Zombie CSU (43 page)

If the zombie is even more aggressive—or is rushing forward in such a way that the officer does not feel that the baton is the appropriate choice—there are two very serious upgrades in his potential response: Tasers and firearms.

The final step in the force continuum is the use of deadly force.

Expert Witness

Wilson says, “Shooting to the head is not standard procedure for police. We’re taught to aim for the center of the body. That’s where the heart, lungs and spine are. Unlike the movies cops don’t fire unless they have no choice, but when they do fire shooting to wound is seldom a smart move. You don’t try to ‘wing’ someone, you don’t shoot them in the leg. Guns are killing devices. If we’ve drawn our service weapon then a lot of other things—strategies and tools—have failed, or the situation was too big to begin with. In those circumstances you are shooting to put someone
down
.”

Former LAPD officer Dennis Miller agrees. “In the twenty-two years I worked LAPD I never fired my gun once. I used OC spray a lot, and my baton. I even did some hand-to-hand stuff. I’m a believer in the idea that guns are for killing, not for settling disputes. Sure, we may draw our weapons in order to maintain order, say while someone else is cuffing suspects or during a house entry, but having to fire is rare. And I’ve been in some pretty hairy situations. So I know for sure that if I had ever needed to fire my gun it would be to kill.”

An active officer from Washington, D.C., who declined to be named in this book, had this to say: “Here’s the problem with shooting to wound. Actually, here are a couple of problems. First, you aim for an arm or leg you could miss and that bullet is going to keep traveling until something stops it. How stupid is that on the street? Second, the bullet can easily pass through a limb and you have the same problem. Also, a wounded suspect who still has his gun can continue to shoot back, and screw that! Last, and here’s a real problem all across the U.S.—you shoot some schmuck who’s just popped a cap in a liquor store owner and taken a shot at you and you hit him in the arm or leg, he’s going to
sue
the ass off the city and the SOB will win. I was in two shoot-outs. I guess it’s my good fortune that I didn’t have to kill someone, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. In both cases there were circumstances that prevented me from being the one to make the take-down shot.”

Use of Deadly Force
by Jonathan Maberry

Deadly force seems like an appropriate response to an attack by the living dead.

Though head shots may not be standard operating procedure (SOP) for most police departments, it has become common in the personal enrichment training many law enforcement professionals seek to improve their skill sets. One training exercise that has gained a lot of popularity is the “failure drill.” Firearms expert Karl Rehn, owner of KR Training, a company in Austin, Texas, that teaches firearm safety, NRA instructor certification, and firearm safety instructor programs, tells us about this drill: “Failure Drill” is short for ‘failure to stop’ drill. It—like dozens of other terms used in relation to defensive handgun training—originated from Col. Jeff Cooper and the Gunsite Academy out in Arizona. Gunsite taught students to shoot a ‘double tap’ (two shots in rapid succession) to the chest of someone that was a lethal threat. If that failed, then following up with a single head shot was the next thing to do. Modern thinking amongst trainers is that firing two to the chest and stopping to assess is dangerous because often people do not react immediately to handgun wounds, even two hits to heart and lungs. Current doctrine at most schools is to fire until the threat is down rather than give the bad guy an opportunity to shoot you back. Often this results in the general public getting upset because people get killed in shootouts with cops. The reality is that it can take up to 10 seconds for a lethal wound to drop someone, and even though the first hit may have been fatal the shooter doesn’t know that until the threat is down. So while the first hit is taking effect the shooter continues to fire on the threat.”

The Zombie Factor

Which brings us to the issue of the effect of a gunshot to a zombie.

