THIS IS JUST A THEORY. WE ARE DOING
OBSERVATIONS TO PROVE THE VALIDITY. BUT WE COULD BE WRONG.
Unless this is some sort of doomsday
contagion, this zombie virus is not naturally occurring. I am dying for any
sort of official information but with no contact with the outside world, we are
just kind of winging it. But here is what we know.
It is not airborne or waterborne which
is why we feel pretty safe using the tap water for now. If it was in the air or
the water, there would be no escape and we are just delaying the inevitable. Might
as well slit our wrists now. So we are fairly confident that this is how it
works…
The virus is transferred via body
fluids, which means if you get bit, you have it. If you are fighting these guys
in melee combat, slashing at them with chainsaws and get their blood in your
eyes, mouth, or an open wound, you are in trouble. Fingernail scratches are
dubious right now.
I am by no means a veterinarian but
you hear stories all the time about dogs contracting rabies and they have to be
put down. I remember a news story from a while back about a police officer
putting down a rabid squirrel in a school yard because they were afraid it
might attack the kids. This is what these things seem to be like. They are
rabid. They are mean, aggressive, and just want to eat.
So let’s say this is some form of
mutated rabies or it at least shares the same qualities. As near as I can
figure, filmmakers in the past must have consulted doctors and such when they
wrote their scripts and all the theories and postulating has just happened to
turn out to be correct. It is some weird life-imitating-art thing.
The zombie must carry a virus strain
that is transferred by fluids. It acts like most other pathogens. (Is that the
right word? Pathogen?) Diane was showing serious symptoms over the course of a
few hours.
Okay, so, you encounter a zombie and
you get bitten. You don’t automatically turn and start eating human flesh like
you see in a bunch of Hollywood films. It starts off as a virus in your system.
I don’t believe that an antidote could reverse the effect unless 1) you got it
in your system very, very early or 2) such a thing even exists. I think Amputation
would be very risky. If you get bit on the ankle, could you cut off your leg
fast enough before your blood circulates up from your leg to your brain? I
doubt it.
Now, the virus gets in your
bloodstream. It immediately starts attacking your organs and systems because it
wants you to die. That is the whole
goal. But at this point, you are just sick. You are not a zombie yet.
Eventually, the fever burns you out, like we saw with Diane, your organs shut
down and you die. Once you die, that is when this virus really goes to work.
I have not had enough exposure to
infected test subjects to do a true scientific analysis but my theory is that
if you die by the virus, reanimation is a matter of minutes. With Diane, it
took about ten minutes and her eyes opened back up. But there is another
timetable that I think we have figured out.
Back during Zero Hour, we saw a
customer get hit outside by a pack of these things. She was loading groceries
into the back of her van when several of these monsters jumped her. All we
could do was watch from our doorway as we were barricading it.
Now she did not die from the virus.
She died from blood loss and the fact that her guts were chewed out by these
monsters. Her body was sprawled out in the back of her van for over a day. Then
we watched from the roof as she reanimated and limped around as best she could
on limbs with bites taken out of them and meat chewed away. [The happy ending
to this story is that Hunter put a bullet in her head with one of the weapons
that he brought in and ended her unlife.] But Diane, who died from the virus
killing her, reanimated in a matter of minutes. So a single chomp puts the
virus in your system and you will reanimate eventually, even if you die from
blood loss. (This furthers my theory that amputation will not work… or it may
just slow the onset.)
I keep going back to that scene in the
movie Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman
and Kevin Spacey. In that, the very lethality of the virus was actually a
benefit. It killed everyone so fast it did not have a chance to spread. Do we
have that option here? Is there a chance that there are sections of the
population that are immune to this virus? Or if there are people out there that
are not currently infected (like us) and we can outlast these shambling hordes,
will life get back to some semblance of normalcy?
That is really our plan of attack with
this whole thing. If we can just wait for these corpses to rot off, we can go
back to normal… which rolls us back to our One Year Plan. If we can just
outlast these beasties, we can wait it out and be part of those last vestiges
of humanity that will inevitably reclaim the world.
At least, that is the plan. I just
hope to God that it works.
This concludes your Zombiology lesson
for the day.
