Why there is no Army left; How Zombies defeated the US-Army

[ThrewThatObject]

blame the bandits

[Lars80]

I think how the army got defeated would be that the situation got out of hand and many servicemen abandoned their posts to look after their familly.

Or how about. Everyone is infected. But some people can live with the infection. While others got sick and died?
Imagine waking up one morning and 50% or more of the world population has become zombies, or is about to become zombies very soon.

[fanganga]

If you google the Battle of Yonkers (the scene from World War Z the OP was describing), you'll find quite a lot of discussion from weapons/tactics nerds about the accuracy or otherwise of the scene. This thread seems quite good: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?...tle-of-Yonkers

I'm not a military nerd myself so I can't contribute much to the discussion of weapons effectiveness, but I can expand a little on my initial points.
* I haven't read the comics and I've only seen the first season of the TV series, so I don't know how things went down in Kirkman's world. The tv series shows a lot of dead soldiers and abandoned hardware in Atlanta, so there may have been a Battle of Yonkers scenario, although I have difficulty believing a force with no weapons and no tactical capacity would pose a serious threat to a modern military in a direct battle, so I suspect the primary reason for the absence of an active military presence is that otherwise the story would be a lot shorter.
* I think the most plausible in-world reason involves the speed at which the zombie threat escalated, compared to the speed at which it could be recognised as such and an appropriate response devised. Initial repsonses such as trying to arrest "rioters" and gathering survivors including wounded together in refugee centres would have made things worse and hit first responders hard - and if outbreaks are happening all over the world at the same time, there's limited opportunity to learn from the first disaster before the next one hits. I think it's plausible that a rapidly developing outbreak would result in a sufficiently diminished military that a rescue operation of the kind our heroes hope for is implausible - particularly allowing for reservists deciding to stay and defend their families, and the difficulty of securing any kind of safe zone against Kirkman zombies who can rise from any corpse with an intact brain.
*The best guess I can make at a timeline comes from the game, the events of which seem to take place over five days at most, ending with Glenn's radio telling of widespread destruction but some semblance of civil authority still around (to classify all the disaster areas in the report)

[Rommel49]

Originally Posted by fanganga

If you google the Battle of Yonkers (the scene from World War Z the OP was describing), you'll find quite a lot of discussion from weapons/tactics nerds about the accuracy or otherwise of the scene. This thread seems quite good: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?...tle-of-Yonkers

I'm not a military nerd myself so I can't contribute much to the discussion of weapons effectiveness, but I can expand a little on my initial points.
* I haven't read the comics and I've only seen the first season of the TV series, so I don't know how things went down in Kirkman's world. The tv series shows a lot of dead soldiers and abandoned hardware in Atlanta, so there may have been a Battle of Yonkers scenario, although I have difficulty believing a force with no weapons and no tactical capacity would pose a serious threat to a modern military in a direct battle, so I suspect the primary reason for the absence of an active military presence is that otherwise the story would be a lot shorter.
* I think the most plausible in-world reason involves the speed at which the zombie threat escalated, compared to the speed at which it could be recognised as such and an appropriate response devised. Initial repsonses such as trying to arrest "rioters" and gathering survivors including wounded together in refugee centres would have made things worse and hit first responders hard - and if outbreaks are happening all over the world at the same time, there's limited opportunity to learn from the first disaster before the next one hits. I think it's plausible that a rapidly developing outbreak would result in a sufficiently diminished military that a rescue operation of the kind our heroes hope for is implausible - particularly allowing for reservists deciding to stay and defend their families, and the difficulty of securing any kind of safe zone against Kirkman zombies who can rise from any corpse with an intact brain.
*The best guess I can make at a timeline comes from the game, the events of which seem to take place over five days at most, ending with Glenn's radio telling of widespread destruction but some semblance of civil authority still around (to classify all the disaster areas in the report)

I covered a good chunk of what I found to be incorrect in my ridiculously long post at the start of the thread. Incidentally, I didn't plan for that post to be that long, it's just that the depiction of the battle is like a Matryoshka doll of wrongness on the author's part. Heavy artillery is used for stuff like runway cratering and destroying tanks; it punches holes in concrete and steel, flesh and bone doesn't offer much resistance.

