Dr Dale’s Zombie Dictionary

by Dr Dale Seslick

  Porn sites

  Bear this in mind. Once the apocalypse has been going on for a few months and there are fewer clean, living humans around, and the electricity has finally switched off so neither your computer or your TV works, where are you going to get your kicks, eh? Get onto those sites now and get that printer working on overtime!

  JESUS

  I do not wish to offend anyone, so I thought it best to take this opportunity to clear up a few things about the son of God and the rumours about him being a member of the undead.

  Based on the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, it has been claimed that he is, in fact, a zombie. I would like to make it clear right now, in order to stop further speculation and the sullying of this religious icon’s character, that Jesus was not a zombie. OK?

  Granted, according to the bible he rose from the dead – but once risen, he didn’t go and chew on Mary Magdalene, did he? No. Did he shamble around aimlessly moaning, groaning and rotting? No! He continued to speak and act like a normal human being. It is just childish to associate a man, whom many people believe in so faithfully, with a wandering, mindless corpse just because he demonstrated one attribute of the zombie myth. Ozzy Osborne shambles around and makes incoherent grunts and that doesn’t make him a zombie, does it? Zombies are heinous, nasty creatures and suggesting that Jesus may have been one is just wrong. It’s much more likely that Jesus was a vampire.

  JOGGING

  Many times I’ve looked out of my window over the park and thought to myself: why are those people running really slowly? What purpose does it serve? It doesn’t get you anywhere any quicker than a fast stride and you seem to have to wear very small shorts or velour to do it.

  Then it occurred to me that these people might be on to something. You see, running can be very tiring and walking sometimes just doesn’t cut it when you want to get somewhere quickly. This is where jogging comes in.

  When the dead rise they will be slow (see Speed), so why waste your energy running away from them at full pelt waving your arms and screaming like a girl. They can muster up no more than a shamble so why should you bother putting in the effort to get away quickly? It’s not as if the zombie is going to think to himself: ‘Oh! Look at him go! I’m not going to bother chasing after that one. He’s waaaaaaaay too fast for me. Oh, look! There’s a girl in heels – she’s a better prospect.’

  A zombie will go for whichever prey is nearest, so whether you’re running, skipping or moonwalking away he’s still going to be heading in your direction until you get yourself locked up in your safe house.

  Jogging is the perfect way to get there. At a slow pace it keeps you a safe distance ahead of your pursuer, and hopefully allows you to get out of his line of sight and into your safe house unseen. And you can do this without tiring yourself out in case of a surprise attack from more zombies coming from another direction.

  JOURNAL

  It may be very useful to keep a journal once the apocalypse begins. But before you lick the end of your quill and begin to pen your innermost thoughts and fears, please note that I am not suggesting you become the Anne Frank of the zombie apocalypse. The truth is that no one really cares about anyone else’s innermost thoughts. Be honest. Do you really give a hoot about what any of your friends are feeling deep down? When you occasionally catch them with a sad and wistful look in their eyes do you honestly wonder what dark thought are swooping around the depths of their soul? No. You don’t. You’d much prefer that everyone was talking about you.

  So, sorry to burst your bubble, but no one really cares how you felt when you killed your first zombie, or discovered that your Uncle Nancy was infected or when you saw your first badger. Most of them will have been through those experiences themselves. You are, after all, survivors. Instead, your journal should be succinct and to the point. It should detail the areas you’ve been scavenging in, what supplies you have, how many zombies you have killed and where you have seen the hordes massing. The kind of thing that would be useful should you come into contact with other survivors or should you die and need to pass the information on.

  Look upon your journal as a constant battle plan and a guide to plan your campaigns. If your groups go on separate scavenging missions you will be able to keep track of who got what from where and who spotted which dead in which areas. This will save your team from going on wasted trips back to areas that have been bled dry of supplies and it will also allow you to track the direction of the zombie migration in order to avoid them.

  The information in your journal may mean the difference between life and death when your team is depleted and the days are running into each other and tiredness is setting in. So don’t waste time and space drawing daisies in the margins and smiley faces as dots for your is.

  JUMPING

  Jumping is very much an overlooked skill in the art of survival; however, it can turn out to be a very useful skill to have. Look at the influence this pure act of lifting two feet off the ground at the same time has had on us over the years. Girls Aloud implored us to ‘Jump for their love’ and Kris Kross saw the potential to reach millions with their simple message of ‘Jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump.’ Leo told us that if we jumped, he’d jump and in 2007 Patrick Swayze and Martine McCutcheon gave us a tense psychological drama about anti-Semitism and the unjust murder trial of a young Jew in a film entitled…you guessed it – ‘Jump’!

  So, how do we learn to jump properly? Well, first let’s start with something simple: the stationary jump (this is jumping when standing still and not jumping over a pile of pencils, rulers and an A4 folder). Here’s how we do it:

  Quickly raise both feet off the floor.

  Return feet to floor.

  There are two important issues to bear in mind when carrying out this simple procedure. Firstly, don’t fall over, and secondly don’t forget to carry out point 2, as without point two you would be levitating – which, although vastly more impressive than jumping, may cause other survivors to treat you as if you were possessed and burn you at the stake.

