RIZEN: Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse

RIZEN: Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse

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Their humanity is lost, so much so that humans are feared more than the zombies. This is a good read if you can't get enough of zombies and want to read some nice short stories. I acquired this book during a KDP Select free promotion. Rizen is a pleasant mixture of light reading that deals with a heavy topic. The fact that it is a collection of several short stories makes it very approachable if you only have on-the-fly reading time to spare, which is a definite plus for me. The stories are all unique unto themselves, but remain connected by occurring in the same reality at different points in the apocalypse, all the way from patient zero to ten years after the outbreak.

This also makes it easy to jump back in whenever it's most convenient. If you're looking to digest your zombie stories during your lunch break, Rizen may be for you. The four stories in the book are presented in reverse chronological order, with the first occuring ten years after the outbreak, and the last marking the moment it began.

Author Kirk Anderson includes a note at the beginning welcoming the reader to enjoy the stories in the order they are presented, or to read them backwards if you prefer to remain true to the flow of time. I chose the latter. It really doesn't matter how you approach it, but for me, the best part of a good zombie story is the very beginning, when the people in the story who were apparently never exposed to the legacy of George Romero in their reality have no idea what's happening and must cope with the horrors unfolding around them.

I prefer to begin with that and then expand outwards. While I found all of the stories to be enjoyable reads, it may be the desire I just expressed that somewhat colored my opinion while reading this book. If I had to rank the stories from my favorite on downwards, I would rate them exactly in the order I read them. Allow me to explain: Flight deals with the moment of outbreak, and the shock factor in this story is high. Naturally I can't say much for fear of spoilers, but I want a zombie story to make me react, and this one gave me pause to look away and think, "oh man, did that just happen?

Zombies are still the main adversary, and there is still plenty of ominous fear afoot why read about zombies if not to be scared? The characters in this story have a better grasp of the situation than in Flight for obvious reasons, but all that serves to do is involve them in more complicated moral dilemmas. I was expecting a different fate for the main protagonist, but I was still satisfied with what the story had to offer. There are still enough shambling corpses for my taste and the story does culminate in some serious "what happens next" page turning, but I felt as though the opening was a tad contrived.

The protagonist seemed to have a little too much handed to him on a platter to pull me into the believability of his circumstances. If I didn't think that, I wouldn't have read it to the end. But again, my perception of zombie apocalypse stories clouded my ability to entirely accept this tale as fitting in well with the others. Ten years is simply too much time for my taste. When I think zombies, I want to read about zombies If all mention of zombies had been removed from this tale and it had been included in a different anthology about a dystopian human future, I feel it would have fit right in.

The main character came off as a Lara Croft type to me many readers will like this, though I personally don't care for that character archetype. This story was more about race wars and Mad Max style antics than a zombie horror tale. This story was not a deal-breaker for me because as I've said, it is still a decent tale, but it did cause me to lose the general sense of "zombie-ism" I was hoping would exist throughout the book.

All in all, Rizen is worth the read in my opinion. It's reasonably priced for its length, and though there really isn't much new under the sun here, that shouldn't bother readers who are specifically looking for a zombie horror story to begin with. Writing about the zombie apocalypse is just about as difficult as writing about angsty vampires these days -- even before Twilight came long, the concept had already been beaten to death and well past the point of being a cliche I reference The Vampire Lestat. To write decent tales these days on topics like these, one has to intermingle a healthy dose of the original in with what we expect and want to see, and that gets tougher as new ideas continue to be used up.

Rizen has the groundwork, and I believe it incorporates enough uniqueness to keep it from being consigned to the rank of "just another zombie story". Check it out - for the time you put in, I believe you'll find it worthwhile. This collection of short stories was very good, each of the four stories had that thing, whatever you wanna call it, that makes you start to care for the characters and feel lost in their world. One of the stories in particular really hooked me, it was horrifying but so realistic that I honestly believe that if something like zombies or any end of the world thing happens, that would happen.