It actually occurs to me that in that scenario, they could have simply lured the zombies to a highway overpass, blown a gap in it at the highest point, and position a one-man band or guy with a megaphone on the other side of that gap to make a bunch of noise and just let the zombies fall to their deaths as they tried to reach him.

[Kiel555]

Originally Posted by def_c�n

yes i think tihis is what happened a lot in civil areas, police, military and so on.
i think when they REALLY realise what happened the command and operation structure was already broke down. and with no logistic support, they can´t resist long at any point.

also perhaps most of the national gurad was at home by their families when the outbreak cames.

that is the main question: how fast was the outbreak? was there any signs for it? any time to respond? or did they just underestimate the whole situation?

I think most government/police/fire/etc. had no idea what was going on just a lot of civil unrest and the usual attacks that go on in big cities..even bites. The national guard was most likely called up when it was way too late since this requires activation by each state governor. Remember Katrina? The state governor had no idea it was up to him to request federal assistance and call up the national guard and that washington was waiting on him so they could act. Ah the bureaucracy.

The active military on the other hand would respond differently. Once walker attacks occured on more than one base the military would misinterpret the ZA as a coordinated terrorist attack against priority assets. All bases worldwide would be locked down and anyone "walking" around the base would be challenged. Many bases would still be lost but a few would survive.

Anyway, I think they all fought well, stayed at thier post, served their country to the best of their abilities and put down a LOT of walkers. Unfortunately, there are just too damn many walkers!

[Coolface330]

Didn't you guys listen to the story???

Everyone's infected. If you suicide, you zombify. If you heartattack, you zombify.

The confidence of the army would be shambled at this piece of information eluding them.

You can have the perfect zombie defense,but attacks from within, are unexpected and surprise. Heavens would know what would happen if a swarm forms within a military base and starts eatting(no pun intended) the military tactics from the inside out.

Suicide would be common: I mean, c'mon, everyone you knew is 99% dead! That pain alone would cause so much additional mental ailment.

I find it believable that military is out of service in the Walking Dead story.

[Rommel49]

Originally Posted by Coolface330

Didn't you guys listen to the story???

Everyone's infected. If you suicide, you zombify. If you heartattack, you zombify.

The confidence of the army would be shambled at this piece of information eluding them.

You can have the perfect zombie defense,but attacks from within, are unexpected and surprise. Heavens would know what would happen if a swarm forms within a military base and starts eatting(no pun intended) the military tactics from the inside out.

Suicide would be common: I mean, c'mon, everyone you knew is 99% dead! That pain alone would cause so much additional mental ailment.

I find it believable that military is out of service in the Walking Dead story.

Except the knowledge that people come back regardless of how they die probably wouldn't remain a secret for all that long, which means the cat's going to be out of the bag far sooner than later. With the exception of mosquitoes (which are already everywhere, small enough to evade immediate notice, capable of flight, and don't kill their victims within hours), biting's also a pretty ineffective way to spread disease right off the bat... which isn't helped by the fact that Walking Dead zombies are slow-moving shamblers and are far from inconspicuous.

There's some things that zombies just can't do squat against - let's be realistic, they're not going to be biting through any form of AFV (armored fighting vehicle) - Those are flat out impenetrable to zombies. Likewise for simple shoot and scoot using motorized transport, there's literally nothing zombies could do about it. They don't use tools, think, plan, etc. at its core, a zombie's still more or less a human except it's been stripped of all that stuff which got us to the top of the food chain in the first place.

The diseases that spread the farthest tend to do so because they're undectable with relatively long incubation times... zombies offer neither of those. You'd need a mass die-off first for a zombie swarm to even realistically form, and even that'd be iffy after the 2nd or 3rd person comes back from the dead. Likewise, the instant somebody gets bit and starts reporting they feel sick, with death and reanimation following shortly thereafter, people would start putting two-and-two together, in which case you'd start seeing preventative measures like quarantine, etc.

There's a reason the overwhelming majority of ZA fiction (the Walking Dead included) doesn't show how the apocalypse started, i.e. how you go from that first zombie/patient zero to millions upon millions of zombies, because it's nigh-impossible to show a credible way it happens... nevermind how a mechanized army fails, but a bunch of plucky survivors are able to keep on trucking well after the fact.

