When zombies attack, you need vague (life saving) suggestions and zombie maths

It’s Wednesday morning. You’ve managed to manage your hangover enough to assume the upright position, ensure your vital organs are locked safely in the appropriate compartments and stumble outside in search of the Bakerloo Line. Good, good.

Something, however, is amiss. Where are the hordes of of people in suits and their kevlar-reinforced elbows to inflict bone marrow trauma and tennis elbow? Why are there no people in tabards, handing you today’s summary of current-affair-lite? And why is there a group of twenty people walking – very slowly – towards you who have pink eyes (and aren’t obviously trustafarian stoners) and no pulse?

That’s right. Your confusion and disbelief is not unfounded. Experience and behold: the zombie attack.

They laughed, didn’t they? Your fellow scholars, who didn’t understand that Evil Dead was a series founded on poetic perfection and elegant variation through cut-and-shut special effects. That the ‘B’ in B-movie really stands for ‘brilliant’ and not ‘by the way, you’re really going to struggle to get laid until you find a niche haircut and achieve indie pop success. They aren’t laughing now though. They’re not even sniggering. Mainly because, without a frontal lobe, they aren’t alive anymore. London’s not burning – its head is being eaten by the undead.

But you’re fine (in essence, hangover aside). You know exactly what to do – this is, after all, what years of considered study via the VHS and later, DVD, prepared you for. Right?

Not really. There’s no time to complete the Facebook quiz that will confirm your status as master of zombie-slaying theory (even if you own an iphone that you can actually use). You can’t call the friends you’ve been quoting Shaun of the Dead to in the manner of a cue script – they’re dead. Even more catastrophic, you might be a dedicated fan of the bromcom and have no idea who Simon Pegg is. Lucky then that universities, maths and funding for modelling into survival against heretofore fictional monsters exists.

Enter ‘When Zombies Attack!’ – your only hypothetical saviour. You see, The University of Ottawa care. They’ve watched the films, researched a brief history of zombie derivations (it’s all about the voodoo, people) and cracked out an abstract that could just save your life. That is, as long as you are facing slow, cumbersome, ‘we want your brains but we’ll wait until next week’ variety and not the sporty, ragey versions. The latter presumably involve an exponential death curve and GCSE physics, hastily altered: speed; time; distance; pandemic possession of the undead and need for anger management.

I don’t know the criteria, but I’m sure that deciding ‘not to consider these individuals’ is a decisive form of positive discrimination. You’ve got to ‘act quickly and decisively’, otherwise ‘we’re all in a great deal of trouble’. Here, the university acted decisively and selectively to choose the best of pop culture to theorise the probability of human survival. It’s best not to ruminate on the fact that pop culture is all we have left to save us.

No, this study is all about the through line. Let’s proceed quickly to the end – once you’ve survived you can understand why. In essence: ‘hit hard and hit often’. There. That was simple, wasn’t it? Want to know why? Well, alright then. The three key principles that underpin zombie attack:

1) We are susceptible to most things anyway. In this context, brains make us extremely susceptible to being gnawed on by dead people. If we keep breeding, we are – potentially – infinite in quantity and therefore infinitely susceptible to zombie attack. Endgame.

2) Coexistence between zombies and humans is not possible. No equilibrium, no mediating party: endgame.

3) Don’t ignore infection, or zombies. Attack them. In fact, pushing the zombie issue to the periphery for a moment, never ignore infection. See a medical practitioner. Immediately.

Don’t celebrate too quickly though. Once you’ve survived, there are two fundamental flaws about not being undead. The first, who gives a shit? Everyone’s dead. Secondly, they haven’t modelled how to get rid of that hangover. Yet.

Read it for yourself here.