Maybe the Synthetic Plague the government was working on got unleashed. Maybe a voodoo priest's spell went awry. Maybe an alien space probe broadcast a weird signal at the Earth, or fell to Earth and brought radiation with it. Maybe there's just no more room in Hell. Whatever the cause, the result is the same; the recently dead have risen, en masse , to feed on the living. With each victim they claim, their numbers swell, and no force on Earth can contain them. As society collapses, it's up to the Big Damn Heroes to fight their way to safety or keep shooting until things blow over.

While Horror is assumed to be an inherent part of the zombie apocalypse, not all the horror and conflict comes from the zombies themselves. Instead it can come from the reaction of the living humans involved, and how they respond to the state of fear and violent chaos brought about by the zombies. Often, the answer is "not well". The breakdown of society, the fear that your Fire-Forged Friends could be infected and turned against you without warning, are at least as important to a zombie story as the zombies themselves, if not more so. Whether they'll attack animals other than humans varies, but it's rare for The Virus to affect other species, probably because it's cheaper and easier to film humans in make-up than to work with animals , whether trained, animatronic, or CGI.

Due to the threat that zombies pose they did just become the apocalypse, after all , protagonists of more serious works are required to become very smart very quickly but will be ignorant with regard to the word "zombie" itself. Failure is often the only option in these stories; rarely do they have an ending that could be considered "happy" by typical standards, or indeed one where humanity survives as a species.

Another main staple is that things will always, always go From Bad to Worse. Either from the character's actions or circumstance which are out of their hands, no matter how improbable it is. The Militaries Are Useless trope is a must in such a movie to avoid the film ending in five minutes. If they ARE actually competent, they'll just also happen to be evil.

The collapse will also take place very quickly, over a period of weeks or months, instead of years. In the occasion where collapse occurs in a couple of months, a nuclear submarine or aircraft carrier could realistically be expected to weather the entire outbreak start to finish in perfect isolation and safety.

This will never be brought up. Characters will also assume that their portable radios have infinite reception and frequency range, and local dead air means a completely global collapse. The audience may not need to speculate about this, if a Spreading Disaster Map Graphic crops up in the opening credits.

Another common staple of the Zombie Apocalypse is that the zombies are often not the most dangerous enemy that a survivor will face. It's usually other survivors, power-hungry maniacs or regular-hungry people who want to attack you to get at your food and shelter. Expect an aesop about how Humans Are the Real Monsters to be thrown about after all, a zombie is just a degraded human! Subtrope of Our Zombies Are Different. A member of The Undead trope family. See Night of the Living Mooks for cases where zombies don't threaten the end of the world. Raising the Steaks is what happens when humans are not the only creatures that can be infected by The Virus.

The zombie apocalypse is almost always a case of Guilt-Free Extermination War requiring that everybody be armed. Expect a healthy dose of Infant Immortality — for despite a population of millions of children at any given time in any human population very few will become visible zombies — and when they do show up it will just be one child zombie, for audience effect. Also expect the Incongruously Dressed Zombie to turn up for occasional comic relief.

The trope Zombie Apocalypse refers to any kind of undead apocalypse the common traits of this trope are that the undead spread rapidly, wipe out humans primarily by eating or biting them, and are usually highly infectious — even if the undead happen to resemble vampires or yet another kind of monster more than zombies. Not to be confused with Vampire Apocalypse: The Series by Derek Gunn. Sometimes the 'zombies' might be a case of the Technically Living Zombie , but the overall narrative usually plays out the same way regardless.

You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account. You'll just be dead tired. And the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this. That's really all they've represented to me. Romero , director of Night of the Living Dead If Toshiba doesn't make their laptops drop-resistant, the resulting chain of events will cause a zombie outbreak.

