March 6, 2011
There may come a day when you become a zombie. On that day there is a pretty good chance that most other people will become zombies, as well.
Becoming a zombie isn’t pretty. In fact, it is a horrible, degrading experience. Think of the worst thing that has ever happened to you. It is infinitely worse than that.
When you become a zombie, you will first experience dying. That, in itself, is a painful enough. But then it gets worse.
Because you will arise again in a state that is neither living nor dead. Or, to look at it another way, you will be both living and dead… at the same time. This will drive you horribly mad.
Your body will rot as in death — a slow, aching rot. And you will feel it, though somewhat numbly. It will be a genuinely creepy sensation. You will become abhorrently disgusted with yourself. But because you will be insane you won’t know what to do about it.
As a zombie, you will be a walking figment of your former self. Your blood will cease to flow in your veins and will become clotted, black and thick. There will be no thump in your chest because your heart will have ceased functioning. All of your other inner organs will cease functioning, as well. You will still be able to walk, maybe even run somewhat, but your muscles and joints will be stiff and it will be painful. But most of your senses will still work to some degree.
You will still be able to see, but your eyesight will be cloudy and it will hurt to move your eyes. And you will be confused by what you see. Objects will seem familiar to you but you will not be able to work anything or even remember that things worked a certain way. This will cause you to become aimless and bumbling. You will be familiar enough with manmade places to be attracted to them, but you won’t know what to do when you get to where they are.
You will hear sounds, but you won’t know what they mean. Sudden or loud sounds will draw your attention, but the source will generally reveal little interest, unless the sounds are generated by living humans. Your response time to sounds will become greatly inhibited and the confusion behind what they are, their cause, and your abridged response to them will give you a sense of insecurity and will generate much frustration.
As a zombie, you will still be able to smell, but only marginally. And most of what you will smell all the time is the corruption of rot and death that permeates your insides and surroundings. You will not register that what you smell has any meaning. So you will not rely on your smell for navigation or information.
Your mouth will cause you much distress. Your lungs will no longer breathe but they can still take in air. So you will rasp in a parody of breathing, even though you won’t need to breathe. It will just be an action that you still think you need to do. When you become frustrated or want something you will still make sounds, but they will be grunts and groans and idiot sounds that won’t make sense to even you. You will still be able to taste, too. But all you will taste is the putrid essence of the filth and decay inside your mouth.
But the sense of taste goes much deeper for a zombie. You will feel so appalled by the barren emptiness of your body and stomach, so fouled by the cruddy and sour fetidness of your taste, that you will crave only two things:
Blood + Flesh
But it goes even deeper than that. Your driving goal will be to end the state of your zombification. When you see a living human, you will be so filled with primal jealousy that you will seek to either absorb their life force through mastication of their flesh and the devouring of their blood or you will want them to destroy you.
On this, the zombie will force the issue every time. Living human flesh will tear easily with your undeniable intentions and it will taste warm and good in your mouth, relieving it of the normally awful taste. And living blood will soothe your parched and ragged throat, filling your stomach with wholesome relief.
But this satiation lasts only briefly. For what comes out of a living body dies very quickly, and you will feel the aching empty horror of your desecrated body come roaring back. This will cause an overwhelming dismay.
Zombies who exist for any significant length of time soon come to desire not the brief respite of consuming the living, but rather they long to be given what only the living can provide: death. And they will cavort and clamor their way to any weapon, trap, or danger that the living can devise and thrust upon them. For though you will feel an unimaginable desolate torment at being a zombie, and you will hate yourself and your existence, zombies are incapable of knowing how to kill themselves… except at the hands of a living human.
Living creatures, other than humans, do not attract a zombie’s attention or taste. This is because zombies have a limited attention span, even more so now that they are zombies. Think about it. Animals are around us all the time. How many people actively notice all the birds or cows or bugs around them throughout the day? Most of them don’t, unless they have pets, work on a farm, or work with animals. Most living humans concentrate on other living humans.
So it is with zombies, except even more so. A zombie, due to their nature and taste, is even more attuned to human activity and even less aware of other living things. Such is the curse of the zombie. But it is good for other living things, just not so much for living humans.
Living humans are deathly afraid of zombies. So much so that they will kill them without hesitation and with no regard that the zombie was once a living person. Zombies make humans sick. Because let’s face it, zombies are disgustingly loathsome. But when humans are in a relatively safe place, their fear of zombies can turn to humor.
Humans will mess with zombies if they can get away with it. They will take pot shots at them with weapons from rooftops. They will corral them into fortified rings to fight one another. They will cut off zombie extremities just to see how the zombie will react and embarrass itself. And all the while they will laugh and joke about it at the zombies’ expense. They’ll even use a zombie’s head as a sports ball and kick it around, carefully avoiding the mouth.
Humans know that a zombie’s brain is the only thing keeping it going. And their sense of superiority allows them to exploit the zombie for personal amusement. This is particularly embarrassing and degrading for the zombie, and it fills them with a great frustration and hatred of living humans.
There is a certain sense of revenge humans harbor for zombies for ruining their world and making existence more complicated than it used to be. But the same sense of revenge resides in zombies, as well, but on a more rudimentary level. This sense of revenge unites both zombies and living people on a common path: either a path of survival or a path of death. The difference is that living humans have more options to express themselves regarding the matter, while zombies are severely limited other than their sheer numbers.
I don’t think anyone knows exactly how long a zombie can live (or should the term be “persist”). But if you live a long time as a zombie you will probably regret it. As a zombie you will have to contend with the fact that you will eventually just rot away. As your ligaments freeze up and your muscles and skin slough off you will eventually just become a zombie head. For the brain in a zombie is the last thing to go if a living human or circumstance doesn’t get to it first.
At that point you will just be a rolling skeletal zombie head and there will be no doubt that you will be very disturbed and incensed at your fate. Which is why, if you ever become a zombie, you should go to where the humans are. There is a good chance they will kill you off and put you out of your misery. Although you might be inclined to, don’t go wandering off somewhere to decompose alone.
There is little honor in being a zombie. And there is even less in dying alone as one.
