The True Horror of the Apocalypse


The True Horror of the Apocalypse

Or: Don't worry about the zombies, it's the insects that will eat you

 

An exchange on a thread about AMC's The Walking Dead about what was or wasn't an implausible coincidence in the season finale reminded me of one of my favorite hobby horses: the errors one finds in most post-apocalypse stories.

 

To put it simply, in a world where electricity, manufacturing, water treatment plants and plain old gas stations were a memory, life would be hugely different -- mainly in the "dangerous" and "difficult" departments, but also including "unhygienic," "diseased" and "really unpleasant." And that's not even counting whatever dangers result from whatever caused the apocalypse, from atomic radiation to zombies.

 

But those changes are often ignored or glossed over in post-apocalypse stories, and The Walking Dead is as guilty as any. Here's a few of them:

 

When there's no electricity, life stops at sundown. Seriously, even with candles, there's just not much you can do when it gets dark in a world without artificial light. In the modern world, we don't realize it but we see pretty well on overcast nights because lights from the city are reflecting off clouds. But after the apocalypse, there won't be any city lights, or street lights, or anything -- all we'd have is what our ancestors had, the moon and stars, which ain't much most of the time. Maybe during a full moon there'd be sufficient light to move with some confidence, but that's only a few nights a month ...


... And not in the woods. When Shane, Rick, Glen and Daryl were wandering around in the woods looking for Randall in "Better Angels," I had to put my suspension of disbelief in a quiet room to protect it. Because, folks, I was a Boy Scout. And I've been in the woods in the dark. AND YOU CAN'T SEE ANYTHING. The moon can't get through the canopy, the stars can't be seen. It's absolutely pitch black. Even with flashlights, you're constantly tripping or getting caught in vines and you have to move really slowly. Mostly, you try not to move any more than you have to. Plus, there are nocturnal things in the woods you'd really not like to run into, especially when they can see and you can't.

 

So, let's review: Wandering around in the woods after dark is a BAD IDEA. It's also impossible without flashlights, and only Glen was shown to have one. Plus, it's suicidal when there are zombies in the woods, who can track you through sound and smell (or your flashlight), and don't care about injuring themselves, or you injuring them, and will blindly attack in utter darkness. Blundering around in the dark is going to get you hurt in our world, and in Zombieworld it's going to get you dead.

 

The roaches will inherit the earth: A world with millions of unburied corpses -- albeit quite a few still moving around -- is going to be a huge buffet for insects. Not to mention millions of abandoned households with rotting food just sitting around to be eaten, or to lay eggs in, or whatever. The air would be swarming with flies, the ground a carpet of roaches and other offal-eating insects. Daytime would be a misery and night would be worse. Serfs in the middle ages were crawling with lice, bedbugs and other creepy crawlies, and that's with corpses buried and food kept safe. So multiply that by a factor of 100 after the apocalypse.

 

... and the rest: Digest what I said above, and then think about rats, who don't multiply as fast as roaches but still do pretty well. And everything else that man keeps in check would multiply quickly as well. Not only would kudzu take over the South in a season, but all animals would increase exponentially. Granted, in a zombie apocalypse, large animals (like cattle and horses) would be eaten by zombie herds. But anything too small and fast to catch, like rats and squirrels*, would multiply in awesome numbers. And with Man so diminished, would large swarms of rats even fear him ... or just eat him? The air would be full of birds, who also would no longer fear us, and the sea full of ... well, everything that lives in the sea. The biggest -- and just about only -- large predator on the planet would suddenly be gone. Who's going to occupy that niche at the top of the food chain? And how low will we fall?

 

* My wife and I are still debating whether dogs would survive in The Walking Dead scenario. I think the larger ones would be dinner, but the smaller ones might survive, if they escaped into the woods and didn't get trapped in the dead ends of city streets and fenced-in yards. But competition for food would be scarce, and they'd have to somehow overcome their instinct to bark at things to scare them away. That would just be a dinner bell to a walker.

 

Injury or sickness is a death sentence: Just like in caveman times, there would be nothing to retard infection if you cut yourself. Anything beyond a minor scrape would likely result in gangrene or sepsis. A broken leg or any other injury that precludes traveling means the tribe has to leave you, or everybody dies when the herd catches up. Foraged antibiotics would only last so long and then, like the insects, microscopic life would thrive.

 

Ka-BOOM: For the first year or so, the night would be punctuated by things exploding somewhere. If nothing else, every refrigerator that still had some kind of seal would eventually explode as the gases from decomposing food expanded in an enclosed space. There would be inexplicable fires for the first few months also, as unattended chemicals, coolants, cleaning fluids and so forth spontaneously combusted.

 

Impassable streets: Everywhere a car stopped during civilization's final days, MANY cars behind it would perforce stop as well. Then after everybody's dead, there would be cars clogging the streets everywhere, and even if you had a working tow truck, it would take you several lifetimes just to clear a mid-size city like Memphis.

