[Jesika Hendricks gestures to the expanse of subarctic wasteland. The natural beauty has been replaced by wreckage: abandoned vehicles, debris, and human corpses remain partially frozen into the gray snow and ice. Originally from Waukesha, Wisconsin, the now naturalized Canadian is part of this region’s Wilderness Restoration Project. Along with several hundred other volunteers, she has come here every summer since the end of official hostilities. Although WRP claims to have made substantial progress, none can claim to see any end in sight.]
Finally, another female interviewee! Also, a grim hellscape for our setting today, always appreciated.
She is very strangely accepting of everything: I don’t blame them, the government, the people who were supposed to protect us., and I wonder if this part of the book is taking place in a more sudden zombie apocalypse rather than the one we saw where the only reason the dead got a foothold is because the entire US government alternated between ignoring the problem and actively covering it up. She’s only referring to the point our government follows their personal copy of the Israeli’s plan and abandons most people in the hopes of saving some. And she makes a point that lying to people that going north would save them was more humane than just gunning everyone down.
Once the temperature dropped and the undead froze, some us might be able to survive.
This highlights why, as always, Romero zombies are best. There, you don’t have the option of sacrificing people so easily. If you send everyone north and most of them freeze to death, all those zombies get up and shamble south as soon as they thaw. You have to work to keep people alive or admit what you’re doing and personally gun them down.
No, I don’t blame them for wanting to divert us, I can forgive that. But the irresponsible way they did it, the lack of vital information that would have helped so many to stay alive . . . that I can never forgive.
But you just said it was better to give people a slim chance than have to just shoot everyone trying to follow the retreating army. Wouldn’t giving them that vital info have tipped people off about what a bad idea it is?
I mean, if they had the time, they could’ve given people good survival information while mixing in lies, like “we will totally be dropping supplies to keep you alive” to cover up how fatal it’d really be. But given how the zombies grow in numbers at the speed of plot and things go from wholly controllable to overrun whenever, by the time of the desperate retreat there may not have been time to work out the necessary balance of propaganda that would save the most people without risking anyone realizing what was up.
We do find out when this is!
It was August, two weeks after Yonkers and just three days after the government had started withdrawing west.
I guess I can see the government withdrawal taking a few days before people realize…but there should already be rumors. And why was west a solution, anyway? New York may be a disaster, but I find it hard to believe the west coast cities are doing much better. They’re closer to Mexico, too, and even assuming Mexico did astoundingly well at handling the zombie thing somehow, I can’t imagine a competent Mexico going out of its way to keep the zombies from attacking us. For that matter, a competent Mexico should know that any extra zombies they can shove over the border helps make sure that when things stabilize again, America isn’t in any position to fuck up their country any longer.
So, either all of Mexico is zombies coming to eat us, or Mexico has contained the zombies and then dumped them in California on purpose. Maybe use boats, unload them along the coast.
We hadn’t had too many outbreaks in our neighborhood. I’d only seen one, a collection of six feeding on a homeless man.
As always, how?
Okay, let’s assume this homeless guy was drunk into a stupor and couldn’t flee. Where did the six come from? How did an entire pack of zombies make it that far only to find the one person in town who wasn’t in any position to escape them? Remember that these things display less intelligence than insects.
And all of those six were shot by the cops, so…the system appears to be working fine. Assuming catastrophic incompetence, the net change in the zombie population there was -5, and if the cops don’t know to headshot corpses yet, well, they’re also displaying less intelligence than insects. When the absolutely worst case scenario is now that one probably very tattered zombie starts crawling about and then gets shot, how did they take over exactly?
It happened three blocks from our house and that was when my father decided to leave.
Complaints aside, I do admit the fact that six zombies apparently made it into town and then killed someone would worry me. The fact it makes no sense how we got there is irrelevant to the question of how you deal with it. He doesn’t know that supposedly zombies just go toward sound while giving loud moans to alert any prey. Maybe they’re hiding during the day, growing in numbers! Maybe they’re smart enough to go for the throat so the victim can’t scream for help!
She says the news is just zombies.
Looking back, I still can’t believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of “experts” all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more “shocking” and “in depth” than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do. The only thing any of them could agree on was that all private citizens should “go north.” Because the living dead freeze solid, extreme cold is our only hope. That’s all we heard. No more instructions on where to head north, what to bring with us, how to survive
Okay, so make up your mind here. Was it government misinformation or media incompetence?
