I arrive blindfolded, so as not to reveal my “hosts’” location. Outsiders call them the Yanomami, “The Fierce People,” and it is unknown whether this supposedly warlike nature or the fact that their new village hangs suspended from the tallest trees was what allowed them to weather the crisis as well, if not better, than even the most industrialized nation.
The fact their village is in the air WHY IS THIS EVEN A QUESTION.
Because I am up to here with fetishizing back-to-nature bullshit, let me tell you some other things that likely helped these people “weather the crisis”: an incredibly low population density, normalized violence and murder, low life expectancy and limited support for the unwell. In other words, few zombies to start with and people who are already fine with killing others.
Industrialized nations, in contrast, start using their increased resources and organization to care for the sick and discourage individual violence. Already at this point in the book you can see that a large part of the problems are caused by quarantining rather than killing. Another issue will be that the average person isn’t armed and willing to kill. These things are virtues.
It is not clear whether Fernando Oliveira, the emaciated, drug-addicted white man “from the edge of the world,” is their guest, mascot, or prisoner.
Whatever he is, you can bet he’s a drain on their limited resources that puts most of the burden on the women, who do the majority of the labor! Also, institutionalized rape and baby murder is a thing in their culture!
I just feel like it’s disingenuous to stop at “hey, they’re “supposedly warlike” but it meant they did good against the zombies so fuck modern society”.
Anyway. It’s not at all clear why the guy is here so I’m guessing it’s just so the author could drop in a note about how they’re doing. He’s not going to actually interview any of them or anything, but considering how bad he is at this perhaps I shouldn’t criticize him for that.
So, new guy begins by saying that he was a doctor, dammit.
I wasn’t just slicing and dicing little teenage noses or sewing Sudanese “pintos” onto sheboy pop divas.
Stay classy, book! Also, I hope you enjoy gratuitous non-English getting dropped in, it’s his stand-in for actually writing people differently.
I was still a doctor, I was still helping people, and if it was so “immoral” to the self-righteous, hypocritical North, why did their citizens keep coming?
For my part, I have no idea what other areas think about out-of-country surgery, but I hope this isn’t their usual way of thinking about it, because it’s so damn dumb. The people calling it immoral are generally calling the people taking part in it immoral and/or saying the doctors are deceiving people about what’s really involved. And let’s face it, most people are not flying out of the country for surgery. You might as well say people are hypocritical for being against crime because hey look, some people are criminals!
The surgery is a heart transplant, which is a big deal. Apparently other organs are much cheaper because of a law passed where it’s assumed by default that you’re okay being an organ donor. Not sure if the guy’s talking about Brazil or “the north” there, but I’m more interested in if this is supposed to be sinister. It’s something I’m in favor of, and also, if that happened I’d expect you’d see a huge drop in back-alley surgeries like this because those are largely done to get around the lack of organs.
But so anyway. The heart is from China, and remember, China’s where the plague started. The guy getting the surgery needs a very specific heart, so China is the only place that could find him one, and by find, one of course means “murder a political prisoner”. I’m actually kind of meh about that revelation, honestly. I mean, it’s not like China isn’t going to imprison and murder people either way. I’d have to know if the organ donor thing was increasing the actual death rate. I mean, you’d think so, but consider the size of China and the fact we were just told that demand for organs has taken a nosedive due to making everyone an organ donor, it might just as well be that they’re more prone to keeping people alive longer to see if anyone wants a part.
So anyway. After the surgery the guy starts showing signs of distress, but the surgeon in charge says that it’s normal for that to happen and to go party, he’ll keep an eye on the guy to see if his condition worsens.
[Oliveira purses his lips angrily and chews another wad of the mysterious leaves at his side.]
It’s obviously coca. What sort of idiot is this interviewer?
So, our interviewee goes to party, then the receptionist calls to say their patient’s gone into a coma.
I arrived to find Graziela trying to comfort a hysterical Rosi, one of my nurses. The poor girl was inconsolable. I gave her a good one across the cheek—that calmed her down—and asked her what was going on. Why were there spots of blood on her uniform? Where was Doctor Silva? Why were some of the other patients out of their rooms, and what the hell was that goddamn banging noise?
This whole chapter is not told well, but I maintain it’s a really good story seed. Zombies by organ transplant!
So, the guy flatlined, then when they were trying to revive him he got up and bit the doctor. The assistant tried to help, then almost got bit and (I infer) realized she was not getting paid enough to be bit by a crazy guy and locked them in together instead.
Our narrator can’t believe the story, but there’s the thumping, and blood seeping out from under the door. He gets his gun before going in.
Silva was lying in the far corner, Muller crouching over him with his fat, pale, hairy back to me.
Some solid creepiness. The early Resident Evil games have some of this happen and do it quite well.
But, let’s consider what’s happening. The zombie has killed someone, and now it’s feeding on the corpse. It’s going to be doing that for a while if no one bothers it. How much of the body would be left by the time it turns into a zombie?
I mean, let’s say you go for the middle, since zombies are always tearing out guts and stuff. Past a certain point too much of the middle is gone for it to stand upright. I mean, I’m willing to give zombies a lot of leeway regarding how they function while damaged, but I draw the line at non-magic animate skeletons.
I saw that his steel sutures had been partially pried open and a thick, black, gelatinous fluid oozed through the incision
Here’s another issue. These are viral zombies. So, okay, the virus starts to transform the body until it gets too far and the person dies. But having a portion of your blood replaced with toxic slime is not something you can shrug off. This would kill you well before it got that far, and upon death, cellular mechanisms stop. Viruses work by hijacking cellular mechanisms. A zombie cannot have more black goo in it that a person would have at the point of death.
