RANDOM THOUGHTS #165
Steve Cole's thoughts on various zombie scenarios and how he would handle them.
1. THE WALKING DEAD: The current definitive work on zombies, this imagines slow zombies killed by a single shot anywhere in the cranium. It was never explained just how fast things happened, which would define how much stuff is left on store shelves. (Overnight and the grocery store and gun store are full. Over a week, and the stores are mostly empty.) I'm not sure I would not have moved my base to Woodbury after the civil war happened, but if you're going to stay in the prison you need to work every day on improving the bastion. Repair the gates, do something about that big hole in the back wall, and then hunt down and kill every zombie in the place. After that, get some crops planted and conduct an expanding systematic search of every house and building in the area for food, guns, and ammo.
2. SALTY DOGS: A ten-minute short film on YouTube, this has two people (a guy who has several guns and a woman who doesn't know how to use them) who have reached safety on a small island. Then a whole bunch of zombies come up the beach. How did they get there? Not really sure, maybe they drifted in on a boat. (There was a quick flash of a boat.) Maybe they walked across the ocean bottom. These are medium speed zombies, but some of them survive headshots. The gun-happy idiot blazes away at full auto, wasting the two magazines he has for his M16. He apparently didn't do much to be ready for the inevitable invasion, as his plan seemed to be to retreat into someplace not particularly zombie proof and leave the girl alone in a frame house with lots of windows and a baseball bat. Given that these zombies did not die politely of a single headshot, I'm not sure anything he did or did not do mattered.
3. WORLD WAR Z (movie): Fast zombies capable of scaling 100-foot walls by means of zombie pyramids. You're screwed, guy, at least until they figured out how to infect themselves with something the zombies ignored.
4. ZOMBIE COMET: This is my own (incomplete) zombie novel. The Earth goes through a comet tail and, well, zombies happen, quickly, at 10am on a Thursday morning. Everybody with type-B or AB blood is ok, but the rest of the world drops dead, then wakes up 30 minutes later. At least you know how it starts and all the stores are still full of food, guns, ammo, and campaign supplies. The key to survival will be Army types who were on the firing range when "the event" happened. Holding a loaded rifle when attacked by rabid zombies pretty much clued them into how the new world order worked, giving them a much higher survival rate than most type-B blood people (who got eaten by hordes of zombies).
5. BOOKS FOR ZOMBIE WARFARE: Jean Sexton, who is an avid gardener, has suggested that your zombie survival kit should include books about finding edible plants and eventually growing your own food. She recommended for growing your own food you should have one or more of Gardening for Dummies, The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, and All New Square Foot Gardening. In those dark first days after the apocalypse, you should know how to find food, so one (or more) of these should be handy: The Complete Guide to Edible Wild Plants (an Army handbook), Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants by Bradford Angier, and Tom Brown's Guide to Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants.
1. THE WALKING DEAD: The current definitive work on zombies, this imagines slow zombies killed by a single shot anywhere in the cranium. It was never explained just how fast things happened, which would define how much stuff is left on store shelves. (Overnight and the grocery store and gun store are full. Over a week, and the stores are mostly empty.) I'm not sure I would not have moved my base to Woodbury after the civil war happened, but if you're going to stay in the prison you need to work every day on improving the bastion. Repair the gates, do something about that big hole in the back wall, and then hunt down and kill every zombie in the place. After that, get some crops planted and conduct an expanding systematic search of every house and building in the area for food, guns, and ammo.
2. SALTY DOGS: A ten-minute short film on YouTube, this has two people (a guy who has several guns and a woman who doesn't know how to use them) who have reached safety on a small island. Then a whole bunch of zombies come up the beach. How did they get there? Not really sure, maybe they drifted in on a boat. (There was a quick flash of a boat.) Maybe they walked across the ocean bottom. These are medium speed zombies, but some of them survive headshots. The gun-happy idiot blazes away at full auto, wasting the two magazines he has for his M16. He apparently didn't do much to be ready for the inevitable invasion, as his plan seemed to be to retreat into someplace not particularly zombie proof and leave the girl alone in a frame house with lots of windows and a baseball bat. Given that these zombies did not die politely of a single headshot, I'm not sure anything he did or did not do mattered.
3. WORLD WAR Z (movie): Fast zombies capable of scaling 100-foot walls by means of zombie pyramids. You're screwed, guy, at least until they figured out how to infect themselves with something the zombies ignored.
4. ZOMBIE COMET: This is my own (incomplete) zombie novel. The Earth goes through a comet tail and, well, zombies happen, quickly, at 10am on a Thursday morning. Everybody with type-B or AB blood is ok, but the rest of the world drops dead, then wakes up 30 minutes later. At least you know how it starts and all the stores are still full of food, guns, ammo, and campaign supplies. The key to survival will be Army types who were on the firing range when "the event" happened. Holding a loaded rifle when attacked by rabid zombies pretty much clued them into how the new world order worked, giving them a much higher survival rate than most type-B blood people (who got eaten by hordes of zombies).
5. BOOKS FOR ZOMBIE WARFARE: Jean Sexton, who is an avid gardener, has suggested that your zombie survival kit should include books about finding edible plants and eventually growing your own food. She recommended for growing your own food you should have one or more of Gardening for Dummies, The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, and All New Square Foot Gardening. In those dark first days after the apocalypse, you should know how to find food, so one (or more) of these should be handy: The Complete Guide to Edible Wild Plants (an Army handbook), Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants by Bradford Angier, and Tom Brown's Guide to Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants.
posted by Federation Commander at 1:28 AM
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