So Now You’re a Zombie: A Handbook for the Newly Undead

up, surrounded by our stumbling humanoid footprints. Slave owners eventually decided that the myths must be true—and that voodoo itself was to blame for the attacks. They quickly forbade the public practice of the religion, forced voodoo practitioners to convert to Catholicism, and accused voodoo priests and priestesses of witch-craft, but the attacks did not cease. And the slaves, who knew their religion was not to blame for our eating habits, continued to secretly practice voodoo to preserve their culture. This is why today we are often associated with voodoo.

Of course, even the slaves’ understanding of our nature was horribly inaccurate. To suggest that we are merely the spirits of dead humans—it’s an insult! It wasn’t until the mid-1900s that the breathers fully understood our dreaded behavior and constructed a new, more accurate definition of the term zombie: an undead body that feeds on the living. That’s us!

Other Zombie Names

Our rotten team has cataloged a more complete list of names the humans have bestowed upon the walking dead.

banshees

biters

bloodeaters

boomers

brain-eaters

brainless

the Brainy Bunch

carriers

chompers

crawlers

creepers

the damned

deadheads

the decomposed

decomps

drifters

the evil dead

flesh-eaters

ghouls

the grave dead

greenies

the half-rotten

hulks

immolators

the infected

the living dead

jujus

mindless drones

moaners

mutants

ndzumbi

nzambe

nzumbe

parahumans

plague carriers

post-lifers

the reanimated

red-eyes

the restless dead

the risen

the rising

Romero types

the rotted

rotters

revenants

Satan’s soldiers

screamers

shamblers

shufflers

shuffling dead

siafu

souless body

specters

stenches

stenchers

stiffs

stumblers

toxic avengers

toxic Zs

the undead

the undying

walkers

the walking dead

walking corpses

Zacks

zambi

zed-heads

zeds

zeros

zom-bustibles

zombi

the zombified

Zombo sapiens

zombies

Zs

zumbi[1]

The Modern Zombie

Over the last few decades, boneheaded human scientists have inadvertently begun to contribute to the undead cause. At this very moment, they are experimenting with genetically engineered, highly contagious versions of the z-virus. If one of these test-tube strains were accidentally introduced into the general population, it could unleash an unstoppable zombie pandemic, a scenario we’ve being itching for for centuries.

But we modern zombies can’t just lie in wait, hoping that some foolhardy breather will do our job for us. If zed history has taught us anything, it’s that we must remain vigilant and lunge at every opportunity that presents