Zombie CSU

by Jonathan Maberry

  It’s been established that zombies are attracted to sound. Guns are noisy, and unless you have enough bullets to chop down every zombie who comes running after it hears a shot, you’re in trouble. When faced with a zombie while running for cover, it’s best to pick a response that will get the job done as quietly as possible, and the human body is a virtually silent weapon.

  Not all martial arts are based strictly on unarmed fighting, however. Many teach the use of staffs, clubs, chain whips, spears, knives, and swords. None of these weapons run out of ammunition (although swords will blunt after you’ve chopped a few dozen necks); and they are relatively silent. Of course they require skill, and unless we already know there are zombies on the loose, it’s not likely we’ll just happen to have our lucky samurai sword with us the day the dead rise.

  JUST THE FACTS

  Fighting the Dead

  As a martial arts instructor, I advocate self-defense training for everyone—and that has nothing to do with any fear of the dead coming back to life with an appetite.

  There are thousands of different martial arts, and these arts teach both armed and unarmed skills for defense and attack. Every country has had some kind of native art. The process of development and proliferation as we understand it from a historical perspective got its start in India thousands of years ago and then spread slowly through China and from there into Korea, Japan, and Okinawa…and then around the globe. And over the last hundred-odd years, the martial arts have split into three distinct categories: sport (boxing, fencing, judo, wrestling), esoteric (tai chi, some forms of kung-fu, aikido) and combat (anything self-defense oriented).

  A case can be made that all martial arts have a combative element, but really many of the most popular sport arts need significant modification to be effective in life-or-death combat. Judo and wrestling rely on throws and pins; boxing is based on pain and tissue damage; contact karate and kickboxing are mostly point-driven. Zombies never submit to holds, you can’t choke them out, they’re dead so what do they care if they get a broken nose, and they’re not likely to weep over being outscored in a fight. A boxer might get eaten; a mixed martial-arts grappler who takes his undead opponent to the floor is probably going to become a picnic snack for the zombie’s friends. The arts that would flourish during a zombie crisis would have to be those focusing on structural damage and killing.

  From the point of view of technical philosophy—the logic behind the development and implementing of combat kills—even most of these more lethal combat arts need to be adjusted for use against the undead. Some of the most popular skills would be eliminated out of hand. The two-knuckle punch, though capable of breaking bones and rupturing internal organs, is a poor choice against a zombie; as is the tiger-claw slash across the face, the elbow to the solar plexus, and the good old-fashioned kick to the balls. Against a mugger, rapist, or thug, these are fan favorites, but zombies tend to shrug them off. But a side-thrust kick to the knee will take a ghoul down, no question about it. Living dead or not the zombie still depends on its skeleton, and we’ve already established that skeletons are designed by nature to resist the constant pull of gravity. They are in effect scaffolding. Break a knee and gravity will pull the zombie down, simple as that. Yes it can still crawl; yes it can still bite…but it can’t crawl faster than you can run; and while it’s crawling along the floor, you have time to go pick up some handy blunt instrument and bash its skull in.

  * * *

  Art of the Dead—Kevin Breaux

  Subway Zombie

  “If the dead rose then martial arts will save more lives, at least during the outbreak phase, than guns will. Most people don’t carry guns, but millions study—or have studied—martial arts. I know that if a zombie came at me on the street, or in the subway, or some ordinary place…I’d be ready.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Zombies…Fast or Slow? Part 7

  “Quick answer: slow. Slow answer: These dudes are falling apart at the seams. Even I can’t go very fast some days. Imagine how the average person feels the day after a rugged workout and multiply it by 100 or 1000. That’s the sort of physical condition I attribute to zombies. Their muscles are detaching from the bones. It’s a wonder they can move at all.”—Bev Vincent, author of the Bram Stoker Award-nominated book The Road to the Dark Tower (NAL, 2004), the authorized companion to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.

  “I like slow zombies but it’s all about the story that’s being told. I’ve seen fast zombies done right and they’re just as scary, just as effective, as shamblers and twitchers.”—David Wellington, best-selling author of Monster Planet.

