Tag Archives: night of the living dead

Kansas militia expects zombies, and it’s dead serious

It’s got to be one of the coolest names ever for a group:

The Kansas Anti Zombie Militia.

But the group is real and its members are pretty serious about it.

Once the Zombie Apocalypse hits, they’ll be ready for it and they want you to be too.

“Can a natural person change into this monster that many fear?” Alfredo Carbajal, the militia’s main spokesman, said in an interview. “The possibilities are yes, it can happen. We have seen incidents that are very close to it, and we are thinking it is more possible than people think.”

Carbajal and other true believers aren’t so much scared of movie zombies. The apocalypse they see coming is a pandemic spread by a virus that creates zombie-like symptoms.

Last month, the Discovery Channel featured the Kansas militia in a documentary that concluded that such a Zombie Apocalypse — or Zompoc — was possible. The program featured scientists who speculated some evolving virus is bound to jump to humans on our overcrowded planet.

Of course, scientists have been warning about pandemics such as bird flu that don’t produce zombies, but zombies are the hot monsters right now.

A packed house listened last year at St. Mary’s College of Maryland as a chemist, psychologist and student acknowledged the possibility of an epidemic, according to the school’s newspaper.

The panel pointed out that there already have been zombie-like symptoms dating back to 1594; they were eventually determined to be the first recorded human case of furious rabies — an especially serious form of rabies.

Carbajal, 28, didn’t start out as a zombie fighter.

He and several friends grew up in Wamego, home of the Oz museum, watching zombie movies like “Shaun of the Dead,” “28 Days Later” and “Night of the Living Dead” and playing video games like the Left 4 Dead video game series.

The friends designed a web page for fun but then they began wondering what to do if there was actually a zompoc, and their thinking turned serious.

The group has five founders but about 1,500 likes on its Facebook page.

It’s not all zombie crusading; the militia also sponsors a Zombie Walk in October to raise money and food for charities.

But the group’s website points out that the militia is committed to research and preparing for a zompoc.

“We are not crazy. We are not paranoid. We believe in preparedness in any situation,” it says.

Everything you need to know about surviving a zombie attack can be found on the militia’s website — never take on a small horde of zombies by yourself because that would be suicide, and make sure all your skin is covered because blood spatters can be infectious.

Blunt objects are better to use than, say, knives because blades tend to dull after each use. A metal bat and a collapsible baton are the two most recommended weapons.

The site also notes as “a real-life threat to humanity” a biosecurity lab planned near Manhattan, Kan.

Carbajal and his group are not alone in their deep fascination over zombies. Much of the country has been touched.

The “Walking Dead” cable series broke basic cable ratings records with more than 10 million viewers for the first show of season three. And already hype for a movie, based on the book “World War Z,” is widespread even though its release date is six months out.

How-to books have been published in recent years, including the “Zombie Survival Guide,” which made the New York Times Best Seller List, and the “Zombie Combat Manual,” which warns “During a zombie outbreak, 98% of individuals will have to destroy an undead opponent without the aid of a firearm. Will you be ready?”

Carbajal said that if you aren’t a true believer, just being prepared for any apocalypse or natural disaster is a good thing.

“My thought is if you are ready for zombies, you are ready for anything, whether it be natural disasters, fall of government, invasion from another country — the possibilities are endless,” he said. “The point is to keep yourself and your loved ones safe.”

Others agree.

Using the guise of a zombie apocalypse, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state emergency management agencies are trying to get people to be prepared for a natural disaster with at least several days of food and supplies, copies of important documents and a plan.

“It’s a spoof; we are not encouraging a zombie scare,” said Devan Tucking-Strickler, Kansas Division of Emergency Management spokeswoman. “We use the tagline, ‘If you are prepared for zombies, you are prepared for anything and prepared for the unexpected.’ ”

Kansas even used the militia to help promote general disaster awareness.

Members of the group were featured in a photograph with Gov. Sam Brownback when he signed a proclamation declaring October as Zombie Preparedness Month in Kansas.

A little preparation for disaster can prove very important later, but most people don’t prepare, said another viral disaster worrier, Shawn Beatty, who also was featured on the Discovery documentary.

