[Grover Carlson works as a fuel collector for the town’s experimental bioconversion plant. The fuel he collects is dung. I follow the former White House chief of staff as he pushes his wheelbarrow across the pie-laden pastures.]
This may be a petty choice, but let’s admit it, it’s pretty satisfying.
Of course, the rest of the chapter, like the last one, will proceed to beat you over the head with the message, so it’s all downhill from there.
Today’s interviewee says that yes, they got the stupid report, and you know, it’s nice to have someone admit they saw the thing. They had a whole meeting about it.
We got dozens of these reports a week, every administration did, all of them claiming that their particular boogeyman was “the greatest threat to human existence.” C’mon! Can you imagine what America would have been like if the federal government slammed on the brakes every time some paranoid crackpot cried “wolf ” or “global warming” or “living dead”?
Apparently we’d have built a giant wall, possibly while inviting people who hate us into the country and taught them we were right and great, and then smugged our way through the rest of the zombie apocalypse.
But this guy’s bad for not choosing to live in Infinite Resource Fantasyland, where there’s always men to throw at a wild goose chase. (Also, look, no one at the top actually didn’t believe global warming was a thing.)
Anyway, he says their response of alpha teams was totally all that was needed. I’m really not sure how this guy was in politics with his total willingness to double down on his decisions instead of blaming other people.
We produced an educational video for state and local law enforcement about what to do in case of an outbreak. The Department of Health and Human Services had a page on its website for how citizens should respond to infected family members.
What the book will never realize is that this is, in fact, a completely reasonable investment for the danger presented. It’d have stopped the disease fine. “Hey, they’re dead people and they transmit the disease by biting. Jog calmly away from any you see or climb stairs to avoid. Restrain anyone bitten. Call 911 to report any sightings.” There. Apocalypse fucking averted.
I still really want to see someone do a zombie story where the problem is everyone panics because zombie apocalypses always happen, attempt to be genre-savvy by following all the stupid rules of the stories that make no sense, and end up causing most of the damage as they attack anyone in authority (the military is always evil and just takes your stuff and kills you!), blow up labs (the scientists are always evil and probably invented it to boot!), kill everyone infected (everyone turns!), abandon people at the drop of the hat (you die if you stay behind!), swarm out over the countryside (the cities are a death trap!), etc.
And hey, what about pushing Phalanx right through the FDA?
But Phalanx didn’t work.
Yeah, and do you know how long it would have taken to invent one that did? Look how much time and money had been put into cancer research, or AIDS. Do you want to be the man who tells the American people that he’s diverting funds from either one of those for some new disease that most people haven’t even heard of? Look at what we’ve put into research during and after the war, and we still don’t have a cure or a vaccine. We knew Phalanx was a placebo, and we were grateful for it. It calmed people down and let us do our job.
The contradictions are as thick as zombie goo. No one knew about the disease but they needed a placebo to keep the lid on the panicking masses?
Also people are actually pretty testy about how much money has been poured into both of those, in part because the general public doesn’t understand that “didn’t cure yet” isn’t the same as “haven’t made huge leaps and bounds in treating”, so actually the average dumbass would probably be fine with that. Joe Sixpack is fine taking away money for little kids to have heath care even for treatable illnesses, he’d totally be up for stealing the funds for leukemia research and punching the stupid kids in the face as he went by. GET A JOB YOU PARASITES!
Also, the government can produce their own placebos thank you very much.
What, you would have rather we told people the truth? That it wasn’t a new strain of rabies but a mysterious uber-plague that reanimated the dead? Can you imagine the panic that would have happened: the protest, the riots, the billions in damage to private property?
God, I wish America reacted to fucking anything with riots and protest.
Also not sure why of all things to be rioting over it’d be zombies on the doorstep. People don’t usually riot in response to imminent danger. Rioting is more an angry behavior, you know? You don’t do it over bad news, you do it when people then say they’re planning to ignore it so you can die, and even then, the government said that was their plan for bird flu and we didn’t get mass riots there to my lasting disappointment.
We’re just such a lazy people.
He goes on to claim that saying there was a disaster that desperately needed government attention would’ve been bad because it was an election year. We get another not so oblique reference to the Bush years, which really has not aged well given Obama was elected on a platform of doing fucking stuff. Also, he seems oblivious to the fact that a significantly bad threat would’ve been a good excuse to suspend elections and therefore keep themselves in power until it was done, at which point they could ride the wave of goodwill for fixing the whole zombie thing.
He then explains that you can’t fix stuff, just manage it, or at least manage it for the subset of people voting for you.
Is that why certain outbreaks were neglected?
