May is
Zombie Awareness Month. To mark it, and help you, dear reader, prepare for what many think is an inevitable and impending invasion, we organized a round table discussion (by phone) with one of the world's leading zombie experts, Matt Mogk, the Founder & Head Researcher of the Zombie Research Society, and one of the world's leading zombie enthusiasts, Scott Ian, of the heavy metal band Anthrax and the supergroup The Damned Things. Are you prepared for the apocalypse?
Nicole Powers: The ironic thing is that there's so many academics from so many disparate areas of research* that come together and enjoy hypothesizing about zombies, that we're probably, in some respects, better prepared for a zombie invasion than we are for other more likely emergencies.
Scott Ian: I don't know about that though, because, if it was to happen, or when it happens, it would happen so fast that we'd be so behind the eight ball. The first eight minutes of the remake of
Dawn of the Dead to me was a pretty good example, I think, of really what it would be like. Because if you think about it, like I'm walking through Westport in Kansas City, right now, and it's just a small little town - bars, restaurants, all this kind of stuff - and this place, within 15 minutes it would be completely overrun and everybody would be a zombie. We could study it and know that you've got to shoot them in the head, or whatever the case may be, but I don't think there's any way we would ever be prepared and/or be able to shut it down before it got completely out of control.
Matt Mogk: The other thing is that trying to survive a zombie outbreak in many respects - and I think it's one of the reasons that they're so popular and it's fun to think about zombie survival - is that it mirrors the same kind of things that you need to do to survive any large scale natural or manmade disaster. The aftermath of a giant earthquake in Los Angeles, where there's no food and no water and there's lawlessness, potentially has the same dangers as a zombie outbreak. Now, granted there are no zombies, but you're still worried about your neighbor coming over and taking your water, and roaming gangs, and dying of dehydration. So yeah, I agree with you, I think that there's no real way to prepare.
I mean the thing about a zombie outbreak or any disaster, is that governments and emergency preparedness organizations are built around this notion of fixing what they did wrong last time. James F. Miskel said this. He was on the National Security Council for a couple presidents - the first Bush and I think Clinton also. He wrote a book about crisis preparedness and it basically said that
there's no way that any government or emergency preparedness organization is going to be ready, because you can't be ready for the unknown. They're not built that way. And even though we like to think about zombies and its fun, we don't know what it's really going to be like.
SI: No, of course not. I mean, all you can do, pretty much like anything else, if it's something you're worried about, is to just be personally prepared as if you were preparing let's say for an earthquake or something like that. I mean I live in California, so I am always anyway prepared in case a big earthquake was to come. I've got water, I've got food, and I have the ability to protect myself against marauders looking to take that away from me.
MM: Exactly.
SI: Then again my house certainly isn't zombie proof, that's the one thing. I haven't taken that next step forward where I get rid of all my windows and just turn it into a bunker. It hasn't gone that far yet, and I guess if the day comes, I'll be kicking myself.
NP: From a zombie point of view, wouldn't the best place to live be a penthouse, where the only way in is one elevator that you need a pass card for to get up to your level?
SI: Yeah, the isolation though, at the same time, can also be really dangerous, because, in a sense, it's your only way out as well.
MM: Exactly. You've got to understand how much water a human being really needs to survive. And government estimates are that if 25% of the workforce doesn't show up on the job, all systems will fail. It will be complete societal shut down. So no water, no power, no anything. Would you show up at work if the dead were rising and eating the living? Who would - right? Who would go to the water company that day? You could even make the argument, what military would even be able to function? If I'm a sergeant in the Army and I know my kids are living in Nevada and I'm stationed in Alabama, I'm going to try to go home to my kids when I read on the news that Las Vegas is being eaten.
SI: It would be instant. Every single aspect of life as we know it would be over in one second. It just shows you how much power the zombie myth has. That's why, for me, I think zombies have always been my favorites over all the other types of supernatural [beings] or monsters, whether it be vampires or werewolves or Frankenstein or anything else - well I guess you could consider Frankenstein a zombie, but he just doesn't eat people.
MM: Right. And he's also not contagious.
