It was probably 1996 the first time I looked out my bedroom window and down the street with the specific purpose of keeping watch for zombies. I would have been 13, and had just seen the 1968 George Romero classic Night of the Living Dead on a late-night horror movie marathon. It wasn’t my first horror movie – I’d snuck in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a couple censored-for-television Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees movies by then – but it stuck with me. I knew it was pure fiction, but I kept expecting to see zombies shambling up the street to the house any minute.
I think the staying power of Romero’s Living Dead series is that there are few – if any – precedents or qualifications for undead Hell to rain down on its characters. The Nightmare on Elm Street series always depended on a child molester escaping conviction and having his victims’ parents visit lethal revenge on him before he could return from the dead in dreams, so I always figured unless I read about that in the newspapers, I was probably safe from that. Friday the 13th is the result of a young boy who drowned in a lake at a summer camp after his counselors neglected him in favor of drug use and premarital sex. Again, until those qualifications were met, I wasn’t worried about the man in the hockey mask.
On the other hand, Night of the Living Dead only briefly touches on an isolated theory that the dead are returning to life as the result of a spreading virus carried back to Earth via returning satellite. Even that notion is presented as a reporter’s question on a news special in the middle of the film and is quickly dismissed by the scientist or government official being interviewed. If that source is to be believed, the zombie apocalypse is upon us for no reason – it could happen anytime, anywhere, without warning. However, even if the reporter’s hunch is correct, I can still buy “new virus” over “molester escapes conviction and is burned to death by angry citizens” any day. To a kid in one health class and one science class being told that all viruses are constantly mutating and adapting, and that new diseases are being discovered as old ones are cured, that’s good enough reason to believe.
Unfortunately, as a 7th grader, there’s alarmingly little one can do to prepare for the oncoming rise of the undead other than doing extra sit-ups and push-ups in gym class and memorizing directions to the nearest solid concrete building. At that point, my Armageddon plans were put on hold for a few years.
In college it started to resurface. The popular horror video game Resident Evil 4 was released, which simulates a zombie-like outbreak in Spain. One night in Tallahassee at a concert, some friends and I spent much of the evening chain-smoking and deliberating on our zombie survival plans. We debated army bunkers vs. off-shore oil rigs, highway vs. state road travel, multiple exits vs. one exit from any given hideout, and so on. It was good to know I wasn’t alone, and that my plan was decently thought out. I convinced my roommate to help me move us to a first-floor room so we wouldn’t be trapped with no exit, and I quit smoking so I could run faster and farther.
By the time I took over as store manager at a previous job in retail, I realized how it would happen. Every few years, the average IQ in the nation slips by a half-point or so. It seems inconsequential for now, but hypothetically speaking in the next several centuries the United States could become a nation of men and women whose mental cognizance fails to meet that of chimpanzees, barring some kind of second Renaissance or Age of Enlightenment. And chimpanzees eat Rhesus monkeys. With people, I imagine the zombie outbreak will begin, as you’d expect, in retail.
The humans who can still operate cash registers will be trying to help a customer, whose limp, crooked finger precedes a drooling, groaning mouth.
“Can I help you with that?”
“Unnnngh…”
“Would you like to see that in a blue?”
“Blue…”
The cashier will find the item and return to the customer.
“Here you are.”
Then it will happen. There will be a pause, and as the cashier grows uncomfortable, something will suddenly change in the customer’s eyes. Food, he or she will think. Then the first lazy swipe at the cashier’s chest will come.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
After that, management will receive enough complaints from employees about violent customers that they’ll have to call the district managers, whose lives are spent on the road. “Hey, don’t tell me; I have to dodge these jerks in my Prius when they shuffle out into the street. Just…I’ll mention it to the regional manager on our conference call on Monday and see if we can get you some Purell.”
The following season, that company’s new uniform will be made of chainmail or resemble a dog bite suit. Employees will start ditching work because they’re sick of pulling a shift and being clawed at or bitten by customers, which the managers will have to defend. “Come on, ya gotta work somewhere, right? You think those assholes next door give their employees this quality material in their uniforms to protect them? They’re still just telling them to wear wool sweaters. Wool. Sweaters.”
As our bodies evolve to meet our biological needs (as is evidenced by anthropomorphic DNA and the photosensitive patches of skin on earthworms that resemble early eyes), the fingernails that scratch and the saliva that breaks down food will likely take on toxic qualities, like snake venom or the paralysis exhibited from spider bites. This will likely deal the final blow to the civil liberties activists fighting for equal rights for cannibals. If not, the rapidly-growing problem of their numbers and how to keep them at least quarantined if not law-abiding surely will.
From that point it would resemble most popular zombie movies: the population explosion of cannibalistic infected, coupled with a lack of preparedness and the probability that declaring martial law would be less expensive than mobilizing a mass evacuation effort, would lead to a more typical Walking Dead / 28 Days Later scenario. The few remaining survivors would go into hiding, their numbers dwindling by the day as the search for supplies brought upstanding citizens to looting and pillaging Wal-Marts en masse, and gun stores and liquor stores would be the first to be emptied. The streets would be filled with those inexplicably numerous pages of newspaper that are always seen in horror flicks, shambling ranks of humans and random small fires.
Sometime thereafter, district managers from all major retail corporations would send out an email allowing the branch managers of their stores to count down the drawers early and go home for the day.
“Oh, bullshit,” most people say when I introduce that possibility to me. When they do, I’ve got more.
