Searching for some video evidence to confirm what Lucas had guessed at was a laborious task. Given that he was looking for evidence that the zombies were only motivated to attack living targets, it was going to be difficult to determine whether they would also attack the recently dead. After all, in order to determine whether they would snub a corpse, Lucas would have to come across video of a zombie discovering a corpse. And that situation seemed extremely unlikely to happen unless it was specifically arranged.
Of course, while perusing dozens of videos, Lucas did notice a couple of recurring trends that he had first observed in the initial video that sparked his idea. None of the zombies ever attacked one another, they just had some way to tell the others were not their preferred target. That seemed to hold even when the zombies came into the frame of the video from different places, suggesting that even though they had never encountered each other before, they could still discern regular humans from other zombies quite easily.
That was not something Lucas himself could always determine from the videos he saw. Of course, the videos he saw were not optimal for making such determinations, but he had seen the one downstairs. Before the injuries Evan had inflicted upon it, that zombie did not appear to have anything physically wrong with it other than a very minor wound that might be possible to overlook. That also seemed to be the case with at least some of the zombies in the videos.
On the whole, the zombies did have very agressive behavior and the way each one ran towards their targets seemed to be reckless. But while he was watching people running for their lives, there seemed to be no obvious way to tell the difference between an uninfected person and a zombie. Somehow, the zombies could tell the difference, and apparently didn't make mistakes in their determination.
Someone knocked at the door while Lucas was focusing his thoughts. Stepping away from the laptop and kicking a few papers and empty pizza boxes to one side, he moved closer and paused for a second to listen for growling before unlocking it and swinging it open. Leon was out in the hallway, and shrugged apologetically. "Hi, Lucas, we're just gathering the names of everyone, that way we know who's in the building. Is anyone else in there with you?"
"No. And I think you already know my name."
"And your last name?" Leon held a hard cover textbook in one hand, writing onto a sheet of notebook paper with a pencil as he talked. "There might be another Lucas around."
"Oh. Right. It's Jones."
"Thanks." Leon nodded to him and then began to walk down the hall to the next door.
Lucas locked the door and returned to his thinking. Other videos seemed to confirm that the zombies gave up on attacking their targets not long after the targets stopped trying to struggle. In the cases where a video continued to show the attack, every time the infected would give up biting less than a minute after their victim stopped struggling. Usually, the usefulness of the video would end there as the fool capturing the evidence on their cell phone or whatever device they used realized they were in danger and ran.
Together, those two things did seem to confirm his wild notion that they were drawn to life, but the difficulty in actually concluding that was obvious. There was no mechanism he knew of for them to accomplish that feat using basic human senses. The idea was so outlandish and wild that it would be flatly unbelievable if he hadn't been prompted to consider it by the video evidence. If he was going to conclude something as crazy as the zombies could somehow see life, he had to be extremely careful to eliminate every possible alternative explanation.
And even then, it could still be wrong. There might be something much more mundane taking place that didn't rely on some unknown magical powers needing to exist. There was also a very good chance Lucas just wasn't smart enough to figure out what was going on. This whole line of thinking was extremely shaky.
But then, the matter concerning the blood lingered in Lucas's mind. The zombie shouldn't have been able to remain active with severe blood loss, and yet it did. There was no explanation Lucas could think of to account for that, apart from things that were completely magical and entirely unknown to science. Everything about this was just wrong, and thinking about it, that really bothered him.
After a few minutes of perplexed confusion, Lucas considered that maybe he was going about this the wrong way. He was really struggling on the why of things. When really, maybe that was the wrong way to approach this problem entirely.
The basic parameters of this phenomenon were still unknown. Worrying about the why or how should probably come after the basic questions of what the zombies were capable of had been more fully answered. And if he really wanted to, Lucus could play dead out in the lobby and see if the zombie still showed an interest in him past the time it took them to lose interest in a motionless victim. That experiment wouldn't tell him if they were capable of seeing life, but it would still be able to give him useful information about zombie behavior.
Even if the underlying explanation was still out of his grasp- even completely new- it was still possible to make useful observations, perform experiments to conclude additional details about the phenomenon. Whether or not he could understand the reason why things were happening, he could still observe what was actually taking place.
If the underlying process was entirely new or magical, scientific thinking was still the best way to go about exploring this phenomenon. Whether or not it was something outlandish according to his current knowledge, would have to be a question for another time.
