Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies by Matt Mogk Read Free Book Online Page B

about waking it up.

    A sleeping zombie could be a learning zombie, and nobody wants that.
Land of the Dead
(2005)
RILEY:
They’re moving toward the city.
KAUFMAN:
They’ll never get across the river.
RILEY:
I wouldn’t be so sure. They’re learning how to work together.
KAUFMAN:
They’re mindless walking corpses, and many of us will be too if you don’t stay focused on the task at hand. Zombies, man. They creep me out.

KNOW YOUR ZOMBIES: BUB
Day of the Dead (1985)
    Romero’s third zombie film depicts the undead as capable of learning new skills and evolving over time. Bub still craves human flesh, but he’s not such a bad guy overall. He enjoys music, has a basic understanding of tools, salutes his superior officers, and even learns how to shoot a pistol.
    While Bub becomes more refined, the humans in
Day of the Dead
devolve into a chaotic, bickering gang of thugs. Romero begs the question: who is the real menace?
    ILLUSTRATION BY JOSH TAYLOR

8: ZOMBIE BLOOD
    H uman blood is charged with delivering needed nutrients and oxygen to waiting cells in the body and removing waste from those same cells. It contains a substance called hemoglobin, which gives blood its color and contains enough iron to make red cells subject to the effects of magnetic fields.
    Many cultures have used magnetic therapy to treat illness and encourage blood flow to specific parts of the body for centuries. A 2003 University of Virginia study showed that human blood can be propelled through the vascular system by magnets.
    Because it’s clear that the undead possess a fundamentally different physiology from that of your typical human corpse, as evidenced by their walking around and eating people, it may be that changes occurring in the electrical pulses of the brain as it passes from human to zombie create the necessary conditions for magnetization.
STAGNATION OR CIRCULATION?
    Though it is widely believed that all blood flow in a person infected with the zombie sickness ceases at death, a compelling counterargument might be that the undead brain has a constant hunger for blood in order to continue working properly.A brain without blood flow would very quickly dry out, crack, and become little more than a lump of brittle nothing. University of California, Berkeley, neuroscience professor Marian Diamond points out that without blood irrigation to the brain, all channels would flatten, and there would be no brain function and no sitting up or walking around. So it makes sense that there is a mechanism for zombie blood flow.
    In a living human, 20 percent of the blood pumped from the heart goes into the brain. To put this in perspective, an adult male dedicates up to 500 percent more blood to his brain than should be required by weight distribution. Even if zombies function at a substantially reduced capacity compared with their human counterparts, the amount of blood used on a constant basis is staggering. So it stands to reason that if there is blood moving in the brain, then there should be blood moving through other parts of the body.
    And if blood does move through zombie bodies without the aid of a beating heart, we must then discover what is likely driving the system and exactly how it works. As is often the case in zombie research, a single hypothesis leads to many more questions.
    Because the pathogen moves freely throughout the host, is it possible that the pathogen itself has evolved an independent oxygen-carrying capability?
    —The Zombie Autopsies
(2011), Steven Schlozman
    One thing is certain: it’s impossible for the undead to present a credible threat to the living if their blood reacts in a similar manner to that of deceased humans, because they would simply not be able to move around well enough to hunt. The gravitational pooling of blood in a corpse, called livor mortis, causes blood to flow toward the part of the bodyclosest to the ground. As the blood accumulates, that area swells and becomes discolored, stretching the flesh