The Zombie Survival Guide: How To Live Like A King After The Outbreak (4 page)

During the time of the Renaissance, science and art were able to flourish together in one harmonious union. With aristocrats and government officials finally willing to say “fuck you” to the Vatican (at least behind its back), thanks to Martin Luther and his Protestant revolution, the Europeans commissioned the most educated and enlightened among them to create new works of aesthetic and technological wonder.

One of the most popular scientific endeavors of the time was the quest to convert lead into gold through alchemy – the body of arcane knowledge which sought wisdom and immortality for man through pre-modern science. Although practiced by ancient civilizations such as the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and Persians, the Catholic Church's medieval dominance over Europe led to the practice being outlawed as witchcraft. Science and art had traditionally suffered severely under this theocracy.

During the Renaissance, however, many of these ancient secrets were rediscovered. Men with the fashion sense of “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” tirelessly poured their knowledge into alchemy and the development of big ruffled pirate shirts and ridiculously tight pants designed to flatter their junk. It was also during this period that the first documented case of male “stuffing” was recorded – an unfortunate consequence of white people having such small members. A century or two later, during the French Revolution, Louis the 16
^th
would enter history as the first “member” to be sentenced to death via guillotine. According to most history books, his “head” was ordered to be “whacked off” for the crime of false advertising.

As can be inferred from the example above, the Renaissance and its aftermath were also a time of conflicts both domestic and international. For example, the pasty men in charge of Europe had few peaceful interactions with the darker tribes of other continents, mostly as a result of their embarrassment regarding their own members in comparison to those commonly observed in the African population. Although unconfirmed, it is rumored that the Crusades were a direct result of the fear that these colored people would have sex with white women. As a result, the Europeans attempted to inflict genocide upon their well-endowed neighbors to the south and east.

Incidentally, the development of natural male enhancement (that didn’t involve a giant codpiece) was probably second only to discovering the philosopher’s stone on the list of alchemy’s ultimate goals.

Alchemy may in fact have been the root of the western world's first zombie outbreaks. While sifting through texts composed by the ancient Egyptians, it is possible the alchemists recreated zombism in their overzealous aspirations to create more monstrous dongs for themselves.

It is highly feasible that some girl pants-wearing scholar, translating ancient scrolls late one night, accidentally stumbled upon the recipe for just such a potion after coming across a passage loosely translated into Latin as “Animal fuck like beast.” Sending a message to his muse to “come hither,” he anxiously prepared the miasma, unknowingly unleashing a new plague upon his fellow countrymen.

Maybe the church didn't oppress science because it was simply fearful of losing followers to an educated populous. Perhaps the Vatican already knew what consequences this scientific revolution would bring, trying unsuccessfully to protect the people against the evils that such knowledge would inevitably spawn. After all – war, hatred, and greed have created more scientific advances than peace probably ever will. In any event, it wasn’t until after their first attempts to create longer, stronger members for themselves that the alchemists learned what can happen when you screw around with nature – Big-dicked flesh-eating maniacs on the loose across Asia, Africa, and now Europe as well!

Although portrayed throughout American pop culture as the dimwitted adversary to American moral and technological superiority, the truth is that Hitler was an evil genius hell bent on something much larger than simple world domination. Had he not been susceptible to drug addiction, and – toward the end of his Russian campaign – sleeping until the late afternoon, he may have actually achieved his goals. It is a good thing for the Western World that he was too high and out of his mind most of the time to focus his minions on further expanding his world conquest. Instead, while Albert Einstein was busy building us the H-bomb, Hitler directed his best scientists to concentrate on paranormal research.

Although the red suspender-sporting, bald head-having “Nazis” of today – dumb asses who still believe the hateful rhetoric Hitler once spewed – may have the intelligence of zombies, they are not to be confused with the walking dead. They are simply morons who are infuriated with their illegitimate fathers, and do not understand how to redirect their anger into a positive outlet.

It is a well-documented fact the Hitler's scientists and archeologists were quite prolific in their search for answers to life’s many mysteries. It is plausible that they stumbled upon the answer to the ultimate mystery – death – in the process.

Once the secrets of undeath were unlocked, the Nazi scientists quickly discovered (strangely arousing, I must admit) scat-based porn as well. They tried desperately to construct a ballistic missile capable of delivering this dual plague of shieser films and zombism to the United States. However, by this late stage in the game, their efforts were all for naught. Their Russian front had long since collapsed and Stalin's army was beginning to advance upon them. After this, combined with the tenacious advance of the Allied troops, Hitler knew that he was all but defeated. With the zombie pathogen not yet perfected, Hitler decided in his final days that the only hope for realizing his glorious “5,000 Year Reich” was exposing the Hitler youth to Germany’s second greatest weapon yet developed: Techno music.

The Russians were already familiar with the bass pounding, dance-inducing music commonly heard in the Nazi training camps. They were afraid of it, and for good reason – many of their most hardened soldiers had already been lured away by this siren song, trading their uniforms for assless chaps and disappearing into the winter woods for shirtless dance-offs with tutu-wearing “bears” – the true reason behind the exceptionally high casualty rate experienced by the Russian army during World War II. The few capable soldiers who proved immune to this threat hoped that defeating Hitler would also result in the defeat of this new gay sound that he’d cruelly unleashed. But although Hitler finally did give in and kill himself, saving his enemies the trouble of doing it for him, he ultimately triumphed in his final campaign to pussify the rest of the world through music that made Auschwitz look like a daycare center.

