Zombie Apocalypse? Oh, Well, It’s Not the End of the World

[sour_idealist]

Everyone loves a good zombie apocalypse AU, right? Or story, if we’re talking origfic. After all, it’s a cool idea, inherently dramatic - our intrepid heroes trapped and desperate as they fight off hordes and hordes of monstrous, mindless, slavering, hungering, rotting mobile corpses -

Wait. Rewind that a bit. No, no, past there:

Rotting.

Okay

Comments

[fae_boleyn]

I honestly never looked at it this way, but you really do have a point. I guess it would depend - I know some viruses have the victims going mad first, so they might wreak more destruction that way, but even so, if there were enough survivors, things could work. The trick would be their managing to find each other, since if the infection goes worldwide - and it could, in today's world of speedy travel, since infections spread pretty damn far long before that - the survivors would, in theory, be really spread out.

Actually, that might make a good story, the idea of seeking other survivors after a zombie virus in order to start again. Hmm. Has that been done yet?

[sour_idealist]

Oh, I agree that the survivors might be spread out. But you know? The zombies aren't gonna touch the satellites. I don't know a lot about radio programming, but I imagine that once they zombies are gone it wouldn't be too hard to use whatever technology remained (probably most of it) to jury-rig a radio and get some signals going around the planet to the general effect of: HEY, WE'RE ALIVE OUT HERE, ANYONE ELSE?

And yeah, I'd love to read that story. I'm thinking of doing it, if I can pick what or how, but you should totally give it a shot too!

[simply_shipping]

Well, all of the original zombies will be dead. One about the people they infect? They manage to infect someone right before they decompose to the point of uselessness. Now you've got a very fresh corpse, not embalmed but with decomp possibly slowed by the virus, who can then infect however many other people before succumbing to decomposition and so on. You'll still need the bullets/fire/religious methods/decapitation to stop the cycle. Though it does mean that if you can gather all of humanity into safe zones and camp out for a few years, you're fine.

[sour_idealist]

Oh, things are definitely temporarily fucked, but even the second and third waves of infection would eventually drop off. Zombies can't self-propagate except by biting, and so if you manage to stop that then eventually you'll be all right. So basically, yeah: my point is that the safe zone plan will work, not that the stabbing-corpses-every-few-minutes-as-you-trek-desperately-about part will fail. The latter part will definitely still happen in these stories, but it won't be the permanent state of affairs for the planet, you know?

[simply_shipping]

Yeah.

*practices stabbing corpses, just in case*

[wake_the_dragon]

It depends

[sour_idealist]

Well, if the outbreak is fast, then that actually hastens the eventually collapse of the apocalypse: less time for all the zombies to rot. It might lower the chances of people initially escaping, but they don't have to fight off the zombies for that long. If everyone's infected within the first six months, then the time to no more zombies is six months plus decomposition time (around two months), so that would mean the zombies would be gone in under a year. And if everyone comes back as a zombie, then it becomes procedure to cremate your dead immediately, strapping the corpses down to do it, and life can still go on although more hazardously.

As to three and four: yes, there would definitely be panic while the zombies were there, and you'd definitely have to fight them off, I'm not arguing that. And yes, a lot of people would probably die. But there's an end to that stage, you know? There's a point within a few years when you stop fighting and start to rebuild. The world isn't permanently zombie-ridden, and I bet it would be possible

[wake_the_dragon]

What if the virus stops rotting? They wouldn't be falling apart, so there wouldn't be a time limit. Also, what do you mean by if everyone's infected? Most of the population, a city, what

[sour_idealist]

I... agree that there would be a lot of deaths, actually, I never said there wouldn't. Things would suck for a while, and a lot of people would indeed die. But I've seen a lot of stories wherein the zombies stick around for generations, or otherwise where it's implied the world is permanently and entirely doomed, and they just... massive plot holes.

Things would definitely suck in the short term, though, I agree.