The Jester wrote:Well... If we conduct a threat analysis, we find that it could very easily be worse. The zombie didn't stop eating it's first victim to go after the police man who hailed him, and didn't even stop eating when attacked and shot. If subsequent zombies follow this same pattern, they pose a virtually insignificant threat.
Not necessarily. Consider that with the level of intelligence normally attributed to a zombie, a police officer with a firearm likely wouldn't be discernable as anything more than another meal. They'd probably be unable to link the firearm with the pain sensation from being shot, if they could discern the pain at all.
Therefore, from the zombie's perspective, it has two targets, both good prospective meals, one is closer than the other. If it detects pain at all, it probably associates it with the closest of the two targets, rather than the firearm-wielding one farther away.
Since the zombie doesn't have the intelligence to have a concept of death, it would most likely focus on eating over self-preservation, especially when confronted with a potential hazard that it can't recognise, like a firearm.
Now, if the zombie didn't already have a meal item, it probably would have attacked the officer. So we reduce everything to the age-old saying "I don't have to outrun the zombie, I just have to outrun the slowest survivor".
This message brought to you by a man whose teenage years were almost entirely subsumed by zombie movies.