Zombie CSU (39 page)

T
HE
F
INAL
V
ERDICT
: P
REDATOR AND
P
REY

Nature adores a predator. It’s a key component to the survival of the fittest rule, and we see it in ourselves. We humans are a predator species. We are naturally violent, naturally aggressive. The growth of “civilization” has not been geared toward removing our predatory natures, but to either controlling it or focusing it. Sure, there are people of peace like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama…but look at what happened there: Two of the three were murdered, and the last one had to flee the armed takeover of his country.

Does that mean that the violent and vicious outnumber the peace-loving? I sure as hell hope not.

If we are not on the battle lines, we try to become less violent, to focus on growth and values and the cultivation of civilized behavior, and a lot of people do succeed. They’re well apart from the hard and gritty world of pain and damage. They’re antiwar and antiviolence. And then a 9/11 happens.

Like most people, I remember where I was on that morning and what I was doing. I was still working a nine-to-five job then, doing graphic design for a law firm. When the second tower was hit, a bunch of us gathered in a conference room and watched in horror as the towers began to burn. All around me were shocked and terrified faces—the faces of people whose lives had become so disconnected from violence that its presence, even on TV, was as real to them as if someone had struck them each a physical blow. These were people to whom violence was not—or, perhaps, no longer—part of their daily lives.

The next day, when I came to work and we all stood around and talked about how we felt when we watched the TV footage of the towers collapsing, and how we felt when we heard about the plane hitting the Pentagon, and the one that went down in a Pennsylvania field, I saw on each face the civilized mask begin to slide away. I saw anger, rage. I saw hatred. I heard people—good, gentle people—say how they wished we could just kill everyone responsible; how we should find them and bomb them back to the stone age. These were people who were not particularly hawkish, people who weren’t necessarily right-wing. These were just
people
; and they had been hurt. Someone had struck them—however much it was via the surrogates of the victims of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; they were feeling it as each one of them had been hurt. And when humans are hurt, they lash out and strike back. Even babies do it.

It is in our nature. It is a decidedly uncivilized response, and it’s knee-jerk, and many of those people who screamed for revenge later, when the intensity of the moment cooled, backed off from their desire to see a blood-for-blood form of redress. That’s fine, that’s part of the civilizing process; but in the moment, if you had put guns in their hands or handed them a remote detonator, they might have killed. Many would. Not all, of course; but many more than you or I might have previously guessed. Perhaps you would have; perhaps me as well.

We are a predator species.

In times of great conflict, it is the heart and the mind that takes the gravest wounds. If the dead rose to attack us, we would go to war with them. I believe—as do the overwhelming majority of my experts—that we would win. We would be vicious about it, too. It would become a kind of ethnic cleansing: our species against theirs. It would be genocide. So, yeah, we would win…but we would lose, too, because you cannot go from being a nonviolent person to being a violent person and then go completely back again. Ask anyone who has ever been in combat. You may find peace again, you may be able to willingly put down your gun and walk away from war, but you cannot ever forget that it happened, and you cannot ever remove all of the marks it leaves.

We would fight. We would get tougher by becoming more of what we naturally are: the most successful predator species to ever hold the lease on planet earth. We would not yield it to the dead. And once the last of the dead are truly dead, and once we have adapted our society to make sure the dead stay in their place, we would go back to the process of trying to evolve into nonviolent and civilized beings. We would not, however, be the same people we once were. The world will have changed for us, just as it changed on 9/11. We are marked by that event and always will be. If the dead rise and we win that war, we will be a new version of humanity. Who knows what shape it will take, or what paths social evolution will thereafter take? Probably the only thing that you could place hard money on with a guarantee of a win is to bet that no matter what happens that man, the superior predator, will never be too far beneath the surface.

SWAT
by Jonathan Maberry

“Zoms fought the law and the law won.”

F
orensics and medical science have shown that there are qualities of the living dead that will identify them as such and send up all the appropriate flags. Now we need to discuss how police will stop a zombie.

Zombies don’t flee.

Zombies attack.

As soon as the zombie is able to detect the presence of a human, it will invariably turn and pursue that human, and when it’s in range it will attack. If the human is a frail older person, a child, or someone with absolutely no sense of how to manage the rudiments of defense (parry a grab and run like hell), then the zombie’s attack will very likely result in the spread of its infection. That victim, once dead, will reanimate after a period of time, and now we’ll have two zombies. Each person they attack continues the infection, and we are left with a geometric spread.

In this chapter we’ll explore the methods used by law enforcement to arrest and detain a violent suspect. We’ll also go a step further to discuss what officers would do if that suspect was more than ordinarily difficult to control; and then go further up the line to discuss armed responses and the use of deadly force. We’ll even call in a SWAT team.

J
UST THE
F
ACTS

Arrest and Detain

If the human the zombie attacks is a police officer—even a single officer—the outcome is going to be a lot different. Modern police are not only very well trained in the skills of controlling violent or even irrational suspects, they have a variety of tools and weapons at their disposal that will allow them to respond with appropriate force.

In many of the zombie films and books, the officers who respond to a zombie attack are usually overwhelmed very quickly. Too quickly, in my opinion. Granted, verbal commands, threats, and harsh language are not likely to deter a zombie from attacking; but on the whole cops are a lot more effective, careful, and controlled than they are portrayed. A police officer is not just going to stand there with bug-eyes and a gaping mouth while a zombie rushes him or her. At most the officer will assume the person is whacked out on drugs or mentally disturbed. Remember, cops are taught to maintain a safe distance when confronting a possible suspect, and they always—
always
—prepare for the possibility of a violent attack.

Expert Witness

“Officer presence and verbal commands would be tried first,” says Detective Joseph Sciscio of the Bensalem Police Department. “Though if we’re talking zombies I assume we would see a very quick progression through the use of force. Considering the likelihood the officers would or could be getting seriously hurt, I would expect deadly force to be deployed at some point.”

According to retired NYPD officer Jerome Wilson, “I’ve seen all those living dead films a hundred times and they state pretty clearly that individually the zombies are not that strong, not even as strong as a normal man. If one of the slow zombies came at an officer and tried to bite him, the officer would first adjust distance to allow himself time to manage the situation, and to give him more time to try verbal commands. If that failed, he has lots of things to fall back on—OC spray, baton, and nowadays a lot of departments have TASERs.”

The question remains, though, as to what would happen if the zombie was able to get close enough to grapple and tried to bite. Wilson doesn’t see that happening, even when the officers are attempting to put the face shield in place. “Damn, you know how people are when someone tries to bite. It’s like when someone tries to kick you in the balls. People move at warp speed. It’s our natural reaction, our basis instinct, a primal thing. We don’t let people bite us—there’s a fear reaction that amps up evasion and resistance. Now, consider the combatants in the situation. You have a slow zombie who is unsteady on his feet and a police officer who is trained for close combat, who is probably wearing a vest, who has a belt filled with tools, and who can tell that this suspect is not acting rationally. He’s not going to just grapple with the zombie and let himself get bit. No way.”

Dennis Miller, a former sergeant with the LAPD, agrees. “I worked riots in LA and there was all kind of fighting going on there. Things got pretty crazy as you may remember following the Rodney King verdict. Point is, there were some serious tussles and those officers involved in one-to-ones were not fighting mindless ghouls, they were fighting street kids and adults who were very tough, very fast, and very experienced street fighters. I’ll put any kid over the age of fifteen who comes from South Central up against a zombie anytime, and that zombie is going
down
. Cops are even tougher. Get bit by something like they have in
Night of the Living Dead
? No, I just can’t see that happening.”