Flash forward a few years.  The Zombie Apocalypse has come and gone.  And you are still alive.  Surrounded by billions of rotting corpses, the barrel of your rifle still smoking.

What to do, what to do?  What to do with all those headshot corpses?  Shouldn’t they be put to some sort of use?

What can one do with a dead zombie?  How can it’s rotting corpse help you?

The answer my friend is soil.

Everyone is dead, the supermarkets have been looted bare and your personal stockpile will be running out in a year or so.  Your life now depends on the richness of the soil, and as a good gardener you know that any and all biomass is valuable as a soil amendment if handled in the right way.

Compost comes to mind.  But you know that composting meat is not without its problems.  To make it happen well you’ve really got to chop that stuff up and mix it with other decaying matter to make certain that the composting process doesn’t go anaerobic, that is “get unbearably stinky”.  Plus you’ve also got to deal with the problem of bio-hazard leach-ates potentially contaminating your water supply.  Ick!  These sons of bitches used to be humans after-all, well, consumers anyway, but that’s close enough to human to harbor communicable diseases.  It’s a damned slow process too, could be two years before you can use it.

Personally, I’m just going to say no to this task.  No way in HELL am I going to chop up dead zombie corpses mix them with sawdust and woodchips (Which I’m going to have to haul in from somewhere, another problem), and worse STIR the bastards periodically!!!!  No WAY!

When I see a dead zombie there are only two things I want to do with it. 

1. Burn it. 

2. Piss in its face. 

Fortunately there is something we can do with the zombie corpses that allows us to do both of these things AND put the resulting product to use as a safe and useable soil amendment.

We’re going to turn these bastards into Charcoal, or BioChar in Tree-hugger speak.  Charcoal can make an outstanding soil amendment provided it is combined first with moisture and nitrogen.  If you don’t do this it can suck the nutrients out of the surrounding soil like a Bankster on a pension fund.  However, properly “inoculated” it holds moisture, and prevents fertilizing nutrients from being washed through the soil to where the roots of your plants can’t get at them as well it provides an ideal habitat for soil building microbes.  It’s good stuff, and some of the richest soils on earth i.e. the “Terra Preta” soils of the Amazon were man-made this way.  The interesting part though, is that the improvement to the soil is permanent, unlike the temporary benefits of compost and fertilizers.

So here’s what we’re going to do.  Grab Grandma, and the corpse of your cottage cheese gulping fat-ass cousin Bubba and take them to a windy spot downwind of your home.  You’re also going to need two steel barrels one larger than the other, a few firebricks, some wood and a stove pipe. 

• Pop a hatchet into the spine of your dearly deceased flesh eating family to break the rigor mortis that has set in.  This will allow you to fold them in half and drop them ass first into your barrel. 
• Now poke a few holes into the bottom of the barrel that you’re going to stuff the corpse into.  This is to allow the hot gasses to escape.  Some of these gasses will include methane which is highly flammable.  Directing it out of the bottom is going to give you the opportunity to burn that gas and up the temperature of the process even more giving you more efficient ZombieChar production.
• Next you’ll want to put a few holes into the sides near the bottom of the bigger barrel.  Set a couple of fire-bricks in the bottom of the large barrel.  You’re going to set the smaller barrel on top of these and they will allow air and the flammable zombie gasses to flow underneath the smaller barrel.
• Now cut a hole the size of your stove pipe into the lid of the large barrel.  You’ll be setting the stove pipe on top of this hole to create a draught.  That is a chimney affect that will increase the speed and intensity of combustion.
• Stuff Grandma or your fat-ass cousin in the smaller barrel (if he’ll fit) and load the smaller barrel into the large one on top of the firebricks.  Fill whatever loose space remains with either other zombie parts or any biomass like wood or weeds that can also be made into charcoal and seal up the smaller barrel. 
• Pack the area between the two barrels with firewood then light it up.
• Put the lid on the large barrel and then put the stovepipe into place.
• It’s going to smoke quite a bit for the first 30 minutes or so while the zombie corpses dry out, so you’ll want to stay upwind, but pretty soon that smoke will clear up and the burn process will get good and hot. 
• 3 or 4 hours later you’re done and Grandma is now charcoal!!!

Now let’s put her blackened crumbly limbs to work growing zucchini!

First thing you need to do is crush the ZombieChar.  The more surface area the BioChar has the more easily the microbes that make nutrients available to soil can move in and set up shop.

Next you need to piss in Grandma’s face!  Yep, urine is super high in nitrogen and is one of the best ways to “inoculate” that BioChar with the nitrogen and moisture it needs to be a good soil amendment.  So drop that zipper and get to work!

Now you simply mix the material into the soil.  10% by mass is generally considered to be the optimal level of biochar to soil.  That’s a little tricky to figure out since the charcoal is so light, but if you go by volume, i.e. bucketful or so.  A mixture of 1/3 biochar. 1/3 regular compost and 1/3 native soil will likely make for some rich gardening dirt.

Not a bad process at all!

Sure there are other ways out there of handling composting of meat that would work for zombies.  Vermiculture (worms) comes to mind, but this is by far the easiest, most rapidly rewarding and emotionally satisfying method of useful zombie corpse disposal that I can think of.  And it is especially useful in places where the soil is too porous and needs a moisture holding amendment like biochar!