The Zombie Revolution.

I've been thinking about zombies a lot lately. I'm not sure why. Somebody on Twitter mentioned a lycan versus zombie thing, and I don't know the details behind that, but it's the catalyst that got my brain working on zombies.

Here's the deal - zombies are the one thing that sort of wins by default.

See, I get that vampires, werewolves (or lycans), mages, faeries, elves, trolls and whatever else you can throw at them are alive, and have the means and intelligence to bring down a horde of zombies, but what very few people consider is the following...

If something kills a zombie, you have a dead zombie. If a zombie kills something, you have another zombie. On top of that, whatever created the zombie, by and large, will probably have created more than one zombie - there's usually no "patient zero" or a single person who just gets up and decides to turn humanity into a snack. There's usually a lot of them, and they all decide to go after the nearest source of food. That source of food will likely die and return as a zombie, and unless there's some kind of fool-proof zombie plan in effect already (which is unlikely, since every fictional piece involving zombies has proven time and again that humanity is stupid), the initial zombie uprising isn't going to be quelled.

In fact, more often than not, a mass panic erupts and everybody DIES.

Throw other supernaturals into the mix and things sort of balance out, although I don't see how much more balanced they can be for long. Vampires would just die. Werewolves would just die if they're lucky - some fictional sources DO include undead werewolf zombies and those are never pleasant situations. The large majority of the world would just be eaten and get back up a few hours later to continue the Million Muncher March on whatever large settlement happens to be nearby.

There's also numbers to consider - if everything dead suddenly gets back up and decides to forgo the monkey brains and opt for something higher on the evolutionary food chain, not only would we have a hell of a population explosion but we'd be severely and sorely outnumbered. Sure, you can shoot several hundred zombies before you run out of ammo, but you have to consider the sheer amount of dead humans that have existed in the world - if a person dies every second, but two are born every second, and it's been that way for the last decade, there's always the notion that there are going to be a lot of dead people under the age of "I can shoot a gun and protect myself" (just as there would be a lot of people unable to defend themselves due to physical or mental handicap, if not just being too old and weak to do the same).

Of course, it wouldn't take long for anybody with common sense to shoot the people going around biting other people, and as soon as the dead folks get back up and try to eat somebody else, it's likely they're going to get a bullet put in their head. That being said, it's hopeful that mass panic will not spell certain doom. Fiction has assumed otherwise.

This is all also assuming it's a disease and not an act of a higher power or magic (voodoo zombies or "When there is no more room in hell" a la "Dawn of the Dead"). Then, it's hard to tell who's immune to what. It's not a far stretch to assume if it's a higher power that caused the dead to get back up, why wouldn't they level the playing field by removing the immunity some entities would have against the undead?

So, in a fictional world, the majority of us, supernatural or mundane, are fucked. The sheer numbers of the dead will overwhelm us. We may or may not get back up (in the case of vampires, who would turn to ash, and lycans/werewolves, who are presumably immune), but that doesn't mean we're immune to a horde of zombies eating us.

In a mundane world, zombies aren't real... damn it.