The reason the media is worthless spin is because it’s not under government control, so it’s just about ratings and consensus doesn’t get you people glued to the TV for the next scrap of information.
And for that same reason, the media would be giving out instructions. Whether or not those instructions are any good might be another matter, but why wouldn’t they get a pile of experts in to argue over what’s the best food to bring?
“That’s it,” Dad said, “we’re getting out of here tonight and heading north.” He tried to sound determined, slapping his rifle. He’d never touched a gun in his life. He was a gentleman in the most literal sense-he was a gentle man. Short, bald, a pudgy face that turned red when he laughed, he was the king of the had jokes and cheesy one-liners. He always had something for you, a compliment or a smile, or a little extension to my allowance that Mom wasn’t supposed to know about. He was the good cop in the family, he left all the big decisions to Mom.
But that’s about to change, because when the zombies come, men are men.
(Also, a little extension to my allowance that Mom wasn’t supposed to know about is just so irritating. Her mom has to set all the rules, then her dad gets adoration for undermining the mom and saying it’s their little secret. What was her mom like besides the one actually running the household? Fuck that bitch, apparently, what matters is Daddy getting points for being bad at parenting in a way that favored her.)
This situation is more unclear than the other one with where the dad knows that only the good and noble Israelis will save them, but later events make me suspicious.
Now Mom tried to argue, tried to make him see reason. We lived above the snowline, we had all we needed. Why trek into the unknown when we could just stock up on supplies, continue to fortify the house, and just wait until the first fall frost?
So why doesn’t Mom call the shots here? Why the sudden reversal?
It’s also unclear why people who live somewhere it snows would still fuck up so badly here. We’re told that her dad hadn’t been camping ever before, and her mom’s camping status is, I guess, irrelevant.
Now. I have gone camping, so maybe I’m really overestimating what people know…but I find what’s to come baffling. People who don’t go camping may not have the best grasp on what it involves, but they usually picture it as unpleasant enough they don’t want to go camping.
They’re traversing through the icy remnants of all this, so she points out frozen DVDs and criticizes people for bringing electronic stuff. It’s unclear if this is because you can’t use it due to lack of electricity or it’s frivolous because it’s not food. Personally, a laptop seems like a smart thing to bring, since satellites do exist and all, and the addition of a couple favorite DVDs is unlikely to make a difference.
We actually thought we were packing sensibly. Warm clothes, cooking utensils, things from the medicine cabinet, and all the canned food we could carry. It looked like enough food for a couple of years. We finished half of it on the way up.
She recounts how she didn’t think anything of it, but she was a kid. It shouldn’t be that hard for adults to notice the problem. They should’ve restocked on the way and, if they couldn’t, they’d have known there wasn’t enough food available in the area to sustain them.
We also learn that her description of her dad appears to be pretty rose-tinted. As they drive, they see people stopped at campsites and her dad sneers at the fools calling them shortsighted and irrational because he was sure you need to get farther from the cities to have a chance. Only, her mother says, they aren’t choosing to stop but trapped because there’s no more gas.
“And whose fault is that,” Dad would say.
Regardless, they’re not irrational if they want to continue but can’t. And why is her family fine? Because her dad stockpiled a ton of gas since the moment the panic started, which again suggests he was in us vs them mode for a long time before this.
We’d pass a lot of traffic snarls around roadside gas stations, most of which already had these giant signs outside that said NO MORE GAS. Dad drove by them really fast. He drove fast by a lot of things, the stalled cars that needed a jump, or hitchhikers who needed a ride. There were a lot of those, in some cases, walking in lines by the side of the road
So yeah…by all appearances, she remembers her dad as kindly because he was indulgent to her, not because he was a kind person. I’m not sure the book sees it this way, since all this is why she’s here to talk now. Because he doesn’t stop, they’ll make it to their intended destination, and when they do pick up a passenger…
She was really grateful and tried to give my parents all the money she had. Mom wouldn’t let her and promised to take her as far as we were going. She started crying, thanking us. I was proud of my parents for doing the right thing, until she sneezed and brought up a handkerchief to blow her nose. Her left hand had been in her pocket since we picked her up. We could see that it was wrapped in a cloth and had a dark stain that looked like blood. She saw that we saw and suddenly looked nervous. She told us not to worry and that she’d just cut it by accident.