See, again, there’s a difference between AIDS killing people and AIDS turning people into deathbots. And even if we were to consider that a low level zombie problem in poorer areas could well be containable…in this book it isn’t. For whatever reason, the disease spreads like wildfire. They should have been containing it in the poor areas to keep it out of the rich ones.
Jesus, you make it sound like we just forgot about them.
Did local law enforcement request additional support from the federal government?
When have cops not asked for more men, better gear, more training hours, or “community outreach program funds”? Those pussies are almost as bad as soldiers, always whining about never having “what they need,” but do they have to risk their jobs by raising taxes? Do they have to explain to Suburban Peter why they’re fleecing him for Ghetto Paul?
“Because Ghetto Paul lives a few streets away from where you go to work, zombie bait.” You don’t exactly see Suburban Peter whining about paying to make sure the police frisk Ghetto Paul five times a day, and that doesn’t even accomplish anything! Are you really saying checking him for death rabies would be a harder sell?
Also, like last chapter, the stuff he’s saying here is a great way to get a baseball bat through the skull. No one would be this dumb.
He then explained there were no coverups. Instead, the corporations that owned the media ensured no one heard anything upsetting, because god knows the media has always been so calm and levelheaded since scaring people doesn’t help the econowait last chapter we just heard about how much that did.
The NRA alone should have the funds to push the truth through. Scary monsters that can only be stopped by guns? This is their chance to remove every bit of regulation to ever exist. THE GOVERNMENT WON’T LET LITTLE TIMMY BUY A SHOTGUN BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT WANTS TIMMY EATEN BY ZOMBIES! WE WON’T BE SAFE UNTIL THERE’S NO WAITING PERIOD FOR FIVE YEAR OLDS! IF YOU WANT REGULATION YOU WANT YOUR FAMILY MURDERED BY ZOMBIES ACT NOW!
And the ads! They write themselves. A scared yet attractive lone woman rushes into a gunstore, begging for a gun as the zombies beat on the windows behind her. Yet the man at the counter gives her forms to fill out! She scribbles frantically and shoves them back to him, and he smiles and says she’ll be approved for a weapon in just a few weeks as the walls begin to give way. Narrator explains that the current politicians want you and your attractive women dead. Vote for change. Vote for attractive women who will be so into your dick-replacement they won’t care how small the real thing is. Vote for removing all sanity and restraint in guns.
Our interviewer then suggests what about the alternative media, which apparently is only NPR and you know who listens to them? Nobody! and okay, the list of things wrong with that is long so I’ll point out a less obvious one – despite NPR not doing scaremongering bullshit and being really boring compared to the regular shouty stupid news, people still listen to it. You are now postulating a bizarro world in which the mainstream news is reporting on calm boring stuff to keep the sheeple calm while those elitist eggheads shouted “The Dead Are Walking,” at which point everyone else in America tunes in because holy shit zombies.
Also, NPR also has a pretty good reputation for being, you know, reliable, at least in the boring respects. Let’s assume only 1% of the population listens. And let’s assume the other 99% think it’s evil and liberal. 0% of people, however, believe NPR makes interesting shit up. I mean, talk radio talking about zombies? Sure. They’re shouty nutjobs. Liberal talk radio talking about zombies? I can see the conservatives thinking they’re shouty nutjobs, assuming anyone at all listened in the first place. Mainstream media talking about zombies? Well…they wouldn’t shut up about that one guy going crazy and biting another guy. Maybe it’s just that again. British-accented boring folk talking about zombies and the end of all life? …zombies it is.
And of course, even continuing to desperately ignore how very existent the internet is, there’s the fact there is other alternative media. Even assuming only the crackpot stuff exists, people read the crackpot stuff. There is way stupider stuff with way less evidence out there that people believe. A good chunk of the American population refuses to vaccinate their kids because it gives them autism cooties and better dead than autism cootied. Ridiculous numbers of people believe genetically engineered tomatoes will give them tomato cooties. Hell, ridiculous numbers of people demanded the FDA check to see if cloned animals were, I don’t even know, antimatter? Secretly poison dart frogs? Made of angry bees? But the FDA honest to god had to verify that cloned animals were safe to eat. The American public has never seen a thing it couldn’t be scared of for stupid reasons.
The best you could hope for is confusing people for a while about the exact details of the zombies as the crazier media muddied the water with their talk of ghost Hitler and aliens and hive minds.
So, let me see if I understand your position.
The administration’s position.
Across the globe, the rest of the surviving administration just screamed “That’s not our position! This man doesn’t speak for us! I’ve never seen him in my life!” into thin air out of sheer political reflex.
The administration’s position, which is that you gave this problem the
amount of attention that you thought it deserved.
Right.
