Case in point, in most deaths, a coroner or medical officer is involved soon after death and all death exams require the removal of the deceased brain to finally establish death as a certainty. Keep in mind how this zombie preventing medical examiner step becomes a whole lot less likely when medical staffs and health departments become compromised or overwhelmed by something like a pandemic flu outbreak where millions die in a short amount of time.
In direct contrast to Sgt. Jackson, Doc Parker suffered from an exposure to an advanced stage of the Z-virus, very likely an airborne virus. By hive outbreak protocols, when a team identifies animal and other mutated stage 6 zombies, the ZORT members must then quickly decide if they need to put on their protective breathing masks and take the highest precautions to prevent infection. ZORT members are resistant to advanced stages of Z-virus, but apparently the Z-virus encountered there overwhelmed Parker’s defensive immunities. It’s impossible to know exactly why he fell and no one else fell. It could very well have been something in his DNA, his genetics.
It’s impossible to know how resistant ZORT members are, especially when dealing with illegal and artificially produced strains of Z-virus. However, ZORT members are expected to be 95% immune. This is also a sign of how deadly a strain might be; if it can kill a nearly immune ZORT member, what do you think this Z-virus strain would do to the general population if it escaped containment?
It may not have been apparent, but during the debriefing, Lt. Martin showed some effects of advanced Z-virus exposure. His symptoms were only flu-like, hampering his respiration. He fully recovered from the infection and exposure. If the team had encountered any plant-like stage 8 zombies, then the team would have had to put on their fully protective oversuits, which look like black rubbery spacesuits.
I don’t understand what you mean by all the different stages of zombies. I thought there was just one kind of zombie. Can you explain?
In any zombie outbreak, there can be a number of different types of zombies. We know the type of zombie based on what the zombie can do. A zombie that can’t do much more than stumble around and bite things is a lower level zombie compared to a zombie that can climb a fence, sneak up on you, or pick up a weapon and try to use it. The type of zombie depends on the stage of the Z-virus, which infects the deceased person. It’s actually the Z-virus that manifests itself in different stages that produce different zombies. The more mutated the Z-virus you have, the more advanced the zombie you will become.
Recall my previous PSAs… There are some numbers of people worldwide who naturally carry the dormant Z-virus. Dormant Z-virus, waiting for a person to die to reanimate their dead body is stage 1. If a stage 1 Z-virus carrier dies, he or she will reanimate and become the walking dead. This newly reanimated new zombie is a stage 2 carrier, a stage 2 zombie is capable of infecting others with stage 2 Z-virus usually by biting. Stage 2 Z-virus is deadly, causes extreme flu-like symptoms, and then kills all who have no resistance to it. The CDC estimates that 95% of those exposed to Z-virus, either through a zombie bite or some other accidental exposure will die. Even untreated Ebola does not have the infected kill rate of stage 2 Z-virus.
Stage 2 Z-virus kills the infected person very quickly. Once this infected person dies, if he or she is not attended to appropriately and immediately after death (medical examiner removing the brain), this person will reanimate into a stage 2 infectious zombie. Stage 2 zombies are the stumbling bumbling kind. They are relatively easy to kill and a stage 2 zombie outbreak is relatively easy to contain.
Stage 2 zombies are the most common. They don’t run, climb, hide, or attack very well. If you ran away from stage 2 zombies across a set of railroad tracks, there is a good chance most stage 2 zombies would trip and fall on the tracks. They are easy to trap and easy to evade.
Stage 2 zombies aren’t smart enough to open doors and they don’t hardly have the mental capacity to know how to turn a doorknob. This is why many stage 2 zombie outbreaks are easy to contain. You may not hear about stage 2 zombie outbreaks because they are reasonably easy to deal with. You don’t need a ZORT platoon to contain a stage 2 outbreak. You can’t really get a pandemic event from a stage 2 zombie outbreak. Just remember, a stage 2 zombie outbreak combined with a pandemic flu outbreak is when the magic happens. Outbreaks of higher stage zombies usually happen when pandemic conditions are already pretty bad.