A marketing campaign has the CEO imagining various worst-case scenarios if some seemingly minor feature isn't added to their product. This is the main plot of Apocalypse no Toride. The main characters are 4 boys who have so far survived the zombie apocalypse by being in a high security juvenile delinquency prison. Attack on Titan contains many of the hallmarks of the trope, with the constant threat of humanity being devoured by a mindless horde of humanoid creatures being only one problem. Dot Pixis repeatedly predicts that humanity will be its own worst enemy, with food shortages and limited space creating ever-present dangers of starvation or civil war.

His grim prediction comes within days of coming true, as the crisis within Wall Rose leaves the refugees starving and on the verge of violent rebellion. The Titans are essentially enormous zombies, with most mindlessly shambling about in their search for human flesh and only possible to bring down by inflicting major damage to the back of the neck.

There's also the fact that Titans are transformed humans, and the only way to kill them is to sever the spinal column. The Beast Titan is a being capable of infecting human victims, leaving the horrifying possibility that anyone could become a Titan without warning. While not strictly undead, Titans lack many of the hallmarks of living beings and make about as much sense as a zombie in terms of how they function. The story gradually moves away from this though as it becomes apparent that the people in the walls are not the last remnants of humanity and the Titans are more of a finite, organic weapon being used against them by another human faction rather than some infinite supply of creatures acting on their own.

The mindless Titans are completely cleared from Paradis Island about a year after the battle of Trost and the story then becomes more about human-warfare than the Titan invasion. Black Butler has one on a Titanic -sized ship they're "only" artificially reanimated corpses. The Science Department created Komuvitamin D in order to help people work overtime, however it turned them into zombie-like people instead. The zombie arc was played mostly for comedy but there is one scene where it is discovered that a ghost of a girl experimented on didn't want the Black Order to leave and infected them so they would stay forever as mindless infected people.

However, Komui starts reciting the names of all the kids that died from experimentation by the Black Order in order to find out her name, telling her that even if they leave, they will never forget her. It doesn't stay serious for long. Dropkick On My Devil: Jashin has a nightmare that she, Medusa, and Minos were all victims of one at the end of episode 9 of the anime.

In Dorohedoro , Hole gets a Zombie Apocalypse every year, and surviving it is as simple as being inside behind locked doors after midnight. This has been going on long enough that the braver or stupider denizens of Hole have turned it into a game , with prizes for killing a certain number of Zombies and everything. Spoofed in a bonus chapter of Fairy Tail titled "Fairy Tail of the Dead Meeeeeeeeen", where Ichiya creates a "beautifying" perfume that spreads into the city and turns everyone who smells it into shambling Ichiya clones.

Several typical zombie traits are replaced with Ichiya's quirks, such as moaning " meeeen " instead of "braaains", and infecting their victims by sniffing them instead of biting them. For bonus points, Wendy nearly calls Romeo " Romero " by mistake. In the end, Natsu manages to turn everyone back to normal with a deodorizing spray. Franken Fran has a zombie outbreak on an island. But it's a Deconstruction. It's actually a disease, and its victims are unable to talk or do anything about it. Fran does note that they're all going to be killed by the survivors if she doesn't do anything soon, but not only was she bitten and forced to detach her head from her body in order to cure herself without being infected, but the chapter ends before she can actually do anything about that or the other victims.

Fullmetal Alchemist has the Cyclops Army, "lesser homunculi" released by Father. They behave a lot like zombies, but headshots don't kill them. They also eat people, and beg for "mama" and "daddy". In the anime version's movie , the Gate inexplicably turns a group of Thule Society soldiers into zombies. They also have thick suits of armor. The Big Bad has some knowledge of alchemy, and so she's able to control the zombies when she passes through the Gate. This results in armored, machine-gun-wielding zombies with militaristic capabilities. About their only real weakness is that they possess the zombie gait.

Hellsing has the Nazis causing a zombie apocalypse in London as a side effect of their powers. But that is the least of the protagonist's problems. It is hinted that the zombies along with the vast fires cause much more damage than the main actions of the Nazis.

