It's the latest fad right? All sorts of books, movies, and TV shows have come about recently about the living dead taking over the world. My favorite is AMC's The Walking Dead, but Jonathan Maberry, Max Brooks, Colson Whitehead, and so many more have been writing really good stories too. Zombies lurked in popular culture for a long time before now though. The modern canon of reanimated corpses resulting from a virus, radiation, or neurotoxin that are aggressive but can be stopped by destroying the brain comes from the great George A. Romero. Night of the Living Dead premiered in the awful year 1968 when American society seemed to be coming apart at the seams. I first saw it when I was 12 and have been hooked ever since.
My favorite zombie movie though has to be The Return of the Living Dead, written and directed by the late Dan O'Bannon, sure it's a black comedy but the ending is so great. I won't give it away, but let's just say it doesn't end well for our heroes. O'Bannon was also responsible for the great ideas in Alien, specifically the facehugger scenes which he described as the most horrific fate a man could imagine, oral rape.
The zombies in RLD were fast and did not shut down or die when you destroyed the brain, leading one character to exclaim after they were discussing Night of the Living Dead "you mean the movie lied!?!" The latest round of zombie apocalypse stories take place after the big event has already occured. Max Brooks' World War Z is told as an oral history, Jonathan Maberry's Rot and Ruin series takes place fifteen years after First Night when the dead rose. Why not tell a story, based in our real world, that details the apocalypse itself?
A friend of mine says she loves disaster movies so much because they usually show humanity coming together and rising above themselves to meet the challenge. She has a really good heart and I have no doubt that she would rise up to meet a disaster, but what about the rest of us? After all, after 9/11 so many Americans were ready to do whatever was necessary and the president told us to go shopping. "Go shopping, visit Disneyland, we'll take care of this just be really scared when we tell you to and reelect the great president who kept us safe." Now, with polarization at practically a fever pitch, would it even be possible for us to "come together" in a huge zombie outbreak?
RLD put the fictional facts to ronnie reagan's "nine scariest words in the English language, 'I'm from the government and I'm hear to help.'" The deadly trioxin gas is released from a drum after James Karen's character says "no they don't leak, these things were made by the Army Corps of Engineers." Anyone remember the space shuttle blowing up a few years ago? That disaster occurred not because NASA is incompetent, but because the private contractors and sub-contractors cheaped out on maintanence. Tragic yes, but what if one of these incompetent contractors who bribed a congressman to get hold of lucrative contracts to secure one of DARPA's projects and cheaped out knowing that they wouldn't be held accountable?
So, an improperly secured bunker at Ft. Meade or an equivalant base explodes due directly to privatization and corruption, showering nearby population centers with a trioxin-like gas that first kills you, then reanimates you as a shambling, aggressive zombie. It also mixes with rain and seeps into graveyards, further augmenting the ranks of the undead. The smaller amount of trioxin in the rain takes longer to kill people it falls on, allowing the "slow burn" cases to get out all over the place. Bites spread what becomes a contagion, but these first cases are completely reanimated so destroying the brain does not stop them. Burning the first wave simply releases the trioxin into the atmosphere and spreads the outbreak faster. Yee-Haw!
What happens next? In this story, all the things we have in the real world still exist, the canon of zombie literature that says shooting them in the head works. For people bitten it does, but not the first wave. Pile on to that our utterly disfunctional government, tea party people who hate taxes and such, fundamentalist wackos, nra gun maniacs, impotent suburbanites with no idea how to survive on their own, and of course the uber-rich schmucks who care far more about their ill-gotten loot than their country. I'd love somebody or something to convince me otherwise, but I don't believe there is enough goodwill or common ground for Americans to come together for this kind of disaster.
How do you think a government practically bankrupted by years of unneccessary wars of aggression, corporate welfare, and tax cuts for the greedy would fare? How would a society wrent by years of scapegoating, economic segregation, and culture war respond? Finally, how would the rest of the world react to a zombie apocalypse in the US? What do you think? Send me your ideas, I have never written a fiction story before. Or if there is a story like this out there already that I missed, let me know okay?
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