When stage 2 zombies continue to infect more and more people, some of these people will infect others and eventually newly infected people in the transmission cycle will become stage 3 zombies. The Z-virus mutates into advanced stages after several successive transmissions. So, while stage 2 zombies tend to stumble and bump around chasing and then biting whatever they happen to find and grab, stage 3 zombies are different. They work harder and a little smarter to carry the active virus further away from the initial outbreak point than stage 2 zombies will work.
Stage 3 zombies are not typical. I wouldn’t expect to see very many stage 3 zombies in a typical outbreak until a full-blown zombie outbreak has had a chance to really get going and containment hasn’t worked over an extended period. It takes a large number of transmission cycles for the Z-virus to begin mutating to stage 3. Once these mutations happen, it will be very obvious in the actions of the zombies and the higher rate they can attack, move, and kill survivors.
Stage 3 zombies and all higher stage zombies retain more of the mental capacity of their hosts. They run better than stage 2 zombies, but still not as well as living people who are healthy and in shape. Stage 3 zombies can in some cases carry and crudely use an item like a baseball bat or a tire iron. They can duck your blows and hide from gunfire. They can crudely fight back. They can climb a little better, open some doors, throw bricks through windows, and actively avoid some simple booby-traps. While you often see a horde of stage 2 zombies blindly chasing after anything that makes noise like a cat or dog or bouncing ball, you will often know a stage 3 zombie because it doesn’t blindly chase such things.
You may notice a stage 3 zombie pausing and waiting or hanging back in the horde, deciding what is worth chasing and what is not. Stage 2 zombies will chase things over a cliff, but new stage 3 zombies and higher stage zombies wouldn’t go over a cliff, blindly following something. So, stage 3 zombies are harder to kill, but they are still limited in their abilities.
All zombies come with an expiration date, the date they can no longer effectively spread the Z-virus. So, in any case, as stage 3 zombies and even some of the more advanced zombies get older and older, they begin to lose the abilities they started with. Old zombies that can still walk and run will probably follow something over a cliff.
Stage 4 zombies are the really scary kind. The stage 4 Z-virus has mutated enough that it starts to work collectively with the brain of a dead zombie host. The reanimated person will retain significantly more of their pre-death mental characteristics. The zombie host is still gone once they die and reanimate, but if the stage 4 zombie host had particular knowledge, the zombie will have some of this knowledge, and if the host was strong and fast, the stage 4 zombie will now have slightly enhanced speed and strength. Stage 4 zombies are significantly smarter and harder to kill, but they are also very rare.
If a stage 4 zombie bites a person, that person will die very quickly and also become a stage 4 zombie. Again, stage 4 zombies (and some stage 3 zombies) are commonly referred to as “atypical” zombies because they will seemingly do things that other zombies are not doing. A stage 4 zombie can maneuver through obstacles, climb fences, ladders, and ropes, and can actually predict or tactically guess your next move. So, if you go in one direction, a stage four zombie will sometimes sneak around behind you or try to head you off at a different location. These zombies also are known to carry crude to advanced weapons and use them.
Stage 4 zombies (and some stage 3 zombies) also exhibit behaviors that suggest they can communicate with other zombies on some basic level. The puzzle is that most stage 4 zombie communication appears to be n
on-verbal. These zombies cannot talk to each other, but they work together for common goals. Some have suggested that their communication may be subliminal, psychic, or even paranormal. My own research suggests stage 4 zombie communication abilities and behaviors are simply just the increased residual intellect from the host acting to protect itself. However, I cannot refute the research which shows zombies communicate much like honey bees using heightened pheromonal senses. Do a Google search for “pheromonal communication.”
Survivors will run into stage 4 zombies that can heal themselves, fire a gun (but have difficulty loading it), and can act out simple strategies and tactics such as pretending to be dead and hiding in the shadows or under water. Stage 4s are resistant to damage and decay and will only die from significant brain damage, incineration, or from decapitation. So, while stage 4 zombies expire slower and can recover from injuries caused by sword slashes and gunfire, they cannot reattach severed limbs like you may have seen in a movie or two and likewise, they cannot control their bodies if you cut off their heads; but like I said before they are significantly more difficult to fight and contain.
