Burning Zombies: Yea or Nay?

So you’ve blown the heads off of a pack of undead marauders and now you’ve got infected corpses laying all over the front lawn for the homeowners association to raise hell about. What should you do? When should you do it? How? Let’s get right down to it and see what’s what!

First things first, when it comes to fire, we should be sure that we only use it as a tool for removal of the dispatched Zombie. The worst thing you can do is whip up some sort of clever fire-spewing flame thrower device and hose down the living dead with it. The fire will ultimately burn out the contagion laced brains of these poor souls, but in the meantime you’ll have a terrific walking/crawling/running bonfire traipsing around catching everything around it on fire too. This is extremely unfortunate if you’d prefer to keep your surroundings (or self) from being burnt to the ground. I know that I would!

Now that we’ve got any delusions of Rambo-esque glory out of the way, what can be done with fire? First, it has got to be hot, hot fire. Not” hot time, summer in the city” Lovin’ Spoonful hot. We’re talking blast furnace hot. The heat has to be intense enough so as to render any biological contaminant denatured. Potential sources for this kind of inferno include but are not limited to: Medical waste incinerators in hospitals, smelting furnaces in zinc or iron refineries or industrial size glass blowing furnace (minimum temperature capabilities of 1600 Fahrenheit). By utilizing these heat levels you can be virtually guaranteed to eliminate not only the unsightly corpses that have been rotting in the driveway, but also that the contagion carried by them will be eliminated as well.

This all sounds well and good, right? No more vulture bait on the street and eliminating contagion spreading carrion! What’s not to like? Well, before you grab the rake and wheelbarrow and head out for a Zed roast, take a minute to consider this- burning corpses requires TOUCHING corpses. You’ve just dispatched the undead hordes by any means necessary, right? There are bound to be fragments of bone, metal and who knows what else out there with the piles of the dead zeds. If one of those sharp edges, covered in bio hazard, pokes through whatever Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) you’ve got on, you risk the infection of yourself and thereby those around you. To me that’s a risk not worth taking.

So while fire MAY be used as a cleanup and removal resource, I would HIGHLY recommend leaving the dead where they lie and making your way away from contaminated zones and into less populated regions. Leave the cleanup plans to the municipal waste authorities and keep yourselves infection free.