Mischiviktus said:
There's plenty of online zombie strategy guides to look up. Also shooting a zombie in the heart kills them too, last I checked the heart pumps the blood, and reanimation takes a corpse and makes everything work again. Big ol' frickin' article about it (I really wish I could find it, fun reading (contains info about mind controlling wasps, plants and fungus, as well as stuff about how it causes insects to kill themselves and etc)), basically said a shot to the heart is as effective as a head shot, as destroying the heart prevents the blood to be pumped, this re-killing it.
It is interesting how Zombies can be analogy for highly simplified humans in a highly aggressive or "Berserker" state, like a fight-or-flight response or drug induced rage for war-fighting.
During a strong stress response, blood flow to your non-vital organs like kidneys, Liver, intestines and so on is reduced so much you could get an incredibly grievous wound to one of those organs but would bleed relatively slowly as the artery feeding it is constricted. This is also the source of "butterflies in your stomach" if your are nervous,
Priority blood flow is to the muscles, so much that you can still move around and attack after massive blood loss. Higher brain functions get low priority in bloodflow, just the lower "basic" brain functions like instinctive actions.
As to lung shots, I read an interesting account from a Doctor from the Crimean War, back then medical practice was extremely limited, all he did was take notes and made very little active intervention - and then it was just to note when a limb was gangrenous and then hack it off.
Anyway, he noted the surprisingly high survival rate amongst soldiers shot through the lungs, even both lungs by .30 cal bullets. They would have extreme difficulty breathing but often the wounds would eventually seal, the lungs re-inflate and heal all on their own. This was also noted by big game hunters who found that animals they had successfully killed they found the animals seemed to have been shot through both lungs by .50 calibre bullets yet just "walked it off". Seems lung shots are only deadly if a major artery of the lung is punctured and the lungs fill with blood.
If zombies had been mutated by their infection to have highly prioritised bloodflow at a low pressure with extremely effective clotting factor, immune to all pain, fear or discomfort. I can see how you could empty a pistol clip into one of these ghoul's torso without them even breaking step.
But one small caveat on shots to the heart, even battlefield surgeons and big game hunters have found - respectively - that soldiers and bison can be shot through the heart and still stand and fight.
The key is how a bullet causes damage, a relatively low velocity round-nose bullet (1000-1500feet/sec) or high velocity
pointed bullet (~3000feet/sec) shooting straight through flesh, including the heart will cause little disruption outside the bullet path and tends not to actually crush the flesh in front of it, more just stretch and tear a small path.
Through tough muscle (like the heart) the resulting wound is not a round hole but a cleft, shorter than the bullet is wide. The interesting thing is how much this is self sealing, and as the muscle tenses it seals even more tightly. So as blood flows into the chamber that the bullet shot through as the muscle tenses to squeeze the blood out it seals the hole.
There have been many recorded incidents of people being shot through the heart and lived without immediate surgical intervention. Providing the shock of a bullet through the heart doesn't cause fibulation or arrhythmia, but a punch to the chest could almost as equally cause that.
This is why almost all medium-large game hunters are now legally mandated to use hollow-point expanding ammunition, as when that hits the heart, and it mushrooms to create such a wide frontal area it will leave a massive jagged hole through the heart and may even completely burst it. At the very least they use a flat-nosed "wad-cutter" bullet, who's blunt surface will cut a hole at least the diameter of the barrel.
So that's how one of these theoretical zombies could survive being shot in the chest, including the heart. The solution: expanding or at least flat-nosed bullets.
Also, if a long, thin, & pointed rifle bullet "yaws" (flips on its side) as it passes through the body that will have the same effect as a mushrooming bullet, it may also fragment = incredible damage.
cabooze said:
The book, Zombie survival guide explains the matter fully. When a zombie has been fully converted, they do not use any organs, other than the brain. They do not process food and their blood becomes stale and dries. This makes the heart quite worthless, as the zombie can live, even when the head has been severed. tip:when beheading zombies, make sure to have thick protection on your ankles. death by severed head probably isn't how most people would want to go out.
Max Brooks's book right?
My problem with that approach is if the zombies really do just dry up then we have firmly moved out of the area of sci-fi into pure magical fantasy.
I have mentioned before, life can thrive literally ANYWHERE that there is water... but without water there is absolutely no life. It is almost a universal rule: water = life, no-water = no-life.
And that includes the undead, consciously they may no longer be living but they must still be metabolising and have a some hierarchy of bodily functions. If they are simply corpses that have been "animated" by some voodoo spell, well then they could do the same with any inanimate object, with a puppet, a cutlery collection, go poltergeist on your ass.
If that is the case the solution is not to bother attacking the reanimated undead but target the source of their control. If it is magic, there must be some logic behind it, there must be some way to stop that "power" over them.
