The following is information that I
hope can save your life. Zombies seem to all have one thing in common… Their
balance is shit.
See, zoms shuffle when they walk. They
don’t pick up their feet. I think part of this has to do with deteriorating
motor skills. So they have this irregular shuffling to their gait. One might
even say, “Zombies, every day they’re shuffling.” Oh c’mon. It’s the end of the
world. I cannot go out with a laugh?
I think everyone associates most
zombies with the mental image that the Romero films brought us – those
shambling horrors that just shuffle relentlessly towards you with their arms
extended and moaning. In one R.A. Salvatore novel, a ranger tracker couldn’t
understand what he was tracking because it said zombies don’t pick up their
feet. Then Zack Snyder changed everything with his version of DAWN OF THE DEAD
by having his zombies run.
What we have discovered with the Kharon
is that these shambling horrors do somewhat mill about. They shuffle and they
stagger about with a gait that is directly proportionate to their body
deterioration and any damage that they might have sustained in their unlife.
They are all milling about, doing
their thing, barely picking up their feet, looking for some brains to feast on.
With their deteriorating motor skills, you are not going to see these things
doing parkour. I think they have their shuffling gait because they have lost
90% of their equilibrium. This doesn’t make traversing stairs impossible but it
does slow them considerably. Climbing up them is one thing (especially if they
are following bait). Climbing down them is a whole other thing because they can
just fall down them if they need to.
So they stagger and shuffle about
until they get their sights set on meat and then everything changes. When it
comes to combat, zoms do have incredible tenacity when it comes to trying to
get at living human flesh. However, this lack of equilibrium makes it quite
easy to knock them over, knock them down. They fall quite easily.
See here is the thing that you may not
know. In Hollywood, you see these people take these shotgun blasts in these
action movies and the stun guys go flying out windows or get blown backward
against walls. It doesn’t happen that way in real life. Bullets slice through
people, they don’t blast through them.
I have seen zoms take shots to the
chest or to the legs and they collapse like rag dolls. In sorties, in melee
combat, zoms are taken off their feet quite easily. And it is almost like their
brains are rattling around inside their head, like they have shrunk about 75%
in their brain pans. So if you can knock them down, they do get stunned for a
bit.
It is the same when they fall down the
stairs. They will lay prone and motionless for a few heartbeats. But unless
that brain is destroyed, eventually, those dead neurons start clicking and
snapping and then they get back to their feet.
So I have seen zoms fall down stairs
and take all kinds of damage. But, what is the Number One Rule, kids? DESTROY
THE BRAIN. So regardless of broken limbs, ribs puncturing heart of lungs, or
even broken necks, eventually, they will get back on those shaky limbs and keep
coming after you.
Still, in that moment when those zoms
are stunned, they are in prime position to have that cranium cracked. So have
at ‘em. Level that pistol and end their eternal zombie dance party.