Stage 4 zombies begin to act more in swarm patterns as if controlled by a central idea, which is primarily to survive and spread the Z-virus. This is the earliest stages of hive behavior. Note that the lower stage zombies do not possess a desire to survive, only to infect. A stage 4 zombie can in most cases chose not to attack, run away, and wait for the best moment to attack, defending itself and ensuring its survival. Stage 4 zombies have been known to hide in a ship’s cargo. Some stage 3 zombies will do this too. Some stage 4 zombies can even control other zombies, such as creating a diversion so it can survive and escape.
Stage 4 zombies are the first sign of a potential zombie hive. In 1999, in Texas A&M’s Health Sciences Lab, scientists created and are still maintaining multiple fully contained zombie hives as of today. This is what the illegal weapons facility in Romania attempted to do.
Now think about this… Did you notice how the Z-virus works? It doesn’t really attack us as a full outbreak until only after there is a major pandemic event like the Spanish Flu of 1918. This sort of pandemic event thins the heard, removing a significant number of weaker people. The remaining people are hardier and possibly smarter. After the lower stages of the virus remove most of the weakest survivors, attacking more of the weaker and less smart first, the Z-virus mutates to take care of the rest of the survivors. So once weaker and not so smart people are all gone, the virus graduates so it can now attack those who are left, smart stronger people. By the time stage 4 zombies appear, most of the weak and infirm people will already be gone and the only people left for stage 4 zombie manifestations will be the stronger smarter people who survived the earliest waves of the outbreak.
You see, this is a very clever virus. After multiple transmission cycles, the Z-virus will continue to mutate and attack successively smarter and stronger groups of people. Because stage 4 zombies retain many of the mental capacities of the hosts, then this is why stage 4 zombies are so much smarter and harder to kill—because the hosts are smarter and harder to kill. Imagine the sorts of people that are survivors by this point in a pandemic zombie outbreak. These survivors are the stronger, faster, smarter people. If these people become stage 4 zombies, they will be significantly more deadly and aggressive than previous stages of zombies.
The final component to the Z-virus’s attack on this world is to mutate into a hive where stage 4 zombies begin to act much more like a swarm—a swarm of locusts rather than a swarm of bees that work to protect a queen. There are no queen zombies. Zombie swarms work toward one key goal; promoting further mutations and continued spreading to take over all life on this planet.
I almost hate to say this out of a fear of choosing an easy cliché, but when I think of a zombie hives, I think about Star Trek’s Borg collective. Although, a zombie hive is the extreme opposite of a technologically advanced species. Instead, a zombie hive is a biologically advanced species.
Stage 5 zombies are a sure sign that a hive is fully active. Stage 5 zombies are a whole other category of dangerous, so I’ll share more about them later--for now just think about a mutant zombie like a Solomon Grundy…I know, another cliché.
A zombie hive controls the actions of all zombies near it. A hive does not need human hosts to make zombies. It can make zombies out of other animals and after a while, it will be able to create zombies without biting and in some cases without any hosts.
In outbreak incident #83-2005, we reported of strange, but still expected mutant zombie behavior. Because we knew the illegal weapons facility in Miercurea-Ciuc, Romania created zombie hives artificially, we knew to expect odd mutant zombies. Artificially created zombie hives can be incredibly unpredictable. You can never know what sort of mutant zombies will manifest once these artificially developed zombie hives escape containment.
You can imagine what sort of pandemonium a terrorist group could cause if they had their hands on a zombie hive. ZORT people refer to illegal Z-virus products as Z-tech or Z-technology.
In Part III of your outbreak incident report, Lt. Martin stated that GySgt Ricks recommended a nuclear drop to contain the zombie outbreak. Would the government really nuke a city to contain a zombie outbreak and if so, why didn’t they nuke that Romanian city as a response from the start? Why waste time with containment if you can use nukes?
