Zombie Apocalypse

[beejazz]

Woah. Nicely done.

[Endless_Helix]

Ernest sighed as he and his classmates listened to their teacher lecture. He doodled a little on his arm, which didn't do much since they were using clay tablets. Styluses just left a red mark for about for about fourty or so seconds on his skin. His classroom had once been a part of a steel factory. Bits of machinery littered the factory floor. Perhaps the room they used was once an office for a manager, or a storage room,  but now there was no hint to it's original purpose. It was just a bare room full of 30 kids and a grizzled old man. The old man's name was Greg. He'd been fairly old  when the Pale event happened and consequently had survived a lot. Ernest and all the kids at least vaguely remembered the pale event. Ernest was 8, and consequently it was somewhat foggy for him. The Pale Event happened about four years ago; he was four at the time, and could hardly be expected to remember much about it.

"Now, listen here you little tykes, today we're going to deal with how to kill zombies, or Revenants, or whtever they're calling them these days. The obvious thing is that range is your friend. A lone zombie is far stronger than a lone man, and consequently wrestling with one is a bad idea."

The island this community was on is called Blackrock Military Base. It had just under 300 inhabitants, mostly over 20 and under 30. A lot of them were soldiers or factory workers. A lot of the kids were from the town near by. Ernest used to live right near the elementary school. The elementary school was now a mass grave full of child-sized revenants. What protected them from all the dead in town was the water. The life-giving Atlantic ocean. It also provided a lot of their food and water; the desalinization plant still functioned, and someone had rigged up a small power generator that ran off of the medium sized river on the island. It powered the desalinization plant and the Factory. Not the one they were in, which didn't have power, like most of the buildings on the island. The Factory produced munitions, body armor, and converted vehicles to suit the needs of the survivors.  It was also one of the largest communities of humans on the planet. There were maybe two larger on the continent and seven total larger accross the world.

"Guns are our biggest advantage. We can take them zombies down without much difficulty, comparitively. Headshots are the key, knees are good, neck is better, hips ain't bad either, but only with high caliber weapons or explosive rounds. The key is taking down their mobility or totally blowin them to bits. Also we got water. For some reason, water scrambles 'em up and they can't just sense us, like they normally can. You need to drench them or partially submerge them, at the least. It isn't based on size though. One big one I saw, was friend of mine actually, got stuck in a kiddie pool. Couldn't summon the energy to get out of it. Blew it's head off. Anyway, Fire's fine if you got something to hide in while it's taking them down. Dead flesh burns decent, specially husks and dashers, but it takes a long time to kill them if you only use fire. They don't feel pain, so it doesn't disable them while it kills them."

One of the things that the Rock, as it was known coloquially, did was train the few kids that lived there to survive. Greg was the one who brought it up originally and was the teacher. Already the survival rate was up 30%. Ernest remembered hearing the figure from his father, originally a mechanical engineer, currently a weapons designer. Ernest had inherited his father's head for numbers and interest, so he didn't really care about actually killing zombies himself. It was useful information, but it was mostly obvious when you thought about it. The worst thing about the training program was the clay tablets. Ernest much prefered the computers that ran on the solar batteries, and paper. Paper was hard to come by; there hadn't been a real timber operation in four years. They said that out west most of the power grid was still functional, if dormant, because of all the solar batteries in the desert. The concentration of people who died out there during the Pale Event was actually quite low, due to the lack of populace.  Sure the bigger cities were essentially mausoleums, just like in the east, but in the desert there just weren't enough people around to create a huge zombie problem. It was a question of population density.

"The Zombies biggest edge is their ability to sense us whenever we get close. We haven't figured out any other way to jam it besides water. Some believe that they can pick up our brainwaves, and once an EMP generator was suggested, but no-one has the resources to produce something like that. So don't laugh when you see some of the recovery teams go out with water balloons."