The Pulse Super Boxset

Highschool of the Dead is about a group of teenagers who're forced to escape their school as it quickly becomes overrun by zombies, during a sudden and unexplained outbreak. But they quickly learn that their school was only the beginning. Yet, despite the grim sounding nature of its narrative, it's often offset by bits of comedy and fanservice. The justification for the Plan 34 massacre is that the Hate Plague Hinamizawa Syndrome could cause a Russo-style Zombie Apocalypse if it started spreading out of control.

The manga-only chapter Onisarashi-hen shows precisely what happens when Plan 34 fails and the disease breaks quarantine: The person who created Plan 34 deliberately lied about how dangerous the Syndrome was in order to get it approved. Higurashi Kira's second episode features a fog that zombifies the residents of Hinamizawa by brainwashing them and making them act hostile towards those unaffected by the fog. The fog was created by — you guessed it — Miyo Takano. The Kaku special is even closer to an actual Zombie Apocalypse than anything else in the series.

I Am a Hero: Subverted in Kara no Kyoukai , the zombies are around for about a minute before Knife Nut Shiki shows what happens when zombie meets very well aimed knife. In Magical Girl Apocalypse , the world gets invaded by magical girls who inexplicably start slaughtering everybody in their path. Anybody they kill rises again as a zombie. Played with in Mitsuboshi Colors where Kotoha makes a Halloween game out of it and gets quite a few townsfolk involved.

One of them is a guy whose Quirk is called, appropiately enough, "Zombie Virus". He unleashes it by spreading out pink gas, infecting almost everyone including his own classmates , but then gets infected himself when he's bitten by a zombified Bakugou. The infected become chalk-white, lose their eyes, along with most functions of their brains, gain Super Strength and Zombie Gait , randomly use their Quirks, are Nigh Invulnerable , can be fooled into thinking someone is a zombie, and retain some aspect of their personality. In the end, the only ones not infected are Midoriya, Todoroki, Uraraka and Ashido, who retreat themselves to a cave to plan a counterattack.

But when they do so, the infected return to normal, revealing the effect was only temporary. Bakugou is not happy about this and attacks Midoriya in retaliation. In a Naruto Shippuden filler arc, a group of ninja has a special jutsu that makes zombies. It turns out that the zombie apocalypse facing the leaf village is actually a diversion, and the real goal is to revive 4 powerful ninja monks who can use a lightning jutsu to destroy the village in one shot.

During the Fourth Shinobi War , Kabuto uses the Edo Tensei to resurrect and control hundreds of the various nations' most powerful shinobi for use against the Shinobi Alliance. Parodied in the Thriller Bark arc of One Piece , where pretty much every single zombie convention is shattered. Here, zombies can move pretty quick, they get tired, they have resorted to fighting each other on a couple occasions, and bite from them has no effect; plus, the giant zombie is actually the fastest one of the bunch.

However, this does make sense considering these zombie are made by implanting the personality and move set of a living person into a specially modified corpse. Thriller Bark zombies feel no pain, however. They feel fear just fine, but not pain. In a surprising aversion. The title characters not only fail to stop the zombie outbreak. But end up becoming zombies themselves. It should also be noted that in this universe zombies can zombify angels, demons and Ghosts.

This episode has Negative Continuity. The main characters, the self-named "School Life Club", are a group of schoolgirls living in a barricaded section of their old school. Space Dandy 's fourth episode is about a zombie outbreak at a hospital where Meow is admitted after he gets bitten by a zombie alien , leading to your typical yet surprisingly frightening for such a light-hearted comedy series fight for survival for the main characters.

Halfway through the episode, all the main characters get bitten and turned yes, even the robot QT, because they live in an age where robots can be zombified , and by the end, the infection spreads across the entire universe. In a hilarious twist, this turns out to be the best thing to happen to the universe ; as detailed by the Lemony Narrator , there's no more death, war, or discrimination now that every living thing in existence is undead, and the heroes even find a more positive outlook on their undeaths by eating yogurt instead of flesh, thinking of themselves as "fermenting" instead of "rotting", and mooching off their own life insurance.