It’s possible it was – under the circumstances you can see people being anxious about it – but we know the zombie wounds have a distinctive black goo and it’s hard to believe that’s still secret knowledge (well, not hard to believe for this book, but I’d think she’d at least mention that ignorance as a mitigating factor given people definitely know in the present), so having a visible suspicious bandage and being unable to pull it off to show it’s full of normal red blood means she’s probably yet another pre-zombie screwing everyone over. And we do know previous chapters have been full of people with zombie bites trying their best to get to where all the food will be when they turn.
So that night they force her off and drive away, lying to the narrator. She says there was a lot of stuff like that where she just ignored what was going on because it was all too stressful, like the occasional zombie in the road.
Finally, they get to their intended campsite. It’s actually not too bad – lakeside, not too many people around, but just enough to make us feel “safe,” you know, if any of the dead showed up. Why are there scarequotes around “safe” when having a decent number of people to deal with a zombie is in fact safe? Probably because we’re still in the section where everything everyone does is a mistake. Those people will, in fact, keep it “safe” when the dead start showing up.
It was kind of like a party at first. There were these big cookouts every night, people all throwing in what they’d hunted or fished, mostly fished. Some guys would throw dynamite in the lake and there’d be this huge bang and all these fish would come floating to the surface. I’ll never forget those sounds, the explosions or the chainsaws as people cut down trees, or the music of car radios and instruments families had brought. We all sang around the campfires at night, these giant bonfires of logs stacked up on one another.
That was when we still had trees
This is just all really obvious.
Look, let’s assume that almost everyone involved is from a city, and moreover that this makes you a complete idiot. Chainsaws are not easy to use, and getting an entire tree down without killing anyone is significantly harder. At least those people had to have basic competency. They know how many trees they’re cutting down each day. They can tell they have to walk farther and farther out to cut down fresh trees. If nothing else, they can tell it’s physically harder and harder to transport the heavy wood back to camp.
I can completely see people showing up and not immediately realizing how fast they’d use up resources, but like the drive up, as soon as you actually start using them you find out how much you need, and then you can look around and guess how long the rest will last.
Someone might throw dynamite into the lake once – but the group should be able to do the math afterward and understand that unless they’re planning on heading to another lake, killing everything in this one is a poor choice. They might build a big bonfire once…and then the chainsaw guys realize a few hours burned through wood it took them two days to gather. And chainsaws run on gas, and they’re going to be aware of that.
Instead of realizing this entire enterprise was fucked from the start, she continues, as if it’s their fault,
the second and third waves starting showing up, when people were down to burning leaves and stumps, then finally whatever they could get their hands on. The smell of plastic and rubber got really bad, in your mouth, in your hair. By that time the fish were all gone
Now, you might think this is desperate people, but no, the plot of this book is zombies vs sheeple, so of course No one seemed to worry. Everyone was counting on winter freezing the dead.
What’s annoying is the narrator admitted there’s a lot she missed because people were hiding it from her, so it’d have been reasonable for this to be the impression she had rather than the reality. But no, we never really get unreliable narrators. Kid-her always really knew what was going on but didn’t want to think about it, and anything else she says is just objective fact.
It is possible people were thinking they just had to hold out until winter and then they could head back down to get more stuff…except “the second and third waves” picking things clean where they are makes it obvious they must have done the same to all supplies along the way. It’s also unclear why no one considers the solution is to head further north, where there are still trees and possibly animals.
But once the dead were frozen, how were you going to survive the winter?
Good question. I don’t think most people thought that far ahead. Maybe they figured that the “authorities” would come rescue us or that they could just pack up and head home. I’m sure a lot of people didn’t think about anything except the day in front of them
It’s starting to get weird how the book seems to be written assuming everyone always picks exactly the choice they want and no one’s ever trapped in situations they know are bad.
What else were they supposed to do? They gambled on running rather than fortifying. They’re now in an open area. They can’t head back toward civilization because there’s a wall of zombies in the way.
Note also in the recounting she and everyone else seem to already know that freezing won’t kill zombies despite how it absolutely should and how this entire plan only makes sense if you think the ice will actually resolve the zombie problem for good. This is presumably because it’d make it slightly harder to keep up the chant that they’re idiots who deserve to die if it was clear the plan should’ve worked.
