Subway Moments: The Mumbly Guy and the Zombie Apocalypse

My commute this morning was longer than the usual 25 minute ride due to some malfunction between 72nd and 59th Streets. So for 20 minutes we sat there waiting in the darkened tunnel for something, anything, to happen. Most of this time I spent reading Kathy Griffin's book but part of my mind was paying attention to the mumbly man sitting next to me.

Since 168th Street he had been sitting next to me quietly talking to himself and seemingly very engaged in some sort of argument with one of, what could have been, many voices in his head. He'd fidget back and forth, his dirty North Face coat bumping me slightly as his disagreement continued on unintelligibly.

The only five words that I was able to ascertain from his garbled diatribe were:

1. subway
2. vibrations
3. happy
4. zombie
5. apocalypse

The first three seemed to go together, which is disconcerting enough and might explain his squirming back and forth. The last two were said together and seemed to instill him with abject fear... which got me to thinking:

If a zombie apocalypse were to happen I would definitely not want to be stuck underground in a subway car!

Let's imagine for a moment that you are trapped in a subway car, deep inside a tunnel, the power has probably gone out because, for whatever reason, zombies seem to be able to cut the power whenever they appear in movies. So it is dark, your surrounded by other people who are going to panic, and the doors are probably locked shut since there's no power to crank them open again.

Now, let's say a zombie gets on the train and, in the ensuing chaos, bites someone. This is going to happen... it's just too likely that someone is going to be idiotic enough to get caught by one of these slowly moving monstrosities (I'm assuming of course that the zombies will be like those in a Roger Corman film and not the super-sonic runners in modern takes like 28 Days Later).


As Hollywood has taught us, being bitten by a zombie is a sure way to become a zombie yourself. So now there are two zombies. And those two zombies will bite people as they crawl through the car and eventually make their way through this horrifying smörgåsbord to you.

Rationally, if a zombie got in the car you could get out. They aren't smart enough (in theory) to unlock a door, open it and lock it behind them, so in theory you could leave the same way they got in. But that's assuming you could get past them. But even if you got out of the car you'd then be in a dark tunnel and have no sense of who might be right next to you. There's very little light down there when a train isn't barreling through the passage so it is quite possible that millions of zombies have fallen down into the tracks and are ready to devour you. Unless you have some super-human skills or are as clever scripted as the Hollywood action hero... you're probably going to be either a zombie or zombie food if you're stuck in the tunnel.

All of this ridiculous worry rushed through my head in a matter of seconds and all because of the mumbly man next to me who spoke, albeit briefly and incoherently, about a zombie apocalypse while I was riding the subway with him. This might be a form of hypochondria so that I took on some of his "crazy" as another person might assume they had a cold because the person next to them sneezed.

So here's hoping we avoid a zombie apocalypse completely... and if we do someday I pray I'm not on the train. Just seems like a bad idea all over.