Are Zombies People? Does Life Continue After the End?

There has been a debate going on since the 1960s regarding whether or not zombies are people. Two years ago, Dr Gary Miller was shot during a church service for performing Zombie Removal Procedures, and the debate has been raging ever since.

Dr Miller saved the lives of countless spouses, children, relatives, and friends of the zombies he had removed. "When my husband came home from work," Angela Sadako told us, "he told me he wasn't feeling well. He was sweating profusely, and slurring his words. By the middle of the night, his eyes went white, and he was clutching at me in bed. I almost didn't make it. I called Dr Miller on my cell phone as I ran out of the house. Gary saved my life."

Some, however, call Gary a murderer, and consider the lives of the "sickly" people Dr Miller had ended, such as that of Angela's husband.

Necrophiles argue that "personhood" status cannot be revoked once it has been granted: A free man cannot be made a slave, so how is a zombified corpse not considered a person? Necrophiles see hope in the "personhood" of zombies: They point to their remarkable ability to feed themselves, that they can still hear, smell, and see; they believe that it is possible to retrain them by way of positive reinforcement. They have not accounted for the fact that many zombies are missing parts of their anatomy that would be considered important in order to function, and also cannot account for the copious amount of blood lost in the course of zombification.

Deadists, however, believe that zombies are in fact dead, and point to the fact that millions of lives have been lost to zombies and trying to retrain them. In fact, they claim, New York City, Chicago, Tokyo, Beijing, Washington DC, San Francisco, the entire African continent, and all of the Middle East have been consumed by the Zombie Plague. If the Necrophiles had their way, claim the Deadists, all of humanity would be eradicated.

However, because Necrophiles see no clear distinction between zombies and live humans, they aren't concerned.

A court case in 1985 was supposed to have shed some light on this controversial subject, but the plaintiff, on whose behalf a Necrophiliac organization filed the lawsuit, allegedly attacked the stenographer, and there has been no further word on either side for 26 years. State officials claim that employees are terrified to open the doors to the courtroom where the event took place.

About 50% of the 10 million people in the United States (sample consisting only of those who were able to answer the question; zombie rights groups argue that the study was inherently biased against the vast majority of zombies. The organization claims that it did try to get the opinions of zombies on the issue, but too many of their local representatives never returned to headquarters) believe that zombies are people. 40% are quite convinced that zombies are truly dead, and 10% are still unsure. 100% of respondents have seen someone become a zombie. Republican members of Congress have been trying to pass legislation making it illegal to incapacitate a zombie, but many of these congressmen have been themselves caught shooting zombies in the head "out of necessity." Several congressmen this author has personally spoken to are very worried about the effect the current situation has had on the global economy.

Asked what she thought of the Zombie Plague, Sarah Palin said, "Well, you know, they're people. Bristol's out in the back yard. We have to keep her on a leash until she gets better, but I don't like those awful noises she makes all the time. And she ate our dog last month. We're doing the best we can to give her the help she needs."

Religious leaders were more hopeful: "This is the Ressurrection at hand!" Many Pentecostal and Millennialist believers were eager to catch the plague, seeing it as God's reward for good behavior. Becky Fisher noted, as she recalled many of the children at her summer camp eager to be zombified, "a few hours of intense pain and suffering is a small price to pay for an eternity with Jesus." No one has seen the children in at least a year.

Scientists are reasonably certain that zombies are dead. They point to the terrible stench that emanates from corpses, and say that the discoloration and gangrene consistently seen on zombified persons match perfectly normal human decomposition. They claim that the Zombie Plague is a viral infection first found in Africa, and called it a Rabies-Ebola hybrid. Scientists claimed that the virus was a consequence of the African practice of eating tainted bushmeat. They admitted that diseases spread and die out in communities where bushmeat is consumed, but that this disease was particularly virulent, combined with the fact that

"UN health officials and local communities were woefully unprepared for this kind of outbreak. Because symptoms are not seen for 6-12 hours after exposure, health officials and suppliers were zombified on airplanes and in airports, and the disease spread extremely rapidly, spreading from Africa to Europe, Asia and the Middle East in just two days. The disease spread to America by business and recreational travel."

There is currently no cure for zombification, as scientists point to the brain being mostly dead and rotted away. "There is no way to restore brain function to the degree that a normal person would have. The brain is mostly killed by the virus, except for the hypothalamus."