The Extinction Parade
The Extinction Parade is a horror short story written by Max Brooks and published online by The Daily Beast on January 14, 2011.[1]
The story was adapted into a horror graphic novel series by Avatar Press in 2013,[2] and was optioned for development as a television series by Legendary Entertainment in 2014.[3]
Plot[edit]
The narrator (unnamed in the original story but identified by Brooks as "Min"[4]) is a female vampire living in Malaysia with her companion, another vampire named Laila. They hear rumors of a zombie outbreak (one of a series of outbreaks taking place across Southeast Asia) in a nearby district and travel there to witness it in person. Vampires regard zombies with a mixture of novelty and disdain, referring to the mindless creatures as "subdead"; zombies, for their part, pose no direct threat to vampires and completely ignore them in favor of living prey. Min observes the aftermath of a violent battle between zombies and the military, fondly reminiscing upon hunting humans during the Malayan Emergency and the "'69 race riots."
The outbreak continues for months, spreading to Australia, Mexico, France, and Russia. Panic and civil unrest sweep the world, resulting in wars, riots, and the gradual decline of humanity. Min and Laila are initially grateful; during times of war and great social upheaval, when large numbers of humans are already dying, vampires can hunt them without fear of discovery. The unprecedented chaos caused by the encroaching zombies grants vampires nearly unlimited freedom of movement, a luxury they have not enjoyed for centuries due to advances in human technology. Min, Laila, and other vampires indulge in bloody, hedonistic feasts during a celebratory period that Min coins the "Nights of Glory."
This attitude of revelry changes, however, as the zombie outbreak stretches on for years and shows no signs of stopping. Historically, zombies have always been successfully contained by humans (or have burned themselves out for lack of new people to infect), but in modern times, with human society interconnected by global networks of trade and high-speed travel, the zombie plague has been able to spread farther and faster than ever before, making containment impossible. Nguyen, an uncommonly intellectual vampire and an old friend of Min's, warns that zombies will soon outnumber living humans, and because zombies are not sapient and have no concept of overexploitation or resource depletion, they will eventually hunt humankind to extinction. This, in turn, will cause vampires to become extinct since humans are their only food source.
Other vampires brush off Nguyen's warning, but they begin to grow concerned as the global situation worsens and human civilization continues to collapse. However, vampires are unable to devise an effective strategy for dealing with the zombie threat. The concept of helping humans, whom vampires regard as both their prey and an inferior species, is difficult for them to comprehend, and the idea of voluntarily revealing the existence of vampires to humanity (to form an alliance against the zombies) is virtually unthinkable. A similar taboo prohibits any vampire from turning more than one human into another vampire; this prevents them from raising an army of vampires to fight the zombies, which grow in number every day.
During a nighttime hunt, enraged at their own helplessness, Min and Laila lash out against a horde of zombies, and with their superior speed and strength, they are able to kill over a thousand before morning. This act of defiance inspires other vampires to wage war upon the zombies, and many more are destroyed, but the effort amounts to little, as the millions of zombies now infesting Malaysia vastly outnumber all of the vampires in the entire country.
The human population continues to dwindle, and their numbers eventually grow so thin that vampires begin to kill each other while fighting over the few that remain. Other vampires commit suicide by walking into burning buildings or biting into toxic zombie flesh; some, including Nguyen and Laila—now revealed to be Min's sister—voluntarily expose themselves to sunlight.
Four months after Laila's suicide and ten years after the zombie outbreak began, a despairing Min concludes that both humans and vampires are doomed, and that zombies will soon be the dominant species on the planet. With enough surviving humans in the area to sustain her for only a few months, Min fantasizes about attempting to leave Malaysia and escaping to another country, but she fears what she might find in the outside world. She leaves her story behind as both a guide and a warning to any who might discover it, hoping that she will not be "the last dancer in the extinction parade."
Themes[edit]
The Extinction Parade has been compared to the climate change crisis. The depletion of limited resources is a central theme of the story, and the character Nguyen expressly speaks of the time when zombies will outnumber living humans as a "tipping point."[1] Brooks describes the story as being "An Inconvenient Truth for vampires,"[2] as they are a complacent race that doesn't recognize the severity of the threat they're facing until it's too late:
So I thought, “What if they were confronted by a threat that wasn’t a direct threat, something they were just ignoring?” They would realize, pretty late in the game, that, “Oh, my God, it’s depleting our one food source. What are we going to live on?”[4]
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Brooks, Max (2011-01-14). "The Extinction Parade: An Original Zombie Story by Max Brooks". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 2017-02-18.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Max Brooks Wages World War Vamp in "The Extinction Parade"". CBR.com. 2013-05-17. Retrieved 2017-02-18.
- ↑ "Legendary Options Max Brooks' "Extinction Parade" for Television". CBR.com. 2014-04-24. Retrieved 2017-02-18.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Max Brooks: Welcome to "THE EXTINCTION PARADE," Part One". FANGORIA®. Retrieved 2017-02-18.
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