  “I kind of like the fast zombies only because there is a greater sense of urgency to their approach. They seem more human, and thus deceptive. You may have to get up close to one to tell if it’s an actual zombie, and then it may be too late. But I think a proper mix of the fast and slow type of zombie is probably the best. The slower ones can be the ones that have been dead and rotten a lot longer.”—Zombie portrait artist Robert Sacchetto

  * * *

  Expert Witness

  “There are few techniques more reliable than the side kick,” observes Rene Sampier, an 8th-degree black belt instructor of Shorin-Ryu Karate-Do from El Paso, Texas. “Even a fair-sized kid can break a grown man’s knee. The technique is pretty simple: you pull your knee up above the waist and tilt your hip so that the flat of your heel is aimed to the thin spot just above the kneecap, the base of the femur. There’s very little muscle there and by stamping sideways and down you knock the attacker’s leg straight and then it breaks. It’s about as easy as standing a cheap broomstick against a wall and breaking it with your foot.”

  Australian women’s mixed martial arts champion Jane Dalkieth agrees. “The adult male knee breaks at about twenty PSI when hit just above the knee. Just a side kick of even reasonable speed (anything above fifteen miles an hour) will crack the bone My grandmother could at least sprain a man’s knee, and if you piss her off enough she could probably break it.”

  Jim Winterbottom, a teacher of Jeet Kune Do (the style developed by the late Bruce Lee), has this to say: “As much as the human body is built to be enormously tough there are always built in vulnerabilities. Otherwise only the strongest would ever have survived, which we know isn’t the case. Martial arts taught us that smart trumps strong because the smart fighter knows where the body is weak. Even a bruiser like the Rock has weak spots. The knees, the elbows, the small bones in the foot, the ankle, the neck…all vulnerable. Zombies have those same structural weaknesses and they don’t dodge, evade or block. You don’t even have to be a great fighter to score the shot.”

  “I had steel-reinforced hockey pads on my knees, covered with double-thick foam,” remembers Sean Gallagher, a former assistant in the Personal Defense for Women program at Temple University, “and even with all that I had my leg sprained a couple of times. If it hadn’t been for the steel struts in the knee braces I’d be in a friggin’ wheelchair. And these were just women—some of them as small as five foot tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet. And I was trying not to get kicked. Some friggin’ zombie would go straight down, no questions asked.”

  The kick to the knee is the easiest, fastest disabling technique for zombies. A slightly less effective but still highly useful skill is the sweep. “There are two basic kinds of sweeps,” explains Sensei David Pantano, fourth-degree black belt and owner of CounterStrike Kenpo Karate in Philadelphia. “You have the footsweep and the leg sweep. The footsweep needs more timing and is used to knock aside an attacker’s foot just as he’s taking a step forward. With the foot knocked aside the body is still committed to the forward motion and down he goes. The leg sweep, on the other hand, doesn’t rely on such precise timing but it does require more muscle. With that you launch a kick—wheel, roundhouse, whatever—at the attacker’s lower leg; anything from the back of the knee on down. Basically you’re kicking out his support, and again down he goes.”

&nb
sp; Other useful kicks include the back kick and some of the lower, more powerful turning kicks including the front thrust. “A front thrust or shuffle side thrust isn’t going to do any kind of damage to a zombie,” warns semipro kickboxer Calvin Watson, “but it’ll knock their ugly asses away from you, maybe clear a path, maybe knock the sonsabitches into a ditch or down a flight of stairs. You use them to buy time to move, and then you damn well move!”

  “Snapping kicks will not have the effect that we would desire,” advises Damian Gonzalez, an Aikidoist and instructor of Nami Ryu Kenjutsu. “Avoid all of the snapping kicks, front, side or snapping round kicks, either to the body, face, or groin. They work by generating pain and we are dealing with something that wouldn’t feel pain.”

