Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (15 page)

A
parasitic fungus in Thailand has scientists baffled, as it infects helpless carpenter ants and inexplicably turns them into the walking dead. Once infected, the ants are compelled to climb down from their natural canopy home, latching on to low leaves just before they die. Assistant professor of entomology and biology at Penn State University David P. Hughs has studied the phenomenon extensively:

The fungus accurately manipulates the infected ants into dying where the parasite prefers to be, by making the ants travel a long way during the last hours of their lives.
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After the ant dies, the fungus is careful to preserve its outer shell, reinforcing weak spots to protect against invading microbes and other fungi. Growing inside the carcass for a week or two, fungal spores then fall to the forest floor to infect new ants.

The scientific study of zombies is largely an exploration of all that is strange and disturbing in our natural world and often leads to more questions than answers. There is no better example than the many zombielike creatures living on land and at sea across the globe.

Tiny eggs from parasitic flatworms are ingested by the amber snail, later to hatch in its digestive tract. The larvae then change into sporocysts, causing drastic mutations in the snail’s brain and physiology. Healthy snails seek darkness to hide from predators, but the infected amber snail moves itself into dangerous open space and light. It is also helpless to retract its newly swollen, pulsating tentacles.

The end result is that feeding birds mistake the exposed tentacles for a caterpillar or grub and rip them off the snail’s defenseless head. The flatworm then grows to maturity inside the bird, laying eggs that are released in droppings for new snails to consume, and the disturbing cycle continues.

Zombies are unique in that they are thought to eat only living human flesh, while most animals kill their prey before feasting. But the undead share a dietary interest with the common screw worm.

Screw worms are parasitic maggots that eat only the living flesh of warm-blooded animals. While other species of maggots feed on dead flesh, such as a rotting piece of meat or a putrefied wound, screw worms attack healthy tissue. The larvae hatch and burrow deep into the tissue as they feed, making them capable of causing severe tissue damage or even death.

If not quickly treated, a screw-worm attack will leave the host mortally wounded in a matter of days, and as the maggots become flies, dozens of additional victims will quickly be needed to support the growing population. The exponential
model of a screw-worm outbreak is disturbingly similar to projections of a potential zombie sickness.

It’s widely believed that the driving force behind a functioning zombie is its brain, so whatever root sickness causes zombieism is likely controlling the body from there. With that in mind, a team of researchers at Stanford University created zombie rats by using a virus to insert genes into a specific part of a rat’s brain, encoding a new reaction to certain colors of light.

Team leader Karl Deisseroth explained that shining the specific color of light onto a modified rat causes neurons in the primary motor cortex to fire.
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The result is a rat that involuntarily runs around on command. Admittedly, this differs from common depictions of the modern zombie, because the undead are not normally controlled by an external force. But it’s disturbing that a virus was used to deliver the controlling gene into the rat’s neurons.

Skeptics often point to the widely held belief that zombies don’t breathe as proof of their impossibility. They note that in all of human history, no complex creature has been found that didn’t rely on oxygen to function. But this argument was dealt a crushing blow in 2010, when researchers from Italy’s Polytechnic University discovered the first-ever oxygen-free animal.

Though some types of bacteria and other single-celled organisms can live without oxygen, it was previously believed that nothing as complex as this newly discovered phylum,
Loricifera, could possibly exist on earth. Lead researcher Roberto Danovaro points out that the discovery of these life forms opens new perspectives for the study of all life.

While every other animal converts oxygen and nutrients into chemical energy for survival, Loriciferans get their considerable energy by internally creating molecular hydrogen. If the infectious agents behind zombieism function in a similar manner, then the undead body might be freed of its dependence on a constant flow of oxygen after reanimation.

If there have been scattered zombie outbreaks throughout history, it seems possible that an undead pathogen may have the ability to remain dormant for extended periods of time. In 2010, researchers at Cornell University found that at least one species of complex animal has the ability literally to turn into dust.

The aquatic bdelloid rotifer escapes mortal danger by transforming into dried particles and floating off into thin air. The rotifers remain in this passive state until they happen to fall into a habitable body of water that is free of any predators, then suddenly and mysteriously reanimate.