[fanganga]

Originally Posted by Rommel49

The diseases that spread the farthest tend to do so because they're undectable with relatively long incubation times... zombies offer neither of those. You'd need a mass die-off first for a zombie swarm to even realistically form, and even that'd be iffy after the 2nd or 3rd person comes back from the dead. Likewise, the instant somebody gets bit and starts reporting they feel sick, with death and reanimation following shortly thereafter, people would start putting two-and-two together, in which case you'd start seeing preventative measures like quarantine, etc.

Which is why most zombie fiction also has the zombie-causing agent initially spread by some other vector than the zombies themselves. Night of the Living Dead had fallout from the meteorite, the Left 4 Dead series had "the Green Flu", which reached pandemic levels and caused a mass die-off before the victims started coming back to life, etc. I don't know what's revealed about the zombie-causing agent in the Walking Dead, whether it can be understood by epidemiology, or if it's supernatural in origin, but it's strongly implied that it's lying dormant in everybody, taking effect as soon as they die.

If you assume the initial outbreaks are simultaneous, there would be huge loss of life in population centres, with people reanimating in hospitals surrounded by other patients who can't easily escape. By the time the Army is deployed, they could be facing the biggest counter-insurgency campaign ever.

[Rommel49]

Originally Posted by fanganga

Which is why most zombie fiction also has the zombie-causing agent initially spread by some other vector than the zombies themselves. Night of the Living Dead had fallout from the meteorite, the Left 4 Dead series had "the Green Flu", which reached pandemic levels and caused a mass die-off before the victims started coming back to life, etc. I don't know what's revealed about the zombie-causing agent in the Walking Dead, whether it can be understood by epidemiology, or if it's supernatural in origin, but it's strongly implied that it's lying dormant in everybody, taking effect as soon as they die.

If you assume the initial outbreaks are simultaneous, there would be huge loss of life in population centres, with people reanimating in hospitals surrounded by other patients who can't easily escape. By the time the Army is deployed, they could be facing the biggest counter-insurgency campaign ever.

Except there's the small issue that the zombies are shown to be slow, I mean hell, Lee was able to outrun them with a gimp leg. At the end of the day, we're still looking at what are ultimately slow shamblers that lost everything that got us to the top of the food chain, don't know to avoid danger, and they can be distracted by bright lights and loud noises, which for me brings up the funny image of them trying to attack things like fire engines (it also means they'll head towards things like explosions and not away from them).

That's also the problem with trying to compare it to counter-insurgency, what makes COIN difficult (aside from the fact that living, thinking people can shoot back) is that the insurgents can blend into the ordinary population; just another fish in the ocean. Zombies... can't.

[fanganga]

Originally Posted by Rommel49

That's also the problem with trying to compare it to counter-insurgency, what makes COIN difficult (aside from the fact that living, thinking people can shoot back) is that the insurgents can blend into the ordinary population; just another fish in the ocean. Zombies... can't.

The one main similarity between a zombie infestation and an insurgency is that there's no real front-line. We agree that if a zombie invasion lined up and marched over the border, they wouldn't last a day. With Kirkman zombies, potential enemies are everywhere - anybody who dies with an intact brain becomes an enemy, and can breed more if not put down. Therefore, it's a constant challenge securing any area where there's a concentration of people.

In Kirkman's world, the government initially tried to concentrate people in the cities for protection, indicating that some manner of control was restored, but Atlanta fell within a week (in the game Glenn sets out for Atlanta a week after the outbreak, in the comic/tv show he says Atlanta had fallen by the time he got there), probably because of the numbers of zombies that could spawn in a mob of frightened and confused people before an armed response could be mounted. In the first comic, Glenn loots a gun store in Atlanta that isn't sold out - presumably the authorities thought that the need for citizens to arm themselves against the walkers didn't outweigh the danger from letting large groups of frightened angry people have guns.

[Cornson]

Why are there no military left? an easily answerable question

They (the military) got grossly outnumbered and eaten, sure some of them are just stuck in building with massive hordes of zombies laying seich on the buildings the soldiers are occupying...

[GetOutNearToTheDock]

Realistically, I don't see how an Army of well-trained soldiers with weapons and tanks could get overrun by stupid zombies.

In real life, once the very first zombie case pops up. The government will be up their asses.