And that was about as much of the lesson that was useful to Ernest, so he started designing a new spiker. Probably wouldn't work, but it might. And that was the key.

 

[DeeL]

Ooooooh, nice addition, Helix!  This is most certainly not 'The Bunker', but Blackrock could easily be an interesting setting in its own right.

And now I think it's time to establish what I originally had in mind, although at this point it's been blown to smithereens.  The first vignette, The Captive, was intended to have taken place a few months after the Pale Event, when everyone was still exploring the ramifications.  The first generation of zombies would most certainly have taken the world by surprise.  They would have had essentially human characteristics, although evidence of actual thought would have been elusive until someone had a chance - and the stomach - to watch them feed.

Things wouldn't have exploded completely out of control until the first generation 'developed' into dashers, the light-weight zombies that combined inhuman endurance with superhuman bursts of speed.  I have a story in mind for those early days, but it might have to wait until Halloween.

By the time the dashers had started to degenerate into husks, zombies would outnumber humans in the major population centers.  Where there were no humans at all, the undead would begin to amble, spreading the curse outward to rural areas that might have been otherwise untouched.  Where humanity kept a toehold, however, the dead would congregate.  It would be a nightmare, but it would give the 'safe areas' a chance to regroup and eventually strike back.

Events would be complicated by the presence of zombies, or creatures very like them, that would seem to demonstrate human levels of intelligence.  Mostly they would avoid human contact - since they didn't trigger the feeding instinct of zombies, they could escape contact fairly easily.  This definitely includes the 'person-zombie' in Dirt's account, and might include the being that provoked Edward to homicide in Beejazz' earlier post.  

We've kind of gotten the time periods jumbled, though - The Captive (or the Doc as we've begun to call him) seems to be contemporaneous with the 6-years-later period.  He may have a unique story of his own.  

So humanity would survive in those places where there would be sufficient isolation to keep the zombies away, or sufficient preserved food to keep humans alive underground or in confined spaces until the dashers were gone.  After that point, human communities would have the best chance in places that combined a significant military force with some knowledge of agriculture.

Who else has thoughts on the matter?  I have less interest in being the sole creator or arbiter of this setting than I do making a fun shared universe.

[beejazz]

Only real thoughts are "Whatever happened to the Doc after escape?" I got no real ideas on how to *conclude* it, really.

[Endless_Helix]

Another thought is that islands are wayyyy safer than the continents. It just wasn't likely that people died during the Pale event on islands. Probabiity functions more accurately the more people you put in the function, so many of the islands would be essentially untouched, giving a nice foot hold to humanity.

Also, I'd think that since it's highly likely that the human population centers are near or in the ocean (islands, not underwater empires), fishing would become an immensely important part of the human diet, and livestock would fade out of the picture. My post was kind of intended to "jump ahead" a little to ressurrect (pun intended) the thread.

[Túrin]

If left alone, how long would it take for a zombie to lose mobility? Probably more than a decade I guess? More than two? Regardless, a time may come to pass after the Pale Event when most of the zombies that were created shortly after it are no longer mobile. What would happen then? (I'm assuming here that a few years after the Pale Event, the surviving humans will have become smart enough to no longer suffer considerable losses to the zombies, so few new zombies will arise anymore.)

Túrin

[DeeL]

Indeed Turin, the zombies are a transitory crisis.  The effect that animates the dead also preserves them from decay, but by no means perfectly.  In the dry, cold Gobi Desert a zombie might make it for 20 years; in other environments the 'unlife' expectancy is much lower.  In a temperate climate, figure a decade, tops.  Probably the zombie in question would be reduced to harmlessness considerably before then as wear and happenstance removed limbs and bone structure.  Six years after the Pale Event, Key felt confident in going alone to a metropolitan center and spiking husks; he described this as 'boring work'.