Still, it took generations for the booty shaking beats of Nazi techno music to take hold of the post-war population. It all started with disco and the electric slide a few decades later, and though punk rock came along in the mid nineteen-seventies to at least partially stem the tide, by the later nineteen-eighties (after
everyone
started listening to Depeche Mode), the onslaught could no longer be withstood by the youth of the world. On every continent, this electronic infestation insidiously worked its way through popular music to eventually convert nearly every musician into an anemic, talentless spaz or a blonde, overly sexualized teenage girl. To top it all off, their “music” was no longer played by musicians at all, but by the superior synthesizers invented by Germans. Hitler’s revenge was complete.

The Third Reich, though close, never did manage to infect anyone with zombism. It did, however, manage to infect succeeding generations of the Allied and Russian troops' children with a much more horrifying affliction, hypnotizing them to the point where their herky-jerky dance moves almost resembled the writhing of zombies. Perhaps the last laugh (for now anyway) is that this aural plague has succeeded in pussifying its listeners to the point where they will be completely unable to resist the impending Fourth Reich, when it finally comes, with its even more irresistible dance tunes and male leather fashions.

Most scientists who accept the possibility of zombism believe it to be caused by something much more pedestrian than effeminate alchemists or outright homo Nazis – parasites. Parasites have adapted over the ages to direct a multitude of functions from within countless host organisms. In the case of zombism, advanced parasites seek to control the host’s mind and body in an effort to perpetuate its own growth and reproduction, causing the host to ignore its own needs and blindly serve its master. Listed below are several examples of zombism that already occur in nature due to parasites.

Sacculina Carcini
is a virus that infects male crabs, and is a horrific example of crustacean zombism. The parasite in its larval form resembles a slug. When it encounters a host later in its development, it attaches to the crab’s exoskeleton and burrows it way through this natural armor. Upon infection, the one-time “man's man” of a crab loses all ability to think for itself (much like a zombie, or a woman). This emasculating parasite even goes so far as to sterilize the male and enlarge its sacculina, completely changing its overall gnarly body structure, giant virile claws and all, to more closely resemble that of a voluptuous female.

In human terms, the male crab grows a nice rack. The parasite then causes the once masculine crab to turn gay crab and perform the female mating dance. Though lacking the beauty and grace of the actual female performance, this is enough to entice all of the loser, mateless male crabs in the area to approach. This enticement is similar to the trance I myself have fallen under (with the aid of triple-thick beer goggles, of course) before approaching rather manish-looking fat chicks at the bar in the hopes of “mating” with whatever was available. However, humans only have to wake up the next morning and hope that their friends and/or girlfriend don't catch wind of the event. In the crab world, the transvestite male crab will have impregnated you with parasite larva. And with no crab health clinics to help you, you will be doomed to grow a fantastic set of your own, get pumped by some other loser man crab, and begin the cycle of gay, parasiste-controlled, zombie crab sex all over again.

Leucochloridium Paradoxum
, what a sight for sore eyes… This particular zombism-inducing parasite has adapted a particularly clever strategy in its efforts at self-replication. Though birds usually serve as its primary host, this parasite causes no harm to the organism carrying it through this part of their lifecycle, beyond sharing in the consumption of its food. The only side effect of this infection, as far as the lucky avian host is concerned, is that all other birds in the vicinity will typically become jealous of its new and apparently effortless slim, model-like look. The larvae of its little “weight-loss secret” are then transmitted to the next host through the half-digested feces of the infected bird.

What happens in between is a food-chain waiting game. After enough time has passed (it takes awhile), a snail will inevitably come along to absorb the nutrients from the bird's droppings. Once the slug unwittingly devours the dormant larvae within, its death becomes instantly imminent. Forgetting its natural tendency to remain hidden in the foliage and underground, the snail is mentally manipulated by the parasite to remain out in the open, on top of rocks on the limbs of trees, where it is easily consumed by another bird.

Having reached adulthood, the parasite bores its way through the digestive cavity of the snail and into one of its eye stalks. It then protrudes itself out through one of the eyes and takes on the appearance of a delicious worm, as irresistible as the sirens of Homer's Odyssey. As if the snail weren’t appetizing enough to our feathered friends already, this parasite ensures its continued evolution by making the snail doubly delectable to its prey. When the lucky bird finally swoops down to consume its worm and snail sandwich, the seeds are shortly sewn for the next round of parasitic infection.

Toxoplasma Gondii
is a very small, almost microbial parasite that is commonly found is the guts of cats. Like
Leucochloridium Paradoxum
, it causes little damage to its primary host. Also like its snail-infesting counterpart, it has difficultly spreading itself directly from primary to primary (i.e., cat to cat) without the use of an intermediary.

Traveling from one cat’s shit to another cat’s mouth, usually in a shared litter box situation, is one way that this parasite can bypass its intermediary. Usually, however, the eggs within the stool are picked up first by rats and mice, who also eat cat shit, apparently, and are then eaten by another cat from the next alleyway down the street, who passes its feces on to the next hungry animal to become a pawn in this deadly game of literal cat and mouse.