But then again in TWD, anybody who dies becomes a zombie anyways. So it's basically and endless fight.

[Rommel49]

Originally Posted by fanganga

The one main similarity between a zombie infestation and an insurgency is that there's no real front-line. We agree that if a zombie invasion lined up and marched over the border, they wouldn't last a day. With Kirkman zombies, potential enemies are everywhere - anybody who dies with an intact brain becomes an enemy, and can breed more if not put down. Therefore, it's a constant challenge securing any area where there's a concentration of people.

In Kirkman's world, the government initially tried to concentrate people in the cities for protection, indicating that some manner of control was restored, but Atlanta fell within a week (in the game Glenn sets out for Atlanta a week after the outbreak, in the comic/tv show he says Atlanta had fallen by the time he got there), probably because of the numbers of zombies that could spawn in a mob of frightened and confused people before an armed response could be mounted. In the first comic, Glenn loots a gun store in Atlanta that isn't sold out - presumably the authorities thought that the need for citizens to arm themselves against the walkers didn't outweigh the danger from letting large groups of frightened angry people have guns.

In the case of a zombie infestation, the front line is wherever the military wants it to be. The zombie horde will obligingly go wherever you want them to as long as you make enough noise. A Zombie here or there isn't a threat. As noted, Lee was able to outrun them with an untreated leg wound following a car accident - unless you've got gray hair and use a walker, it wouldn't be that hard to keep your distance.

It's also not going to take that long to figure out what causes zombies; it's either that guy that just died, or the guy slowly shambling around trying to bite people - both can be solved by either staying away from dead people, or shooting them in the face.

The whole "everybody got a weapon and shot each other shtick" doesn't make much sense either. A sizeable number of Americans already own firearms, the figures of self-reported ownership among adults have ranged between 40 - 50+% for the past two decades, which kinda constitutes an armed response right off the bat. That tradition potentially goes on even longer, it was Admiral Yamamoto that famously said of the United States "there'll be a rifle behind every blade of grass" prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor... and it's worth mentioning that we didn't just up and start killing each other off in droves during past emergencies.

Originally Posted by Cornson

Why are there no military left? an easily answerable question

They (the military) got grossly outnumbered and eaten, sure some of them are just stuck in building with massive hordes of zombies laying seich on the buildings the soldiers are occupying...

Numbers stopped being much of a factor with the invention of stuff like machine guns or accurate artillery which fire single shells that can kill everything in an area near the size of a football field at ranges of well over 20 miles. Human wave attacks went the way of the dodo for a reason, and that was with guys who could run and shoot back. There's nothing a zombie horde can do.

Likewise with tanks, zombies can't even chip the paint and a tank won't even need to waste ammunition on the zombies, the crew can just crush zombies under the treads.

[Cornson]

Originally Posted by Rommel49

Numbers stopped being much of a factor with the invention of stuff like machine guns or accurate artillery which fire single shells that can kill everything in an area near the size of a football field at ranges of well over 20 miles. Human wave attacks went the way of the dodo for a reason, and that was with guys who could run and shoot back. There's nothing a zombie horde can do.

Likewise with tanks, zombies can't even chip the paint and a tank won't even need to waste ammunition on the zombies, the crew can just crush zombies under the treads.

first of all you have to remember that blast that will kill a human is not always a kill on a zombie, and when a horde of literately millions of zombies won't take much damage from artillery do to the zombies being so tightly packed, and then you might be thinking millions of zombies? lol it will never come to that, and I say it most likely will (if it ever happened) and lets face it, most people won't survive the zombie apocalypses... I would expect at least 8 out of every 10 person dying for one reason or the other (not all of them would become zombies of cause)

and how will you outrun a zombie horde that comes at you from all directions, and lets not forget the fact that when you are totally out of breath and puking do to the fact that you pushed your self way over your limit the zombie horde is still shambling after you, and how long can you keep it up? because the zombies don't need food, water or sleep, and a zombie won't need to rest...

and sure a tank will be mowing down zombies like there would be no tomorrow, until it runs of out gas and will be 100% surrounded and the soldiers inside would either die from starvation or a bullet to the brain...