If the walking-dead sickness is able to mimic this newly discovered process, its disappearance and reappearance throughout history would be explained. Zombies that can’t find food or are set on fire or even shot in the head could deteriorate to dust before the pathogen simply drifted away. Once external conditions were right, the sickness would then reappear to infect new victims and continue its morbid destruction.

For yet another disturbing display of zombielike behavior in the animal kingdom, we need look no farther than the parasitic hairworm. The worm develops to maturity inside an unsuspecting cricket on land but must live its adult life in water.

To make this transition, it takes control of the cricket’s brain and forces it to commit suicide by leaping into an available pool or pond. Once in the water, the cricket quickly drowns, allowing the hairworm to emerge and swim away in search of a mate, having grown up to ten times as long as its host. Gross!

Ultimately, we won’t know if the next great zombie plague will be delivered to mankind through insect, virus, bacteria, or rogue protein. Only by exploring all the possibilities and developing reasoned theories can we hope to have any chance of surviving when that final day comes.

I
n Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel turned film
The Road
, a father and son try to escape the bitter cold of a postapocalyptic winter by heading south on foot across what used to be the United States. They struggle on a daily basis to find food, water, and shelter while ducking violent, cannibalistic nomads who wander the countryside looking for fresh human flesh to eat. Sounds a lot like a zombie story, right?

McCarthy doesn’t introduce a single zombie in his book yet still manages to paint a more realistic picture of an undead planet than much of the zombie literature produced in the past several years. In fact, with the slightest tweak to some minor characters and no change to the plot or core message,
The Road
would instantly become one of the best zombie novels ever written.

When I mentioned to my wife that one of the main characters in
The Road
kills herself rather than face life in such deprived times, she said she’d do the same thing in a heartbeat. Her exact words were:

When the dead rise, I’ll still want my hot showers and happy hour. I’ll definitely want to die if I don’t get either for a month, maybe sooner if the weather is bad.

And it seems she’s not alone in her plan to end it all when zombies come shambling through our neighborhood. A 1998 study published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
found that people kill themselves in greater numbers in the aftermath of a serious disaster, citing an almost 70 percent
increase in the year following a major earthquake. In fact, results from a variety of studies overwhelmingly suggest that social breakdown caused by a catastrophic zombie outbreak will result in skyrocketing suicide rates.

If you’re in my wife’s camp, then you can skip this section altogether. But if you’re willing to slug it out, you should read on, even if you don’t believe in zombies, because the techniques needed to survive a zombie outbreak are the same needed to survive any number of catastrophic natural or man-made disasters.

M
ax Brooks stands onstage before a packed lecture hall. He is the bestselling author of
Zombie Survival Guide
, the first in what is now a long list of zombie survival manuals, most of which are, in my opinion, poor imitations of Brooks’s original work. Hundreds of college students fill every seat and crowd along the back wall in giddy anticipation. Some are dressed up like zombies or zombie killers. Some flip through dog-eared copies of the guide, as if cramming for the most important test of their lives. Some compare survival strategies in heated, whispered debate. Finally, Brooks steps to the center podium, and the room falls quiet. “What is the first thing you’ll want to have with you in a zombie outbreak?”

Eager students shout out possible answers.
A machete! A tank! A shotgun! My mommy!
They laugh. They shift in their seats, looking about as suggestions fly from all corners of the room. A jock in the back thinks it must be Molotov cocktails. A young professor with a ponytail twirls a pair of night-vision goggles around his index finger. The housewife zombie in the second row with a human-brain Jell-O mold just wants a friend who runs slower than she does, so she can get away when push comes to shove. Brooks shakes his head. They’re all wrong. Dead wrong. Without a word, he simply holds up the water bottle in his hand. He takes a sip, then holds it up even higher so everyone can see. “Water, people. Water.”

As the most recognized name in zombie survival, Brooks isn’t a student of some exotic martial art. He doesn’t engage in advanced weapons testing at a secret desert compound. He hasn’t trained his family to neutralize an approaching threat instantly with their bare hands. No. Instead, Brooks composts his kitchen waste. He grows home crops in the backyard. He worries about the preservation and storing of extra food and water for drinking and cooking. He rightly focuses on the clear connection between crisis preparedness and response strategies for more common man-made and natural disasters and the measures needed to survive an infestation of the walking dead. He understands that the basics are what keep you alive in a zombie outbreak, and lacking those basics will kill you faster than any undead horde ever could.