Could slow zombies ever really defeat the military?

[Eternal_Freedom]

You guys really need to establish the rules of the zombie you're asking about, because there are a shitload of different options, including differences in speed and strength, proliferation and method of transmission, etc.

Consider the difference in response to Walking Dead zombies versus, say, Resident Evil zombies. I remember bosses in RE4 that had the strength and durability of construction equipment even if you account for game mechanics.

This is exactly what I've been saying. It's not enough to just say "yep, humans win" when there are so many possible scenarios that fall under "zombies."

[biostem]

For the purposes of this discussion, let's use the Walking Dead portrayal of zombies.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I've never seen that, can you elaborate on them please?

And how long/how far the plague has spread before the military gets involved? Also, how the infection is spread out globally. If it's a straight one-in-100 become zombies but spread over the world, thats different to, say, 1-in-100 but concentrated solely in, say, China, India and South-East Asia.

[Purple]

The issue is that once we start pining those things down we lose sight of the big picture. And the big picture right now is saying something that should be rather obvious. Every time you hear a zombie story where society collapsed it's always due to something other than the zombies them self.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Yes but unless we pin these criteria down the discussion is essentially meaningless. There are far too many variables. Someone can make a convincing point that would be perfectly true under one set of conditions and not true in a different set.

[Purple]

Yes but unless we pin these criteria down the discussion is essentially meaningless. There are far too many variables. Someone can make a convincing point that would be perfectly true under one set of conditions and not true in a different set.

And if we do than we are going to diverge from the discussion and into a very specific tangent that does not reflect the broad picture at all. To make an analogy, you want to turn a discussion about plants into one about apples specifically.

[Guardsman Bass]

I've never seen that, can you elaborate on them please?

And how long/how far the plague has spread before the military gets involved? Also, how the infection is spread out globally. If it's a straight one-in-100 become zombies but spread over the world, thats different to, say, 1-in-100 but concentrated solely in, say, China, India and South-East Asia.

Walking Dead/Romero Rules Zombies:

1. Slow walking/shambling, although they can maybe get up to a slow jog when prey is near.
2. Undead - only injury to the head or top of the spinal column kills them for good.
3. Slower-rotting than you'd expect, so they last for months and years
4. Possibly resistant to cold/freezing
5. Poor eyesight, detects prey with smell and sound. Basically, if you can cover yourself with zombie viscera or keep a zombie nearby, you can mask your smell and avoid detection as long as you don't put out any unusual sounds.
6. Everyone Who Dies without the destruction of the head comes back as a zombie, regardless of what you die from. Bites just kill you.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Ok, if it's not an infection that infects only a certain fraction of the population, but everyone who dies without serious head/brain trauma, then methinks that long-term the military, and everyone else is fucked unless there is a way to stop the curse (for want of a better term).

[Jub]

How did they handwave away everybody on earth getting infected? No disease has ever had that kind of penetration rate.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Hence why I called it a curse, for lack of a better term. It fits better than disease or infection, that's for sure.

[Jub]

Hence why I called it a curse, for lack of a better term. It fits better than disease or infection, that's for sure.

At that point, the zombies themselves may as well be magic too and you're back to a fantasy genre rather than the soft sci-fi that most zombies shows pretend to be.

[Raw Shark]

Well, this is the Fantasy forum...

[Jub]

Well, this is the Fantasy forum...

True, but by that logic we could imagine a horde of Solomon Grundy clones attacking the military and it's just as valid as any other zombie scenario.

There's also the fact that TWD pretends to use science zombies instead of magic ones.

[Esquire]

Ok, if it's not an infection that infects only a certain fraction of the population, but everyone who dies without serious head/brain trauma, then methinks that long-term the military, and everyone else is fucked unless there is a way to stop the curse (for want of a better term).

That, or decapitation/cremation becomes a standard funeral practice.

Basically, there's no excuse for a modern military force to take significant casualties against a Romero zombie horde, simply because they're so slow. Find your bullets aren't dropping the shambling enemies advancing on your position? Walk away slightly faster. Better yet, hop in an APC, use up the onboard magazines, run a few over, then drive away. Regroup, rearm, rinse and repeat until all the zombies have been deliberately head-shot or killed by random shrapnel.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That's certainly true. But if it's a global thing that affects everyone who dies, rather than an infection that can be quarantined against/vaccinated for (possibly), and there isn't a way to stop said curse/effect/whatever, then life is in for a radical shift no matter how successful the military might be.

[Guardsman Bass]

That, or decapitation/cremation becomes a standard funeral practice.

That's what I believe would happen. Until they find a vaccine or cure, people would adjust to deal with the transformation. They usually have between a few minutes to a few hours after death before the transformation happens, so hospitals would take extra precautions in restraining patients who might die in surgery or in the hospital. People who die would almost certainly have someone use something like a pneumatic bolt gun to smash in the top of the brain stem from the back of the neck to prevent them turning while minimizing damage to the rest of the head (for burial purposes). And you'd have stuff like morning check-ins and stronger doors/windows on the ground level to make sure no one died in the night - i.e. if you don't report for your morning check-in by phone or in-person, they send the police to your house to knock on the door, then call for back-up if no one responds.