[Rommel49]

Originally Posted by Cornson

first of all you have to remember that blast that will kill a human is not always a kill on a zombie, and when a horde of literately millions of zombies won't take much damage from artillery do to the zombies being so tightly packed, and then you might be thinking millions of zombies? lol it will never come to that, and I say it most likely will (if it ever happened) and lets face it, most people won't survive the zombie apocalypses... I would expect at least 8 out of every 10 person dying for one reason or the other (not all of them would become zombies of cause)

and how will you outrun a zombie horde that comes at you from all directions, and lets not forget the fact that when you are totally out of breath and puking do to the fact that you pushed your self way over your limit the zombie horde is still shambling after you, and how long can you keep it up? because the zombies don't need food, water or sleep, and a zombie won't need to rest...

and sure a tank will be mowing down zombies like there would be no tomorrow, until it runs of out gas and will be 100% surrounded and the soldiers inside would either die from starvation or a bullet to the brain...

Tightly packing together isn't a defense against artillery it's a liability, this is the same mistake the author of WWZ made and it basically shows that the guy doesn't understand how artillery works. All that'll happen when they tightly pack together is that more of them end up dead from each individual shell fired at them... especially since the rounds are detonated in the air against squishies to ensure a wider spread of shrapnel (it also means that shrapnel's coming from above). Overpressure/underpressure effects will turn a brain to goo through open holes in the face (mouth, nose, ears), tear limbs and heads off of torsos, etc. Zombies aren't made of steel and concrete, and artillery punches holes in that just fine.

Seriously, take a look at a picture of the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme sometime, it didn't so much as leave the trees standing. You can still see the shell craters produced by artillery in the landscape nearly 100 years after the fact. Artillery's been the premier killer in war before, during, and since: during WWI the British pegged artillery alone as being responsible for over 50% of all war deaths, that trend continued into WWII... even against an intelligent enemy that knows to take cover from it and can move at better than a walking pace, the fact is that artillery's already proven it's capable of killing millions.

Diseases which spread farthest do so because they're hard to detect and/or have asymptomatic carriers, i.e. the infected can pass for uninfected. Things like the flu are airborne, a person infected with HIV can pass for someone that isn't, and so on. Zombies offer none of those, they're obvious.

A modern MBT has an operating range of a couple hundred miles with a top speed of around 40 MPH (and they pretty much never operate alone). They can go out, kill zombies to their heart's content, head back, and leave the zombies in the dust. Hell, they can use the tanks themselves as fortifications when they're not out killing stuff (assuming they don't have any other fortifications for some bizzare reason). Just park them end-to-end to make an impenetrable wall of armor the zombies can't get through whenever they need to resupply. As the saying goes when it comes to tanks "Without mobility, a pillbox, without weapons, a bunker".

[fanganga]

Originally Posted by Rommel49

The whole "everybody got a weapon and shot each other shtick" doesn't make much sense either. A sizeable number of Americans already own firearms, the figures of self-reported ownership among adults have ranged between 40 - 50+% for the past two decades, which kinda constitutes an armed response right off the bat. That tradition potentially goes on even longer, it was Admiral Yamamoto that famously said of the United States "there'll be a rifle behind every blade of grass" prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor... and it's worth mentioning that we didn't just up and start killing each other off in droves during past emergencies.

That wasn't what I was trying to say - I agree with you that it's unlikely the people in the cities would be killing each other for food and supplies within a week, although based on your assessment of the zombie capabilities we may have to somehow handwave in armed and intelligent insurgents to reach Kirkman's world. I was trying to say that with Kirkman zombies, securing an area means both establishing a perimeter and ensuring that anyone who dies from any cause within that perimeter is destroyed - and with the implied concentrations of refugees in the cities, that would be a huge task that would require armed and willing citizens to make it work. I took the fact that the comic showed loads of guns in the store instead of people's hands meant that the Atlantans weren't prepared for a scenario in which everyone needs to fight the walkers - maybe people and the authorities worked under normal rules for too long (I don't know Georgian gun laws, I'm assuming there would be waiting periods and background checks the government would be unwilling to relax in a situation of civil unrest). If the store was full because all the people who needed guns and ammo to fight the walkers already had them, then we're going to have an even harder time understanding how the world of the Walking Dead came to be.