“We’ll all be home before you know it,” people would say. “It’ll all be over by Christmas.”
What else are they supposed to say around a little girl? “We’re fucked, and the only thing left is to find out if the zombies reach us before we freeze?”
[She draws my attention to another object in the ice, a Sponge-Bob SquarePants sleeping bag. It is small, and stained brown.]
What do you think this is rated to, a heated bedroom at a sleepover party? Okay, maybe they couldn’t get a proper bag-camping stores were always the first bought out or knocked off-but you can’t believe how ignorant some of these people were.
And that’s this chapter. The story isn’t quite so divorced from reality that it won’t give lip service to the fact there’s things constraining people, but it doesn’t even finish the sentence because going back to blaming people and explaining it’s really their own fault.
This is really consistent. We see the celebrity chapter mocks the huge number of hanger-ons, oblivious to the fact those people were probably doing it because they didn’t want to be left outside to die. We see it in the bit about the line of cars – “Where did they think they were going? Sure, the people who weren’t in the line were already dead, but still, what idiots they were for doing something when it didn’t actually save them, what sad, sad idiots.” The previous female interviewee had a pile of excuses for why she didn’t see it coming that boiled down to not wanting to rather than that it’s impossible to know what’s happening when everyone’s lying to you.
A lot of them were from Sunbelt states, some as far away as southern Mexico. You’d see people getting into their sleeping bags with their boots on, not realizing that it was cutting off their circulation. You’d see them drinking to get warm, not realizing it was actually lowering their temperature by releasing more body heat. You’d see them wearing these big heavy coats with nothing but a T-shirt underneath. They’d do something physical, overheat, take off the coat. Their bodies would be coated in sweat, a lot of cotton cloth holding in the moisture. The breeze’d come up … a lot of people got sick that first September. Cold and flu. They gave it to the rest of us.
And ironically, you actually fucking deserved it.
Here we see the attitude that everyone’s to blame for their own actions leech into the very behavior of the characters. How were city-dwelling Mexicans supposed to know the finer points of Canadian winter survival? Oh right, we have LANGUAGE which we use to COMMUNICATE INFORMATION when faced with EXACTLY THIS PROBLEM.
This should be a complete indictment of the entire concept. That they smugly looked down on the newcomers and didn’t care what happened to them so much they refused to even tell them the handful of sentences she just said, only for it to result in a wave of disease that spread to everyone. Indeed, isn’t that the same sort of thing that happened with the outbreak itself, criticizing the other countries for not handling it well enough while refusing to work together?
She goes on to say that she had a radio they listened to.
It was all stories of the pullout, army units leaving people stranded. We’d listen with our road map of the United States, pointing to the cities and towns where the reports were coming from. I’d sit on Dad’s lap. “See,” he’d say, “they didn’t get out in time. They weren’t smart like us.” He’d try to force a smile. For a little while, I thought he was right.
And in context, that seems to be “he was pretending things would be okay for us, and not that we were doomed too” rather than “he was pretending hearing about everyone else dying was okay”, because why else would him faking a smile be contradicted by bad things happening to them shortly?
I mean – you could do something with this, I suppose. You could do a subtle thing where there’s supposed to be this contrast between her thinking of her dad as a kind person and the fact he was already monstrous long before the camp falls apart, how even now, recounting this, she sees no issue with smiling at the idea other people died for not running like they did, where the point is not that what’s coming changes them but just that it makes it obvious who they always were.
But I really don’t think this book is that sort of book.
Whenever Mom and Dad would go looking for food, they’d always leave me with a neighbor.
Another conspicuous thing is the lack of other children. There are kids, so we can laugh at people for how they deserve to die for having a toy sleeping bag rather than one rated for the cold and really roll around how awful their failure was given it got their kids killed too, but there are no actual kids. She isn’t out running around with other kids, they aren’t talking about what’s happening and trading their own rumors, she doesn’t go over to her friend’s family when her parents aren’t there…
Even assuming the kids aren’t allowed out of the camp, they can still run around within it. If it’s too cold to be outside, they can hang out in different cars/tents/etc. Maybe, on some level, the author realizes that if there are kids, they’d talk to each other, and if people talk about something they think about it, and even a split second of thought would tell you things are already getting bad, and that would get in the way of people mindlessly waiting for their deaths. As they feel superior to those who didn’t run, we, I think, are meant to feel superior for knowing they ran badly. WE read the zombie survival guide, right? We’d do great. So great. The greatest.
