I thought I was done with the Walking Dead.
But then I saw the line-up for the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. A civil war zombie apocalypse movie and a zombie comedy in which the main characters are wise-cracking zombies. To be honest, Exit Humanity, the civil war movie set in the 1800′s(but with zombies!), looked well done.
So I’m going to tell you what would happen if the zombie plague really happened. By this, I mean the classic scenario: millions of shambling, moaning corpses; they only die from headshots; the infection spreads through bites.
The cities would do well. No, they would, sorry. Modern cities are full of secure condominium complexes, police stations, brick schools, historic forts, and army bases. Some cities have underground tunnels connecting underneath the financial districts, and each section has its own armoured doors. Many are near ocean shores. A few, like Montreal and Richmond, British Columbia, are islands. You know what else are in cities? Banks. Huge, secure, armoured buildings, several of which are on every busy street. Central branches are even bigger. We would hide in those places. Could a bunch of drooling dead idiots use their rotting fists to break down the door of a bank?
The country folks? They have guns, room to manoeuvre, and the privilege of seeing the zombies come from a long distance away. There might be a few massacres as some communities get caught unaware (I’m thinking of the Quakers, who would have neither guns to defend themselves or radios or TV from which to hear of the threat). But on the balance the country folks would be fine.
The cities would mobilize, thanks to the police and army. That other trope of zomb-lit – that of the real monsters coming out of hiding when all the humans are trapped in one place? Bull. Remember the Japan Earthquake, 9-11, the subway bombings in London? Humans stick together and help each other when the going gets tough.
Once the world’s leaders understand the nature of the threat, they release an edict by text, Email, Radio, and TV: Every living person should endeavour to kill at least one zombie. The math works.
The third world? That might be different: an enormous, dense population, fewer places to hide, smaller land mass, a higher prevalence of disease. The body count could could be brutally high. There I could see the million-plus herds of zombies form, like in the ZA Recht novels, heading en masse towards African and Mid-eastern cities.
Here’s where the colonial legacy comes through: US army bases in the Mid-east, Africa, the Phillipines. A single Apache gunship could take out an entire herd. Look at the night-vision videos from Apache attacks in Iraq – they’re on Youtube. The they-only-die-from-headshots trope is meaningless in the presence of bullets that rip apart the human body. Battleships with cannons with twenty-mile ranges, jets with smart bombs and guided missiles, Abrams tanks that could simply steamroll the walking dead without even bothering to use ordinance. Massed hordes of slow-moving dead people would be powerless in the face of modern weaponry.
Winter would arrive in the Northern countries: zombies would be reduced to almost motionless, desiccated hulks. Dead or not, human tissue dries and contracts in cold. In northern Canada, they would freeze solid. The First World would be free to send mop-up UN troops to the hotter countries. It might be beginning of unintentional colonialism, but that’s another novel.
The plague would subside once the world understands that the brainstems of the newly-dead must be destroyed. There would be terrible economic damage. The publishing world would be swept by Zombie non-fiction; Zombie documentaries and movie treatments of the plague would sweep the Oscars.
But in the end we would be fine. We’d survive. No survival-of-the-fittest, Desperados-roaming-the blasted-landscape; no last holdouts. We’d be fine because we’re human, because we’re organized.
We humans have made it to space, explored the north and south poles, cut canals through continents. We’ve invented democracy and vaccines; we’ve split the atom, gone to the moon, invented quantum theory; we’ve gone through a real plague.
Would we really go down so easily before the Walking Dead? I can’t see it happening.
