All aspects of the zombie lifestyle are surveyed in this satirical take on an orientation manual for the newly undead. From how one became a zombie in the first place and the stages of zombification to survival mechanisms, this handbook offers specific advice on everything a fresh zombie needs to know about "life" expectancy, hunting techniques, hitching a ride, hand-to-mouth combat, and feeding etiquette. Instructions for extracting the living from boarded up farmhouses and broken down vehicles are included along with dozens of helpful diagrams outlining attack strategies such as the Ghoul Reach, the Flanking Zak, the Bite Hold, and the Aerial Fall for securing human prey and their all-important flesh and brains.
All aspects of the zombie lifestyle are surveyed in this satirical take on an orientation manual for the newly undead. From how one became a zombie in the first place and the stages of zombification to survival mechanisms, this handbook offers specific advice on everything a fresh zombie needs to know about "life" expectancy, hunting techniques, hitching a ride, hand-to-mouth combat, and feeding etiquette. Instructions for extracting the living from boarded up farmhouses and broken down vehicles are included along with dozens of helpful diagrams outlining attack strategies such as the Ghoul Reach, the Flanking Zak, the Bite Hold, and the Aerial Fall for securing human prey and their all-important flesh and brains.
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Overview
All aspects of the zombie lifestyle are surveyed in this satirical take on an orientation manual for the newly undead. From how one became a zombie in the first place and the stages of zombification to survival mechanisms, this handbook offers specific advice on everything a fresh zombie needs to know about "life" expectancy, hunting techniques, hitching a ride, hand-to-mouth combat, and feeding etiquette. Instructions for extracting the living from boarded up farmhouses and broken down vehicles are included along with dozens of helpful diagrams outlining attack strategies such as the Ghoul Reach, the Flanking Zak, the Bite Hold, and the Aerial Fall for securing human prey and their all-important flesh and brains.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781613742860 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 104,367 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
John Austin is the author of Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Prank University. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Read an Excerpt
So Now You're a Zombie
A Handbook for the Newly Undead
By John Austin
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2010 John AustinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61374-286-0
CHAPTER 1
WHAT THE HELL I AM?
Zedulations, you're a zombie! You are one of the newest appendages of an alliance of infected ex-humans, a creature seasoned for a single duty: to gorge upon the living. The zombie virus stuffed in your innards borrows the human body — similar to "borrowing a tissue" — shutting off all your wasteful bodily functions then reanimating you with a hunger that defies the laws of human science. Your body is now controlled by roughly 50 billion contaminated neurons in the brain (though, admittedly, we've never counted them), all manipulated to a new purpose: to hunt, fight, and feed.
Prior to your body's metamorphosis, also known as zombitication, these neurons were highly developed, capable of problem solving, language, memory, and perverted thinking. But once you became infected, all these mental processes were dissolved in a traumatic brain event, even the kinky ones. This viral dementia is precisely the reason you don't remember joining up! Going forward, it will affect your ability to use weapons, hunt cooperatively, and communicate during the pursuit of the living. These attributes have been replaced by screaming, drooling, shambling, and other zed mannerisms, which may or may not come in handy.
Once the z-virus is introduced into a system, it is 100 percent incurable, so rest assured: your position in the Army of Darkness is irrevocable. However, in order to remain a productive member of our team, you must consume and absorb uninfected flesh to decelerate decomposition.
The good news is, you are well equipped with the weapons necessary to gain access to your tasty prey. Your newly transformed brain cells still erratically control all gross motor skills, allowing your zombie body to be clumsily mobile and react to the world in a limited, instinctual way. With the help of newly enhanced zombie senses, these crude motor skills are all you need to track and dine on the living. In addition, you're impervious to pain and capable of absorbing large amounts of damage, including the loss of appendages or major organs. Your body will keep on ticking until it's disconnected from your brain, whether through decapitation, blunt force trauma, fire, or cranial penetration.
It's a lot to absorb, but throughout the rest of the book all the information you need will be regurgitated in body-dragging detail.
Screw Responsibility!
They say infection, we say solution! In your past incarnation, the world was filled with what humans call "responsibilities," grotesque obligations that held you accountable to your peers. But as a zed, you are no longer bedeviled by these rules. In fact, high standards and quality living are actually frowned upon in the zombie world. As the Zombie Code clearly states, "A zombie shall never follow the laws of man, punishable by decapitation" (see "The Zombie Code," page 143). So F responsibilities!
Need specifics? Here are just a few of the human distractions from which the z-virus has freed you.