“Aiming for small targets such as the head or legs from any distance beyond 4 or 5 yards seems like a near-certain recipe for a miss; remember, in a gunfight, only hits count.” This comes from a Vietnam War veteran and member of the Combat Handguns online group.
⁷
He adds, “Rather than aim for small areas such as legs, arms or head, it seems more logical to continue to aim for the center of mass, as we are now taught, and to concentrate on the lower portion of the center of mass, in particular, the pelvic area. The pelvis is a large and very strong bone but most bullets with a kinetic power level of the .38 Special +P or larger and most centerfire rifle rounds can break the pelvis. Once the pelvis is broken, the individual is not physically able to stand and mobility is limited to his ability to crawl using the upper part of his body. Now, in a real human being, the pain associated with the slightest movement with a broken pelvis is almost beyond belief so effective resistance is pretty much ended. In a zombie, pain is not a consideration but the loss of agility and movement is the same. They may be able to crawl after their intended victims, but only a very slow pace. Their intended victims could simply walk slowly away and dispatch the crippled zombies at their leisure. Yeah, it’s a bit gruesome, but such is the nature of the beast.”

“It’s also a question of sheer impact,” says Miller. “In the movies everyone seems to shake off a bullet. Heroes get shot and they keep running and firing their guns, same with the bad guys. In zombie movies they get shot over and over again and, okay, they’re corpses so a body shot won’t hurt them, but the foot-pounds of impact is sure as hell going to knock them down. At the very least it’ll knock them back. That’s a reality, man. A .357 Magnum handgun bullet weighs about 125 grains and travels at 1450 fps.”
⁸

“The shock of impact of a gun,” explains Miller, “will knock most people down, even if they’re not taking a serious injury. Look at what happens when an officer takes a round in his Kevlar vest. Puts him on his ass.”

But Rehn reminds us of the “failure drill,” with its two-to-the-body one-to-the-head philosophy. He observes, “While this may sound overly aggressive, in reality it’s been proven that this approach is the best way for the shooter to survive the incident and the fastest way to immediately stop the attack.”

T
HE
F
INAL
V
ERDICT
: D
EADLY
F
ORCES

Cops versus zombies? Except in the presence of truly overwhelming odds, I give it to the cops. The question then becomes what constitutes overwhelming odds?

In a Romero scenario, one officer with a handgun and at least two spare magazines could probably take down six to ten zombies, and this accounts for body shots and misses. an expert shooter would do 50 percent better on average. A police sniper may be 100 percent better. In one-to-one confrontations it seems highly unlikely that a slow zombie would win against an armed and trained officer.

If we’re talking fast zombies of the kind found in the
Dawn of the Dead
remake, or the fast human infection as seen in
28 Days Later
, then there will be a lower success rate due to shock value; but as the situation becomes known, even in the midst of a crisis, the officers would bring more aggression to the game and more firepower. So round one may go to the zombies, but the rest of the fight will go to the guys with the guns.

Now the math on this changes in favor of the officers if they don’t need to score a kill shot every time. Head shots are tough; shots to the centerline are easier, and a damaged spine will drop anyone—alive or dead. That’s an electricity thing, and a damaged central nervous system is not going to help a zombie any more than it’ll help a human. If the officers shoot to the pelvis and damage the hips, hip ball joint, or thigh bones, then not only will the zombie go down, they’ll become obstacles that will slow down the attack of the zombies behind them. Again the odds turn in favor of men and women trained to use firearms.

A slam dunk? No; but the hot money will be on the boys in blue.

Hands
by Brandon Hildreth

“This painting has a lot of personal meaning to me ‘psychologically’ but I’d say it represents a person that has been dragged down in the world, or someone that has been sort of killed inside and shut out, turned almost monster, but there is still a small part that begs to be let back inside; a part that still longs to show signs of a human soul.”

J
UST THE
F
ACTS

When the Spirit Moves You…

In
Night of the Living Dead
the zombies are just walking corpses. There is no trace of a personality in any of them. There is no love, no compassion, no fear; just as there is no hate, no malice, and no
deliberate
aggression. They are no longer human beings by any of the conventional definitions just as they are no longer “alive” by any known definition of that word.

