Shambling Undead
Zombies—Condition and Characteristics
Zombies are ambulatory corpses, drawn to living flesh, particularly brains, although sufficiently fresh hamburger will work in America. They have limited brain functions, which allows them to walk, chase prey, and on occasion groan simple vocabulary. They lack higher brain functions, however; a good test for telling if someone is a zombie and not just drunk, for example, is to ask them a math question.
No one knows what causes zombie-ism, although it is blood-and-saliva contagious and always fatal. The only way to re-kill a zombie is to destroy its brain or to sever the brain from the spine. It is not known in the case of spine-severing if the brain continues to function, but as long as the mouth isn’t working and they cannot chase the living, it’s counted as a win.
Zombies often retain certain habits kept in life. Suicides return to the place of their death; devoted family members head home. Alcoholics gravitate toward bars, while workaholics might sneak back into the office or factory and resume their job. (This caused some trouble at first, as some employers came under fire from the Zombies Are People, Too! movement for exterminating the corpse, while others sought to take advantage of an employee they neither needed to pay nor provide health care for, but who messed up paperwork and left bits of himself lying around the workplace.)
Zombies also have culturally bred preferences and aversions. In America, television distracts most zombies, and will fight each other over political handbills. Jewish and Muslim zombies have an aversion to pork. Inexplicably, nearly all zombies are drawn to strong smells like pickles or kimschee and mattresses, but are repelled by cleaning products containing ammonia or chlorine.
Zombies have been known to congregate in areas and even take up residence. Colloquially known as “roach motels,” they are sometimes preserved and patrolled by city officials as a stopgap measure for containing zombies. However, after the Burbank Massacre of 2042,
The Zombie Syndrome—History and Laws
No one knows quite when the Zombie Syndrome began; the first officially recognized sighting was Halloween night, 2019, when a zombie attacked and zombiefied a young couple necking on an abandoned road near Pleasnatville, KY. However, once confronted with indisputable evidence—aka, a policeman being bit, dying, and coming back to unlife in front of witnesses—the nation reacted with typical efficiency: panic, sensationalist and inflammatory articles, conspiracy theories spread through social media, a strict hand-washing campaign, and of course, a crass dismissal by people who were too busy with their lives to be bothered by an undead problem. The military added undead combat to its basic training, the CDC slapped itself on the back for being proactive in its contingency plans, and pharmaceutical companies clamored to get a sample of undead tissue and did cost-benefit analyses while herbalists made a killing on anti-zombie teas and tinctures.
Even as some cowered in fear and fought to get shotguns exempted from gun control laws, others saw the brain-eating corpses as the new persecuted minority deserving rights. It was helped by the fact that zombies can be passive as long as they are allowed to continue certain routines that they held in life. The greatest case study for the Zombies Are People, Too! movement, for example, was that of Jebediah Gump, who returned to his trailer in Podunka, AR, to drink beer and watch Jerry Springer reruns. Jokes about registering the undead to vote aside, the Zombies Are People, Too! movement created a great deal of confusion and led to many dying and becoming zombies. The movement finally died when Josie Gump, tired of doing nothing but feeding her undead husband beer, turned off the television to demand some “attention.” Programmed habit broken, Jebediah attempted to eat her brains, proving that not only had death not made him a more considerate husband after all, but that even the most passive zombie will revert to a mindless murderous state. (Josie Gump escaped with the help of her poodle and became a re-grief counselor and spokeswoman of the Zombies are NOT People movement.)
Numerous laws were enacted in order to stem the tide of zombie-ism. Most notable was the Spine Severing Act, which requires that all corpses have their spine severed from the brain. Zombies were given a special designation—ambulatory undead—and officially declared as no longer human and thus devoid of all rights, including the right to life. Military, law enforcement officials, and specialists were given license to re-kill.
The Zombie Exterminator
Zombies are nasty, dirty, inconvenient, and unwelcome—in other words, pests. So it’s not surprising that exterminators would become instrumental in keeping the zombie population under control.
Some of the first zombie exterminators were simply trying to defend themselves while on the job. In the classic case of Carol Lyffe of Lyffe-Undeath Exterminations, she and her partner, Jerry Lee, were handling a rat problem at the Sunnyside cemetery when, for reasons unknown, a pack of undead rose from their graves. Using tools found in the groundskeeper’s shack, they successfully destroyed over twenty corpses. After that experience, Lyffe and Lee became strong advocates for zombie extermination, calling for stricter laws and for the qualification of specialized exterminators.
Zombie extermination is usually a specialization of general extermination, especially in America, where the zombie syndrome has been contained. Exterminators are required to take a qualifying test as well as a practical exam to include chainsaws, flame throwers, squirtgun accuracy, and short-and long-distance timed running. In addition major cities have a specialized team on their police force, known as Z-Mat, which not only handles undead extermination but also enforcement of zombie-related laws and cleanup and containment of zombie-related incidents.
