The
arrival and subsequent departure of Ray, Michelle, and Kim got me thinking. In
zombie movies, as an audience member your first knee-jerk reaction is always,
“Shoot them in the head, stupid!” I think we all have that attitude because we
know what situation we are in. We saw the trailers. Everyone loves Matt Damon
and we all saw that one shot where Sofia Vergara was pulling off her dress to
reveal bra and panties. And yes, after we got home, we searched for the trailer
on YouTube just so we could catch that shot again. We knew from the beginning
that this was a zombie movie. We knew that the only way to deal with these
monsters was to destroy the brain and you get impatient with the characters in
the story because they haven’t figured it out yet. That is pop culture for you.
I
want you to rewind and remember what I told you about Zero Hour. The first big
collection of these zoms was the ones that came bursting out of that nursing
home. They had been dead for all of ten minutes before their bodies reanimated.
So with the exception of their milky eyes with yellow bloodshot running through
them, they looked human. They didn’t stink. They didn’t even look dead. They
just looked sick. And unless you are some psychopathic killer, your first
instinct is to help someone not brainpan them with a claw hammer from the
toolbox in the back of your pickup.
Now,
I am just postulating a theory here. But imagine a hotspot of these things
popped up overnight, say within a hospital. Doctors and nurses would be trying
to diagnose what the problem was. They would be making calls up the chain of
command probably all the way to the CDC. They wouldn’t start running and
barricading themselves behind closed doors because they would want to treat the
infected. But remember, they would have no idea what they were dealing with.
When
my then wife was going to school to be a nurse, I was always afraid of her
getting stuck with a rogue needle or coming into contact with some flesh-eating
bacteria. They know it is unlikely but it is part of the job. So they would all
be standing as the first line of defense for the public against some outbreak.
And that is why most of them probably fell to the infected.
I
cannot stress enough how fast something like this spread. And the sheer
lethality of the Kharon Virus… I think the only way to prevent something like
this would have been to cap it in three days. After that, Clara bar the barn
door.
So
now, imagine this overrun hospital set in a major metropolitan area. Once these
things spilled out onto the streets and started chomping on anything that
moved, it would be chaos. And what is worse, there would be no protocols for
the local authorities to deal with this. Sure, we know now that these are the
walking dead but what if it turned out that these were living breathing
subjects. Imagine the YouTube videos that would pop up and public outcry if
cops were shooting sick people in the head…
This
had to have been how the cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Dallas were
overrun. New York City? Manhattan? I think there would be so little hope. Now,
keep in mind that was 178 days ago. Now, the hordes are roving. I am quite
certain none of them really have knowledge of where they are going. But with
whatever brain function they have left, they must have figured it out. There is
no food here. There must be food somewhere else. And that is why I am guessing
that a large portion of them are now on the move. This is all a theory but it sure does sound
solid to me.
And
if these things move in a herd, a school, a shamble of zoms, then the more zoms
the shamble, the more zoms are likely to follow. Next thing you know, you have
a horde so big you cannot even begin to fight them. And what if that horde
wants inside here? Can we keep them out?
