Richard Weems is the author of three short fiction collections: Anything He Wants (finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize) (Spire Press, 2006), Stark Raving Blue (WbW Ink, 2016) and From Now On, You’re Back (WbW Ink, 2017). Recent appearances include North American Review, Flash Fiction Magazine and Ginosko Literary Journal. He lives and teaches in New Jersey.
Preface to A Brief Treatise on the Treatment of Zombie
Bites
If this document came to you by way of military courier or heli-drone, congratulations! The US Department of Undead Control (USDUC) has labeled you a prime candidate for the repopulation of our species. Please use the content within to maintain your survivor status and the handbook itself as a membership card to confirm your eligibility to a suitable mate. While we offer condolences for the horrors you have witnessed during these trying times, we encourage you to recognize the opportunity this apocalypse affords the human race.
For too long, human survival and social evolution have been anything but Darwinian in nature. Take for example the early days of the present infestation. Though incidents were still sparse enough for us to explain away as extreme reactions to designer drugs or the antics of demonic cults, the Pentagon in collaboration with the newly formed USDUC decided to move chosen individuals into secluded environs, should the outbreak grow to unmanageable proportions. While our foresight proved prudent, the criteria for ‘choice’ candidates depended more on the individual’s political clout or persistent braggadocio. The tragic outcome that has resulted in those bunkers initiated a revision to our thinking to direct our repopulation under more intelligent design. We eliminated frivolous qualities like social standing from survival algorithm 2.0.
You, dear reader, have ticked at least seven boxes on our quality checklist (in no particular order: unwavering aim, astute foraging techniques, spatial intelligence, healthy gums, rigid morality free from sentiment, demonstrable vigor and stamina, catholic eating preferences, excellent peripheral vision, a spidey-sense for danger, a facility for tinkering through mechanical issues, lactose tolerance and innate hygienic instincts). Yes, your activities have been under scrutiny for some time, even if you thought you were on your own. If this document appeared covertly in your knapsack or tucked under your pillow (or whatever object has served as such), please do not share it with present company. Instead, seek out USDUC-approved stock with whom to increase. Should your personal predilections tend away from traditional spawning methods, we implore you to reconsider. The future of the the human population lies squarely in your loins!
While the numbers and resources available at USDUC are significant and could provide a significant base from which the human species could replenish, we are objective and frank enough to confess our population a less than ideal substance with which to refill the genetic pool. Our military affiliates possess in spades the physical fitness we favor, but they often lack creativity and critical thinking skills (a conceit so inbred into governmental systems we don’t hesitate to make mention of this, as we doubt any screwhead will ever read this far into our script). The cogs of our departmental bureaucracy, the administrative assistants, interns and yes-men (and -women), lack initiative and leadership skills. The techs who maintain the network that lets us collaborate even while cordoned into separate bunkers exhibit the facility for tinkering and ingenuity, but they fail at physical prowess and offer only an imbalance of men among their numbers. And the politicians? The fact they are politicians, combined with their pasts as lawyers, make them more likely to be lunchmeat than progenitors (again, note our confidence in presenting such claims).
And we, the researchers and scientists who have authored this very treatise, disqualify ourselves due to our circumstantial ethics. We gathered much of our data for the following treatise through the extensive surveillance network at our disposal, but in order to provide the most accurate information possible, we also needed primary material. Thus, we had to relegate concern for our fellow man to a global rather than individual precept. In short, not only did we toy with live human experimentation but worked at it like a crew of Santa’s Little Helpers the week before Christmas. Some of us try to justify such dedication as a sign of our master status, but this delusional self-advocacy eventually lost out against the confirmed qualities listed previously. As candidates for a better breed of mankind, we must conclude ourselves unfit. Instead, we offer our findings, confident they will give you an edge in survival and propagation.
But despite our confidence, we continue to harbor concerns and debate amongst ourselves over a quality harder to measure: human reasoning, specifically the lack of it and the tendency to forego logic and evidence to take action (or inaction) that has done nothing less than aid the present decimation. Our concerns do not apply so much to the recklessly stupid or fraudulent, as we hope their deficiencies will prove painfully obvious and thus avoidable. Take three tenets that should by now be indisputable: 1) zombies exist; 2) they are corpses reanimated by contagion; and 3) they yearn only for human flesh, despite an inability to digest their intake. Yet even these basic laws remain in dispute within certain circles, namely zombie Truthers who blame gluten, radical Islam or false flag government operations while they huddle unvaccinated in their burrows surrounded by evidence to the contrary. Clearly, these high-diving acts should remain far from our gene pool.
We also presume you to have the good sense to be wary of those with fraudulent tendencies, like the purveyors of the Brazilian Suppository Treatment, which involved a leaf-wrapped mixture of pimento, cumin and paprika inserted as per the title suggested to ward off zombie attacks. While the prevalence of undead with such suppositories rolling free in the seats of their pants suggested the recipe provided no protection, these hucksters insisted the only failure was in the insertion phase and subsequently offered finger-thick applicators, just pay separate shipping and handling, first thousand orders to include a battery-operated grill or hand-cranked radio.
