Tires vs. Zombies

Inexorable, it seeks prey and when it finds prey it is unrelenting. I’m talking about a virus. It invades a cell, uses what’s inside the cell to reproduce itself, and the cell is destroyed when all of those copies burst out, each seeking more prey.

The analogy to zombies is not precise. One zombie grabs at a helpless victim, tears into her flesh and begins consuming, but this does not lead to several zombies bursting out. For the analogy to work, we would need on zombie invading a “cell” containing several humans, and the result is several zombies bursting out of the mall or the safehouse or whatever.

(This, by the way, is why I always scoff when people post picture on the internet of their “zombie strongholds.” Hard to get in means hard to get out, and all it takes is one zombie to make that stronghold a gut-gobbler factory).

What’s more, it’s not that a virus goes into a cell and then uses the material inside to make copies—the virus uses the cell’s actual mechanisms to facilitate the reproduction process. The zombie-in-your-safehouse analogy then would suggest that its not just that the zombie turns people into zombies, but that the social dynamics of the group lend themselves to zombie making. Bickering distracts folks from maintaining the stronghold, falling in love makes it hard to put a shotgun to the head of a newly turned zombie, etc.

So the analogy is not a bad one, it just needs adjustment to work. And the consequence of a working analogy is, how does it inform a solution to a zombie problem? Well, your body will elevate its own temperature to kill of a virus. In other words, it makes the host inhospitable. How would we do that in the real world?

I have no idea. In World War Z, people with fatal diseases were unappetizing to zombies. But that breaks out analogy- we need the host, the cell, the mall, to be in hospitable.

I’ve got it—tires. Like those tires you step into and out of quickly an obstacle course. Line the roads with tires! The living have agility—the dead don’t. They’ll fall all over themselves. It would take weeks for them to move a few city blocks.

This is brilliant. I’m applying for the MacArthur Genius Grant. I may have eradicated the need for zombie fiction forever.

Oh no.

A Negative Review of a Zombie-Related Thing.

Quick n dirty zombie blog post today because I am way behind and trying to get stuff done. Think of this as a make-shift zombie-killing weapon, like a chainsaw duct-taped to a baseball bat or something.

An article popped up on my radar, over at the Boston Globe, called “Zombie-proof your home.” The gist is that, since the zombie thing happens due to some virus, you can save yourself by making your home a place where a virus can’t get in or propagate.

I’m a big defender of “let people use zombies to do/sell/describe whatever” but here, I have to draw a line. There’s nothing zombie-useful in this article. It describes how you have to, basically, control air quality in order to avoid the zombie virus. Its zombie pictures throughout. But it doesn’t say a word about what will REALLY get you:

Teeth. Grasping hands ripping into your flesh. Other humans fighting you over scarce resources. Depression and doom.

Now, if this was an article about making your home cleaner, with a zombie theme, that would be fine. But none of this is useful in the real world either. No one’s going to tape up their house just to avoid the indignities of cold and flu season.

Taping up your house and hacking an air pressure system, if anything, is only fit for folly: I can imagine some guy in a zombie movie go to all of this trouble to keep the “virus” out of his lungs, only to have a horde of shuffling gut chuggers rip his duct-tape-and-plastic-wrapped windows to shreds as they devour his family.

The post mentions the Walking Dead too, but I can’t complain about that, since I do it all the time myself. Suffice it to say that, much like this post right here, I get the feeling this was slapped together in a pinch just to get on that zombie train.

You, Zombie

Darkness falls, and the city is lit by warm yellow light. Your pineal gland, no longer suppressed by blue rays from the wide-spectrum light of the sun, begins to produce melatonin. You walk down the street towards your apartment building, become slightly, almost imperceptibly drowsy.

Out of the shadows a figure emerges. A homeless person, dressed in filthy rags, looking for a hand out. You try to ignore him as he shuffles closer. Suddenly he’s upon you, grabbing your arm. He shoves his face in, teeth bared, and bites. But your heart is racing in fear, your adrenal glands pumping, producing a burst of energy and pain-suppression, along with an (unhealthy) dose of cortisol. Still, you can see blood, the homeless guy’s bitten clean through the sleeve if your jacket. You manage to push him off and run down the street.

At the corner you stop to catch your breath, pain finally starting to ooze into your arm. You look back—he actually doesn’t look very homeless. He’s wearing suit, albeit a stained and torn one. He’s still shuffling toward you, and that’s your blood dripping from his mouth. You turn the corner and run home.

Inside you strip off your jacket to look at the wound. It’s not a very big bite, but in the poor lighting of your bathroom the edges look a little green. You pour hydrogen peroxide over it, wash it as best as you can, wrap it in gauze. Jesus Christ, what the hell was that all about.

You grab some leftovers from the refrigerator, sit down in front of the TV. Inside your brain, a virus attacks and annihilates your pineal gland. All serotonin productions shuts down. You are wide awake. You watch one, two, three hours of TV. Soon it’s midnight. Then three in the morning. Then six. You haven’t slept a wink. And something happened to you last night, what was it? There’s red and green-stained gauze on your arm. Did that have something to do with it?

Your hippocampus is no longer in communications with your visual cortex. You see things, but they don’t have any meaning. Your adrenal glands are producing a steady supply of adrenaline and cortisol, further eroding your hippocampus and your amygdala. Your metabolism has been ramped up, and you’re running a fever. Free radicals built up inside your brain are taking out neurons in your speech and fine motor areas.

There’s a stirring in your belly. You’re hungry. You know you need to eat. You know you need protein, meat, as fresh and free of decay as possible. You stumble out your door. Your olfactory senses are no longer distracted by emotion or memory. You can smell food in the door across the hall. You move towards the door, but it’s closed. You pound on it, and hear movement inside. This makes you hungrier. Food inside. Pound on the door.

The door opens and you lurch forward. Food. Hair and eyes and skin and food. She screams. You grab her arm, and she kicks you away, runs down a hall, slams a door. You follow the food. Your throat is convulsing, swallowing in anticipation. Your gums are bleeding as they recede and rot, your teeth protruding. You move towards the door. It opens, and she’s standing there. There a bright flash and a loud noise, and you’re pushed back. Five more noisy flashes, all on top of one another, and you fall down.

Hydrostatic shock has stopped your heart. There’s a hole in your shoulder, your leg, your stomach. Your brain, starved for oxygen, starts to shut down. But the cancer eating your brain is feeding your adrenal glands. Free radicals mutate and collide, exciting nerve endings, telling your arms to move, your legs to move. You stand up. You are dead, no heart beat, adrenaline and cortisol washing through your body like blood soaking through a sponge. You’re rapidly deteriorating but the food still standing in front of you and moaning, “no, no, no!” has protein, her own store of adrenaline, and maybe a few drops of that sweet sweet melatonin.

Your lurch towards her. She falls back, blocks the door. You’re on top of her, sinking your teeth into her neck. She screams, but your grip is too powerful, pinning her as your rip out her throat. The eating is everything. Healthy meat, clean meat, peristalsis uninterrupted by breathing.

But it’s not enough. Finally you stand, your guts, unnoticed, spilling out of the gaping wound in your belly. There’s more food in this building. You can hear it. You can smell it.



You can feel it. It’s the only thing you can feel.