* Taxes. The government may be looking for you, but it's probably not because your 1040 form was late. If they want it, they can come and get it. You could give a rat's ass about W2s when you have WWZ on your tainted mind.
* Work. In past lives, most zombies were chained to demeaning desk jobs and tortured by asshole bosses. Consider this an early retirement. The time for pushing pencils and processing numbers is over — this is the time to burn bridges!
* Investments. Remember having to save for your financial future? No, you probably don't, and that's for the best. If you'd known that the currency-free existence of a zombie awaited you, you could have just bought that damn sports car!
* Dieting. South Beach, North Beach ... you've counted your last calorie. The Brain Beach Diet is not restrictive.
* Hygiene. Body maintenance is now out of your hands, assuming you still have them. Even without a daily grooming routine, you'll still turn heads, trust us. A slow shamble down any main street will have all the girls and boys screaming.
* Sleep. Party all night long! Zombies don't need sleep, which allows us to hunt continually, sun up or sun down!
* Social Networking. As a human, you probably spent much of your time dodging shady acquaintances and their "friend requests." Now they'll be the ones avoiding you.
* Dating. Zeds are not great with relationships; they often mistake attempts at intimacy for an aggressive attack and respond accordingly. Think on the bright side: no more buying flowers or forgetting anniversaries. Good for you, bad for Hallmark.
Zombie History
Like zombies throughout history, you roam in the present by the seat of your soiled pants. You have enough trouble just staggering day to day, and probably don't have any interest in eyeballing your gloomy past. Unfortunately, this fixed mindset can be unhealthy (just like you!). When it comes to sustained destruction, the undead have a mediocre legacy, and without some slight rubbernecking, history can easily repeat itself. We've ripped out most of the blood-soaked details, narrowing it down to a skeletal outline.
Prehistoric Zombies
Zombo sapiens stumbled into West Africa roughly 200,000 years ago, hauntingly close to the time of modern man — Homo sapiens. Evidence indicates that in the beginning, breathers and the undead had many similarities. Both species exhibited shoddy communications skills, lacked personal hygiene, and occasionally experimented with cannibalism.
The ancient zeds lacked any zombie culture, though they did exhibit primitive communal dynamics, assembling into hordes, also known as mobs or zombie walks, to hunt down their elusive prey. With relatively few humans to feed on, the ancient zeds were often on the brink of severe decomposition. Once massed together, early Zombo sapiens would rely heavily on the newly reanimated to sniff out hidden human flesh. If a human victim was located, the new recruits' screams and moans would shatter the stale air and stimulate the starved pack to close in on the bewildered human. Flesh proportions would have to be shared.
Not only was Zombo sapiens' existence a constant struggle for survival, but also the ancient strain of the z-virus was weak by today's standards. For both these reasons, our earliest ancestors succeeded in infesting only a minuscule portion of the human population.
Soon, however, populations of Homo sapiens and Zombo sapiens were both on the rise, and it became more difficult to coexist. Uninfected humans invented stone tools, including blunt weapons, and embraced pointlessly aggressive behavioral patterns. Armed and dangerous, the living were now killing zombies for pleasure, a murderous pursuit that previewed humankind's bloody future.
With an undead genocide underway, the zeds were forced to evolve in order to survive. They developed a persistent hunger for brains that transcended their basic need for nourishment. Other evolutionary adaptations also occurred: increased adrenaline production, and changes in the positioning of the larynx and hyoid bone that improved their projectile vomiting abilities.
With the zeds bullied into aggressiveness, zombie attacks began to rise during the Middle Paleolithic Age, about 150,000 years ago. Our ancestors began to experiment with nocturnal hunting; they could more easily locate breathing humans in the dark, while the defending breathers found it more difficult to see clearly and defend themselves. Soon, with an estimated world population of around 4,000 living and 400 undead, humans were on the brink of extinction. Unfortunately, ancient zombies lacked the ambition to finish the job, a pesky trait many of us suffer from to this day.
The living, on the other hand, took action to ensure their own survival. Around 40,000 B.C., they began to migrate away from zombie-infested territories. Armed with hunting spears and food rations, they divided into three tribes and set off in different directions, thus beginning the exodus from Africa. Hungry and pissed off, the undead straggled behind, feasting on the weak.
The first human tribe set out north, along the Nile River, then navigated into southern Asia. The zombie horde kept pace, shadowing the living, until their sluggish eating habits created an unbridgeable distance between them and their remaining enemies. The humans had outmaneuvered the flesh hunters, and the zombie horde's fate is unrecorded.
