New Types of Zombies for your consideration
Panic Zombies. People infected with something akin to the rage virus that locks them into a perpetual state of blind panic. They aren’t hungry or even actively malicious, they’re just constantly hauling ass away from a perceived danger, and they’ll beat you to death if you’re in the way.Â
And you’ll inevitably end up in their way, because the horde never stops moving. They tear down the roads, trampling pedestrians, smashing open occupied cars and forcing entry into every building they come across. Not to kill the people inside (although they do that too) but just to find a good hiding space…. except they move on within an hour, convinced that it’s about to find them.Â
The ones in the countryside lurch towards the city, distantly remembering that streetlights and crowds afford some protection from what’s chasing them. The ones in the City flee to the country, distantly hoping that whatever’s chasing them will take longer to kill everyone in town. There’s no town or cabin remote enough that one of them won’t try to hide there…. and they aren’t willing to share their hiding spots with the people who’re already there.
Disproportionate Reaction Zombies. Infected who are outwardly human, complete with language, mannerisms, and memories….. and completely stripped of any emotional response to negative stimuli that doesn’t involve clawing the source to death, before going right back to whatever they were doing.
Society shambles on in a pathetic mockery of what came before. Entire Offices are filled with infected and a handful of human survivors, all going about their jobs. Every hour or so, someone tells an annoying joke at the water cooler and the sounds of mauling carry across the cube farm. Usually, this is ignored. Sometimes, a more sensitive infected prickles at the noise, blood pouring out of their nostrils, and they tear down the hall to murder the murderer. They trip a third infected on the way over, and they start clawing each other. Blood splashes on the pristine dress of a passing secretary. Her paper work is ruined. She reaches into her purse and pulls out a well-worn machete as blood starts to gush from her eyes.Â
A wave of violence starts to consume the office, Mayhem style, as the few uninfected workers sigh and head to the restroom to ride it out. It’s survivable at first, because they’re rarely the most irritating thing in the environment when these rolling gigabrawls go down. But in the long run it’s unsustainable, because the infected, when they return to docility, don’t notice anything wrong. They’ll stab a friend to death and remember them fondly in their next sentence, without being able to articulate exactly what they did. If you force them to acknowledge it directly, they find it quite annoying. And so it goes.
Eventually, the world is riddled with corpses, and the remaining infected are locked into a near constant state of rage from the frustration of trying to carry out their normal lifestyles while being unable to acknowledge that most of the people facilitating that lifestyle are dead. The infected queue up at the coffee shop for hours or days, unable to register that the barista has in two pieces behind the counter since she got an infecteds order wrong. They pack into bus stations, unable to acknowledge that the bus they’re waiting on his crashed into a telephone pole twenty feet away. Inevitably, someone sneezes, and everyone turns on each other. Uninfected survivors, if seen, are called upon to explain what’s happening, which they can’t do satisfactorily. This ends poorly.
After a few months, asking any variant of “Do you know what’s going on?” merits being instantly shot to death, and Vicious Taunts at a distance become a common way for the uninfected to vet each other.
Schroedinger’s Zombies. Standard issue Romero zombies, with the caveat that they fade out of our reality when no humans are within a few hundred feet of them, unconsciously retreating to a mirror dimension akin to the Upside Down from Stranger Things. Vast hordes march across the Midwest, undetectable to the human eye unless their course brings them through a populated town, or until it they inevitably hit one of the coasts. They can’t detect living humans while in their mirror dimension, so they’re forced to wander at random; zombie attacks are purely a numbers game.
 An entire industry springs up around trying to track where the zombies are likely to emerge, based on what areas have gone dark or reported an abnormal number of missing persons. The Parks department gets clever, building heavily fortified waystations throughout the interior, staffed with enough people to trigger the dimensional shift effect, in the hopes that they’ll be able to catch the edges of larger hordes and extrapolate the size from there. Towns build walls at the radius necessary to keep away the infected, holding back phantom armies that number in the thousands without being at all detectable. “Chance of Zombies” become another inclement condition like bad rain; one more thing to pay attention to in your morning weather report.
Over time, the world grows quieter. More and more towns seem to be empty, although they stop being empty when you try to loot them. As armored caravans tear down the crumbling highways, ghostly figures fade in and out of being in the fields, coming home for a confusing second before the living move on and the dead fade back out to their netherworld, only briefly stimulated.
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