Sunday Without God has a subtle and not particularly violent one. Fifteen years prior, people lost the ability to truly die, so those who did die became undead. At first, something called the "half-dead fever" sprouted up, rendering people straight into zombies, and a deceased's body and mind will still rot, driving them mad, but eventually humanity adapted and deceased people began to create their own communities to support themselves, such as Ortus, with a population of over one million undead.

Of course, with no new life the world is still dying and eventually all of the living will become deceased, but it's not a violent or horrific apocalypse. Spoofed in an episode of Urusei Yatsura. Alien toothaches are contagious, and if the sufferer bites three or four people, the pain will go away. In short order the entire classroom is filled with crazed teenagers with swollen faces and a burning need to bite each other and any non-infected that they can. It's like a very silly Zombie Apocalypse. The Marvel Universe comic Marvel Zombies , spun off from Ultimate Fantastic Four , fuses this with the Super Hero genre, to transform the superpowered characters into intelligent, Russo-style zombies.

Zombiism in this series causes decay and an incredibly powerful craving for non-zombified human flesh. Although the virus can infect anyone, the super-powered zombies still keep their powers, and thus quickly overwhelm and devoured all the defenseless, normal humans. The series starts on a world where they're the only ones left, having already hunted down and eaten every last non-zombie person on the planet. In addition, Marvel Zombies discusses why they do not turn on each other; zombie flesh is unappetizing, and flesh imbued with the Power Cosmic is more nourishing to the zombie-ized superheroes.

Also, the zombies are able to stay sane and focused after they have just eaten, though it is later revealed that the hunger also goes away if they go without eating flesh for a sufficient amount of time, making it more like a drug addiction. Later on, they're attacking the main Marvel universe. Good thing Aaron Stack is a robot with chainsaw hands A later series also hints that the zombie virus is sentient , with various zombified characters referring to it as "the Hunger Gospel".

Amusingly, this was actually itself made fun of in Marvel Zombies 5 , in which the characters go to the real world and talk about how the trope itself makes little sense. The Goon is all about zombies, all are created by an unnamed Zombie Priest to be his army, most are fully sentient and can do pretty much anything others are standard Romno also the bulk of them are all former Mobsters.

Amazingly, this even happened to The Smurfs. The Smurfs started out as a Belgian comic book, and in the first issue, "The Black Smurfs", a Smurf is infected by a disease that turns him jet-black, violent, and unable to speak. He then spreads the disease by biting other Smurfs, and Papa Smurf and the few other remaining normal Smurfs have to find a cure.

This story, despite having nearly every element of the modern Zombie Apocalypse, predated Night of the Living Dead by nine years. When the story was adapted for the animated series see below , the color of the "zombie" Smurfs was changed from black to purple, presumably to avoid any accusations of racism.

www.farmersmarketmusic.com | Zombies Can't Swim And Other Tales From The Undead, Colin M. Drysdale |

The Papercutz translation of the original comic book story to English also changes the infected Smurfs to purple. Also, purple allows for more shading and greater visibility. Gary explains the events of the first issue, Les Schtroumpfs Noirs , here. The original story also serves as the Origins Episode for the comics version of Grouchy Smurf — he was the Patient Zero who initially spread the infection, and retained some of the anti-social tendencies after the disease was cured.

In the animated version, Grouchy already exists, and Lazy is the first Smurf infected. The Walking Dead is an ongoing comic book that follows Rick Grimes, an Atlanta sheriff who Slept Through the Apocalypse , as he tries to find a safe place for his family and a rotating cast of other survivors. Since it is an ongoing series perpetuated by Rule of Drama , any safe haven is a Hope Spot at best, and Rick's life is perpetually a From Bad to Worse scenario.

