This is not a story or even an outline of a story. It’s my brainstorming for an idea for a story. In this post, I flesh out some ideas for a writing project I’m working on, tentatively called “Plague of Dead.”
During the Late Middle Ages, a bubonic plague pandemic wiped out half the population of Europe. The “Pestilence,” as it was called by contemporaries, was later recounted by historians as “The Black Death.”
But what if the Black Death was not just a bubonic plague? What if it was a zombie plague? What if whenever someone died of the Black Death, they arose again as a zombie within a few minutes of death?
The zombies of this world are not your standard dumb, sluggish zombies. In the beginning, they are as nimble and intelligent as they were in life. Perhaps they are even more intelligent and cunning than they were in life, because a group of zombies working together may possess a sort of hive mentality with ability to coordinate with each other without speaking.
Newly risen zombies appear as they did upon death. They possess awareness that their bodies are decomposing and that at a certain stage of decomposition, their bodies become useless to them and the infection dies along with the body. It is this awareness coupled with the instinct to keep the virus alive that drives the zombies to attack the living and spread the infection to new hosts.
New zombies may organize and lead other zombies to attack the living. They may set up traps or even disguise themselves as living people in order to find clever ways to attack and spread the disease. The disease is highly contagious and the newer zombies know it. I say “newer zombies” because as their brains decay, the zombies gradually lose their intelligence and their ability to think for themselves. In the late stages of decay, the zombies follow the instructions of their leaders mindlessly and they move sluggishly, since their muscles have decayed as well. The newer zombies also know that they are racing against time to spread the disease before their brains and bodies decay to the point that they can no longer effectively spread the plague.
So the world is full of these zombies who start out smart and cunning, but eventually become mindless and slow. As the living people begin to understand what is happening, they start organizing against the zombies. Some groups actively attack zombies and burn their bodies in an attempt to stop the contagion. Other groups, more wary of getting infected, try to hide in remote places to wait out the disease.
Since it is the 14th century, there is no knowledge of pathogens and firearms are extremely rare. Most people, when faced with a zombie, would attempt to cut off the head to stop it. While doing this would effectively stop the zombie (or maybe even kill it for good), it wouldn’t stop the person from catching the highly contagious Black Death and eventually become a zombie.
There will be many instances of traps set by intelligent zombies, ambushes, disguised zombies, and zombies tricking living people into getting infected with the plague. The only way to really eradicate the zombie Black Death is to avoid contact between healthy and infected people until all of the zombies decompose to the point where they can no longer move, and thus can no longer spread the disease to new hosts.
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