SI: Exactly. But to me that's why the zombie myth is so much bigger in my brain, because it always seems like just in popular literature and culture, if you buy into the way these characters are depicted in fiction, vampires are never really a threat to the whole world...Certainly werewolves aren't. The Mummy, it's like this thing walking at you really slow that's trying to strangle you. I'm not really scared of The Mummy, but zombies would destroy our way of life and everything we know would be over the second the first person was bit and it started to spread. That's really the only thing you can say about, except for like contagious diseases like Ebola or things like that, which would have the same kind of effect, except people wouldn't be eating other people.
NP: So Matt, after all of your research over all of these years, you haven't really got further with regards to survivability than 'we're fucked'?
MM: Well, no, I mean I think that Scott made some really good points there. One is that, for instance, I live in Los Angeles too, and I know that you may not think that there's ever going to be a zombie outbreak here, but you ask any expert and they'll tell you there will be a giant earthquake. But that never inspired me to get an earthquake kit. I never had one. But I do have a zombie preparedness kit, and that actually also works for earthquakes, because it's sort of practical preparedness. So I think that what you can do, on an individual level, like Scott said, is just try to be prepared, the same way that you'd prepare for any other large scale disaster.
But on a societal level, no, there's no way to really be ready for it. But there's also no way to really be ready for the next great flu strain. It's like the 1919 flu that comes around and kills hundreds of millions of people, or the Black Plaque...which I think is another reason that zombies are popular, because they sort of do mirror our understanding of infectious diseases.
NP: In that case, with zombies there's got to be safer places to be. Like with the bird flu, if you were working with chickens you were more likely to be at risk.
MM: Oh yes, absolutely.
NP: So with zombies, for example, if you're in a room full of vegetarians at a Moby show, are you safer than being at a metal concert? Would zombies prefer to eat the brains of carnivores first?
SI: No. It actually doesn't matter.
MM: It's interesting, I mean you bring up a couple points there, but yeah, I agree with Scott. It doesn't matter. It's like saying you'd rather eat a cow that eats grass rather than a cow that eats corn. I mean you don't even really know, you just want to eat the steak - right?
NP: Well someone pointed out that a vegetarian brain might be the Kobe beef equivalent of human flesh, because it's been looked after better.
MM: Actually, it's funny, it's likely that
zombies don't eat brains for a couple reasons. Actually Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute did a study on the bite force strength of various species of animal, humans being one of them, and found that the human jaw is not shaped properly and it's not strong enough to actually bite through the human skull. So zombies may prefer brains, but it's very unlikely that they actually eat brains. The other thing that never really made sense to me about eating brains is the idea that the way to destroy a zombie is by destroying the brain. If zombies are eating the brains of their victims, they are eliminating their reinforcements, so they're inherently making themselves less dangerous.
NP: But wouldn't zombies be like those ants, where a virus (or fungus in the case of zombie ants) takes over. With
zombified ants, their brains get bypassed, and thought happens at a cellular level.
SI: Yeah, I don't think a zombie is being picky and choosy about what they're eating. It's just strict impulse, and, if anything, I think part of that impulse that they're thriving on and that they're feeding off also has anger in it. And a certain amount of mania, because it certainly is a very aggressive impulse. It's not like zombies are walking around aimlessly and bumping into things. If they smell the living near them, there's an impulse inside them that makes them want to destroy that entity, so they certainly have an anger issue thing going on in that impulse as well.
MM: You were asking before where the safest place to be; first of all, you want to be away from people. Because of all the things we don't know, we do know that a key ingredient in making a zombie is a person. So you inherently want to be away from people. If there's no people, there are no people to become zombies, and also no people to steal your stuff, so you're safer...
We actually did a study of all the states in the United States to see who would fare the best in surviving a zombie outbreak. We looked at population density, gun ownership rates, military presence, topography, climate, and sort of the whole thing. It turns out New Jersey ranks the lowest in survivability and actually the entire Northeast is in really, really bad shape, because the population density is really high, and the gun ownership is rated low. And the sustainability rate, people's ability to access food when grocery stores don't exist anymore, is just really at the bottom of the scale.
SI: Where was the best?
MM: Well, if you're talking about region, the Northwest is the best by far - especially the middle Northwest. Because if you look New Jersey, it has a gun ownership rate of around 12.5% or 13%, and they've got a population density of a thousand people per square mile. Then you look at Wyoming, and it's got a population density of about five people per square mile and a gun ownership rate of like 68% to 70%. There's a lot of farmers that are very spread out, and they all are armed. So the chance of a giant horde of zombies coming over the mountains from Colorado...