The camp became a mess, nobody picking up their trash anymore. A couple times I stepped in human shit. Nobody was even bothering to bury it.
Incidentally, I’d just like to mention I don’t think the author’s ever been camping either.
Picked up the trash and then what? When my family goes camping, we tend to bring a lot of prepared food. Actually cooking is a big undertaking, as is cleaning, so if you’re feeling a little hungry, you open one of those single-serving cereal boxes instead, the ones where you can use the box as a bowl. The ones with wax paper linings you can burn but the plastic linings have to go in the trash. So do the cans from the canned food, the wrappers from those health bars, etc. We bring along small plastic bags (makes it easier to divide up recyclable and not) and they fill up surprisingly fast. Since we’re camping by choice, we just bring that with us in the car and throw it out when we’re done.
If you’re not…well, you have three choices. You dig a hole and bury it. You dump it. Or you try to burn it, bearing in mind a lot of trash doesn’t really burn so you’ll still have to bury/dump that afterward.
Now, my family didn’t do hardcore poop-in-the-woods camping. If you’re staying somewhere long-term, you have to dig a lot of holes and you’re not going to want to have to dig extra for harmless trash. Once the weather gets cold, it’s going to be harder and harder to dig into the ground, and worse, you’re going to have to go farther out to do so – each filled latrine is an area that can’t be used again. As there are zombies (and it’s just cold and an unpleasant trip) you don’t want to go too far out, either. But you can’t go too close to the lake because I’m assuming that’s where they’re getting their water from (you’ll notice no mention of that, even though it’s actually a really big concern and even through knowing how not to pollute your water source is way harder than any of the stuff we’ve been told they fucked up. No mention of how tedious and cold it is to keep getting water and lugging it back, how hard it is to get and heat enough water to wash dishes or how miserably cold it is to wash them directly in the lake. No mention of hygiene issues like running out of soap – in the average American’s life, we actually don’t need soap much, which leads to people thinking it’s not that big of a deal, but oh, it is, and it’s going to be so much worse as it gets cold and people don’t even want to wash with water. The one germiphobe family that brought hand sanitizer are probably the only ones not eating shit off their hands. And no mention of how I’m sure no one has toilet paper at this point.)
If there’s enough people on little enough land, in conclusion, no one bothers to bury shit because they already buried as much as they can and trying to dig a hole is just unearthing different shit, and no one has the energy because they’re busying dying of diarrhea anyway.
In conclusion, camping sucks, fortify yourself in a city.
But knowing how camping works isn’t the point, it’s that everyone was stupid for not knowing how camping works and now it’s time for them to desperately tear into each other for supplies.
I saw one guy catching another guy trying to steal some stuff out of his car and beat his head in with a tire iron.
Incidentally, I really hope people were smart enough to start eating the murdered early on, especially given their existing sanitation problems mean they really shouldn’t leave a corpse out. It always bothers me when there’s this huge gap between killing people over food and realizing dead people count as food. So many extra deaths from wasted calories! Especially when you’re pretty much reenacting the Donner party fiasco so you all know where this is going.
I could completely understand if the fact zombies tear people apart had strengthened our already strong taboo against cannibalism, but they’re going to start eating people without any fanfare before long and it won’t factor into that in the least.
One time we heard someone moving outside the makeshift tent we’d draped over the minivan.
Incidentally, how fucking stupid are you if you don’t bring a halfway decent actual tent for camping? How dare these people look down on anyone else for not being prepared.
Mom told me to put my head down and cover my ears. Dad went outside. Through my hands I heard shouts. Dad’s gun went off. Someone screamed. Dad came back in, his face was white. I never asked him what happened.
This is why I said at the start that I don’t think we’re supposed to think the dynamic of Dad insisting on going vs Mom saying to stay had anything wrong with it. This is now the second family where the dad does the shooting, and it’ll get spelled out even more clearly in a moment.
