Zombie Apocalypse? Oh, Well, It’s Not the End of the World

[sour_idealist]

Everyone loves a good zombie apocalypse AU, right? Or story, if we’re talking origfic. After all, it’s a cool idea, inherently dramatic - our intrepid heroes trapped and desperate as they fight off hordes and hordes of monstrous, mindless, slavering, hungering, rotting mobile corpses -

Wait. Rewind that a bit. No, no, past there:

Rotting.

Okay, hold that thought. Now: how do you kill a zombie?

Answers vary - fire, various religious methods, cut off its head, et cetera. Most agree that the last works, though, or at the very least that caving in the brain will do it. No more brain equals no more zombie, just a lump of now-harmless flesh. (Yeah, don’t eat it, don’t go near it, but it won’t jump up and eat you anymore.)

Okay, now back up to that thought you’re holding. Zombies are rotting. All of them - including that very vital brain. Shambling around will most likely not slow down this process, and many forms of zombie apocalypse don’t re-animate the normally dead, which means that they won’t be embalmed. Sure, some variants of the virus that cause zombies to exist will also slow down decomposition, but they can only do so by so much. After all, they aren’t very good zombies if they aren’t rotting.

Say the embalmed come back to semi-life. Say the virus slows decomposition. Say the infection takes a while to spread around the globe. I’d still say that within ten years at the absolute outset - with a little luck, maybe within less than one -  every last zombie will have rotted to a pile of bones.

Survivors, the world is yours. And given that your apocalypse was zombies rather than bombs or war, then there’s probably a fair bit left - buildings, roads, cars, et cetera. Is society as we knew it going to be immediately restored? If we got the the apocalypse stage, then eh, probably not. Is the human race as a whole fucked? It depends on the numbers of survivors - I don’t know enough about genetics to say how many you’d need - but I’d put my money on a bounce-back, there. Even if not, said survivors might just have a decent while left to live and find each other, might even be happy. And the rest of our planet’s flora and fauna, well, according to the rules of most zombie viruses then they’re fine. (They kind of have to be - imagine if you had to worry about zombie bugs. Or even mice. You ever try to keep mice out of a
place when they really want to be in there?) Who knows, the bears or the dolphins might develop sentience.

I still don’t want to look out my window and see zombies, but I don’t think it would be the sign that it’s time for the species to throw in the towel.

Comments

[fae-boleyn.livejournal.com]

I honestly never looked at it this way, but you really do have a point. I guess it would depend - I know some viruses have the victims going mad first, so they might wreak more destruction that way, but even so, if there were enough survivors, things could work. The trick would be their managing to find each other, since if the infection goes worldwide - and it could, in today's world of speedy travel, since infections spread pretty damn far long before that - the survivors would, in theory, be really spread out.

Actually, that might make a good story, the idea of seeking other survivors after a zombie virus in order to start again. Hmm. Has that been done yet?

[sour-idealist.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree that the survivors might be spread out. But you know? The zombies aren't gonna touch the satellites. I don't know a lot about radio programming, but I imagine that once they zombies are gone it wouldn't be too hard to use whatever technology remained (probably most of it) to jury-rig a radio and get some signals going around the planet to the general effect of: HEY, WE'RE ALIVE OUT HERE, ANYONE ELSE?

And yeah, I'd love to read that story. I'm thinking of doing it, if I can pick what or how, but you should totally give it a shot too!