Yes, the US government would nuke a city to contain a zombie outbreak. The US government has nuked a city to contain a zombie outbreak in South Africa. No US cities have ever been bombed. Most recently, the Chinese had to resort to nuclear containment of a zombie outbreak. The Russian government had a recent outbreak covered up with a nuclear strike. Do a Google search for “secret Chinese” or “Russian nuclear tests” and in several of these cases, a zombie outbreak was contained by a nuclear detonation while the news reports simply suggest some sort of reactor accident. Some reports mention “nuclear tests.” Nuclear detonations worldwide are immediately noticed by satellites and geological measuring devices—they are hard to hide, but the reasons for the detonations are often hidden.
In zombie outbreaks of higher levels, where there is a heightened potential for loss of containment and strong potential for additional pandemic spreading, US government protocols allow for nuclear containment measures even in the US.
So if a small town in Iowa has a zombie outbreak… Let’s say this zombie outbreak is not piggybacking a deadly pandemic flu outbreak. It’s just a run of the mill zombie outbreak—kind of sort of like the zombie outbreak depicted in the 2010 movie, The Crazies. The CDC would become aware of the outbreak when key medical responders enter their reports into the CDC’s online systems, which are required at all medical facilities. The CDC would then contact local authorities and offer guidance on containment. If the outbreak is very small and the locals contain it, the CDC will usually ask the Medical Examiner’s office to send samples to the CDC including whole bodies and other tissue samples.
If the locals have any difficulty containing the outbreak, the CDC will contact a regional ZORT commander, like me, and order us to the location. Inside the US, ZORT members will work to contain the outbreak and report back to the CDC. If the ZORT responders request military assistance, usually reserved for a major outbreak, the CDC will order a military outbreak response. Zombie outbreaks requiring military response have happened before in the US—most recently in El Paso, Los Angeles, Detroit, and in Spearfish, South Dakota. US Military outbreak response teams also mobilized recently to fight a zombie outbreak following the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. Do a Google search for Haiti Earthquake zombie outbreak. While you’re at it, do a search for New Orleans Hurricane Katrina zombie outbreak.
US military zombie outbreak responders have never failed to contain an outbreak, but if the outbreak was unnatural, perhaps caused by terrorists using illegal Z-tech (artificially manufactured strains of Z-virus), military responders can request a nuclear containment on a US city and on
almost any city in the world outside of Russian, China, North Korea, and most Arab countries.
US zombie outbreak protocols in a pandemic zombie outbreak, are negotiated by the WHO (World Health Organization), the United Nations, and by each country that agreed and signed the secret 1982 Auckland Treaty for Pandemic Zombie Outbreaks (don’t bother Googling this; you won’t find it). I don’t need to tell you which countries have refused to sign this treaty.
In the treaty, governments agreed that the US and its CDC and the UN would receive funding for global pandemic outbreak responses and each nation agreed to nuclear containment contingencies in the case of pandemic zombie outbreaks. Nuclear containment is a last resort. Nations should report all outbreaks to the WHO and CDC.
Military outbreak response teams can be mobilized on a moment’s notice, and agreeing nations allow military containment to use full and extreme force, weapons, and actions as necessary to prevent a global pandemic zombie outbreak and to prevent terrorists and non-treatied nations from manufacturing, acquiring, and/or using Z-tech.
When a country calls and requests a military containment to an outbreak, they want to save as many people as possible and also preserve cities, homes, buildings, and natural resources. If the military strategy in every outbreak was to nuke the city, we wouldn’t expect very many countries to make the phone call—thereby their reluctance to make that phone call increases the potential for a global pandemic zombie outbreak.
This would be like you seeing a filthy bug or a roach in your home and then calling the exterminator and then when the exterminator shows up, they then burn your house to the ground. This would definitely kill a few pests in your home, but it’s a rather extreme extermination tactic and it’s very likely to make most homeowners wait until the last possible second before making that phone call if they ever make it. By using extreme measures, we would actually promote bigger outbreaks.