First rule of warfare: Know your enemy.
THIS IS JUST A THEORY. WE ARE DOING OBSERVATIONS TO PROVE THE VALIDITY. BUT WE COULD BE WRONG.
Thankfully, we have a roof hatch access inside the store. We had to pry off the pad lock to use it but it is positioned above the ice cream freezer in the northwest corner of the store. With all of the windows blocked off and now barricaded, it is pretty hard to get a true sense of what is happening outside, so we have been using the roof. (Lance has some plan that he has been talking about where he is going to rewire the security cameras but I cannot tell if he is full of crap or not. Still, he was taking electrician classes at Vo-tech when all this went down so…)
Given that our structure would probably be the equivalent of a three story building, we cannot fathom any possible way that the zombies can reach the roof. They can climb stairs but when it comes to the physical coordination required to actually climb a hand-over-hand ladder, they just don’t have it. So from that aspect, we are pretty safe on the roof. And it is from here that we have done a lot of observations.
This is what we have extrapolated given what we have seen as a first hand account of victims. This is pretty gruesome stuff but people need to be told the truth. So bear with me.
Somewhere out there is Patient Zero – the one who started this whole epidemic. Truth be told, we may never know who that is or was. But obviously it got up here somehow. Patient Zero must have bitten someone else and that is where it all took off.
Unless this is some sort of doomsday contagion, this thing is not naturally occurring. It is not airborne or waterborne which is why we feel pretty safe using the tap water. If it was in the air or the water there would be no escape and we are just delaying the inevitable. Might as well slit our wrists now if this thing can be contracted by drinking water.
So we are fairly confident that this is how it works. The virus is transferred via body fluids, which means if you get bit, you have it. If you are fighting these guys in melee combat, slashing at them with chainsaws and get their blood in your eyes, mouth, or an open wound, you are in trouble. Fingernail scratches are dubious.
Now, as we were discussing this, someone joked about having sex with a zombie. Obviously disgusting but my theory is that this thing started (at least in our area) in the Reedy Nursing Facility. [More on that later.] Before they realize what the virus was, crazy Ms. Glick bit Orderly Sam. Just a bite, no big deal. They may have thought she was delusional. Sam finishes his shift and heads home. His girlfriend meets him at the door for a quick round of hide the salami. Bam. Infected. They both wake up the next morning with a hankering for human flesh. And suddenly, you have two spawning zones for the zoms. So it is not tremendously far fetched. I am not saying that is what happened but it certainly could have.
I am by no means a veterinarian but you hear stories all the time about dogs contracting rabies and they have to be put down. I remember shortly before all this happened about a police officer putting down a rabid squirrel in a school yard because they were afraid it might attack the kids. This is what these things seem to be like. They are rabid. They are mean, aggressive, and just want to eat.
So let’s say this is some form of mutated rabies or it at least shares the same qualities. As near as I can figure, filmmakers in the past must have consulted doctors and such when they wrote their scripts and all the theories and postulating has just happened to turn out to be correct. The zombie must carry a virus strain that is transferred by fluids. It acts like most other pathogens. (Is that the right word?) Keith’s wounded started to show signs of serious infection within a few hours. And it was like he was hit with a double dose of anticoagulant because we could not get the bleeding to stop.
If it seems like dying from a few bites seems unrealistic, look at what a hungry man can do to a steak even without utensils. Combine that with five of these things surrounding you, chomping furiously, a few doses of the anticoagulant that they give you and a major artery. Add all that together and you have a deadly combination…
Okay, so, you encounter a zombie and you get bitten. You don’t automatically turn and start eating human flesh. It starts off as a virus in your system. I don’t believe that an antidote could reverse the effect and amputation would be very risky. If you get bit on the ankle, could you cut off your leg fast enough before your blood circulates up from your leg to your brain? I doubt it.
Now, the virus gets in your bloodstream. It immediately starts attacking your organs and systems because it wants you to die. That is the whole goal. But at this point, you are just sick. You are not a zombie yet. Eventually, the fever burns you out, your organs shut down and you die. Once you die that is when this virus really goes to work.
I have not had enough exposure to infected test subjects to do a true scientific analysis but I am guessing it takes anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours and then the virus kick starts your brain. You sit up and become like poor Orderly Sam from earlier in this blog entry.
My theory is that if you die by the virus, reanimation is a matter of minutes. I say this because before we blacked out the windows, we saw a customer get hit outside by a pack of these things. She was loading groceries into the back of her van when several of these monsters jumped her. All we could do was watch.
Now she did not die from the virus. She died from blood loss and the fact that her guts were chewed out by these monsters. Her body was sprawled out in the back of her van for over a day. Then we watched from the roof as she reanimated and limped around as best she could on limbs with bites taken out of them and meat chewed away. [The happy ending to this story is that Lance put a bullet in her head and ended her unlife.]
So in theory, if your immune system is compromised, you are stressed out, extremely old, or something along those lines, the virus burns through your system pretty fast and death is pretty quick. It also takes very little time for your body to “reanimate.”
Now, one saving grace is that the dead are not popping up out of the cemeteries. It does not work like that. Corpses are not busting out of their caskets and running around. You have to be infected to reanimate. So this is a viral outbreak. Either there is a cure somewhere in nature or we just have to outlast it.
I keep going back to that scene in the movie Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, and Cuba Gooding Jr. In that, the very lethality of the virus was actually a benefit. It killed everyone so fast it did not have a chance to spread. Do we have that option here? This works in conjunction with our One Year Plan. If we can just outlast these beasties, we can wait it out and be part of those last vestiges of humanity that will inevitably reclaim the world.
At least, that is the plan. I just hope to God that it works.
More soon…
