I think we're chasing down a red herring. The issue isn't that George A Romero-style zombies lurched around; it's that people known to be dead came back to life and interacted with friends and relatives. Why did nobody outside the story write this down? How did that news not make it back to Rome?
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
