A Rapidly Realistic and Quite Unromantic Zombie Tale.

Once upon a time, in order to get her partner Beth off her back, Jenny decided she would attempt to write a retarded story about a retarded fear everyone but her seemed to like to indulge in.

The fear surrounded the dystopic posthuman monster category known as zombies.  Jenny didn’t think zombies were very interesting, in fact, she thought they were about the most bland monster anyone could conjure up in their imaginations.  She thought they were about the most absurd form of fear anyone could have, because as a rule Jenny did not think people would devolve, or turn into rabid raging savages as time passed.  The concept of “The Road” was not exactly what Jenny believed would happen in the future, and to drag on and on the likely 1950‘s-imagined-and-created monster which first represented communism and later represented savage capitalism really didn’t interest her at all.

Most of Jenny’s friends loved the idea of zombies.  For Jenny, the Zombie Apocalypse wasn’t something to look forward to, nor was it something that ever seemed even remotely biologically possible.  It goes against all manner of viral life and biology to have something ‘return’ from the dead and walk around, attempting to ingest all other humans and turn it into itself, thus rendering no possibility for long-term life overall, as matter will decay, including zombie bodies.  No one ever goes into the rate of decay of the human body, and the explanations of zombies still existing months after viral infection is completely absurd - the lack of circulation because of the heart stopping would almost immediately result in a rate of decay which would override the viral infection in the brain, thus rendering skeletons, not zombies.  I can hardly imagine a mind such as mine could ever outdo the likes of Larry Blamire in a tale, as I cannot recreate or improve on “The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra,” and that’s about as retarded as a real live zombie possibility would literally be.

So, no, I don’t want to write about zombies.  I mean, all I could say was:

Once upon a time, there was a virus that wiped out the brains of some cannibals in a forest.  This virus, which was actually a prion, but let’s not get too technical as most people can’t even fathom a protein which behaves as though it is biologically capable of reproducing without all the necessary ingredients for the comprehension of ‘life’ according to the ‘experts.‘  So for the sake of the fact that most people reading anything are fairly more intelligent than those who do not read, but most people reading fiction are likely less intelligent than those who read nonfiction as they would prefer to hide in entertainment, and so they don’t want to think, ergo we will call our brain-prion a ‘virus.‘  

This ‘virus’ infected some pigmies who were still maintaining the restrictive shamanistic practice of ritualistic cannibalism.  In so doing, a small number of human beings contracted the illness, because only a few of them were actually allowed to be high enough in the hierarchy to participate in the rite, thus making all of these persons also male.  

The ‘virus’ took several years if not decades to manifest, and when it did, the persons affected were so debilitated by it that they could barely move.  The lack of food going into them resulted in a weakening of the body, as the ‘virus’ caused enough nausea to reduce apetite, due to the fact that it was slowly ingesting brain tissue, which would naturally make these ‘zombies’ dizzy and unable to eat, much less be able to tell their legs to move properly.  

I would imagine the effects of the zombie ‘virus’ would assuredly induce an overall lack of the central nervous system to convey the proper signals to the external organs and limbs of the infected person, creating numbness and tingling, and likely paralysis, which means that the ‘zombie’ would just lie there, moaning and groaning for want of nutrients and water, and eventually succumb to comatose paralysis and death.  If the ‘virus’ at that point switched into its desire to reproduce, and if that reproduction for some bizarre reason took the pathway of induction into another host by way of a bite festering with particulates located in the saliva, well, I suppose the now-paralyzed-semi-corpse would gnash it’s teeth, and most family members would probably have enough agility to avoid a bite from their once virile kindred.  Caretakers of an ill person who dies yet still maintains mobility to gnash and thrash will likely listen to their natural aversion and behave accordingly with avoidance and quite possibly extermination of the ‘mobile’ corpse by way of fire or decapitation.  Such an act of extermination would render the 

‘virus’ unable to reproduce, and there the story would likely end.

If the story did not end there, keep in mind that pigmies live near the equator, so there is a high rate of decay occurring due to the even amount of sunlight, heat, and moisture.  So, chances are this zombie would only last as long as the body was able to avoid decay, and if in the likely possibility these pigmies are living at a poverty level similar to that found in most developing countries, they are living in either squalor, or close enough to natures processes that decay would occur likely even more rapidly than it would in a developed and sterile nation such as the united states.  

If by some random chance the zombie bit and infected another human, chances are that human is either slow, immunocompromised, or stupid, in which case the ‘virus’ would not spread nearly as rapidly as hollywood projections would like us to imagine.  If in the highly unlikely chance that the ‘virus‘ were to infect someone in a developed country, it would be rapidly eradicated due to big-government infringement, and wouldn’t hardly even make the news.  If it hit someplace like the US, it would likely hit a coastal city, which as anyone with half a brain knows, a coastal ecotone means more moisture and thus a higher rate of decay, and once again we run into the inevitable reality that the bacteria which feed on dead flesh would outpace the ability for the ‘virus‘ to populate more hosts, and thus the zombie story ends rather uneventfully and quite unromantically.

The End.