Zombie Apocalypse Begins at Disney

Zombie Apocalypse Begins at Disney

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The dreaded zombie apocalypse
Began one summer day
In Disneyworld.

Where a Chinese tourist
His wife and two children
Had gone on a group tour
With twenty-five other Chinese guests.

He did not know that he was patient zero
In China COVID 19
morphed into COVID 25.

COVID 25 was incredibly effective
At killing people
But the few who survived
Became bloodthirsty, crazed rabid.

As COVID 25 merged COVID
With rabies
One bite was all it took
To transmit the zombie virus.

About noon the change occurred
By five PM the entire group
Had been infected.

The infected spread out
Across the park
Infecting thousands
By the end of the day.

Within two days
Disneyworld was closed
And quarantined.

Guard dogs patrolling
As the dogs could tell
Who was infected and who was not.

But the damage was done.
COVID 25 spread rapidly
The vaccines were not effective yet
Social distancing and mask requirements
Difficult to enforce due to pandemic fatigue.

Within one month
World civilization began to fall apart
Travel was banned.
Anti-Asian riots
spread everywhere.

COVID 25
Became a civilization
Ending plague.



On May 30th, 1906, Hersheypark in Pennsylvania opened. Initially a park just for the enjoyment of businessman Milton S. Hershey's employees, it has since become one of the more popular public amusement parks in the U.S.

Write a poem or story set at an amusement park where something goes wrong... something other than one of the rides.

Maybe the food contains hallucinogens, or the animatronic mascots start attacking the patrons, or the life support system on the first lunar amusement park breaks at
the height of tourist season. Be creative!
Author note:

Although I don’t think COVID was an escaped bioweapon, advances in genetics are advancing rapidly. Pretty soon someone could bioengineer a virus combing the worst of COVID (rapid transmission) with elements of plague, and rabies for example. Most Zombie novels and films start off with a mysterious flue like illness in China and rapidly spreads around the world infecting millions of people ending civilization. Sometimes it starts in Russia or Africa but usually in China, sometimes naturally occurring, other times an escaped bio-weapon.

I think the best zombie novel is World War Z where the zombie flu started out as an escaped bioweapon in Wuhan, China.

One could theoretically target only certain types of people like Jews, Africans, and White people, male or female. Targeting the LGBTQ would be a bit more difficult as we don’t yet have a genetic code for being gay figured out yet. The key is to have a distinctive genetic code for the virus to attack. As AI systems are developed further, no doubt some mad scientist could use AI research to target specific people with a new bio-weapon.

We are not ready for the next pandemic. Given pandemic fatigue, and the general distrust of the medical community, public health officials, and science in general as well as the spread of misinformation across the internet, it will be hard to re-impose social distancing measures, mask mandates, and vaccines, even though these measures work and save lives. The good news is that vaccine development has developed a lot and AI is being used to help guide the next generation of vaccines. If only we can convince people to take the vaccines, pr stay home, or wear a damn mask….