The second tribe crossed the Red Sea, which at that time was 230 feet lower than its present level. Once across the strait, the living continued marching east toward the coastal regions of what is now India. Trying to contain the humans, the zombies pushed them to the Beringia land bridge, which connected Asia to present-day North America. Unfortunately, the pursuers were ill prepared to cross the thousand-mile ice-covered tundra; the freezing conditions rendered their undead bodies useless (see "Cold," page 62), and they were ultimately lost to the elements. It is assumed that the humans survived and completed their journey into North America.
It wasn't until the third tribe migrated that we achieve a feasting victory. This last tribe of breathers headed south, not realizing their journey would come to abrupt stop at the coast. Quickly outnumbered by the pursuing undead (Go, zed, go!), the tribe was overtaken and hunted to extinction.
With these three great migrations, the z-virus was out, spread globally. Further outbreaks could now strike any time, anywhere.
The Zombie Name
The birth of an everlasting name! Although humankind had whispered warnings about the undead menace for thousands of centuries, it wasn't until relatively recently that they granted us recognition in the form of our own name: zombie. The term was coined in the 16th century a.d. by a bunch of tasty Central and West African slaves. Kidnapped from Africa by transatlantic slave traders, these displaced tribesmen were soon confronted with a number of hardships waiting in the New World, including our rambunctious company.
Exhausted from hours in the hot cotton, coffee, and tobacco fields of Haiti, the slaves became easy targets, and our Caribbean ancestors stealthily gobbled them down under cover of darkness. Because the torture of slaves was a regular occurrence, our victims' screams of pain were completely ignored, and our night hunting continued unopposed — until, during one attack, we got a little sloppy.
It appears that a lone slave survived to witness our undead, cannibalistic feeding habits. Our secret was out, and we noticed that slaves began to travel in groups with farm tools as makeshift weapons for protection. These groups were often a mix of West and Central African people who spoke a variety of native languages. Those who spoke Kimbundu, coming out of Angola, called us nzumbe or nzambi, a word that means "spirit of a dead person." People from the Congo spoke Bantu and called us zondi, a word that means "ghost" or "soul of a dead person." It wasn't long before these displaced people combined the words into zombie (ZOM-bee), which would enter the English lexicon in 1871.
As for the slaveholders, at first they assumed that the tales of undead attackers were just myths, products of the slaves' voodoo religion. They misdiagnosed our killings as animal attacks. But there were no major predators in Haiti (crocodiles and iguanas were quickly exonerated), and of course devoured human carcasses began to turn 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 witchcraft, 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
______________
______________
______________
______________
______________
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 itself. The humans continue to evolve — greater weapons, a greater appetite for war and destruction — and so must we. One thing is certain: until the living no longer exist, we cannot rest.
Significant Events in Zed History
200,000 B.C. The rise of Zombo sapiens
40,000 B.C. Exodus out of Africa, early migration of the undead
22,000 B.C. Beringia land bridge disaster
9,600 B.C. Extermination of Atlantis
3,000 B.C. Battle of Stonehenge
480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae
250 B.C. Crossing of the Great Wall of China
717–718 A.D. Siege of Constantinople
1340 A.D. Zombie plague of Europe (a.k.a. the Black Death)
1527 A.D. War against the Inca Empire
1871 A.D. Great Chicago Fire (zed and lantern)
1888 A.D. Takeover of Easter Island
1920 A.D. Mutation of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (a.k.a. mad cow disease)
1925 A.D. Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett discovers "Lost" City of Z, is eaten
1941–1944 A.D. Zombie defense of Leningrad
2009 A.D. Early stages of zed outbreak ("swine flu" epidemic)
Not in the Family
Now that you've been introduced to your undead heritage, you may feel the urge to reach out to the zombie horde. Not so fast — you still have a lot left to learn! First, you must be able to distinguish between fellow zeds who share your destiny, and zedlike humanoids who are not on your side. Remember, a breather's body is vulnerable not only to the z-virus but also to all types of other intruders. Just because it smells like a zombie and looks like a zombie, doesn't mean it is a zombie! Study this list to better identify nonzombie types you may encounter during your roaming.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from So Now You're a Zombie by John Austin. Copyright © 2010 John Austin. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: The Road to Brainville,1 What the Hell Am I?,
2 Your Zombie Body,
3 Know Your Enemy,
4 Hunting for Brains,
5 Transportation,
6 Attacking,
7 Human Buffet,
8 Infecting,
9 In the End,
Appendix: The Zombie Code,
Final Word: A Message for the Living,