 Taking a cue from the Zombie Survival Guide, I am ruling that zombies may be preserved perfectly by freezing; this means that in areas where the temperature regularly drops below freezing in the winter the zombie menace may be ongoing for several decades; I'll go as far as to say that such thawed zombies would function as husks, however, due to the effect of freezing and thawing on their remaining body integrity.

[Endless_Helix]

Still, that reduced casualities would only really apply to an organized, intelligent resistance that dealt with zombies on a consistant basis. The construction of the Zombie Pandemic doesn't really facilitate much communication which makes it very difficult to share knowledge. It creates small, closed communities that are hyper defensive. Carrier pigeons would be one way, given that zombies aren't attracted to animals. The zombie pandemic would basically be a series of epidemics.

 One zombie would find an undefended location and then basically create a new epidemic, which would lead to at least two or three zombies wandering off to found new colonies, while the rest spread in a fairly circular growth pattern. In cold climates the safest time would be winter, because it would certainly slow them down. Their joints would freeze.

One thought that occured to me was on the "talkers", the zombie-people. I have to say that they have the potential to sneak into a closed community and quickly spread the "disease". Perhaps that's their function, to turn the transient zombie threat into a permanent threat.

[Velox]

I offer up my theory on re-animation; it's simple, it's crude, maybe unimaginitive, but I dare say reasonable. Maybe I can tell you something you didn't know, or give you an idea for something new.

The dead cannot walk or eat. Nothing that is dead has motivation, nor does it feed or reproduce. Zombies have all the characteristics of being living organisms; they seem to require fuel (they try to eat people), they have some motivation (desire to eat people), and they reproduce (by spreading their "disease" through their bite). They move and walk and in some stories even have some memories of what they once were, sometimes even operate simple machinery in the quest to end their obligatory hunger for human flesh. Suffice to say, I don't think "zombies" are really dead. I think they simply are no longer true mammals. Instead, they are similar to single-celled organisms.

They all have the motivation to move to a source of food; or at least, a host for reproduction. Who knows if zombies actually gain any nourishment from human flesh. I think it's unlikely, as few stories (except "28 days later"... but they weren't really dead, just pissed off) ever feature zombies starving. The only thing they can do in their unlife is to create more zombies. Reproduction is common among all living things, and zombies seem to do so in a viral fashion, or at least like any disease. They seek a healthy host for their "seed" (supposedly the micro-organism which gives the human corpse energy and motion), which they infect; soon after the host becomes like the parent.

Like I said before, the dead can't move. Without muscles to move bones, and something to provide power and command to the muscles, you don't have an animated body (unless you want to get into telekinetic animation of bones, but I'm not big on "magic" explanations). When alive, the brain provides command to the muscles, and the muscles are powered by normal human metabolism -an extremely complicated system involving the intake of many different substances and transforming them into energy, and then motion. Zombies usually don't need their organs, so normal human metabolism is no longer functional. This is what makes them "dead", in that they resemble dead human beings. However, something must provide energy and motivation to the muscles that move the body towards live, healthy human flesh.

If I remember my biology class, the thing in our body that turns all of this oxygen and food and whatnot into actual energy is similar to bacteria; a little organelle in our cells that makes ATP, which we use to do stuff. I suggest that maybe the micro-organism which reanimates the body replicates some of the functions of a normal human body in order to get it moving and spread itself. It creates ATP which powers the muscles, activates the very base and simple functions of the brain, and provides a motivation to reproduce.

Therefore, zombies still rely upon some processes present in the human body, namely the skeletal, muscular, and nervous systems (hence the "shoot-them-inna-head" or "chop-em-up" methods). If the micro-organism which reanimates the body can act like the vascular system and transport the energy it creates throughout the body, then it can provide energy to all parts necessary for its reproduction.

I don't think a zombie is really all that far-fetched. There's a lot we don't understand about how life and death works, many ways for a disease to be spread, and lots of ways for an organism to survive... could be an alien bacteria that survives by reanimating the native dominant species and spreading like wildfire. I'm always a big fan of the bio-engineered weapon story.