  Hand strikes are a different matter. Body punches would serve little purpose, but the jaw, eyes, neck, and legs are still viable targets for well-placed, fast, and powerful blows. “I would think their (zombies’) motor functions and dexterity would be greatly impaired,” observes Raymond Hook, a sibak (assistant instructor) of Kajukenbo2, “therefore the balance of a zombie would be almost non-existent. With this in mind, striking from a distance would be my best bet. I think low strikes to the legs and knees could be just what the witch doctor ordered. With limited motor skills a broken leg or separated knee would be hard to maneuver with. Also, weapons would do great. I would most likely want to use something with a bit of length, and something that might be lying around. I’m thinking a shovel, something that’s practical and easily accessible, and nothing fancy.”

  The Zombie Factor

  Zombies don’t fight. They just grab and bite. Singly they are easy to defeat and easy to escape. A punch or forceful blow—with hands, feet, or a handy blunt object—that just knocks them off balance will allow a human to run past them.

  The danger comes when the zombies are in groups, or if there are a lot of them spread out along the human’s route of escape. While fatigue won’t affect a zombie, a human can eventually tire and slow down. That could get ugly.

  JUST THE FACTS

  Edged Weapons

  Swords and knives have worked pretty well for the last several thousand years, and if somehow zombies became a concern for modern man, I think we’d see a pretty quick return to the way of the blade. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this book, zombies can probably hear, and gunshots are noisy. Attracting more zombies when trying to deal with the one at hand is not a great solution if you don’t have a lot of ammo and are a reliable marksman. Though finesse in swordplay takes years of exacting practice, the basics of swinging a sword are fairly easy for anyone to grasp.

  Like all forms of combat, however, the nature of zombies does require that the sword be used with some degree of precision. Slashes to the body and stab wounds are (pardon the pun) pointless. Swords would have to be used to decapitate (ideally), or failing that to literally “disarm” the attacker and cut at least one leg out from under him.

  When possible it’s preferable to cut off a zombie’s head. Most swords are capable of doing this, and anyone from a midsized adolescent boy (or average-sized woman) can manage that, once they learn how to use the hips rather than muscular arm strength to power the cut. Muscles may fatigue quickly but hip torsion provides easy and virtually inexhaustible power. The motion would be similar to that of a ballplayer swinging a bat. This does take practice, and requires a sword sturdy enough to cut through meat, tendon, and bone; or one slim enough to cut like a scalpel. Heavy-bladed swords, like European longswords, sabers, and cutlasses are fine, but they depend on considerable physical strength. Most Asian swords such as the Japanese katana are lighter and designed to take a finer edge. This is my favorite weapon of choice.

  The katana, with its sleek and elegant single-edged blade is the samurai’s traditional weapon, and these swords are considered to be the sharpest weapons ever devised. The samurai treasured their swords, and eventually formed such a devotion to them that it was believed the sword was the embodiment of the samurai’s soul. The katana is so sharp and the cut it makes so fast that it is estimated that it can sever the head from the neck in one hundredth of a second. Even fast zombies are no match for that kind of speed.

  The samurai had many different types of swords and knives, including the tachi—great swords, which were four feet in length; katana—thirty-two inches; wakizashi—fourteen inches; tanto—a dagger of varying length; among others. The samurai were trained to use these and many other weapons through practice of various specialized weapon arts such as kenjutsu (swordplay), naginatajutsu (art of the halberd), kyujutsu (archery), tanto-jutsu (dagger fighting), hanbojutsu (art of the short stick), to name just a handful of their weapon arts.

  Despite the antiquity of the Japanese sword arts, it’s easier to learn the use of those arts today than it is the use of more modern European sword skills. Many martial arts teach weapon use—and the sword is very popular—including jujutsu, aikido, aikijutsu, ninjutsu, as well as those schools dedicated expressly to the sword: kenjutsu and kendo, iaijutsu and iaido.

