Journal 8

Matt Steel
Journal 8 - Free Write: Zombie Apocalypse

Through all the movies and video games and folklore, at one point everyone has had the thought; What if it really happened? What if mankind was legitimately facing extinction due to an infection that renders the victim vicious, mindless, and hungry? It seems silly, of course, but the notion of a widespread infection isn’t something altogether foreign to us as a people. The scepticism in this scenario is having people who have already -died- come back to life, teeth bared and blood-covered hands swinging.

The bit that all those great zombie movies miss is it actually being able to happen. I’m fully convinced that a "zombie" infection is not only possible but at some point down the road, assured. For example, look at rabies. Rabies has a couple traits that on their own are quite normal, but paired together result in something altogether more deadly. The fallowing is a brief list of rabies symptoms - Anxiety, insomnia, confusion, agitation, abnormal behavior, paranoia, terror, production of large amounts of saliva, and "hallucinations progressing to delirium". There are two different things worth noting here. The first is a variety of negative, aggressive mental traits and a mouth filled with infectious bodily fluids. The mode of viral transportation is as frightening as it is efficient.

Diseases and infections are constantly changing and adapting just like any other form of life, new symptoms and conditions develop all the time, so what’s stopping our current form of rabies adapting to keep the host alive longer? If the infection didn’t turn people in to brain eating monsters immediately after being bitten, a week of delusional paranoia with no sleep on an already insane mind could easily lead to the beastly freaks we call "zombies".

We live and treat our lives not as the gifts they are but as assumed rights, how prepared are we for an apocalyptical event? If we started hearing moans right now as we tap, tap, tap on our plastic keyboards drinking our twelve-servings-of-fruit-in-one-bottle syrup, if the windows started smashing and a rabies-infected south America started rushing over our borders, through our schools and up our stairs, would we be prepared for it? People keep themselves in piss poor physical shape, people smoke cigarettes and sleep three hours a night to accommodate their homework addictions. People can’t sprint a hundred metres without huffing and puffing by the eighty mark, because when you’ve got a car to drive to the store and a video game and a cigarette to keep you occupied, who care’s about what ifs? I’ve got what I think to be a clever escape plan formulated in my brain including every variable from friends to family to guns to long term raids reconstruction, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t overlooked some other silly, fiendish cult monster looking to take over the world. Zombies are no problem, but if Cthulu or aliens start slapping us around I’m on the same probe boat as everyone else.