“You can get a first aid kit for $100, something that you should have in your house anyway, or you can go to dinner, take a trip, or have a really nice night out with that $100,” said Beatty, a public-school teacher in Columbia. “Who is going to say, ‘Let’s go buy something that you may not use?’

Best Car to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse

  • zombie.jpg
    Conquest Vehicles

Now that the Centers for Disease control has warned Americans to prepare for a possible “Zombie Apocalypse,” it may be a good time to rethink your upcoming automobile purchase.

If Hollywood has thought us anything over the years it’s that, while they are very susceptible to baseball bats, zombies are adept at jumping on cars and breaking through their windows in order to eat the brains of their occupants. Not to fear, there’s one vehicle that should keep your noggin intact.

The Knight XV from Conquest Vehicles wasn’t designed with the undead in mind (at least we don’t think that it was) but the mega-SUV is perfectly suited to the task at rotting hand. About twice the size of your typical HUMMER, the fully-armored truck could likely survive an assault by Team 6, let alone cracked fingernails.

Its opaque bullet-proof glass will keep you out of sight of glazed-over eyes, while ballistic run-flat tires should have no problem driving over the unkempt, bone-strewn streets of your town. It even runs on bio-diesel, so when the supplies run dry you can make your own fuel. Night-vision surveillance cameras and an external listening device serve as an early warning system and a high-power roof-mounted spotlight is just the ticket in case a few vampires find their way into the mix. Hey, you never know.

Granted, the price of survival is high at $300,000, but that’s about how much a three-bedroom costs in Pittsburgh – the location of “Night of the Living Dead” – and you won’t need one if you drive one of these. Its interior is upholstered in leather and Wilton Wool, comes with a flat-screen TV, refreshment bar and satellite TV to pick up the signal from any other survivors who might be out there.

Unfortunately, there’s no bathroom, so good luck with that. But it does come with a cigar humidor so you can live the good life to the fullest while you’re still alive. Hurry up, though, only 100 will be made and you don’t want to be the one stuck driving around in a convertible.

Inside zombie brains: Sci-fi teaches science

In "The Zombie Autopsies," Dr. Steven Schlozman imagines a virus that strips the brain down to its basest levels.
In “The Zombie Autopsies,” Dr. Steven Schlozman imagines a virus that strips the brain down to its basest levels.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • A new novel “The Zombie Autopsies” is about, well, zombies
  • The zombie virus basically eats the brain down to the amygdala
  • When it’s humans vs. zombies, the best solution is a strategic attack, mathematician says

Zombie author and expert Dr. Steven Schlozman will join us for a Twitter chat at 12:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, April 26. Tweet your questions to @cnnhealth and follow along at #cnnzombies.

(CNN) — An airborne virus is rapidly turning people into zombies. Two-thirds of humanity has been wiped out. Scientists desperately look for a cure, even as their own brains deteriorate and the disease robs them of what we consider life.

Relax, it’s only fiction — at least, for now. This apocalyptic scenario frames the new novel “The Zombie Autopsies” by Dr. Steven Schlozman, a child psychiatrist who holds positions at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital/McLean Program in Child Psychiatry.

You might not expect someone with those credentials to take zombies seriously, but it turns out the undead are a great way to explore real-world health issues: why certain nasty diseases can destroy the brain, how global pandemics create chaos and fear, and what should be done about people infected with a highly contagious and incurable lethal illness.

“One of the things zombie novels do is they bring up all these existential concerns that happen in medicine all the time: How do you define what’s alive?” says Schlozman, who has been known to bounce between zombie fan conventions and academic meetings.

“When is it appropriate to say someone’s ‘as-good-as-dead,’ which is an awful, difficult decision?”

What a zombie virus would do to the brain

So maybe you’ve seen “Night of the Living Dead,” read “World War Z,” or can’t wait for the return of the AMC show “The Walking Dead,” but you probably don’t know what differentiates the brains of humans and zombies.

First things first: How does the zombie disease infect its victims? Many stories in the genre talk about biting, but Schlozman’s novel imagines a deliberately engineered virus whose particles can travel in the air and remain potent enough to jump from one person to another in a single sneeze.