The narrative only follows Rick's story, so it is unknown how bad the apocalypse is, but the zombies have at least overrun the East coast of the United States. The zombies follow typical Romero rules. The Walking Dead is a unique case of the Zombie Apocalypse setting. Firstly, the zombies are presented as more like a natural disaster than a consistent threat: Secondly, bites do not infect people, as the virus is airborne and people turn on death, meaning the likelihood of a widespread outbreak occurring is much greater although the bites are still deadly.

Thirdly, the USA as a nation state collapsed long before the story starts, leaving people as scattered, nomadic scavengers. Finally, walkers seem to have good hearing and smell but poor eyesight. This functions as a double-edged sword: This overall makes the idea of a widespread outbreak more realistic and plausible, while addressing commonly cited issues people have with the setting. Averted in an issue of B. In Dead West , zombies rise up in a town built on ground where a Native American tribe was slaughtered.

Robots and its sequel Zombies vs.

Amazons starts out in a post-zombie apocalypse world where man's former servants fight to protect the last uninfected baby. The zombies are reanimated by flying rings that are programmed to automatically seek out corpses. As long as the rings are still worn, they can construct zombies out of almost anything, even empty skeletons , so damage to the brain doesn't kill them. They are neither slow nor stupid, regaining all the skills and abilities they had in life, including any superhuman powers. The number of Black Lanterns in existence is truly Legion, recruited from multiple different planets across the entire universe.

Worst of all, while Black Lanterns do possess many elements of their former personalities, they will all kill any living thing they encounter without hesitation or remorse. They actually have to kill people to recharge their rings. One ripped out heart, filled with one of the seven emotions, equals 0. Not that they need the incentive.

Worse yet, even though they're magic zombies revived by power rings, their bites still carry part of The Virus. Hope the rest of the universe is more savvy than Donna Troy. The series Crossed is a days series done with Garth Ennis ' subtle touch. The infected like to rape people to death and do other absolutely horrific things. They do not lose their intelligence and they can talk.

Oh, boy do they talk. The crossed will prey on each other if there are no uninfected around, and they get bored. Ennis calls this the most fucked up thing he's ever done. Zombo had this as a background in the far future, where a zombie apocalypse is sweeping through the galaxy, and being hushed up by the government. Zombies personalities are exactly the same as when they were alive, except they now crave human flesh. It's a weird story, even by AD standards The necromagus Sabbat has zombies attack every Mega-City on Earth, overrunning five which Dredd has nuked and killing three billion before being stopped.

Mega-City One's response to the zombies, by the way, is "Estimate sixty million plus! Namely, introducing the "dead fluids" that they normally use to prepare their host bodies into a civilian population will turn those afflicted into half-dead, Ax-Crazy zombies. Another AD strip, Defoe , involves a motley crew of adventurers fighting zombies in the 17th century using weapons provided by Isaac Newton and Robert Hook. One character is also trying to invoke the Zombie Apocalypse in the most literal way possible — ie, creating an apocalypse that will wipe out all the zombies.

A UK-original story in the Marvel Transformers Generation 1 comic involves a plague of reanimated Transformer corpses overrunning Kalis city-state under the command of rogue Autobot Flame , which forced Autobots and Decepticons to join forces to defeat them. Impaler depicts the start of a Vampire Apocalypse which, by the end of the second volume, reached Class 0 proportions, with no sign of stopping. Possessing the ability to become Made of Air Living Shadow s and manifest long shadow Combat Tentacles , it only takes two days for what started as a few dozen vampires to become a few million and infest New York City to the point where it has to be nuked.

Damn Nation takes place five years after a Vampire Apocalypse has mostly wiped out the United States. The government has abandoned the lower 48 states, and the rest of the world has put the country under quarantine.