Given that at any time, government always has a lot on its plate, and
especially at this time because another public scare was the last thing
the American people wanted.
Yep.
So you figured that the threat was small enough to be “managed” by
both the Alpha teams abroad and some additional law enforcement
training at home.
You got it.
Even though you’d received warnings to the contrary, that it could
never just be woven into the fabric of public life and that it actually was
a global catastrophe in the making.
[Mister Carlson pauses, shoots me an angry look, then heaves a shovelful of
“fuel” into his cart.]
Grow up.
Advice the author should have taken. Look, Bush sucks and all, but that doesn’t change that this is stupid too.
Someone on TVTropes pointed out that this guy has basically the same job, with a pay reduction.
I lol’d.
>, swarm out over the countryside (the cities are a death trap!),
That’s kinda difficult, given that the countryside is in fact large amounts of open space. In fact, the book has people running in panic from one city with an outbreak…straight towards another city.
>The contradictions are as thick as zombie goo. No one knew about the disease but they needed a placebo to keep the lid on the panicking masses?
A placebo that turned the guy who made it into a gajillionaire because it was so popular, no less.
>For whatever reason, the disease spreads like wildfire.
Stealth wildfire that nobody notices until it’s Too Late.
Going into the countryside spreads out the zombies, but it means you don’t have walls. The precious, precious walls. And where there aren’t walls, it’s all nice flat pavement, allowing you to see the zombies instead of stumbling into or onto them in brush and shallow water.
You’ve got chokepoints everywhere and lots of ways to make more. Put simple bridges between buildings for travel and you can avoid the zombies as well as enjoy watching any you do encounter on those levels go splat when they try to follow you back. Your biggest problem is if there’s enough food in a city for the population, but assuming mass zombification to the point the cities are dangerous, the population of citydwellers should be at an all-time low already. You can use retractable ladders to get people into your safe areas without risking zombies (most cities already have some nice fire escapes for you could use for this!) You also have all sorts of nice sudden drops to help pulp your zombie population – get them to walk off a nice ramp. And electronics! You don’t even need human bait to risk on traps like that, you can just set up radios on both ends and trigger first one then the other remotely.
Out in the country, meanwhile, there’s few houses and what houses there are tend to be large, flimsy and full of windows, or zombie murder zones. Should you find a defensible house not already taken and being defended by someone else, you’re trapped in it, with whatever meager supplies you have. Best case scenario, you’re the .0001% who trip over some dead survivalist’s bunker, at which point you’re still probably fucked because it’s set to be a bunker, not give you what you need to winnow the zombie population. Maybe you find some nutcase’s anti-zombie bunker, but it’d probably be shit from the Zombie Survival Guide, full of crowbars and katanas, which are mostly good for committing suicide with after you contemplate actually trying to use them against zombies. You stay there until you run out of food or someone else stops the zombies.
Assuming that you want to avoid engaging zombies, which is required for a zombie apocalypse to be an apocalypse and not just a pretty shitty Thursday, cities are much, much better.
(Also, in the case of everyone being genre savvy and fleeing the cities immediately, you’d end up with few city zombies at all while you’re spending the initial countryside days fighting with other people over limited resources. It would be a complete disaster. That’s one of the few things this book gets halfway right when it has people running north with no further plan.)
Oh, I getcha.
Your reviews of the book having intrigued me, I obtained a copy to read a little ahead.
I think the author had an idea of what he wanted to write, and started writing without ever looking back to wonder if it made sense, or wether such and such was really a good idea.
For example, next chapter: the fortified settlement ( based on an Israeli model, of course, because sue ) is called ” Troy”, despite it being the name of a city who fell because a handful of people had gotten inside, i.e. exactly how something would fall to zombies. That’s just tempting fate.
Or maybe he thinks it’s super clever because of course the main threat to such a settlement would be a virus-infected person, or a “trojan horse” and they named it that because they must be ever vigilant against the only thing that can get through their impenetrable walls!!!!!!!!!!!
Wait, actually that fits well. Like the actual fall of Troy, a still-living infected would only actually be a threat if they too celebrated the infected’s entrance with failing to check it followed by getting roaring drunk and everyone passing out to give the infected time to die, reanimate, and bite half the people without any resistance.
Never mind, I just discovered that “Trojan” is the name of the leader in American condoms. So the “Troy” thing is not the author fault, it just means that advertising is retarded.
Ages late I know, but I’m just binging on your writing right now.
Anyway this one: okay I can see why the government of the day might want to cover it up, but the opposition loves a crisis. Also all the police and army and what not would be using it as a call for more government funding.
It’d have been an interesting subtext if it was implied the government made sure their opposition didn’t make it to the safe areas.