“Review of
Dead Sea
© 2007
by
Brian Keene”
© 2013
by
Jordan S. Bassior”
Introduction: Zombie apocalypses straddle the ground between fantasy horror and science fiction horror, depending on the reason given for the apocalypse. The tendency is for zombie apocalypses set on the near-future Earth to be science fiction horror, because that allows authors to exploit our fear of epidemic disease, which is an obvious rationale for the zombie apocalypse. Dead Sea is no exception.
Synopsis: A zombie apocalypse has spread around the world. Lamar Reed, a gay black man living in Baltimore, is forced to flee the dubious safety of his apartment when the city catches on fire. He makes it the harbor, making and bringing with him a few friends on the way, and is fortunate enough to leap onto a museum-piece Coast Guard cutter, the Spratling, which a Coast Guard veteran and some other survivors have managed to get running. They flee offshore, trying to find a safe haven.
Spoiler-Free Analysis: A lot of the scenario in a zombie apocalypse is set by the nature of the chosen apocalypse: specifically, the rules under which the zombies operate and spread their curse. Keene chose one of the nastiest possible zombie apocalypses compatible with science-fiction rather than fantasy assumptions.
This zombie apocalypse is caused by a plague -- and specifically a zoonotic plague – one which can leap some species barriers. This is seriously bad news, because it means that one has to beware not only of zombie humans but also of zombie animals. The plague in Dead Sea, in fact, is called “Hamelin’s Revenge” because it first manifests with a swarm of zombie rats in the New York City subway system. At the start of the novel, it has already shown the ability to infect humans, apes, cats, rats and dogs, among the list of vulnerable creatures.
Now, you might think that the reason this makes it especially dangerous is because it can infect large animals – and indeed it does: we see zombie lions and tigers, for instance, escaped from the zoo. But actually the larger problem is that it is infecting small animals: if one is heavily armed, one need not fear zombie lions, and there are not in any case very many lions to infect. Zombie rats, on the other hand, are very difficult to avoid; they can get into places which zombie humans cannot, and there are lots and lots of rats living in any human city.
What makes matters worse is that this is one of the most contagious zombie plagues in zombie-apocalypse fiction. Hamelin’s Revenge can be spread not only by bites and scratches, but even by bits of flesh, blood and other bodily fluids spattering onto a person’s mucous membranes, such as the eyes, nostrils, and mouth; or onto any open wound. The plague is 100% contagious and 100% lethal, provided that one is exposed. Death occurs within hours; transformation within seconds to minutes of death. A Hamelin’s Plague zombie is slow, clumsy and almost mindless, but it takes serious damage to the brain to put one of them down for good.
This is a disease that I can truly believe not even our military might could stop. One problem I’ve had with a lot of proposed zombie apocalypses is that modern military forces could easily bring down zombies faster than the plague could spread: the reason why writers miss this is that most of them don’t appreciate the full resources and tactical flexibility of a modern military organization. To take one obvious example, there is very little that any number of zombies could do to overwhelm a main battle tank, and there are obvious body armor configurations that would render the wearer close to invulnerable to human zombies, even ones which could spread the infection by their own bloodsplatters.
But a zombie plague that affects rats? That can spread to new victims in less than a day? The sheer speed at which something like this could spread would prevent the issuing (and in some cases design) of the necessary military equipment , let alone the development of tactics to use it effectively. Before the world’s armed forces could react, it would be too late, provided that it got out of the city in which it first appeared. Really, the only hope would be immediate and repeated saturation atomic bombardment of the area – and who’s going to order that sort of strike on one of their own cities, until they realize the magnitude of the threat? And by the time they’ve realized it … it’s already too late.
And it gets worse …
TOTAL SPOILERS for Dead Sea
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Continued Synopsis: The survivors attempt to make it to someplace the zombies can’t function in or reach, such as Antarctica. Their immediate problem is that they’ve taken a museum-piece ship with only limited supplies, certainly not enough to travel almost halfway around the planet.
They attempt to get supplies from various bases and stations, but find them all overrun by zombies. In the process, they lose some of their number. In the meantime, their supplies are running out, so they supplement them by fishing, which they believe to be safe because Hamelin’s Revenge hasn’t spread to sea life.
Unfortunately, the disease does. They land a zombie tuna before realizing what they’ve caught, and it infects one of them. What’s worse, they don’t realize the man is infected. Hamelin’s Revenge breaks out on the Spratling, and in the resultant fighting most die and the ship is fatally damaged by explosions.
Lamar and a few survivors manage to launch a motorboat before the Spratling sinks. Now they have no prospect of reaching Antarctica. They instead make for the oil rig at which they were hoping to refuel. This is difficult and dangerous, for now the marine life is infected, and in a small open boat they are vulnerable to everything down to the size of sharks and dolphins.
Just as they reach the oil rig and scramble aboard, a zombie whale smashes their boat, killing the Coast Guard noncom on whom they were relying for nautical experience. Now they are trapped on the oil rig. On the positive side, there is only one zombie on the oil rig (a human) and it turns out to be easy to destroy. Also, there are few of the survivors left, and the oil rig has lots of supplies.