SI: Yes, there's less walkers, that's for sure.
MM: Exactly.
SI: Well let me ask this, this is something I've always wondered about and it's not touched on all the time...You see these movies, and it always gives you the idea that the zombies are here and they're never going away. It's always going to be like this. But to me, that's never been the case. Because a human body naturally once it's dead, it's going to decay. And in a certain amount of time it's not going to be able to walk anymore, it's not going to be able to come after you. Zombies don't have a very long shelf life.
That's what it always seemed like to me. I thought in
28 Days Later, although those weren't actual risen from the dead zombies, they did at the end burn themselves out. They just can't survive anymore, because they burned all their energy, and they're done. You guys must have done studies on how long a zombie can actually last.
MM: Definitely. That's a key area of research, because if they only last two weeks it's a lot different than if they last two years. And if you think they last two years and you make your survival plan for two years, and they last two years and two days, you're in trouble.
Obviously a zombie is a human, it's a human corpse, and so I agree with you, it is decaying. I don't subscribe to the notion that they're living forever. One of the things about zombies is that they are biologically based. They're not super-human, they don't fly around, they don't turn into bats, which I think is A, one the reasons they're very popular, and B, it's a way that you can actually research them. As far as I know there's no vampire research society of Ph.D.'s.
So the first thing you look at is the stages of decomposition. There are four stages; fresh, bloat, rot and putrefaction. And what you learn is that by the end of the first stage of decay, which is the fresh stage, before they even start to bloat, the bacteria in the mouth has eaten out the brain, it's sort of traveled up to the brain and eaten out so much that literally the brain oozes out of their nose like yogurt. So the brain is completely destroyed by the first stage of decay.
So in theory the zombie wouldn't live beyond the first stage of decay. Now that doesn't mean that it's only going to live the week or two weeks that the first stage takes in a human, you know depending on the climate and everything else. But we can sort of establish that theoretically you're probably not going to see a zombie that's just bones. If it's going to make any scientific sense whatsoever, you're not going to see a zombie like that.
SI: Yeah, physically it couldn't walk as just bones. It needs connective tissue.
MM: One of the people in ZRS is the Boston Medical Examiner. He's doing research on radiation as it impacts decomposition. He argues that if something is radiated, you can kill it, but it actually decomposes at a much slower rate, because what it does is it kills all the bacteria. If you have a toxic body that's radiated and it's a zombie, no bacteria can live in it. The bacteria is what makes the decomposition really speed up. So that's a potential way that you would have a very extended life span. And you know in the [George A.] Romero [film], they're radiated, in the original
Night of the Living Dead, that's how it started - a radioactive satellite crashes back into the Earth...
One of the things I think is cool though about life span is you can look at potential past outbreaks and try to figure out if there is something to learn there. It's like
The Lost Colony of Roanoke, I don't know if you're familiar with that event?
SI: No.
MM: In the late 1500s, 1580's there was a colony of 100 people. They were intended to be the first permanent British colony in the United States, and they settled on an island off of North Carolina called Roanoke Island. They were dropped off there by a supply ship. The supply ship left 110 people. They came back two years later and there was absolutely no sign of the colony. No bones, no people. The weird thing about it is that the Native Americans in the area were friendly, and so the [crew on the] supply ship talked to them. There was no evidence of war, there was no fighting, nothing happened. They didn't starve, there was still food there. They built these forts and everything, they were all still there. It remains the biggest mystery in early American history.
The interesting thing about that is that there's an archeologist from Harvard who just I think a year ago discovered evidence of mass cannibalism on Roanoke. So there's this question: what would cause 110 settlers to all eat each other when they're not starving and they still have supplies, and they're not fighting anybody else?
There's not much evidence there, but we sort of look at that and go okay, is there anything there that could suggest that potentially there is some sort of zombie sickness. And, if there is, what could we extrapolate from that? Well, we know the zombie life span is less than two years, because the ship came back and there's nobody there. So theoretically they died and their bones rotted back into the earth before anybody came back. Again, ultimately it's all speculation.
