Babel Clash

Sometimes I feel like I’m a missionary from the First Church of Romero.  “Hello.  My name is Mira Grant.  Are you prepared for the inevitable zombie apocalypse?  Have you accepted the shotgun, chainsaw, and cleansing flame as your personal saviors?  Would you like an informational pamphlet?”  Like most missionaries, I feel very strongly about my message, and have grown accustomed to having doors slamming in my face.  Accusations of insanity are not uncommon.  (Unlike most missionaries, I’m not worried about going into bad neighborhoods, because very few faiths are as well-armed as the First Church of Romero.)  The end of the world as we know it is coming, people!  When the dead rise, will you feel fine?

I started preparing for the coming of the monsters when I was about nine, and booby-trapped my closet to prevent the large, hairy, hulking beast I was sure lurked behind my clothes.  My mother was afraid reading Stephen King would give me nightmares, but let me tell you, the man had nothing on C.S. Lewis.  I’m pretty sure we can blame Narnia for an entire generation growing up convinced that their closets led to a magical wonderland…of death.  Stephen King was much more upfront about things, and I appreciated that.

My introduction to the inevitable zombie menace came, not from George Romero, but from old episodes of Doctor Who and issues of Creepy and Eerie magazine.  Their many, many iterations of the undead had only two things in common: they didn’t stop for anything, and they were planning to eat or convert us all.  Pretty straightforward.  I like a straightforward monster.

I like zombies.

I like their flexibility.  Zombies are the Unitarianism of monsters–there’s room for everybody in here, as long as you’re willing to work with a few very simple core tenets.  Zombies will eat you.  Zombies used to be you.  Zombies will make you into a zombie.  Once your mother has been bitten by a zombie, she’s not your mother anymore.  There’s room for fast zombies, slow zombies, viral zombies, parasite zombies, alien zombies, even nanotech zombies.  Some zombies are alive, some zombies are dead, but all zombies want to eat you.  It works for me.

I like that–with very few exceptions, most of them recent, although “I Am Legend” is definitely the granddaddy of this particular branch on the family tree–zombies are the monster you can kill without feeling bad about it later.  It’s not that I’m a bloodthirsty person.  It’s just that, in a world where vampires, werewolves, even unstoppable serial killers and mutant sharks, can have feelings and families, it’s nice to have something where the rational response is “kill it with fire.”  Kill it with fire, I can do.

I like that everyone has a zombie apocalypse plan.  Some of them aren’t very well-thought-out, but they represent a step toward disaster preparedness that many people would never take unless it was directed at a fictional event.  “Do you have your earthquake kit?” is a morbid question.  “Do you have your zombie kit?” is an excuse to start talking about water purification after the infrastructure collapses.  People are weird.  And weird is good.

So this is me, ringing your doorbell, knocking on the door of your underground bunker, transmitting wirelessly through the wall of your hermetically-sealed shack, and asking: Are you prepared for the inevitable zombie apocalypse?  Have you accepted the shotgun, chainsaw, and cleansing flame as your personal saviors?

Would you like an informational pamphlet?

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