Vampires, because they are intelligent and retain the memories of who they were before they were transformed into the undead, are a different matter. If a vampire kills a human, it is an immoral act, even if the vampire claims exemption from moral laws because those laws were created for mortal man and they are no longer mortal. The issue of a separate morality has been endlessly explored in vampire fiction and is the ongoing plot thread in all of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, where her characters step back and forth across the line of “human” moral behavior and the belief that they are no more bound by moral restraint than a human is when slaughtering a cow. The vampire at least has an argument, however thin, to defend his actions, especially if he truly believes that he is now a higher being, or at very least, belonging to a separate species. This is the same view used in one way or another by centuries of humans to justify everything from slavery to eminent domain.

Zombies are not vampires. They don’t think and they don’t wrestle with complex issues of social and political philosophy.

Unless, of course, they possess a soul. If they possess souls, or if they retain any portion of their human consciousness or memories, then the issue suddenly becomes vastly more complex.

In
Night
there was not even an issue raised about zombies with souls, just as there was no obvious connection with any aspect of spirituality. The dead rise because of radiation. It’s weird science, sure, but it’s science. Then in Romero’s second zombie film,
Dawn of the Dead
, hard science seems to take just a bit of a sidestep into spirituality in that it is
suggested
that planet earth has become the standing room only area for an overcrowded hell. The catch phrase is: “When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth.”
¹
Just as with the first film, the cause of the zombie resurrection is implied rather than clearly explained.

Looking back, though, it seems likely that Romero had at least some kind of spiritual connection in mind when he conceived the whole series. After all, an early working title for the first film was
Night of Anubis
, and Anubis is the jackal-headed Egyptian god who served as the guardian of the dead and the overseer of the embalming process.
²
Anubis was also one of the gods who weighed the good and evil of each newly dead person and passed judgment on them. The bad souls linger in the underworld, the good ones are made into stars and cast into the heavens. The old working title implies both a spiritual link and a process of celestial judgment that has been imposed on mankind and his works. It’s this latter that appears to inform most of Romero’s
Living Dead
films and fits in well with his often scathing social and political commentary.

But then the rest of that second movie is played out in a way that reinforces the message that the zombies are soulless; just organic machines programmed by some totally unknown means to kill humans and eat them. There doesn’t seem to be any emotional or psychological component evident; the zombes are aggressive and they’re deadly, but they aren’t actually
mean
about it. There’s no evident personal hatred in them, no deliberate malice in their actions even though those actions are potentially lethal. If they are truly mindless and soulless, then their actions bear no more actual ill will than a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake. From that view zombies are a fact of a rather strange tweak on nature. They do, however, retain the smallest spark of memory, at least in as far as it is attached to gross motor skills. They can use simple tools (clubs, etc.), they can grab with their hands, they can make fists, they can climb ladders, and even turn door handles. Sure, you say, so can a spider monkey, but that doesn’t make it a human being.

In Romero’s third and fourth films,
Day of the Dead
(1985) and
Land of the Dead
(2005), the issue becomes much more complicated, which further complicates any forensic analysis.

In
Day
a scientist tries to rehabilitate a captured ghoul by working to rebuild some degree of conscious awareness associated with ordinary objects (pocket combs, a paperback copy of a Stephen King novel,
³
etc.). The implication here is that pattern and object recognition might possibly stimulate active cognition and therefore some amount of reason. To a degree this works as the test zombie, known as Bub (wonderfully played by Sherman Howard
⁴
), seems docile toward the scientist, Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty), and even manages a single short sentence: “Hello, Aunt Alicia.”

Though speech alone is not enough to establish a reasoning intelligence (just ask a parrot to explain
why
he wants a cracker), speech coming from a creature formerly capable of it is at least suggestive of the potential for a return to some level of reason.