Zombies Can't Swim And Other Tales From The Undead

The near-future " found journal " Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection , which is presented as the journal of Seattle doctor Robert Twombly, has the western seaboard of the United States and some of Canada overcome with a zombie uprising in caused by, of all things, an experimental food preservative gone bad. Although Twombly is implied to have been killed at the end, since his journal cuts off with a blood splatter on the last page the fact it was found and published suggests in the context of the journal's universe the zombies were successfully stopped somehow.

Zombies Calling has a zombie apocalypse taking place in a campus on a university. Comics had one carried out by one of its own flagship characters, Evil Ernie. The zombie apocalypse was limited to the eastern United States, eventually spilling out across the country during the company's own Crisis Crossover. After that event established a multiverse for Chaos! Afterlife with Archie is a zombie apocalypse set in the Archie Comics universe. Sabrina the Teenage Witch is disturbed from her sleep by her friend Jughead Jones, whose beloved pet dog was struck by a car.

Though her Aunts try their best, there is nothing to be done — Hot Dog is long dead. However, Sabrina is moved by Jughead's plight and they plot a way to bring him back. Naturally, the spell goes awry, and Jughead becomes the Patient Zero of a full-blown Zombie Apocalypse right in the heart of Riverdale. The Flip Side , this is the final catastrophic stage of the Reverse Curse, due to reversing life and death. Lesbian Zombies from Outer Space: I think you get the gist from the title Harley Quinn Volume 3 starts with Coney Island invaded by zombies.

An alien named Vertigax crash-landing on a farm and disguising himself as a cow, who accidentally gets butchered. After the meat-processing, we see that Vertigax has been shipped all over as various meat products particularly Coney Island hot dogs , contaminating everyone who eats him. This, naturally, results in zombies.

by Kirk Anderson

Abracadaver, the zombie magician The Powerpuff Girls faced in their animated series, returns in "Undead Kola" DC run, issue 58 with a zombie army fueled by a soft drink they obtained after raiding a soda delivery truck. If you like Happier anime, you've come the wrong place, kiddo.

In the Mass Effect and Jurassic Park fusion fic Tyrant Kings , Khar'shan the Batarian homeworld suffers two at nearly the same time, in addition to an alien invasion. The first was the result of a fungal bioweapon that turned Batarians into zombies, while the second was because the Emperor of the Hegemony decided that the way to fight the zombies was to turn loyal soldiers and civilians into Husks to fight the menace.

In the The Familiar of Zero fanfiction, The Steep Path Ahead , Albion went through one of these courtesy of Sheffield being more than a little upset over her lover's death. They had to burn the entire city down. Not the first fanfic to present a zombie apocalypse, but Zombies uses this trope as the backbone of the plot. Its one big video game crossover and the Zombie Apocalypse is quickly wrecking civilization, and the monarchs who attempt to deal with it are summarily killed off for their efforts.

What happens when an unstoppable virus starts turning the Mushroom people into flesh-eating monstrosities? Dead in Ohio manages to combine Glee , slash and the Zombie Apocalypse. Word of God states it's a Crossover with Zombieland in that it takes place during the same zombie outbreak, even though the Glee characters never encounter the Zombieland characters though the complete destruction of Columbus, Ohio in the film happens in this fic too.

Not Using the "Z" Word is played with, as Puck starts calling them zombies right away, while Kurt initially states that he doesn't believe that what's walking around out there is The Undead , but if Puck wants to call them that, then fine. Notable is that, unlike many works featuring a Zombie Apocalypse, the characters here are successful in pulling off their long-term plan for survival, thus avoiding a Downer Ending. One chapter of You Got HaruhiRolled!

Naturally, this trope is in effect. Outbreak and Of Death and the Undead , fan fictions based off the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, use this and the beginnings of this trope as the main story focus. Under Cover Of Darkness: A Magic School Bus fanfic in which an older Ms. Frizzle's class has to survive a mauler apocalypse.

