Zombie CSU (19 page)
Gregg Winkler’s Decaying Zombie Quiz, Part 2
Folk-rock singer Jonathan Coulton did a song about zombies that was a major hit on YouTube. Name the song.- Who is the only actor to reprise a role in Romero’s zombie series?
- What is the incantations Bart and Lisa used to return Springfield’s zombies to their graves in
Treehouse of Horror III
? - What Japanese zombie movie has a television commercial selling “Bruce Campbell’s Right Hand 2”?
- Who infects Spider-Man with the zombie virus in the
Marvel Zombies Versus Army of Darkness
miniseries?
Across the United States there are a number of outdoor field labs, called “body farms” where forensic anthropologists train, such as the Anthropological Research Facility operated by the University of Tennessee Knoxville, a facility founded in 1972 by Dr. William Bass—a pioneer in the field.
Expert Witness
According to private investigator and forensic anthropologist Bryon Morrigan,
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“Just about the first thing a forensic anthropologist (FA) is going to want to do is remove all of the ‘soft tissue,’ so any work on the skin or other organs is going to need to be completed prior to the forensic anthropologist getting his/her hands on the body. If the body is severely decomposed, then an FA is probably going to be the one doing the examinations, but those are often limited to establishing time of death, which is going to be hard to figure on a zombie.”
Zombies…Fast or Slow? Part 3
- “Definitely slow. Zombies aren’t cheetahs, you know? They’re not particularly smart (they’re dead, after all), and the muscles are slowly dissolving, but if those bastards get hold of you, you’re zombie meat.”—Nate Kenyon, award-winning author of
Bloodstone
(Leisure Books, 2008) and
The Reach
(Leisure). - “Damned fast!”—Nancy Kilpatrick, author of
The Goth Bible
(St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004). - “Slow zombies will always have their place but I think the fast zombie even if it isn’t intelligent is a far more frightening thing. With slow zombies you have a chance even if you’re unarmed and vastly unnumbered whereas with fast zombies, they will take you down even if you’re armed to the teeth and a highly experienced combat veteran.”—Eric S. Brown, author of the zombie novel/novellas
Cobble
(Mundeniz, Press, 2005),
The Queen
(Naked Snake Press, 2006), and
The Wave
(Naked Snake Press, 2006).
He adds, “A good FA, with access to a full skeleton, ought to be able to tell you the body’s sex, age, and race with no problems. They can also give good information about damages to the body. For example: You find a gunshot wound in the skull, but the FA finds a certain amount of healing has taken place, leading the FA to believe that the wound was not fatal, and the person lived for some time after the wound.”
Retired Canadian forensic anthropologist Martin Schöenfeld adds, “Forensic anthropology is as much about preserving remains as it is about discovering who this person was. I’ve worked some cases high in the mountains where a bone was exposed by soil erosion, and as we began excavating the site we determined that the skeleton was broken up and scattered by weather and by scavenging animals. If the reconstruction had been attempted by anyone but an expert FA some valuable information may have been missed. As it turned out we determined that the bones were not from one body but from two—young twins that had gone missing a number of years before. We had 15% of one body and 11% of the other and we were able to determine the approximate age of the victims and even a cause of death. It went a long way to solving the case.”
The Zombie Factor
So how would forensic anthropology help our manhunt for a zombie?
“In the early stages it won’t,” says Schöenfeld, “at least not in the initial stages because this is not a fast science. Forensic anthropology is slower because it requires very precise care in recovering even a single fragment of bone. There’s site mapping, photography, and all manner of precautionary steps needed to preserve both the integrity of the site and the actual remains. However…. if it turns out that the zombie disease is the result of some older incident, perhaps contamination from an old toxic disposal site, or a contamination from improperly buried medical wastes—or even the grave of a person who had died from an infection years before, then we can help.”
I asked him to explain. “There are incidents in folklore that hint at zombielike creatures,” says Schöenfeld, who is currently writing a book on anthropology and folklore. “The
Ghul
of Arabic legend, the
Blutsauger
of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the
Brahmaparush
vampire of India, and the
Craqueuhhe
of France—all of these were flesh eaters according to legend, and since many people believe that there is a connection between myth and truth, then we could stretch the point to say that a zombie plague is a disease that has occurred from time to time throughout human history. It is a much more plausible and workable hypothesis than demonic possession or alien radiation. The pallid face, the diminished mental capabilities, the unnatural hunger—each of these symptoms can be individually explained by medicine. Why would it be so outrageous to postulate than a single disease, perhaps a mutated strain of rabies, cropped up now and again in different places around the world and caused zombielike behavior? If such a thing turned out to be the case, it would be either a forensic anthropologist or, perhaps, a forensic pathologist, who might make that discovery, and from there we might find a line of research leading to a cure.”