.
LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: Virtually 100%. For storytellers interested in spinning a truly apocalyptic zombie story then the classic Night scenario is the way to go. But it’s so completely unwinnable as to almost inspire a ‘who cares?’ response. Everyone dies, therefore everyone will become a zombie…whether now or in forty years, so what’s the point of fighting for survival.
It would be the same as taking a week’s worth of food and locking yourself in a radiation-proof room during a worldwide nuclear war: sure, you’d survive for a week, but so what? The futility of this was eloquently explored in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend; but even here the author relents from total fatalism by providing a new ‘humanity’ to inherit the earth once the original tenants have all been evicted.
When writing the script for Night, Romero was undoubtedly not thinking of launching either a franchise or a genre, and from a creative standpoint the “all recent dead rise” mythology painted him into a corner. In the later films Romero subtly backed off from this stance. It may still have been part of his mythology, but he didn’t belabor the point, or even raise it again as it negates the point of all resistance. Instead the infection through bite scenario was used.
FAST ZOMBIES RISING BECAUSE OF A PLAGUE.
This is the premise of the remake of Dawn of the Dead. Something starts the plague and it spreads very, very fast. Victims who die as a result of bites reanimate within seconds and they retain human speed and coordination.
POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: Less likely than shown in the movie unless a lot of folks with bites suddenly hop onto airplanes to visit foreign countries. Once the disease becomes known in one country the governments of neighboring countries would react the same way they would to a military coup: they’re seal their borders, start pointing missiles and very likely consider pressing those big red buttons. If things got out of hand it would be a race to see whether the plague or radioactive fallout would claim the most lives.
LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: Most likely it would become an overwhelming disaster within the confines of connected continents. North and South America would fall within days or weeks if the infection starts there. Same with Australia. Since Europe and Asia are connected by shared borders any plague that starts there would consume that land mass. Rough terrain (mountains, ice, oceans, big rivers, etc.) would form natural barriers and allow for humans to regroup and make a coordinated stand.
LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Slim to none unless the nature of the threat is identified (and believed) early on. The disease spreads too fast to allow much reaction, study, preparation and response. It’s the same nihilistic view as the radiation raising all the dead, and from the storytelling point of view there is only one story to tell. At best you can try for episodic survivor tales, but that’s it.
LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: There are two views on this. If you stick to the mythology as shown in the Dawn remake, then yeah, we’re toast; but since the disease in that film doesn’t operate the way any disease is likely to act, then we probably have a shot. No matter how virulent and aggressive a disease is, there has to be time for it to spread through the bloodstream.
The thought that an infected person reanimates after hours or days is plausible; and the fact that they reanimate quickly makes some degree of sense, especially in justifying why they are fast and more coordinated: they are not in rigor yet and they’ve suffered significantly less damage to the brain. Fewer brain cells have died and therefore more of their motor cortex is working even if cognition is diminished.
But the thought that a person who is bitten to death immediately reanimates and as a completely infectious vector is less likely. If they die from a bite to the throat (as does Anna’s husband in Dawn) and bleeds out from a torn artery, there won’t have been time for the disease to have taken hold throughout the entire body.
The mouth won’t yet contain a sufficient (if any) amount of the pathogen to make them an instant carrier for the disease. So, the whole scenario where the disease spreads out of control and everyone immediately becomes a murderous zombie doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. Makes a helluva movie, though.
FAST, THINKING ZOMBIES RISING BECAUSE OF A GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENT GONE WRONG.
This is the Return of the Living Dead model, and it has other tweaks on the model. The infected die over a period of a few hours and then reanimate as fully cognizant zombies. They can think, talk, strategies and work cooperatively. They also have a desire to eat only human brains, and their own bodies are remarkably difficult to kill.
Even severed limbs are active, as if every cell in the body has become a separate being. How this works with an arm detached from the central nervous system, not to mention the supportive and cooperative structures of the rest of the shoulder’s tendons and bones, is a bit hard to explain (which is why even as a kid I always thought that films like The Crawling Hand were just plain silly).
POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: If we accept the mythology in its entirety, then the spread of the disease begins as a standard one-to-one outbreak with pandemic potential; but when we add to this a deliberate and hostile intelligence then it becomes a battle on the level of ethnic genocide.
LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: Whomever has the best weapons will win; but with an enemy that can never be completely destroyed (even ash from incineration is a contaminant), there is no foreseen limit to the spread of the disease.
LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: Isolated communities capable of fortification may survive until the zombies acquire weapons. And even that fifty-foot high concrete wall will yield to a tank or fifty determined thinking zombies with jack-hammers.
FAST HUMAN ZOMBIES RISING BECAUSE OF A VIRUS.
This was the model used in George A. Romero’s The Crazies (and its remake) and in 28 Days Later. An event --a government experiment gone wrong in Crazies and a rage virus accidentally released in 28 Days Later—results in a rash of savage murders. The infected humans, especially in recent films, are incapable of controlled or rational thought and are, for all intents and purposes, fast zombies –even if they are technically alive.
POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: Like Dawn the premise requires that we accept that infection spreads instantly and completely through the entire body within seconds of contamination. This is the case in 28 Days Later but not so in the Crazies (the disease is in the local drinking water).
LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: The model from The Crazies is less destructive in that it has to enter the water and has to be consumed. Unless it is spread to other bodies of water by runoff, drainage, or (more devastatingly) rainfall, the problem could be contained to a limited area.
The 28 Days Later model is much worse but also unlikely. More likely the process of individual infection would take hours during which the infected would experience a decrease in rational behavior and an increase in hostility. Triage and quarantine would come later once order is restored.
LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Since a real disease needs a lag time of a few hours this would likely spin out of control when it first presents, but once a crisis is identified there are infrastructural disaster procedures in place at the local, state and federal levels. Losses would be high, and among them would be many uninfected who would be killed because the initial military responses would have to take a big-picture view of containment. However this applies to the Crazies model. If a disease could exist and spread with the rapidity shown in 28 Days Later, then, adios muchacho.
LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: If things were handled with the lack of military efficiency shown in the movies, then the whole world would go down in less than a year, except for isolated islands and fortified pockets. But I doubt that any military would crumble as easily as the occupying U.S. military does in 28 Weeks Later.
Some of my military chums tell me they groaned louder than a hungry zom when they saw the way military tactics were portrayed in that flick. Though they all liked the movie from a fan point of view, they all agreed that no one would ever have made it out of England (as they did in the film, using a stolen military helicopter).
Captain Dick Taylor, US Army (retired) put it this way: “Knowing the potential for a global disaster, anything—and I mean anything—flying out of that country, especially after a known outbreak, and not heading directly to a secure quarantine spot, would be shot out of the sky before they cleared the outbound coastline. There is not the slightest doubt about it.”
DELIBERATELY REANIMATED DEAD.
Authors and film-makers have been kicking this concept around for a long time, and there are some zombie experts who consider Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, published in 1918, to be the very first entry in this sub-genre. There’s some weight to the argument since it does involve the dead being brought back to life and, once revived, demonstrates decidedly hostile tendencies.
In the H. P Lovecraft’s 1922 short story “Herbert West—Reanimator,” a scientist’s attempts to create a reagent that will restore life to the dead backfires resulting in reanimated but mindless and aggressive corpses who bear a striking resemblance to the flesh-eating ghouls of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Director Stuart Gordon filmed this as Re-Animator in 1985 based on a script he co-wrote with Dennis Paoli and William Norris, and in this landmark film the zombie element was played up, both for laughs and for real shocks. These creatures are typically very strong, uncontrollably violent, but they can be destroyed.
POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: Only moderate.
LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: The dead are reanimated during a scientific process (electrochemistry in Frankenstein; injections of a reagent in Re-Animator; etc.) which means that any spread would be very slow unless a more efficient process was developed.
LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Once the threat is known, then any armed response would likely end things pretty quickly.
LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: Slim to none.
DEMON ZOMBIES.
Movies like Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series and books like Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead use demonic forces as the reason the dead rise. The demons of Evil Dead possess dead (and sometimes living) bodies and turn them into raging, bloodthirsty killing machines that can only be stopped by cutting them into harmless pieces. In the Keene novels, the demons inhabit all dead things, including insects and animals. Destroying the body of one does little since the demonic force can just switch to another host.
POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: Absolute.
LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: None.
LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: Not a chance.
LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: Prepare to meet thy Maker.
REVENGE ZOMBIES.
These are stories of the dead returning to life in order to redress some wrong or to resolve some unfinished business. The waterlogged zombies of Creepshow have come back for revenge; as is the sort-of-a-cyborg zombie in Deadly Friend. In the Blind Dead series, a bunch of slaughtered Knights Templar return from the grave to exact revenge on descendants of the villagers in whose town the knights were murdered.
In many of these stories the logic is warped in that there is supposed to be a need for justice so powerful that not even the grave can bar the way, and yet too often the murder spree of the zombies continues on long after the right is wrong, or more often, a large number of uninvolved civilians are killed just to satisfy the body-count fix of the audience.
POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: Small, if any.
LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: These cases tend to be localized incidents.
LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSITION: There’s a long and valued tradition of villagers with torches. Seems to work pretty well.
LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: None.
ALIEN ZOMBIES.
This is a storytelling form that allows all known rules of science to be quietly chucked out the window by taking the stance that “It all makes sense if it comes from outer space.” In some cases this is just lazy storytelling, as in dreck like the 1969 el cheapo film Astro-Zombies (with John Carradine) and Fred Olin Ray’s 1980 piece o’ junk Alien Dead and the all time worst film ever, Plan 9 From Outer Space.
On the other hand, it’s been used to great effect for storylines like the Marvel Zombies series of comic books (written by Robert Kirkman, Fre Van Lente, David Wellington, Seth Grahame-Smith and me) in which an alien plague begins infecting all of the Marvel superheroes, including Spider-Man, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and the Avengers). And the 2006 movie Slither, written and directed by James Gunn, dealt with a zombie outbreak caused by an alien organism that crash-lands on earth in a meteor.
POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL PANDEMIC: This varies depending on the type of infection. In Marvel Zombies the plague spreads as fast as it does in the films Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later, and the problem is exacerbated by having super-powered zombies. That’s a no-win scenario; but in Slither and films of its genre the problem spreads with relative slowness.
LIMITS TO DISEASE SPREAD: Potentially none in all cases unless deliberately stopped.
LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL HUMAN OPPOSI
TION: For Marvel Zombies it’s zero; for the others we stand a fair chance.
LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’RE ALL TOAST: For most of the genre, we have a shot at staying alive; but if a zombified Incredible Hulk shows up at your door, just pack it in.
###
JONATHAN MABERRY is a New York Times best-selling and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author and Marvel Comics writer. His works include the bestsellers PATIENT ZERO (St. Martin’s Griffin; in development for ABC TV), THE WOLFMAN (Tor Books; based on the hit movie), ZOMBIE CSU and WANTED UNDEAD OR ALIVE (Citadel Press); The Pine Deep Trilogy (GHOST ROAD BLUES, DEAD MAN’S SONG and BAD MOON RISING; Kensington Books); and ROT & RUIN (Simon & Schuster). He was part of the writing team for the MARVEL ZOMBIES RETURN (with Fred Van Lente, David Wellington and Seth Grahame-Smith) and writes Black Panther, DoomWar, Captain America, Deadpool and other comics for Marvel. His short fiction has been included in THE NEW DEAD, THE LIVING DEAD 2, HISTORY IS DEAD, NEW BLOOD and others. His books have been translated into over 20 languages. He is also a board member of the Zombie Research Society.
MURDERMOUTH: ISSUE ONE
A comic script by Scott Nicholson
Art by Derlis Santacruz
(You get be drawn as a zombie in our comic for a $25 donation to support the project. Visit http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/murdermouth for details.)
ARTIST NOTE: Post-apocalyptic world in which zombies are an endangered species—they are so rare they are kept as sideshow freaks. Murdermouth is one of the freaks—he is fully intelligent, caged against his will. But his intelligence is masked in a fog—he’s only dimly aware that he used to be human, and his hunger sometimes obscures his reason.