Now, then, to the brain-eating. The zombie virus as Schlozman describes it basically gnaws the brain down to the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure responsible for the “fight or flight” response. The zombies always respond by fighting because another critical part of the brain, the ventromedial hypothalamus, which tells you when you’ve eaten enough, is broken.

The brain’s frontal lobes, responsible for problem-solving, are devoured by the virus, so zombies can’t make complex decisions. Impairment in the cerebellum means they can’t walk well, either. Also, these humanoids have an unexplained predilection for eating human flesh.

“The zombies in this book are stumbling, shambling, hungry as hell,” Schlozman said. “Basically they’re like drunk crocodiles; they’re not smart, they don’t know who you are or what you are.”

Why we love those rotting, hungry, putrid zombies

How a zombie virus would be made

So the bloodthirsty undead wander (or crawl) around spreading a lethal illness ominously called ataxic neurodegenerative satiety deficiency syndrome, or ANSD, for short.

“When something really terrifying comes along, especially in medicine or that has a medical feel to it, we always give it initials. That’s the way we distance ourselves from it,” Schlozman said.

The virus has several brain-destroying components, one of which is a “prion,” meaning a protein like the one that causes mad cow disease. In real life, prions twist when they are in an acidic environment and become dangerous, Schlozman said. How our own environment has changed to make prions infectious — getting from the soil to the cows in mad cow disease, for instance — is still a mystery.

Now here’s something to send chills up your spine: In Schlozman’s world, airborne prions can be infectious, meaning mad cow disease and similar nervous-system destroyers could theoretically spread just like the flu. Swiss and German researchers recently found that mice that had only one minute of exposure to aerosols containing prions died of mad cow disease, as reported in the journal PLoS Pathogens. A follow-up described in Journal of the American Medical Association showed the same for a related disease that’s only found in animals called scrapie. Of course, these are mice in artificially controlled conditions in a laboratory, and humans do not exhale prions, but it could have implications for safety practices nonetheless.

Like mad cow disease, the zombie disease Schlozman describes also progresses in acidic environments. In the book, a major corporation doles out implantable meters that infuse the body with chemicals to artificially lower acidity when it gets too high. But, sadly, when acidity is too low, that also induces symptoms that mimic the zombie virus, so it’s not a longterm solution. Everyone who gets exposed eventually succumbs, Schlozman said.

As for the unknown component of the zombie disease that would help slowly zombifying researchers in their quest for a cure, that’s up for the reader to figure out — and the clues are all in the book, Schlozman said.

How we’d fight back

You can’t ethically round up fellow survivors to kick some zombie butt unless the undead have technically died. And in Schlozman’s book, a group of religious leaders get together and decide that when people reach stage four of the disease, they are basically dead. That, of course, permits zombie “deanimation,” or killing.

The ‘zombie theology’ behind the walking dead

And how do you kill a zombie? Much of zombie fiction knocks out zombies through shots to the head. That, Schlozman said, is because the brain stem governs the most basic functioning: breathing and heartbeat.

A zombie-apocalypse disease like the one he describes probably wouldn’t evolve on its own in the real world, he said.

But, as we’ve seen, individual symptoms of zombies do correspond to real ailments. And if they all came together, the disease would be creepily efficient at claiming bodies, Schlozman said.

Bad news, folks: Even if people contracted a zombie virus through bites, the odds of our survival aren’t great.

A mathematician at the University of Ottawa named Robert Smith? (who uses the question mark to distinguish himself from other Robert Smiths, of course), has calculated that if one zombie were introduced to a city of 500,000 people, after about seven days, every human would either be dead or a zombie.

“We’re in big, big trouble if this ever happens,” Smith? said. “We can kill the zombies a bit, but we’re not very good at killing zombies fundamentally. What tends to happen is: The zombies just win, and the more they win, the more they keep winning” because the disease spreads so rapidly.

The best solution is a strategic attack, rather than an “every man for himself” defense scenario, he said. It would take knowledge and intelligence, neither of which zombies have, to prevail.

Why study zombies?

In his day job, Smith? models how real infectious diseases spread. But he’s already reaped benefits from his work on zombies. For instance, while many mathematical models only deal with one complicated aspect of a situation at a time, he tackled two — zombie infection and zombie-killing — when it came to speculating about outbreaks.

