For the stories I think it's just a matter of how our news media operates in this era of increasing information and the internet. People doing freaky stuff like that probably happens semi regularly, but right now freaky killings are "trending".
As for an actual Zombie apocalypse the only credible scenario I've heard of is the idea of the "golden horde". The idea is that Iran or somebody pops a nuke in the upper atmosphere knocking down our electrical and communication grids or some disease or natural disaster causes a similar massive scale disruption.
Food and gas would be rapidly snapped up by hoarders and within a few weeks you've got millions of people hungry and footbound in the cities. At which point they get desperate and start moving out on the rural areas. Not exactly zombies, they're still fast, smart, have nicer clothes than the farmers, and they want your grains not your brains.
But for the farmers near the major urban areas where their supplies of food can't hope to cope with what starving people want to take from them it's basically the same thing. Barricade the windows, load the shotguns, and gas up the chainsaws.
In any case, I really hope it never comes to something like that, or society manages to rearange in some better way than resorting to violence.
Bookmarks