Zombies Lived

This piece written by Darksyde at Daily Kos should start you a shivering in the dark. Real-life zombies, brought to you by that most famous of plagues, the Black Death.

by Darksyde

The near full Moon creeps toward zenith on the West Coast, and somewhere over the lonely Pacific Ocean, Midnight Breaks: The Witching Hour is at hand. Halloween is just around the corner, and soon homemade ghoulish gals and junior ghosts will prowl US streets seeking a sugary or salty snack. All in fun, all for show. What a delightful tradition Halloween is. In that spirit, gather thee round Kossacks, dim the lights, and hear a true Dark Tale from the DarkSyde.

Way back in the 'good ole days' of 1347, those carefree times of wanton slaughter, religious torture, and massive infant mortality, another abomination arose far more gruesome than any mere manmade method of killing. It swept across Eurasia, smothering it like a thick blanket, leaving many of the dark, foreboding icons we’ve come to associate with All Hallow’s Eve still hidden and lurking in its deadly wake. Make no mistake: this thriller is not the modern costumed version of a fake fright night; children adorned with made up faces highlighted in dark eye shadow with blackened glossy fingernails. Oh no, that is all just a game my friends.

This was a real Horror Show premiering in the Middle Ages written by Mother Nature gone mad. At its crescendo, entire communities were abandoned to the afflicted and dying; some burned to the ground intentionally or by accident. Leaving animated quasi-zombies oozing dark blood through cracked, blistered skin, stumbling hopelessly through the ruins and streets in mobs, dying en masse, with chunks of dead meat dropping off their disfigured bodies, flies buzzing around them, maggots already crawling through the flesh of the barely living. At times, useless eyes bulged or dangled from bleeding sockets escorted by clouds of gnats. If a team of demented bioweapons researchers led by Stephen King possessed by the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe had set out to conjure up a more terrifying apocalyptic vision, they would have been hard pressed to spin a more macabre fiction, than this sickening historical reality: The Black Death.

No one knew from whence it came or when it might depart. And while science can now explain the basics of infectious disease, what few people understand is, it’s only a theory ...

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