Zombie Attack!

I love zombies. They're unfeeling killing machines made all the more horrific by their former identity of living beings, but without all the gothic whining of the vampire. Best of all, zombies are inherently proactive: they want flesh/brains/whatever, and they spread their infection to everyone in the world sooner or later. They're great bad guys, more of a force than a character though.

But these days, they're everywhere. Dead Island, Left 4 Dead, DayZ. Resident Evil. Zombieland. Dawn of the Dead. Some French movie on Netflix called the Horde. The Walking Dead. Hell, even the CDC released a zombie survival guide in some vain attempt to be cool. It wasn't a very good guide, of course - no weapons, nor anything unique to the challenges facing those living in a  world populated with the walking dead. Zombies have gotten so 'mainstream' that my dad actually linked me to the CDC guide, and I'm pretty sure he still has trouble figuring out Youtube.

The point is that the only way I could see more zombies is if there was an actual zombie apocalypse. Which would actually suck, by the way, that Facebook group non-withstanding. They've become such a, well, inoffensive, generic bad guy, that for some stories they're more secondary bad guys/ background than anything else - after seeing an episode of the Walking Dead, I made the argument that it wasn't really ABOUT zombies. It just happened to have them in it.

I hate to say it, but zombies might be played out. If not, they're certainly getting there. A decent zombie story these days requires differentiation, a unique take on the zombie apocalypse. I've never put a lot of thought into my own permutation, but I'd go after one of the common rules of zombies: water is safety. Living in the Midwest, escaping the apocalypse by taking a sailboat to some isolated island is much more of a long term goal for me in case of sudden zombies, so I don't put a whole lot of trust in it. In truth, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, since I don't see why zombies couldn't swim to the supposedly safe island in their endless quest to devour all human flesh.

So I'd do the reverse. Zombies come from the sea. They swim quite well. The tides are changing, they sweep in, bringing thick fog, and the zombie hordes of the drowned climb up the beaches of coastal towns, killing people and throwing them back into the ocean to rise as more sea zombies. As the apocalypse spreads, the sea level could be rising; if I wanted to be a preachy environmentalist I could connect it to global warming or something.

And on a side note, if anyone reading this gets bitten by a zombie during the apocalypse, do us all a favor and admit it. You're not special, not immune, and you'll save your buddies a lot of trouble. :)