Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (19 page)

In line with expert predictions, 1978’s
Dawn of the Dead
depicts a small band of survivors who find refuge from the zombie plague in a sealed shopping mall, only to be overrun by hostile human marauders who exploit the lawless environment to take what they want violently.
Dawn
is Romero’s second zombie movie, considered by many to be among the best ever made.

So, if you think that being eaten alive will be your biggest problem when the undead rise, you might want to think again. What’s more likely is that your house will be set on fire with
you and your family inside, just because some desperate survivors think you might have something they want.

In fact, humans are arguably much more dangerous in a zombie plague than the undead horde itself. Zombies don’t possess a human’s ability to think, plan, plot, scheme, double-cross, negotiate, and cheat. Furthermore, zombies don’t know where you hide your essential supplies and wouldn’t be interested in stealing them even if they did.

The seriousness of the human threat in a zombie outbreak cannot be overstated. We may not know exactly where the un-dead sickness will start or how it will spread, but one thing is certain: your fellow citizens will be the most dangerous thing you face in the early days of societal collapse.

It seems that every few weeks, we’re given another reminder of this, and numerous reports out of the 2010 earthquake zone in Chile were no exception. On February, 28, 2010,
NBC Nightly News
had this to say about the situation there:

The real peril now is that the looting and violence is not confined to empty businesses but is also widespread in the homes of those who have survived. Basically a nightmarish scenario of neighbor against neighbor is unfolding.
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Because of the breakdown in the distribution chain in Chile, people were desperate to secure food, water, and supplies for themselves and their loved ones. Even though they knew that the world wasn’t coming to an end, that everything would eventually get back to normal, the drive for survival was too great for them not to take matters into their own hands.

In a zombie pandemic, we will have the same lack of supplies and services, with the added shock and fear that walking corpses bring. The peril faced by survivors of a zombie infestation at the hands of their neighbors will be exponentially greater than that of any more common disaster.

When the dead rise, will it be your fault? Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University says that when things go bad, there is a human need to find someone to blame, and that spells further disaster in a zombie outbreak. His paper “Negativity Bias in Attribution of External Agency,” published in the
Journal of Experimental Psychology
, explains that blame is our natural default setting because unexpected events are difficult to predict, and the unpredictable can be scary. What is more scary and unpredictable than an infestation of the walking dead?

The Black Plague of the Middle Ages was the deadliest event in human history, with some estimates suggesting that
half of the world’s population was killed off. Looking at societal reactions to such a devastating time, specifically the blame trigger, can give insight into the challenges we may face in the coming zombie pandemic.

As the very real notion of the end of the world set in at the height of the Black Plague, many previously peaceful people were sent into a religious panic that bordered on sheer insanity. And no group better illustrates this point than the flagellants.

The flagellants walked across Europe whipping themselves to a bloody pulp as they shambled through the streets of any plague-infested town they passed. Their aim was to atone for the sins of man that brought such suffering to them all. But when masochism didn’t work, they started to attack and kill anyone they thought might be a particularly offensive sinner. Even town priests were not safe from their wrath. As the violent fervor intensified, the flagellant mob murdered tens of thousands of innocent people before the plague began to subside and the Catholic church ruled them heretics and outlawed the practice.

But we don’t need to look back hundreds of years in the past to find irrational blame based on misguided religious beliefs. On the January 13, 2010, episode of
The 700 Club
, Pat Robertson openly blamed the Haitian people for the devastating earthquake they had just suffered. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and according to Robertson, it was their own fault because they’d made a pact with the devil years before:

And you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon the Third and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact
to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.” True story. And so the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.”
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On that same program, just two days after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, Jerry Falwell blamed the tragedy not on the foreign hijackers or distant terrorist masterminds but on what he perceived to be the real homegrown menace: homosexuals and feminists.

Irrational blaming in times of crisis crosses all cultures and religions. A prominent Indian journalist, Rajeev Srinivasan, suggested that a 2004 earthquake and resulting tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in fourteen countries was a sign of retribution against Christians in India, whose activities he sees as betraying that nation’s essentially Hindu character. He referred to the event as the “Christmas quake” and implied that the December 27 date was no coincidence.

A 2010 study from York University in England found that sustained levels of anxiety can give rise to radical, violent religious beliefs. Published in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, the evidence suggests that anxious people more fervently cling to their ideals and are more extreme in their convictions. Lead researcher Ian McGregor explains that a process known as Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) is to blame:

Reactive Approach Motivation is a tenacious state in which people become “locked and loaded” on whatever goal or ideal they are promoting. They feel powerful, and thoughts and feelings related to other issues recede.
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McGregor adds that extreme stress in the face of danger causes many to become both paranoid and more willing to
submit to the control of a charismatic external force, allowing cult leaders and doomsday prophets to flourish when the zombies come.

If you’re not planning to join a cult with the rest of the crazies, you might want to think about keeping a low profile when CNN starts talking about dead people rising and attacking their neighbors. If not, you could find a bloodthirsty horde of freaks kicking down your door and burning you alive on the off chance that you caused the undead apocalypse.

Karen Cooper is the first film character ever to turn into a modern zombie. Her parents frantically attend to a bite she’s suffered, only to be killed and eaten by their little girl in the basement of a secluded Pennsylvania farmhouse. Still, Romero makes it clear in all of his zombie films that the human threat is much more deadly than any undead menace.

Though she never appears outdoors on-screen, a promotional photo of Kyra Schon as Karen standing in the farmhouse yard is one of the most iconic images from
Night of the Living Dead
.

ILLUSTRATION BY MATT GROLLER

I
f you think you’re going to be saved by the solid advice of your elected officials in a zombie outbreak, think again.

In late September 2005, Hurricane Rita was approaching Houston, Texas. With memories of Katrina’s devastating impact on the Gulf Coast still fresh in the minds of public officials, dire warnings went out across the airwaves that implied that citizens needed to get out of town or die. Upwards of 2.5 million people jammed the roads, creating a colossal hundred-mile-long traffic jam that left many people stranded and out of gas for days.

Houston mayor Bill White, who originally called for the mass evacuation, soon admitted that the highway was a death trap. He said that his plan had not anticipated the volume of traffic, even though a simple math equation that measured the number of residents against the road capacity could have been successfully completed by the average middle school student.

In neighboring Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Governor Kathleen Blanco advised residents to “write their Social Security numbers on their arms in indelible ink” so that the medical examiner could identify their dead bodies after they were found drowned by floodwaters in their homes or bludgeoned to death by debris sailing on deadly winds. But then she and other officials seemed completely unprepared for the mass panic that ensued.

Back on the gridlocked highways of Texas, twenty-four elderly evacuees were killed when a mechanical problem ignited a fire on their charter bus. Rescue workers had no chance of reaching them through endless stalled traffic. They heeded the bad advice of their government representatives and paid the ultimate price. Be careful not to do the same.

James F. Miskel served as professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College for twelve years and was also a member of the National Security Council under former presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. In short, he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to issues of government preparedness in the face of a crisis. And that’s what makes his insights on the topic so much more disturbing.

In his 2006 book,
Disaster Response and Homeland Security
, Miskel observes that government typically deals with past failures by adopting a narrow focus on specific problems and generating targeted solutions. But because no two catastrophes are ever the same, a new and unforeseen failure is always waiting just around the corner. In fact, this “fine-tuning” approach, coupled with a highly interdependent agency structure, practically guarantees that we won’t be ready for the next surprise: