I Resent the Implication That I Have Become a Zombie of Some Sort

Honestly, just because I’m away from the blog for a day or two does not mean I’ve gone over to the undead side. Yes, my skin is pale and rotting. Yes, I find it hard to enunciate with a decaying jaw. Yes, I have a big steaming pile of tasty, tasty brains harvested from the screaming skulls of my former neighbors. What of it? Those things, in themselves, prove nothing. Nothing at all.

Damn it, losing one’s thumbs makes it hard to type.

Actually, forget I said that. Or mumbled it, at least.

Anyway, another day I’ll be away from the blog for most of the day. Hey, it happens.

In the interim, a project for you:

We all know that zombies are the monstrous creatures who crave the brains of the living. Create and describe the monstrous creatures who crave one of the three following organs of the living: Pancreas, gall bladder, lymphatic system. Because, honestly. Just eating the brains? Seems wasteful, even for monstrous creatures. Time to build a whole ecosystem of them shambling bastards.

I’ll check in later in the day to see how all y’all are doing with the project.

41 thoughts on “I Resent the Implication That I Have Become a Zombie of Some Sort

  1. Clearly the lymph will be craved by Lymph Vampires, who vant to suck your lymph. They need lymph and the white blood cells therein to sustain their constant fight against a deadly virus that they contracted. This virus was originally a harmless chicken virus that was intended to vaccinate the chickens against bacterial infection, but morphed into a deadly, lymph-vampire-creating virus when consumed by humans along with gouda cheese (don’t ask). They now must roam the streets during the day only (they can’t stand darkness, and collapse into a pile of soot if they ever are in total darkness) and find willing, or unwilling, donors to replenish their supply of macrophages and dendritic cells. At night they sleep in a tanning bed.

  2. Obviously, the zombified humans are followed by groups of zombie scavengers. (They didn’t make it into The Walking Dead for budget reasons, I assume.) There are the zombie crows and ravens first. They like the eyes, ears and other simple, easily-found squishy bits. Then come the cats. They scare off the birds and proceed to eat the skin. About the time they finish, rather large nasty looking zombie dogs show up. These guys scare off the cats. (Except for the few that stay to eat a couple of last bites – they get torn up by the dogs. Bad way to spend your zombie existence, only a couple of legs and unable to die. Dumb cats.) The dogs proceed to eat most of the remaining organs. The pancreas is, in fact, a popular organ, but the gall bladder is where it’s really at. It’s not very big so the biggest, meanest, nastiest zombie dog gets it. And we don’t mess with him. He scares the other ones away. In fact, if I happen to see him coming, I might just give him my gall bladder to get it over with.

  3. Zombies need brains because they have hardly any intelligence. So the pancrevore, gallovore, and lymphovore have more-or-less human intelligence but lack some other quality.

  4. The Gall Bladder zombies (Gallombies) are obviously in search of bile. They can be recognized by their three-piece suits and affinity for talk radio. They are frequently seen at parties consuming tea.

  5. Hmm, the gall bladder is traditionally the source of anger. Maybe gallovores are totally mellow creatures who calmly kill you and rip out your internal organs.

  6. Well, everyone has heard the story of Dr. Samuel Gall, inventor of the gallbladder (Lehrer, 1959). Less well known is that he became a very embittered man late in life and wished that he had not given mankind such a wondrous gift. So very, very embittered, in fact that upon his death his soul did not go on to its eternal reward (a room full of cheddar cheese with tasteful curtains and antimacassars) but remained on the earth as a revenant. This undead beastie has a very simple, horrible desire — to take back his gift to the world. And so it lurches from home to home, pinning unsuspecting couch potatoes and removing their gall bladders with its sharp teeth.

    It is a terrible, tormented spirit, not least because it is shamed and haunted by the cries of its victims: “That wasn’t so bad, actually” and “I guess I didn’t really need that after all.” Fear the gallrevenant, children.

  7. Fools, everybody knows that the pancreas is the favored food of the dreaded Midwestern Sewer Eel, which can chimney-crawl up pipes like a slimy, very hungry ninja. It waits patiently in toilet bowls until someone takes a seat, then it feeds. Trust me, you don’t want to know the details.

  8. It doesn’t get much play from the movies or literature on the topic, but there is a whole undead, post-zombie apocalypse ecosystem. Mother nature does not like waste, after all, even when she’s being a crabby, undead-loving bitch.

    Of note is the scavenger of blood & lymph. It is a leather-winged beast roughly the size of a crow, but more reminiscent of a mosquito with tentacles for legs. While having its blood-draining proboscis jammed into the jugular of the zombie-eaten, it grasps the body with its tentacles. Needles at the center of each sucker on the tentacles are used to drain the muck from the lymph nodes. After all, the bodies of those who don’t rise again still fight off the zombie infection to the very end. It leads to some plump & delicious lymph nodes.

  9. My wife is giving up her gall bladder today (by a doctor, not a zombie). I will ask what they do with the removed part. If they are selling them a la “My Life as A White Trash Zombie”, we want a cut!

  10. For those unfortunate enough to be selected as a host for the underwhelmingly named Adhesive Slug, a prolonged and painful death await. The Adhesive Slug is shaped much like a sauce covered grain of rice, making even the most vigilant person unaware that he could be ingesting his eventual demise. What appears to be “sauce” is a protective coating that allows the slug to survive the journey through the stomach to the intestinal tract where it bores through the wall and migrates to the gallbladder. There, the slug will coat begin to coat itself in bile as well as consume it for nourishment. As the slug adheres bile to its body, the host on occasion feels pain and will seek out medical treatment. Most doctors, having done an ultrasound of the area, pass the growing slug off as a gallstone and tell the host it is not necessary to surgically remove a solitary gallstone. The host goes home, confident in the doctor’s assessment. Woe! The slug continues to grow, the bile slowly turning to a sludge, viscous and purulent, providing more nourishment to this monster. Soon, the host’s gallbladder becomes to small to contain the growing slug. It begins to consume the walls of the organ, seeking to escape its host and find another slug with which to breed. The emergence from the host’s body is almost always a nocturnal event, the poor bastard writhing in pain in his bed until the slug gnaws through the abdominal wall and crawls out, the vile creature the size and shape of an American football. Oozing down the usually dead body (some survive the emergence long enough to see what caused their pain and eventual death), the slug moves of into the night, seeking a mate with which to create the next generation of Adhesive Slug.

  11. Not all undead are humans.

    Anyway, a lymph eating monster is thirsty. Their skin would be dry and flaky and their fleshy bits would be sunken in; cadaverous, even. (I slay me.) They would be dark and shadowy creatures, the color of bruises. And deeply creepy–their nails are pointed, long, and perfect for surgically extracting lymph nodes.

  12. “Tonsilectomy” read the sign lashed to the side of the traveling doctor’s trailer. He was a gaunt individual, the doctor, pale with dry cracked lips. He’d come through Scrabbleton every couple of years, always right around the time two or three of the younger generation were in dire need of just such a service. Marge thought it was terrible good luck when she saw the trailer parked up along the grange, since little Timmy had been having trouble swallowing now for a few days.

  13. Those who crave gall bladders? I assume you are referring to the notorious Bladder Meinhof Gang.

    I surrendered my gall bladder last summer to someone who claimed he was a surgeon.

  14. When someone dies and becomes a zombie, so far as I know, their skull is generally intact and presumably contains a brain. Can a zombie eat its own brain? Do two zombies eat the brains of each other? Or are there zombie zombies who shamble about eating the brains of zombies? This may explain why the whole Earth hasn’t become zombies.

    What eats the all the bits that fall off of zombies as they shamble? Are they also undead? Somewhere there must be colonies of undead bacteria.

  15. Unlike zombies – hideous, disgusting creatures whose condition is the result of a virus invading human flesh – the lymphovores are lovely, ethereal creatures resembling wispy clouds. They congregate in fog banks and attack via an exquisitely painful forced osmosis, in which the foggy, foggy tendrils wrap around the limbs and bodies of their victims, after which all the fat and water are violently sucked out, leaving little more than desiccated shreds.

    The condition causing lymphovoria is spread pneumonically, via airborne spores. The initial symptoms include intractable thirst, followed by frenzy or derangement (lymphatio). The doomed sufferer becomes rapidly thinner, starts to wear fashionable clothing and embarks on a modeling career. Although not yet able to suck fat and water out of other living beings, just the photographic image of these proto-lymphovores can suck brain cells out of casual observers.

  16. The Pancreatus is a small, rodent-like animal that has a constant need for Insulin. It has red, glowing eyes, and large nose and razor sharp teeth and a pointed. flexible tongue that envenoms it’s victim.. It normally goes after sedentary life forms, like Video Gamers and Software Developers. It has also been known to exude the aroma of popcorn, chocolate and pizza, depending on the subspecies. The victims wil be attracted to the aromas and will be stung b y the Pancreatus’ tongue. It will then merrily drill into the body and consume the pancreas, leaving the victim helpless and dependent on an Insulin pump.