NP: So in that case, to be safe, you're looking for somewhere isolated, but with two years worth of supplies.
MM: Yeah, if you had two years worth of supplies - that's a lot of supplies - you'd be in pretty good shape for pretty much anything....The real problem is, again, I live in Los Angeles, if you read a lot of these apocalyptic survival books having nothing to do with zombies, you know, how to survive the end of the world, they all [say] you should get a safe house or some sort of cabin 300 miles away from anybody else, and have two years of supplies and all this stuff, 5000 rounds of ammunition.
SI: Yeah, lots of ammo.
MM: Lots of ammo - right? But, you know, I'm in LA. If something hit right now, how am I going to get out of the city? There's absolutely no way.
NP: Well,
Neil Strauss, he wrote an all-purpose disaster manual called
Emergency, and in it he talks about how he figured that bit out. He actually became an EMT specifically so that he could get the vests and the badges that mean you can get through police blocks and out of the city. He figured out how to get out of LA, and he actually has several stashes hidden outside of the city. He has a stash buried on Catalina Island, for instance. But I don't think that he has stashes that would last for two years, so I think he needs to up his anti for the zombie scenario.
MM: You think about hurricane Rita, which is the hurricane that came after Katrina. It turned out to be a little bit of a dud, but it was heading towards Houston, and so they recommended Houston to evacuate...The Governor of Louisiana, because it was going to hit part of Louisiana, recommended that people write their Social Security numbers in marker on their arm so when they were found dead they could identify them. Obviously this made for massive panic. The traffic jam getting out of Houston was 115 miles long. People were on the road not moving, literally their cars didn't move, for three and four days. Didn't move at all. A bus overheated with a bunch of old folks in it who were trying to be evacuated - forty of them died. They burned to death because they couldn't get out of their seats because they were old. And no emergency workers could get to them because both lanes of the roads were going the same way, and on the side of the road, on the grass, there were cars - just straight cars for 114 miles. What are you going to do? How are you going to past that?
NP: You'd want to be on a motorbike so you can weave between the cars, with your EMT vest so you could get through road blocks.
MM: Yeah, a motorcycle would be good. The one downside about a motorcycle is that if I thought it were the end of the world, literally, and people were eating each other, and I saw you on a motorcycle, I might do what I could to try to get you off of it. You don't have a lot of shelter on the motorcycle and you need balance. So if you're driving in between cars and I'm stuck in traffic for three days, and there are people getting eaten a mile behind me, I might open my door when you drive by, let you run into it.
SI: Yep.
MM: There's a down side to everything. There's no perfect answer. People think, 'I'm going to get a Hummer and I'm going to be so bad ass.' And it's like, I don't care how big your SUV is, if you're stuck in an extended traffic jam, there's nothing you can do.
NP: You'd need an off road motorcycle.
MM: Yes, totally, just don't run out of gas.
SI: Or have a monster truck.
MM: A monster truck would be good. And that's the cool thing about it, I think that's why I have so much fun with this. There is no easy answer ever, and no perfect answer. You just can keep working at it. It's sort of like of a problem that will never be solved. But you try to get as close as you can, because I'd like to live.
Unfortunately, I was talking to my wife about this stuff before, and she basically doesn't want to live. I don't know if you guys read the novel
The Road, but she's like the wife in that. She's like, 'As soon as there's no more Starbucks, I'm going to freaking off myself.'
SI: It's so funny you mentioned that because I was just going to bring that up. To me that book is the best depiction of what life would be post apocalypse. We don't even really know what happened in
The Road, but the description, the way the man and the boy are living, just scavenging for anything they can, and roaming gangs cannibalizing...So imagine that, but with zombies, because that's what it would be like.
MM: You literally have taken the words right out of my mouth. When
The Road first came out, I wrote
a review of it on our blog and I argued that it's the best zombie book ever written with no zombies in it. And just like you said, there were roaming hoards of cannibals, you didn't even need to change the plot, all you needed to do, literally, with a tiny tweak of some minor characters - that's a freaking zombie book.
SI: Exactly. So as bad as that is, and as hard as that is, then throw zombies into the mix. I can understand why people would say 'I wouldn't want to live.' I'm the opposite though, I just have a survival instinct, and just from having read so much and seen so much zombie lore over the years, I would want to see how I fared.
