Zombie Warfare Preparation: Will Zombie Guts Kill me?

It’s finally come: The Zombie Apocalypse.

While many, like myself, have been mentally preparing themselves shortly after the overseas reports of unexpected cannibalism in Asia as well as the threat of homeless people on bath salts, others will be taken completely by surprise. Of course readers like yourself will be ready because you know what’s really going on.

In fact we don’t know what’s really going on.

There are many theories. Some people think our own government is experimenting with a new kind of super-soldier formula that has had violent, lethal, and unexpected results – i.e.: indestructible nonliving human automations. Others feel that either a spore or a meteor has landed within our vicinity and an uncatalogued radioactive isotope has contaminated its immediate surroundings, spreading to the populace and bringing the recently deceased back as carnivorous berserkers.

In point of fact, it really won’t matter how they came about. None of us will have the necessary grey matter to connect the dots or be able to extrapolate some kind of cure from the zombies that will plague us.

What will matter is that we’ll have to deal with them.

It won’t matter if these creatures were some kind of supernatural experiment between a vampire and ancient occult magic. It won’t matter if this was caused by a new strain of the avian flu. We will still need to destroy these things before they come and eat us and our loved ones.

While we won’t be biologists, we will need to observe what happens when someone gets attacked by these creatures. We’ll need to watch them.

And if they should actually be a product of contagion, we may have to alter our fighting tactics a bit.

Most of the zombie lore within the last forty years will presume that becoming a zombie is a contagious event.

It will either happen one of two different ways. It will happen when a zombie bites a victim and upon that person’s death, they will rise again. The other way is somewhat incidental. As in The Walking Dead and in some of the other George Romero films the contagion is environmental. That means that until whatever is making the recently deceased turn, anyone who dies will turn regardless of whether they are bitten or not – which makes a bite wound from a zombie incidental.

Either way, to be on the safe side, don’t get bit or scratched.

Now I can hear you guys out there screaming that if it is contagious what happens when I find myself fighting a zombie and, for one reason or another, shoot him and get guts all over me. Should I be worried?

Probably not. What I mean to say is that since everything I’m telling you here is pretty much theoretical, there is no real way to know until you’re in that situation. However, if it were me, I’d be a little cautious. I know we’ve all seen episodes of The Walking Dead and Rick will kill a few zombies with an axe or a screwdriver – or maybe he’ll take a bunch out without a gun. And we’ve seen what he looks like after the fight.

Pretty disgusting.

I can’t imagine how bad zombie guts smell and I know that it’s been weeks since Rick’s last shower. My first priority would be to get a good shower. Apparently in the world of The Walking Dead, getting zombie guts on your body is either really good camouflage and completely harmless to the living or Rick just likes doing that.

What you have to watch out for is anything that bites or scratches you and breaks the skin. According to Max Brooks of The Zombie Survival Handbook, ingesting zombie blood is poisonous to everything, that’s why animals stay away from them. The blood is just toxic. So don’t get any in your mouth.

Of course there’s always the scientific method. Wait until someone gets bitten.

It’s bound to happen. Someone gets careless and slow and somehow a sweet smelling zombie manages to sneak up on someone and takes a bite out of their shoulder.

I’ve logged the symptoms of some of the zombie turns and you can read them by clicking the link. But you really need to look for signs of fever and infection in the victim. And once the person goes into a coma, they should be watched for a twelve hour period.

Bind them. If they turn after post mortem either decapitate the victim or destroy the brain in any way you see fit. Remember, that with decapitation, the head is still animated.

It isn’t over until the brain is destroyed.

Remember that the scientific method is observation, hypothesis, and conclusions based on facts.

In any of these observed deaths, always remember that although they turned, there still must be some amount of dignity to the victim. After all, they may have been a friend.

Hollywood.

I know that it looks really cool when the zombie slayer takes an axe or a gun and either decapitates the zombie or shoot it in the head. The problem is that when there’s a huge splatter from the wound or blood gushing, that’s technically wrong. Blood only gushes if there’s a working ticker somewhere in the zombie. And we know that these things are definitely dead.

We also probably know that an axe won’t go through a neck completely without a heavy chopping block (like they did in the French revolution before the guillotine). You have to be pretty strong to slide through an entire human neck or member because you’re going through muscle, bone, and sinews.

A sword or an axe won’t go through a limb unless the weapon is really, really sharp and the wielder is pretty strong. I will draw the line at some of the modern day long swords. I’ve seen them cut through things that an average person can wield effectively. The fact that they can go through a giant water cooler bottle with little effort may force me to reassess my statement.

However, on the average, you will need to practice with a sword, if you are going to use that for zombie slaying. I do hold firm that most axes won’t be able to slice all the way through a limb on any count unless the user is strong and well rested.