The only time anyone ever came together was when one of the dead showed up. These were the ones who’d followed the third wave, coming alone or in small packs. It happened every couple of days. Someone would sound an alarm and everyone would rally to take them out.
Another example of it making no sense the dead overran everyone.
She says that finally, the lake froze and the zombies stopped coming, so some people tried going home.
Every day there’d be these groups of half-starved, ragged wretches, all loaded down with all this useless stuff they’d brought with them
Okay.
Look.
It’s understandable to criticize people for bringing things up they didn’t need because they don’t know how to pack. That’s a known mistake people make. But if they haven’t abandoned those things at this point, then it wasn’t useless stuff. If, after a month, starving people are willing to carry it back on their backs, it’s something valuable to them.
This book is so much better at this. In a lot of other ways, too. It’s far more depressing, but honestly, this chapter would be horribly depressing if it was done with a smidge of empathy. As it is, you have to kind of skim along and fill it in, pay just enough attention to get the broad strokes of the horror without hitting the way the author cares more about laughing at the people for not following his guidebook.
So, October, her dad refuses to leave. By Thanksgiving, she’s dying of starvation.
They were fighting a lot, fighting about everything. That scared me more than anything. They’d never raised their voices at home. They were schoolteachers, “progressives.”
aaaaaaaaaaaaand here the book tips its hand.
We now see what underlies the recurring pattern. Part of the unnatural weakness of modern life is equality. The proper world is more primitive, with men doing and women following after.
We also get a glimpse into why all the chapters sound the same. You can imagine a writer struggling with his task of international interviews, but we see here he can’t even manage to write someone in his own backyard. There are no progressives, just people who pretend to be in defiance of the true order of the world, and this is so self-evident than a child raised by them puts the word in mocking quotes.
This is a quieter version of the celebrity revenge porn chapter – see, those people who talk about feelings rather than shooting guns are just fakers!
The final argument is about food. Their neighbor is cooking a delicious meat stew.
Mom said “it” was the only way. I didn’t know what “it” was. She said “it” wasn’t “that bad” because the neighbors, not us, had been the ones to actually “do it.”
It is unclarified if “it” is murdering people or just hacking them up for food after their death. The latter fits with how there appears to be no sense of fear, but the former makes far more sense as an objection.
Dad said that we weren’t going to stoop to that level and that Mom should be ashamed of herself. Mom really laid into Dad, screeching that it was all his fault that we were here, that I was dying. Mom told him that a real man would know what to do. She called him a wimp and said he wanted us to die so then he could run away and live like the “faggot” she always knew he was. Dad told her to shut the fuck up. Dad never swore. I heard something, a crack from outside. Mom came back in, holding a clump of snow over her right eye.
See what I mean about how they’re fake? Oh, they pretend to be okay about gay people, they pretend it’s natural, they pretend it’s wrong to be prejudiced, but when they’re mad, when they’re honest, they’ll scream it as an insult because it is.
What’s even more interesting is the woman’s utter helplessness. She’s apparently completely incapable of going to get the food herself, her only option is to nag and abuse her husband for not providing for the family enough until he allows it.
Anyway, having been called a faggot and then asserted his heterosexual credentials by punching his uppity wife, he is ready to fall into the correct role of male provider. He takes the radio and comes back with a bucket of stew.
She looked relieved. She was crying a little. Dad still had that look. The look I had myself in a few months, when Mom and Dad both got sick and I had to feed them.
We aren’t told how this was accomplished given the only thing of real value was the radio. Now, generally prostitution is the last option when you run out of everything else you can barter, but given the mom’s inability to do anything to feed her dying child makes it clear the book wants to avoid that whole business, I really doubt child prostitution is the answer here. So, she somehow provided for her family and got them food at a point when people were dying of starvation, and “the look” is presumably just about the horror of realizing the food you were getting is made of other people.
That or she went out murdering people, but in that case comparing her expression to her dad handing over a radio is a bit much.
(Also, the mom knows just as much as the dad what’s in that soup, but only the dad has the look because he is nobly shouldering horrors for his family while wifey somehow is oblivious.)
[I kneel to examine the bone pile. They have all been broken, the marrow extracted.]
I’m glad to hear people weren’t wasteful.
She says that in December, the snow completely covers everything, higher than a person.
The camp got silent. No more fights, no more shooting. By Christmas Day there was plenty of food.
