I know this is my
second Aliens reference but I keep
going back to a line from that film, where Ripley is commenting to Burke (and I
am paraphrasing I think). “You know, Burke, I don’t know which species is
worse. You don’t see them f**king each other over for a g-d damn percentage.”
Our situation is kind of along the same lines.
For a reason that we
cannot explain zombies do not eat other zombies. It is like they instinctively
do not eat infected flesh. Now, if you are just bitten, believe me, you are on
the lunch buffet if the zoms can get to you. But once a zom rises from the
dead, the other zoms never attack them. They just become another member of the
shambling horde.
Now, in between the
time when a person gets bit and when they collapse and become a corpse, zoms
will chow down on you if they can get to you. However, believe it or not, this
is actually a good thing. Strange to say that, I know, but here is my reasoning.
If even two or three
zoms get to a living person, drag it down, and cause enough damage for a person
to die, they don’t just stop and quit eating after that person dies. They stay
there and feast. We have found that a zom prefers living flesh to dead flesh. A
live person running past a feasting zom will prompt them to get up, leave the
body and chase after the living person.
But, if the zom is
allowed to chow down, they can do some serious damage to a body. Try to imagine
how much a stomach can hold. Now imagine that much meat missing off your calves
or thighs. Pretty tough to walk on those limbs… And rarely is there just one
zom feasting… As that virus makes its way through the body and then triggers
the reanimation process, the newly animated zom will have suffered the trauma
from the bites between death and rebirth. And I would prefer to deal with a
zombie with chewed legs then a zom shuffling about on fresher legs.
However, do not let a
zombie with mangled legs lull you into a false sense of security. They are
easier to get away from but that does not make them any less lethal. A bite
from a mangled zom corpse can infect you the exact same as a freshly animated
100% intact corpse. Now imagine a zom like that crawling through waist-high
grass. Mmmhmm.
What we do not know
is how they know if a moving target is a zombie or not. Can you, in fact, pull
a Rick and Glen from Season One of The
Walking Dead and drench yourself in zombie guts and walk among them? No one
is brave enough to attempt something like that and at this point it is pretty
much an unnecessary risk.
Still, it does range
an interesting question and I have a bit of a theory. Do zoms have some sort of
extrasensory perception? We have a theory that zoms hunt the same as normal
human beings (sight, sound, smell, etc.) But if they do not attack other zoms
because they do not attack their own kind, how do they know that the shambling
horror next to them is an infected zom?
If they can just
somehow sense that the shambling horror is infected, then wouldn’t the other
side of that coin be that they can sense uninfected flesh? And if that is the
case, how fine-tuned is that sense? I mean, if we are out of sight, out of
smell, and out of ear shot, they should leave us alone. But if that is not the case
and they can sense us, shouldn’t we start preparing for that roving horde?