Throughout this book, all zombies will have their blood replaced by black goo anyway. Realism!
Also, a related issue. I can buy that zombies don’t bite other zombies for some reason, but this zombie is still chewing on an infected corpse. As it’s a corpse, we can be sure that it’s not going to develop further and develop whatever sign a zombie might use to indicate it’s fellow zombie plz do not bite. If it doesn’t have it now, it never will. When this guy reanimates, why wouldn’t the current zombie keep chewing on him?
The guy fires his gun and does it badly, so it goes high and blows the zombie’s head off. This is now the second story to use that, but still, you figure that this kind of thing must have happened a bunch of times, and it’s just that everyone who didn’t hit the head isn’t here to tell about it.
He calls his police buddies, who remove the bodies and cover it up. He says he wonders what happened to the surgeon.
His brain was intact when he died. If he wasn’t in a body bag…if the ground was soft enough. How long would it have taken to dig out?
Here’s another failure of realism. The virus is somehow not only 100% infectious, but even a quick death somehow doesn’t stop the virus from transforming the brain. The dead brain. The brain that viruses, by definition, can no longer impact in any way, because the cells are dead.
The guy goes on to explain that if the organ came from someone who’d only just been infected, the amount in their system would be so little that it might be weeks before the virus showed itself in the person who got the transplant.
See, this would all work if it was literally anything other than a virus. Fungi can act on dead tissue. Bacteria can act on dead tissue. PLANTS can act on dead tissue. Literally everything but viruses can act on dead tissue. A bacteria could theoretically kill, rewire, and restart dead cells almost exactly the way the book describes.
But the chapter’s not done. There’s more attempts at science worldbuilding. He says that the guy’s widow never knew what really happened, and how lucky she was that her husband reanimated still in the clinic rather than making it home.
Because the infection started in the heart, the virus had direct access to his circulatory system, so it probably reached his brain seconds after it was implanted.
See, the idea is that the virus alters the brain to control the zombie, so the more of it gets to the brain, the faster it works.
Even if they did know, like elements in the Chinese army…you want to talk about immoral…Years before the outbreak they’d been making millions on organs from executed political prisoners. You think something like a little virus is going to make them stop sucking that golden tit?
Yes, I do.
Let’s consider the first chapter again. The government’s response is to surround the village, check everyone for bites, then take the healthy ones in as well just in case. They were not fucking around there. Hell, if they wanted to be evil and immoral, the people they rounded up just then were far better targets to murder for organs! Unlike political prisoners who agencies try to keep an eye on, the whole point here was to disappear those people, and they just verified that most of them were virus-free.
And sure, if you expect the virus to cause a zombie apocalypse anyway, it’s only an ethical issue, but otherwise, sending out zombie organs would destroy their business in short order as people realized it was a terrible idea to buy those organs. You don’t see AIDS hotspots exporting organs, now do you? The zombie plague is a thousand times nastier than that.
Also, there’s just practical issues. Prisoners shouldn’t be getting bitten because they’re kept locked up and not out where zombies can get them, and unlike AIDS and similar diseases, the zombie plague kills you within days rather than being invisible for years.
You remove the heart not long after the victim’s died…maybe even while he’s still alive…they used to do that, you know, remove living organs to ensure their freshness
It’s actually a really good idea. Assuming you’re killing the person either way, it’s not like it’s extra unethical to knock them out and yank out the organs. It’s just really creepy. Some hospitals do something very close when dealing with doomed babies that are full of parts that can make other babies less doomed.
Anyway, so, this guy says the real vector for the virus was transplants, including pituitary gland transplants which I guess is part of this being the future.
And that’s just the organs! You want to talk about the “donated” eggs from political prisoners, the sperm, the blood?
Uh, no, I don’t think so. Blood is pretty manageable and eggs at least are usually handled in a lab to create embryos before implantation, and I refuse to believe that something infected by a virus that’s constantly pumping out black death virus goo will successfully divide, let alone look normal while doing so. The only possible vector would be turkey-basting sperm, and I’ve never heard of Chinese sperm being that hugely in demand that people don’t care who it came from. Generally women are really picky about the person’s history, and let’s face it, it’s just not that hard to get sperm.
The basic idea of a modern epidemic traveling by transplant is a cool one. But the devil’s in the details.
Can you explain all those stories of people suddenly dying of unexplained causes, then reanimating without ever having been bitten? Why did so many outbreaks begin in hospitals? Illegal Chinese immigrants weren’t going to hospitals.
This seems like the sort of thing that there’s records of. The interviewer asks if the guy has any “proof” (Answer: No…but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen!) instead of realizing he’s an incompetent hack if he didn’t notice something so obvious on his own.
The guy didn’t do anything himself, though. He wanted to pretend it never happened and get on with his life.
By the time I realized the danger, it was scratching at my front door.
Good line. This would work well with a pretty fast outbreak – you run into one anomaly, and nothing more happens until the wall of zombies is shambling down the street. WWZ’s outbreak, sadly, is far too slow. After you see something like this, you’d notice things like that popping up in other news stories and you’d notice them happening more often. This is literally how your brain works – if something traumatic happens, your brain is primed to keep paying attention to it. You can hide in a hole to avoid this, but you can’t just not notice reminders when you encounter them. The people who narrowly avoided a lion eating them and dealt with it by completely forgetting about it were eaten by lions and didn’t have babies. The ones who got obsessed with watching out for signs of lions survived and produced more obsessive babies.
The majority of the outbreak in this book requires people not only to function in ways alien to people, but in ways that could never possibly have evolved in any species.