I’ve written about hearing them, hiding from them, hitting them and turning into them.
Slow, and half blind
A zombie is slow, and slow in a particular way. It doesn’t move a little every moment the way you do. It does one thing, then nothing for a while, then one thing again. Take a step. Hit the survivor it’s after, if it’s close enough. Push on a door. Each zombie keeps its own time, so a crowd never moves as one block. One shuffles forward while the one beside it stands. On the street that reads like a tide coming in. You always have time to think.
A zombie sees, but badly. It looks one way, and it only notices what’s in front of it. It always sees a little less far than you do, by day and at night. You can walk behind one. You can stand two steps to its side and it won’t know. When it does spot you it flashes and picks up the pace a little, and it comes for you as long as it can see you. Lose it around a corner or through a door and it doesn’t forget straight away: it goes to the last place it saw you and looks there. Then it gives up, and goes back to being a thing that wanders.
It hears too, but hearing is not the same as seeing. A noise doesn’t alarm a zombie, it steers it: when it next decides to move, it drifts toward the last thing it heard. That’s the half of Zombie Days’ sound I kept, noise bringing zombies to you; the hearing entry added the other direction. Your noise pulls them, slowly, and the pull is the only reason a quiet street fills up around a loud player. Zombies don’t hear each other. A hundred groans in a district don’t make the district gather.
Doors
The part I care about most is doors. A zombie that reaches an open door walks in, and once it’s in it will find whoever is on that floor. A zombie at a locked door shoves it, and the shove is loud, and the lock gives. Next time it moves, it’s inside. So a locked door is a delay, not a wall. It buys you the time between the shove and the step. The street hears the shove, but inside you still hear nothing, so the first you know of it is the zombie on your floor. I wrote in the buildings entry that a refuge is also a blind spot. This is the other half of that.
The thing I’m not sure about is whether any of this is scary. One zombie, this slow, this short sighted, is not a threat to anyone paying attention. The threat has to come from numbers, from the dark, and from the door. If ten of them outside with the lock giving way isn’t frightening, the numbers are wrong.