  17. When the USA was suffering the Zombie apocalypse, her southern neighbor Mexico had to take steps to protect itself. A secret laboratory was created in a meat factory to develop weapons and antidotes to fight the zombies. A freakish accident with some radioactive isotopes causes some piles of meat to spontaneously come back to life. The only way it can sustain itself is to gather more of the lymph that makes up it’s basic substance. The creature is blob like and sticks to floors, walls and ceilings where it springs upon it’s prey and sucks the lymph of it’s victims. The locals have named it the Chupachorizo (sausage sucker)

  18. Lymphatic system: The Wuchereria Bancrofti causes an infection of the lymphatic system and can lead to elephantiasis

    I know we’re supposed to create one but I’m full of use-less knowledge and thought it would interesting to put something up here that really attacks a system.
    Because sitting on testicals the size of Rock & Roll concert beach balls is more messed up than anything a zombie could do…think that that.

  19. Well, it’s not really about those organs, but it has a slight alternative to brain eating: http://t.co/rNUG9jS

    Although, if I remember right, in some films, brains aren’t really specified, as any bite on the body will do (i’m thinking of “Planet Terror” here….

  20. So far as I can tell most of the respondents have done something to DESCRIBE the monstrous creatures as assigned by SCALZombIe; I want to see some posts with the CREATE part going on: photos or it isn’t CREATED.

  21. The liver seems straightforward enough. The liver will be craved by zomboholics who have lost the use of their own. Brighter but more erratic than traditional zombies, zomboholics are capable of fairly rapid movement, but never in a straight line. The yellow eyes and skin let you know that you are facing a zomboholic. If you’re close enough to smell the pungent breath, it’s probably too late for you.

  22. Excerpt from the New York Times food blog

    New York was witness to an unfortunate outbreak of mutant gormandism during yesterday’s taping of an episode of Iron Chef America. Irritable food writer Jeffry Steingarten was on the panel and it appears he may be patient zero in this outbreak. The secret ingredient last night was the Micronesian delicacy Bikini Atoll Long Pig. Steingarten was sampling the sweetbreads sautéed in butter with garlic foam and micro greens when he became more agitated than usual. He began moaning and mumbling “pancreas” over and over. Before paramedics could arrive, he suffered a seizure, and then ripped the still beating heart and internal organs from co-panelist Karine Bahkoum. As Steingarten began noisly feasting on Bahkoum, the situation degenerated.

    As every foodie knows it is notoriously difficult to isolate the mutagenic portions of Bikini Atoll Long Pig from the edible portions. Its like Fugu in many ways. It appears that the challenger, renowned science fiction writer John Scalzi, was not up to the task.

    Celebrity food network host Alton Brown at first appeared to have escaped the mêlée unharmed, but we are now told this may not be the case. Review of footage from one of the Kitchen Stadium cameras shows Brown sneaking a portion of the offending sweetbreads from those not used in plating. His whereabouts are currently unknown. Unfortunately it appears that he may have attended a private cocktail party with other FoodNetwork personalities later that evening. Several persons known to have attended that event are also unaccounted for.

    Anyone seeing Brown, Paula Deen, Rachel Ray, Guy Fieri or either of the Neelys should report them to the CDC’s Zombie Eradication Squad immediately. New Yorkers are warned to not approach any chef, restaurateur or foodie behaving oddly (or more oddly than usual). Restaurant patrons are also cautioned against eating any esoteric foods…as mutant gourmands often take over trendy restaurant kitchens and began processing the staff to serve to unsuspecting patrons. If you cannot readily identify whether it is dairy, fish or vegan you should probably avoid it this week.

  23. I’ve always wondered, what would happen if a zombie ate a brain contaminated with mad cow disease prions?

  24. If a zombie ate a mad cow brain, it wouldn’t notice … there’s no intelligence to destroy.

    Which is why I personally do not think there is any “slow food” movement among zombies to eat people nose to tail, or more properly brains to toenails … unless you find me a zombie columnist named Bittman.

    Which could happen. Except that you’d get someone like Reg Shoe, who isn’t really much of a zombie, of Mr. Slant, who is so indistinguishably from an ordinary corporate lawyer that the only way you can tell he’s a zombie is that he skips lunch. Which a lot of corporate lawyers do when they’re busy anyway, thus invalidating even that.

  25. Pete Abrams already figured that out for Sluggy Freelance. His zombies can’t automatically replace body cells as they die, so the smart ones eat a carefully balanced diet of brains, skin, blood, etc to keep themselves in a condition almost indistinguishable from normal humans. The dumber ones at least figure out what they need to keep their intelligence, hence the “brains! brains!”

  26. Tully: actually it’s the thyrovores’ victims who are sluggish and inactive. Thanks to our intake of large quantities of thyroxine, the thyrovores themselves are thin, lively and sparky. And we have a profitable relationship with other classes of zombie, because once someone’s been attacked by a thyrovore he becomes slow-moving and makes easy prey for the other classes.

    …I mean, “they”. They have a profitable relationship. I am a normal person. Like you. I just, er, drink a lot of espresso and go for runs.

  27. For all of your organ-disposal needs, think Cthulhu – for when you’re tired of the lesser of the 2 evils.

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