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

a nearly impossible goal, especially if you’re not aided by any advance strategy or tools. So zombies may want to eat animals, but if their abilities are limited, as we suspect, then for the most part, it’s just not going to work out for them.
    Good news for your pet ferret Bobo, but you’re still pretty much screwed.

KNOW YOUR ZOMBIES: TARMAN
Return of the Living Dead (1985)
    Tarman crawls out of a fifty-gallon drum of toxic sludge with one thing on his mind: brains. A military experiment gone wrong, he is the first modern zombie to ever say “brains” and the first modern zombie to ever eat brains, making him one of the most iconic ghouls of all time.
    William Stout, famed production designer of Return of the Living Dead , later worked on creature design for Predator (1987), Men in Black (1997), and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).
    ILLUSTRATION BY WILLIAM STOUT

12: HOW LONG HAVE WE GOT?
    W e’ve all seen the unlucky saps in zombie movies who get bitten, fall ill, die soon after, and then come back as undead beasts themselves. But how exactly does the zombie sickness cause such a speedy death in its victims? Turns out your own immune system might do most of the work, acting as a final nail in your coffin.
    Sepsis is a condition in which the body fights a severe infection that has spread via the bloodstream. The immune system goes into overdrive, overwhelming normal processes in the blood and leading to blood clots and organ failure. Patients who become septic must be quickly seen by medical professionals or risk falling into a state of shock. If they are left untreated, death can occur within a matter of hours.
    More than 200,000 people die of sepsis each year in the United States alone, and the symptoms closely mirror those seen in depictions of the progression of the zombie sickness. If a flesh eater’s bite can deliver enough toxic filth to induce septic shock, it doesn’t need to be fatal, because your own immune system will react so violently to the invading sickness that you will essentially kill yourself. In fact, new findings suggest that a bite resulting in infection need not be as directly damaging as previously thought to be fatal.
    A 2010 study of the causes of deadly inflammation atHarvard Medical School found that when the cells in our body are damaged by injury, they release large quantities of mitochondrial DNA. Though harmless, the DNA debris is interpreted by our immune system to be foreign bacterial invaders, and legions of white blood cells are called into action, sometimes with fatal results.
    Therefore, a microscopic zombie sickness could kill a newly infected person quickly without relying on any sophisticated mechanisms. It has only to launch small attacks on cells it doesn’t need for future functions, thereby overwhelming the immune system and sending white blood cells into a deadly panic. Death by septic shock would quickly follow.
    But to really address the question of how long we have, we must look at two factors: the incubation period of the zombie sickness and the zombie life span.
INCUBATION PERIOD
    As the speed of zombies on the hunt has increased in recent years, so, it seems, has the rate of infection. Rather than a day or even several hours, films such as
28 Days Later
present a virus that takes full control of its host in just a matter of seconds. In the case of living zombies, the argument is that it can transform its victims much more quickly because there is no need to go through the traditional process of death and reanimation. But is that logic sound?

    Dr. Natalie Mtumbo of the World Health Organization suggests that the living zombies are in many ways less realistic than their classic undead counterparts. She explains that a disease spreading instantly through the body goes against everything we know about the rules of pathology, and so thenotion of an extended incubation period makes more sense, even if it includes death. 21
    Echoing this point, Dr. Phil Luton of the United