-Professor Velox

[Túrin]

@ DeeL : I agree with Endless_Helix. If it takes 10 years on average for a zombie to rot away to the point where it can no longer move, it would be about 15 years after the Pale Event when things really start calming down (note that this is not taking into account the effect of the "sentient zombies", which, as Endless_Helix suggested, might serve to lengthen the crisis even further). Throughout the first five years, there would still be plenty of humans that have too little knowledge to prevent zombie-victims, especially considering that the Pale Event took a while to transform into a full-blown crisis. I'd imagine the zombie epidemic as a bell-curve, worsening throughout the first five years until the surviving humans would all have gathered in well-defended communities, then at its top throughout years five to ten, and then slowly wearing out throughout the next ten years (again, unless the "talkers" find a way of suspending the epidemic).

@ Velox121 : Though you've got some interesting suggestions, I'd personally opt not to get too deep into explaining the inner workings of the zombies. It demystifies things, and on top of that, people at the Bunker or the Rock or another post-Pale Event community don't have the means to figure this kind of things out.

Túrin

[Endless_Helix]

@Velox: That is a great summary of what could be zombie biology. Personally, I think that there are several other explanations as to precisely what animates the body (How about parasites in the reflexive nerves that feed off the bacteria attracted to the rotting flesh. The parasites generate an electric field that stimulates our reflex arcs. Adding more flesh to the pile would attract more bacteria, and thus more food...). While it does take away the mystery a bit, perhaps a bit of that is needed to comprehend why zombies do the things they do. Of course... That doesn't explain talkers.

[SA]

Not sure if anyone's covered this already, but with all these parasites/bacteria or whatever, what's coordinating their movements?  It's all well and good to have the motive power to walk, but walking is not an easy process, requiring the tandem effort of numerous muscular activities.

The wonderful thing about having a brain and spine to dictate function is that it's all connected, so how do these bacteria communicate so that their actions are not totally contradictory to one another, and how do they motivate an organism continuously over a period of years as its muscles slough off, its eyeballs drain, its eardrums shrivel and its nerves degenerate (including the brain - fact is, none of our fleshy bits last long in any structurally cohesive fashion), effectively eliminating the possibility of sensual experience and motive function?

Of course, if I've just missed the point entirely, nevermind.

[Endless_Helix]

Hive mind? Pheromones? Electric Pulse Fields? Take your pick. I'm pretty sure that there are plenty more ways to get bacteria and parasites to march in lock-step...

[SA]

"Like all the walking dead, Beth did not decay."
(From the 'Beth' vignette)

Ah, that one solves it for me.  As long as they are not prey to the bacteria that cause decay, a lot of my doubts are alleviated.  A few things still seem a little iffy though: when the inevitable dessication kicks in, are neurons still suitable conduits for impulses, and can muscle retain its function?  Does natural cell death occur?  If not, why not?  Do the micro-organisms prevent it?  How are nutrients conveyed?  How do the parasites modify the human organic process and regulate it in its subsequent form, and how do they perceive without a brain to interpret senses?  Is sensory input rerouted to the parasites?  My understanding of biology is elementary at best, so bear with me.

Even having answered this, can a corpse that has in fact been rotting be reanimated, or is it "too dead", so to speak?  Can only fresh corpses come back?

Oh yeah, and probably the most important question for me: where in the fuck did these badass parasites come from?  They can't possibly have evolved for the myriad of functions they are required to perform (they lack that element of... evolutionary reducibility), and the fact that they know how to psychically (for want of a better word) communicate extraordinarily complex coordinations of muscular process (heck, even if they're shambling and stumbling, that's still mighty impressive) suggests that they were designed for the very purpose of making our lives as shit as possible.

Not trying to be an ass.  Just playing devil's advocate.  I want to make sure this is as cohesive as possible.

[beejazz]

Or maybe this don't run on microorganisms.


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