  Once you have mastered the stationary jump you will be able to reach shelves that were previously too high, avoid a low sweeping attack from a member of the undead and confidently hold your own in a mosh pit.

  The next step up, once the stationary jump is mastered, is the ‘travelling jump’ (jumping over things like a hole or rooftops). Unfortunately, due to space restrictions we won’t be able to go into that today, but much can be learnt about the art of jumping from the interweb and we urge you to carry on bettering yourself in this art, incorporating such gems as the ‘star jump’, ‘wolf jump’, ‘straddle jump’ and ‘ring’ (no jump on the end of that, but it’s still a jump – trust me, I’m a doctor).

  Eventually, with all these jumps in your repertoire you may even be able to master the art of ‘parkour’ which although sounds a bit French is actually quite impressive and will allow you to jump around a council estate wearing baggy jeans and a baseball cap – a useful skill if ever there was one.

  KAMIKAZE

  Maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, but if you’re planning on strapping explosives to yourself and running into the middle of a horde of zombies, it somewhat defeats the art of surviving. As does crashing a plane into a horde of zombies, driving a burning oil tanker off a cliff into a horde of zombies and running into a horde of zombies shouting ‘You’re all smelly girls!’ armed with nothing but a bendy straw. If that was your plan from the offset then you’ve really wasted your money buying this book.

  KANGAROO

  For those who think it’s possible, you cannot hide in the pouch of a kangaroo. You won’t fit, the zombies will still get you and the kangaroo probably won’t be best pleased either.

  KARMA

  Do you believe in karma? The theory of what goes around comes around? Bad things happen to bad people? Consider this: in speculative projections it is thought that if a zombie apocalypse occurs and the virus is transmitted by bite only, 92% of the populatio
n of the UK will be dead or reanimated within a week. Now surely that amount of people can’t have done that much wrong? If you were a mass murderer or rapist then I can understand that Karma would be shaking his head at you and cooking up some pretty darn special punishment to sneak up and bite you in the ass – and becoming a rotting, animated corpse might just fit that bill. But then, surely 56,600,000 folks can’t have been naughty enough to deserve that kind of punishment.

  At the moment the idea goes that if you steal a pen from work, you might drop 20p under a shop counter and be unable to retrieve it. And thus the cosmic balance is restored and the universe is in order again. The bigger the crime, the bigger the consequence. I have to say, I wouldn’t like to be a claims assessor sitting in the Karma Corporations head office in this day and age. With so many misdemeanors occurring it must be hard to keep everything aligned, which is probably why the zombie apocalypse is going to occur in the first place. Some trainee karma operator or member of middle management having a mid-life crisis is going to flick a switch that is going to rain down punishment on the whole population irrespective of what the crime is. So, anyone who has done anything mildly spankworthy will become a walking corpse. This leaves us with two possible morals to the story:

  If you do anything bad, from eating the last hobnob to poking a nun in the eye with a pencil, you will become a zombie due to karmic resolution, or

  If you don’t believe in karma then none of thiswill happen because not believing in something means it doesn’t exist and then you can just ignore it and get on with your biscuit-stealing and nun-poking.

  Either way it’s all a bit too much to bear thinking about so I think I’m going to go and find a nice comfy kangaroo to have a lie down in.

  KATANA

  The melee weapon of melee weapons. Damn the machete! Throw down that spear! I spit on your chainsaw and ridicule your big pointy stick. Zombie survivalists the world over revel in the shiny loveliness of the Japanese beauty that is known as the katana. With a curved blade of over 60 cm and a squared guard and broad handle ideal for two-handed usage, it is renowned for its cutting ability almost to the level of mythological proportions. Kevin Costner was seen dropping a silk scarf over one in a sexy manner in The Bodyguard (if that doesn’t make you want to rush out and buy one I don’t know what will).

  Also, it’s illegal to own one in the UK due to an amendment to the Offensive Weapons Order of 2008, so unfortunately you’ll just have to go back to using that big pointy stick. Or move to Japan.

  KNITTING

  You can make your own clothes and have two pointy sticks to use as weapons at the same time. What else needs to be said?

  KNOTS

  You’ve got a piece of rope – what possible use could it be? Well, you could use it to make a trip wire across a door, as a possible escape route out of an upstairs window, to attach your supplies to the back of your giraffe or just coil it up and wear it as a hat. The uses for rope are endless, but all of those applications will be less than successful if you don’t know how to tie a decent knot.

  Over the centuries people bored with stamp collecting have gone in for the far more thrilling study of knots, learning about both their practical and mathematical attributes. Now, we’re not particularly bothered about the mathematical properties of the simple knot (it is unlikely that you will find much use for the equation J = N – 2 during a zombie apocalypse), but discovering the practical applications and learning to tie strong and effective knots that will hold under pressure could be the difference between you comfortably abseiling to safety down the side of a building or ending up as a mushy paste on the pavement below.

  Here is a basic list of knots and their rudimentary uses which you may find handy during the apocalypse:

  The Sheet Bend – Used for tying two similar-sized ropes together.

