It’s two in the afternoon, you’re starting to feel that after-lunch sleepiness when suddenly sirens go off and the Cathedral is thrown into chaos. A day you thought was only reserved for fiction has arrived: it’s a zombie apocalypse, and it’s time to use your brain before your brain gets used.
I contacted a few professors in the Dietrich School for their expertise on how to survive a horde of cranium-hungry, infectious, zombies.
This is the Dietrich School Zombie Survival Guide
Every fall term, Bard Ermentrout, a Distinguished Professor in the Math Department, hosts a class on Zombie math. More specifically, math on how fast the virus will spread. Ermentrout bases his math on two zombie strains: Romero-NLD1 and Boyle-28DL. Romero-NLD1 of course for the zombies in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and Boyle-28DL for Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. The Romero zombies are slower and not very coordinated while the Boyle zombies are cleverer.
Ermentrout talked me through the infectious math formula:
“In the standard well-mixed model with no mitigation, the equations are the usual HZ model: Human + Zombie = 2 Zombie. However, it is also possible that the humans could also kill the zombies with some sort of weapons that might be handy.”
He points out that the Cathedral may not have too many weapons available; maybe some scissors or a textbook. Elevators would be a no-go as they are confined spaces, and while stairs might wear out the zombies, you could also wind up cornered on one of the smaller, upper floors of the building.
Adam Lowenstein, the Director of Pitt’s Horror Studies Working group, Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program, and Board Member of the George A. Romero Foundation, has his own theories. He says the height of the Cathedral poses an advantage: You have a bird’s eye view of every zombie lumbering towards the Cathedral. This can be useful if you can round up and delegate other Cathy inhabitants into some sort of Cathy Resistance Army. It could also be a bleak view of how long you have before you’re done for.
Adding up all of these caveats would require a little more finessing of the zombie equation.
“In the simplest scenario, if there were, say 200 people in the Cathedral, then it would take roughly. log(200)/b time to convert half of them where b is the rate that zombies encounter humans and manage to bite them. In the Cathedral, b would be much smaller than in, say, Posvar since that doesn't have many stories. So I would back of the envelope conclude that the Cathedral may be the safest place” says Ermentrout.
It might also help that Pitt is home to the George A. Romero archival collection. Romero conducted most of his career in Pittsburgh, including filming Dawn of the Dead in Monroeville Mall. Lowenstein says that film would likely be the best depiction of what to expect if zombies took over the Cathedral, using the mall as a comparison.
“If we were to be experiencing a zombie apocalypse where we're looking at is a world that has been sort of closed off to us because of the zombie threat. You can take refuge inside and visit the nationality rooms to get a taste of what the outside world used to be like. So, there's that, [and] there's a dining facility on premises, [so] you've got your basic needs taken care of there. And I think most importantly, the cathedral is built in a way that you could imagine it being defensible in a zombie onslaught: there's a limited number of entrances [and] you can conceivably sort of fortify them in a way that the zombies can't get in. And then you can always retreat up to the next floor of the cathedral and try to work it out there, so on, all the way up until you get to the top, of course.”
There are also negatives, which Dawn of the Dead points out for us.
“No matter how well-fortified your space is, the zombies are always going to get in, because they have endless patience and endless numbers, and they will wait until the moment when you're not paying attention [to] come around,” says Lowenstein. “Another drawback of the Cathedral would be that so many faculty, students, and staff come there in their everyday life that when they become zombies, they may well be drawn back to visit. The same thing happened with the habitual shopping zombies at the mall in Dawn of the Dead; the zombies remember the places that were important to them in life.”
He also notes that if you escape out of the Cathedral there’s not a good way to evade the zombies. In the movie, they had a helicopter, and here on campus, I don’t think the PRT buses will be driving us off into the sunset of a possible franchise anytime soon.
Lowenstein says that horror offers all kinds of life lessons, and not just of the zombie-kind. Horror has always been used as a medium to explore what people are fearful of: disease, aging, grief, and so on. So, if you want to be as prepared as possible for any horror movie moment and be a “final girl” we have some options for you:
Lowenstein’s Horror Studies Working Group has a newsletter you can sign up for, or you can join one of his upcoming spring term classes.
Amy Murray Twyning, a teaching professor in the Department of English also recommends her favorite zombie apocalypse novel, The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey, as another possible guide to keep you safe. Plus, the English Department offers a few courses like Apocalypse and Horror Literature.
And finally, it’s always good to crunch the numbers and know your odds (and may they be ever in your favor). So why not slip in a course or two with Professor Ermentrout while you’re at it.
If all else fails, just try to not be the slowest runner in the group. Maybe adding the Stairmaster to your workout routine couldn’t hurt.