A Zombie History Lesson (Disney's ZOMBIES)

Lesson 1: The Outbreak

(Here's a little stand-alone ZOMBIES one-shot, but this theory is gonna come up in small doses in my other fics!

I made a post on Tumblr a while back with my theory about the "zombies" actually being mutants and how the Z-bands work in relation to that, and since a lot of my headcanons that are going into the one-shots revolve around this theory, I thought it'd useful to have it here, and that meant writing a story to explain it! And it seems like a good idea to post it separately, cuz it can really be it's own thing outside of the one-shot collections. This is written from the POV of an unnamed zombie, though I am thinking of it as my OC/zombiesona Lizzy, who may or may not appear in a fic at some point, I really don't know

So, anyway, here's what I think went down in Seabrook after the outbreak...)

Fifty years ago, there was an accident at Seabrook Energy Plant. Everyone knows about it – about the outbreak. You've heard the story, right? An accident involving lime soda set off the apocalypse. Well, there's a lot more to it than that. And the "zombies"? Not exactly zombies. I mean, you can call us zombies. We call ourselves zombies. We do look like zombies, and we do move like zombies, and we do sound like zombies. Without our Z-bands, at least. I guess they don't teach them what really happened back then on the humans' side of town. They don't really like to talk a lot about it over here, either, but we still know. We are told about our own history. What happened to our grandparents fifty years ago. It's a long story, but you know what? You should probably hear it.

You know how it started – with the spill. Someone was dumb enough to leave a bottle of soda lying around in a nuclear power plant, and someone else was dumb enough to knock it over. Things got out of control pretty fast; electronics going haywire, soda mixing with chemicals, explosions, mass panic, the works. Noxious green gas came seeping out of every crack. The whole plant was evacuated but it didn't do much to help. The haze blew west when in rolled out of the doors and windows like a thick fog and not one of those people could escape it in time. Once they inhaled it, they were gone. They all got sick, really bad, really fast, or that's how it seemed. This wasn't how radiation poisoning was supposed to work, but this was a totally unique incident.

Within hours, their heart rates were dropping to nearly nothing, leaving their skin pale, their breathing harsh and shallow and their veins bulging. Their muscles constricted and loosened in all the wrong places, making their movements stiff and their speech slurred and guttural. Their eyes sunk in, dark and red. It flipped a switch in their brains and soon whatever impulse control they once had was gone. Long forgotten feral instincts kicked in. Cravings for flesh and brains. They became savage, ready to attack, to kill if needed, to hunt to survive. But, somehow, they were still alive. The radiation had mutated them, not killed them. Don't ask me how, but something about that lime soda must have altered the effects. Who'd have thought? Over the coming days, the so-called monsters' hair started growing in a lime green, a reminder of the stupid, stupid mistake that made them this way.

The west was overrun by the mutants and when they came stalking towards the east side, the humans left there saw what looked to them like dead and dying bodies up and moving, shambling about in search of prey. Zombies. The horrifically pale skin, the red eyes, the loosely hanging jaws and eerily stiff movements. These were zombies. So they thought.

Some people were lost to the zombie hordes, others were bitten, maimed, permanently scarred. It's hard to think about that now, that our own grandparents could do those things, when we knew them when they were stable. We knew who they really were, still the same people they had been before the accident, just.. altered. Like all of us.

Reinforcements were called in to push them back and detain them but it was all too clear that their mutated muscles were far stronger and far more durable than an average human's: it was nearly impossible to stop them or hurt them.

That's when the wall was built, to divide the two sides of Seabrook – the mutants and their unfortunate victims were barricaded out.

People were scared – scared of their former neighbours, friends, even family. They'd witnessed them in the worst possible state. The image stuck. Every scientist and doctor still living in Seabrook, and some called in from neighbouring towns, worked to find a solution, a cure, anything. And as they did, the zombie patrol was formed. Mostly police officers and other "trained specialists". Trained in what exactly, I don't know. And now they were getting even more special training. The patrol was sent into Zombie Town – what they had started calling the west side of Seabrook – to bring back test subjects.

They ran test after test, looking for something that might bring the restrained zombie-mutants in their containment facilities back to some level of sentience. After some time, there came a sign of promise; electric shocks could temporarily relax the muscles, increase the heart rate and stimulate the inactivated brain cells, which meant strapping them into electric-chair-style machines. The jolts of electricity were painful, but they got the results they wanted, if only for a short period of time. The zombies could move better, speak better, think better, but it didn't last long. They needed a continuous electric current flowing through them for it to really work, for them to be "normal" again. They were dragged back to Zombie Town.

Back in Zombie Town, the ones who had been left would get violent, territorial. They attacked each other, but it wasn't so easy for one to kill the other. But the test subjects, they were different now. Less threatening. Less savage. And way less likely to bite and claw and attack on sight. They retained the slightest traces of the "cure" for a short time, capable of thought or speech to an extent. That was when the beginnings of Zombie-tongue came about. New (or altered) words that their facial muscles were capable of voicing and it took little thought to piece them together with less rules and less structure than English. More test subjects were taken and each time, they returned with a little more humanity, if still feral and essentially living in dying bodies. A community was building.

The patrol kept working. The Z-bands are relatively new – there's been a lot of other devices over the years. The first looked something like a battery pack on a collar, worn around the neck, which shocked the zombies at regular intervals. Not perfect (nowhere near perfect), but it got the job done. They were tried out on zombies still in Zombie Town this time, and on a larger number. The batteries would wear out sooner or later, but they lasted long enough for the zombie subculture to grow, and for them to once again have real relationships with each other. The patrol infiltrated Zombie Town to replace the collars and, seeing their success, brought more. Things were looking up – the zombie society was growing, becoming more defined – but not for long.

This was a threat. As far as the humans, particularly the zombie patrol, could tell, this was a mass gathering of zombies who could turn on them at any moment. It didn't matter that they were finally living normal lives. The humans couldn't let go of the old image they had of monsters terrorising their town. The government issued regulations: uniforms (to identify them, as if it wasn't obvious enough already), no pets (they might eat them), no meat in their diets (it might trigger those old cravings) and no being out after dark. Once the humans felt they could trust the collars were working, zombies were allowed to work in Seabrook, but only work. They lived in Zombie Town. And only the most menial of jobs. And nothing that involved direct contact with humans.

The collars were replaced with a different device after a few years, then that was replaced, then updated, again and again, until the Z-band. They can be charged, with the battery needing to be replaced twice a year. This was the closest to normal the zombies had ever been able to live. The consistent electromagnetic pulses emitted by the bands is enough to stimulate the mutated genes, though nothing could ever change the lime green hair. The constant reminder. But the zombies learned to find some pride in that, and in a lot of things. We'd come far. Seabrook might label us as different, and therefore wrong, but to us, it's who we are.

Besides, I've realised a thing or two since the integration began at the start of the school year. Did you ever notice, there's a lot of talented athletes here? Cheerleaders, mostly. With strong, durable muscles. So maybe they can't throw themselves against the concrete and bounce back up without so much as a scratch, but some of them do seem to take a tumble pretty well.

Some people wonder how Seabrook came to have such an impressive cheer squad. I can't help but wonder how many of those unaffected humans were bitten all those years ago...

It's all in the genes, you know?