When it came time for modeling of real-world human papillomavirus (HPV), then, Smith? felt equipped to handle many facets of it at the same time, such as heterosexual and homosexual transmission of HPV.

“Knowing what we knew from zombies allowed us to actually take on these more complicated models without fear,” he said.

Studying zombies is also a great way to get young people excited about science. Smith?, who was on a zombie-science panel with Schlozman through the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange in 2009, has also seen math-phobic people get interested in mathematics by reading about his work with zombies.

“There are insights that we gain from the movies, and from fiction, from fun popular culture stuff, that actually can really help us think about the way that science works, and also the way science is communicated,” he said.

And as to why people like reading about zombies and watching zombies so much, Schlozman points to the impersonal nature of things in our society, from waiting in line in the DMV to being placed on hold on a call with a health insurance company.

Think about all the situations in daily life where you sense a general lack of respect for humanity, and zombies make a little more sense.

“The zombies themselves represent a kind of commentary on modernity,” Schlozman says. “We’re increasingly disconnected. That might be the current appeal.”

Zombie Survival Guide Review

The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead

Let’s face it: at one time or another we’ve all faced a zombie scare we aren’t preparedfor. And yes, the local constabulary usually cleans things up with a minimum of fuss, but what happens when things go wrong and the cavalry doesn’t arrive? That, my friends, is the day that Max Brooks’ “The Zombie Survival Guide” saves your life. With several millennia worth of field experience distilled into a manageable 254 pages, everything you need to know to survive the coming war with the undead can be found in these pages. Your life and the lives of those you love are at stake, act now and be prepared!

OK, so that paragraph was obviously tongue in cheek, but hopefully in conveys some sense of what Brooks’ remarkable “The Zombie Survival Guide” is like. While obviously a parody of both the horror genre and civil defense/survivalist manuals, it maintains an “all-business” demeanor, never once cracking the façade to reveal the underlying humoristic intent. The result is a book that is, when taken as a whole, a funny, incredibly thorough work of satire. However, at the same time, page-by-page, it is a rather accomplished addition to zombie horror.

Starting with zombie physiology and then moving on to weapons, tactics, long-term strategy and history Brooks has produced a manual which has a thoroughness that belies the absurdity of its subject. Point by point he discusses the pros and cons of rifles, machetes and flamethrowers, then considers the optimal defensive positions for various types of outbreaks. After an extensive discussion of survival in a zombie doomsday scenario, he lays out zombie outbreaks through history, and what their implications are. Throughout, entries are extensively cross-referenced and alternative courses of action are always weighed for potential risks and benefits.

The remarkable thing about all this is that Brooks has managed to infuse a tension, and urgency into his manual that makes for great reading. Part post-apocalyptic fiction, part “Night of the Living Dead” and part “Saturday Night Live” sketch, this is a book that should hold appeal across a broad range of genres. Thorough without being dry, creepy without being clichéd, and funny without relying on cheap laughs, “The Zombie Survival Guide” is undoubtedly one of the most original books I have ever read, and one that I enjoyed reading immensely. If you appreciate any or all of these genres, or if you just enjoy a well executed, original idea, this is definitely a book you’ll want to check out.

And remember…Tomorrow may be too late, read this book today!

Real Life Zombies

The thought of our bodies walking around and operating without our personal conscious or as the more spiritual believe without our soul is an idea that has intrigued and captivated the minds of human beings for centuries. Whether it be the living-dead and body snatchers of Hollywood movies or the stories of voodoo priests using potions to turn rivals into mindless drones to do their bidding, myths, movies, and stories about zombies have been a mainstay in human culture. But the idea of our bodies walking around without freewill or after we have passed may be closer to the realm of the natural than we all thought.

We have all been in the situation where we see a hideous bug in our sink or bathtub and instead of squishing it we take a more timid approach and turn the water on and drown the pest. Imagine you try to that and you watch the ugly sucker spin down the drain. You return to the bathroom later to make the horrifying discovery that the bug had returned from the dead. There are two possibilities: either you have a bathroom infested with bugs or you are dealing with a wolf spider, whose appearance is even more terrifying than its name.

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