Brrraaaaaaaiiiiinnnnns

"I feel so alo-one/

gonna end up a big ole pile of them bones"

Alice in Chains

As you can probably guess I had intended to write this closer to Halloween, but I was reading Colson Whitehead's pretty good Zone One, and because its subject matter was on point with this entry I wanted to finish it.

As I write this, cannibalistic zombie hordes are the metaphor du jour. AMC's excellent show based on the excellent comic-book The Walking Dead. The aforementioned literary effort titled Zone One. Cormac Macarthy's The Road (well, sort-of). Countless bad horror movies that imitate the really good ones (more on this in a moment). Videogames titled Left for Dead or Dead Rising. Zombie hordes are in cartoons from Spongebob to Calvin and Hobbes (ok, that was a long time ago). They're part of our spooky, fear-inducing zeitgeist, like Dracula and Frankenstein's monster - now engrained in our scary repertoire of silly costumes.

Let me back up. They scared the absolute sh*t out of me when I was a kid.

Did you ever read TV Guide? I've always read voraciously (if not finicky), and my parents used to buy it at the store every week. I'd grab it and look for late-night monster movies or cartoons (and little had changed since, I'm sorry to report). One day I blundered across an "article" by Stephen King about his choices for the scariest movies and he mentioned George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead." Better yet, he described the plot and what spooked him - the unending horde of zombies seeking out human victims on which to feed.

Zing! It hooked me. From, "ewwww that's gross" came the inevitable "wonder what it looks like?"

I found it on a late-night show sometime in the '80's and it was a spooky as advertised. I could be a light sleeper before but I spent several nights anxiously planning my escape from the zombies (I knew where my dad's gun was) and trying to be vigilant for the signs of cannibalistic doom (save the last bullet for yourself -I didn't wanna know what it felt like to be ripped apart or munched on while still alive.

The plan was, if I was awakened by the sounds of shambling death, to try and wake up my dad and mom - then get the guns. My dad was in the Guard, I was pretty sure he'd have no problem killing zombies. Of course I'd have to save my baby brother.

My middle brother? Well, if there was time.

Then the neighbors. My friends down the street. Maybe Father Bozell at the church (can't hurt to have God with you, or the closest-best thing). I was a good shot, and I already knew you had to hit 'em in the head from the movie.

Oh, and for good measure maybe I'd try and save one of the girls I liked in class. Then she'd like me instead of ignoring my existence - when I saved her from the zombie doom. Everyone would be impressed with my forethought and how good I was with a rifle and I'd be King of Whatever the Zombies Left Behind ......someday.

What the hell? It wasn't a terrible plan.

Wherever I'd stay overnight I'd check out my plan. When we stayed at my grandmother's place at the beach I was particularly concerned because we stayed on the second floor and there were too many avenues of access for hungry undead. But, on the other hand, we had boats close by and everyone knows zombies can't swim. Alas, however, there were no guns there that I knew of.

[OK, so my plan sucked]

What did I find so scary? I guess the Fall of Everything and the End of all Hope. Something like that. Or the gross idea of being someone's meal. Or, in my twisted 10 or 11 year old mind, maybe I wanted to show humanity how great my Apocalyptic survival skills would be. "Look coach, all you need to do is shoot 'em in the head!" I can be an idiot sometimes. An imaginative idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. [I'm only mentioning in passing my daydream to invent a time machine that would allow me to save Jesus from crucifixion by going back intime with a gun....Freud would've had a field day with that dream I'm sure]

But apparently (deities aside) I wasn't alone, given all of the mass-media that pertains to zombies - it must have captivated other minds than just mine. Back in the early '80's I only knew of George Romero's zombie flicks, Night and Dawn of the Dead (the shopping mall movie). His zombies were slow but relentless and his movies were tense but still had some humor to them. The knockoff movies weren't scary at all, like Return of the Living Dead and some similar-plotted movie where an Egyptian tomb is disturbed and zombie mummies run amok.

Poor Mr. Romero. He invented all this in 1968 with his low-budget flick in Pittsburgh. He lost the rights, somehow (lazy reporting on my part - go look it up yourself) and the movie ended up in the public domain - which is how I ended up seeing it on "Creature Feature" some late evening in 1981 or 1982. I think he's seen some cash since then, and most of the guys and gals who are cashing in on the zombie stuff tip their collective caps to the man - his movies started the whole thing.

The "conventional wisdom" passed down in these mediums suggest that humanity would be wiped off the planet's dry-erase board. When you think about it, though, the center cannot hold and things fall apart (begging your indulgence, Mr. Achebe - your book was tremendous). I nitpicked the zombie hordes, and thus return them to death from their un-death and removed the scare.

It's a completely implausible premise, here's why it's all bullsh%t:

Bugs, birds, dogs, and fungus: In almost all of the movies and books I've seen I never see bugs. Hold up, if there's a dead chipmunk in my front yard one morning it's teeming with scavengers by noon and in a few days mostly chewed up and removed. Crows and vultures are always swarming around the bodies of roadkill. As society breaks down packs of wild dogs would run feral - wouldn't they feast on zombie flesh? But wait, the afficianado says, perhaps the zombie's necrotic flesh is poisonous to animals and insect? I see no evidence of such in anything I've read or watched. The zombie is dead, scavengers would decimate the hordes. If not, then why not fungus? Fungus lives on all detritus - why not necrotic flesh?

Go where it's hotter : in the unlikely event that zombie flesh repelled all other living things on Planet Earth that currently eat dead tissues, the warmer the weather the faster the decay. This is inarguable, flesh decays faster in warmer climates. OK, perhaps the two zombies roaming in the Arctic wastelands would "live" a very long time....anything South of the Mason-Dixon is probably going to decay itself to bones within a year....two years max. And those folks in the tropics? The plague's over by tourist season.

We aren't that stupid: every movie I've seen or book I've read maintains that Man is inhuman towards his fellow Man -that we can't solve something like the fictional zombie plague because we can't come together and work as a united front. It's a cynic's weltanschuung, that I completely reject as a matter of practical application of logic. It's not hard to imagine that some people would be awful to each other, but I think it's more likely that- when faced with a common enemy - people would come together to collectively attempt to fend off the fictional extinction event. And, I'm betting on the human race in any stupid zombie apocalypse. We survived the Black Death. We survived the Spanish flu. Hell, we have government entities using zombies as some kind of disaster-preparedness plan (really? taxpayer funded?).

We'll be fine. Just remember my plan, a gun and a pretty girl. After that, it's clear sailing.

I'd be dead in a day, I know.