As the story ends they are waiting on the oil rig, hoping against hope that the zombie plague will burn itself out (the only good thing about Hamelin’s Revenge as a zombie plague is that it does not much retard decomposition of the corpses). They are supplementing their supplies by baiting and trapping seagulls …
… and then Hamelin’s Revenge jumps to the seagulls. The survivors are lucky enough to realize this quickly enough to avoid infection. But now, they must remain within the oil rig’s superstructure, indoors, while the sea and skies around them are filled with death. And what will they do when their supplies run out?
On this note, the story ends.
Further Analysis: This is a very grim situation. Most of their possible means of survival have been rendered impractical by the spread to birds, fish and sea mammals. For instance, cold mountaintops may no longer be sanctuaries, since zombie birds might be able to attack before being frozen by the air temperatures; likewise Antarctica may be no haven since flying and marine creatures can readily reach its shores.
On the other hand, there may still be hope – possibly even for the protagonists. Since infected creatures decay, after a certain time there will be very few zombies of any particular species in any condition to attack anyone. The disease can thus survive more than a few months to a year by zoonotic transfer and by individual zombies happening to be preserved and then released from their preservation.
One thing that occurred to me when I read this is that there might be groups of humans able to avoid contact with the plague. People in fully-enclosed shelters with plenty of supplies, for instance, could last for as long as their supplies did (unless zombie rats managed to chew their way in) and this would give them time to improvise protective gear which would keep them safe from any but the largest zombies. Likewise, nuclear submarines might be able to survive (as long as they managed to avoid too much damage from really large zombie marine life, and remember that the ocean is mostly a desert); they likewise could improvise protective gear to make forays on land to acquire supplies (and they normally carry a year or more supplies onboard anyway).
Thus groups of survivors could outlast the plague, eventually make contact with each other by radio or scouting parties, and repopulate the Earth, rebuilding civilization.
Unless …
… just how widely will the plague spread, anyway? The zombies are after all dangerous even to creatures they can’t infect, since they are hungry and attack all living things they can sense. Any species (other than Man) to which the plague can spread is probably doomed; and this implies that a lot of the ecosystem is being destroyed. When the plague’s burned itself out, the sea-algae and other plankton will still mostly be intact, as will most plants and bacteria, but there sure won’t be a lot of animals left behind above the level of insects.
With everything but mini- and micro- fauna cut out of the Web of Life, what’s left behind is bound to be unstable. There will be huge population crashes even among surviving species, and large local extirpations, and it could be centuries before the remaining species settle down into a new stability. It’s quite possible, even probable, that the post-apocalyptic Earth will be much less fertile than the pre-apocalyptic one.
This probably doesn’t spell total doom for human survivors. But it does mean an additional problem. As the years pass, avoiding the (now few) remaining pockets of Hamelin’s Revenge will be overtaken by the problem of finding food, especially as existing stores of canned or otherwise foodstuffs become useless.
Recovery would be a matter of centuries – to millennia. During this time, it might be possible to retain a roughly 19th to early 20th century level of technology, but in the early centuries there will simply be too few people in existence to support the complex web of informational transaction needed for anything like sustained scientific and technological progress, or even a return to early-21st century levels of technology.
And there’s another problem …
A ‘Screwfly Solution’?
I can’t help noticing what an awfully convenient plague this was, from the point of view of eliminating the human race. One would think that a zombie plague would start off far less able to spread this effectively against all the human resources which could be turned to combating it. Hamelin’s Revenge is, after all, zoonotic and able to spread by any fluid-to-mucous-membrane contact.
Indeed, every time I hear of a zombie plague, I have this in mind: that it sounds like something designed to kill us. Not a natural disease, in short, but a biological weapon.
Something like this would be far beyond our own capacities of genetic engineering. But it might not be beyond the capacities of others – others who might want to claim our Earth, without the bother of having to first eliminate our military, especially since in the final fight we (though doomed) might damage the Earth far more severely than could the plague.
They might be immune to the plague: they would after all be products of an evolutionary history alien to our Earth. Alternatively, they might have immunized themselves, since they would have designed it in the first place and would know its characteristics and weaknesses. Even if they weren’t immune, all they would need to do would be to wait a few years, and the plague would burn itself out. A few decades, and the existing weapons of mass destruction in the hands of missile-silo crews and nuclear submarines would have degraded to harmlessness.
They wouldn’t have to wait that long, if they didn’t care to wait. Destroying a whole civilized species from orbit, without badly degrading the habitability of the planet, would be a protracted and difficult operation – though sure of success in the end. By contrast, destroying a few pockets of survivors would be easy. The survivors might even give away their locations with their desperate radio transmissions. And they wouldn’t have to get all the survivors anyway: only those with access to functional nuclear weapons and possessing the skills to use them.
So it might be that the survivors of the Zombie Apocalpyse might breathe a sigh of relief, and venture outside – only to be vaporized by orbital laser batteries. Or alternately, be waiting in their shelters, glad to be secure – and never even know that an antimatter-tipped missile was streaking down toward them through the skies we no longer owned.
Congratulations. I’ve just thought of something even more depressing than the Zombie Apocalpyse. J
Conclusion: This is an excellent Zombie Apocalypse book, and I heartily recommend it.
Of course it was designed. By the author. 0:)
ReplyDeleteThough it does come straight out legend. Vampires did associate heavily with rats. (Since movie zombies are medieval vampires, not Haitian zombies.)