The other side of this process is explored in Stephen King’s 2006 novel
The Cell
in which a computer virus broadcast through cell phones wipes clean the mind of anyone using a phone at that moment. The wiped brains reboot into a new form—a telepathic hive mind that unifies the zombified masses. King’s book discusses personality and its loss but stays away from any exploration of the soul and its connection to organic life. Romero, on the other hand, at least suggests that the soul exists and is tied to the physical body even after death.

In
Day
, after the inevitable plot turn when the humans typically screw things up through infighting and pettiness and everything goes to zombie hell in a handbasket, Bub reacts with both grief and anger when Dr. Logan is murdered. He goes hunting for the murderer, the vicious Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato) and kills him; but instead of doing it the typical zombie way, he
shoots
the captain. This demonstrates intelligence (however rudimentary), a thirst for vengeance, and some understanding of the concept of justice. Whereas revenge brings with it its own complex set of questions about morality, it is a decidedly
human
action. So…if Bub is human to some degree, does he then have a soul?

In
Land of the Dead
, the zombie Big Daddy—played with remarkable sympathy by Eugene Clark—is a hulking brute of a ghoul who is clearly functioning on a reasoning level, and who ultimately leads his fellow zombies in an attack on a walled city of humans. Big Daddy’s assault directly follows a supply raid by the humans during which a number of laughing, mocking humans maim and kill several ghouls. This seems to both alarm and anger Big Daddy, and he leads his “people” in a fairly clever and successful attack. During the attack Big Daddy demonstrates cunning, planning, and the use of tools. When his fellow ghouls are killed, he cries out in pain; when one is beheaded, he puts the crippled ghoul out of his misery. Each of these actions, though minimized to the barely articulate level, is human.

He learns from his actions, and he teaches other zombies what he’s learned. For example, one plot device has the humans, who are raiding zombie-infested towns for food, using fireworks (called “sky flowers” in the film) to distract the zombies. For whatever reason zombies are attracted to fireworks. But Big Daddy shakes off his fascination with them and then jostles other zombies to take their attention away from the fireworks so they can focus on attacking the humans. That is reason.

He then organizes all the zombies in a raid on Fiddler’s Green, the last known stronghold of humans. This is also an intelligent action; but his real moment of genius comes when his zombie army comes to the edge of the river separating his town from Fiddler’s Green. Big Daddy looks out at the city across the river and then down at the water. Humans would be stopped there without the use of boats; but zombies don’t
need
to breathe.
⁵
Big Daddy jumps into the river, followed by his army, and then they apparently walk across the riverbed to the far shore. The moment when they emerge is a riveting scene, beautifully shot…but more than that it establishes that the zombies not only made their way across the river but did so in a way only zombies could accomplish. That shows self-awareness, reason, and invention. It’s advanced and adaptive problem solving.

Hard to imagine soulless and unthinking creatures figuring that out.

The actions of Big Daddy show more compassion and moral outrage than do the actions of nearly all the humans in the story. Just as Bub’s vengeance on Captain Rhodes shows more humanity than is shown by most of the humans involved in that story. In both cases—Bub and Big Daddy—we have a zombie with emotions and compassion; in both we have zombies with soul. If Bub and Big Daddy have souls, then we can infer that all the Romero zombies probably have souls.

Boy does that open up a can of worms, especially when you consider that we have to kill them in order to survive. So now the issue of whether zombies have souls is more complicated. Much more complicated.

Expert Witness

I asked my panel of experts to discuss these issues.

Dr. Kim Paffenroth, associate professor of religious studies at Iona College and author of the book
Gospel of the Living Dead
⁶
sees it this way: “Since some people consider killing animals immoral, they would (I would assume) also consider zombie killing immoral. However, given the examples of Bub and Big Daddy, I would think that killing them would then have to be justified, especially under theories of self-defense (or, in our current troubled world, perhaps national security or an undeclared state of war). That could still be done, of course, as the killing of another person can be justified, but it would represent a huge difference from simply machine-gunning whole crowds of zombies without considering the action any further.”
⁷