While it follows a similar storyline to the TV series, there are notable differences. There are characters that share names with TWD characters, but they are not the same people, and the story isn't set in Georgia. Respawn of the Dead asks what would happen if a Zombie Apocalypse took place in the Team Fortress 2 universe long before the Scream Fortress event that let players use cosmetic items to turn into zombies or the "Wave " mission, which is a rather literal armed zombie invasion.

The answer is that in spite of the game's darkly comedic setting, things would get really horrific and really heartbreaking really fast. In short, one of the Medics elects to recreate the technology behind respawning, which goes very bad in a big hurry.

Ashes of the Past does a variation of this to fit the setting. Early on during the first chapter of the Orange Islands arc, an entire island made of limestone spontaneously reanimated into a few million Kabuto one of which Misty caught and Cradily. As it turns out, Altomare is built on limestone. Surprisingly enough, someone managed to make a Watchmen zombie apocalypse Alternate Universe fanfic, which you can find here , that really kicks ass. Probably because Rorschach is just about the only character that would wind up happier and saner upon becoming one of the flesh-craving undead.

Principal Celestia Hunts the Undead: Cinch uses the brain worms to turn the Crystal Prep students into a zombie-like mob and has them attack Canterlot High. Invisible Invaders may be the Ur-Example.

In this film, invisible aliens possess corpses and use them to attack the living. It's largely Un-built , since the zombies aren't contagious and humankind quickly finds a way of dealing with them.

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Night of the Living Dead and its sequels. Perhaps because the original film predates most of the zombie canon , it actually avoids many of the "rules" it is credited with creating. Some zombies in the Romero canon can move quickly, use tools, and show problem-solving ability. These abilities are increasingly developed through the sequels. Also, the term " zombie " is never actually used. They are called "ghouls" instead. Zombies are also distinguished from the original by being capable of sprinting. Romero , which split the Night of the Living Dead sequels into two branches. Russo only lived to make the first film with his new partner Dan O'Bannon.

The The Return of the Living Dead series is more campy and humorous as well as more grotesque than Romero's more famous films. The zombies have human-level intelligence, specifically eat brains rather than just human flesh, and are much more difficult to kill. The first film lampshades its departures from the original by acknowledging the existence of Night of the Living Dead as a movie within its world. One character even exclaims, "You mean the movie lied?! Necropolis Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave 28 Days Later is a zombie film with Technically Living Zombies who are afflicted with the "rage virus," something akin to super-rabies.

Zombies are called "the infected", and can spread the condition through any bodily fluid transfer. In the Italian film Nightmare City a. City Of The Walking Dead the zombies are radioactive, drink blood instead of eating flesh, and can run. In the Spanish version, the origin is Demonic Possession and an exorcism going wrong in the American remake the zombies are afflicted by a disease described as similar to rabies and it's hinted that a mysterious tenant intentionally created the disease.

Blending Zombie Apocalypse with Our Werewolves Are Different , Mulberry Street gives us a virus that's transmissible by rats as well as humans fat chance keeping those out by boarding up the farmhouse windows Subverted in that the Virus goes into remission at sunrise, restoring victims to normal, albeit not until after the protagonists have killed off their loved ones in self-defense or mercy. ABR received this audiobook for free from the Submitted in exchange for an honest review.

This does not affect our opinion of the audiobook or the content of our review. There were certain things in this that really gave me chills! First off, zombies that talk?! That is an issue! My daughter and I had an entire conversation about this. When zombies can do things that are too human-like, then we have issues.

Why would zombies just stop running all of a sudden. Yes, they are dead, but those muscles were just recently dead. The ability to talk calls in the same question. The idea of this really gave me the creeps! And mostly from a cold. So, I really enjoyed this turn of events and how the author really went out of the way to make readers look at zombies differently. There were a few other areas where I was creeped out but really the talking thing was the pinnacle for me, and that was at the beginning.

The narrator did a freaking fantastic job of upping the creep factor to intense! Not often felt, even with horror, lately.

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