This Is the Way the World Ends: an Oral History of the Zombie War

by Keith Taylor

not a single author had attempted to pick up Brooks' baton.

It's because no one can top it. *World War Z* by Brooks is the ultimate peak of zombie lit. It set canon. TWD's radioactive, burned, zombies are straight from the Battle for Yonkers

The way they dumped the story in the D block the moment the advertisers started complaining, because it’s tough to sell Ensure and adult diapers to people worried about a zombie apocalypse?

This happened during COVID.

The shared delusion that our place at the top of the food chain was ordained by God and could never be challenged.

a belief among the people that Mongolia is one of the few countries it could be argued ‘won’ the war.

I'm going to have to check wind patterns. If melting Siberian permafrost re-introduced this virus, wouldn't Mongolia get hit early?

Of course Putin would never have admitted it even to his closest allies, but he was deeply worried that his... what’s a nice way to put it, his Crimean adventure? He was terrified that would be the beginning of the end for him.

Nope. Instead, he's gone after Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!

He wanted tighter visa quotas, medical checks at our borders, maybe some kind of temporary quarantine for new arrivals.

This book is so en pointe with COVID. We all did close our borders - just some of us did it too late.

Biting is a ridiculous way to spread a virus, you know. Truly stupid. Just think about that for a moment.

Seems to work pretty well for rabies. Almost *any* mammal can harbor & spread rabies. Deer, cattle, orca whales. Imagine getting rabies from an orca that ate a rabid moose. Malaria spreads through mosquito bites. Tick-borne illnesses are spread by tick bites.

How did it succeed when everyone from epidemiologists to thoughtful fans of zombie movies assured us that such an epidemic could never take hold in the real world?

Because people are fucking disgusting. Touching everything, huddling up, not washing their hands, not covering their noses & mouths, not staying isolated when sick. People are nasty.

few considered the possibility that the virus was already lurking within our very blood.

This was the premise of TWD at first. *Everyone* was infected, but the virus only activated at the time of death.

I’d even filled six Jerry cans with gas

Gas rots. Faster than you'd think, too. Rotten gas will fuck up your car's engine if you try to run on it.

The infection simmered unnoticed in India’s countless slums, in the hidden, invisible spaces beside rail tracks and beneath highways,

Calcutta, Lord of Nerves, a short story by Poppy Z. Brite, is an excellent zombie tale set in India. It's got graphic gore & sex.

Himsa in this life brings bad karma, which may affect our happiness in this life and our future lives, so harm of any kind is to be carefully avoided.

Karma is a toxic belief. No one deserves anything, good or bad, based on a past life. Remaining a victim in this life to avoid punishment in a future life keeps people trapped in abusive situations. Religion is a mass delusion.

Alan Lamb

Alan Lamb is Steve Rogers in retirement. Even the Avengers couldn't save us from a zombie pandemic, but gosh darn it, the Captain is doing his best. This is now canon.

We had Brody actually on base, yelling at us to haul ass to Atlanta.

This is the prologue for TWD. That opening... Rick Grimes on horseback, on the empty highway into Atlanta, seeing the exodus out of the city. That was prime zombie media. I noped out of the series when Negan entered the scene. Blegh.

I hooked up my iPod, cranked some Kate Bush as loud as it’d go and voila, instant test subjects.

You just fucking know it was *Running Up That Hill*, too.