MM: Yep, me too. Plus my wife said I could eat her, so I got some food supplies. When she offs herself, I'm all set.
NP: Have you got that in writing, so that afterwards, when all the zombies have died and society recovers, and we're sorting out the legal ramifications of the situation, you've got something in writing that says 'my wife said I could eat her brains.'
MM: I'll just say she wandered off in the woods, and I never saw her again.
SI: That will be a little secret between us.
MM: I think that the survival stuff is really interesting...I was talking to Robert Kirkman about this actually, the creator of
The Walking Dead, and I asked him the same thing - 'Do you have a zombie survival plan?' You got to ask a guy like that the question. And he said, 'Yeah, I do have a zombie survival plan. At the first sign of zombies, I'm going to find the tallest building of whatever city I'm in, and I'm going to jump off.' He's like, 'Look, I'm lazy, I like sitting on my couch, I'm out of shape, I like eating, I wouldn't want to live in a world where people are trying to eat me.'
SI: That's right.
MM: Fair enough.
SI: In his book, when they find the jail, and they clear the jail out of walkers and they burn dead bodies and they make it livable, that's such a great idea. Because they've got this place that people can't get in. When you're reading the book, on a monthly basis, it can give you a sense of safety for this cast of characters. They were in an environment that was very much controllable as far as who gets in and who gets out. Of course things go awry, because it's a comic book, and, if he wants to keep you interested, these people can't be safe for four years. But that would be something that I would certainly explore. You wouldn't be able to do it yourself, but if you were with a group, and it's months down the road and you came across a state prison somewhere, if you could go in there with a bunch of vehicles and RVs and you're all loaded, you've got a bit of a militia going, it seems like that would be something that would be a smart plan.
NP: Like taking over Alcatraz or something?
SI: Yeah, though Alcatraz isn't stocked at all, because it obviously hasn't been a working jail in years and years, but yeah, something like that. Like if right now you could stock Alcatraz with 20 years worth of supplies and secretly own that island so when the shit goes down, you just fly your helicopter to Alcatraz, I think you could probably ride it out pretty well.
MM: I agree, totally. It's such a delicate balance between the ideal level of isolation and security, and the ability to find and access to food and water. Like you said, in a perfect world, if you could have an island like that, and you had it stocked with all your food, that's exactly where you want to be.
SI: Richard Branson owns a really nice island in the Caribbean somewhere, and has a private resort on it - Necker Island, right? I bet you he's got enough supplies where he could just fly off there and after the zombie apocalypse he'd be just fine. He even has his own planes to fly there. So basically the morale of the story is: if the dead start to walk, go find Richard Branson and hang with him.
NP: And he's got the ultimate escape plan because he can even get off the earth.
MM: Yeah, Virgin Galactic right?...You know, a lot of the concept of the zombie apocalypse is that it's this great equalizer. It doesn't matter if you're a CEO or if you're a ditch digger, some will survive and some will die, and all the money in the world doesn't really matter any more. I think that holds true a lot, but with somebody like Branson, maybe his money doesn't matter, but he's got islands and planes, and those help a lot.
SI: Exactly. He has the facilities.
MM: In terms of your question about the skyscraper and things like that, I think that those are definitely a good idea. People also talk about bunkers - would a bunker be a good idea? An enclosed space where no one can get in. As Scott mentioned, the escape is potentially a concern. And the second thing I always think about is if electricity and water is out, you're going to run out of water pretty quickly, unless you have a lot.
NP: So it really does depend on the decay time. If the decay time is two weeks, maybe a penthouse with a lot of bottled water would work, but if it's two years then you'd be screwed.
MM: It depends on so many things - even incubation period. Because a lot of people think that the zombie plague will start in one place, like Cleveland, and gradually spread out from there. But there is a potential that the incubation period, rather than being hours, it could be weeks, or years, or even decades. Potentially, you could have a zombie sickness lying dormant in all of us. One example of this - which is a very benign example - is chickenpox. When you get chickenpox, it stays in your system for the rest of your life. You actually have chickenpox in your spinal column for the rest of your life, and then it sometimes shows up later as shingles.