But once you get past the obvious charlatans, frauds and dopes, the problems of logic get a little harder to take a hard line on. How to classify the marks of such hucksters, for example? Gullibility would seem to be a trait we should breed out of our species. But could such gullibility denote a trust in authority? This is where the logic behind the human animal becomes harder to fathom. For now, we have decided to rule such people unworthy of reproduction. You, dear reader, are our purest subject—unyielding and furiously pragmatic in your dealings with other human beings. Only if you prove too small a sample to stem the tide of this infestation will we reconsider such second-string qualities as trust and faith in others.
Another troublesome lapse in human reasoning comes with the conclusion based on (excuse the unavoidable wordplay) the dead man’s response. For example, the Mouse Ingestion Method, popular in Illinois, where a live mouse is dropped into the mouth of the recently deceased and the mouth sewn shut as a preventative. Despite the simple fact that a corpse that does not reanimate in the five to ten minutes it takes to complete the procedure will most likely not reanimate under any circumstance, the Mouse Ingestion Method has been deemed a resounding success by the locals. By the same reasoning, if we were to stick the stems of green bananas in our ears and note the lack of crocodile attacks in the immediate vicinity, we might be inclined to conclude bananas to be crocodile-repellant when inserted aurally. If we lived in in an Arctic region, this experiment could be repeated endlessly with almost complete agreement in the results. But take us to the middle of the Okefenokee with a bounty of bananas. Will our results hold up, even if we vary the state of ripeness among our bunch? Even the simplest calculations of probability will provide a grim outlook.
Yet the Illinois Mouse Method remains popular in its region. A sad, undeniable truth about our species as pattern-seeking mammals is that we are masters of self-deception and yearn to see proof where none exists when we have already decided upon a certain conclusion.
But why a mouse and not, say, a potato bug or sparrow? The ritual itself may contain a kind of placebo effect, an assurance of having some control over the zombie apocalypse. Is this kind of hope, albeit false, such a horrible trait?
While some of us at USDUC see such indiscretions of reason as relatively harmless, others contend that false hope and acquiescence to authority can and has led to far worse acts and should be bred out. They cite the Evisceration Protocol, spearheaded by a survivalist group encamped in Montana. The leadership of this group concocted the notion that a substance extracted from the entrails of the weak and elderly while still alive served as a vaccination against the zombie virus. The members of this group followed suit and constructed a machine that streamlined the evisceration process. As hard as it may be to believe that two workers could stand by while live people had their innards ripped away, such seemed to be the case. (In the spirit of thorough research, such substance was extracted and tested during the composition of this document. None of our own extractions yielded any measurable benefit.)
But our common concern, even as we bicker over such examples, is the possibility that illogic and the propensity to reach faulty conclusions may be inseparable from the human genome. Especially when it comes to the subject of zombies, the human race has a long history of utilizing logic that may not seem far-fetched at first, though the caboose of that train of logic turns out quite perplexing. For example: if malaria includes a modicum of the disease, and shots against influenza incorporate the same, wouldn’t it stand to reason that a zombie bite could be cured by further application of the same? Hair of the undead, so to speak? Perhaps letting a revenant ruminate the area of injury (a method tried in Romania in the early 18th century) seems outlandish to those who have acquired a more accurate body of knowledge, but a certain logic, albeit fallacious, does apply.
Exhibit B: a 16th century Norman medical script that suggested defeathering the rectal area of a rooster and placing the exposed portal directly against the wound. The pucker may have been correlated to the ability to suck infection from the victim, but why a rooster in particular? A quick visual examination of other anuses will show that various creatures, aviary to mammalian, offer more puckered cavities and would seem more apropos to the task.
A monastic document dating from the Dark Ages references a scroll in ancient Arabic that offered an antidote composed of marzipan and warm sherbet poured into the wound, which should then be covered with lemongrass. The original source, if there ever was one, has remained undiscovered. Perhaps the original technique was intended more to comfort the dying victim than to provide pharmaceutical benefit.
The earliest discovered reference to a cure comes from a scrap found in a trash heap in a north African desert. The scrap is only a fragment, and most of the markings are illegible save a combination of the symbols for deceased and sleepwalker. From there, the only other legible markings offer the following prescription: ear, force, licorice root, almonds, burn. We have experimented with different combinations and recipes since finding this scrap, but nothing resembling any kind of treatment has yet resulted.
In short, human beings have a long history of poor reasoning skills. One wonders how we ever managed to evolve into the dominant species in the first place.
Or did we? A curious characteristic of the zombie, which has in fact taken top billing in the world food chain, is that it operates on the most binary of equations (simply put, to eat or not to eat), yet that binary is so absolute that the zombie seems immune to subterfuge. No experiment has produced any kind of by-product, doctoring method or disguise that has dissuaded one from wanting to eat that which it would normally eat and spread its contagion. Thus, its absolute lack of reasoning skills seems to be its evolutionary advantage.
So we exhort you, chosen recipient, to use this document to carry forward the traits we find most admirable to the species, but in the spirit of full disclosure, we have to acknowledge the possibility that no amount of selective breeding can stop the larger devolutionary wave eating away at us, literally and figuratively, and that this document will prove in the end to be more of an accounting of our death throes than our revitalization. If you are a visitor to this planet–welcome. We hope to provide you a reliable account of the cause of our decimation. USDUC, as befits the thorough nature of federal agencies, has not ruled you out as a possible audience. Read on!