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is a newly-discovered fungus group with four distinct species, all of which are flourishing in the ant population of Brazil. Nicknamed “the zombie fungus” by researchers, Ophiocordyceps travels airborne as a spore until it is inhaled by an ant. The fungus then grows in the ant’s body while the ant continues to live among its population. After several days, during which the fungus has spread throughout the ant’s body and taken hold of its brain and muscles, Ophiocordyceps waits for the ant to go outside and crawl onto a tree. It then causes the ant to convulse violently until the ant falls off the tree onto the fallen leaves on the forest floor, less than a foot off the ground. It’s dark and moist on the ground, and when the fungus senses this comfortable climate, it makes the ant lock its jaw onto a leaf until the ant dies. The fungus then leaves the ant’s body and travels airborne as a larger number of spores until it reaches its next victim. There are four species of Ophiocordyceps and each attacks a different kind of ant better than the others.
This mind-controlling behavior isn’t unique to the ant fungus. A species of flies lays its eggs in the head of a fire ant, and when the fly larva begins to hatch it eats the ant’s brain and causes it to behave erratically before leaving the ant’s body entirely. Wasp venom has caused some cockroaches to behave like the Haitian “zombies” studied in the last 50 years – in which case Haitian natives were administered a specific type of poison, which causes a degree of submissive behavior and brainwashing, and was popularized in the book The Serpent and the Rainbow.
If wasps can do the same to cockroaches, flies to fire ants and Ophiocordyceps to other ants, who’s to say there isn’t a similar toxin in mankind’s future that makes the Haitian poison pale in comparison? Or that Ophiocordyceps couldn’t carry over from one group of host species to another, the way AIDS introduced itself to mankind? The “zombie virus” of horror lore isn’t a matter of having some unknown element introduced into the ecosystem so much as it is of evolution or mutation, both of which happen every day. It’s not an outcome that’s inevitable, but it is reasonable, which has kept me up nights.
A nearly equal fear to mindless cannibals overtaking our species, in my eyes, is the truly awe-inspiring effect that chaos has on the human psyche. This phenomenon was first televised on an episode of The Twilight Zone called “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” In “Monsters,” a peaceful suburban cul-de-sac suddenly has a power and phone outage. What begins as simple annoyance for a small community of neighbors turns into a witch-hunt following one child’s insistence that the aliens have landed and are removing our ability to warn others or seek help. The adults are quick to dismiss the boy until a coincidence or two from one of his comic books catalyzes their fear and they turn on one another. The final moments of the episode are the real scare – as so frequently happened on Twilight Zone – as the neighborly massacre is left and the audience is shown a flying saucer on a rural hillside overlooking the titular Maple Street and its slaughter. Two aliens watch and one says to the other “See? Simply remove the familiar elements of the humans’ day and they’ll tear themselves apart; we’ll never even have to fire a weapon.”
This same theme took center stage in The Lord of the Flies and Stephen King’s short story “The Mist” and, to a lesser extent, the 1999 Japanese novel Battle Royale. In each story, otherwise normal people are dropped into a tightly-quartered space and of their own accord they quickly divide into ranks and try to reduce one another’s numbers through primitive violence. Gallons of blood later, only some survivors ever regain their humanity, despite that the latter two stories even address this mass hysteria in characters’ dialogue, but the message is clear – abandon the rules, structure and social norms set into place since the dawn of man and fear can easily conquer hope and patience, turning brother against brother, even in the most passive of people.
In applying this viewpoint to the end of mankind at the hands of zombies, George Romero and Dario Argento addressed a return to primitive clan-based society in the original Dawn of the Dead. Four survivors – two policemen and two news reporters – escape the city as it deteriorates and arrive at a shopping mall. Over several weeks, their fear is replaced by boredom and eventually a territorial ownership of the building. Near the end of the film, these same four people, who had clung together and have valued life so highly, fight off a gang of bikers, each side attempting to blow the other to bits with rifles and shotguns, to keep hold over the mall. It’s implied in the film that the battle is fought not over the safety of the building but over the possessions inside. People have also proven historically that times of chaos, like riots and political overthrowing, may be signs of civil unrest but, to a select few, are an excuse to loot and steal. By combining these situations we can learn what to expect, in terms of vandalism and burglary, following a zombie outbreak.
It is because of this that I’m worried about the Mayan calendar predicting that the world will end on December 21, 2012. I have no reason to believe anything will happen to Earth or mankind themselves, but I do believe in the fallout from mass hysteria and I’ve told my wife we need to make sure we take the baby somewhere safe that day. I have no doubt that, much like the Y2K scare, it will just be another 24-hour period of fear fading to sheepish embarrassment, but in the height of the fervor, people’s fear of Armageddon will likely lead to a sense of care-free self-indulgence, including vandalism, burglary and, in some cases, violence.
So if and when the zombies attack, I can already see myself lighting a candle or a flashlight, since power will likely go out without human maintenance, and locking up all my electronics anyway, shaking my head at them and considering potential thieves with a sigh. “Morons.”
In the meantime, I don’t consider zombie movies or survival horror games to be “just entertainment.” They’re research, the same as TV series like Doomsday Preppers, which documents the paranoid as they get ready for the end of the world by buying abandoned missile silos and industrial-grade quarantine and water filtration equipment – even as my own preparation is still limited to the occasional glance out the window and mental map to the nearest solid concrete bunker.