But the notion is that if you had a very long incubation period of weeks or years or decades, you could have tens of millions of people across the world infected with zombieism and they don't even know it. And then you have some sort of new strain of a virus, a flu, whatever comes along and combines with this, and causes an outbreak on a global scale almost immediately. So it's not like it just started off in one place and as long as we wall of Texas we're OK, you know.
The other question is: if it's a long incubation period, and let's say you could test for it, what are the rights of the infected? Let's say I'm infected with zombieism but I'll be totally normal, just like myself, for the next 20 years. I'm not going to get sick at all for 20 years. What do you do with me?
SI: We shoot you in the head is what we do.
NP: I think we do what the English did with criminals, we send you to Australia. It's big enough.
MM: Thanks guys, I appreciate it. But if you actually look at leprosy, the way that they used to treat lepers in the 1800s, it's kid of the problem that they thought they had. Because they thought leprosy was 100% fatal, totally incurable and very infectious. So on the island of Hawaii, if someone got leprosy and they were diagnosed, they declared them dead. They literally declared them legally dead, and they put them off on this colony on another island and they executed their will. So if I'm married, my wife gets all my stuff, and I'm legally dead. Technically, in historic terms, they were the first legally walking dead people. I mean, they were dead, they did not exist. They just put them on there to die
SI: Yeah, I'm the guy in the movies that has no emotions and no feelings. If you've got it, I don't care what the story is, you need to be put down.
MM: I agree, it's definitely not a time for sentimentality...The other thing I'm really interested in about zombies is the reaction of other people, and especially religious fanaticism...the religious fanatics will have a hay day...Certainly someone's going to think it's my fault, right, or your fault? So it will be a real problem. I think that you're much more likely to die by the hands of another human well before you see a zombie in a zombie outbreak.
NP: Yeah, you're going to die by the hand of Scott.
MM: Scott in a monster truck.
SI: Anyone in my scope is going down.
NP: So we've established the safest place to be when the zombie apocalypse happens is not near Scott.
SI: I'll tell you somewhere else to be, and someone to be with if it happens would be on Ted Nugent's ranch down in Texas. He's completely self-sustainable down there, and he's got the guns and the ammo. I've already made my plans. I know where I'm going - if I can get there.
MM: That's fantastic. Maybe I could try to squeeze in there.
NP: I saw Ted Nugent on one of those food programs and apparently he throws a really good barbeque.
SI: Oh yeah. He's cooked venison for me. It was the best I've ever had.
MM: Wow, and he's good with a bow too, which is big. Why waste the ammo when you don't have to.
SI: He sure is. He taught me how to shoot a bow.
NP: So it's you and Ted Nugent surviving the apocalypse in gourmet style, shooting zombies with crossbows.
SI: Yeah, that's a TV show.
MM: I was about to say, I would really like to see that. You guys should have a camera there, just in case the world gets back on its feet. It would be the first new hit show.
SI: It would be bigger than
Jersey Shore.
MM: If that's even possible. Do you guys have any other questions?
SI: I think I'm good. I have to go in and soundcheck.
NP: I think we've got Scott surviving in fine style.
MM: Yeah, well it sounds like he's already got it taken care of, so I don't know what you need me for - other than target practice.
*The Zombie Research Society has a membership of over 60,000 academics and enthusiasts spread across six continents who are dedicated to advancing zombie scholarship in the arts and sciences. The organization's advisory board includes Dr. Steven Schlozman, the co-director of Harvard Medical School, Mike Harris, the Associate Professor of Biology (Neuroscience) at the University of Alaska, and George A. Romero, director of the 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. Visit ZombieResearch.org for membership details.
The Grey Ribbon: Supporters of Zombie Awareness Month wear a gray ribbon to signify the undead shadows that lurk behind our modern light of day. From May 1 through May 31 concerned citizens are asked to take this small step to acknowledge the coming danger.
Talking of coming danger, Scott Ian and his band Anthrax will be playing alongside Slayer, Megadeth, and Metallica at The Big 4 Festival in Indio on April 23.
Ironiclast, the debut album from The Damned Things, a supergroup Ian formed with Rob Caggiano (of Anthrax), Keith Buckley (of Every Time I Die), and Joe Trohman and Andy Hurley (of Fall Out Boy) is out now. 
Then I had some great friends over for a delicious meal and some wine.
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