[thestalkinghead]

Originally Posted by Cornson

and how will you outrun a zombie horde that comes at you from all directions, and lets not forget the fact that when you are totally out of breath and puking do to the fact that you pushed your self way over your limit the zombie horde is still shambling after you, and how long can you keep it up? because the zombies don't need food, water or sleep, and a zombie won't need to rest...

you dont need to OUTRUN a zombie horde, just walk at a slightly fast pace and they will be miles away in a few hours, if it was the 28 days later zombie/rage infected then you would have no chance (thats why in reality they are scarier) but a zombies only advantage over a human is its harder to kill than a normal human.

[Master of Aeons]

Originally Posted by thestalkinghead

you dont need to OUTRUN a zombie horde, just walk at a slightly fast pace and they will be miles away in a few hours, if it was the 28 days later zombie/rage infected then you would have no chance (thats why in reality they are scarier) but a zombies only advantage over a human is its harder to kill than a normal human.

Let me just say I hate this thread. It's boring and tries to apply barely researched military tactics onto a fictional medium. It's ignorance versus the supernatural. That said, I really want to plug Simon Pegg's essay on what StalkingHead just said.

Zombies aren't fast as a rule. Pegg states that the "rage infected" are inferior because "...the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable."

Full link here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008...-pegg-dead-set

[Rommel49]

Originally Posted by fanganga

That wasn't what I was trying to say - I agree with you that it's unlikely the people in the cities would be killing each other for food and supplies within a week, although based on your assessment of the zombie capabilities we may have to somehow handwave in armed and intelligent insurgents to reach Kirkman's world. I was trying to say that with Kirkman zombies, securing an area means both establishing a perimeter and ensuring that anyone who dies from any cause within that perimeter is destroyed - and with the implied concentrations of refugees in the cities, that would be a huge task that would require armed and willing citizens to make it work. I took the fact that the comic showed loads of guns in the store instead of people's hands meant that the Atlantans weren't prepared for a scenario in which everyone needs to fight the walkers - maybe people and the authorities worked under normal rules for too long (I don't know Georgian gun laws, I'm assuming there would be waiting periods and background checks the government would be unwilling to relax in a situation of civil unrest). If the store was full because all the people who needed guns and ammo to fight the walkers already had them, then we're going to have an even harder time understanding how the world of the Walking Dead came to be.

With individual or small groups of dead people, it actually wouldn't be that difficult even if there was no one onsite that could safely keep them from reanimating; just advise people to stay away from corpses (which shouldn't be that difficult since most people have a natural aversion to corpses anyway) until onsite security/law enforcement/military got there to put it down - they already advise you to do that with dangerous people; don't approach, call the police, etc. Sure, it'd be disruptive to the daily routine when somebody dies, but it'd be quite manageable.

Typically speaking (atleast in the south, though it wouldn't surprise me if it was true for the majority of states), there's no waiting period on atleast rifles or shotguns and potentially handguns, depending on state. Likewise, background checks aren't necessarily required at gun shows.

Regardless, I'd attribute unlooted gun stores to the proprietors not wanting to forfeit what is both their livelihood and means of defense. I remember from my time in the Army this was more or less the case during the whole Y2K scare; our unit's priority was to defend the armory in case somebody tried to loot it (there was the concern that the armory door would unlock and/or the alarm would go off once the New Year rolled around), so in addition to having a few squads of riflemen on watch, we had a couple of .50 cal machine guns plopped near the entrances to the building along with signs and security tape that basically said we had the right to shoot people dead if they crossed it. Damn, that was a really depressing New Year's.

[thestalkinghead]

Originally Posted by Master of Aeons

Let me just say I hate this thread. It's boring and tries to apply barely researched military tactics onto a fictional medium. It's ignorance versus the supernatural. That said, I really want to plug Simon Pegg's essay on what StalkingHead just said.

Zombies aren't fast as a rule. Pegg states that the "rage infected" are inferior because "...the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable."

Full link here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008...-pegg-dead-set

while i agree that a true zombie is slow, i have watched enough films and thought about surviving a zombie apocalypse enough to conclude that not only would a zombie apocalypse never happen (unless millions of people across the world were almost simultaneously turned into zombies) but a zombie is basically one of the least dangerous predators on the planet, not only are most people physically superior (reflexes, speed, agility) almost everyone is mentally superior and that is of course the only reason we are at the top of the food chain, take that away and we are useless (like a zombie)