The trick would be getting past the initial panic to that set of procedures. Once you've got that down to pat and dealt with any zombie swarms, then it's a manageable if annoying problem. I suspect they'd also be extremely careful about disease outbreaks - not only because the zombie disease weakens the immune systems of living people in The Walking Dead, but because an outbreak of lethal disease could create a bunch of zombies that have to be put down.

I actually wrote a small short story about a scenario like that (an "Under-Control" world with Romero zombie infection).

[Esquire]

I'd like to read that story. I agree about the extra problems of serious infectious diseases, too - imagine if, say, second-stage Ebola meant ravenous hunger for brains.

As an aside, it probably wouldn't be everyone checking in every morning; there's epidemiological models that predict mortality by age (and dozens of other factors, but I'm simplifying) fairly accurately and combining those with weekly pr monthly chechups by armed, trained security troops would probably be cheaper and/or more effecient.

[Vendetta]

You're welcome

Trilogy set in a post-Zombie-Apocalypse world showing exactly the sort of social changes you'd expect where all corpses reanimate and bites are fatal. (This is a story where the zombies already lost and society recovered, albeit with radical changes because some places were too difficult to secure when 100% of all mammals were infected before the first symptoms showed, anything over 40lb body mass will turn and anything with sufficiently low bodymass can be an immune carrier so it can still turn you).

[Lagmonster]

How did they handwave away everybody on earth getting infected? No disease has ever had that kind of penetration rate.

I read an article somewhere quoting Kirkman that it's in all humans on the planet already, and it renders normal humans MUCH more prone to dying from otherwise survivable conditions. Other than that they don't seem to care.

[Purple]

Which underlines the point I was making. It's newer the zombies that do humanity in. It's something else. The zombies are just opportunistic scavengers that come into their own after the fall and make everything worse.

[Q99]

Agreed, unless you're talking something massively superhuman (Resident Evil Bosses, while zombie-related, IMO aren't 'zombies.'), or the virus/infection itself (i.e. the problem isn't the zombies, it's the disease that's infecting them with the zombies as a kick-while-you're-down effect), even fast zombies are very unlikely to do the job.

Eventually you get to a point where the zombies run into too many bad-kill-ratio scenarios.

One thing a lot of stuff doesn't think of, zombies need a positive kill ratio to expand. If they bite one person for every zombie lost, they're maintaining ground, and anything less and they're losing.

[biostem]

Agreed, unless you're talking something massively superhuman (Resident Evil Bosses, while zombie-related, IMO aren't 'zombies.'), or the virus/infection itself (i.e. the problem isn't the zombies, it's the disease that's infecting them with the zombies as a kick-while-you're-down effect), even fast zombies are very unlikely to do the job.

Eventually you get to a point where the zombies run into too many bad-kill-ratio scenarios.

One thing a lot of stuff doesn't think of, zombies need a positive kill ratio to expand. If they bite one person for every zombie lost, they're maintaining ground, and anything less and they're losing.

Another oddity, which is rarely portrayed, is that you get a bunch of zombies that manage to drag down someone and start eating them... they never seem to depict said horde stopping to eat that person once they turn. Personally, I kind of imagined zombies as having a sort of "life sense", and once the body is cold, they lose interest. Of course, this is also countered by the fact that we often see the heroes trying to sneak past zombies that are currently snacking on a carcass...

[Sea Skimmer]

They would have to appear everywhere at the same time, such as to preclude any coherent response by anything. Otherwise they'd simply be defeated by bulldozers running them all over after someone spent a few hours welding on chain link fence armoring. "need headshots' really doesn't mean much when you can squish them constantly for hours on end. Snowplows would also be pretty effective. Plus tanks, and pretty much anything else built strongly and weighing over five tons.

That's the damn problem with zombies. You don't need weapons. You just need a way to kill them, and unlike wild animals they have no ability to avoid or escape blatant traps. Modern weapons are absurdly over engineered for merely killing.

[Eternal_Freedom]

If we are stuck with the Romero Rules zombies (in that anyone who dies without serious brain trauma becomes one) then I can see one longer-term effect. Chemical and biological weapons will probably be seen as being far worse than nukes.

Hit a city with a nuke, boom, everyone in the lethal effect radius is vaporised/blasted into a paste by debris/burnt to a crisp, so no zombies. Hit a city with nerve gas? Not only do you have the "oh fuck you just killed 20,000 people" problem, but also the "oh fuck another 20,000 zombies to kill."

[Borgholio]

Radioactive fallout could create quite a few zombies...but yeah I agree that nerve gas or smallpox or something would definitely be worse.