  Double Sheet Bend – Used for tying two dissimilar-sized ropes together.

  Truckers Hitch – Used to tighten a load and secure it.

  Diamond Hitch – Used for loading pack animals.

  Spanish Bowline – Used to hoist a person aloft.

  Prusik Knot – Used for ascending a rope.

  Buntline> – Used for tying a rope to a pole.

  Hitchline Bunt – Used for tying a pole to a rope.

  Loftys Clump – Used for descending a rope into a pit of fire.

  Crabcleft Man Knot – Used for dangling a piano over a large open space from a chandelier.

  Drabcan Shamalyn Triple Dogger – Used for sealing Weetabix boxes.

  Triple Whore-Maker Frumpline Staple Cran Boogle Knot – Used for attaching a rope to an elastic band that in turn is tied to the back of an articulated lorry that is currently hanging over the edge of a canyon in the south west of America whilst your sister sits at home listening to James Blunt on the radio whilst reading Proust.

  LEARNING

  Yes, that’s what you’re doing now. Learning all about how to survive a zombie apocalypse. Although the bigger question is, can a zombie learn to survive the coming human apocalypse? Are zombies capable of being taught? Now for those of you who are considering the idea of grabbing yourself a couple of undead, sticking them in silly hats and teaching them to dance, I’m going to stop you right there. Using zombies to add a new twist to your children’s entertainment business is just not going to work – not unless you could at least get them to learn magic or some form of acrobatic trick, but even then I’d stick with making balloon animals if given the choice. The point is, though, that technically speaking, yes, zombies can learn. Any creature that is aware of its surroundings will eventually adapt to those surroundings over time.

  Let’s just make one thing clear from the offset – zombies will hold no memories of their past lives. They will not remember where they lived, who their friends were, what TV shows they liked or how to make an omelette. They will also not remember how to carry out simple everyday tasks like climbing ladders and using door handles to open doors.

  But they will adapt to their surroundings. A zombie will be able to perceive when an object is solid and can thus not pass through it. Which is why we will not see zombies just walking willy-nilly into walls, trees and post boxes. To begin with, they will not know what glass is – and we may get a few chortle-worthy moments as a member of the undead goes shambling face first into a plate glass window. A zombie can also tell the difference between a member of the undead and a living survivor which is why they do not attack each other.

  So, we can deduce from these few simple facts about the undead that they do have a sense of perception. And any creature with perception, no matter how simple, will adapt to its environment. After a few attempts at walking directly into shop windows, they will ‘learn’ what glass is and not attempt to do that anymore.

  The positive side to this rather scary thought is that humans tend to learn a lot by trial and error. You wouldn’t stick your hand in a fire because you know it would hurt. Because a zombie feels no pain it will never learn not to walk into fire.

  Humans are also taught a ge of its sdeal by other humans (either by witnessing others’ mistakes or by teaching each other). Zombies are not a species that will socialise so there will be no sharing of information between them. They also reproduce in an unconventional way so will never pass on their teachings to new zombies.

  Therefore, if we do destroy a zombie, the things it has ‘learnt’ will die with it. And every new zombie that comes along will have to start afresh walking into windows.

  But do bear in mind that scientists still don’t understand the inner workings of the human brain and they’ve been studying those for decades. So how can we ever hope to know what is going on inside the brain of the undead? If a zombie is left wandering the earth long enough – will it begin to understand more?

  Everything evolves after time and there is no reason to think the undead will be an exception. After all, they learnt how to use weapons and adapt to their surroundings in Land of the Dead; in Cell they began using previou
sly defunct parts of their brains to harness psychic powers, including levitation and hypnosis; and they learnt the beauty of rising to the occasion, the importance of seizing a special opportunity, and the special empowerment achieved through respect for the dignity of others in The Princess Diaries… Or that may have been Anne Hathaway? Anyway, this is why it is imperative that we do not attempt to close ourselves off from the hordes or attempt to live a life alongside them. Who knows what they could learn and ultimately become? And then we would have real problems on our hands. Fighting a zombie that felt no pain but had a plan! No! Whatever you do, once you have the means you must ensure that every last zombie is put down for good! Because once they start to show signs of sentience you will have your greatest enemy yet to face: tree-hugging Liberals fighting for the Rights of the Undead. And THAT really doesn’t bear thinking about.

  LORRAINE KELLY

  Forget Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme, Arnie and Bruce Lee, this mistress of morning television is the perfect person to have around in the apocalypse. Her life as a reporter has meant she has amassed a gargantuan amount of information that pertains to all walks of life. This could come in handy once civilisation starts to break down. For instance, she has filmed her own fitness videos, meaning that she is in peak physical condition; during her early morning shows on Sky, episodes of ER were shown meaning that she will have learnt how to carry out all manner of surgical procedures that could help significantly when the apocalypse begins (especially if a helicopter falls on you). She is also used to functioning on very few hours of sleep, all the while balancing family life with show business extravagance and early morning broadcasts. Compared to all that, dealing with midnight attacks from the undead will be a doddle.