 

I groaned aloud when Will Smith was charging around in his sports car in Manhattan in I Am Legend. I can't imagine anyplace on earth that would be MORE clogged with abandoned vehicles than Manhattan. Even if a few streets were somehow clear, or he somehow cleared them, why would he risk injury or death turning blind corners at 40 mph where there could be fallen masonry, broken-up streets, fallen street lights or signals or, yes, an abandoned car or two blocking the way? And besides, how do you shoot a deer and drive at the same time? Idiocy.

 

It made for a nice poster in The Walking Dead showing all those abandoned cars clogging the exits from Atlanta, with all the roads leading into the city ominously empty. But in reality, everybody would use every road possible to get the hell out of Dodge, and all roads everywhere would be clogged with abandoned cars. Somehow Rick & Co. have only found one such "roadblock" -- and even that didn't make sense, with people having somehow died quietly at the wheel.

 

Also, I know Rick's crew is siphoning gas, but that won't last forever, and has anyone in a post-apocalypse story ever dealt with the problem of getting gas from gas stations? Without electricity to get gas up to the pumps, it might as well be on the moon. I suppose you could rig a generator to do that somehow, but I haven't the slightest idea how, and I doubt many other people do, either. Which brings me to:

 

We're all idiots: Let's face it, most of us don't know how to hunt. Or tan skins. Or make candles. Or do the hundred-and-one other things our ancestors knew how to do before the industrial revolution removed all that labor from our lives. Rick's TV crew is lucky enough to have Daryl, but in the comics they somehow survived for many issues by foraging. I think that would work for a while, but you're only one bad week -- foraging in an area where others beat you to it -- before starving to death. And where are you going to get fresh water when the taps don't work? You'd have to stick by running water -- stagnant water is death -- which means you couldn't stay on the move. And if you don't stay on the move  the zombies eventually find you and you either move away from the water or stay and die. It's quite the pickle, and I can't remember too many post-apocalypse stories dealing plausibly with simple survival when you can't turn on the tap or drive to the grocery store. Let's hope that Rick's world still has some libraries with actual books in them to show them how to do things, and they get to those books before mildew and the insects do.

 

There's more, but y'all can think of them as easy as me (and I encourage you to do so, and append your ideas below).

 

Also, I'm not actually complaining about these things -- well, maybe a bit -- because many of them would be boring or unpleasant to film. Do we really want to see Rick and crew as dirty, unshaven and chewed up by bugs as they'd really be? Do we want to see them fighting rats, or see millions of roaches pour out when one of them opens a barn door? Do we want to see feral, rabid dogs and cats? Do we want to see everyone slowly die because they don't know the simple hunting skills of a Cro-Magnon? Well, maybe we do, but I can see how filmmaker would want to skip over most of that.

 

Still, next time, Walking Dead: No more wandering in the woods after sundown, OK? And maybe Rick's crew could try to be a little quieter? Geez, they're practically hog-calling the walkers with all the clamor they make.

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  •  

    Richard Jefferies's After London (1885) begins with a striking description of the ecological changes (Jefferies had been a nature writer) resulting from the collapse of British civilisation. I thought the book really remarkable: later there's a sequence in which the hero ventures into the area where the destroyed London was which is very much like a scene in which a hero explores a city destroyed by nuclear weapons, but written long before they were thought of.

  • Good points, Baron, especially the nuclear power plants. There will be "hot spots" all over the earth if there's an abrupt end to civilization, and Japan in particular will probably be uninhabitable for thousands of years.

    And your point about dams raises the issue of how often survivors would find that simple journeys we take for granted now would be impossible, or really time-consuming. If you discover a bridge down over the Forked Deer River, how far do you have to walk to find a way across?

  • Delete Comment

    Alot of thoughts like these have occurred to me over the years, particularly from my re-readings of The Stand.

     

    Nuclear Power Plants: Every nuke plant on Earth got properly and completely shut down when the Apocalypse struck? Seems unlikely to me.

     

    Roads: I don't know about the rest of the country, but where I grew up, the frost heaves of one bad winter could wreck a road. And here on the Island, beach erosion is a big concern. Lots of coastal places would sink into the sea without the huge efforts made to maintain them.

     

    There's a book called The World Without Us - I think it was made into a TV show. too - that talks about how quickly alot of man-made stuff would go bye-bye without regular maintenance.  Let's put it this way - you wouldn't want to live down-river from any of our major dams after the folks who do the up-keep on them were suddenly taken away.

  • You brought up the point about the gas pumps in the forum discussion, but by the time I started watching The Walking Dead and caught up on the discussion it didn't seem worth bumping the discussion up just for that. But now that you've mentioned it again I would like to point out that, if you open the housing on a gasoline pump, there's a crank inside which can be used to manually pump gas in cas of a power failure. At least, there used to be when gas pumps had dials like... well, I was going to say "like pinball machines" but I guess I'll have to say "like pinball machines used to have." I assume modern electronic pumps have something similar. Not that that invalidates any of your other points.

  • On LOST, they seldom travelled at night and when they did, something bad always happened. They did find fresh water and John Locke could hunt and Jin fished.

    But yeah, Jack's eternal three-day growth was weird and the women apparently found a case full of Max Factor!

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