  There are a number of useful swords in the Chinese martial arts, many of which are taught in the various styles of kung fu. The dao is a tough single-edged saber ideal for chopping and useful to modern zombie fighters because its use is so common among practitioners of kung fu and wu shu, which means that there are—at a conservative estimate—ten thousand Americans who have a fair working knowledge of its use. The heavier dadao and piandao are also reliable, though fewer people are skilled in it; and the pudao, known as the “horse cutter sword,” is very powerful, but its use is almost entirely unknown in the West. A guandao is an excellent weapon (once mastered) but cumbersome for a beginner. It’s a pole weapon with what looks like a heavy curved blade on the end, similar in basic concept to the European halberd.

  If we enter an age where zombies are a reality, then the way of the sword would make an even more substantial comeback. Bet on it.

  Expert Witness

  Jujitsu sensei Rick Robinson, chief instructor of the Yamabushi-Ryu dojo in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, agrees that the sword will, quite literally, give humans an edge over zombies: “There is a cut that is drawn in an are from left to right that hits the forward forearm of the attacker, and continues to hit the orbital socket with the kissaki,3 that would turn the head away, the sword is brought around a second time to take the head. This prevents an initial grab and then beheads the zombie. If you use the hips for the cut rather than the arms the movement takes almost no energy and can be utilized many, many time without tiring. That would be very helpful with groups of zombies. There are techniques meant to sever the legs, but with zombies they would be more useful with naginata4 or nagimaki.”

  “I would want to have either a wakizashi, or katana—one of the thin-bladed swords,” says kenjutsu expert Damian Gonzalez,” so that I can cleanly cut through necks or hit them right above the bridge of the nose to remove the tops of their heads. Cutting off the arms and legs is useful when trying to escape.”

  Harry Matsushita, a fourth dan5 in the Cleveland Toyama Ryu Iaijutsu sword school, says, “If we have a problem with those ghouls from the movies people would flock to our dojos (schools) to learn how to fight. We’d be able to meet that need, too, because we wouldn’t have to teach them the full art of iaijutsu or kenjutsu. After all, they wouldn’t need to learn formality and ritual, they wouldn’t have to learn how to block. All they would need to master are a very few basic cuts. Taking the leg, taking the outstretched arm, taking the head. We could crash-course them through a lot of that in a day and refine it for practical application in a week.”

  Zombie Mutations by Ken Meyer, Jr.

  “Zombies are frightening but they’re no match for skilled fighters.”

  “Ninjutsu swordplay would be pretty useful,” insists Bernardo Gutierrez, a fifth dan in that art. “Ninjutsu isn’t about ritual swordplay or duels—it’s dodge, evade and kill. The big thing would be to reinforce in practitioners the need to take head
s off rather than cut throats or slash open the body, but that’s just a matter of some focused training.”

  And what about other edged weapons?

  “I’d bet my life on the effectiveness of the kukri knife,” says Tapaswi Dhamma,6 a practitioner of the Burmese martial art of Bando. “It’s a great bone cutter, it’s heavy enough to lop off an arm or sever a head but light enough to be mighty damn fast.” The kukri, or khukuri, is an ancient weapon from Nepal that is favored by the Gurkha, a hardy people from Nepal and parts of North India. This long knife has a 20-degree bend in the blade that allows for a combination of chopping and cutting.7 “If zombies ever attacked a Gurkha village,” Dhamma reflects, “even our kids would make short work of them, slow or fast.”

  “I think you’d find that there are a lot of people out there who know how to use a sword,” insists Brady Howard, a sword and arms trainer for Renaissance combat performers. “Sure, we don’t practice with sharpened blades, but we train to be good swordsmen; and most of us own new or historical blades that will definitely take an edge. If zombies start coming after us we’ll sharpen up and be ready.”

  Smaller knives would be a bit less useful because they require far more precision and would really only be of value in attempting to blind a zombie (very risky), darting in to cut hamstrings or ankle tendons (also risky), or in stabbing up into the slot at the base of the skull where a knife blade could rise up to pierce the brain. Whereas this technique, favored by knife-wielding assassins and military special forces, would dispatch a zombie, it’s doubtful anyone but an expert would be able to pull it off.