Zombie CSU (34 page)

Based on that, what questions will the police need to have answered to help them find this guy?

“Does the guard know the attacker? That would matter in a profile. What was the guard doing when attacked? What area of the parking lot? What season? What was the weather? Was the attacker larger than the guard? How long did the attack last? What time did it occur? There are many questions that need to be answered to give a more detailed analysis. I’d recommend having a dog handler track him, since the scent is fresh and he was barefoot.”

I asked Dr. Ramsland to speculate on what kind of advice might a psychologist give to police/military if a case turned out to involve zombies.

“Nothing generic,” she says. A lot of it would depend on what kind of zombies are involved. “How many, what happened, what’s their behavior, what kind of analysis is wanted, and for what purpose? The advice will depend on the situation and on what’s specifically requested. There’s obviously no codebook for zombie psychology. If they came to someone like me, with a pretty good background in the occult, I would suggest a strategy of containment in order to see how they act. Find out what’s predictable about them, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. That will provide some answers in terms of how dangerous they are, how imminent the danger is, and what kinds of things might work to protect society. Again, their actual behavior is the key for what to do, not a generic idea.”

For more on the psychology of zombies see Chapter 4.

T
HE
F
INAL
V
ERDICT
: D
OCTOR
, D
OCTOR
, T
ELL
M
E THE
N
EWS
…

Are zombies likely? No. And we can all be thankful for that.

Are they totally impossible? Also no. And we can all lose some sleep over that.

Granted there would have to be some pretty radical shifts in human physiology and disease pathology for anything even close to this to happen, so there is additional comfort in the thought that Mother Nature probably isn’t actually out to get us and so wouldn’t craft mutations of this kind just to mess with our heads. On the other hand, Mother Nature did invent prions, so she certainly has her mood swings.

In light of the medical evidence and theories discussed in this chapter, we have to turn around and take another look at the issue of whether zombies are dead or alive. Let me rephrase that: Are they truly dead or only partly dead?

If they are actually corpses, then the process of rigor mortis could offer storytellers a reasonable explanation for why zombies are sometimes fast and sometimes slow, because with rigor mortis first the body is loose, then stiff, then loose again. Loose could equal quick and spry. Also, a dead zombie will eventually decay and fall apart. If they are somehow kept alive-ish by feeding on living flesh, there will be a point where that source will either run out or be denied to them. With no nutrients, proteins, or liquids being ingested, the bodies will decompose. It should take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months before zombies are no longer even a marginal threat (though the infection will likely persist).

On the other hand, if zombies are at least marginally alive, as my experts all seem to think, then a zombie’s speed will depend on how much brain damage is present. Brain damage can certainly interfere with motor function, resulting in stiff, jerky, and uncoordinated movement.

Romero called his film
Night of the
Living
Dead
. Everyone has focused all their attention on the word
dead
; but for me the operative word is
living
but only as it impacts the definition of
dead
.
Living death
, then, would be a brand new term, a concept that fits into what we now see as a gap between truly alive and definitely dead. Given all that we’ve learned so far from our experts, that’s what
living dead
is going to have to mean: a third designation of existence.