The warfare here is asymmetric. Good ways to ensure that zombies get close to wiping people out, making it less likely that the military will destroy them, are to invoke weird science so that (1) the epidemic is highly contagious in a way that defies classic containment (e.g., memetic contagion or protean vectors) and (2) the products of destroying zombies are insidiously dangerous in themselves. If every zombie you behead, burn, or blow to bits releases 1,000 times the LD
50 of zombie toxin instantly, in a violent plume – and if that toxin is, say, weird radiation or an adaptive nanomachine that attacks and pierces biohazard precautions – then your army has a whole lot more to worry about. This is extra-true if the weird radiation is some kind of superscience that's activated by ordinary radiation, so that when you nuke a million zombies, you release a pulse of zombifying rays over, say, 30 times the demolished radius.
Of course, such measures mean that humans lose and your story is about the naturally immune survivors fighting monsters who can't infect them. That's the logical upshot of zombies outbreaks that aren't trivially contained. The in-between case – the zombies don't lose trivially but neither do humans, and it's a long, knife-edge struggle – isn't consistent with most of the things used to explain zombies.
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Originally Posted by Anthony
Just make zombies the side effect of the fall of civilization, not the primary cause. Pick your method for 'almost everybody dies', then add 'and come back to life as zombies'.
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This is by far the best way to have zombies warring with humans on an equal footing. Of course, it isn't "zombies wipe out society" but "something else wipes out society, and then zombies take advantage of this." The
Fallout video-game series is a great inspiration here . . . it has places where zombie-like things are a serious threat to civilization, and other places where they aren't, but the ghouls in question are a product of the nuclear apocalypse, not the infectious bringers of a zombie apocalypse.