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

video game withdrawal, or a misguided urge to reunite with family and pets can lead to an ill-advised journey out of a hiding place. Most of this craziness adds up to an easy meal for you.

By the end of a truly devastating zombie outbreak, the breathers may have succumbed to total desperation. They may take their own lives to avoid joining the ranks of the undead—or they may try to join our ranks even without being infected (see “The Mentally Disturbed,” page 12).

Always Drawing Attention to Themselves

Hey, look at me, I’m at Pacific Playland! Humans continually evolve and have, just recently, mutated into multitaskers. Case studies have shown that the living today are incapable of sitting quietly. They constantly create noises by humming, tapping, whistling, and talking. These annoying noises piss us off—and tip us off that dinner is served!

Zeds have also observed that the living find it necessary to surround themselves with objects that increase their visibility. Barking dogs, vehicles, weapons, electrical appliances, and other technologies flash before our eyes and ring in our ears, helping us pinpoint which direction we should shamble. When humans shoot out a window, turn on the lights, or let the family dog bark, they’re letting you know that you’ll be eating good.

At the Mercy of Big Brother

If it’s anything like the TV show Big Brother, the human resistance is going to be a train wreck! There is no question that during a z-virus epidemic, military personnel or other government officials will be dispatched to “assist” the living. However, this aid will take the form of containment only—officials will simply set up a large perimeter around the infected area.

At this point, it’s open season on everyone trapped inside the confines of zombieland. Humans barricaded in homes or other shelters are just leftovers for us to claim. Eventually we’ll infect or eat everyone within the perimeter, swell our numbers, and prepare to assault the humans’ main line of defense.

There Is No “I” in Human

Unlike the efficient, self-motivated zed, panicked humans need someone to slap them around and tell them what to do. This freakish weakness soon becomes a burden. It starts with complaining, then leads to questioning leadership. Eventually it escalates into something uglier: a once-powerful breather band can be torn apart by irreconcilable differences, making it vulnerable to a zombie horde’s attack. Not unlike a severed appendage flailing on the ground, a separated individual becomes an easy target.

Not to toot our own horns, but there is an “I” in zombie!

How to Kill a Human

Yes, the living can experience minor injures—muscle soreness, sprains, contusions, tendinitis, and possible fractures—but none of them will guarantee you a brainy dessert. If you scratch or bite a human, they will be infected by the z-virus and will eventually die and join our cause—but you want to eat, dammit! What you need to do is kill a human, not just harm it. Knock it cold to the ground, then chow down until your face is painted red.

Fortunately, if you can harm it, you can kill it! Breathers come in all shapes and sizes, but absent weapons or protective clothing, bodies of every type are equally susceptible to infection and/or death. Don’t be fooled—tattoos will not improve your prey’s defenses against the horde.

Every human’s soft underbelly shares the exact same set of innards: 11 entangled body systems that must continually perform their respective duties to maintain life. If any one system is seriously damaged, the body as a whole cannot function. This interdependency provides you with 1,001 termination possibilities. For example, the human circulatory system is responsible for pumping six quarts of fresh, uninfected blood through thousands of miles of veins. If interrupted, the human goes down, blood squirting everywhere.

Getting hungry yet?

The human body is covered with vulnerable entry points into one or more organ systems. The following slaughter strategies will help you find them. Each one, when executed correctly, will result in something horrible. For them, that is.

Head Trauma

Be a trauma momma and go for the head!

Biting or scratching a breather’s facial features can cause major disorientation, and possibly impair your victims’ vision (see “Use Your Body as a Weapon,” page 81). Without sight, he or she will definitely be at a disadvantage.

You can also use your flailing arms to rain heavy blows to your victim’s head. This can bruise its brain and put the human in an unconscious state. Other common symptoms of a bruised brain are dizziness, stroke, seizures, vomiting, aneurysms, nosebleeds, and seeing stars and little birdies.

If pushed to the ground, a human could experience a skull fracture, and a skull fragment could “dent” into the brain. This could lead to quick death, or at least impair your victim while you feast.

And no, battering a brain it does not affect its nutritional value.

Internal Organ Damage

Like a turducken, the human body is stuffed with all types of internal organs. While the human skeleton is highly resistant to damage and human skin is highly resilient, damage done to internal organs such as the liver, kidney, or heart is often delightfully deadly.

To gain access to these organs, concentrate your bites and claws in body locations that offer the least resistance. The diagram on the right shows areas that are not protected by the skeletal system. Use your jaws or claws to break through the skin and tear away until you’ve damaged something important.

Bleeding

Make them bleed! Many humans go queasy at the sight of blood, and can quickly turn hysterical when they see blood flowing directly out of them.

Fragile humans are also super-duper blood dependent, and will go into shock if they lose even 30-40 percent of the red stuff, guaranteeing you a quiet meal. How can you, a scatterbrained zed, estimate the percentage you’ve drained? When your unwilling patient turns ghostly white and his or her heartbeat increases, you’re on the right track. To increase lethality, aim for a major artery shown on the diagram below.

4. HUNTING FOR BRAINS

Can we speak zed-to-zed? You can’t keep putting the brain on a pedestal. Uninfected breathers to brainwash gullible zeds into believing a coherent brain is godlike and unattainable. And though functioning gray matter can be cunning and crafty, it’s basically gooey mush.

Brains are also plentiful, though they don’t grow on trees. You have to get up off your bony butt and find them! Brain acquisition is the first rite of passage for any new recruit. But locating a human volunteer for your undead hazing is not easy. As all zombies know, heads are attached to bodies, and bodies have legs. A human’s are responsible for both locomotion and “consumption prevention”—anything to stay off the menu. Humans will run and hide, which can make obtaining their brains very difficult.

Yet not all humans will be hard to sink your teeth into. During the early stages of any zombie plague, less intelligent humans will be completely oblivious to the severity of the problem and continue to stumble around. As