…no, that doesn’t seem right. Snow is an insulator, you see.
People are dying of some combination of starvation, disease, and cold. In order for there to be a sudden glut of food, a whole lot of people need to die of cold and disease suddenly. Otherwise, eating people who die of starvation keeps delaying the next death of starvation and stretching things out.
No snow, on the other hand, can get bitterly, half-the-camp-freezes-overnight cold.
They say eleven million people died that winter, and that’s just in North America. That doesn’t count the other places: Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia.
I feel like Greenland, Iceland, and Scandinavia know how to handle their winters. The reason it makes sense this happened in North America is that it’s relatively easy for people from a wide range of climates to all end up in Canada. Two of those three places, though, are islands. It’s pretty easy to keep people from getting to them. (…for that matter, they’re pretty well-situated to prevent zombies from getting there at all and going on with life relatively uninterrupted.) Scandinavia maybe could’ve had a big influx of people, but they’ve got a lot of coast available to them, which would help starvation, and varied terrain, which would make it relatively easy to keep people away. Given they’re on the same landmass as China and right above highly populated areas, zombie density seems their bigger concern.
I don’t want to think about Siberia, all those refugees from southern China, the ones from Japan who’d never been outside a city, and all those poor people from India.
…I also find it hard to believe even desperate people would think Siberia was the answer. Pretty sure we all understand that’s where you go to freeze to death. If you’re in Japan, you have to get on a boat to get to Siberia, why wouldn’t you just stay on the boat?
That was the first Gray Winter, when the filth in the sky started changing the weather. They say that a part of that filth, I don’t know how much, was ash from human remains.
Given it is super, super hard to burn human bodies, nope, and then triple nope given how you guys used up your fuel before you used up your food. You can wonder at how much was ash from campfires cooking people, sure, but if you’re cooking people and they’re ending up as ash, you’re a very bad cook.
(And there’s no need to burn the zombies, since they’re full of mary sue goo that prevents them from rotting and would actually help kill flies and other disease vectors that land on them.)
You know…this sounds really dramatic, and I think you could argue a mass displacement of humans and huge number of open fires would mess with the skies, but for there to be a credible zombie apocalypse, those zombies need to have taken out a huge chunk of the population already, leaving a lot fewer to light those fires. Add in that all our industry is gone, so none of the factories are pumping out anything, and it doesn’t seem like it’d be all that much.
Now, there’s other, more valid factors to consider. Nuclear bombs have been dropped. Also, we mistakenly suppressed fires in forests for a long time before realizing if you don’t let it burn off occasionally you get even deadlier blazes when it finally goes – now we’re no longer able to do that, plus there’s people desperately trying to make their way into lower population areas like forests to camp out.
But I don’t think cannibalism campfires made up much of it.
But eh, fine. Winter is scary, nuclear winter a thing, and Canada is already pretty cold. She says that it didn’t thaw until July. And, of course, that just meant the zombies came back too.
Now, bear in mind no one could’ve expected that. As she’s about to explain, it’s a stupid idea that makes no sense. The whole sequence of events makes perfect sense if you think that people were running north in the hopes the frozen zombies would be dead for good.
Picture this – everyone runs north, fully intending to head back down with the frost line explaining why they assume they’ll live if they can just survive to the first freeze and they aren’t concerned about not having enough food to make it through the whole winter. First cold snap buries them in mountains of snow, everyone’s trapped, cannibalism happens.
[One of the other team members calls us over. A zombie is half buried, frozen from the waist down in the ice. The head, arms, and upper torso are very much alive, thrashing and moaning, and trying to claw toward us.]
And somehow, magically, moving when half of it is frozen doesn’t do any damage at the connecting point. The zombies aren’t tearing themselves apart as they thaw, because his zombies are awesome, how dare you think they could be stopped by basic logic.
Why do they come back after freezing? All human cells contain water, right? And when that water freezes, it expands and bursts the cell walls. That’s why you can’t just freeze people in suspended animation, so then why does it work for the living dead?
[The zombie makes one great lunge in our direction; its frozen lower torso begins to snap. Jesika raises her weapon, a long iron crowbar, and casually smashes the creature’s skull.]
Because they’re mary sues, we’ve been over this. Also, no, all alive human cells contain water. As someone who ate people jerky, you should understand this.